Crises on Schedule: Who Conducts the Orchestra of Global Impoverishment?

Every eight to twelve years, the global economy plunges into an abyss as if on command, leaving millions without jobs, savings, or hope — and if you still believe this just "happens," you're probably exactly the naive investor whose bones serve as foundation for the financial empires of the new millennium.

Let's be brutally frank: we live in a world where four central banks control over seventy percent of the global money supply. Where decisions made behind closed doors in Basel or at the annual Jackson Hole symposium determine the fate of billions of people who don't even know these gatherings exist. Where a single careless word from the Federal Reserve chairman can wipe trillions of dollars in market capitalization within hours, bankrupting pension funds and destroying the accumulated savings of entire generations. And we're seriously being told that economic crises are unpredictable "black swans," random fluctuations of a complex system? Sorry, but even a blind man can see the pattern in this chaos.

This article isn't a tinfoil-hat manifesto or the fevered imagination of a crypto enthusiast. It's an attempt to examine the mechanics of financial catastrophes through the eyes of a skeptic armed with facts, figures, and healthy cynicism developed through decades of watching how this system actually operates. Because between "conspiracy theory" and "natural cyclical pattern" lies far more interesting and dangerous territory — territory where the truth proves uncomfortable for absolutely all sides of this debate.

Anatomy of Financial Cataclysms

The history of economic crises reads like a poorly disguised Hollywood blockbuster screenplay written by an unimaginative dramatist: 1929, 1973, 1987, 1997, 2000, 2008, 2020... Note the intervals between these dates. Note the remarkably similar patterns of how events unfold. First comes euphoria, cheap credit, unbridled asset price growth, talk of a "new economy" and the "end of business cycles." Then sudden, sharp monetary policy tightening, market panic, collapse. And finally, "rescue" government measures that somehow invariably benefit those already sitting at the top of the financial food chain.

Take the 2008 crisis — that unsurpassed masterpiece of financial engineering and simultaneously a monument to human greed. The largest Wall Street banks spent years giving mortgages to people who clearly couldn't repay them — waiters, janitors, the unemployed. Then this toxic mass of hopeless debt was packaged into complex financial instruments with unpronounceable names, assigned AAA ratings, and sold to trusting investors worldwide. Regulators looked the other way, receiving promises of comfortable positions after leaving government service. Rating agencies rubber-stamped approvals, receiving generous fees from the very banks whose products they were evaluating. And when this grandiose house of cards finally collapsed, burying trillions of dollars in the rubble, what happened? Were the guilty sent to prison? Were banks nationalized in the public interest? Nothing of the sort! They were bailed out by taxpayers, and the top executives who crashed the global economy received record bonuses for "successful management during the crisis period."

And here's what's particularly curious: on the eve of every major crash, the biggest market players somehow manage to exit risky assets as if by magic, locking in profits at historic highs. Goldman Sachs actively shorted the very same mortgage securities it was selling to its clients. The largest hedge funds closed positions weeks before the crash. Some call it insider trading. Some call it superior analytics and intuition. And some simply call it having good connections in the right offices and access to information ordinary mortals will never see.

Who Wins When Everyone Loses

Here's a statistic that should genuinely unsettle anyone who thinks about its meaning for even a moment: after every major economic crisis, wealth concentration in the hands of the planet's top one percent invariably increases. After 2008, this figure grew by a record fourteen percent in just five years. During the 2020 pandemic crisis, the combined wealth of the world's billionaires grew by a mind-boggling $3.9 trillion — and this was happening at the very same time hundreds of millions of ordinary people were losing jobs, closing businesses, watching in horror as their modest savings evaporated.

The mechanism of this redistribution is embarrassingly simple, insultingly obvious. When markets crash, panic-stricken small investors — those same doctors, teachers, engineers who'd been saving for retirement — sell their assets in terror at rock-bottom prices, locking in catastrophic losses. Big capital, with privileged access to cheap central bank liquidity and reserves sufficient to weather any storm, methodically buys up devalued stocks, real estate, entire companies. Then markets "recover" thanks to another round of monetary stimulus — and voilà! A grand redistribution of wealth from many to few has occurred. Without wars, revolutions, and most amazingly, without formally violating any laws.

Oil magnate J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men of his era, put this logic more bluntly than most: "Buy when there's blood in the streets. Even if that blood is your own." Sounds cynical? Absolutely. But in this cynicism lies the cruel truth about how the system works. The thing is, the overwhelming majority of people don't have spare capital to buy assets during a crisis. They're too busy with basic survival, trying to keep their home and feed their family. And this isn't a system bug, not some unfortunate side effect. It's a key feature, an essential characteristic.

The Printing Press as a Weapon of Mass Impoverishment

There exists a weapon of mass financial destruction that operates around the clock, without weekends or holidays, and whose existence most of its victims don't even suspect. It's inflation — a completely legal, socially approved method of systematically robbing every holder of cash and bank deposits. Every second, approximately 4,755 banknotes of various currencies are printed worldwide. And each new banknote rolling off the press makes yours slightly less valuable, slightly more meaningless.

Since 1971, when Richard Nixon unilaterally unpegged the dollar from gold backing, opening the era of unbacked fiat currencies, the American currency has lost over 85% of its purchasing power. The 1971 dollar and the 2024 dollar are fundamentally different entities connected only by a common name. The Russian ruble has depreciated thousands of times over the past thirty years, turning Soviet-era millionaires into paupers of post-Soviet reality. Yet from TV screens and macroeconomics textbook pages we're told that two to three percent annual inflation is a "target rate" and a "sign of a healthy economy." May I ask: healthy for whom exactly?

Central banks explain unbridled money printing as an urgent necessity for "stimulating economic growth" and "fighting recession." Noble goals, aren't they? But where do these freshly printed trillions actually go? That's right — into financial assets. Into tech giant stocks. Into government and corporate bonds. Into elite Manhattan and London real estate. Where large capital owners are already sitting. And the ordinary working stiff from Ohio or Ryazan discovers with surprise that his salary, having nominally grown three percent, somehow catastrophically can't keep pace with housing, children's education, and healthcare prices growing at double-digit rates.

Inflation is a tax that nobody voted for. It's redistribution without representation, violating the basic principles of democratic society. And this mechanism has worked flawlessly for centuries, since the days of Roman emperors diluting silver coins with copper.

Cycles or Conspiracy: A False Dichotomy

Honest intellectual analysis requires acknowledgment of an uncomfortable fact: economic cycles do exist as objective reality. Kondratieff waves spanning half a century, Juglar's medium-term cycles, the debt supercycle theory developed by Ray Dalio based on analysis of five hundred years of history — all have serious empirical foundation confirmed by decades of academic research. The economy does develop nonlinearly, periods of rapid expansion naturally give way to painful contractions, and there's an objective, almost natural logic to this.

But here's what academic economists systematically miss, buried in their mathematical models: knowledge of cycles' existence itself becomes a powerful tool for profit extraction for those who possess it. If you understand that recession is inevitable in two to three years, you can prepare in advance. Sell risky assets at the peak of euphoria. Accumulate cash liquidity. Then methodically buy up the wreckage after the crash at fire-sale prices. Now guess who has privileged access to the best macroeconomic analytics, insider regulatory information, and armies of economists with doctoral degrees?

The boundary between "using cycle knowledge" and "actively manipulating the cycle" is blurred beyond recognition. When the Federal Reserve sharply raises interest rates, knowing perfectly well this will inevitably crash overheated markets — is that conscientious inflation fighting or controlled demolition? When the largest investment banks synchronously exit risky positions weeks before a crisis — is that excellent risk management or coordinated asset dumping onto uninformed retail investors?

The truth, as often happens, lies somewhere in between, in an uncomfortable gray zone: economic crises do have objective fundamental prerequisites, but their precise timing, depth of decline, and long-term consequences are far more manageable and predictable than textbooks and financial media persistently try to convince us.

Digital Refuge in an Age of Managed Chaos

And here we finally come to the main practical question: what can an ordinary person do upon realizing that the global financial game is played with marked cards, and the rules change mid-game in the casino's favor? The traditional answer from conservative financial advisors is gold. But history shows that gold has been repeatedly confiscated by governments, its ownership legally banned, it's extremely difficult and expensive to store in significant quantities, and completely impossible to use for everyday transactions in the modern world. Blue-chip stocks? They obediently fall with the whole market when the next crisis arrives. Real estate? Try selling it at fair price in the midst of financial panic when banks have frozen lending.

Cryptocurrencies emerged precisely as a conceptual answer to the 2008 crisis — and this is far from coincidental. Satoshi Nakamoto deliberately embedded a Times newspaper headline about bank bailouts in Bitcoin's genesis block, forever recording the context of the new technology's birth in the blockchain. The idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: create money completely beyond the control of central banks, governments, and financial elites. Money that can't be printed at a bureaucrat's or politician's whim.

However, over fifteen years of existence, Bitcoin and the vast majority of altcoins have demonstrated a critical, possibly fatal flaw: they closely correlate with traditional risk assets. When stocks fall, cryptocurrencies fall even more precipitously. This isn't a crisis hedge — it's a risk asset on steroids, multiplied by ten. Bitcoin has lost 80% of its value with alarming regularity in every cycle. Where's the promised protection from financial turmoil in that?

The market urgently needs a fundamentally different type of asset — with algorithmic deflation, protocol-level crash protection mechanisms built in, and a real, functioning economy supporting organic token demand.