They keep telling you that stock's art record highs, but that's the illusion. In reality, they're down eighty four percent. Now, I know that sounds impossible, that's exactly what happens when the system starts breaking, because what you're seeing isn't real growth. It's just the dollar melting. The numbers go up, but your purchasing power goes down. And this exact pattern, the same signature, has shown up before every major currency collapse
in history. Rome sawed wymar Germany saw it, Argentines are living through it right now, and we're seeing it again today, only this time it's global.
Now.
Most people they don't realize it yet because they're still measuring their wealth in the wrong yard stick. But when you change the unit of account, when you measure in real money, the truth jumps off the page. And that's what we're going to break down in this video. I'm going to show you how stocks, homes, and even your savings have already collapsed in real terms, and what this means for the next stage of the global financial system.
Now, I've built and I've sold.
Multiple tech companies. I'm a partner a lead bitcoin venture fund. I've been studying and teaching macroeconomics for a decade, and I'm telling you this data is real. By the end of this video, you're going to see exactly why the markets look like they're soaring, but in reality, they're already collapsing, and more specifically, what that means for every dollar, every stock.
And home that you own. So let's go all right, you've probably seen it everywhere lately.
Right.
Stocks are at record.
Highs, the economy is super strong, the wealth effect is back. You got CNBC, you got Bloomberg, you got Reuters. They're all running victory laps. Now on the surface, they're all right. If you look at the numbers in dollars, it's pretty hard to argue.
Right.
Since early twenty twenty, the S and P five hundred has climbed from around thirty two hundred points to nearly sixty nine hundred today. That's more than one hundred percent gain in just five years. Home prices they're doing pretty good too, They're up about fifty percent over the same time period according to case Shiller Index. So yeah, in dollar terms, it looks like a golden age for investors, right, everyone's richer.
But here's the problem.
If that were really true, why doesn't it feel like it, Because while your four one K may look bigger on paper, everything you actually need, you know, like food, insurance, housing, it's eating away at it faster than ever.
Right.
You feel it every time you fill up at the gas pump, every time you buy groceries. And that's not just in your head, it's.
Baked into the data.
Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, they show real wages, that's that are wages that are just for inflation. They've barely moved in the last five years. They're up about one percent year over a year. But the cost of living, it's exploded.
So the boom.
That you're seeing, the boom in the financial markets, is not matching your daily reality.
So what is it?
Something's off right, And of course you can't help but notice that this is all disconnected. Right. The headlines tell you the economies never been stronger, but somehow everyone you know is struggling to keep up. People are working harder, earning more dollars, yet they're feeling poor. Right, that's not just a feeling, it's a signal. Because the last time we saw this kind of mismatch between nominal wealth and the real living standards when the chart that boom, but
life felt more like a bust. That was during every major currency shift in history. So the question that we need to ask isn't our stocks at record highs? The right question is record highs measured in what? Because when you change what you measure in, when you stop assuming
the dollar stable, that entire story looks very different. And I want to show you what's really happening behind those record highs and why the same signature is showing up today that we've seen before every major currency collapse in history. All Right, you know, everything we measure right, our income, our investments, the prices of our goods that we buy, it all comes down to one simple thing. It's the yard stick, the measuring stick, the ruler that we use, and that yard stick.
Is the dollar.
Now, the Federal Reserve finds money as having three basic jobs. A medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account or the way that we measure value in economic transactions. But that measurement only works if the yard.
Stick itself stays stable.
If the inch changes every day, the blueprint all falls apart. Since twenty twenty, the inch the measuring stick. It's been dhrinking really fast. According to data from the Saint Louis FED the US money supply, the M two grew almost twenty seven percent year over year in February of twenty twenty one. That's the fastest monetary expansion in monetary records. Now, to put that into perspective, it's bigger than anything we
saw in the nineteen seventies inflation. It's bigger than the QB programs of two thousand and eight.
Think of it like this. If I owned a.
Company worth, say a million dollars, and I asked you to invest, let's say invest one hundred thousand, and I'll give you ten percent ownership, right, And then I grew the business from one million to ten million dollars, your ten percent ownership would have grown from one hundred thousand dollars to now being worth a million dollars. It's awesome, right, Well, it is unless I diluted you.
Right.
If I went and raised more money and I increased the amount of shares. This happens all the time, by the way, when companies are growing, they're raising money, right.
This is exactly what's happening to you when you measure things in dollars.
And of course, when you create that much new money that quickly, you don't get more real wealth, You just get more units chasing the same goods and services. Now we can see it right in the data, the Consumer Price Index, the CPI, how the government tracks prices. I like to call it CPI, but going off of their data, it shows that it's climbed roughly twenty five to thirty
percent just since twenty twenty. That means the same grocery basket, the same rent payment that cost one hundred dollars five years ago now costs about one hundred and thirty dollars. That's the yardstick.
It's shrinking.
So when the media says stack hit new highs or home prices keep going up, they're soaring, what they're really describing is the denominator breaking down. The measuring stick is getting shorter, so then everything that you measure with it looks taller. History's full of examples of this right, and the examples of what happens next. In ancient Rome, the silver content in their coins dropped from nearly one hundred percent silver to less than twenty percent silver as the
empire debased its currency to pay its debts. Now, people back then thought the same thing.
They thought they were getting richer.
They thought they had more coins in their hands, but the coins themselves were worth less and less and less. During Wymar's Germany hyperinflation, stock prices nominal wages also exploded higher, but in real purchasing power they collapsed. People carried wheelbarrows of marks just to buy bread, while charts on paper showed that they were growing, showed they were getting rich. And today you can see the same dynamic in Argentina.
Last year inflation ran over two hundred percent, prices tripled, salaries double, and yet somehow everybody still ends up poor. That's what a falling yardstick looks like in real time. So when you see record high markets in dollars but stagnant wages and crushing costs of living, it's not a paradox.
It's the textbook example.
It's the sign of a yardstick that's losing integrity. So the question now isn't whether the dollar is weakened. Right the data already tells is that I already proved that out. The real question is what happens when you start measuring in something that isn't melting?
What happens if we get.
Another yard stick. All right, that's where the illusion completely breaks. Now, before we get into that, have you ever wondered how the US can run trillion dollar deficits every single year, you know, spend more than it earns, print money like crazy, and yet somehow the dollar never.
Seems to collapse.
Well, it's because the system isn't built on productivity anymore. It's built on something else, something I call the imperial carry trade. Here's how it works. For over eighty years, the US has issued the world's reserve currency, the dollar.
Right.
That means everyone around the world, governments, corporations, banks, they need dollars to trade, to borrow, to save, and that privilege it gives the US an almost unlimited credit card. Now, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, last year, America ran a current account deficit of about one point one three trillion dollars, nearly four percent of GDP. That's money flowing out of the country to pay for imports, for military bases, for foreign investments, and interest on the debt.
But because the world uses those dollars, those dollars they come right back in. Foreigners recycle them by buying US assets by buying US treasury bonds, by stocks, by buying real estate. Now, today foreigners hold a record nine point one trillion in treasuries. Japan alone owns more than one point one trillion. The UK recently passed China as the second largest holder. So while the US runs these massive trade, these massive budget deficits, it also attracts the world savings
to fund all of it. Right, That's what we call the carry, and it shows up on the balance sheet. Now, if you add up everything the US owns abroad versus what foreigners own here, the US is now negative by twenty six trillion dollars. That's the net international investment position. Think about that, the world owns twenty six trillion more of America than America owns of the world. And yet the system it still runs because the rest of the world wants those dollar assets. That's the power of having
the reserve currency. But now here's where the imperial part comes in. When the FED cuts rates or launches QE, which is coming, it pumps liquidity into the markets, Asset prices rise, stocks, homes, bonds. All that creates what economists at the New York FED call the quote wealth effect.
Right, now they've studied this for decades.
For every dollar of stock market wealth, Americans spend about two or three cents more. That extra spending boosts GDP. It makes the economy look really strong, and it attracts even more global capital that's chasing those rising nominal returns. It's basically one giant feedback loop. Policy creates acid inflation. Acid inflation creates consumption. Consumption attracts capital, and that capital funds the next deficit. Round and round and round the
flywheel goes. But every carry trade it has a hidden risk because all those foreign investors, you know, the ones that are holding US bonds and holding stocks, they're taking currency risk.
If the dollar weekends.
Or inflation runs hot, they're the ones that are going to eat the loss in real terms. Right, the US gets to inflate away part of its debt burden, but the foreign holders, they lose purchasing power. That's why I call it the imperial carry trade.
Right.
It's the modern version of what every single empire does in its final phase. It uses currency privilege to siphon the world's wealth, inflate domestically, inflate asset prices, and quietly export the losses abroad. It's elegant, it's great, but it's temporary because no empire can keep this carry trade going forever. And when that carry unwinds, when the world no longer wants to hold melting dollar claims.
Well, the illusion starts to break.
That's when the real scoreboard starts to matter. And when we switch to something else, a different scoreboard, we measure something else other than dollars. Let's say we measure it in gold, we measured it in bitcoin. That you'll see how far the system has already fallen. Okay, So now to really see this, to really understand this, let's measure the markets using three different yardsticks. We'll measure it in the dollar, we'll measure it in gold, and then we'll measure.
It in bitcoin.
And that way we can see the story that each one of these yardsticks tell us. So let's look at first. We'll look at the dollar. We'll call it the comfortable illusion. Let's start with the dollar is what every headline uses, it's what most of the world uses. At the start of twenty twenty, the S and P five hundred sat at around thirty two seventy eight. Today, it's roughly sixty eight seventy five, So that's a gain of about one
hundred and ten percent. Now, the case Shiller Home Price Index, which tracks the US housing it was around two twelve back then. Now it's around three thirty, so that's about fifty six percent. Now, those are the charts that you see on TV. Right, those are the ones that people make that make you feel rich. Right, stocks at record highs. Home values are soaring. But remember what we talked about earlier. Those highs are only due to the nominal dollars, right,
those dollars have been inflated at record speeds. So the real question isn't how much the prices went up, it's how much the measuring stick went down.
So let's use something different. Let's use gold.
If we switch that yard stick over to goal, then we see something different. Now why gold, Well, because for thousands of years, gold has been the baseline. Gold has been the unit of account. Right, it's the oldest, most trusted form of money. It's a real test of purchasing power. So if we price the S and P five hundred
and gold, we get something completely different. Back in early twenty twenty, gold was about fifteen to twenty per ounce, and the SMP five hundred was thirty two seventy eight, so that means the index was worth roughly two point one six ounces of gold. Fast forward, today, the S and P five hundred is up around sixty eight seventy five, and now gold's up over four thousand dollars an ounce. That means that the S and P five hundred is
only about one point seven ounces of gold. So, in other words, after all the inflation, after all the stimulus, after all the AI, all the booming headlines, the market's down when you measured in gold.
Not up down five years, and it's down now. The same is true for housing.
Your home might have gone up by fifty six percent in dollar terms. Again, gold's gone up to four thousand, right, so in gold terms, real home values are down again. Everything is going down. That's the first crack in the illusion. Even under a traditional hard money standard, the gold standard, supposed wealth boom completely disappears. Now let's switch to bitcoin,
arguably the hardest denominator we have today. In twenty twenty one, bitcoin traded for about seven thousand dollars, and Bitcoin it's been falling. It's fallen off of it's high of about one hundred and twenty six thousand. Today it's around ninety ninety two thousand, but it's still roughly a thirteen times increase. So if we reprice the S and P five hundred and bitcoin back then, one unit of the index was worth about zero point four to seven bitcoin, but today
it's about point zero seven bitcoin. That means that's a drop in real terms of roughly eighty four to eighty five percent. Now, when we do the same for housing, a fifty six percent moving dollars over the period, but against a thirteen times bitcoin rise, the result is a decline in bitcoin terms in the eighty to ninety percent range. Even gold, which doubled in dollars terms, has lost the vast majority of its value when measured in bitcoin.
So in just five.
Years, bitcoin has completely flipped the scoreboard.
In dollars assets are going.
In gold, they're stagnant, but in bitcoin they're absolutely collapsing. That's what Luke Grammin calls the scarf layer. It's a living record of a dying denominator. Because what you're looking at right now isn't just a bull market, it's not just a bubble. It's the first stage of a global unit of account fracture, a slow transition away from the old measuring stick, the dollar, toward a new one. That's why the world feels so off.
Is why wages don't match prices.
It's why the economy looks strong on paper, but it feels weaker in reality. We're measuring our world with a broken ruler, and when you finally switch to one that doesn't change, the truth comes into focus.
So now let's you understand that.
The next question is why the US keeps doing this, why policy makers keep inflating assets and exporting risk abroad. Because it's not random, right, It's a strategy. It's the play the US is run before. It's what I call again.
The imperial carry trade.
It's the hidden engine that's been keeping all of this alive. Every empire's currency goes through the same process. First it dominates, then it defends, and then finally it dilutes. And when you reach that last stage, the smartest players they quietly start shifting out of paper promises and into hard collateral. That's exactly what.
We're seeing right now.
According to the World Gold Council, central banks bought over one thousand tons of gold in both twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, the two biggest years on record. In twenty twenty five, they're still buying. Just in August alone, they added another nineteen tons to their reserves. Now this isn't about a profit, this is about insurance. They're swapping all those fiat IOUs for real settlement assets. Because when you trust in the unit of account that starts breaking down,
gold becomes the neutral reserve choice. It's not someone else's liability. That's the entire point. Now, the dollar still dominates. It's roughly about fifty seven percent of global reserves once you adjust for exchange rates, but a decade ago that number was close to sixty five percent. So the change is slow, but it's persistent. Right, it's a creep While a lot of people are thinking there's a crash coming, it's crashing just a little bit slower than what most people expect.
But at the same time, we're watching dozens of small bypasses starting to open up.
Right, India and the UAE, they're now testing rupee trade.
Brazil and China, they've launched a twenty seven billion dollar currency swap line. Iron ore contracts they're settling in Yuwan. Now these things they sound small, they don't look really big.
Yet they are right.
They're small, but they're important because they start to chip away at the monopoly of one settlement rail.
That's how a unit of account fractus spreads.
It's not through a single event like most people think, but through one thousand quiet experiments. And while governments are trying to build alternative rails, the market already has. It's already built them. Stable coins, private dollar denominated tokens are now settling over twenty seven trillion dollars a year. I mean to put that into perspective, that's more than visa. These digital dollars move peer to peer, across borders, without banks,
without swift. That's the market quietly building its own financial plumbing, one that doesn't need permission, a unit of account agnostic system that can clear dollars today, bitcoin tomorrow, or whatever comes next. And on the other end of the spectrum, the institutions, they've also arrived. In the first year of US spot Bitcoin ETFs, we saw thirty eight billion net inflows,
a record for any new asset class. Blackrocks IBID alone now holds over eight hundred thousand bitcoin nearly four percent of the total supply. What this means is that what used to be considered a risk asset on the fringe is now sitting inside retirement accounts, inside corporate treasuries, sovereign balance sheets.
So what does all this mean.
It means the scoreboard is already changing, even if the referees keep pretending it's the same game. Central banks they're hoarding gold, right, trade partners are using their own currencies. Stable coins have built a complete shadow payment network bigger than visa.
Bitcoin has become.
A parallel reserve ledger recognized by Wall Street. We're not watching theory anymore, right, We're watching a transition. This is what a unit of account shift looks like from the inside. It's slow, it's uneven, and yes it's messy, but it's happening right now. And that brings us to the real question. What do you do in a world where the measuring stick itself is breaking?
How do you position? How do you plan?
How do you protect yourself when the scoreboard is being rewritten in real time? Well, as they say, awareness and admitting the problem is the first step. So now that you see that the scoreboards chained, the question is what do you do with that information? Because this isn't about trading, right, It's not about chasing headlines. It's about awareness. It's about knowing what game you're playing. It's about knowing what rules are quietly being.
Rewritten underneath it.
Now, the first step is simple, right, measure your wealth in more than one yardstick. Now, most people only look at their net worth in dollars, right, that's mistake number one. Start tracking it in gold, Start tracking in bitcoin terms. Just divide your total net worth by the price of gold or by.
Bitcoin once a month.
Now, when you do that, you'll start to see what central banks already know that the dollar is not constant. Next, understand your positioning, right, This isn't about financial advice. It's about building a framework that survives transitions. Every empire's currency cycle ends the same way.
Right, the paper gets inflated.
But productive assets and scarce stores of value they carry forward.
They keep going.
That's why institutional research from the World Gold Council shows gold held it's purchasing power across centuries. Okay, and then comes the process because behavior beats brilliance. Now, history shows that lump sum investors tend to outperform about two thirds of the time, simply because markets just tend to always drift upwards. But dollar cost averaging reduces regret, it keeps you consistent, and it protects you from emotion. Now, the
best system is the one that you'll actually stick with. Now, that's really what this whole video has been about. Right, It's all been about awareness, but it's specifically it's about taking action now that you're aware of the problem, because once you start measuring wealth correctly, you're going to start seeing it correctly. You'll start to see what central banks are doing when they buy gold, You'll see what operators are doing when they start adopting bitcoin. You'll see the
new system forming under your very feet. And the more people that see it, the faster this transition unfolds. Like we're literally living through a monetary transition that only happens once in a generation. So don't watch it, just happen. Understand it, prepare for it, use it for your advantage, because once you see the truth behind the numbers, you'll
never measure your wealth the same way again. And if you want to see the time frame that I predict all of this to happen over how it all unfolds, you should probably go watch this video right here, and i'll see you over there.