One of the great fictions about money is that it is neutral. It isn’t. It’s either designed for the elites or for the citizenry. Many proclaim a desire for “sound money,” but “backed by X” currencies are not “sound money” unless they can be converted directly into X.

If we don’t bother measuring national well-being, the health of the nation’s commons and resources and advances in the public’s interests, then we foolishly call a decade of tremendous advancement “stagflation.”

Rather than cheer the concept of a new currency, we’re better served to look at the velocity of that currency and the cycles of investing that currency in assets denominated in that currency for a low-risk return.

Should the wealth effect reverse as assets fall, capital gains evaporate and investment income declines, the top 10% will no longer have the means or appetite to spend so freely. Soaring wealth-income inequality has all sorts of consequences.

We need a new iteration of economics that advances beyond the obsolete, misleading statistical measurements of bygone eras. Let’s focus on a largely forgotten history, one within living memory of everyone born in the 1950s, a history of signal importance to our understanding of the forces that will dominate the next decade.