We need to talk about your cash.
I know it feels safe in the bank. But that is the most dangerous place it could be. The public argument about inflation is a complete distraction. They are arguing about symptoms. They are not looking at the code.
As a systems builder, I am obsessed with finding bugs in the code. But what I see in our economy is not a bug. It is the system’s core feature.
Look at the modern corporation for a perfect example. It has a choice:
Take $1 billion and invest it in R&D. This is risky. It takes five years to pay off.
Take that $1 billion, borrow another billion at 1%, and buy back its own stock.
It mechanically increases earnings per share. This is a mathematical certainty. The stock price goes up. The executive’s bonus is paid.
Central bank policy forces this choice. It makes financial engineering more profitable than productive innovation. What do you think that does to the engines (and incentives) in the economy?
The stock buyback is a siphon. It takes the real value, profits generated by labor, and converts it directly into asset price inflation for equity holders.
Labor’s productivity is siphoned directly to the equity class.
This system punishes work.
It punishes saving.
It rewards debt and financial games. Again, how does that make the system or its participants better off?
Back to your cash, “safe” inside savings.
Your cash is actually in the middle of this game. It is not working for you. Its purchasing power is being siphoned away. Even from the confines of your account.
This is the wage earner’s trap. You are running on a treadmill. The central bank is systematically increasing the speed. You have to get off this treadmill. You must stop holding melting currency. You must own assets. You must own equity.
This is why you should be building companies solo, teaming up with co-founders and investing into promising start-ups.
We are builders. We are doing the R&D. We are creating real, tangible value. We are a productive asset, not a financial trick. An investment in a tech start-up is a vote for real innovation. It is a way to put your money into something that builds, not just siphons.
Stop holding cash. Own a piece of the future.
My life has been about modeling the future.
My first job was on Wall Street, in the 100-hr week crucible of investment banking. We built financial models. These models were designed to distill the chaotic, sprawling reality of a company, an industry, or an economy down to a set of key inputs and expected outputs.
You learned the levers.
You learned what a one-percent change in a key variable, like an interest rate, could do to a ten-year projection.
You learned to see the world as a discounted cash flow.
I left that world. I saw the rising power of a different kind of model. I saw the logic, the brute-force elegance of machine learning. I became a technology builder. I design systems that learn, that adapt, that find patterns in data humans can no longer see.
The parallels are striking.
Both finance and technology are systems. They are architectures of logic. They have rules, protocols, and feedback loops. And the most powerful, most pervasive, and most poorly understood system we have is the one that governs our money.
I’ve been on both sides of the divide. I’ve been the banker, and I’ve been the builder. And from this vantage point, I can tell you that the public conversation about inflation and inequality is almost entirely wrong.
We are arguing about the symptoms. We are not looking at the code.
The hard truth is that our global financial system is no longer a neutral utility for facilitating trade. Perhaps it never was.
We live inside a sophisticated operating system for the transfer of wealth. It is a system designed with a core function. That function is to channel economic energy from the broad class of people who trade their time for currency, the wage earners, to the small class of people who own the system’s assets, the equity holders.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a systems analysis.
This isn’t a bug, either. It is the system’s primary feature. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, the “Great Divergence” to put it nicely and THE GREAT HEIST to put it cleanly, is not an accidental byproduct of modern capitalism. It is the predictable, mathematical output of a set of rules. It is the specific result of coordinated central bank policy and global monetary debasement.
It was the plan.
Who Creates the Money and Where Does It Go?
To understand the divergence, you first have to understand the machine.
The public imagines “money printing” as a physical act.
They picture printing presses running hot, churning out paper. This is a comforting, industrial-age metaphor. The reality is digital, instantaneous, and far more insidious.
Modern money creation is an algorithm.
The core of this algorithm has a name. It is the “Cantillon Effect” a concept from the 18th century that is more relevant today than ever.
Richard Cantillon observed that new money is not distributed evenly. It is not a gentle rain falling on the whole economy. It is a hose, and it is plugged directly into specific points.
Those closest to the hose, the first recipients, get the new money at its full purchasing power. They get to spend it before it has had a chance to warp the economy. They can spend the money before it gets wet.
Who is closest to the hose today? The central banks.
How Central Bank Policy Enriches the Few at the Expense of the Many
When the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank wants to “stimulate” the economy, they do not send checks to citizens. We call that “helicopter money” and its a rare trick, usually saved for the end. Instead of loudly handing out money to the common folk they silently execute a program called Quantitative Easing, or QE. This is a polite term for a massive asset swap. The central bank creates new, high-powered digital money on its own balance sheet. It uses this new money to buy assets, mostly government bonds and mortgage-backed securities, from the big banks.
On Wall Street, we understood this perfectly. This new money would flood the servers of the banks I worked for. This money, this digital liquidity, must go somewhere. It is a tide, and it lifts all assets. It flows into the stock market. It flows into real estate. It flows into venture capital. It flows into my world, the tech world, funding “unicorn” valuations for companies that may never turn a profit.
This creates the first of our two inflations. Asset Price Inflation.
This is the “good” inflation… if you are an asset owner. The inflation you see celebrated on financial news. The S&P 500 is at an all-time high. Housing values have doubled. This inflation is the goal of the policy. It is designed to create a “wealth effect” the idea being that if owners feel richer, they will spend more.
But this new money eventually, slowly, painfully, leaks out into the real economy. And when it does, it shows up as the second type of inflation: Consumer Price Inflation.
This is the “bad” inflation. This is the one central bankers claim to be fighting, even as their other policies create its preconditions. This is the rising price of groceries, of gasoline, of rent, of health insurance.
The key insight is this. Central bank policy intentionally creates asset price inflation AND consumer price inflation. It treats consumer price inflation as an unfortunate, manageable side effect. But it is not a side effect. It is the other end of the same transfer.
The Wage Earner’s Trap
The wage earner lives on what I call Track 1.
The social contract for this person is simple. You trade your time and your skill, your one non-renewable asset, for a stream of currency. Your salary. Your wage.
In the system I am describing, this is a losing trade.
A worker’s salary is a fixed-income product in a hyper-inflationary world. Your wage is “sticky.” You get a contract for $67,000 a year. You might get a 3% raise at your annual review. You feel you are moving forward.
But this is a statistical illusion.
The central bank’s policy, by creating asset inflation, is also debasing the currency this worker is paid in. Your 3% raise is a lie when the true inflation of your life, your rent, your food, your energy, your education, is 8%. You are not getting a raise.
You are receiving a pay cut, delivered with a smile (and a bigger tax bill).
Your income is being eroded.
Your savings are even worse. Any cash you manage to put aside, the money you place in a “high-yield” savings account, is not a store of value. It is a melting ice cube. Its purchasing power is being actively debased, by policy, every single day. The system is punishing you for saving.
It is forcing you to spend, to consume.
It is forcing you to do what the asset owners and central bankers want.
This is the wage earner’s economic function in the machine.
They are being used to run the gears. They are the human input, the labor. They are also the designated consumers, the ones who must buy the output of the machine to keep it humming.
They are a closed loop of production and consumption.
They are price-takers.
They are the last to receive the new money, after it has already bid up the price of everything they need to buy.
They are running on a treadmill, and the central bank is systematically increasing the speed.
Rising on the Monetary Tide
As I said earlier, I have lived on both sides of this. As a banker, I facilitated the process. As a tech builder and executive, I became a beneficiary.
This is Track 2.
The person on Track 2 is not compensated in currency. They are compensated in equity. They are compensated with stock options. With equity grants and restricted stock units. With a stake in the fund. With ownership.
They are not trading their time for money. They are owners of the machine itself.
While the wage earner’s savings melt, the equity holder’s assets act as a sponge. They are designed to absorb the new money the central bank is pumping into the system.
The effect is exponential.
This is the feedback loop that creates the Great Divergence.
It works like this. The central bank’s QE policy inflates the stock market. The tech executive’s portfolio, full of company stock, doubles in value. He is now measurably wealthier. But he does not sell. Selling creates a tax event.
Instead, he borrows.
He goes to the very same banks that are flush with new central bank liquidity. He pledges his inflated stock portfolio as collateral. The bank gives him a loan for millions of dollars at an interest rate of one or two percent, a rate set by the central bank’s policy.
He uses this new, cheap money to buy more assets. He buys real estate. He invests in other funds. He funds his lifestyle. He has “monetized” his wealth without ever selling, while paying almost no tax.
This is the “Buy, Borrow, Die” strategy.
It is a wealth-creation algorithm, and it is only available to the people on Track 2. The wage earner cannot do this. Their “asset” is their future labor, and the bank will not give them a multi-million dollar loan against that.
An entire generation, and $400T of the $1 quadrillion global economy is tied up in this nonsense. The vast majority of the economy is “monetary premium” which is code for FAKE. This is wealth that exists because it was printed, not because value was created and realized.
The wealth of the equity class becomes decoupled from the productive economy. Their wealth is no longer a function of their current work. It is a function of their ownership in a system that is being actively, intentionally, inflated by central bank policy.
They are on an elevator, and the central bank is pressing the “up” button.
The wage earner is running on a treadmill to power the elevator.
How Wealth is Channeled from Labor to Capital
So, we have two parallel tracks. How does the value created by the person on Track 1 get systematically transferred to the person on Track 2?
One mechanism is the modern corporation.
As a tech builder, I have seen this up close.
In a healthy, productive economy, a corporation does two things with its profits. First, it pays its labor. Second, it reinvests in the future. It builds new factories. It conducts research and development. It invents new products.
It builds.
Our current system makes this behavior irrational.
Look at the choice for a C-suite executive, one whose entire bonus structure is tied to the company’s stock price. Back to our initial example:
Option 1: The R&D Project. Take $1 billion in profit and invest it in a new machine learning initiative. It is risky. It will take five to ten years to pay off, if it ever does. It requires hiring new, expensive engineers. Its effect on this quarter’s stock price is zero.
Option 2: The Stock Buyback. Take that same $1 billion and call your banker. Borrow another $1 billion at the 1% interest rate the central bank is offering. Take that $2 billion and buy back your own company’s stock from the open market.
By reducing the number of shares outstanding, you mechanically increase the earnings per share. This triggers all the algorithmic trading bots. Analysts love it. The stock price goes up. This quarter, you win.
Your stock options are now worth 20% more. You are a hero.
The benefit is channeled, by design, to the elites. The wage earner’s wallet is bypassed entirely.
The Inevitable Outcome
What I have described is not a bug.
It is the system’s core feature. It is a regressive wealth transfer protocol, running on a global scale. It is stable, robust, and working exactly as intended. It punishes work. It punishes saving. It rewards debt. It rewards financial engineering.
But all systems have their limits.
You cannot run a system on a divergent feedback loop forever. You cannot have two classes experiencing two completely different economic realities and expect the social fabric to hold. The machine overheats. The code begins to break.
The Great Divergence is not just an economic chart. It is a countdown clock.
The anger and polarization we see in the world are not an accident. They are the human response to a system that feels, and is, fundamentally rigged. The people running the machines are beginning to realize that no matter how hard they work, the game is designed for them to lose.
As a systems architect, I know that systems with broken feedback loops do not self-correct.
They crash.
The real question is not if this system will fail, but when. And what code we will write for the system that comes next.
One thing is for sure, that code will dominated by a few key forces: digital assets, artificial intelligence, robotics and raw power generation. These are the most important sources of transformation for the next-10 years.
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I started Wealth Systems in 2023 to share the systems, technology, and mindsets that I encountered on Wall Street. I am a Wall St banker became ₿itcoin nerd, ML engineer & family office investor.
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