Everything you've heard about the dollar collapsing is exaggerated. Almost everything you've heard about Bitcoin saving you is exaggerated. Now let's talk about the part that's real.
Every few years somebody hands me a document explaining that the money is fake, the system is collapsing, and there's exactly one exit, and it happens to be the thing the author already owns.
I read every one of them. I've written a few, and I've done the research end of this for people who publish it, so I know how it goes from a spreadsheet to a slide and which caveats fall off along the way. The research gets careful. The deck gets loud. By the time it reaches you somebody has trimmed the hedges for space, and I have been the guy doing the trimming. Eighty percent right about the disease, a hundred percent full of shit about the timeline. The timeline is the part people bet on. Same architecture as a diet ad. “There is a terrible truth about your body.” Here is the pill.
I'm not selling the pill. I want to talk about the disease, because it's real and it's going to be ugly, and then I want to talk about what a sane person actually does about it, which is smaller and less glamorous than the guys with the laser eyes will tell you.
The money is fake, and that part isn't controversial
August 15, 1971. Nixon goes on television and tells the world the dollar is no longer convertible to gold. He calls it temporary. Congress once put a three percent tax on phone calls to pay for the Spanish-American War, and it took them until 2006 to stop collecting it. Fifty-five years later, Nixon's temporary has outlived Nixon, the Soviet Union, and every economist who said it wouldn't work.
Before 1971 a dollar was a claim check on a metal. After 1971 a dollar was a claim check on the continued good behavior of the United States Congress, and if that sentence doesn't put you on the floor, you're not paying attention.
Here's where the good behavior stands. The national debt is $39.83 trillion, up $2.88 trillion in the past year. The Joint Economic Committee clocks it at $91,549 per second, so in the eight minutes it takes to read this, another $44 million goes on the tab, and not one dollar of it buys anything you'll ever see. a Congress whose entire fiscal doctrine is that the train does not stop.
Nobody in Washington is fixing that. Not this party, not that one, not the serious men with the charts. Both teams have run the same play for thirty years: promise the spending, defer the tax, retire before the bill lands. The one authentic bipartisan achievement of my lifetime is the agreement not to look at the number.
So when somebody tells you the dollar is being debased, they're not a crank. They're reading the receipt.
Everybody saw it. Nothing happened.
Now for the part I actually find alarming, and it happened three weeks ago in broad daylight. Bloomberg called it a Band-Aid on the bond market. Fortune ran a piece with an economist calling it weird and unwise. Goldman did a segment. Then everyone moved on, because there was no crash to photograph.
Japan's currency got into trouble. Tokyo sold about $59 billion to buy yen. And the United States came in alongside them, the first coordinated intervention between the two countries since 2011.
Read the mechanics slowly, because the mechanics are the story. Japan is the largest foreign holder of American debt. To defend the yen at scale, Japan sells Treasuries. If Japan starts liquidating in size, yields spike, the government's interest bill goes up, and the deficit gets worse while it's being financed. So Washington stepped in to keep Tokyo from having to dump the bonds.
Then look at how Washington paid for its half. The New York Fed sold euros, with no heads up to anyone across the pond. Not dollars. It reached into the drawer for somebody else's currency rather than touch a Treasury market already choking down a $2 trillion deficit.
Barry Eichengreen, who has spent his entire career studying reserve currencies and is nobody's idea of a gold bug, said it plainly: the dollar is not the attractive reserve currency it once was, and when that sinks in, other countries will redouble their search for alternatives.
That's the fiscal cluster fuck in one transaction. Not a collapse. A rescue operation staged specifically so nobody has to find out what the bond market would do. Probably more excitement like this on the horizon. None of this is new, either. Yellen spent 2024 politely telling Tokyo that interventions should be rare. The difference in August is that the talking stopped and the checkbook came out.
And the referee is now on the payroll
There's a fourth requirement for fiat that never makes the list, and it's the one that actually matters to anybody running a business: enforceable rule of law. Money is a promise, and promises need a court.
On May 20, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a memo declaring the IRS "forever barred" from auditing the President, his family, or his businesses. Releases, waives, acquits. Past matters included. It supplemented a $1.8 billion settlement that followed Trump dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, an arrangement in which he was somehow both the plaintiff and the beneficiary.
Senators asked out loud whether he was the government's lawyer or the President's, and the Judiciary Committee sat on his nomination for weeks. He is now the confirmed Attorney General, sworn in eleven days ago on a 50-49 vote. He got there by rescinding the fund and narrowing the audit protection down to Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization, retroactively. Not withdrawn. Trimmed until it fit through the Senate.
I don't care which team you root for. If the tax authority can be permanently switched off for one family by memo, then the phrase "equal treatment under law" is a decorative item, and every investor pricing American assets is now pricing a jurisdiction where the rules bend for whoever is holding the pen. That's a bigger threat to the dollar than any spreadsheet about M2.
Okay, now let's beat up my own side
If you're nodding along and reaching for your wallet, sit back down, because the Bitcoin case is loaded with garbage too, and the garbage is mostly in the sales deck.
Bitcoin is at about $63,000. Its high was $126,198 last October. That's roughly half, right now, in the middle of what the doom documents keep calling the great inflection point. AI sucked the wind out of those sails.
The American Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is a real executive order, signed March 6, 2025, and the government has purchased exactly zero coins. It's a policy of not selling what it confiscates. The stack went from around 200,000 to something north of 320,000 on the public trackers mainly because the Justice Department grabbed roughly 127,271 coins from a Cambodian scam syndicate last October, and that's a civil forfeiture complaint, not a final judgment. Cambodia is not seeing a satoshi of that money again, and neither is anybody else, which tells you what the reserve actually is: an evidence locker with a mission statement.
The Treasury has never published a balance. When somebody quotes you a figure down to the last coin, they're quoting a blockchain sleuth's guess about which wallets Uncle Sam controls.
The closest thing to legal sanity, the CLARITY Act, cleared two Senate committees and then stalled out. The vote slipped to September, partly over a fight about ethics language aimed at a President who disclosed north of a billion dollars in crypto income last year. The industry spent four years begging for rules and the thing holding up the rules is the guy who promised to make the US Bitcoin Capital of the World.
Brazil did not pass a Bitcoin reserve law. Brazil has a bill. I could introduce a bill this afternoon and we could both put it on a slide deck.
Three states passed reserve laws: New Hampshire, Arizona, Texas. The states that killed theirs include Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota, and half of those keep showing up on adoption maps as wins. Counting the no votes as yes votes is how you end up believing your own newsletter.
CalPERS did not buy Bitcoin. It bought about $144 million of Michael Saylor's stock, which then fell 44 percent. Strategy itself has traded below the value of the coins it holds and has sold Bitcoin four times this year, nearly 7,000 coins, which for a company whose war cry was “never sell” is a hell of a thing to bring up at Thanksgiving.
And the professionals? The central banks everybody cites as the smart money leaving the dollar? They're leaving it for gold. Around a thousand tonnes a year, 244 tonnes in the first quarter alone, gold at $4,350 and printing records while Bitcoin sits at half price. Not one central bank holds Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Fifty-five years of financial innovation and the sovereign play is to get more of the shiny rock.
The honest scoreboard has one nation actually stacking on purpose. El Salvador dropped Bitcoin as legal tender in 2025 to close a $1.4 billion IMF deal, which the true believers hate to mention. What they also leave out is that Bukele kept buying anyway, roughly a coin a day, past 7,688 of them, with the IMF publicly telling him to stop and El Salvador publicly not stopping. That's the whole nation-state adoption story right now: one small country buying the dip in defiance of its creditor. It's more than nothing. It is not a global monetary transition, and every time we dress it up as one we insult the exact people we're trying to reach.
So what is it, then
Bill Gross had the phrase back in 2012, describing the dollar. The cleanest dirty shirt. Not clean. Cleanest.
Everything in the drawer is filthy. The dollar is filthy: $40 trillion in debt, a Treasury market that needs a chaperone, a Justice Department writing get-out-of-audit-free cards. Gold is filthy: it does nothing, it costs money to guard, and its price is set by the same central banks running the printers. Bitcoin is filthy: it just lost half its value, its loudest champions are leveraged promoters yelling about staying poor, and its biggest corporate holder is selling into the exact drawdown it swore it would never sell into.
There is no clean shirt. There has never been a clean shirt. Anybody promising you one is selling something.
What I'll defend is narrower and I think it holds: Bitcoin's dirt is visible. The supply schedule is published, the ledger is public, nobody can sign a memo at midnight that creates more of it, and no acting attorney general can declare a wallet forever barred. Every other shirt in the drawer is dirty in ways you find out about later, on a Friday, in a press release.
The dollar's share of global reserves went from about 71 percent in 2000 to 57 percent today. That's half a point a year. Extend the line and the dollar dies around 2133, so calm down, it isn't Tuesday. But it isn't nothing either, and the direction hasn't reversed in twenty-six years, and the interest bill compounds whether or not anybody panics.
You don't need to bet the house. You need to stop believing the laundry is clean. Own something nobody can print, understand it'll get cut in half sometimes, and quit waiting for a savior currency, because the species that produced Bretton Woods, quantitative easing and a $1.8 billion tax settlement with itself is not about to produce a clean shirt.
Pick the cleanest one in the pile and keep your eyes open. That's the whole strategy. Everybody selling you more certainty than that is selling the pill.
Yes, there's an AI watermark on this. There's also a $39.83 trillion tab with your name on it. If the watermark alarms you more than the Attorney General handing out audit immunity by memo, we have very different alarms. Rank your concerns accordingly.