Why 73% of Americans Failed Finance in 2025 (You’re Probably One of Them)

Most people believe financial collapse happens because of bad decisions, corruption, or unexpected crises.
History shows something far more disturbing.

This video breaks down the repeating monetary pattern that has quietly destroyed every major civilization — from Ancient Rome, to Weimar Germany, to the modern U.S. financial system.

Using publicly available data, historical case studies, and structural analysis, this video explains why debt-based monetary systems always reach the same mathematical endpoint — regardless of technology, political system, or national power.

This is not speculation.
This is pattern recognition.

In this video, you’ll understand:

• Why financial illiteracy is not accidental — it’s systemic
• The four-stage monetary cycle governments repeat every time
• How currency debasement works in ancient and modern systems
• Why debt expansion always precedes monetary instability
• How Rome destroyed its silver currency over centuries
• Why Weimar Germany collapsed in months, not decades
• How the 2008 financial crisis followed the same pattern
• Why modern money printing is digital debasement
• How inflation silently transfers wealth from savers to debtors
• Why credit card debt and rising living costs are warning signals
• What “loss of control” actually looks like in real economies
• Why asset inflation benefits the wealthy while wages fall behind
• What historical Stage Four outcomes look like — collapse or reset

This video does not predict dates.
It explains mechanisms — and mechanisms repeat when conditions are identical.

The goal is not fear.
The goal is understanding.

When you understand the machine, you stop being surprised by the outcome.

⚠️ IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

I am not a financial advisor. This video is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this video constitutes financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Always consult with qualified professionals before making investment decisions.

The views expressed are my personal analysis and interpretation of publicly available data. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments carry risk.

🔔 NEXT VIDEO

The next episode breaks down:

• How the modern monetary system was constructed
• Why the Federal Reserve operates the way it does
• What happened in 1971 and why it matters today
• Practical, historically grounded ways people protect wealth during monetary instability

Subscribe if you want understanding — not noise.

Pull up your bank account right now. I’m serious. Open it. Look at your credit card balance. Look at what you think you understand about money. Because I need you to realize something. You’re inside a machine. A machine that’s been running for over 2,000 years. And you have no idea you’re even in it. 73% of Americans can’t correctly answer five out of seven basic financial literacy questions. We’re not talking about hedge fund strategies or complex derivatives. We’re talking about compound interest, inflation, risk, the absolute fundamentals. But here’s what nobody’s telling you. This isn’t a failure of education. This isn’t an accident. This is by design. This is the predictable mathematical endpoint of a pattern that has destroyed every major civilization in recorded history. Rome, VHimar, Germany, modern America in 2008. And right now, in this exact moment, you’re living through the same sequence again. Stage by stage, step by step, as predictable as gravity. The US national debt just hit $ 38.4 trillion. That’s not a typo. 38.4 trillion. And it’s growing by over $6 billion every single day. Americans collectively owe $1. $23 trillion in credit card debt. The average household is carrying over $9,000 in revolving balances, paying nearly 24% interest. You think these are just random numbers? They’re not. They’re coordinates. GPS coordinates placing us at a very specific point in a pattern that has never failed to reach the same conclusion. Not once, not ever. You don’t understand finance because you’re not supposed to. The system works perfectly when you don’t understand it. And what it’s designed to do is extract wealth through a mechanism that governments have used whenever they need. Resources they can’t legitimately tax. Four stages every time, without exception. Stage one, the setup. A nation accumulates obligations it cannot possibly meet through normal tax revenue, military expansion, social programs, infrastructure, wars. The reason doesn’t matter. What matters is the gap between expenses and income grows wider every single year. There’s no way out except one. Stage two, the expansion. The government can’t raise taxes without triggering riots. So instead, they expand the money supply. In ancient times, you’d shave silver off coins and remitt them with less precious metal. Today you call it deficit spending. Quantitative easing, central bank interventions, different vocabulary, same mechanism, more currency units flooding the system, chasing the exact same amount of goods. Stage three, loss of control. Prices rise, people notice. They demand more money to compensate for rising costs. The government creates more money to meet those demands, which causes prices to rise further, which triggers demands for more money. You see where this goes? What started as controlled expansion becomes a self-feeding spiral, a death loop. Stage four, the inevitable outcome. The currency becomes worthless. Economic systems fragment. Trade networks collapse. The civilization either restructures under a completely new monetary system or it falls apart entirely. You think I’m exaggerating? You think this is doom and gloom theory? I’m going to prove this to you three separate times using three different civilizations spending two millennia. Same pattern, same stages, same outcome. Watch Rome 54 AD. Emperor Nero takes power. Rome controls everything from Britain to Egypt. The greatest military force the world has ever seen. But here’s the problem. Conquest has stopped. The borders are fixed. The flood of plundered gold and silver has ended. Yet military expenses keep climbing. Rome needs to pay its legions. Needs to build roads, aqueducts temples. Needs to keep the population happy with free grain and gladiator shows. But tax revenue can’t keep up. That’s stage one right there. So Nero makes a decision that will echo for the next four centuries. He orders the debasement of the Daenerius, Rome’s silver coin. For generations, the Daenerius had been 90% pure silver. Nero drops it to 90%. Just 5% less silver. Seems harmless, right? But now he can mint more coins with the same amount of silver. Treasury is full. Soldiers get paid. Problem solved. Stage two in motion. Except the precedent is set. A 100 years later, Marcus Aurelius cuts silver content to 75%. His son Comeodus takes it to 70%. By 265 AD, during what historians call the crisis of the 3rd century, the Daenerius contains half of 1% silver. It’s basically a copper coin with silver spray paint. In 150 years, they’ve destroyed 99% of the silver content. And what happens to prices? Between 150 AD and 300 AD, the price of wheat increases 200fold. Citizens who saved Daener for retirement watch their entire life. Savings evaporate. Merchants refuse to accept the worthless coins. Soldiers demand higher wages to keep pace. The government responds by debasing the currency even more to pay those higher wages. The spiral accelerates. Stage three. Emperor Dialesian tries to stop it in 301 AD with price controls. He issues an edict covering amousing 300 different goods and services. If you violate the price limits, you get executed. You read that right. They’re threatening to kill merchants who raise prices. That’s how desperate it’s become. The result? Merchants stop trading. They hide their goods. They resort to barter. The formal economy effectively dies. By 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire ceases to exist. Stage four, complete. You’re thinking, “Okay, but that’s ancient history. Modern economies are sophisticated. We learned from this really. Watch how the exact same mechanism destroyed one of the most advanced industrial nations in Europe less than a hundred years ago. World War I ends with the Treaty of Versailles. Germany must pay reparations totaling 132 billion gold marks. In today’s money, that’s roughly $500 billion. Germany’s industrial capacity is shattered. Its workforce is decimated. Its economy is rubble. But it still has to pay. The Vimar government faces an impossible choice. tax the population into starvation and probably trigger a communist revolution or print money. Stage one check. The Reichkes Bank starts printing marks slowly at first. Money supply increases. Government pays its bills and prices start rising. Workers demand higher wages. Government prints more to pay them. Prices rise more. The cycle begins. By 1922, it’s in full acceleration. They’re printing money not just for reparations, but for basic government operations. The Reichs Mark is losing value so fast that workers get paid twice a day because waiting until evening means their morning wages are worthless. Restaurants rewrite menus between lunch and dinner. People carry money in wheelbarrows, not because they’re rich, but because paper is more valuable than the currency printed on it. That’s stage two, locked in. January 1923, one US dollar equals 17,000 Reichkes marks. August 1923, $1 equals 4 6 million marks. November 1923, $1 equals four, two trillion marks. The currency has stopped functioning as money. People go back to direct barter. They use foreign currency. They use cigarettes. They use anything except Reich’s marks. Citizens who saved for 30 years find their entire retirement can’t buy a loaf of bread. An entire generation’s wealth gets erased in 11 months. Stage three verified. The VHimar Republic adopts a new currency, the rent mark, in late 1923. takes years for stability to return, but the psychological damage permanent. Historians directly link the economic trauma of VHimar hyperinflation to the political extremism that followed in the 1930s. When you watch an entire monetary system collapse, you don’t forget. You don’t trust. You don’t believe in the system anymore. Stage four confirmed. But wait, that was war reparations. Extreme circumstances that could never happen in peace time America with no foreign debt obligations, right? Let’s talk about 28. Year 2000. The dotcom bubble bursts. Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve respond by dropping interest rates from six 5% to 1% by 2003. Cheap credit floods the entire financial system. Banks suddenly have access to almost free money. They need somewhere to deploy it. Housing market. Mortgage lending explodes. But there’s a problem. Not enough qualified borrowers. So they lower the standards. Subprime mortgages are born. loans to people with terrible credit. Loans requiring zero down payment. Loans where you don’t even have to document your income. These mortgages get bundled into securities and sold to investors worldwide as safe, reliable investments. After all, they’re backed by real estate, and real estate always goes up, right? Stage one, locked and loaded. Housing becomes a feedback loop. Easy credit pushes home prices higher. Higher prices attract speculators. Speculators take out more loans. More loans create more mortgage back securities. More securities mean more investors buying. More demand means easier lending standards. By 2006, median home prices have more than doubled in a decade. People are taking out home equity loans to buy cars, vacations, second properties. Everyone’s getting rich on paper. And it’s all built on debt that cannot possibly be repaid if prices stop rising. Stage two, full speed. Home prices peak, then they fall. Subprime borrowers start defaulting. Not dozens, thousands, then tens of thousands. The mortgage securities investors thought were bulletproof start failing. Bear Sterns announces in July 2007 that two hedge funds have lost nearly everything. By March 2008, Bear Sterns itself collapses, gets acquired by JP Morgan for pennies. September 2008, Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old investment bank, files for bankruptcy, $400 billion in losses, largest bankruptcy in American history. AIG, the insurance giant that insured these mortgages, needs a $182 billion government bailout to avoid implosion. The entire global financial system freezes. Banks stop lending to each other because nobody knows who’s actually solvent. Stock market crashes. Dow Jones loses over 50% from peak to bottom. 9 million Americans lose jobs. 6 million lose homes. Stage three, undeniable. Federal Reserve responds with unprecedented intervention, drops rates to zero, implements quantitative easing, which is just a fancy term for creating trillions of new dollars to buy bonds. Treasury Department bails out major banks with TARP funds. Auto industry gets emergency funding. Government essentially nationalizes the mortgage market. Crisis contained. System survives. But at what cost? The Fed’s balance sheet explodes from $900 billion in 2008 to $4, 5 trillion by 2014. That money doesn’t vanish. It enters the economy, inflates asset prices, widens inequality. People who own assets get rich. People who depend on wages fall further behind. And the fundamental problem, the debt, never gets solved. It just transfers from private balance sheets to government balance sheets. Stage 4 in progress. Now, apply this exact pattern to where we are right now. December 2025. United States of America. National debt $384 trillion. That’s 130% of GDP. After World War II, US debt hit 119% of GDP. It took decades of economic growth and actual fiscal discipline to bring it down. But here’s the difference. After World War II, America was the only industrial power with its manufacturing intact. It was a global creditor. It had a growing population with expanding workforce participation. Today, America imports more than it exports. Demographics are aging. Social Security and Medicare alone require tens of trillions in future spending. These aren’t optional expenses. They’re promises to millions of Americans who paid into these systems their entire working lives. The government must honor them. But how? That’s stage one. Right now, tax revenue can’t keep pace. Government runs deficits every single year. The Federal Reserve enables this by keeping interest rates artificially low and purchasing government debt. When the Treasury needs to borrow a trillion dollars, the Fed creates digital dollars and buys Treasury bonds. This isn’t materially different from the Reichkes Bank printing marks. It’s the exact same mechanism with digital technology instead of printing presses. The money supply has exploded. M2, which measures currency plus savings and checking deposits, went from $15 trillion in February 2020 20 to $21, 7 trillion by April 2025. That’s a 40% increase in 5 years. Where does this money go? Asset prices, real estate, stocks, crypto, anything that can’t be printed. The wealthy who own these assets become vastly wealthier. But ordinary Americans, people working for wages, their purchasing power declines. Inflation hits essentials first. Food, energy, housing, rent, the things you can’t avoid buying. From 2020 to 2023, cumulative inflation hit roughly 19%. Wages increased, but not proportionally. Real purchasing power declined. And people’s response, they borrowed. Credit card debt hit $1, $23 trillion in 2025. Average balances increased over 43% since the pandemic. Delinquency rates are climbing. Nearly 9% of credit card accounts are at least 30 days overdue. That’s the highest rate since the aftermath of 2008. Stage two accelerating. The feedback loop is forming right in front of you. Americans borrow to maintain their standard of living. They pay 24% interest on revolving balances. This creates more debt. More debt service means less money for everything else. Less spending means economic slowdown. Slowdown means pressure on government to stimulate. Stimulus means more spending, more borrowing, more money creation. Prices keep rising. But here’s where it gets genuinely terrifying. Unlike Rome, which debased coins slowly over centuries, and unlike VHimar, which everyone knew was a catastrophic situation, the modern system obscures the mechanism. Most Americans don’t understand that when the Fed buys Treasury bonds, it’s creating new money. They don’t understand deficit spending financed by central bank purchases is functionally identical to running a printing press. They don’t understand their declining purchasing power isn’t random bad luck. It’s the predictable result of currency debasement. They feel poorer but can’t articulate why. So they blame corporations, immigrants, the opposite political party. Everything except the mechanism itself. And while they’re pointing fingers at each other, the machine keeps extracting. Stage three in progress right now. So what’s next? What does stage four look like? History gives us two possibilities. First possibility, what happened to Rome? Complete collapse. Currency becomes worthless. Economic system fragments. Trade stops. Society reorganizes at a more primitive level. This is the catastrophic scenario. It’s probably not imminent for the US because the dollar remains the global reserve currency. But that status isn’t permanent. China and Russia are actively building alternative payment systems. Brics nations are discussing commoditybacked currencies. If the world loses faith in the dollar, if central banks start dumping treasury holdings, if international trade shifts to WAN or gold or whatever else, then the United States loses the ability to export its inflation. And when that happens, when all those dollars come flooding back home, when there’s no external demand absorbing American money creation, prices will rise in ways that make the 1970s look like a golden age. Limar speed, modern scale. Second possibility, what happened after 2008? Massive intervention. Government and Federal Reserve take extreme measures to prevent total collapse. Bailouts, emergency lending programs, potentially even helicopter money directly to citizens. Modern monetary theory. People argue government can just print money to solve problems. They say debt doesn’t matter when you control your own currency. They’re partially correct. Debt doesn’t matter until suddenly, catastrophically, it does. until the exact moment when citizens and foreign creditors lose faith. And when that moment arrives, it arrives fast. Bimar went from functioning economy to hyperinflation in months, not years. Months. The question isn’t whether stage 4 happens. The question is which version we get and how fast it hits. And here’s what makes this particularly insidious. Every individual step feels rational in isolation. Of course, government should help people during crisis. Of course, we should have low rates to encourage investment. Of course, we should stimulate during downturns. Each decision makes sense by itself, but the cumulative effect, the systematic pattern, always leads to the same place. You don’t see the trap until you’re deep inside it. And by then, there’s no easy exit. Rome couldn’t suddenly put silver back in its coins. Vimar couldn’t unprint its marks. America cannot unwind 40 years of debt accumulation and currency expansion without triggering the exact crisis it’s desperately trying to avoid. That’s the machine. That’s what you’re inside. And that’s why 73% of Americans can’t answer basic financial questions because the system doesn’t want you to understand. An informed population might demand different choices. They might vote differently. They might save in hard assets instead of dollars. They might question why government debt grows forever. They might recognize this pattern repeating across civilizations and centuries. Knowledge is dangerous to any system that depends on public ignorance. So what do you actually do about this? First, understand this isn’t conspiracy. Nobody’s sitting in a dark room planning to destroy the currency out of malice. This is mechanism. Governments face impossible choices between catastrophic options. But understanding the mechanism lets you position yourself accordingly. If currency debasement is inevitable, hold assets that can’t be debased. Real estate, commodities, productive businesses, things with inherent value that exist in physical reality. Second, eliminate high interest consumer debt immediately. If you’re paying 24% on credit cards while your wages rise 2% annually, you are mathematically trapped. The system profits from your debt service. Break that chain first. Third, abandon the assumption that things will just work out. Romans thought Rome was eternal. VHimar citizens thought hyperinflation was impossible in a modern economy. Americans in 2007 thought sophisticated financial models made subprime mortgages safe. They were all catastrophically wrong. The pattern has never failed. Not once, not ever. In the entire span of recorded human civilization, this mechanism has played out to completion every single time it starts. Right now, some of you are thinking, “But this time is different. We have modern economics, sophisticated monetary policy, lessons from history, technology, innovation, American exceptionalism.” No, this time is not different. This time is never different. Those exact arguments were made in Rome. Citizens said Roman engineering and military superiority made them exceptional. In Viimar, economists insisted they could carefully control money printing. In 2007, financial institutions claimed sophisticated risk models made everything safe. They were all wrong. You’re not special. America is not special. The pattern doesn’t care about your technology, your economic theories, or your sense of exceptionalism. It cares about mathematics. Cold, merciless, unforgiving mathematics. The United States is currently deep into stage two, approaching stage three. Currency expansion is accelerating. Public awareness is increasing. Inflation expectations are becoming embedded in psychology. The spiral is forming. How long until stage three becomes undeniable to everyone? Could be years, could be months. The velocity depends entirely on confidence, which is psychological. It can shift overnight. One major debt crisis, one loss of reserve currency status, one moment when the public suddenly realizes the game cannot continue. That’s all it takes. And on the other side of that realization is stage four, restructuring, reset, collapse. Use whatever term you want. The outcome is identical. Your savings, if held in dollars, lose value. Your wages lose purchasing power. Your standard of living declines sharply unless you understand the pattern and position yourself accordingly before that moment arrives. This isn’t pessimism. This is pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is the only tool that lets you survive a machine specifically designed to extract wealth while keeping you ignorant of the extraction. So stop worrying about whether you personally should know more about finance. Start asking why the systematically ensures you don’t. Start questioning who benefits from your ignorance. Start understanding that every single civilization that followed this pattern ended in the same place. And start making concrete decisions based on that knowledge right now. Not tomorrow. Now. If you want to understand exactly how this machine was built, how the Federal Reserve system actually operates, why Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, and what specific actions you can take right now to protect yourself as stage three accelerates, then you need to subscribe immediately. Because what’s coming next isn’t theoretical. It’s already in motion. The only remaining question is whether you’ll be prepared or whether you’ll be another statistic in the next historical case study of currency collapse. The pattern has spoken every time without exception. Time to listen.