➡ The U.S. has a negative net international investment position of $26 trillion, meaning the world owns more of America than America owns of the world. However, the system still functions due to the power of the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency. This system, referred to as the “imperial carry trade,” allows the U.S. to inflate its debt burden while foreign holders lose purchasing power. However, this system is temporary and when it unwinds, the real value of assets will be revealed, potentially in terms of gold or Bitcoin, showing a decline in real terms.

➡ Bitcoin and other digital currencies are becoming more accepted and are now part of retirement accounts and corporate treasuries. This shift is changing how we measure wealth, and it’s important to track your net worth not just in dollars, but also in gold and Bitcoin. This isn’t about making quick money, but about understanding the changing financial landscape. By doing this, you can better protect your wealth and take advantage of this once-in-a-generation monetary transition.

They keep telling you that stocks are at record highs, but that’s the illusion. In reality, they’re down 84%. Now, I know that sounds impossible, but that’s exactly what happens when the system starts breaking, because what you’re seeing isn’t real growth. It’s just the dollar melting. The numbers go up, but your purchasing power goes down. And this exact pattern, the same signature, has shown up before. Every major currency collapse in history. Rome saw it. Weimar Germany saw it. Argentines are living through it right now. And we’re seeing it again today, only this time, it’s global. Now, most people, they don’t realize it yet because they’re still measuring their wealth in the wrong yardstick.

But when you change the unit of account, when you measure in real money, the truth jumps off the page. And that’s what we’re going to break down in this video. I’m going to show you how stocks, homes, and even your savings have already collapsed in real terms. And what this means for the next stage of the global financial system. Now, I’ve built and I’ve sold multiple tech companies. I’m a partner at a leading Bitcoin venture fund. I’ve been studying and teaching macroeconomics for a decade. And I’m telling you, this data is real. By the end of this video, you’re going to see exactly why the markets look like they’re soaring.

But in reality, they’re already collapsing. And more specifically, what that means for every dollar, every stock and home that you own. So let’s go. All right, you’ve probably seen it everywhere lately, right? Stocks are at record highs. The economy is super strong. The wealth effect is back. You got CNBC, you got Bloomberg, you got Reuters, they’re all running victory laps. Now on the surface, they’re all right. If you look at the numbers in dollars, it’s pretty hard to argue, right? Since early 2020, the S&P 500 has climbed from around 3200 points to nearly 6900 today.

That’s more than 100% gain in just five years. Home prices, they’re doing pretty good too. They’re up about 50% over the same time period, according to K Schiller index. So yeah, in dollar terms, it looks like a golden age for investors, right? Everyone’s richer. But here’s the problem. If that were really true, why doesn’t it feel like it? Because while your 401k may look bigger on paper, everything you actually need, you know, like food, insurance, housing, it’s eating away at it faster than ever, right? You feel it every time you fill up at the gas pump, every time you buy groceries.

And that’s not just in your head. It’s baked into the data. Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, they show real wages. That’s that our wages that are adjusted for inflation, they’ve barely moved in the last five years, they’re up about 1% year over year, but the cost of living, it’s exploded. So the boom that you’re seeing, the boom in the financial markets, it’s not matching your daily reality. So what is it? Something’s off, right? And of course, you can’t help but notice that this is all disconnected, right? The headlines tell you the economy’s never been stronger.

But somehow, everyone you know, is struggling to keep up. People are working harder, earning more dollars, yet they’re feeling poor, right? That’s not just a feeling. It’s a signal. Because the last time we saw this kind of mismatch between nominal wealth and the real living standards, when the charts that boom, but life felt more like a bust. That was during every major currency shift in history. So the question that we need to ask isn’t our stocks at record highs. The right question is record highs measured in what? Because when you change what you measure in, when you stop assuming the dollar stable, that entire story looks very different.

And I want to show you what’s really happening behind those record highs and why the same signature is showing up today that we’ve seen before every major currency collapse in history. Alright, you know, everything we measure, right, our income, our investments, the prices of our goods that we buy, it all comes down to one simple thing. It’s the yardstick, the measuring stick, the ruler that we use. And that yardstick is the dollar. Now, the Federal Reserve defines money as having three basic jobs, a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account or the way that we measure value in economic transactions.

But that measurement only works if the yardstick itself stays stable. If the inch changes every day, the blueprint all falls apart. Since 2020, the inch, the measuring stick, it’s been shrinking really fast. According to data from the St. Louis Fed, the US money supply the M2 grew almost 27% year over year in February of 2021. That’s the fastest monetary expansion in monetary records. Now to put that into perspective, it’s bigger than anything we saw in the 1970s inflation. It’s bigger than the QB programs of 2008. Think of it like this. If I owned a company worth say a million dollars, and I asked you to invest, let’s say invest 100,000, I’ll give you 10% ownership, right? And then I grew the business from 1 million to 10 million.

That’d be amazing, right? Your 10% ownership would have grown from $100,000 to now being worth a million dollars. It’s awesome, right? Well, it is unless I diluted you, right? If I went and raised more money, and I increased the amount of shares, this happens all the time, by the way, when companies are growing, they’re raising money, right? This is exactly what’s happening to you when you measure things in dollars. And of course, when you create that much new money, that quickly, you don’t get more real wealth, you just get more units chasing the same goods and services.

Now we can see it right in the data, the consumer price index, the CPI, how the government tracks prices, I like to call it CPI. But going off of their data, it shows that it’s climbed roughly 25 to 30% just since 2020. That means the same grocery basket, the same rent payment that cost $100 five years ago now costs about $130. That’s the yardstick. It’s shrinking. So when the media says stocks hit new highs, or home prices keep going up, they’re soaring. What they’re really describing is the denominator breaking down. The measuring stick is getting shorter.

So then everything that you measure with it looks taller, right? History is full of examples of this, all right? And it’s examples of what happens next. In ancient Rome, the silver content in their coins dropped from nearly 100% silver to less than 20% silver as the empire debased its currency to pay a debt. Now people back then thought the same thing. They thought they were getting richer. They thought they had more coins in their hands. But the coins themselves were worth less and less and less. During Weimar’s Germany hyperinflation, stock prices, nominal wages also exploded higher.

But in real purchasing power, they collapsed. People carried wheelbarrows of marks just to buy bread, while charts on paper showed that they were growing, showed they were getting rich. And today you can see the same dynamic in Argentina. Last year inflation ran over 200%. Prices tripled, salaries double, and yet somehow everybody still ends up poor. That’s what a falling yardstick looks like in real time. So when you see record high markets in dollars, but stagnant wages and crushing costs of living, it’s not a paradox. It’s the textbook example. It’s the sign of a yardstick that’s losing integrity.

So the question now isn’t whether the dollar is weakened, right? The data already tells us that already proves that out. The real question is, what happens when you start measuring in something that isn’t melting? What happens if we get a nether yardstick? Alright, that’s where the illusion completely breaks. Now before we get into that, have you ever wondered how the US can run trillion dollar deficits every single year? You know, spend more than it earns, print money like crazy. And yet somehow the dollar never seems to collapse. Well, it’s because the system isn’t built on productivity anymore.

It’s built on something else, something I call the imperial carry trade. Here’s how it works. For over 80 years, the US has issued the world’s reserve currency, the dollar, right? That means everyone around the world, governments, corporations, banks, they need dollars to trade, to borrow, to save. And that privilege, it gives the US an almost unlimited credit card. Now, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, last year America ran a current account deficit of about 1.13% trillion dollars, nearly 4% of GDP. That’s money flowing out of the country to pay for imports, for military bases, for foreign investments, and interests on the debt.

But because the world uses those dollars, those dollars, they come right back in, right? Foreigners recycle them by buying US assets, by buying US treasury bonds, by stocks, by buying real estate. Now today, foreigners hold a record $9.1 trillion in treasuries. Japan alone owns more than $1.2 billion. The UK recently passed China as the second largest holder. So while the US runs these massive trade, these massive budget deficits, it also attracts the world’s savings to fund all of it, right? That’s what we call the carry. And it shows up on the balance sheet. Now, if you add up everything the US owns abroad versus what foreigners own here, the US is now negative by $26 trillion.

That’s the net international investment position. Think about that. The world owns $26 trillion more of America than America owns of the world. And yet the system, it still runs. Because the rest of the world wants those dollar assets. That’s the power of having the reserve currency. But now here’s where the imperial part comes in. When the Fed cuts rates, or launches QE, which is coming, it pumps liquidity into the markets. Asset prices rise, stocks, homes, bonds, all that creates what economists at the New York Fed call the quote, wealth effect, right? Now they’ve studied this for decades.

For every dollar of stock market wealth, Americans spend about two or three cents more. That extra spending boosts GDP. It makes the economy look really strong. And it attracts even more global capital that’s chasing those rising nominal returns. It’s basically one giant feedback loop. Policy creates asset inflation. Asset inflation creates consumption. Consumption attracts capital. And that capital funds the next deficit. Round and round and round the flywheel goes. But every carry trade, it has a hidden risk. Because all those foreign investors, you know, the ones that are holding US bonds and holding stocks, they’re taking currency risk.

If the dollar weakens or inflation runs hot, they’re the ones that are going to eat the loss in real terms, right? The US gets to inflate away part of its debt burden. But the foreign holders, they lose purchasing power. That’s why I call it the imperial carry trade, right? It’s the modern version of what every single empire does in its final phase. It uses currency privilege to siphon the world’s wealth, inflate domestically, inflate asset prices and quietly export the losses abroad. It’s elegant, it’s great, but it’s temporary. Because no empire can keep this carry trade going forever.

And when that carry unwinds, when the world no longer wants to hold melting dollar claims, well, the illusion starts to break. That’s when the real scoreboard starts to matter. And when we switch to something else, a different scoreboard, we measure something else other than in dollars. Let’s say we measure it in gold, we measure it in Bitcoin, that you’ll see how far the system has already fallen. Okay, so now, to really see this, to really understand this, let’s measure the markets using three different yardsticks. We’ll measure it in the dollar, we’ll measure it in gold, and then we’ll measure it in Bitcoin.

That way, we can see the story that each one of these yardsticks tell us. So let’s look at first, we’ll look at the dollar. We’ll call it the comfortable illusion. Let’s start with the dollar is what every headline uses. It’s what most of the world uses. At the start of 2020, the S&P 500 sat at around 3278. Today, it’s roughly 6875. So that’s a gain of about 110%. Now, the Case Shiller Home Price Index, which tracks the US housing, it was around 212 back then. Now it’s around 330. So that’s up about 56%. Now, those are the charts that you see on TV, right? Those are the ones that people make that make you feel rich, right? Stocks at record highs, home values are soaring.

But remember, what we talked about earlier, those highs are only due to the nominal dollars, right? Those dollars have been inflated at record speed. So the real question isn’t how much the prices went up, it’s how much the measuring stick went down. So let’s use something different. Let’s use gold. If we switch that yardstick over to gold, then we see something different. Now, why gold? Well, because for 1000s of years, gold has been the baseline gold has been the unit of account, right? It’s the oldest, most trusted form of money. It’s a real test of purchasing power.

So if we price the S&P 500 in gold, we get something completely different. Back in early 2020, gold was about 1520 per ounce, and the S&P 500 was 3278. So that means the index was worth roughly 2.16 ounces of gold. Fast forward to today, the S&P 500 is up around 6875. And now gold’s up over $4,000 an ounce. That means that the S&P 500 is only about 1.7 ounces of gold. So in other words, after all the inflation, after all the stimulus, after all the AI, all the booming headlines, the market’s down when you measure it in gold, not up, down, five years, and it’s down.

Now, same, same is true for housing. Your home might have gone up by 56% in dollar terms. But again, gold’s gone up to 4000, right? So in gold terms, real home values are down. Again, everything is going down. That’s the first crack in the illusion. Even under a traditional hard money standard, the gold standard, supposed wealth boom completely disappears. Now let’s switch to Bitcoin, arguably the hardest denominator we have today. In 2020, one Bitcoin traded for about $7,000. And Bitcoin, it’s been falling, it’s fallen off of its high of about 126,000. Today, it’s around 90, 92,000, but it’s still roughly a 13 times increase.

So if we reprice the S&P 500 in Bitcoin, back then one unit of the index was worth about 0.47 Bitcoin, but today it’s about 0.07 Bitcoin. That means that’s a drop in real terms of roughly 84 to 85%. Now, when we do the same for housing, a 56% moving dollar over the period, but against a 13 times Bitcoin rise, the result is a decline in Bitcoin terms in the 80 to 90% range. Even gold, which doubled in dollars terms has lost the vast majority of its value when measured in Bitcoin. So in just five years, Bitcoin has completely flipped the scoreboard.

In dollars, assets are going. In gold, they’re stagnant. But in Bitcoin, they’re absolutely collapsing. That’s what Luke Grauman calls the scarf layer. It’s a living record of a dying denominator. Because what you’re looking at right now isn’t just a bull market. It’s not just a bubble. It’s the first stage of a global unit of account fracture, a slow transition away from the old measuring stick, the dollar toward a new one. That’s why the world feels so off is why wages don’t match prices. It’s why the economy looks strong on paper, but it feels weaker in reality.

We’re measuring our world with a broken ruler. And when you finally switch to one that doesn’t change, the truth comes into focus. So now that you understand that the next question is why the US keeps doing this? Why policymakers keep inflating assets and exporting risk abroad? Because it’s not random, right? It’s a strategy. It’s a play the US has run before. It’s what I call again, the imperial carry trade. It’s the hidden engine that’s been keeping all of this alive. Every empire’s currency goes through the same process. First, it dominates, then it defends. And then finally, it dilutes.

And when you really reach that last stage, the smartest players, they quietly start shifting out of paper promises and into hard collateral. That’s exactly what we’re seeing right now. According to the World Gold Council, central banks bought over 1000 tons of gold in both 2022 and 2023. The two biggest years on record. In 2025, they’re still buying. Just in August alone, they added another 19 tons to their reserves. Now, this isn’t about a profit. This is about insurance. They’re swapping all those fiat IO use for real settlement assets. Because when you trust in the unit of account that starts breaking down, gold becomes the neutral reserve choice.

It’s not someone else’s liability. That’s the entire point. Now the dollar still dominates. It’s roughly about 57% of global reserves. Once you adjust for exchange rates, but a decade ago, that number was close to 65%. So the change is slow, but it’s persistent, right? It’s a creep. While a lot of people are thinking there’s a crash coming. It’s crashing just a little bit slower than what most people expect. But at the same time, we’re watching dozens of small bypasses starting to open up, right? India and the UAE. They’re now testing rupee trade. Brazil and China, they’re they’ve launched a $27 billion currency swap line.

iron ore contracts, they’re settling in you want. Now these things, they sound small, right? They don’t they don’t look really big yet. They are right? They’re small. But they’re important. Because they start to chip away at the monopoly of one settlement rail. That’s how a unit of account fracture spreads. It’s not through a single event, like most people think, but through 1000 quiet experiments. And while governments are trying to build alternative rails, the market already has. It’s already built them stable coins, private dollar denominated tokens are now settling over $27 trillion a year. I mean, to put that into perspective, that’s more than visa.

These digital dollars move peer to peer across borders, with out banks without swift. That’s the market quietly building its own financial plumbing, one that doesn’t need permission. A unit of account agnostic system that can clear dollars today, Bitcoin tomorrow, or whatever comes next. And on the other end of the spectrum, the institutions they’ve also arrived in the first year of us spot Bitcoin ETFs, we saw 38 billion in net inflows, a record for any new asset class. BlackRock’s IBIT alone now holds over 800,000 Bitcoin, nearly 4% of the total supply. What this means is that what used to be considered a risk asset on the fringe is now sitting inside retirement accounts, inside corporate treasuries, sovereign balance sheets.

So what does all this mean? It means the scoreboard is already changing. Even if the referees keep pretending it’s the same game, central banks, they’re hoarding gold, right? Trade partners are using their own currencies. Stablecoins have built a complete shadow payment network bigger than Visa. Bitcoin has become a parallel reserve ledger recognized by Wall Street. We’re not we’re not watching theory anymore, right? We’re watching a transition. This is what a unit of account shift looks like from the inside. It’s slow. It’s uneven. And yes, it’s messy. But it’s happening right now. And that brings us to the real question.

What do you do in a world where the measuring stick itself is breaking? How do you position? How do you plan? How do you protect yourself when the scoreboard is being rewritten in real time? Well, as they say, awareness and admitting the problem is the first step. So now that you see that the scoreboard is changing, the question is, what do you do with that information? Because this isn’t about trading, right? It’s not about chasing headlines. It’s about awareness. It’s about knowing what game you’re playing. It’s about knowing what rules are quietly being rewritten underneath it.

Now, the first step is simple, right? Measure your wealth in more than one yardstick. Now, most people only look at their net worth in dollars, right? That’s mistake number one. Start tracking it in gold. Start tracking in Bitcoin terms. Just divide your total net worth by the price of gold, or by Bitcoin once a month. And when you do that, you’ll start to see what central banks already know that the dollar is not constant. Next, understand your positioning, right? This isn’t about financial advice. It’s about building a framework that survives transitions. Every empire’s currency cycle ends the same way, right? The paper gets inflated.

But productive assets and scarce stores of value, they carry forward. They keep going. That’s why it’s so important. Okay, and then comes the process because behavior beats brilliance. Now, history shows that lump sum investors tend to outperform about two thirds of the time, simply because markets just tend to always drift upwards. But dollar cost averaging reduces regret. It keeps you consistent and it protects you from emotion. Now, the best system is the one that you’ll actually stick with. Now, that’s really what this whole video has been about, right? It’s all been about awareness. But specifically, it’s about taking action now that you’re aware of the problem.

Because once you start measuring wealth correctly, you’re going to start seeing it correctly. You’ll start to see what central banks are doing when they buy gold. You’ll see what operators are doing when they start adopting Bitcoin. You’ll see the new system forming under your very feet. And the more people that see it, the faster this transition unfolds. Like, we’re literally living through a monetary transition that only happens once in a generation. So don’t watch it just happen. Understand it, prepare for it, use it for your advantage. Because once you see the truth behind the numbers, you’ll never measure wealth the same way again.

And if you want to see the timeframe that I predict all of this to happen over how it all unfolds, you should probably go watch this video right here. And I’ll see you over there. [tr:trw].

See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.