The Programmable Crisis
Iran, Debt, and the Financial Regime Change
The accelerating economic downturn will not just be managed with more money printing. It will be programmed directly into the money itself.
The focus on geopolitics alone hides a systemic shift that is unfolding away from public scrutiny. An escalated conflict with Iran creates a massive risk of a sustained oil price spike. Roughly one fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz. A major conflict that disrupts this chokepoint would rapidly translate into a global energy shock.
In a highly indebted economy, a sustained oil shock behaves less like traditional inflation and more like a tax on consumption. As rising energy costs absorb a larger share of household income, discretionary spending collapses. Corporate revenues fall while input costs rise, leaving heavily leveraged firms and households struggling to service debt. The result is not necessarily sustained inflation but the risk of a debt-deflation spiral—a dynamic visible in the months preceding the 2008 financial crisis. This economic crisis scenario makes the existing mountain of US public and private debt much harder to manage, creating a powerful incentive for radical financial solutions.
In other words, the escalation of the Middle East conflict could allow the US to legitimise tools for:
1. Digital Debt Monetization: a government-aligned digital dollar infrastructure could allow for the direct distribution of stimulus and the purchasing of government debt, bypassing traditional banking system constraints and political gridlock.
2. Direct Economic Control: a programmable, centrally managed digital currency platform gives authorities unprecedented levers to influence spending, saving, and capital allocation during a crisis. Money is no longer just a store of value; it can become “money with an expiry date,” programmed to devalue or vanish if not spent in a certain way.
3. Maintaining Dollar Hegemony: integrating private stablecoins into the official system can be a way to co-opt and regulate the crypto space, ensuring the next generation of digital money remains dollar-denominated and under US oversight, rather than shifting to a decentralized alternative.
In this respect, the recent US moves on crypto look like a strategic pivot toward enhanced monetary control. What am I referring to?
- On 4 March, Kraken Financial became the first crypto-native institution to obtain a Federal Reserve master account, allowing direct access to core payment rails such as Fedwire. This can be regarded as a “crossing of the Rubicon” regarding the centralisation of cryptos.
- On 19 February, the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) issued new guidelines on stablecoin use, slashing the capital penalty (“haircut”) from 100% to 2%. This move legitimizes stablecoins as equivalents to money market funds in corporate accounting, effectively bringing privately issued digital dollars into the regulated financial system rather than leaving them in the crypto periphery.
The above coincided with Trump attacking traditional banks (on 3 March) for blocking crypto-friendly laws (his administration’s ‘powerful Crypto Agenda’). It also coincided with a technical failure of the Fed’s ACH payment system, which delayed payroll deposits, vendor payments, and bank transfers across the United States. The timing of that failure conveniently highlights the fragility of existing payment infrastructure. Such events provide a direct channel for policy implementation, potentially allowing for more surgical interventions than traditional interest rate or quantitative easing tools. In other words, the US is building the digital pipeline through which economic crisis management would flow.
Let’s not forget that the COVID “pandemic” provided the ultimate political and economic cover for unprecedented intervention (massive money creation, direct payments and bailouts). So what we are witnessing today could be framed as the “COVID Playbook Revisited”: the Iran-induced downturn would serve the exact same monetary function as the “pandemic.”
The key difference lies in the delivery mechanism. During COVID, the Federal Reserve printed money and sent it via the “going direct” strategy devised by BlackRock in the summer of 2019. Today’s newly regulated crypto/stablecoin infrastructure (Kraken on Fedwire, stablecoins in money market funds) resembles a digital “going direct”: the Fed could credit digital dollar wallets directly. They could impose time limits on spending, restrict usage to certain sectors, or even implement negative interest rates on excess digital cash to force spending. In this respect, BlackRock’s recent (6 March) restrictionon withdrawals is highly symptomatic.
There is a further dimension to stress: the elevation of Bitcoin from speculative and decentralised asset to recognized collateral. In late 2025, the Federal Reserve signalled that crypto assets could be used in secured lending, with JP Morgan simultaneously preparing to allow institutional clients to borrow cash against Bitcoin holdings. The logic is straightforward: Bitcoin shifts from a deadweight bet into a liquidity-generating instrument, folded into the same supervisory frameworks that govern Treasuries. More critically, Bitcoin can now back the very stablecoins that sit inside money market funds. Tether already holds around 5% of its reserves in Bitcoin. As stablecoin issuance expands, the one asset that began as the system’s explicit alternative becomes part of its foundation—dollar-pegged money partially collateralized by the cryptocurrency designed to escape the dollar.
So, the strategic cycle I am proposing looks like this:
The Catalyst: the Iran crisis is escalated, spiking oil prices.
The Economic Consequence: this external shock lands on a fragile, debt-heavy US economy. It crushes consumption and accelerates a deflationary debt crisis.
The Political Cover: this crisis, framed as an external attack on American prosperity, creates the same political “blank check” for intervention that COVID did.
The New Tool: the previously prepared and stealthily integrated crypto/stablecoin infrastructure is now unveiled and deployed as the solution.
The Outcome: the Fed intervenes massively, but this time the money flows through a programmable, centrally overseen digital dollar system, granting unprecedented monetary control.
Crucially, the emerging system is unlikely to be a purely state-run digital currency. Instead, it appears to be evolving as a hybrid architecture in which private stablecoin issuers, exchanges, and fintech platforms operate on top of central bank settlement infrastructure. In this model, the state controls the monetary base and regulatory perimeter, while private actors control the interfaces through which money is used. The architecture ensures what politics alone could not: there is no opting out. The result is a panopticon-like digital “private-public partnership” to manage the accelerated impoverishment of entire populations.
Stablecoins introduce another strategic dimension. Because most are backed primarily by short-term US Treasuries, their expansion automatically generates demand for government debt. A large global digital dollar ecosystem would therefore function as a new buyer of Treasury bills. In effect, the growth of private digital dollars could become a structural mechanism for financing US deficits while attempting to reinforce the dollar’s role in global finance.
All of the above turns a very likely long war in the Middle East from a mere geopolitical objective—regime change in Iran—into the catalyst for a historic financial regime change. While the bombs fall on foreign soil, the revolution lands in your digital wallet. The crisis doesn’t just allow monetary intervention; it demands it, and the pre-built crypto rails determine its form.
 | A guest post by
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The foolish attempt to make a commodity perform the function of measure and thereby annotate human interaction has shifted the focus of that human interaction first to the commodity and literally caused people to think that their interactive capacity is limited by, restricted by, and 'valued' by the value placed on the commodity. This has then confounded human activity such that hoarding of the commodity precludes genuine human activity of genuine value while energies are expended toward 'acquisition' of abstract units! Inside this insane thinking process, I promise you that if the focus shifted to sand as the 'commodity of value' the populace would seek the hoarding of that instead of using it to build housing.
There is a reason children's stories like The Emperor's New Clothes are told.
It is very hard for those who have been "educated" in the 'workings' of the present money paradigm to even attempt to 'think outside the box.' Because the pull is to remain faithful to what they have so heavily invested in during their 'education' and professional careers. The thing is that this 'faithfulness' becomes religiosity and abandons critical thinking and analysis and instead turns to repetition of dogma that cannot be made to work..
Elizabeth Black:
“Those who brag about their education, certification, degrees and what they consider qualifications are usually unable to unlearn the misinformation of the level of indoctrination they worked hard for, and paid, and their justification of their pride stands in the way of recognizing their own errors.”
It is interesting that the whole digital coin world touts the 'traceability' aspect of the transactions but stops at the original instance of the magical "creation" of the coins as though that process is legitimate!
Money creation, from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank.
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept this stupid shit because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'.
When we stopped using fungible physical commodities as 'trade goods' and moved to bookkeeping about the value contained in the goods and services of our interchange, we mistakenly and foolishly and illiterately assigned "value" to the number units themselves using symbols ($, etc.) as though those units were still commodities that had just lost their physical form.
All very mysterious really, the claims of these magical powers. Where the hell did that come from!?
In ancient times the temple priests told the peasantry who came to make their offerings to God that the offerings brought by the peasants were not acceptable to God. The priests told the people they needed to take the coins, that only the priests issued, and leave the Real Goods that the peasants had brought to the temple with the priests, go lay the coins on the altar because that was acceptable to God, and then go home. The original claims of 'authority' about ‘money’ by the temple priests is where the eventual claim of authority about money by government originated.
But the claim of 'authority' is nonsense, and so is the system of money itself; since what is real is the wealth of a people, and money is made up nonsense that the people have been told is real (acceptable to god). It's a long history of lies and deception. It is like unto the miss use of genuine authority as egregious as telling kids lies!
We are not going to get out of this mess while using the very system instituted ages ago to enslave and deceive and steal. And we certainly are not going to solve a systemic problem that is based on illiteracy by moral condemnation of those still acting illiterately within the illiterate system and never condemning the system. That is like telling slave masters they have to be good masters but never challenging the system of slavery.
It seems absurd because it is absurd, yet in this the 21st Century we are still not using an economic accounting/credit/number system that gives direct credit to the doer after the doing is done. Many, many rightly point out that in this country the black slave population that basically built such a large part of this country did not get ANY credit for the doing that they did. Indentured servants of many races and places of origin also have been given No Credit for the doing that they did. Most all of the absolute most critical doing that a society needs done is given No Credit in the system we have today. (child care, elder care, environmental care, ….) And still today the very notion that there must be an issuer of the numbers before The People can give and receive credit amongst themselves persists. When one thinks about how rich a society can be if it does not use banks (or government or temple priests) to originate acCounting units but only gives and receives credit for real doing it boggles the mind to think that we are still borrowing the use of the numbers with which we do our acCounting!
'Never anywhere and at any time in history in the BIble, Quran or elsewhere has money's logical function been defined and specified as is required by any modern information system. This can be done authoritatively with formal information science and dynamical systems theory and practice. Here we have done just that!' - Marc Gauvin bibocurrency.com
We can do something about this by not conceding power to "them" and by reclaiming monetary literacy and bringing these resolutions to every jurisdiction.
https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
Bruce Fanger contributes:
“Markus, you are pointing at the load bearing beam most critiques politely step around.
Money is treated as if it were both a ruler and a thing measured, which is a category error so old it has hardened into theology. Once the unit of account is rebranded as an object of value, authority slides in quietly and never leaves. First the temple, then the crown, then the state, then the bank. Same move, different costumes.
That is why moral critiques of capitalism stall. People argue about greed inside a system whose imperatives reward extraction by design. You cannot ethically behave your way out of a structure that converts abstraction into power and power into violence. As you note, much of what we call “the economy” is bookkeeping in service of coercion, especially war. David Graeber was right to trace coinage, debt, and militarism as a single historical thread rather than separate domains.
Where I would sharpen your point is this. The problem is not just misunderstanding money. It is obedience to a measurement system that is allowed to rewrite reality. People delay building, feeding, healing, or creating until permission slips in the form of numbers appear. That is how a fiction begins to rule material life.
You are also right that blaming villains misses the deeper failure. The system does not persist because bad actors are clever. It persists because the conceptual error is rarely challenged at the root. Until money is understood as record keeping and coordination rather than wealth itself, the same cycles will repeat with different flags and uniforms.”
Many do not see the jumping off place as the conflation...maybe because it was so far back in human history. But the simple awareness of ancient social orders and, therefore, ancient economies, (ones that some call 'human economies') brings the opportunity to start the focus there and consider that not everything "modern" has come as a 'progression' of greater truth and accuracy. I like that some have the courage to express respect for the ancient human economies and hope that citing anthropological sources like Graeber means that the 'anthro analysis' does not have to remain limited to ancient currencies that "mediate the human economy and the spirit world."
Brett Scott, in a recent paper, points to the problem of the present day "reductive focus on the movement of commodified goods." My intent is to put the focus back to the 'mediation' within these 'human economies' and to point out that bookkeeping is that simple mediation process of keeping records for the eventual resolution of human interactions in an open and inclusive manner such that none are un-accounted for, and no commodities are in need of protection or imposed on colonized peoples.
Maybe the discourse will present the opportunity to add these thoughts.
My thanks to Marc Gauvin for bringing this focus and my attention to that historical moment of mistaken reasoning along with the peaceful process of resolution such an awareness can bring.
http://www.bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii