The Austrian(TA): What is the global currency plot, and who benefits most from the success of this effort?
Thorsten Polleit (TP): The global currency plot denotes a rather inconvenient truth: the existence of states (as we know them today) sets into motion a dynamic process toward creating a single world fiat money controlled by a world central bank, and most likely a central world government. The beneficiaries will be the very few—the “elite”—in charge of running the state and those few privileged by the state, such as big business, big banking, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. However, the great majority of the people will suffer a very great disadvantage. In fact, a single world fiat currency would most likely entail tyranny.
TA: The first half of the book is largely focused on economic theory and method. Why is economics so important to understanding the global fiat currency threat?
TP: I would argue that thinking about the method of economic science is actually the most important part of all of this. You know, economics is not an empirical science but must be conceptualized as a science of the logic of human action—or “praxeology,” as Ludwig von Mises called it. The logic of human action allows us to understand that there are regularities in human reality to which we must adapt our actions to succeed. It also makes us understand what will happen if— under certain conditions—actions that are contrary to the logic of human action are taken. For instance, we can know in advance (without having to resort to any kind of testing) that a state—defined as a coercive territorial monopoly—will (other things being equal) continue to expand no matter what; that it will seek control of money, replacing commodity money with its own fiat currency; and that states will form a cartel and strive to eventually establish a world government with its own world fiat currency. The logic of human action reveals these dynamics that many people are most likely unaware of.
TA: What role do central banks such as the Federal Reserve play?
TP: It may be hard to swallow, but central banks were not created for the greater good but to support the state and special interest groups. After World War II, the US became the dominant economic and military power in the world, and the Federal Reserve (the Fed), founded in 1913, became the world’s most powerful central bank, issuing the US dollar, the world’s leading reserve currency. It is fair to say that the Fed does indeed call the shots in the international financial and economic system. The Fed acts as the unofficial world central bank. Central banks play a crucial role in making a fiat currency system possible, and if they form a cartel, they can basically create a single world fiat currency.
TA: The dollar has played a central role in the global economy for decades. Does the dollar’s global hegemony help or hinder efforts to create a single global currency?
TP: The dominance of the US dollar is certainly helping to push the world toward a single fiat currency. Just imagine a major crisis that will eventually hit us. When the worldwide fiat currency regime starts to unravel, the US dollar will likely be the last man standing. In such a situation, it is also very likely that many countries will try to peg their currency to the US dollar (i.e., effectively adopt the US dollar as base money). It may not sound realistic right now, but imagine a scenario in which the United States and China join forces and endorse exchange rate fixing through the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, later declaring the exchange rates irrevocably fixed. The world would be closer to a single world fiat currency than ever.
TA: What would it look like if the dollar were replaced by some sort of new international currency?
TP: Most recently, the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have openly challenged the hegemony of the US dollar and considered introducing their own currency. What could it look like? It could be a basket consisting of various national fiat currencies or a new gold-backed unit of account. I believe the only challenge to the dominance of the US dollar might come from a gold-backed BRICS money. But even then, the US could also link the US dollar to the Federal Reserve’s theoretical gold holdings (which are actually owned by the Treasury). As you can see, dethroning the US dollar will not be easy under the current conditions. Whatever comes from states pursuing their own monetary interests, we should not get our hopes up that the states will provide sound money to the people. If states monopolize money production, they will use it predominantly to serve their own needs.
TA: You note that the world needs free market money, and you say it could be anything the market accepts—from gold to cryptocurrencies. Why is market-based money better?
TP: There are only two ways human beings can interact: voluntarily or coerced/violently. Voluntary cooperation is economically and ethically acceptable; coercion and violence are not. The free market is voluntary. In a free market in money, people are free to choose the type of money that best suits their needs and people are free to offer a good people may want to use as money. The outcome will be sound money—simply because no one (in their right mind) will demand bad money. For instance, people could decide to use gold as a base money and implement digital gold payment systems. If people want prosperity and freedom, nationally and internationally, they must abandon fiat monies, end the government’s control of money, and embrace a free market in money. The alternative is tyrannical government money, with the unpleasant prospect of eventually ending up with a tyrannical fiat world currency. I hope my book will inform and stimulate discussion on these extremely important issues.
Interview transcript cross-posted from Mises.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.