Among the recurring questions subscribers submit, the most common involve the concept of “dollar collapse.”

A prominent stockbroker, in fact, recently posed a version of this question in a note to his customers:

When [analysts] warn that fiat currencies are dying, the logical follow-up question — one that almost never gets answered — is: dying relative to what, exactly?

In other words, if the dollar is collapsing, what is it collapsing against?

This almost feels like a trick question, but if we accept it as serious, the too-obvious answer is: The dollar is collapsing against the things it buys. Its purchasing power is evaporating. Here are two charts illustrating this ongoing decline; the first is a bare-bones version from the Federal Reserve, the second a little fancier from Visual Capitalist:

And It’s Not Just the Dollar

As the previously mentioned stockbroker observes elsewhere in his note, all fiat currencies are falling in lockstep —at an accelerating rate — when priced in gold:

Extrapolating From Here

If a currency’s purchasing power is in steep decline, the question becomes: “Are the conditions that caused this decline still in place?”

The answer is a resounding yes. Not only are the conditions (rising government spending, societal debt, currency creation, and financial manipulation) still in place, but they’re all worsening dramatically.

So the answer to the original question is the same whether we’re looking at the past or the future: The world’s fiat currencies are staging a kind of mass suicide versus most of the things we hope to buy going forward.

Coming next in this series: How Can There Be A Monetary Reset If The Global Financial System Is Set Up For Today’s Fiat Currencies?