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I like your explanation. theymos merely reserved his sMerits for months and recently spent a lot of merits to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Bitcointalk.
I think JJG is correct,My suspicion is that there is almost no way (unless I am understanding the situation incorrectly) that theymos merely had all those smerits in his reserve bank. Of course, he had likely not been spending his smerits on a regular 30 day basis, so those smerits would have frequently been expunged by the system's algorithm.
I like your explanation. theymos merely reserved his sMerits for months and recently spent a lot of merits to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Bitcointalk.
But it is not a suspicion, it is a certainty confirmed by theymos himself in this thread of mine Merit spree is underway:
Who knows at the end of today, theymos will write: "I am out of sMerits, please help me all merit sources!" 
Code:
if($smerit+$source < $merits && $ID_MEMBER!=35)
fatal_error("You do not have enough sendable merit.", false);
fatal_error("You do not have enough sendable merit.", false);
I guess the merit economy needed some emergency repo operations.
On a partially unrelated note: happy to be top spot on this special chart!