There’s a moment in most careers where the cognitive dissonance becomes too loud to ignore.

Mine came twelve years into investment banking - the last several as a Director - in 2020. We were in the middle of structuring a debt deal - the kind of transaction I’d done dozens of times - when the full picture of what we were doing finally resolved with uncomfortable clarity. The Federal Reserve had just dropped rates to zero and was purchasing assets at a pace that had no precedent in peacetime. Central banks globally - the ECB, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan - followed suit, collectively expanding their balance sheets by trillions in a matter of months. Credit markets that should have been repricing risk were being artificially supported.

We were helping a client borrow at rates that bore no relationship to economic reality, to acquire assets whose prices had been inflated by the same policy that made the borrowing cheap. The deal was legal. The returns were real. The client would make money - the bankers certainly would. Nobody in the room was asking who was on the other side of the trade.

I kept doing the job. What changed was what I understood about it.

What I found instead was a body of work that institutional finance treats like a distant embarrassing relative - rarely cited, never fully refuted. Not the FT and Bloomberg and the usual diet of institutional consensus - the kind of monetary history that doesn’t appear in CFA curricula or an MBA programme, precisely because it raises questions that are difficult to answer while maintaining faith in the system you’re being trained to serve.

Ludwig von Mises wrote about the consequences of credit expansion in the 1940s with a precision that reads today less like theory and more like a slowly arriving telegram. Zoltan Pozsar and Luke Gromen mapped the same dynamics in modern language - the petrodollar recycling mechanism, the fiscal arithmetic that makes debasement a mathematical inevitability rather than a policy choice - and drew conclusions that mainstream finance was too conflicted to engage with seriously. Russell Napier had documented how governments historically resolve unsustainable debt: not through austerity or default, but through financial repression, holding rates below inflation until the real debt quietly evaporates, with the cost borne silently by savers. Jim Grant had been writing about all of it with the dry precision of a man watching someone divide by zero, and had been correct about the direction of things for longer than most careers in finance.

Here’s what they don’t teach in the CFA programme or an MBA: when a central bank creates money, it doesn’t create wealth. It redistributes it. Every new unit of currency dilutes every existing unit. The person holding cash savings - usually the person who can least afford the loss - pays an invisible tax to the person holding real assets - usually the person who least needs the subsidy.

The redistribution runs in one direction, continuously, and the people it extracts from rarely know it’s happening because the mechanism is called “inflation” rather than “expropriation” - a framing choice that has done considerable work over the past fifty years.

John Maynard Keynes, in a rare moment of clarity about the system he helped design, wrote that “by a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens”. He meant it as a warning. Successive generations of central bankers appear to have read it as a how-to guide.

The moment this moved from analytical to visceral for me was during due diligence on a client engagement. The fund in question was a large defined benefit pension - the kind that teachers and nurses and public sector workers had paid into for decades on the assumption that prudent management would preserve their purchasing power into retirement. Generating nominal returns that looked adequate on paper. But when I worked through the real numbers - adjusting for the actual inflation experience of the fund’s beneficiaries rather than the official CPI figures - the purchasing power being preserved was substantially less than the nominal statements suggested. These were people who had spent careers doing everything the system told them to do. The system was quietly doing it to them anyway.

Mises described what he called the “Crack-Up Boom” - the terminal phase of fiat expansion, where money creation accelerates beyond the point of return and people begin fleeing paper currency into any real asset available, not because those assets have suddenly become more useful but because the paper has become less trustworthy. It’s less an event than an acceleration of a process that has been running in the background for decades.

We are somewhere in that process.

The Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet by roughly $8 trillion since 2008. Every major central bank has followed. Global debt has compounded at rates that make nominal repayment a mathematical fiction requiring either default, debasement, or a rate of real growth that the demographic and productivity data does not support.

The dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, and the pace has accelerated markedly since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 and untethered monetary policy from any physical constraint.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s arithmetic with a long track record of being ignored until it can’t be.

The investment implications are specific.

Gold and silver are in the early stages of repricing as what they actually are - monetary assets - rather than the lazy shorthand fifty years of post-Bretton Woods financial education assigned them: relics, commodities, barbarous vestiges of a system the world had supposedly moved beyond. Central banks globally have bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold annually for three consecutive years - the most sustained institutional buying since the Bretton Woods era. They are not making the relic argument.

Energy is in a structural supply cycle - a decade of underinvestment colliding with demand that hasn’t gone anywhere - that is barely visible in current valuations. Junior resource stocks remain the most hated corner of the market. They are also, if the macro thesis holds, the most leveraged way to be right about it.

And the dollar’s reserve currency status - the foundational assumption underneath decades of portfolio construction - is being questioned by every central bank that watched the US freeze Russia’s reserves in 2022 and quietly asked: if it happened to them, why not us?

This is the landscape Crack-Up Capital covers.

I’ll tell you what I own and why. In banking, a bad call has consequences. I’m bringing the same standard here - positions will be stated clearly, and when they’re wrong, I’ll say so plainly, not in small print. When I have financial interests relevant to what I’m writing about, you’ll know before I say anything else. What follows is built on twelve years of watching how the machine works - and a growing conviction that it’s broken in ways most people inside it are paid not to notice.

The only question worth asking is what you’re doing about it.

Crack-Up Capital publishes weekly. Hard assets. Hard truths. Jokes that haven’t been debased yet.