By Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America
Americans are not the most economically educated people. They hear, for example, that the U.S. Dollar is the “world’s reserve currency.” Their chests swell up with pride – the reserve currency! Wow. That is awesome! USA! USA! USA! But the truth is, how many proud Americans understand, really understand, what that even means?
Since WWII, global trade, particularly in the energy sector, flowed through dollars and dollar-based financial channels. If China wanted to buy Saudi Oil, it needed dollars to do that. That meant selling something to someone for dollars that could then be repurposed to buy oil. Countries exported to earn dollars to buy imports.
Except the U.S. didn’t need to do that. After the dollar was severed from any tie to Gold in the early 70’s, all the U.S. had to do was create dollars to pay for imported goods and services. We sent foreign nations dollars they could use as a medium of exchange on the global market to trade with other nations. They sent us…. everything. Electronics, cars, food, oil, raw materials, toys, cooking utensils, etc.
Representative Thomas Massie responding to a post from Peter Schiff (economist, financial commentator, author, and investment professional) concerning the free ride that the U.S. has gotten based on the USD being the global reserve currency.Â
Of course, we all know what happened to our own economy since the early 70’s. American labor and manufacturing inputs became increasingly expensive. Why try to make anything in the U.S., when you could just pay foreigners to make it for you at a fraction of the cost? Dollars are plentiful in the U.S. American workers and vendors demanded more dollars in the U.S. for the same units of work and resources that could be purchased cheaper elsewhere. Dollars are rarer in China, as they can’t just create them, so the Chinese were willing to work for fewer of them. The American economy, therefore, hollowed out and turned from one producing real goods and services to one based on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE).
This was a great gig really. We traded essentially worthless fiat currency and got real stuff in return to put under our Christmas Trees. What’s not to love? Except that, unfortunately, it’s all coming to an end. The dollar is rapidly losing its reserve currency status. The use of sanctions has driven Russia completely out of the dollar-based system. China, seeing the treatment Russia received, has been dramatically reducing its dollar-denominated financial holdings. The Russians and Chinese are not alone; even U.S. allies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia are moving towards trade in currencies other than the dollar. Global percentage of banking reserves held in dollars has declined from 72% in 2001 to 56% at the end of 2025.
China sold net $14.96 billion in October 2025 and $9.97 billion in September 2025. China is the third largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. Japan holds the most amount of U.S. debt at $1.2 trillion, and has also become a net seller.
Global demand for the dollar is declining. To trade, you increasingly don’t have to first earn dollars. Which means the vaunted “U.S. consumer market” is of less consequence to many nations. Especially since trade with the U.S. is fraught with massive uncertainty. Every time a business owner checks his phone, the news is informing him that Trump has announced some kind of crazy new tariff or regulatory scheme. If we Americans think the whole thing is tedious, imagine looking at it all from Shanghai.
Unfortunately, even as global demand for the dollar wanes, the highly indebted U.S. government has no choice but to keep producing more of them. Deploying carrier battlegroups is expensive. Building missiles to replace those fired by Ukraine against Russia is expensive. Overthrowing foreign governments and propping up Israel are expensive. Plus, let’s not forget social programs in the U.S.
The US issued $9 trillion in Treasury debt over the last decade at zero percent interest rates. All of that debt matures in 2026. Huge supply of dollar-denominated assets + low foreign demand = Fed monetization via money creation. The more the dollar declines, the more the dollar declines as this is all a confidence game. Trust is lost incrementally at first, then all at once in a panic.
Dollars are a commodity. No different than apples or wheat. When you have a huge supply of a commodity, but decreasing demand for it, what happens? The value of the commodity declines, of course. Which is precisely what is happening now with the dollar. That is called loss of purchasing power. All normal U.S. consumers feel this, but how do you objectively measure the depth of the loss? You could look at the increase in domestic prices. How many more dollars are required for you to get the same bag of groceries now, as opposed to a year or two ago? But such measures are imprecise as pricing for consumer goods varies by domestic market, and are impacted by more than just purchasing power decline. So even though we have plenty of evidence for the collapse of the USD against everyday commodities, we are likely to find ourselves in an argument over “inflation rates” or whatever. Government statistics are no more accurate in America than they are anywhere else. Their purpose is to make those in office look good, not to give the public correct information. Sometimes, however, the truth sneaks in – especially when Americans can see it with their own eyes.
The average price of ground beef in the US is now up to a record $6.67 per pound. Prices have surged +72% since January 2020, when they stood at around $3.88 per pound. Over the same period, chicken breast prices have risen +36%. Coffee prices have surged +52% since January 2020.
To avoid all the talk about the difference in food stuffs between Alabama and California, let’s illustrate dollar decline using an objective measurement that is good world wide – the value of the USD to Gold and Silver. Gold and Silver have functioned as money since the dawn of civilization. Maybe even earlier. Silver has an additional feature in that it has industrial uses. Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of any metal on the Periodic Table. It is essential in electronics manufacturing and in medical devices. Silver is in everything from solar panels, to Tomahawk missiles, to Tesla cars. Gold and Silver cannot be created on demand by Washington. Their supply increases slowly through hard effort. In physical form, they represent zero counterparty risk. Hand me a Silver coin, I hand you six bushels of corn. In that scenario, no one cares what the Federal Reserve is up to. I got my coin, which is a portable store of value fully and totally under my control, and you got your food.
No wonder the globalists hate physical metal in the hands of citizens. But I digress.
In any case, how is the dollar standing up to Gold and Silver, particularly at a time when central banks around the world are increasingly buying both metals by dumping dollars? See for yourself. The first chart shows the spot price of Silver versus the dollar over the past one year. The second shows the value of the spot price of Gold versus the dollar for the same one year.
An ounce of Silver is (as I write this) worth 226.22% more in dollar terms than a year ago. Gold is worth 75.27% more in dollar terms than a year ago. What the precious metals market is signaling is an ongoing collapse of the value of every dollar in your wallet, your bank account, and your retirement plan. This is just now getting started in earnest. Things will get a lot, lot worse.
Especially since foreign central banks are ramping up their diversification into Gold (and now Silver) at an accelerating rate.
Since 2001, U.S. assets as a percentage of total foreign exchange reserves have declined from 72% to 56%. Central banks are rotating out of Treasuries and into Gold. For the first time since 1996, central banks now hold more Gold than U.S. Treasuries.
Whoa. Wait a minute. Won’t the economic brains in Washington and New York do something to save the dollar? You mean won’t the people who engineered the crisis now do something magically to fix it? Like what, exactly? Stop using the dollar to punish Washington’s enemies, thereby encouraging them to trade within the dollar system? Stop recklessly creating dollars to finance our trillion dollar budget deficits? Stop wandering around the world causing havoc and chaos? American actions are fragmenting the global trade system into competing power blocs, at precisely a time when we are totally import dependent and desperately need foreign governments to acquire dollars.Â
There will be no rational fix to our current predicament. What will happen is what always happens. More of the same. The Fed will nominally lower rates, create more dollars, inject them into the economy and hope for the best. Trump will keep threatening, bullying, and angering the rest of the planet. Any nation that can will keep moving away from the dollar as quickly as practical. Eventually, you will start to see empty shelves in stores on a routine basis. You will try to order something off Amazon, and it won’t be available because the producer no longer accepts dollars as payment. At some point, you will realize that your dollars can’t cover the costs of even basic necessities.
The same four phases of imperial collapse, caused by bad monetary policy, recurred in even the largest empires across thousands of years and over multiple continents.Â
By the time you fully realize what has happened, whatever dollar-denominated assets you have will be essentially worthless. See, you were looking for an action movie. Some massive event starts the plot moving, and next thing you know there are zombies roaming the streets. The world ends, and a tidy survival story is told, all within a 90 – 120 minute runtime. Only this isn’t an alien invasion or a war or a massive earthquake. This was a slow motion collapse lasting decades that went largely untelevised, so you were pre-programmed to ignore it. Prices spiked and retreated. Mass media told you everything was fine. Until it wasn’t. Your broker told you to keep buying shares in no-load mutual funds, because the U.S. stock market always recovers. Your house on Zillow looked like it was a major store of wealth. Until you tried to sell it, and realized no one could get an affordable mortgage with the banking system seized up.
At some point during the crisis, the U.S. government will probably swoop in and try to help the situation by imposing price controls. That’s a favorite move of politicians who need to be seen “doing something” in the middle of an economic crisis. Interest rate and wage controls are also popular political responses. All of these strategies only make things worse – more empty shelves in stores, more wealth destruction, a burgeoning black market for goods and loans. The smarter economists know that such government intervention never works to fix a system that is broken to its core. Politicians never listen to the smarter economists.
Okay, that is a lot of doom and gloom. Maybe at this point you are doubting the severity of our situation. That is fine. Do your own research and feel free to challenge me in the comments with a rosier picture. Maybe you ask – what can we do? If you mean personally, there are potential courses of investment and other actions you can take to preserve purchasing power. I’m not trying to give you financial advice, so I will leave it up to you to research. If you mean politically, then I think that is an absolutely lost cause and waste of time. We will not vote our way out of this. The Military-Industrial-Financial-Complex owns almost all the candidates on both sides. From where I stand, this is a giant train coming at us full speed ahead, and we are trapped in a tunnel with no way to escape.
Now if you are asking when all this is going to occur, the answer is this is happening already. If you want to know when the situation goes super critical, the answer is known but to God. Outside of the small percentage at the top, all of us will get progressively poorer until we can’t, regardless of our political leanings, pretend it isn’t happening any longer. When that day arrives for you depends on your income and wealth at the moment. The vast majority of Americans are already nervous, and they are right to be.
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The coming dollar crack up, however, won’t be all bad. I know that sounds ridiculous given how much pain and suffering we will experience. However, a new system(s) inevitably arises from the ashes of the old. The U.S. that emerges from the dollar crack up will not be the same nation into which we were born. It may not even be one country anymore. However, barring the return of Christ (always a possibility), there will be some kind of societal and monetary order. As a result of this crisis, there will be some positive outcomes, particularly for Orthodox Christians. Throughout the 2,000 year history of the Church, empires have come and gone. But the Church is still here, and will still be here till God closes this age. So, despite the depth of the crisis that I believe we are about to endure, here are three positive things I expect to happen for Orthodox Christianity.
1. Greater American Pan-Orthodox Unity
The Orthodox jurisdictional mess in the U.S. (and the West in general) harms Orthodox witness. This interview with Fr. Josiah Trenham is a very concise explanation of the obstacles to Orthodox unity, and our need to overcome them. He drops a shocking statistic that the total number of Orthodox Christians in the U.S. is less today than in 1940.
Fr. Josiah is correct that proper Orthodox leadership would have overcome all these obstacles. But we have never had proper leadership on this topic, don’t have it now, and aren’t likely to have it any time soon. However, God can accomplish through poverty what we have so far failed to do out of piety.
Let me explain.
In the U.S., the Orthodox have more seminaries than we actually need. We have plenty of bishops, but their territories overlap. Some parishes have bishops whose territories are so expansive, that they rarely or never see them. Nearby are parishes of different jurisdictions that have bishops who show up on a regular basis, because their territories are more geographically manageable. We have parishes that rely on their members to drive extensively, often passing other Orthodox Churches on their travels. We have locations where all the local parishes are weak and underfunded, but refuse to consolidate because this group wants to be “Greek”, while that one wants to be “Serbian” and the other one wants to be American (OCA). Many “ethnic” parishes rely off annual festivals to make their budgets work. Festivals that are quite expensive to put on, and really expensive to attend.
The above situation has been possible only because of a certain level of American prosperity. We could afford to be stupid and misallocate resources. In the post-dollar world, however? We can no longer afford such ridiculous pride.
Distances are going to expand. People who can barely afford transportation don’t have the luxury of driving unnecessary miles to attend a Church just because it is “Serbian” or “Greek.” The donor base, and the student base, won’t be there to keep multiple, competing seminaries open. A parish that is already financially weak today, will be unable to survive what is coming. The congregations of closing parishes will have to consolidate into viable ones, regardless of jurisdictional ethnicity. Bishops will have severely restricted travel budgets. Diocesan finances, already stretched thin in many jurisdictions, will be unable to cope with the lack of meaningful donations. Streamlining of episcopal oversight (one city, one bishop) will have to happen out of pure necessity. Can you really claim to be bishop of a community that you know that you will never be able to visit?
You want Orthodox unity in America? You are going to get it in practice, even if some stiff-necked jurisdictions want to maintain paper boundaries. Economic institutional survival will require consolidation and cooperation. Stupidity is a luxury poor people can’t afford. When the crises come in rapid succession, we are going to work out solutions that most Orthodox Christians consider impossible today.
2. Increased Spiritual Health
Poverty and piety are correlated. Did not Jesus say, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”? America is a materialistic society. American Orthodox imbibe that materialism along with everyone else, even though our Orthodox spirituality warns us not to store up our treasures on Earth. Every Sunday, many of us jump in our expensive, gas guzzling luxury SUVs to drive further than needed to attend a Divine Liturgy, often held in honor of a saint who lived in absolute poverty. We then get back in our cars to stop off for an expensive brunch, before returning to houses that are bigger than we require, full of possessions we mostly don’t really need. When you are enjoying your material success, it is easy to get spiritually distracted. We end up attributing our material comfort to our own cleverness, thereby forgetting to thank God for His many, undeserved blessings. Let us heed the words of St. Ambrose of Optina:
A continuously happy life produces extremely unhappy consequences. In nature we see that there are not always pleasant springs and fruitful summers, and sometimes autumn is rainy and winter cold and snowy, and there is flooding and wind and storms, and moreover the crops fail and there are famine, troubles, sicknesses and many other misfortunes. All of this is beneficial so that man might learn through prudence, patience and humility. For the most part, in times of plenty he forgets himself, but in times of various sorrows he becomes more attentive to his salvation.
Orthodox Americans are about to lose a lot of spiritual distractions. Life is about to get much harder. You didn’t like Trump’s proposal for 50 year mortgages? Try no mortgages because the banking system is on life support. Try going on that luxury cruise, when the true cost of a ticket is more than you earn, in real terms, in a year. Or even two years. Don’t think about putting it on a credit card, either. Unsecured credit will be out of reach for most people. Try buying a new car when there is no financing available, or what is available starts at 40% interest.
Get the point? American “prosperity” over the past few decades has been tied to easy, cheap credit and the ability to pay foreigners in dollars for their products. It was always an illusion. Now it is one that is being shattered. With hard struggle comes spiritual clarity. You will pray more than you ever have. You will lean on God in ways you never thought possible. Or you will succumb to bitterness over your reduced circumstances and curse God.
Will you be Job who bore all things through faith, or Naomi who became bitter after losing her husband and two sons in Moab? That choice belongs to you.
We should ponder the words of Elder Ephraim of Katounakia:
Everyone has a cross to carry. Why? Since the leader of our faith endured the cross, we will also endure it. On one hand, the cross is sweet and light, but, on the other, it can also be bitter and heavy. It depends on our will. If you bear Christ’s cross with love then it will be very light; like a sponge or a cork. But if you have a negative attitude, it becomes heavy; too heavy to lift.
As a brief aside, our need as Orthodox Christians, to strengthen our own prayer lives is a primary reason we, at Orthodox Reflections, have been publishing so many prayers newly translated into English. Â
3. An Increase in Orthodox Converts
Mega churches are already closing, and our downward economic spiral is only now picking up speed. No one is interested in prosperity Gospel when “living your best life now” is revealed to be nothing more than a hollow marketing slogan. “Conservative” Protestant Churches, with their Zionism and pro-establishment politics, will increasingly stand empty. No one wants to hear sermons about “American greatness”, or the need to unconditionally support Israel, over empty bellies while wearing worn out clothes.
In the coming time of economic hardship, Americans will demand spiritual depth. They will want answers to why things are the way they are. How could God allow us to suffer so? Especially since they are living through such hard times, and Jesus did not come back to “rapture” them. The Orthodox Faith can give them real answers to their questions. Orthodoxy will teach them that earthly suffering is not a curse. It is not a punishment. Rather, it is medicine for the soul. The weary and troubled will come to us, and we will teach them the words of St. John of Kronstadt:
The Lord, as an artful physician, subjects us to various trials, sorrows, illnesses, and misfortunes, in order to purify us like gold in the furnace. A soul that is hardened in various sins does not easily undergo cleansing and healing, but has to be forced to a great extent, and only through lengthy experience in patience and suffering does it become accustomed to virtue and begins to love God, from Whom it was alienated after becoming attached to all kinds of mortal sins. Such is the purpose of the trials and tribulations sent to us by God in this life.
And the words of Seraphim Rose:
Why do men learn through pain and suffering, and not through pleasure and happiness? Very simply, because pleasure and happiness accustom one to satisfaction with the things given in this world, whereas pain and suffering drive one to seek a more profound happiness beyond the limitations of this world.
I am at this moment in some pain, and I call on the Name of Jesus—not necessarily to relieve the pain, but that Jesus, in Whom alone we may transcend this world, may be with me during it, and His will be done in me. But in pleasure I do not call on Him; I am content then with what I have, and I think I need no more.
And why is a philosophy of pleasure untenable?—because pleasure is impermanent and unreliable, and pain is inevitable. In pain and suffering Christ speaks to us, and thus God is kind to give them to us, yes, and [allows] evil too—for in all of these we glimpse something of what must lie beyond, if there really exists what our hearts most deeply desire.
Other “leaders” will be busy bitterly blaming the former political / economic system. You can’t find God with a heart full of recriminations. Or they will be pushing even greater allegiance to the same political / economic order that just failed us. Still others will be preaching about propitiating an angry God. Or rejecting God altogether and embracing some other counterfeit spirituality. Good luck to the Wiccans trying to “spell” personal prosperity into existence.
Orthodoxy, however, will be preaching Christ crucified, and us with Him. As Elder Sophrony said:
Sufferings bear so much fruit that if we were a little wiser we would not want to “come down from the cross”.
The Orthodox message won’t be constantly lamenting, “How could this happen to us?” The Orthodox message will be, “Glory to God in all things. Let us turn to Christ in our time of need.”
We will, of course, find ourselves relying on our local Orthodox communities to get through the hard times together. At some point in history, Christ will return in glory and we will place all our burdens at His blessed feet. Until then, however, no one is better at turning sorrow into joy than Orthodox Christians. For this time ahead, let us be a light unto all.
