Last September, I wrote a piece of fiction to illustrate the dangers of societal dependence upon electronic currency for day to day, minute to minute transactions. Recent events have proven that we are far closer to such a scenario that most people realize –
(Fox Business News) System outages at several Chinese banks since the weekend have exacerbated concerns amongst the public about a credit crunch, after the central bank tightened the availability of funds in the banking system as it tries to rein in informal lending.
A money transfer system at Bank of China (BOC), the country’s third largest lender, temporarily failed on Monday, and some customers at Bank of Nanjing also could not transfer money this week.
On Sunday, a nationwide outage of automatic teller machines (ATMs) and Point of Sales (POS) machines at China’s biggest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), were tweeted across China’s popular Twitter-like Weibo.
BOC, Bank of Nanjing and ICBC have all said the outages were due to technical problems, but this did not allay customer concerns of a larger problem in the banking sector.
“I cannot withdraw money from ICBC and BOC, and don’t know who will be next,” wrote blogger Wang Yangyu.
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We have already seen similar, unexplained shutdowns of large portions of the British and Irish banking systems, as well as state declared “banking holidays” in Greece, Cyprus, and Spain. There have already been some *limited* banking outages in the US, as well, such as the JMP “glitch” earlier this year which impacted millions of customers.
Having cash on hand is good, but having a pantry stocked with 90 days worth of food and other supplies is much better, for as Dickens wrote, it will be “the best of times, and the worst of times” and further, “The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.”
WE HAVE BEEN WARNED
LT
~Those who abuse Liberty, sentence themselves to death!
Let those who have ears, hear. The normalcy bias outlined in 299 Days is hard to overcome.
If the powers that be can ignore/cover up the issues with the PBOC, there is very little hope that we will stand up until it is too late.
We may be seeing the ‘leading edge’ of it right now --
http://www.kake.com/money/headlines/Social-Security-Deposits-Apparently-Delayed-213792381.html