IN SUMMARY
**THE MONEY THAT DOESN’T EXIST:
How Debt Sustains the Empire and How Bitcoin Could Break It**
by
Alfredo Cuéllar
Special to DEBATEX and ARJÉ México Noticias
“Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet it is never outside it.”
— Michel Foucault
I. The Fiction That Governs the World
We live within a great accounting illusion: money no longer represents value, but faith.
The most powerful nations on the planet — the United States, China, the United Kingdom, India, and the European Union — share a common secret: all are deeply in debt. Global debt exceeds $300 trillion, three times the size of the world economy. How can an entire planet owe itself without collapsing?
The answer lies not in economics, but in politics: money is a construction of power.
Since 1971, when Richard Nixon unlinked the U.S. dollar from gold, the global financial system has lacked a tangible anchor. Money became a pure symbol, a promise backed by nothing but trust. Since then, governments have learned to sustain stability not through productivity or savings, but through infinite debt issuance. The world prospers because it pretends it can pay.
II. Debt as the Architecture of Empire
Debt is no longer a financial tool; it is an instrument of domination.
Every bond issued, every IMF loan, every interest rate set by the Federal Reserve functions as a thread in the net that binds nations and shapes their domestic policies.
In this century, debt has replaced the army as a mechanism of global control. Nations are no longer invaded; they are indebted.
The result is a silent colonialism: financial flows now decide what cannons once did.
The economies of the Global South — Mexico included — live trapped in a cycle of dependence: they produce, export, pay interest, and borrow again.
Political sovereignty has been replaced by creditor sovereignty.
III. Fractional Reserve Banking: The Greatest Trick in History
Few citizens understand how the modern banking system truly works.
For every dollar a bank holds, it may lend up to ten.
This practice, called fractional reserve banking, allows the creation of money out of nothing. When a bank issues a loan, the money does not come from its vault; it is generated with a digital entry. Hence, the most lucid economists speak of the “imaginary money” that sustains contemporary capitalism.
This accounting engineering is the heart of the bubble: an economy built on debt multiplied and re-multiplied by savers.
Each mortgage, credit card, and Treasury bond adds another layer of illusion.
And when that illusion begins to fade, central banks print more money to avert collapse. Thus, the machine keeps turning while real value dissolves.
IV. What Do We Mean by “Real Value”?
Real value is not measured in bills or market screens, but in a society’s capacity to produce, create, and sustain life.
It is the sum of human labor, tangible goods, energy, knowledge, innovation, and social cohesion that give meaning to money.
When monetary issuance grows without a corresponding rise in productivity or well-being, the system multiplies numbers but not wealth.
The result is a silent inflation of deceit: citizens work as hard or harder, yet their effort is worth less because money has divorced itself from the reality it was meant to represent.
In this way, the text’s rhythm remains coherent: it first explains how the system fabricates illusion and then clarifies what is lost when illusion prevails over real value.
V. The Great Bubble and the Inevitable “Reset”
Every system of fiction eventually collides with reality. The great question is when this confrontation will occur.
Global debt has reached levels impossible to sustain. Governments finance themselves by borrowing to pay the interest on previous loans — a cycle of monetary addiction.
Many analysts — including Elon Musk and a growing school of heterodox economists — warn that the United States is already technically bankrupt. Not because it has defaulted, but because its debt grows faster than its ability to generate wealth. The world’s most powerful economy survives on the promise that no one will dare call it insolvent.
But every myth has its breaking point.
When investors lose faith in the dollar’s value, when inflation corrodes the system’s credibility, the planet will be forced to execute a global financial reset — a massive restructuring, a disguised write-off, or the emergence of a new monetary standard.
As Rafael Carmona — the first analyst who explained this economic illusion to me — puts it, “the end of this story is already written in the numbers.”
VI. Bitcoin: The Crack in the Wall
Here enters Bitcoin, that digital intruder defying the rules of the game.
It depends on no government, cannot be printed at will, and its supply is capped at 21 million units — no more.
For many, Bitcoin is the perfect heresy: money without a central bank, without intermediaries, without debt.
If the current system is a pyramid built on coerced trust, Bitcoin is its negation: distributed trust.
Each transaction verified on its network is an act of technological sovereignty.
That is why it provokes such discomfort — not because it threatens the economic order, but because it proves that money can exist without power.
We do not know whether Bitcoin will save the financial world, but we do know that it has shattered the symbolic monopoly of money, exposing the fragility of the fiction upon which the empire of credit stands.
VII. The Invisible Resistance
Foucault foresaw it: where there is power, there is resistance.
Resistance does not always appear as protest; sometimes it takes the form of innovation, thought, or rejection of the dominant narrative.
Bitcoin, decentralized FinTech, and movements advocating personal financial sovereignty are expressions of this micropolitics of resistance.
Yet the system does not yield easily. A perfect storm must come — the moment the fiction collapses and stopping it becomes impossible.
The same institutions that created the bubble now present themselves as its saviors: central banks are testing state-issued digital currencies, new forms of economic surveillance disguised as modernization. Even Trump has his own Trump Coin.
Control reinvents itself to survive.
VIII. The Pedagogy of Money
Most people do not understand the language that governs their lives.
I confess it took me days to begin grasping it myself.
People talk about inflation, credit, and interest rates — and economists deliver daily reports — but few realize that each bill is a promise of payment that can never fully be kept.
That is why the system persists: financial ignorance is its fuel.
Nothing will change until citizens understand that money is not wealth, but a relationship of power.
The day more people comprehend the absurd — and ingenious — nature of this system, the myth will collapse.
Economic education is not an academic luxury; it is a form of emancipation.
IX. Epilogue: The Power We Don’t See
Money does not exist, but the power it generates is real.
People believe money is power and power is money — but money, in reality is merely the language of power, not its essence.
True power does not reside in coins or numbers, but in those who define their value, decide their circulation, and can stop them at will.
The truly powerful do not need to possess money; it is enough to control the system that creates it.
That is the great paradox of our age: a world where money can be printed, devalued, or destroyed, yet the power that manages it remains intact — protected by collective ignorance and blind faith in a fiction few dare to question.
Empires are no longer measured by their armies, but by their capacity to create debt and make others obey it.
That power resides not in banks or governments, but in the shared narrative that makes us believe numbers on a screen equal life, labor, and future.
Bitcoin may not be the definitive solution, but it is the crack through which a little light enters.
The system may resist, reinvent itself, or disguise itself as progress — but it will never escape its own contradiction: sustaining itself with money that does not exist.
Dr. Alfredo Cuéllar: Academic, international consultant, and founder of the discipline of Micropolitics.The first Mexican to teach at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He publishes regularly in DEBATEX and ARJÉ México NOTICIAS on power, education, and the ethical tensions of the digital age. Inquiries: alfredocuellar@me.com
