2024 – 2025 INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND WORLD OUTLOOK
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He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God…
– Aeschylus
BLACK CHRISTMAS
December 24th, 2024.
The New York Stock Exchange and Elsewhere; Wall Street, New York, New York, USA.
It was supposed to be an ordinary day— depending on whether one believed any day spent at the beating heart of global finance could count as “ordinary”. December 24th, Christmas Eve to many across the world, was usually seen by most bankers, traders and investors as a sort of trucial period; although the market and it’s traders never really stopped for anything, many took the holidays off to rest, relax, spend time with their loved ones and their children, if they had any, and to take their minds of the calamities of the modern world they tried to make a buck off of. So it had been for decades, and so it would be for decades more; the peace and tranquility of a nation and a world at rest for the holidays serving as a convenient backdrop to a lowering of the sabres, if only for a little while.
Of course, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, financial capital of the world and arguably the most important building in the nation, would never be actually empty. God forbid. There were always those who stuck around, even in the slower seasons, who had nothing to go home for and who were keen (or sociopathic) enough to spend their holidays wheeling, dealing, and trying to look like Jordan Belfort to nobody but themselves and the guy next to them. So it had been for decades, and so it would be for decades more; if only they hadn’t been the lucky few to watch the world burn to the ground in a matter of minutes.
It started innocently enough. Every screen in the New York stock exchange was still tracking the graphs, numbers, green and red wedges, and the news, in a perfectly ordinary fashion, as they had done since time immemorial. Then, all of a sudden, one turned off. Odd, but not a huge deal. A technician would come around to fix it eventually; nothing worked perfectly forever, after all. It was only when the third screen shut off, just a few minutes later, that concern started to mount. Angry phone calls were made to whoever the few present thought would fix it; some filtered their way up to the NYSE’s long time President, Stacey Cunningham, who was away in Connecticut with her family. Although she had a reputation for a sharp mind, she ignored the calls; it was Christmas Eve, and she was away. A few wannabe Buffets pestering her could be ignored.
By the time the tenth screen went down, the news got out. CNN, as always, was the first on the scene— but they were too late to catch the real show anyways. By the time the first reporters got onto the floor, it had happened. In a flash, every single remaining television, computer, and monitor on the floor (and elsewhere in the building, although the floor was the center of attention) had flicked themselves off. For the first time in decades, the whole of the New York Stock Exchange was… off. During trading hours, and with the power still on.
Oh, no.
Panic started to spread, and more phone calls were made; to bosses, to loved ones, to government officials. The floor going dark during trading was bad, but it wasn’t a deathblow to trading, so long as the NYSE’s servers responsible for lightspeed electronic trading hadn’t also gone offline. Someone, fortunately, had the good sense to take a look at them; they were locked behind several high security doors and located a few miles away in New Jersey, but the staff there worked quickly, and they were down less than ten minutes after they got the call. They were the lucky few who got to be the bearers of bad news; the servers, too, were offline, and the power was still good. Electronic trading at the New York Stock Exchange had been cut off, and with it the beating heart of global finance.
And then it got worse.
15 minutes after the news broke, a little after 11:20 in the morning, reports came in that the same thing had happened at the IRS building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, and elsewhere across the IRS. Someone had leaked a conference call from Goldman Sachs; all their computers at their head offices were down, too. The other major banks; BoA, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and JP were all asked for comment; only BoA confirmed they too had had their systems go dark, but the spokesmen for the others were nervous, and sweating. Already, the market had entered (theoretical, since nothing was actually happening and no transaction could go through outside of paper) free fall; with the whole US financial system apparently out of service, many feared the worst, and demanded the banks hand over their money, demanding they pull out of their investments. Investors, bankers and others had abandoned their plans for a relaxed Christmas Eve, and those close to New York had flooded the city, hoping beyond hope nothing had gone wrong; that they hadn’t lost any money. Other news organizations, both domestic and international, had picked up the scent and were running their own story. Confusion was rampant; nobody except those running the NYSE had any idea of what was going on, and even then only they knew that their servers were not just offline, they weren’t accepting commands to turn back on. By 11:35, the President had been informed, as had the Secretary of the Treasury and other leading government officials.
And then it got worse.
At precisely noon, and with the whole floor of the NYSE (and several city blocks around) bustling with irate investors, traders, bankers, reporters and corporate staff, the screens, servers and computers all came back on. The hustle and bustle of the crowds demanding answers (and more often, their money) was reduced to a murmur, and then a stunned silence. The screens booted, and almost immediately loaded a video clip; a cartoon triangle with a tophat extolled to a man, dressed, to the untrained eye, like a banker, their manifesto— reality is an illusion; the universe is a hologram; buy gold. It played on loop, with subtitles in seven languages, mocking the traders who stood, mouths agape. It was at precisely this moment that all of the computation power of the whole of the NYSE, and many computers outside of it, began to whir. Some quick thinking exchange staff hopped over a desk to look at one; to see what it was doing, and he saw the unimaginable. Every file, every program, every bit and byte and zero and one on the computer was in the process of being deleted, and, worse still, it refused to stop. Someone called the Jerseyite staff again, and was met with screaming— their servers, the whole of the NYSE’s database, had spun up as well and were doing much the same as their counterparts in New York; file after file, record after record, bit after bit after bit after bit were swirling the metaphorical drain, and, short of taking an axe to every processor and hard drive in the ludicrously expensive server farm, they couldn’t stop it.
Mass hysteria had been thrown around by news organizations and political pundits several times over the past decade, usually over some new social media fad or some political blunder. But few had really known what it had meant to be hysteric, and today they got a crash course. Almost immediately, almost everyone in the entire country who had heard the story drove as quickly as possible to their local bank, and demanded the withdrawal of their entire bank account into cold hard cash. This was impossible to achieve, of course; no bank had that much in their reserve. But it hadn’t stopped the masses in the 30s or the 2000s, and it wouldn’t stop them now. Almost at the same time, Wall Street grew even more restless; although the bell to mark the closing of trading had been sounded at 1 PM, hours earlier than normal, and the now very busy President of the NYSE had announced a suspension of all trading as soon as she got into the city, the floor was still packed with those demanding money, answers, and the withdrawal of all their investments. By 1:20 PM, the Dow Jones was down almost 1000 points (although most considered it only theoretical, given the NYSE had essentially ceased to exist earlier that morning), and showed no signs of stopping. By 1:30, the IRS had made a statement stating that their whole computational system, including backups and deep archives, had gone down, plagued by the same glitch or bug or virus that was eradicating the hundreds of terabytes of stored data in the NYSE. They estimated only 15% of digital records would be saved, provided that their inhouse technicians, underpaid and overworked as all IRS staff are, could stop it. Further, they had discovered, buried in their systems (the ones not permanently displaying an obnoxious “DEATH NOT TAXES” image), a plain text document that appeared to contain the first clue as to who had launched the (at this point evident) assault on the American financial system; it was a short manifesto, apparently written and saved all the way back on October 28th, that read:
FELLOW PATRIOTS! I have come here today to announce that the STORM HAS ARRIVED! I have disabled the BIG BANKS and LAMESTREAM MEDIA, and cut off the funding to the DEEP STATE! Crooked Hilary will be shaking in her boots knowing that execution at Gitmo by our BRAVE SOLDIERS will soon be forthcoming! The ROTHSCHILDS and their kin GEORGE SOROS are now PENNILESS, the FED has been destroyed and the PEOPLE shall now breathe free of the burden of taxes, now that FULL DISCLOSURE is at hand. I am sure some of you will look at your 401(k)s in horror, but BE NOT AFRAID for the LORD is thine shepherd, thou shall not want.
I HAVE DONE ALL I CAN HERE, NOW IT IS FOR MY FELLOW DIGITAL SOLDIERS TO CONTINUE THE FIGHT! SUFFER NOT THE XENO TO LIVE! RISE UP AND DESTROY THE DEEP STATE WHILE THEY ARE VULNERABLE! DEATH TO AOC AND HER CHINESE STOOGES! ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP, WHO STILL REIGNS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE TO THIS VERY DAY! THE REVOLUTION IS AT HAND! GODSPEED TO ALL OF YOU, AND GOD BE WILLING, WE SHALL MEET TOGETHER VICTORIOUS! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
They also noted that of the hundreds of millions of individual records maintained by the IRS, only a select few had thus far seemingly been left untargeted; those of ex-President Donald Trump, his wife and immediate family, many of his former Presidential staff, and the staff of the Trump Organization.
And then it got worse.
By 1:45, the catastrophe had spread further. The CEOs of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch had all released statements announcing they too had suffered the same fate as the NYSE and the IRS; their computer systems, at an estimated 90% rate from their Head Offices down to 40% across their wider banking locations, had also been affected; they too were hemmoraging files. Their in-house technicians' best guesses were that they had until 2:30 to fix it, or everything they didn’t save would be gone— every record of debt, every investment portfolio, and every archive of every transaction they had left. They pleaded with the public to remain calm; that there was no way they could handle the amount of requests for withdrawals; that they were doing all they could to resolve the issue. The CEOs of investment banks were hardly the most well liked figures at the best of times; and this time proved no different. Social media took the statements and ran, and the rate of withdrawal requests didn’t even marginally slow. Photographs of ATM machines with queues stretching for blocks cropped up. Somebody spray painted an anarchy symbol on the side of the World Trade Center, and a giant Soviet Union flag appeared on the ground in Battery Park.
And then it got worse.
By 1:55, the international markets closest to the US had taken notice, and were in their own, smaller freefall. The Toronto Stock Exchange crashed; London spiralled; like dominoes, a feedback loop of falling values, bank runs and general panic spread across the American-aligned world. If the NYSE could collapse in a matter of hours, then what was stopping the entire Western World from lapsing into the same fate? Japan and South Korea, close allies and financial partners to the United States, took the brunt of Asia’s share of the newly christened Black Christmas, and the collapse of the American financial system served only to worsen the Taiwanese crisises aftershocks as Taipei went into freefall. Eventually, the shocks would spread farther; by 5PM every major stock exchange was down, and several countries were estimated to be in recession. The digital financial world, too, went into a nosedive— by 1:20 the value of Bitcoin had tumbled $4,000 dollars, rose by $667, and then bombed again by another $2,000. Ethereum was similarly falling, collapsing by $2,546 within a matter of minutes. Digital currencies didn’t seem like particularly good bets if the threat was in the computer, after all. On the contrary, things like Gold, Silver, Diamonds and Platinum now seemed like pretty good investments; orders for Gold drove up the price by hundreds within minutes, until companies suspended purchasing due to a lack of supply. At 2:00, President Biden held a telephone conference with the leaders of Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Japan, although the details of their conversation wasn’t made public. At the same time, ex-President Trump made his own statement via his website (his ban from social media was never lifted, even years after) condemning the President for his handling of the crisis and praised the “man or woman who’s trying to drain that swamp we’ve fought so hard against”. It would be read 2,000,000 times within the first ten minutes of the statement going live.
And then it got worse.
At precisely 2:10 PM, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, primus inter pares of the Federal Reserve banks, publically issued thousands upon thousands of sales of the bonds, Yen and Euros currently held within it’s colossal reserves; almost at the same time, it attempted to place orders for literally every Iraqi Dinar in existence, apparently without realizing that Iraqi Dinars are both worthless and in Iraq, as well as several thousand pounds of Gold, apparently trying to mirror the rush from the public. Approximately four minutes afterwards, the President and CEO of the NY Fed would go live to CNN to state, in the nicest possible terms, that they had absolutely zero intentions of issuing those buy/sell orders, that their own computer systems, although not being wiped clean like the others, were effectively out of their control, and that everyone should really not buy those sell orders because you would be in a world of trouble once this whole thing was over. Fortunately for the NY Fed, nobody took the rogue bank up on the offer, although the whole thing was rendered moot half an hour later when President Biden would sign one of the last executive orders of his presidency, detailing the temporary suspension of all activities of the NY Federal Reserve Bank except those vital to national security and the resumption of the integrity of the bank.
Meanwhile, social discourse over the event had reached a new, feverish pitch, from both sides of the political spectrum. Ironically, those on the far left and the far right were equally pleased with the apparent downfall of the American financial system; praising it either as the first stage in the imminent collapse of American capitalism and imperialism, or as the latest step in clearing out the Jewish financial world order and/or draining the American swamp of it’s many corrupt bigwigs. Still, a run on the banks and the temporary(?) effective dissolution of the largest stock exchange on the planet was as good a reason as any to get out and go burn some stuff, and the rising tension that has been plaguing the American domestic world boiled over once again as looters, rioters, protestors and militants took to the streets. Activity would be particularly notable on the West Coast, where several “autonomous zones” were set up to join the ones left over from years prior, and in the East, where rural republicans would organize adhoc parades of vehicles and where urbanite leftists would try their damndest to stop them. In New York, a large protest, estimated to contain up to 500,000 individuals, made their way first to the World Trade Center (the memorial to 9/11 was left untouched), then to Battery Park, and then, at their most miltant, to Wall Street itself, where the investors who once dominated the scene were swept up and pushed out, and in two cases seriously beaten by the mob. There they organized something of am adhoc repeat of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, including demands to keep the Stock Exchange offline and to, in one notable case, to burn the whole street to the ground. The Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, personally pleaded with the protestors to remain civil and to disperse in short order, calling the crisis ”an imminent threat to the United States of America, on the grandest possible scale.” Although the crowd would shrink some in the following hours, by the end of the day the remaining 460,000~ protestors still held the street. Four days later, when the last of the mob had been dispersed by Police, they would discover that the famous Bull of Wall Street had been toppled, it’s legs, horns and face melted by blow torches, and it’s sides tagged with Eat the Rich and Feed the Poor.
By the end of the day, and the onset of Christmas Morning, the United States and the rest of the World was a changed place. Feverish, nonstop work by the officials of the various financial institutions of the US Government and of the major banks, as well as their international counterparts, had, in spite of their best efforts, failed to halt whatever was causing the collapse and destruction of the New York Stock Exchange, the IRS, and the major investment banks; by 4 AM, workers had simply cut off power to the entirety of lower Manhattan to stop the effects until it could be more thoroughly assessed; similar deliberate power outages were staged in New Jersey, Washington, and Boston, and several major banks deliberately cut their headquarters (and in some cases their physical banks) off from the power grid to isolate their internal computer systems.
The United States financial system as it had existed had been effectively dissolved in a matter of hours; trading of stocks was suspended nationwide, confidence in (and the value of) the dollar had plummeted and was only barely beginning to stop it’s decline, hundreds of billions of dollars had been withdrawn from banks across the world, the IRS, defunded and demoralized even before the attack, had been rendered effectively out of play, the Dow Jones was down almost 2500 points, and by early estimations almost every nation in the Western World, including the United States, had entered a sharp, but theoretically short (depending on when things reset), recession, not counting the nations who’s growth would be hit hard but not quite turn negative. Additionally, only furtive clues had been acquired by the now ludicrously busy FBI and CIA; the IRS manifesto, which indicated a domestic conspiracy, and several messages deposited in the computer systems of several major US companies, namely Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and others which extolled anti-”Big Media” sentiments, the notion that these companies had sold out America and their workers to China and Mexico, and, in the particular case of GM, that the attacks were “[THIS IS] FOR ME AND THE BOYS WHO WORKED AT THE LORDSTOWN PLANT, WE GAVE OUR LIFE AND LIMB TO YOU AND YOU REPAID IT WITH SCORN, NOW YOU WILL REAP THE WHIRLWIND”. Investigations continue, but more work is necessary, and the United States (and the world) must now, if it wishes to recover, begin on the long and harsh road of rebuilding, of solving the many issues it now faces, and of restoring order to the international financial system and to the domestic political and economic situation.
Above all else, there is one thing that is clear. It is that the world of December 23rd, 2024, and December 25th, 2024 are now wholly, unmistakably, unrecognizably different— and that there will be hell to pay for whoever drew the line between the two.
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