McAuley went on. ‘The exchange of old US bonds and currency for the new Treasury bonds continues, with several major corporations and private investors buying in. They are able to exchange pre-Wave bonds for a variable face value that’s tied to their interest-rate payments. Currency exchange with overseas asset holders continues at twenty per cent face value, although there is a deadline for final exchanges set for this time next year.’

Jed suppressed a grin at the glaze he could see frosting over Kip’s eyes. He, on the other hand, found this shit fascinating. A lot of folks were getting rich off of the new bonds, deepening their credit or using the paper to levy purchases of vacant land in the Wave-affected territories. Cesky Enterprises immediately came to mind as one of the major players in that brand of rampant land speculation. The US Government would accept bonds as payment at face value for land, whereas the best a bond holder could get on the open market was less than thirty per cent for face value.

It was simple enough: buy the land on the cheap, dumping the bonds to someone else in the process, and hope that the value of the land would rise, generating a profit. Several other corporations, such as Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks, had opened land offices with a similar objective in mind. The only problem was the same one that faced the Confederation Congress prior to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Back then, they’d also tried to sell land in order to pay the bills, without much success. The territory, the much contested Ohio River Valley, was difficult to secure against the British and the Native Americans. This instability ensured that the land, while valuable on the surface, sold for far less than it was worth until the central government gained true control over the valley.

Funny how history could loop back and bite you on the ass like that. Spheres of control were ringed by looser rings of what might be called ‘influence’. The land in those areas did yield decent gains. However, outside of those areas? Selling that land was a lot like eating rat poison: it would fill your belly with blood while you slowly starved to death.

‘The profits from the bond and overseas currency exchange should be enough to restore short-term faith in the solvency of the government,’ Paul McAuley continued. ‘We will still be in debt, to be certain. However, the United States of America has rarely been without a national debt.’

‘The history books tell me as much, Paul,’ Kipper said. ‘Still, the blue-collar engineer in me would like to make that debt a bit more manageable.’

‘We are fortunate in the cold fact that many who received government entitlements were . . .’ McAuley struggled for a moment to find the right form of words.

‘We get it,’ Culver said. ‘The Republicans got their wish with social security. It went away.’