Decisions

Mental model (five questions)

❓ What should a careful reader ask of any monetary claim?

1. Who can write or freeze this ledger?
2. What is the scarcity rule for the unit?
3. Is this base money, a bank claim, or a leveraged bet?
4. What is my exit under stress?
5. Who is near new credit when crisis hits?

Savers (structural, not advice)

Understand deposit vs bearer. Inflation and financialization can tax cash and wage-earners who cannot access cheap leverage. Diversification across jurisdictions and asset types is the historical response to soft local units—including, for some, scarce global assets.

Firms and FRFIs

Treat payment-rail choice (cards, wires, stables, future CBDCs) as operational risk + sanctions risk + run risk, not only cost. Custody of digital assets recreates classic deposit duties. Watch GENIUS/MiCA-class rules for stablecoin exposure.

Policy watchlist 2026–2030

• Stablecoin issuer regimes and redemption stress tests
• Retail CBDC design (privacy, holding limits, offline cash coexistence)
• Self-custody / “unhosted wallet” law
• Sovereign debt paths US/China/EMU
• Reserve diversification without deep alternative safe assets
• Base-layer censorship resistance and fee markets if open money grows

What would make the diagnosis obsolete

Credible global settlement in a hard, portable, widely accepted unit without serial periphery collapse and without perpetual advanced-economy debt-inflate cycles—whether via reformed fiat institutions or open networks—would force a rewrite. Until then, the speed-gap → claim entropy story remains the hard-to-vary spine.

Story seeds for later narrative work

Lebanon interior decorator bank confrontation; Nigerian protest freezes; Egypt black-market dollars; Nixon 1971; 2008 bank bonuses amid bailouts; SVB 2023; Oslo parliament HRF bitcoin hearing; Terra May 2022; Canada Emergencies Act freezes.