Why the West Can't Recover

In 1977, The Economist coined the term "Dutch disease" to describe the damage to the real economy when wealth derives from resource exports rather than productive work. On April 1, 1978, the Second Amendment to the IMF's Articles of Agreement came into force, ending gold's monetary role within the IMF system and consolidating the transition to pure fiat money. With "money" no longer backed by anything real, the alchemists' dream of a "Philosopher's Stone"--the ability to create seemingly limitless wealth out of nothing--appeared to have been realized.

But while real wealth produced by human labor is finite, fiat money creation is not subject to the same physical constraint. The result was a new and far more powerful variant of Dutch disease: the Philosopher's Stone Disease.

The Money Powers' financialization of economies and imposition of neoliberalism increasingly privileged finance over production. Over the next four decades, the consequences extended beyond economics, eroding the cultural and civilizational heritage and traditions of large swaths of the global population.

The socioeconomic impact of this pure fiat-money regime, globally and within the United States, has been an across-the-board deterioration, while its benefits accrued overwhelmingly to less than 0.01 percent of the population. Yet creating money cannot create the real goods it commands. The system therefore depends upon a steady external supply of real goods and the recycling of part of the resulting surpluses into U.S. financial assets. Energy revenues from West Asia have been key to sustaining it.

A resurgent Iran thus posed an existential threat to the UK-established and U.S.-dominated oil order. Sanctions, assassinations, proxy wars, color revolutions, terrorist attacks and mass psychological manipulation followed, but failed to achieve their objective.

If Iran emerges victorious from the war launched against it in 2026 and breaks U.S. control over the oil-rich Levant, the petrodollar recycling system will suffer a massive blow, accelerating withdrawal from U.S. Treasuries. The dilemma is stark: financial dominance ultimately requires real power to enforce it, while the Philosopher's Stone Disease has hollowed out the productive and military foundations of that power.

Why the West Can't Recover: The Philosopher's Stone Disease explains why there may be no way back.