Imagine this, it’s the end of the month, your bills are overdue and somehow the payments didn’t go through this time.
You open your laptop, you grab your credit card and try to pay them online but some sort of annoying “System error” prevents you from doing so.
But you have a deadline, so what do you do?
Fine, you put on some shirt and some slacks and head to the ATM to check your balance and retrieve some cash.
What you’re about to see now is gonna blow your socks away.
Never before have you seen so many people in your life waiting for the ATM. Or better said, never before have you seen so many people waiting in a line, period.
You wonder for a second if you’re still sleeping and you’re in the middle of a dream where you were heading to the ATM and ended up on some breadline in Venezuela.
As soon as that thought fades away, the doubts begin piling up, and as you take a deep nice look into that gigantic human train and you start to question.
There’s only two reasons why there’s that many people at that time a night in front of the ATM.
Either they started giving blow jobs at the cash machine, or something has gone seriously wrong.
You contemplate the possibility of a Bank run for a second, however such a thought is so uncomfortable so you secretly hope it’s the blowjob.
Still in disbelief, you can’t help but realize that everyone around you is showing unquestionable signs of distress, they all seem to be worried sick about something, and that thing is the possibility of not being able to withdraw their money.
The minutes pass and the uncertainty turns to anguish, anguish turns to desperation. No one knows what’s going on, the only thing that’s clear is that no one is able to withdraw their money anymore.
“This is the fifth ATM I find with the same problem” says a voice among the crowd causing people start to feel even more anxious than they already were. In fact, you can feel a collective sense of fright in the dark cold of night.
And from there it was only a matter of time until some people started talking about what everyone else were thinking:
Bank Bail-ins
“Oh, no! This cannot happen here!” You say to yourself.
But then again, that’s probably what everyone said in Argentina, in Venezuela, and whatever country that went through the same.
Still, you refuse to believe that because want to believe that these things only happen in developing countries where corruption is more predominant and politicians don’t seem to care about the public.
Then again, you immediately realize that nowadays when it comes to corruption, there’s rarely any difference left between developed countries and developing nations, or banana republics for that matter.
Matter of a fact, we’ve crossed that line long time ago… With a truck filled with bananas.
You still can’t believe that the banks made a run for your money, or that the government allowed them to do so. And more importantly, you still can’t believe that this is happening in your country.
But all your attempts of rationalization fail as you realize that you know full well what politicians do in times of crisis:
They all protect the too big to fails on expense of the public. The same as any other place in the world.
Your mind at present is a warzone. Reality is now clashing with the spoon-fed narrative fabricated by the political class who strangely enough, are notorious for their severe allergy to telling the truth.
And yet you believed them, everybody did. Because they told us what we wanted to believe. Plus, nobody wants to think about these things.
After all, most people are even afraid to check their bank balance just for the fear of worrying, so everyone just accepted the politicians’ narrative about the banking system. Hell, you’ve built a wall on your mind around that narrative, but now all of the sudden…
That wall is coming down, and cognitive dissonance is no longer a luxury you can afford.
The Music Always Stops
You still don’t know what hit you, and all these thoughts come knocking at your door, thoughts you tried to block for so long because they were just too uncomfortable to entertain.
You get more worried as you start to remember, you remember that the banks have been insolvent for too long, far too long.
You remember that only a tiny portion of that money does actually exist in reality. You remember that if just a small percentage of the population tried to withdraw their money at the same time, that it wouldn’t be possible because…
It’s the greatest trick of all, always has been. It’s like that game with the musical chairs, you better grab a chair before the music stops, because the music always stops.
But you knew that already, you always knew.
Maybe you still don’t want to believe it. Maybe you don’t want to admit to yourself that you do.
But you deep down you knew, you knew this day was coming. You knew the inevitable was unavoidable as they were only kicking the can further down the road.
So you better not be caught off guard when the shit hits the fan as the can runs out of road.
Because that’s the moment when the music stops.
Of course none of this may never happen, or it will all start on that day, the day they allow banks to freeze all accounts, and when that day comes, it’s gonna be the biggest bank robbery the world has ever seen, and the banks will probably be doing the robbing.
