The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 11

Eventually, the United States had run out of money.

This wasn’t unusual. Ellie had learned about it at school. Most of the nations still organized as nations ultimately did. Their costs were too high, with their grandparented-in welfare and healthcare expenses, so they were unable to survive as competitive business entities in a world made up primarily of business entities.

At first, nations had some advantages over businesses. Nations controlled territory, and so could charge access fees, exclusive or otherwise, which they usually still called taxes. Nations had legacy armed forces, too, which could operate either as bill collectors or brigands and so supplement their income. Nations should have been unable to compete, but they were stifled by their inherited expenses, and so most eventually reached one kind of financial crisis or another. Some survived their crisis, but many did not, and the worst affected were usually those still dependent on oil-based energy systems in a world rapidly switching to cheaply-manufactured wind-farm and solar plants. Nations dependent on oil, like the United States.

In the United States, the transition had triggered a crisis. Or rather, it had precipitated a crisis which had been looming for a generation. The economic cost of overly-expensive legacy energy sources had combined with assumptions about limitless credit, and social dysfunction, and a hesitant attempt at empire, and expectations about how comfortable life ought to be for everyone in what had still been seen as the most important nation in the world, together those things had created a crisis from which the United States had never recovered.

The United States had run out of money, and had no way to pay its debts, so those debts had been sold to banks and foreign nations, and eventually, years later, to companies such as Ellie’s.

Not long afterwards the debt-recovery operations had begun.

Debt-recovery was a vast, disorganized, semi-military operation, ostensibly begun to recover the capital cost of the unpaid loans, plus service fees such as interest, but mostly now just a business enterprise which existed for the sake of its own existence. It had been going on for decades, and showed no signs of ending soon. There had been a lot of wealth in America once, and also a vast amount of debt, and so there was a great deal to recover, and no real reason to hurry about doing it.

Now, debt-recovery had taken on a life of its own. Like all large business enterprises sooner or later did, Ellie supposed. The American debt-recovery, the Měi-guó debt-recovery, had ballooned into a web of interlinked businesses, all providing cost-added services to one another, a kind of self-perpetuating system of patronage and contracts and pocket-lining and greed rather than anything to do with the most efficient way to recover outstanding credit. The debt-recovery companies charged exorbitant fees for their services, adding on those costs to the capital debt they were recovering. Costs such as shipping and security and consultant analysts to advise on best-value removal strategies, until it seemed as though there was almost a cycle of services fees where entire subcontracting companies existed to do nothing but provide a service to another company, and then charge a fee. Companies existed to resell recovered equipment, or recover the component metals in scrap, or advise on predicted market fluctuations which could alter the expected returns on recovered goods. Old rubbish tips were mined. Old industrial plants were too. That mining incurred expenses. There were refineries which did nothing but recover rare earths from scrapped electronics, or oils from dumped plastic. There were engineering firms which did nothing but remove factories and bridges and old railway lines for scrap, and all of these consultants added their fees to the existing debt, and none of their fees were regulated or controlled, since the creditor banks didn’t care, and most of the time the subcontractors were owned by the creditor banks anyway, because they had decided they might as well retain the profits of their debt-recovery business.