Sorry to break it to you, but fiat is broke. You don’t notice it because it nibbles away at your earnings a few percentage points at a time.

Remember Covid? Your ZAR has lost 30% of its value since then. Now ask yourself if your pay has gone up that much.

It likely hasn’t, in which case you are going backwards, as in, getting poorer. Since 1961, when the ZAR was introduced, it has lost 99.9% of its purchasing power. That’s what happens when your average inflation rate is 7.8% over 63 years.

Think about that. The ZAR has lost 99.9% of its value in that time. There was a time in the early 1980s when the ZAR was worth more than the USD. You could be earning R400 a month, own a car, a house and go on overseas holidays.

Crypto fund manager Listed Reserve notes that “the value of fiat currency collapses far more quickly than anyone reports or realises. The whole story (and it is a story) of economic growth, rising real wages, is in many cases, simply a mirage.”

If what we were told about rising real wages (in other words, wages increasing faster than inflation) was true, we could all own a house, a car and go on overseas holidays as happened back in the 1980s. That’s not the case today.

Just recently the US introduced 50 years mortgages, the purpose being to lower monthly payments. This means that a 30 year-old buying a house on a 50-year mortgage will be paying that off until they are 80. The interest they will pay over the term of that loan is unimaginable.

On a mortgage loan of $380,000, the monthly savings come to $270. This may seem ridiculous but consider this: you will be paying 6% on your mortgage bond over 50 years, but the nominal value of things will be increasing by 10-12% a year. You’d do well to lock yourself into this product.

But this may turn out to be the best currency short in history. “If fiat currency is as terrible as I think it is, then these products are a gift,” says Listed Reserve.

Donald Trump plans on introducing 15 year car loans. Great idea, except the average life of a car is 12.5 years. The world’s car makers have become more automated and efficient, so they should be reducing in price – they the price of cars continues to soar (unless they are Chinese ones). Because we measure these things in fiat like the ZAR and USD.

“Why is it that, with economic growth, technological growth and vastly more educated society, people cannot afford an electricity bill or a basic car and certainly not a home? Because fiat is a mirage. It’s a story and a giant fraud that lots of people are in on. They live warmly in its bosom. It suits nobody with influence to rock that boat.”