The “rules-based world order” was never about rules; it was about the house always winning. Last week in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney didn’t just give a speech; he delivered a eulogy. The system birthed at Bretton Woods in 1944 is not “fading” - it is undergoing a violent, self-inflicted liquidation. For eight decades, the world operated on the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar. Harry Dexter White’s 1944 victory over John Maynard Keynes ensured that the United States could essentially print prosperity, exporting green pieces of paper in exchange for the world’s labor and resources. It was a brilliant grift while it lasted. By pegging the world to the dollar, the US gained the ability to run endless deficits, financing its global military footprint and a consumer lifestyle on the tab of foreign central banks. But the bill has finally come due. The cynical reality is that Donald Trump is not the cause of this collapse; he is its inevitable, mutated byproduct. The Bretton Woods system required an overvalued dollar to maintain its status, a policy that systematically hollowed out American manufacturing and turned the Mid-West into a graveyard of industrial ambition. The “Rust Belt” didn’t just happen; it was the price paid for financial hegemony. Now, the man propelled to power by that domestic wreckage is busy burning down the very institutions - NATO, the UN, the IMF - that allowed the US to dominate the globe in the first place. The mathematics of the end-game are grim. The US Treasury now needs to peddle $2.5 trillion in new debt every month just to keep the lights on. Recent auctions suggest the world is losing its appetite for American IOUs. When the “risk-free” asset of the world - the US 10-year Treasury - starts spiking despite the Fed’s desperate attempts to cool the market, you aren’t looking at a “market correction.” You are looking at a sovereign debt trap. The sudden, desperate resurgence of interest in Keynes’s “Bancor” idea is a sign of global panic. Economists are frantically dusting off the 1944 proposal for a “unit of account” that would penalize surplus-hoarding nations and shield the world from the erratic whims of the US Federal Reserve. But power is never surrendered voluntarily. China and the BRICS nations aren’t waiting for a new Bretton Woods; they are building their own lifeboats. From the “New Development Bank” to blockchain-based trade settlements, the goal is clear: decoupling from a currency that has been weaponized by a nation that no longer wants the responsibility of leadership. The transition will not be the “orderly adjustment” central bankers dream of. It will be a fractured, mercantilist free-for-all. We are moving from a world of one “policeman” to a world of regional warlords, where trade is a weapon and “rules” are whatever the strongest actor in the room says they are. The era of cheap credit and American-guaranteed stability is over. Welcome to the fallout. PAST STORIES: - The Metaphysical Heist: Why Arsenal’s Premier League Ambitions are Statistically Impossible: /posts/the-metaphysical-heist-why-arsenal-s-premier-league-ambitions-are-statistically-impossible