Image Source: Unsplash

The New, Global Asset-Based Money

It is clear, that our present liability-based fiat currency system, which includes the Federal Reserve and other central banks of the world is in process of being replaced by a new asset-based money/currency.That complete process is still going to take a number of years, before the world fully embraces and uses it.Indeed, we in the United States still require legislators to define and pass a crypto market bill before our financial institutions can transition more fully towards the new money system.Expectations are high that such a market bill may be approved in the first quarter of 2026, so a claim for this transition is realistic, and because of the increasing visible failure of the world-wide fiat currency monetary system - unavoidable.

Demise of the global, current liability-based currency.

For the last several thousand years, precious metals, gold and silver have been considered as money.Indeed, the original value of a dollar was codified in 1792 by the Coinage Act, defining a dollar as a unit of account equal in value to 371.25 grains of fine silver.At our peril, politicians past and present have violated this provision, without changing its definition in our Constitution through amendment, resulting that our national debt and liability-based currency are already in a state of collapse.That breach started in 1914 with the founding of our Federal Reserve system, but accelerated in 1971, when the U.S. moved away from the convertibility of paper dollars held by foreign governments into gold.The common parlance of our investment lexicon is that gold or silver have risen in value since 1971.However, this is totally false; their value has not changed at all!Instead, it is that our currency has fallen in value both dramatically and irreversibly!

An ounce of gold before 1971 was valued at $35 an ounce; today it requires over $5000 to buy that one-ounce coin.In the 1960s, one dollar silver coins were commonly being used in Las Vegas casinos, today a one-ounce silver coin costs upwards of $120.With the indicated amount of fiat currency necessary to buy precious metal coins, “demise” is the correct word to describe this multiple-decade long governmental monetary heist.

The ruse of devaluating money is at least as old as the Roman empire, which collapsed because its silver money was being shaved at its rim or diluted with less valuable metals.Today the American Empire is losing, or has already lost its primacy precisely because the value of its currency is being continuously diluted.To expect that the result of monetary dilution and money printing for America not result in the demise of its global leadership or hegemony is to expect a different outcome than that for Rome, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, France, and England when they possessed the world’s dominant currency but lost it from excessive dilution.  

Our national debt of over $38 trillion, and over $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities can never be paid off with money of original or even present value purchasing power.Our government will claim victory, if it can inflate its debt away without completely collapsing the government or its dollar.Inflating the national debt away means that the investments and savings of its citizens become worthless as federal notes and bonds, the assets of its hapless citizens lose their purchasing power.People trusting in “the full faith and credit of their government” of backing for issued treasury debt will sadly learn how little that means. 

Since 1971, America’s banks have been depressing the market price and value of gold and silver.This is understandable since we abandoned a gold backing for our currency, and sought to remake gold as a “barbarous relic”.Gold has risen dramatically, and will continue to do so. Given that China has stopped exporting its silver, the London Bullion Market cannot fulfill its contract settlement in precious metals, and precious metal prices have risen precipitously despite the suppression, it is now clear that the long-imposed fiat monetary system is beyond rehabilitation, and is moving to its inevitable complete demise. As Scott Bessent, Chairman of our Treasury Department stated more elegantly, we will have “a grand global economic reordering”.From this we can conclude that the global dollar denominated system is ending.

Implications for investing

The demise of our current monetary system creates the most hazardous investment environment in recent decades.It cannot be otherwise, as trust in the measuring stick for performance, the dollar itself loses value.The formerly safest investment in this world, the dollar-based Treasury bond is unquestionably losing value as the dollar itself is depreciating. Investments in equities seem satisfying as markets seem to be rising, but this ignores the shrinking dollar measuring true investment performance.A century ago, Weimar Germany investors experienced exhilarating stock market returns, even as investors were becoming poor. 

Commercial real estate investment has always been predictable, but in the post covid period, where working no longer means a daily trip to an office has dramatically and forever changed the former attractiveness and predictability of commercial real estate investment.Changes in consumer preference for their preferred means of shopping, on-line versus direct store visits, also changes the attractiveness of shopping malls as investments.

Gold and silver were the top performers for investments in 2025; it is highly probable that gold and silver will top investor performance statistics also for 2026.Why?As the world transitions from a fiat debt-based monetary system to an asset-based system it will be important, above all, to have money, as opposed to currency. Today, precious metals in both systems are money. Banks still operating in the fiat system are accumulating gold and silver at a record pace – they are hoarding real money, and that will also become the foundation for asset-based money.    

Technology is modernizing our payments and asset custody process, making them far more efficient, and facilitating the transition to asset-based money, as traditional assets also become tokenized.At the same time the world is dividing into two major sectors: the Anglo/European world, and the rest of the world - commonly referred to as BRICS+, or the “global south”.The former is characterized by debt-based money, aging and declining population, unrecoverable indebtedness, and serious infection of socialism of its population and political leaders.The latter is characterized by a young and growing population, low economic level from which to grow, abundance of real-world resources and commodities, money based on gold and silver, and land-based transportation system of China’s Belt and Road initiative. It is easy to determine which system provides more investment opportunity for more reliable future growth, but it will be far more difficult to actually select and make such investments.    

The Mackinder Legacy

In 1904, Halford Mackinder presented an insightful strategic/geopolitical paper in England and proposed a very important concept for its maritime power.He proposed that the nation or power that controlled “the world island” comprised of the contiguous land mass of Europe, Asia, including also Africa, would control the world.He claimed that its cohesive land mass, huge population, and vast natural resources would make it an independent global power from a maritime power such as England - which could not access or control land-based trade routes.The implications for Britain were clear: for it to remain a global power it had to continue dominating sea trade, and destroy or retard any land-based trade or transportation systems. Mackinder famously summarized his theory as: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world".

Because by the early 20^th century Germany was producing more steel, ships and industrial materials than England, and it was building a rail line to Tehran which had discovered abundant oil, it was clear that Germany had to be stopped for Britain to maintain its global hegemony. It was recognized by the European powers that a political union of Russia and Germany would create a global power that could not be defeated by any leading European power.Therefore, such a geopolitical alliance had to be prevented at all costs.  A war needed to be started without showing Britain’s conspiratorial involvement.That war pitted primarily Germany and Austria against Russia, France and England.Germany was winning this war decisively, until America was enticed by the British to join this entirely European conflict.   

With America’s help, Allies won the war and set destructive war reparations upon Germany, which were intended to forever eliminate the prospect for Germany itself to become a great or even regional power.It was also a time when the world became more acutely aware that Russia’s vast land mass was an incomprehensible 48.5 times that of England, 17.9 times of Germany, 9.8 times that of France, which held natural resource wealth that made it an attractive future target for conquest and plunder.Great Britain at this time also partitioned the Middle East into countries which crossed cultural and religious lines, and because religion had been historically the most frequent cause of war, guaranteed that conflicts would keep “the middle island” from becoming one unified power which could challenge Britain’s hegemony.

The U.S. was induced into WWI through England.The manufacturing of weapons, war materiel and other goods sold for gold to the war’s belligerents was so profitable that America was quickly becoming one of the richest and powerful manufacturing countries in the world.With WWI being so incredibly profitable to the United States, surely someone got the brilliant idea that another similar war would bring even more profit. So how does one go about making it happen?!Providing western financing to a political party should work.  

After WWI, with Germany prostrate, it may be reasonable to ask as to who helped the NAZI’s come to power? Between 1924-1929 almost 63 billion gold marks of foreign investments flowed into Germany, led by America’s leading financial and industrial groups.The rise of NAZI power was financed by the Bank of England, Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Rockefeller and about half of the 30 prestigious companies comprising the Dow Jones industrial average of the 1930s.Prescott Bush, grandfather of president George W. Bush, was a director and shareholder of Union Banking Corporation, which was seized in 1942 under the trading with the Enemy Act for their profit and involvement with the financial backers of NAZI Germany.  

Wall Street was trading with Germany up until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.In 1934, America’s Standard Oil today known as Exxon, acquired 734,000 acres in Germany on which they built oil refineries which supplied oil to NAZIs, without which they would not have been able to invade Russia.The oil was also sold to Germany during the intense 1941-1945 war period indirectly by selling it first to neutral countries such as Venezuela and Argentina.So, some American companies actively collaborated with NAZI Germany, even as America won the war in 1944.This information is so incendiary, dear reader, that you should use your favorite AI to verify it – as it may change your perception of world history as written by the victors, from the early 1900s forward to the present day Ukrainian war.

BRICS now controls the “world island” 

For decades after WWII, as England and the rest of Europe were in ruins and in ruinous debt, capitalist America shared global power with nuclear powered communist Soviet Union.When this communist power collapsed in 1989, the United States became the world’s uncontested global hegemon.It sent a civilian army of western advisors to help Russia to make a transition from a communist economy to a market-based economy.In truth, most of the advisors were there to collapse Russia completely, to make it open to regime change and plunder.

In the decades that followed, America was truly a bulwark against communism and socialism forming a new world, according to its own design. This vision required the active attempted regime change in 64 countries in the 1949-1980 period (Covert Regime Change, by Lindsey A. O’Rourke, 2018) and another large but classified number of regime changes or war (including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Venezuela) from 1981-2025.  

Overall, America desired to separate powers that could combine to challenge Americas hegemony.By identifying Russia as an “occupying expansionist power”, an enemy for no other country to unite with in economic activity and legitimacy, it forced it to look east to China and south to India and Iran for solidarity.Now that China has developed its Belt and Road initiative, there is a land trade route that neither England nor America can control.Global power has shifted.The BRICS and other member countries together with its global supporters now control “the middle island”. That contest is now over.The Anglo-empire of England, America and its “allies” is now over.      

Also, after WWII, the United States reset the world’s monetary system tying gold to the dollar and making all foreign currencies tied to the dollar.The implication was that all currencies were backed by the U.S. dollar, and indirectly by gold.This new monetary system allowed for the rebuilding of Europe, with America fully in control and with significant industrial ownership of Germany.America used the full privilege of its global primacy in order to maintain its hegemony, including weaponizing transnational financial transactions, and launching sanctions on its enemies and even allies alike.   

As the United States was managing its vision of the world, foreign rebuilding and growth demands required more money to be distributed into the global system. Initially, Treasury bond sales were constructive to foreigners because “the dollar was as good as gold”. However, when U.S. debt zoomed past the first few trillion dollars, concerns over fiscal stability started to be raised.When America’s “barbarous metal gold” was made a Tier One asset by the Bank of International Settlements in 2019, it was a clear signal that the dollar was being downgraded.To protect its monetary supremacy, it started using the IMF, World Bank and SWIIFT ever more aggressively as tools of financial suppression and financial recolonization.When individual countries could not oppose the United States, they considered forming alliances.When the U.S. implemented sanctions, weaker countries sought ways to circumvent them, and found that trading between sanctioned countries in their own currencies rather than through the SWIFT monetary system to settle trade was effective.

In an escalatory strike, in 2022, NATO (U.S. and its European allies) decided to freeze over $300 billion in Russian reserve assets to penalize and perhaps debilitate Russia for its war in Ukraine.Other countries became aware that displeasure by the U.S. could also make their deposits frozen, and caused them to look for alternatives to holding dollars.The formation of BRICS, an alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was the original grouping of the “global south” countries to find alternatives to dealing with dollar dominance in global trade.As U.S. debt escalated, it became more strident in utilizing its sanction policies, which accelerated countries desiring to become a part of BRICS.Today, ten countries have become members of BRICS and many more desiring to join. The BRICS countries now represent nearly half of the world’s population and about a third of its economic productivity. US can only retain its hegemony if it destroys BRICS, but this alliance knows that its own survival is dependent on their continuing solidarity.  

To facilitate trade among the global south BRICS developed and are now using their own trade settlement system called the Unit, which is 40% backed by gold and 60% by their own currencies.This system is designed not to offend the U.S. in that it has not created a competing global currency, but rather simply a means of setting trade balances between countries without using the dollar.As more countries join BRICS or simply become countries using their means of settling trades without using the dollar, the demand for the dollar will decline, reducing its value and influence.Over the next few years, global trade and payment settlement will be divided between these two global spheres, but western banks will soon seek to transact or settle trade transactions that is backed by gold, hence eventually reuniting the world by financial means not military might.BRICS will not be destroyed.

America’s proxy war in Ukraine was surely the latest version intended to debilitate Russia. In this conflict, U.S. European vassals were prompted not to use Russia’s cheap gas energy, and that gas flow between Russia and Europe has been eliminated.It was accomplished first by blowing up the Russia/German pipeline, then by Europe declaring it will not use Russian gas, and finally by Russia turning off its pipelines to Europe.The consequence?Europe’s economies are declining, while Germany’s economy is in near freefall.This economic conflagration suggests that NATO and EU will experience a complete or partial dissolution in the next several years.Britain is experiencing dire economic and social challenges which are weakening this former world hegemon, as socialism appears to be destroying its former cohesive social structure. 

Marxism, communism, socialism, and related “isms” have been a plague on mankind already for several hundred years.It is well to consider who were the belligerents in Europe’s WWII. WWII was started when NAZI Germany (a socialist country) invaded the Soviet Union (a Communist country).In truth, was this war not already a veiled war schemed by capitalists and bankers to conquer the vast mineral resources of Eastern Europe?In 2021, a former global currency trader, financial advisor, patriot Martin Armstrong, with deep economic insights published a book entitled “The Plot Seize Russia” (Gatekeeper Press, 2023) utilizing then declassified information confirming that American financiers together with Russian oligarchs sought to destabilize the country in the 1990s, replace government officials which would allow the pillaging of its vast natural resources. 

Socialism is the preliminary stage to full communism, under which all production facilities and property are owned by the state.Socialism always starts with promises helping the common worker in exchange for votes that elect socialists as leaders of a country’s government and its economy.With legitimate power they then undermine the economy by distributing the wealth of those who produce and save, giving it to those who produce little.When the treasury of the government is spent, and the savings of savers dispersed, people’s vulnerability then leads to accepting communist rule.

Communism was imposed on Russia and China from the very beginning as they were very poor countries. But the passing and collapse of communism in those countries also took place more quickly, since socialism’s interim phase was bypassed.The communist revolution came to Russia in 1917, while the “more peaceful” version of socialism infected all of Europe’s countries in the 20th century. Russia and China have recovered from this disease, so they now have “immunity” to the Marxist virus, and arguably are more capitalist today than our west coast states.   

Socialism destroys countries over a longer time period, and thus we still have socialism actively affecting Europe more than a century after its original infection. Worse still, socialism has severely infected America, and its recovery will take several decades, if our republic is able to survive, while America’s world primacy will certainly have been demoted.  

Asset-based monetary system

The technology of the last decade has brought us the blockchain, Bitcoin and platforms that provide fast, inexpensive auditable trails of financial transactions.While that forces banks to compete and adopt the new technology in order to more efficiently serve its customers; it also allows individuals to serve as their own banks, and allows private companies to create tech-money such as stablecoins. But importantly, it provides for money once more to be gold and silver, and currency as asset-based tokens, while allowing debt-based currency to expire. It is the “grand economic reordering” noted by Scott Bessent, and the actual transition to it is likely to be challenging and very unpleasant for all citizens of this world.

For decades the dollar has been used as a weapon, with IMF unsavory loan conditions, sanctions, asset freezes, and debanking of entire nations, thereby cutting countries off of global trade.Previously, our bonds were sold to foreign countries to capitalize their banks. Today, if our bonds cannot easily be sold in the global market, the Fed must buy them by printing dollars and causing domestic inflation. We can now surmise that the global dollar-denominated system is ending. The multipolar world is not coming in the future; it is here now.When the dollar is no longer needed for world trade, the domestic bond market will buckle.The Unit is live, and foreign banks will sell dollars and adopt the Unit, because it is 40% backed by gold. Trump is doing what he can, but both monetary, social, and government system have become too degraded, and altered over decades to recover the visionary republic. However, the world is demonstrating that sound money and economic conflict are more important than military might in geopolitical competition. Sound money is making a comeback, while digital currency promises to have significant value from its utility, promising a future of far reduced military conflict in the future, and increasingly technical convenience.

More By This Author:

Transition To The World’s New (Reset) Financial System
Transition To A New Global Monetary System
U.S. Trilogy: Debt-Based Dollar And Economy, Stablecoin Digital Currency, BRICS New World