‘There are secrets the government will never willingly divulge and to draw attention away from the truly unspeakable, the powers-that-be will occasionally grace the American people with distracting snippets of other administrative missteps.
Take, for instance, ‘The Beanie Baby Vault’ at Fort Knox, which has not only been declassified but has opened itself for tours. ‘The Beanie Baby Vault’ is a massively redundant, government-owned collection of the famous under-stuffed toy. Experts in the field (and they do exist) estimate that ‘The Vault’ contains the entire catalogue of the toy line several times over, including a handful of misprinted, promotional, or otherwise limited specimens whose aftermarket worth far exceeds their MSRP.
‘The Vault’s’ revealing occurred at a press conference in 2006, following a long series of vague and semi-apologetic statements by the Federal Reserve, the Press Secretary, and even the President himself. The tone and the careful drip-feed of these statements worked the media into such a fervor that, by the time the conference finally occurred, even the most level-headed news outlets were predicting an announcement of extra-terrestrial life, the end of the world, or some combination of the two. The official declassification of ‘The Beanie Baby Vault’ was so relatively mild, that its purpose was only discovered as an afterthought by a small-town reporter who may have been the only civilian willing to comb through the thousands of pages of accompanying documents.
‘The Beanie Baby Vault,’ it seems, was meant to be the first phase in a government initiative to re-create the gold standard in another form. The system proposed in the documents reads a bit like a patriotic fever dream, detailing a means by which the government could invest in American businesses by making bulk purchases of trending items. By furthering their scarcity, the Reserve could, and this is a phrase infamous for its dozens of uses in the document itself, ‘milk nostalgia.’
Experts (truly, they are out there) suggest that the declassified information on the great ‘Beanie Baby Buy-up’ reflects a surprisingly competent pattern of securing the models that would go on to become the most collectable. At its peak, the collection did very much represent a nation’s fortune in fur and plastic beads.
The failure of the system can be traced to a single, fateful meeting of the Federal Reserve Board when a narrow majority voted to hold onto the collection for a few months longer despite concerning trends. The toys fell out of favor in the meantime and the value of the collection dropped far below what had been spent on its acquisition. Notes from the following meeting of the Reserve suggest a tactful and embarrassingly hopeful strategy of ‘sitting on the collection a little while longer’ and meanwhile returning to a system of currency that is ‘based on faith alone.’
Tours of ‘The Beanie Baby Vault’ have been limited in size since 2006 when an escaped toddler managed to pull the tag from the ear of a vintage ‘Tabasco’ bull, later renamed ‘Snort’ for copyright concerns. Though the tag remains in relatively fine condition, its removal served as the catalyst for the eighteen-month economic recession that followed shortly thereafter.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
