[Billthedrill]

An interesting thesis, and thanks for posting. It will be interesting to see just how long the international game can be played with toy money - quite a bit longer than one might think is my guess, but the end is likely to be the same.

One quibble - if Rome fell due to the extravagancies of Claudius, Nero, and Caligula - I don't think it did - it took four more centuries for it to do so. I don't think we have four centuries the way we're going but I'd be happy to be around to be called wrong.

[helpfulresearcher]

Those rulers were just useful examples of the kind of excessive bread and circus mentality that brought Rome to an end.

It seems like everything that happened back then took longer. Today information travels at the speed of electrons. For example: See how fast the debt is accumulating. Such a debt accumulation as a percentage of GDP must have taken a lot longer in ancient Rome.