I've spent years researching civilizational collapse for The Architecture of Survival. Not the Hollywood version — the slow, measurable deterioration that precedes every fall. And after tracing the pattern from the Bronze Age through the 2023 banking crisis, I've found something that should make you uncomfortable.
The same five warning signs appear before every collapse. Every single one. Across 3,200 years, eight monetary systems, and four continents.
They're all present right now.
Warning 1: The Currency Becomes a Political Tool
The tell: Those in power begin adjusting the money supply to solve short-term problems, breaking the implicit contract that currency represents stable value.
Rome, 64 CE: Nero reduced the denarius from 98% to 93% silver — a 5% haircut — to fund rebuilding Rome after the Great Fire. Trivial in isolation. Catastrophic in precedent. It established that the currency existed to serve the emperor's needs, not the economy's. Every successor exploited this precedent until, by 268 CE, Roman "silver" coins contained 1.75% silver. Bronze discs with a memory of value.
France, 1716-1720: John Law convinced the French regent to let him issue paper banknotes to fix the nation's post-war bankruptcy. Within four years, banknote circulation exploded from 159 million to 1.199 billion livres. Share prices in Law's Mississippi Company rose from 500 to 18,000 livres in twelve months, then crashed to 1,000. The word "banque" became so toxic in French that the next central bank was deliberately called a "caisse" — a cash box.
Weimar Germany, 1921-1923: The Reichsbank printed money to pay war reparations and fund government operations. The mark went from 4.2 per dollar (1914) to 4.2 trillion per dollar (November 1923). A loaf of bread cost 200 billion marks. Coffee cost 7,000 marks by the time you finished your first cup — it was 5,000 when you ordered it.
Lebanon, 2019-present: The central bank ran what the UN Secretary General called "something similar to a Ponzi scheme" — paying interest on existing deposits with incoming deposits — to maintain a currency peg for 22 years. When it broke, the Lebanese pound lost 95% of its value. GDP halved in two years. The central bank governor was later charged with embezzling $42 million.
Why it matters: Currency debasement never feels dangerous at first. Nero's 5% cut was "pragmatic." Law's paper money was "innovative." Each individual adjustment solves an immediate problem. The destruction is cumulative and non-linear — slow for years or decades, then sudden.
Warning 2: Real Value Flows Out While Paper Claims Flow In
The tell: A civilization begins importing more real goods than it produces, paying with financial instruments, debt, or debased currency rather than productive output.
Rome, 1st-3rd century CE: Pliny the Elder complained that Rome was sending 100 million sesterces annually to India for spices, silks, and luxuries. Real goods flowed out. Gold and silver flowed out. What stayed in Rome were increasingly hollow coins and an economy that consumed more than it made.
Spain, 1540s-1640s: The most counterintuitive case. Spain conquered the richest silver mines in history — Potosi alone produced 9 million silver pesos annually at peak, more than all other mines in the world combined. Forty thousand tons of silver crossed the Atlantic over two centuries.
Spain should have become unstoppable. Instead, it deindustrialized. It was cheaper to buy foreign goods with silver than to manufacture them at home. Spanish industry withered. Prices quadrupled. Real wages fell. Spain became "an empire rich in treasure but weak in productive capacity" — a deindustrialized economy dependent on a single revenue stream that was simultaneously debasing its own currency.
Wealth without production is a death sentence.
The Bronze Age version: The palace economies of the Late Bronze Age ran on redistribution — central authorities coordinating production and trade. But the system required tin from Afghanistan, copper from Cyprus, grain from Egypt, and luxury goods from across the Mediterranean. When the trade routes broke, the palaces had no domestic productive capacity to fall back on. Over 5,000 Linear B tablets from Knossos record wool allocations and labor rosters but contain no evidence of currency equivalence — no market mechanism to redirect resources when the central plan failed.
Warning 3: Risk Concentrates While No One Watches
The tell: Financial exposure concentrates in a small number of institutions, counterparties, or instruments, creating single points of failure that can cascade.
Florence, 1340s: The Bardi and Peruzzi banks lent 1.5 million gold florins to a single borrower — King Edward III of England. When he defaulted, both banks collapsed. But the Acciaiuoli bank also failed despite having no exposure to Edward III. The crisis was systemic. The entire Florentine banking system was overleveraged, and one shock brought it all down. Depositors recovered 37 to 48 cents on the dollar.
Four years later, the Black Death arrived. Europe's financial infrastructure was already gone.
Silicon Valley Bank, 2023: SVB invested its deposits in long-term Treasury bonds — safe assets, in theory. But when the Fed raised interest rates, those bonds lost market value. When depositors wanted their money, SVB couldn't sell without crystallizing billions in losses. On March 9, depositors tried to withdraw $42 billion in a single day — a digital bank run accelerated by VCs texting portfolio companies to pull funds. By March 10, the FDIC had seized SVB. Within two months, three of the four largest bank failures in US history had occurred.
The Bronze Age version: All trade flowed through a handful of palatial nodes. When Ugarit fell, it wasn't just one city — it was a critical routing point for trade between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean. King Ammurapi's last letter is desperate: "The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us." Seven ships destroyed a node in a network that connected civilizations.
Why it matters: Risk concentration is invisible during good times. The Bardi's loan to Edward looked prudent — he was the King of England, backed by wool revenues. SVB's Treasury bonds were the safest instrument in existence. Ugarit was a thriving trade hub. Concentration only becomes visible at the moment of failure, when it's too late.
Warning 4: Elites Insulate Themselves
The tell: Those closest to the monetary system begin positioning themselves to survive — or profit from — the collapse they can see coming.
Rome: Emperors debased the currency to pay armies, but the imperial household held gold. The soldiers paid in debased coin eventually figured this out — which is why the third century produced fifty emperors in fifty years, each installed by armies demanding better payment.
Weimar Germany: Industrialist Hugo Stinnes borrowed heavily in depreciating marks to buy real assets — factories, mines, newspapers, hotels. As the mark collapsed, his debts evaporated while his assets retained value. At the hyperinflation's peak, 25 ounces of gold could buy a commercial city block in Berlin. Stinnes bought everything he could.
Meanwhile, ordinary Germans — savers, pensioners, the middle class — watched their life savings become worth less than the paper they were printed on. One woman lit her fireplace with stacks of banknotes because they had less value than firewood.
Lebanon, 2019: The most brazen modern example. Central bank governor Riad Salameh and former Prime Minister Najib Mikati were covert shareholders in Bank Audi, Lebanon's largest bank — meaning they personally profited from the Ponzi scheme they were running. When the system collapsed, ordinary depositors were locked out of their accounts. The elites who designed the system had already moved their wealth offshore.
Salameh was detained in September 2024, charged with embezzling $42 million in public funds. The depositors still can't access their savings.
Why it matters: Elite insulation is both a warning sign and an accelerant. When those with the power to fix the system are instead positioning to profit from its failure, the system is already dead. The currency is just the last thing to notice.
Warning 5: The System Punishes Anyone Who Says It's Broken
The tell: Governments and institutions actively suppress the market signals — prices, wages, interest rates — that would reveal the system's fragility.
Rome, 301 CE: Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices set ceilings on over 1,400 products, with the death penalty for anyone charging more. The result: merchants stopped selling. Goods disappeared from markets. Lactantius wrote that "the scarcity became more excessive and grievous than ever." You cannot force trust into a currency at swordpoint.
England, 1351: After the Black Death killed half the population, surviving laborers demanded triple wages. The Statute of Labourers froze wages at pre-plague levels and compelled workers into year-long contracts. The law was unenforceable. Wages rose 12-28% in the 1350s despite the statute, with some manors seeing 60%+ increases. By the 1360s, wages had risen another 20-40%.
The Bronze Age version: The palace economy had no price signals at all. When Linear B tablets record 100,000 units of wool allocated from Knossos, they record central planning, not market activity. There was no mechanism for a farmer in Pylos to signal that his harvest was failing, or for a trader in Ugarit to indicate that tin prices were spiking. The informational bottleneck of central planning — evident in the simultaneous failure of multiple Aegean palaces — prevented the decentralized problem-solving that might have saved individual communities.
Modern versions: Lebanon's artificial currency peg. Argentina's capital controls. Every artificial suppression of price signals creates the same problem: it prevents the system from self-correcting through small adjustments, ensuring that when the correction finally comes, it's catastrophic.
The Question These Patterns Force
I didn't start writing fiction about civilizational collapse because I'm a pessimist. I started because the patterns are so clear, so consistent, and so consistently ignored that they demand a response.
The Architecture of Survival asks the question that 3,200 years of monetary history makes unavoidable: If the warning signs are always the same, and they're always visible years or decades in advance, why does no one act on them?
The Genesis Protocol says the answer is knowledge distribution — teach enough people to recognize the pattern, and eventually someone with power will act. The Order says the answer is positioning — the pattern can't be stopped, so engineer who survives.
Both arguments have 3,200 years of evidence behind them.
The five warnings are not predictions. They're measurements. And right now, every one of them is measurable.
What you do with that information is the question my characters have been arguing about since 1177 BCE.