I got a feel-good letter from my credit union today (their statements still use a two digit year) stating Y2K is not a problem. They quoted the Alan "99% is not good enough" Greenspan, who seems to have changed his tune recently:

Speaking on Y2K concerns during recent testimony before a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said about the Y2K issue, "There's no conceivable way...that computers will break down and records of people's savings accounts would disappear. There are, fortunately, so many checks and balances that if it's knocked out in one place, it's available in 20 others."

Note that the God of Greenbacks is careful to say that it's the records of the savings accounts that cannot disappear, not the contents.

-- a (a@a.a), April 20, 1999

Answers

Exactly a,

What good is a piece of paper saying you have money in the bank if the Federal Reserve has defaulted and the entire banking system is toast. He is scared to death of that possibility and he will say anything to make sure the sheeple leave their money in the bank.

-- @ (@@@.@), April 20, 1999.

Uh huh. Well the point about the money not being there is the main one. But I recently had to read every detail of a receipt to my bank to convince them that I really had deposited cash, with a human teller, the day before. Wasn't on their computer. I assume they eventually figured it out, since it did show up a day later, as she promised it would. But since one of the things already noted in Y2K remediation is the potential for "database corruption" --

Well, I'm a troubleshooter not an IT person, but I've made at least a zillion databases for financial, securities, inventory and other purposes over the years, and I am wondering, if they don't put all that information into a database, where do they put it? And if database corruption is truly a concern, then how can it be said there is really no reason to worry? And if a database is corrupted, and they have three versions of that database going in and out of use for backups, how do they know which one is corrupted in which areas?

PJ in TX

-- PJ Gaenir (fire@firedocs.com), April 21, 1999.

Good points here. If the 'system' begins to corrupt records then they can conceivably fall back to a (archived) record set which is known good. To do this they would have to halt the entire world financial system. But I suppose if you are desperate to fix it after it has failed then this could be an option.

Greenie knows we are toast. He knows that people will eventually panic. He knows there is no possible way to disgorge all that virutal wealth into tangible currency. 'Houston. I think we have a problem.'

Buying time is all they are doing.

They will lock the system down so that you can not destroy it prematurely by trying to withdraw your assets. This strategy will backfire as people lose any sense of ownership in a government which would knowingly lock them into a burning house.

Try operating on a cash basis for a week. It will give you a taste of things to come.

-- David (C.D@I.N), April 21, 1999.