The government was falling apart
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
Stephensonia
Community Entry
1990's cyberpunk movement, after it seemed like the world would not be exterminated in a nuclear apocalypse/titanomachia, but retaining its punk roots of angst-ridden despair over the future {fed by many other fictional and semi-non-fic warning stories) and desire for punkarchy, was quick to come up with other theories of how the world is gonna go to hell, the primary sign of said hell-going being the weakening, dissolution, fragmentation, or balkanization of the federal government(s).
In the post-Reagan era, it was seen that vast run-up in the national and other public debt(s) would eventually result in a day of reckoning and subsequent devaluation, loss of power for the currency issuing government. However, the vast increase in the net worth of technology corporations in the late 1990's resulted in concurrent increases in the value of property in general and tax revinues in particular, that staved off imminent ruin expected in the early 1990's era of stagflation and zero job growth.
The cyberpunks then alit upon the Y2K bug, widely predicting doom and gloom as our technological world would cease to function because it could no longer tell what day it was.
Others, looking foreward to massive growth in computing power promised by Moore's Law, and similar growth in bandwidth promised by telecommunications technologies, along with the popularization of the internet, cryptography, and a popular backlash against government in general following the Waco and Ruby Ridge massacres of innocent civilians at the hands of federal agents, predicted that the general public would soon learn to bank securely, using cryptography to hide their earnings from the taxman (naively not expecting the banks to be complict informants for the government, or the government to legislate barriers to entry for encrypted banks that did not share customer information.)
There is now 'a new hope' for the dreams of cyberpunk dissolution of the federal behemoth. The Baby Boomers are coming, and promise to bankrupt the social security system, the medicare and medicaid systems, at the same time that the federal government has embarked upon a series of wars of liberation upon "axis of evil" nations in particular, and in general, islamist inspired terror-fascism. The Pentagon's New Map, in particular, seems to be a battle plan for a final multi-decade world war of consolidation of non-market non-propertarian non-democratic economies into the New World Order of Markets, Property Rights, and Democratic Consensus.
This author previously detailed Why the Metaverse Never Happened. The steps taken to prevent panarchist inspired digital crypto-economies from starving governments of revinues have put a serious crimp in the economic output of the United States, such that it remains questionable whether it shall be bankrupted by either Baby Boomer retirement burdens, or else the War to End All Wars currently underway.
Now, in the beginning of 2005, the US Dollar has seen a 40% devaluation in the past two years as nations which formerly tied their currencies (and thus shored up their economies at our expense) to the dollar shifted over to the Euro, dumping bankvaults full of dollars on the open market. The Elephant at this ball will be China, which held $600 billion in dollars as of the end of 2004, when it announced it was shifting to a 'mixed basket' of currency backing, and started dumping dollars on the market in exchange for euros. Gold is trading above $550.00/ounce and promises to break $800.00/oz, a price not seen since the double digit inflation years of the Carter era.