The Reset Already Started
Most People Just Don’t Have a Name for It
I remember my grandmother telling me she bought her first apartment in Madrid for the equivalent of three years of her teacher’s salary. The apartment still exists. My grandmother’s salary, adjusted for what it could actually buy today, does not.
Nobody declared a crisis that year. There was no Lehman moment, no black swan, no front-page collapse. There was just a slow, invisible process of subtraction. Year by year. Category by category. Until the math stopped working for people who played by the rules.
That process didn’t stop. It accelerated. Groceries are up 35% since 2020. Rent in any major European city is up 40% or more...
Insurance, healthcare, energy, all running between 30% and 60% above pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, median wages in real terms have moved maybe 15%. The spread between what life costs and what work pays has never been wider in the post-war era.
Most people feel this. Very few understand the mechanism behind it.
The mechanism is simple, and it has been running since 1971. Governments discovered they could spend money they didn’t have, finance the gap with debt, and repay that debt with currency worth less than when they borrowed it. The political cost of this is low, inflation is invisible enough, diffuse enough, to avoid direct accountability. The economic cost is borne by anyone who holds their savings in the currency being debased. Which is almost everyone.
The reset isn’t coming. It has been running in slow motion for fifty years. What we’re experiencing now is just the phase where the math becomes impossible to ignore.
Understanding the mechanism is one thing. Knowing what to do about it is another.
The first thing to accept is that the system will not fix itself. There is no political constituency for fiscal discipline when the alternative is printing. There is no central bank that will sustain pain long enough to truly purge accumulated debt. The incentive structure points in one direction: more debt, more debasement, more erosion. Anyone waiting for a return to sound money through official channels is going to wait a very long time.
So the question becomes practical. Not philosophical. Not political. Practical.
What does a person actually do to survive and ideally benefit from a monetary reset that plays out over decades?
The answer has three concrete layers, and they need to be built in order.
Getting out of cash as a store of value
The first layer is getting out of cash as a store of value. Not out of cash entirely, liquidity matters. But holding savings in a bank account denominated in a currency whose supply is controlled by people with every incentive to expand it is not saving. It is slow liquidation. The first move is reallocating the savings that aren’t needed for near-term expenses into assets that governments can’t print. Bitcoin. Gold. Productive real estate with real cashflow. Equity in businesses with pricing power. The exact mix depends on your timeline and risk tolerance. The direction is non-negotiable.
Bitcoin deserves a specific mention here because it is structurally different from everything else on that list. Gold is scarce but not absolutely scarce mining expands supply. Real estate is tied to geography and political jurisdiction. Equity is exposed to management, competition, and regulation.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply cap enforced by mathematics, is borderless, is seizure-resistant with proper custody, and cannot be debased by any authority. It is the only asset in human history where the supply schedule is completely immune to price signals or political pressure. For a portfolio designed to survive monetary debasement, that property is not marginal. It is fundamental.