Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [246]
"You see, what makes an economy isn't wealth, but the use of wealth, all the transactions that occur every day, from the kid who cuts your grass for a buck to a major corporate acquisition. If that stops, everything stops." Ryan nodded approval to Fiedler. It was a superb little lecture.
"I'm still not sure I get it," the chief of staff said. The President was still listening.
My turn. Ryan shook his head. "Not many people get it. Like Buzz said, it's too simple. You look for activity, not inactivity, as an indication of a trend, but inactivity is the real danger here. If I decide to sit still and do nothing, then my money doesn't circulate. I don't buy things, and the people who make the things I would have bought are out of work. That's a frightening thing to them, and to their neighbors. The neighbors get so scared that they hold on to their money—why spend it when they might need it to eat when they lose their jobs, right? And on, and on, and on. We have a real problem here, guys," Jack concluded. "Monday morning the bankers are going to find out that they don't know what they have, either. The banking crisis didn't really start until 1932, well after the stock market came unglued. Not this time."
"How bad?" The President asked this question.
"I don't know," Fiedler replied. "It's never happened before."
" 'I don't know' doesn't cut it, Buzz," Durling said.
"Would you prefer a lie?" the Secretary of the Treasury asked. "We need the chairman of the Fed in here. We're facing a lot of problems. The first big one is a liquidity crisis of unprecedented proportions."
"Not to mention a shooting war," Ryan pointed out for those who might have forgotten.
"Which is the more serious?" President Durling asked.
Ryan thought about it for a second. "In terms of real net harm to our country? We have two submarines sunk, figure about two hundred fifty sailors dead. Two carriers crippled. They can be fixed. The Marianas are under new ownership. Those are all bad things," Jack said in a measured voice, thinking as he spoke. "But they do not genuinely affect our national security because they do not pertain to the real strength of our country. America is a shared idea. We're people who think in a certain way, who believe that they can do the things they want to do. Everything else follows from that. It's confidence, optimism, the one thing that other countries find so strange about us. If you take that away, hell, we're no different from anybody else. The short answer to your question, Mr. President, is that the economic problem is far more dangerous to us than what the Japs just did."
"You surprise me, Jack," Durling said.
"Sir, like Buzz said, would you prefer a lie?"
"What the hell is the problem?" Ron Jones asked. The sun was already up, and USS Pasadena was visible, still tied to her pier, the national ensign hanging forlornly in the still air. A fighting ship of the United States Navy was doing nothing at all, and the son of his mentor was dead at the hands of an enemy. Why wasn't anyone doing something about it?
"She doesn't have orders," Mancuso said, "because I don't have orders, because CINCPAC doesn't have orders, because National Command Authority hasn't issued any orders."
"They awake there?"
"SecDef's supposed to be in the White House now. The President's been briefed in by now, probably," ComSubPac