This Will Have Big Implications for Your Wealth
Ever notice that you’ve never heard the phrase, “Good things come in big packages”?
There’s a reason for that.
Big is unwieldy. Big is not easily managed.
And big is almost always prone to breaking or collapsing.
So today, I bring you the story of big… and of its failure.
Our focus is on empires, those big conglomerations built from vast territories and which are ruled by one leadership, often a continent or even half a world away.
History abhors empires. Not a single one has ever survived. Every last one of them has died—Romans, Venetians, Byzantines, Ottomans, British, Spanish, Portuguese, Inca, many others. Not one of those exists today.
Of course, today we don’t use the term “empire” to describe these conglomerations. Instead, we call them “superpowers.” But functionally, they’re similar.
Just one superpower presides over the world at the moment—centered on Washington, D.C.—and its days are numbered. Why?
Because something at the heart of the American system is broken. The American Empire is in its waning days.
Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong…
Let me say that this is in no way a dig at my homeland. I love my country and the ideals on which she was founded.
But America has clearly changed over the course of our lifetimes. She has morphed into a dysfunctional land of debt, discord, political infighting, misinformation, and a distinct slippage toward an authoritarian system that strips away basic rights.
In short, the U.S. is killing itself… to the amazement of the rest of the world.
See, something has gone horribly wrong in America.
Income inequality is massive—a function of Congressional legislation and judicial rulings over the last 40 years that have weakened the working class at the expense of the corporate class. (And, to be clear, I am not anti-capitalist. Capitalism is the least bad of all the economic systems the world has toyed with across history.)
There was a time that a middle-class life was an American birthright, while those who really strived for grandeur could climb the ladder into the ranks of the wealthy and be admired for their efforts.
Today, barely getting by is a birthright for most Americans, and those who really strive for grandeur can climb into the middle class, where they can earn six-figure salaries… and still have to rely on credit cards to make ends meet.
In some ways it feels like democracy itself is failing… which is actually what an NPR/Ipsos poll revealed last year when it showed that 64% of Americans (split almost evenly among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) feel democracy is in crisis. Seventy percent say America itself is in crisis.
Why the American Empire is in Decline
America’s reputation overseas is also diminishing.
That, too, is entirely the fault of American politicians over the last many years. They’ve reneged on global accords. Turned on allies. And used the dollar as a weapon of economic destruction against other nations. That last one is a particularly inhumane means of warfare, given that the dollar is the globally agreed-upon lifeblood of the world economy.
Those machinations have fostered resentment, anger, and hostility. Countries that were once U.S. allies are now showing increased disinterest in America.
France is saying the world, and particularly Europe, needs to consider moving away from a dollar-based global economic order. Saudi Arabia recently said it will no longer play to America’s interests, and promptly shook hands and made nice with Iran, its longtime mortal enemy. The Saudis also noted their increasing interest in selling oil in currencies other than the dollar, a move that would severely undermine the U.S. economy.
South Africa, Indonesia, India, Argentina, and more than 30 other nations are now looking for an alternative global reserve currency, other than the greenback.
Again, most of these are not countries that woke up one day and said “Screw D.C.!”
They are countries that are friendly to America, or at least indifferent. Yet they all realize America is barreling toward an era-defining crisis. They are rightly protecting their own self-interests from the self-imposed destruction of the American Empire.
Consider this: Central banks around the world are hoovering up gold at a record pace, and not because they’re making an investment call. They are buying insurance because they see America’s massive sums of debt and rightly fear a dollar collapse.
They see that U.S. politicians have broken the system. Not just today’s politicians, but those going back to at least the 1980s, when the American love affair with debt was born, and when America’s experiment in laissez-faire economics began and which gave us a national redistribution of wealth that has resulted in the decline of the middle class.
One stat demonstrating this fact: Average hourly wages in America (adjusted for inflation) have remained stuck at about $20 per hour since the mid-1960s, meaning most people are actually poorer.
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Empires rot from the inside out.
They destroy themselves like the ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail.
They grow too big. Too unwieldy.
They grow arrogant.
They grow to focus on and serve only those extremely limited numbers of people and businesses that have financial power. And they disregard the masses.
We are watching the decline of the Last Great Empire in real-time. The American Empire is rotting from the inside out.
The rest of the world is taking precautions. They’re readers of history.
They know how the story ends.