From The Founder's Desk
columnist: Walt Thiessen

Topic: Monetary Policy
A Novel Approach To The Roots of the Financial Crisis

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Most of what the bankers, the media, and the politicians teach us about the financial crisis is either misleading or wrong. I propose to teach America the real roots of the crisis by entertaining them.

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by Walt Thiessen
(libertarian)
Monday, April 6, 2009

Most of last year, I wrestled with the problem of how to educate the American people regarding the true nature of fiat money and banking. This problem consumed so much of my attention because fiat money sits at the root of nearly every big government and anti-liberty issue we face.

As we approached Autumn 2008, the financial situation reached critical proportions, and finally all of America realized a crisis had  come upon us. This happened no thanks to the politicians and the financial experts who, for so many years, did their best to assure America each step of the way that no crisis awaited us.

I saw the crisis as an opportunity, because nothing focuses the attention of people like a crisis. Crises are a staple of our society, our information, and our entertainment. Literature depends upon conflict and crisis to make the story line interesting. Movies and theater depend upon dramatization to make them interesting, and dramatization depends upon conflict and crisis. In fact, every example of storytelling depends upon conflict and crisis. We should not be surprised by the degree of drama in our lives, because that drama gets reflected daily in our media, entertainment, and political environments.

With the attention of the people focused on the financial crisis, I asked myself how that attention could be redirected to focus on the monetary system, since that system caused the financial crisis. After all, the topic of fiat money is dreadfully dull for most people. Read a few sentences about fiat money and monetary policy, and you will probably find it to be more effective than a sleeping pill.

So what could I do to make fiat money interesting? The answer became clear to me. We must make the monetary system entertaining. To do that, we need to learn better storytelling techniques.

Yes, storytelling. All news reporting, at its root, is storytelling. All movies, theatrical productions, novels, television programs, games, sports, political issues, etc. are rooted in storytelling. Say what you want about any or all of these things, but surely we can all agree that the best stories in each of them get the most attention.

And what makes a good story? Drama makes a good story. Conflict and crisis make good stories. In fact, without conflict or crisis, stories do not hold our attention.

Will a particular team make it to the Super Bowl? Which contestant will win American Idol?  Will Robert Langdon and Sophie Nevue successfully avoid capture by a relentless French policeman bent on arresting them before they figure out the solution to the DaVinci Code? Which professional athletes used steroids? How will Scarlett O'Hara survive the burning of Atlanta and the destruction of the life she knew as a little girl? How can America win the Wars on Terror, Drugs, Poverty, etc? When two or more professional poker players go "all-in," which will take the pot? Who will win the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship for 2009: Michigan State (providing a brief beacon of light and hope to an entire, long-depressed state) or North Carolina (everyone's pre-season favorite to win it all)?

I decided that learning how to dramatize a story effectively could enable me to teach people about the real root of the financial crisis: fiat money. I would do it by writing a novel. If I could write a "page turner," or at least a story that held the reader's interest from cover to cover regardless of how little they already understood the topic, I had a chance to influence the debate on the financial crisis better than any other pro-freedom advocate had done so far.

Unfortunately, I felt completely inadequate to the task. In my high school, they did not offer creative writing until 11th grade. I planned to take it, but it got canceled just before my 11th year. 35 years later, my prospects for taking that class had not improved! So, I needed someone else to teach me now, and quickly.

I knew that learning good storytelling usually doesn't happen overnight. My sister majored in theatre. She spent most of her high school years and all of her college years learning how to tell stories through theatre, that plus many years of community theatre afterward taught her good storytelling.

My problem, of course, is that I don't have 7-15 years to learn this stuff. I need to learn it now. After I struggled with this for awhile, it finally dawned on me that I knew someone who could teach me. My sister! Duh! So I got on the phone with her. I told her I planned to write a novel about the financial crisis, but I needed her help to learn how to make it interesting. She managed to distill her entire understanding of effective storytelling into two concepts: (1) conflict and crisis, and (2) active verbs vs passive verbs.

She showed me how important tension (conflict and crisis) is to a story, and she told me that an effective writer holds a reader's attention by using active verbs and eschewing passive verbs. Active verbs (verbs that directly describe action or activity) make the story active and interesting. Passive verbs (all the variants of the verb family "to be" which bring action to a standstill and focus on state of being instead) put readers to sleep. Her advice to me: build tension and conflict into my story, and do so using active verbs.

So I did. I started writing the novel in November 2008. Last week, I finally completed the first draft of a didactic (instructive) novel about a man in a top position at a top bank who gets an up-close look at the seamier side of the fiat money financial system. The story begins with a disappearance of another leading banker, presumably lost at sea in his yacht under mysterious circumstances. The first banker gets shown a secret video of a meeting between the Fed Chairman, the Treasury Secretary, and his uncle, the bank's CEO in which they privately admit that Fed policy and fiat money are the real causes of the financial crisis. Shortly thereafter, the banker's daughter gets kidnapped. He learns the truth about his wife's death six years before in a traffic accident. When he tries to rescue his daughter, he gets shot by an assassin hired by his uncle.

I have built a series of layers into the story, and already my initial test readers are giving it a "thumbs up."

I asked my sister to edit the novel for me, and she just yesterday gave me back her first round of edits. Her summary comment on the novel: she thinks it's a good story and wants to write the screenplay for it, because she thinks it would make a great action movie. As my sister, she obviously has a bias in this case, but on the other hand she does know something about script writing. She recently wrote a historical play, called What Kind Of Love?, about the life of Thomas Jefferson and his intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, which has a good story  line and some really good songs written for it by herself and a talented composer who worked on the project with her. We await the decision of a leading theater in Northern Virginia (just outside Washington, DC) that is 90% likely to produce  and stage the play in June 2009.

My next steps for my novel include rewriting some sections she identified in her editing, making various typo changes, etc. I figure that finishing it will probably take until the end of April. I plan to release the novel first as an e-book in May, while planning to self-publish it in regular book form by July. I'm currently soliciting bids from professional illustrators for the front cover, and after that I plan to start pre-marketing the book. The title will be The Money Suckers.

I promise to supply more details as the first publication date approaches.

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©2009 Walt Thiessen, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Monday, April 6, 2009
Last modified: Friday, May 8, 2009

The views expressed in this article are those of Walt Thiessen only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Walt Thiessen is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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