...it’s all unfolding almost exactly as it has so many times before throughout history:
1. A nation rises to greatness and becomes wealthy based on sound principles and the hard work of initial generations.
2. Eventually, being wealthy becomes the natural expectation… an entitlement, rather than a goal to work hard for and achieve.
3. A nation begins living beyond its means to maintain the high life without the hard work, leveraging its credibility to trade tomorrow’s production for today’s consumption.
4. Living beyond its means eventually becomes unsustainable. Government begins to slowly, then staggeringly, devalue its currency.
5. The market (i.e. people) finally wake up to the fraud being perpetrated.
6. Financial repression usually follows– high taxes which steal from the productive, negative real interest rates which steal from the savers, etc.
7. Capital flight comes next. People take their money and run.
8. Governments implement capital controls, border controls, price and wage controls, and anything else they can do to maintain the status quo. People find out who the police are really there to protect and serve.
9. Capitulation (default) is the endgame; the system resets itself and begins anew.
This is nothing new. From the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (2000 BC) to Medieval Venice to the familiar stories of Rome and the Ottoman Empire, the world is full of monuments to the past greatness of failed civilizations.
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