Two years had passed since September 11, 2001, and I was diligently studying US anti-money laundering rules in preparation for what would be a fairly brief — but impactful — role writing for a world-renowned anti-money laundering expert. The USA Patriot Act of 2001 ushered in sweeping changes to how money was tracked and who was allowed to use it. The idea was that acts of terrorism could be stopped if the flow of money were tracked via a central database capable of detecting dangerous patterns.

One of my first revelations upon arriving at my new job in Miami was that anti-money laundering experts have a wide range of friends. Some of them were high-ranking US government officials. One of them, who worked in port security, told me that actual terrorists do not operate via the movement of money. They operate through the movement of things — such as people and weapons. It would be many years before I fully understood what he meant, about the movement of people.

Another revelation was the shear chaos that ensued upon the enforcement of these new anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist financing rules. The amount of paper forms generated by the money-tracking requirements — especially at casinos — was tremendous. Every transaction totaling greater than USD 10,000 required a special report; every suspicious transaction totaling more than USD 5,000 also required a special report. US casinos move millions of dollars every day. The money-tracking system operated in paper forms at the time, which had to be filled out by employees and sent to special processing centers, where the information on the forms would be manually entered into a database.

One casino employee was so overwhelmed by the volume of forms he was required to process, he “snapped,” and began stuffing the forms in his car and in the drawers of his desk; even more forms were discovered at his home. The errors involved in processing information, in addition to the delays in transcribing and recording, resulted in months if not years of lag time between a transaction’s report and its appearance in any sort of searchable database. The US Treasury Department mandated electronic entry of transaction reports in 2013, twelve years after the enhanced tracking measures were signed into law.

The third revelation I had was when I was speaking to a man who had been hired to assist the current US government administration to build a “cloud” database that would be capable of tracking all monetary transactions, in addition to phone calls, text messages, electronic messages, web browsing and more. I wondered, if those who commit acts of terror do not use money to do so, what is the purpose of the assembly of the database? In the years following the implementation of Patriot Act rules, acts of terror increased significantly, reaching a peak in 2014, when 32,272 lost their lives, according to widely adopted definitions of such attacks.

“Terrorism is the threat or use of violence to intimidate or coerce in the pursuit of political or ideological goals. It is usually understood to be done by non-state actors — individuals or organizations not part of the government.” — Our World in Data.

Meanwhile, more than 940,000 people were killed by direct acts of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen between 2001 and 2023, according to Brown University’s Cost of War research. Nearly half of these deaths were civilian. The number of indirect deaths as a result of the wars’ destruction of economic and health infrastructure is estimated at 3.6-3.8 million people, according to the university’s research. This amounts to approximately 227,000 deaths each year.

More than 3,600 deaths have been reported in Iran alone since the US began strikes in the region on 28 February; of these deaths, at least 1,600 were civilians.

New definitions of terrorism and unprecedented tracking measures “granted the US unprecedented legal authority to bypass traditional war declarations, conduct lethal operations globally, and freeze assets without relying on conventional law enforcement. By equating non-state groups to armed combatants, the U.S. gained the power to target them militarily while aggressively penalizing any foreign power providing them aid,” according to a collection of 2002 documents held in The White House Archives.

“The Bush administration’s framework for countering terrorism … permitted operations in countries with which the United States was not at war, the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without trial, and military tribunals instead of civil trials,” the Cato Institute wrote in a June 2017 policy analysis.

Based on the rate of terror-inducing acts — whether classified as terrorism or war — the tracing of money may not be the answer, unless one applies a different lens. Is money, in this case debt-based currency, at the root of all of this conflict? Whether we are speaking cognitively or literally, the answer seems to be yes. It is certainly the mind operating in a belief in separation which would justify warfare or acts of terror at any scale. Between 2001 and 2021, the US spent more than USD 8trn on acts of war, according to Brown.

While it seems plausible that this money could have been used for humanitarian purposes, the reality is that debt-based currency must maintain economy of scale in order to survive. What this means is that there must always be currencies worth less than the dominant, or reserve, currency. If the dominant currency loses its ability to maintain production power over every currency nested beneath it, it will not only collapse, but bring every other central bank currency with it.

What is production power? Production power is a single currency’s ability to dictate the rate at which goods and services are consumed. Production power is essentially a tempo, like time, that sets the global rate of debt repayment. When production slows, consumption slows; when production increases, consumption increases. Interruptions to this balance of power have historically been mitigated through war, or agreements such as that of the petrodollar, which was enacted by Saudi Arabia and the US between June 8, 1974 to June 8, 2024.

The agreement ensured that the world’s most widely traded commodity — oil — would be priced in US dollars; moreover, profit from oil sales would be reinvested in US currency. In exchange, the country was promised US military protection. Additional oil-producing nations followed suit, largely out of market necessity. The end of the petrodollar agreement, in addition to the United Arab Emirates’ exit from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in May, signals an inevitable end to US Dollar dominance vis-a-vis the end of the petrodollar. The USD’s reserve status fell from more than 70% prior to the year 2000 to just over 56% at present day.

A currency is considered a reserve currency due to its presence on the balance sheets of global central banks. Like savings accounts, central banks hold currencies as financial cushions, in addition to tools for exchange of goods and services. By virtue of holding one dominant currency, countries world-wide could exchange goods in one currency, avoiding the expense of continual exchange. Labor, however, would still be paid in the country’s local currency, resulting in the ability for stratification of worth among all of the world’s currencies. It was this stratification of worth that ensured the purchasing power of the world’s dominant currencies retained the greatest strength.

Acts of war and/or terrorism destabilize economies, resulting in low labor costs, low currency value, and therefore low export value on critical exports — such as petroleum, precious minerals, and more. This perpetuates unequal distribution of world resources and unequal treatment among our global population; the labor of a human being in one part of the world is valued less than or greater than the labor of a human being in another part of the world.

When a country suppresses its domestic wages and implements austerity to back a stable, un-inflated reserve currency system, it creates what political economists call an income deflation. This artificial income squeeze forces local populations to reduce their food intake, causing physical degradation and more, Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik wrote in “A Theory of Imperialism,” 2017.

The rise of a more diverse set of reserve currencies held on central bank balance sheets, including the USD, the Euro, and to some extent the Remnibi and Yuan, is more an effect of the end of the petrodollar than anything; without trade domination over a resource utilized world-wide, the collective desire to maintain dollar dominance wanes. Middle Eastern countries are no longer seeking safety and security from the same force which seeks continual destabilization in the region.

“Gulf allies are no longer willing to be the lightning rods for US military campaigns while relying on uncertain protection when retaliation arrives. And once allies learn they can say ‘no’ to Washington, they rarely return to automatic obedience,” wrote professor and geostrategist Brahma Chellaney, in a 14 May editorial in The Hill.

Where we are moving is not only away from the extractive system of debt-based currency, but away from petroleum as well. As a result of the cognitive shift underway now, resource extraction and stratification of labor value will no longer be linked to currency. Currency will be viewed synonymously with that which is tangibly present on earth in any given moment. It is not a force which must be harvested and monetized in order to achieve value. Rather, it is the value.

When do we reach the tipping point?