Wars as Monetary Destruction
Core Concept
Banks create money from nothing through fractional reserve lending (the “alchemy” of turning lead into gold). For money to maintain its value and social control function, scarcity must be enforced. Banks must therefore periodically destroy excess money. Two mechanisms:
- Financial collapse / recession / depression — removing money through default, deleveraging, asset deflation
- Wars — physical destruction of infrastructure, commodity price shocks, diversion of resources from productive to destructive use
The Money Cycle
Banks print money
↓
Too much money → inflation → people don't need to work
↓
Must destroy excess money
↓
Option A: Recession (destroys quietly, causes unrest)
Option B: War (destroys loudly, channels unrest outward)
↓
Scarcity restored → money = God again
↓
Repeat
Current Application
The US-Iran war (2025-2026) follows a period of massive money creation:
- 2008: $7 trillion in QE after financial crisis
- 2020-2022: $5+ trillion in COVID stimulus
- Federal Reserve balance sheet expanded from ~9T (2022)
Jiang’s argument: this excess must be destroyed, and the Middle East war serves this function. US debt of 2 trillion/year in interest payments makes the system increasingly fragile — destruction urgency rises.
Implications for Current Claims
- CLAIM-019-wars-monetary-destruction — the specific claim
- CLAIM-009-boom-bust-cycles — this is the mechanism behind engineered cycles
- CLAIM-014-mic-siphon — the MIC is also the money-destruction apparatus
- CLAIM-006-global-economy-collapse — what happens when destruction mechanism fails to reset the system
- CLAIM-020-ai-god-replacing-money — the proposed replacement: AI doesn’t need this crude destruction mechanism
Critical Limitations
This framework has empirical gaps:
- War costs ($1-3T for a major war) are large but may not match M2 excess
- Financial collapse is a more direct destruction mechanism — why choose war?
- Counter-argument: war serves multiple functions (geopolitical, eschatological, domestic cohesion)
Related: petrodollar-system | economic-warfare-moc