Is there any way to protect wealth if money is broken?
Is modern money just government debt in disguise?
I had been wanting to sit down and write this piece for months. Every time I thought about it, I kept postponing it, because I knew it would require focus and depth. Not just another quick note on markets, not a passing reflection. Something that needed proper time. And finally I gave myself that time, because this is about the book that marked my summer. Broken Money by Lynn Alden.
I don’t usually say this about financial books. Most are either too theoretical, too biased, or too shallow. But this one? It managed to combine history, macroeconomics, technology, and the brutal reality of our monetary system in a way that makes you pause and rethink everything you thought you knew.
It’s not a Bitcoin book, even if Bitcoin is in the background. It’s a money book. And it’s a book about why money is broken in ways that cannot be patched back together.
What struck me the most is how clearly Lynn Alden frames the irreversibility of the system. Many people, even smart investors, still think there’s some kind of way back to “normal.” A return to balanced budgets, low debt, disciplined central banking. But the mechanics of the system don’t allow it. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Here are the five key lessons I took from Broken Money, explained in my own words.
Debt as Money
We no longer live in a world where money is neutral and separate from credit. Our monetary base has become so entangled with government liabilities that every attempt to reduce debt automatically destroys money. Debt is not just a claim on money anymore. Debt is the money. And when the very foundation of your financial system is built on promises that cannot all be kept, the system is, by definition, broken.
The Path Dependency Problem
Once a system chooses to break the link with hard collateral like gold, and relies fully on elastic credit, it locks itself into a dynamic where each crisis demands more expansion, not less. Every bailout, every stimulus, every liquidity injection is the only politically feasible response. This isn’t accidental recklessness. It’s survival. To go back would require collapsing the very institutions that depend on endless debt rollover.
Technology and Fragility
Digital finance, instantaneous payments, global liquidity flows, they all make the system more fragile. In the past, bank runs took days or weeks. Now they happen in hours. The plumbing of the system is optimized for convenience and speed, but that same efficiency makes it inherently unstable. We built a hyper-efficient mechanism to transmit panic. Broken money isn’t just about too much debt. It’s about the infrastructure making that debt impossible to control.
The Fiscal Dominance Trap
This one hit me hard. Central banks are no longer truly independent, because the scale of government debt makes independence impossible. If the Fed or the ECB were to seriously fight inflation with high interest rates for too long, they would bankrupt their own governments by making debt service unpayable. So eventually, monetary policy bends to fiscal needs. Central banks become forced buyers of sovereign debt. And once you understand that, you see why inflation is not a bug of the system. It’s the only release valve left.
No Way Back
This is the hardest lesson to accept. Investors, economists, even ordinary citizens still want to believe there’s a reset button. But you can’t legislate away the math of compounding debt. You can only move forward. And “forward” means more experimentation, more currency debasement, and more attempts to patch a system that cannot be structurally fixed. The only rational response is to build your own asymmetric system outside of that broken core.
When I closed the book, I felt two things at once. On one side, a kind of despair. Because it means the world we grew up in, stable money, predictable savings, retirement in bonds, is dead and not coming back.
On the other side, a strange sense of clarity. Because once you accept there is no way back, you stop wasting energy waiting for “normal.” You build for the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.
And that’s the deepest takeaway. Money is broken at the structural level. It won’t be repaired by good intentions, policy shifts, or cycles. The cracks are permanent. But for those of us willing to face that reality, there is freedom. Freedom to design portfolios that don’t rely on promises of repayment. Freedom to live from flow, not from liquidation. Freedom to hold assets that stand outside of the political requirement to inflate debt away.
That’s why I needed time to write this. Because Broken Money is not just another book to tick off your reading list. It’s a mirror that forces you to look at the system as it really is. Once you do, you realize there are only two paths. You either cling to the old dream and get crushed with it, or you build a parallel, asymmetric life around assets that can survive what’s coming.
I choose the second.