Porter Stansberry (@porterstansb) “Nixon defaulted and broke world's monetary system in 1971 because the combined c” — TopicDigg

Nixon defaulted and broke world's monetary system in 1971 because the combined costs of the Great Society and the Vietnam War had become impossible to fund with sound money. Greenspan eased through every crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s because the political cost of a real recession was impossible to pay. Bernanke monetized the housing collapse of 2008 because a true deleveraging of the American household would have been impossible to survive politically. Powell monetized the pandemic of 2020 because the precedent of the previous three acts eliminated any other option. Each man inherited less room to maneuver. Each man, when forced to choose, chose to make the room smaller still for the man who would come after him. That is what a monetary death spiral looks like. It does not arrive in a single day. It does not announce itself on the news. It is a series of small, defensible decisions, each one reasonable at the moment it is made, each one making the next decision harder to avoid, until one morning the country wakes up to discover that there are no decisions left. That’s why the dollar has lost more than 90% of its value against gold since 1971. That’s why federal debt held by the public has crossed $36 trillion — more than 120% of GDP. That’s why net interest on the national debt is now the largest line item in the discretionary federal budget. Larger than defense. Larger than veterans’ benefits. Larger than everything except Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and growing faster than any of them. And that’s why the stock market has lost 77% of its real value, measured in ounces of gold, since August 1999. Even though they may not be able to articulate exactly why, that is also why a majority of the prime-age men in this country — the men who built every previous version of America, the men on whose shoulders every future version of America will have to be built — have correctly concluded that the scoreboard has been rigged against them for their entire working lives, and have responded, with perfect economic rationality, by reducing their participation in the rigged game. What is coming in 2029 is not a new crisis. It is the compound interest on the decision Richard Nixon made on a Sunday evening in August of 1971. The math was set in motion 54 years ago. We are, all of us, living out the back end of an equation whose answer was fixed on the weekend Nixon flew home from Camp David. The only remaining question is: what you are going to do about it. The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that in every previous case of this kind of monetary decay, the decay has ended. Always. Sometimes in revolution, sometimes in restoration, sometimes in both. The American Republic has already been through three Fourth Turnings — the Revolution of 1776, the Civil War of 1861, and the Depression-and-War era of 1929–1945 — and it has come out the other side each time, battered but rebuilt, with a new and sounder monetary order. There is nothing in the American character that prevents it from doing so again. The people who will rebuild it after 2029 are alive right now. Some of them are reading this book. The question is whether you will be one of them — or one of the people who are wiped out by what’s about to happen.