Chapter 14

Betsy and Chuck were seated at the conference table in the modular office building. She couldn’t keep from looking around at the plain spartan furnishings. The work environment hadn’t improved any, and it really bothered her. She was half temped to run outside, pull up a plant, stick it in a pot, and bring it into the office just to have something living inside.

The young couple were joined by her business employees and the two interns. Marge, Cheryl, Sherry, Ann, Robert, and Jerry kept glancing over at Shelly and Dawn nervously. They were wondering if the two women were joining them or replacing two of them.

Charlie had spent two days getting Shelly up to speed on Betsy’s business empire, and it really was an empire. She had one group of businesses that spanned the food industry from production in local farms to processing into consumer products and on to delivery at local distribution points. She had another group of businesses that spanned manufacturing from ores to finished products. The products were simple items of common everyday use – screws, nails, nuts, bolts, fusion cells, and wire. Her recycling plant on the island would serve as another source of raw materials.

There were major gaps in terms of the industries in which she was active. She didn’t have any interests in companies dealing with entertainment. There were no film companies, recording companies, or sports teams in her portfolio. Betsy suspected that entertainment was going to be a local affair with amateur productions, street musicians, and local school sports filling in the gap. She didn’t have any investments in education or the information sciences, although she did own a portion of her father’s computer company. That was more of a hardware company than a software house.

The gaps in business sectors were not critical in terms of supporting the recovery of the economy. Her parents and her siblings in the Carter Clan were filling those gaps. With guidance from William, the various concerns were working together to keep a facade of civilization alive until a true civilized world could emerge. Although law and order were slowly returning, it really was little more than a facade of civilization at the moment.

The situation in the country at large was chaotic. There were still major riots, high crime rates, and even outbreaks of minor plagues on the mainland. From having a population of over three hundred million, the United States had dropped down to two hundred and fifty million people during a four month period, and the population was still dropping. The major metropolitan areas just couldn’t support the density of people living within them.

Just the first ten days without food delivery to major cities had created food riots of incredible violence. Until the collapse, the average person took for granted the presence of food at the grocery store. Meat was this miracle food that came on foam trays wrapped in plastic and had nothing to do with animals or farms. Even when the snow was two feet deep, people had gotten used to fresh vegetables that had been shipped thousands of miles to reach them.

The facts of the matter were that a million people eat a lot of food. Assuming just one pound of food per person per day meant that 500 tons of food had to be delivered each day for every million people living in an urban area. While a pound of food a day might seem like a lot, it isn’t that much food at all. A high-end fast-food hamburger with the works, along with a large side of fries, is almost a pound of food. A chicken breast and a baked potato weigh in at nearly a pound of food as well. The average person eats 4.7 pounds of food a day.

For a million people to be able to drink eight ounces of milk requires a supply of 100,000 gallons of milk daily. Eight ounces was about enough milk for a bowl of cold cereal.

The metropolitan area of Atlanta had a population of four million on the day of the economic collapse. Maintaining current dietary practices required that nearly 10,000 tons of food be brought into the city each and every day. That required a constant flow of essentially 400 fully loaded trucks per day, and Atlanta wasn’t even one of the ten largest cities in America.

When the trucks stopped moving, all food within the major cities had been consumed by the fifth day without deliveries. Most people didn’t even have a stockpile of food capable of lasting three days. Think of what that meant in Atlanta, where suddenly there were four million hungry people. Hungry people have no conscience when their families are starving.

Even though the Fusion Foundation was delivering food at a rate that attempted to maintain pre-collapse supplies of food, there were numerous areas where it was just too dangerous for a truck to show up. Mad desperate people would often charge the truck trying to grab as much food as possible. There would be violent riots and people would get injured.

Truckers weren’t willing to take the risks. They had a valuable cargo and as the old saying goes – possession is nine tenths of the law. The average trucker could trade his cargo for whatever he wanted well before reaching an area in truly desperate need.

For now, Betsy’s companies were making incredible profits. Ten percent here and there of the profits of over three thousand companies had forced Betsy’s people to reinvest her earnings into more and more businesses. She was trading food and material goods for partial ownership in a variety of companies.

In just the past month, her empire had grown by nearly twenty percent. That kind of growth was unhealthy. They needed more people to manage it, trouble shooters to investigate problems, and more time to look for new investments. It was obvious that six or seven people weren’t sufficient. She needed a staff of a hundred or more people to manage that kind of empire.

Even Chuck was in a bind in terms of managing what he owned. While his businesses were closer to the retail end of things, a lot of goods were flowing through them. People were fixing things rather than replacing them. William’s car company had gone bankrupt several years ago, but had emerged out of bankruptcy as one of the major manufacturers of car parts. Chuck’s car repair companies, over sixty stores in total, were now assured of parts and business was booming.

The extended time at the Druid College had put him way behind in managing his companies. When he discovered how much in goods and cellphone minutes were stockpiled as his part of the profits, he was floored. Dawn was going to be busy getting that whole mess straightened out. He had more than enough to double the size of his business.

Charlie kicked off the meeting with the simple question, “What do you want to invest in?”

Betsy answered, “Trees.”

“Trees?” Charlie asked.

“Lumber and paper. The owners of millions of acres of timber were mega-corporations. Local managers have taken over the properties, but they don’t have the resources necessary to hold on to them or to turn the trees into products. I want parts of those companies,” Betsy answered.

Shelly was quiet for a moment thinking about the answer. It was the last thing that she expected to hear. Then she realized what Betsy’s long term strategy was going to be. While the past couple of decades had brokers being the money people, Betsy recognized that had been an artificial construct of a digital economy. Raw materials and real goods were always of value regardless of anything else that happened.

“That’s brilliant,” Shelly said.

Dawn looked puzzled by Shelly’s comment. Of course, she didn’t have nearly the level of knowledge of Betsy’s current holdings as Shelly had acquired over the past two days.

Dawn asked, “Why do you say that?”

“She’s investing in raw materials. The world will always need raw materials,” Shelly answered.

Dawn sat back to think about it. She slowly came to realize that investing in large tracts of forest would be a long term investment. At some point in time, people would start rebuilding and the people who controlled the raw materials would make incredible profits. Betsy was well positioned to acquire all of that land and the trees up-on it.

The precedent for what Betsy was doing was well established. When Communism fell, individuals managing state-owned businesses took over those businesses. It was, more or less, a kind of a finders keepers situation. That created a number of Russian billionaires in the steel, timber, and energy industries. A lot of wealthy people all over the world rushed in and invested with those individuals. Essentially, they staked a claim that was impossible for the later government of Russia to invalidate.

A lot of high level managers of individual industrial sites were doing the same thing, after the fall of the corporate business world. The key problem was that they needed something with which to pay people, but there wasn’t an international set of investors available to provide the necessary funding. Betsy, with her partial ownership in a number of companies, could fulfill that role where no one else could.

Chuck said, “If you’re buying trees, maybe I should invest in lumber yards.”

“Not yet,” Dawn said after working out the long term implications of the current situation on the need for wood.

“Why not?”

“There’s too much property just sitting around empty. In a few years, people will start taking over those properties and they’ll need lumber to repair the damage caused by sitting empty. For now, people need transportation, energy, and food,” Dawn answered.

Chuck said, “I’ve got grocery store chains and car repair places. I guess I can increase my holdings in those two areas.”

Chuck had invested in service companies along with a handful of manufacturing firms. The grocery stores were not making great profits despite the high demand for food. With the Fusion Foundation providing free food, the grocery stores couldn’t charge high prices for goods.

His automotive companies were making a profit. People who kept jobs needed to get to where they worked. That required transportation and, in America and at that time, that meant they needed cars. While public transportation (in the form of buses, trains, trams, and monorails) had never been that widespread, it had totally disappeared with the collapse of corporations and local governments. Cars had to be maintained, and fixing things required parts, tools, and skilled people.

For the moment, car parts were relatively easy to acquire. There were cars that had been destroyed in the riots littering the urban-scape. A number of automotive repair places had been paid to tow away the abandoned derelicts as part of the cleanup effort. The smart ones kept the cars they had towed off to use as parts. The exteriors of the cars might have been burned or smashed, but the basic mechanical parts were still good.

Dawn said, “You need to work your way up the supply chain for your auto repair places. Without an infrastructure to assure consistent delivery of parts, you could find your businesses squeezed out of the market.”

“William Redman Carter owns the largest car parts manufacturer,” Chuck said thinking he could rely upon Betsy’s brother to assure delivery of parts in the future.

Betsy said, “That’s right.”

Dawn replied, “That’s not right. His company makes a lot of the different parts that go into a car, but there are essential components that his company doesn’t make. As far as I can tell, no one is currently making headlights, windshield wipers, various automotive fluids, and tires. We’re going to be running out of tires soon.”

“Let’s start with tires,” Chuck said knowing that cars can run without headlights and windshield wipers, but wouldn’t move without tires.

Dawn said, “I’ll start to work on that.”

“Great,” Chuck said.

Chuck knew the wisdom of having people doing the work for him, as well as the problems involved with that. There was a lot of work that had to be done, too much work for a single person. Working alone, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get to everything. Working with others, things could get dropped or overlooked.

He sat back and thought about it for a minute. He went through the process he used when doing all of his own research before investing in a company. There were the obvious things, such as the profitability and maintainability of a company. However, it wasn’t only the bottom line he examined, but the impact of existing and pending legislation.

He said, “Wait! What about Federal Regulations?”

“Don’t worry about that. There’s no one to enforce them,” Dawn said.

The whole Federal machine was broken. The huge number of bureaucrats who worked for the Federal government weren’t getting paid. As a result, they weren’t working. Instead, they were scrambling to get food for their families. Too many of them didn’t have any real work skills. They were rule makers and enforcers of regulations. Most of them were successful only because they were backed by a huge machine. Now, bureaucrats were nothing.

There were some inspectors who were trying to use their past authority to feather their nest. They would show up at a workplace, find a hundred real and imaginary violations of regulations, and then try to get the owner to bribe them into not filing charges. It worked in a few cases, but people wised up very quickly. Now, anyone showing up and claiming to be an inspector was given the bum’s rush.

A lot of the regulations that had been created by hundreds of government agencies were going to get dropped. Too many rules, regulations, and laws had been passed to support large corporations at the expense of small and medium size companies. A million dollar fine to a corporation that did a billion dollars of business every quarter was a drop in the bucket. A million dollar fine levied against a company that did three million dollars worth of business in a year, wiped out that business. There were so many contradictions in the regulations that it was impossible to comply with them all.

Chuck asked, “What do you mean, there’s no one to enforce them?”

“The Federal government is now the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. No one else, other than the military, is showing up to work,” Dawn said.

“Why?”

“It is broke,” Shelly said. “B - R - O - K - E! Broke. It has no money. Without money, it has no power, and no real way of enforcing any kind of regulation.”

The truly sad thing was that the Federal Government did not actually control money. Money was under the control of the Federal Reserve Bank, which was a bank, and not a government agency. The Department of the Treasury creates money, but all financial policies were set by the Federal Reserve Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank was not burdened by Federal oversight. That is, neither the President nor Congress could force any specific policy to be followed by the Federal Reserve Bank.