Americans have gotten rich on paper many times since the flow of new "money" created by borrowing was channelled away from real goods and into financial assets at the beginning of the 1980s. They did it in the stock market boom of 1982-87. They did it again in the even bigger stock market boom of 1994-2000. They did it yet again in the market boom of 2002-2007. And of course, there was the closest thing to nirvana of all, the property boom which burst in 2006.
All of these booms were fuelled by ever increasing amounts of inflation. All of them were celebrated while they lasted. But NONE of them improved the economic condition of the average American at all. As many surveys have shown, the standard of living of the average American stopped rising with the onset of the fiat currency era and has, at best, gone sideways since. Now, it is not going sideways, it is going down - FAST.
Today, there is a deep seated but as yet inarticulate anger over the bailout measures which have been put in place since the credit "crunch" hit last August. More and more people are aware that THEY are not being "bailed out", it is the perpetrators of the system who are being bailed out. Now, with the cost of living rising at rates which make an absolute mockery of government "inflation measures", they are bearing the full impact of a debt-based and backed-by-nothing monetary and banking system. As this impact worsens, the "system" will come into increasing disrepute and the nature of the money which "underpins" it will come into question. That's what happened in the 1970s.
To quote Mr Churchill again, we are seeing "the end of the beginning". But what has begun is not a resurrection of the current system, it is the path towards its replacement.
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