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Washington (AP) – Global financial markets are reeling after the Daylight Savings Bank officially declared bankruptcy today in Washington. The bank reported a loss approaching trillions as a result of risky investments. The government announced that it would immediately begin promulgating a series of emergency measures, including the canceling of the bank’s official holiday, Daylight Savings Day.

All branches of the Daylight Savings Bank have been closed. Nonetheless, angry customers waited patiently outside.

“It’s all gone,” Meredith Templeton of Boise, Idaho cried outside a shuttered local bank. “All of my years of hard work — gone.”

The shock announcement occurred after an internal bank audit revealed that its high-risk portfolio had lost 99.9 percent of its value. Aggressive investments in more speculative markets resulted in a near total loss of assets.

Daylight traders usually speculate about the amount of daylight minutes any given day will provide, betting on such variables as cloud cover and cold fronts. At the heart of the crisis was the tendency to subdivide minutes — a normally stable commodity — into seconds. The smaller increments allowed for so-called “flash trading”, in which floor traders wagered bundles of Daylight Seconds on highly volatile events.

“The whole situation got out of hand,” one trader said on condition of anonymity. “You used to see guys bet on the sunset or moonrise. But the flashers [flash traders] would throw down on rainbows, eyes of the storm. It was nutballs.”

Flash trading has been highly discouraged by Federal regulators, who favor the more liquid denomination of minutes, which can be traded with cell phone companies and energy utilities.

An estimated 600 trillion daylight man-hours — roughly 21 quintillion seconds — were lost in slightly under a year, according to the bank.

Global markets plummeted upon receiving the news. Equatorial daylight creditor nations such as Indonesia, Colombia, and Mauritania were hit especially hard.

The Daylight Savings Bank was invented in America by Senator John C. Calhoun, who developed the initiative so that his slaves could enjoy daylight while contributing to the agricultural economy. It later served chiefly to benefit large scale farmers, who appreciated the extra hour of daylight in the morning in which to work.

But the clock won’t be turned back this year for the first time in over a century.

“There’s no question we’ll have to cancel Daylight Savings Day,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explained at a White House briefing. “Wake up and smell the coffee, people. We simply can’t afford the status quo.”

The principle benefactors of the holiday have traditionally been farmers and what Geithner called “morning people.” Morning People thrive on telling others about everything they’ve done while everyone else was sleeping.

“We’ll look after everyone,” Geithner said. “We’ll just up our subsidies a little for the farmers. Throw in some deal sweeteners, if you will. Farmers love bacon. And fresh seeds. Lots of seeds.”

When asked about pacifying the Morning People, Geithner explained that a government task force would be providing Rubik’s Cubes and free Twitter accounts. That way early risers could quickly inform all their friends and family that they solved a Rubik’s Cube puzzle while ‘ol’ lazybones’ was asleep.

In an example of ‘creative cross-pollination’, as Geithner called it, farmers would also be given subsidies to harvest earth worms. These worms would in turn be provided to Morning People so that they could go fishing before the rest of the sleepyheads awoke. “The Early Bird gets the worm,” Geithner smiled. “Or the fish!”

Not everyone was so optimistic.

“I saved up for fifty years of my life,” one despondent customer said outside a Wilmington, Delaware branch of the Daylight Savings Bank. “I’d hoped to buy a nice condo on a golf course near Tallahassee. Lots of daylight there. Now the best I can get is a time-share in Cabo San Lucas.”

–Deji Olukotun

Photos credits (in order): The Truth About, Cessna 206, whitehouse.gov

(c) Deji Olukotun 2009