Recall, if your powers of retention will allow it, that after the Second Pulse, as the twenty-second century began its surreal and majestic existence, sea level had risen to about fifty feet higher than it had been early in the twentieth century. This remarkable rise had been bad for people—most of them. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.
This remarkable wealth distribution was just a result of the logical progression of the ordinary workings of capitalism, following its overarching operating principle of capital accumulation at the highest rate of return. Capturing that highest rate of return was an interesting process, which became directly relevant to what happened in the postpulse years. Because the areas where the highest rate of return can be obtained move around the world as time passes, following differences in development and currency exchange rates. The highest rate of return comes during periods of rapid development, but not just any area can be rapidly developed; there needs to be a preliminary infrastructure, and hot money, and a fairly stable and somewhat educated populace, ambitious for themselves and willing to sacrifice for their children by working hard for low wages. With these conditions in place, investment capital can descend like a skyvillage on an orchard, and that region then experiences rapid growth, and the rate of return for global investors is high. But as with everything, the logistic curve rules; rates of profit drop as workers expect higher wages and benefits, and the local market saturates as everyone gets the basic necessities. So at that point capital moves on to the next geocultural opportunity, flying somewhere else. The people in that newly abandoned region are left to cope with their new rust belt status, abandoned as they are to fates ranging from touristic simulacrum to Chernobylic calm. Local intellectuals discover bioregionalism and proclaim the virtues of getting by with what can be made in that watershed, which turns out to be not much, especially when all the young people move somewhere else, following the skyvillages of liquid capital.
So it goes, region to region, opportunity to opportunity. The march of progress! Sustainable development! Always there is an encouraging motto to mark the remorseless migration of capital from an ex–highest rate of return to the next primed site. And indeed, development of capital gets sustained.
So in that process—call it globalization, neoliberal capitalism, the Anthropocene, the water boarding, what have you—the Second Pulse became just an unusually clear signal that it was time for capital to move on. Rate of return on all coastlines having been definitively hosed, capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid down the path of least resistance, or up it, or sideways—it doesn’t matter, money being so slippery and antigravitational, with no restraints on capital flight or any other such impediment that the feeble remnant nation-state system might have thought to apply, if it had not already been bought and now owned by that very same capital saying bye-bye to the new backwater.
So first you get off the coastlines, because they are a mess and an emergency rescue operation. Poor old governments exist to deal with situations like that. Capital goes immediately to Denver. Although Denver being Denver, snoozefest beyond compare, a fair bit of New York’s capital just shifted uptown, where Manhattan Island still protruded from the sea with a sufficient margin. That was important locally, but globally speaking, capital went to Denver, Beijing, Moscow, Chicago, et cetera; just as the list of drowned cities could go on forever, such that certain awesome writers fond of lists would have already inflicted this amazing list of coastal cities on the reader, but for now please just consult a map or globe and make it yourself—yet another great list could be made of all the wonderful inland cities that were untouched by sea level rise, even if located on lakes or rivers, as they so often were. So capital had lots of better rates of return to flow to, indeed almost anywhere that was not on the drowned coastlines would do. Places competed in abasing themselves to get some of what could be called refugee capital, though really it was just the imperial move to the summer palace, as always.
This is not to say things didn’t get weirder after the Second Pulse, because they did. The flood caused an unprecedented loss of assets and a cessation of trade, stimulating a substantial recession, or let’s say a pretty big little depression. As always in moments like this, which keep happening every generation to everyone’s immense surprise, the big private banks and investment firms went to the big central banks, meaning the governments of the world, and demanded to be saved from the impacts of the floods on their activities. The governments, being long since subsidiaries of the banks anyway, caved again, and bailed out the banks one hundred cents on the dollar, incurring public debt so huge that it could not be paid off in the remaining lifetime of the universe. Oh dear, what a quandary. Ten years after the end of the Second Pulse it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly the wrestling match had always been professional wrestling and completely staged start to finish, but in any case it looked to be over.
Because the bailout of banks following the Second Pulse crash was huge. They always are. The bailout of the 2008 crash, which served as the model for the two that followed it, was calculated by historians at somewhere between 5 and 15 trillion dollars. One careful guess said it was 7.7 trillion dollars, another 13 trillion; both added that this was more than the cost (adjusted for inflation) of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1980s savings and loan bailout, the Iraq wars, and the entire NASA space program, combined. Conclusion: wars and land and social programs must not be very expensive. And compared to rescuing finance from itself, they’re not.