ELI5: Decades ago, how were people able to get married in their 20's, have kids, afford a house, live/strive rather comfortably, and still have enough saved up to retire?

The short answer is that there are two types of "money" or currency.

One is "Fiat", meaning decreed, or "I say it, so it therefor exists". This is the same thing as saying imaginary or fake money. Money that only exists as part of a scheme or a fraud. This is the money the Federal Reserve "prints" and distributes to banks.

There is a second form of money, called "specie" meaning actually exists, this is gold or bonds, or a bearer promissory note from a true bank, i.e has as debt the same amount of funds as have been lent out, and not anymore.

Banks, especially the banks created by unscrupulous Eastern europeans in the last 400 years operate on the philosophy that they take fiat currency (which as I mentioned, doesn't actually exist) and "lend" it to you. You then take that "lent" (pardon the Wednesday pun) money and but stuff with it. Like with a credit card, or a check. But to pay the bank back, you need actual money. They refuse outright to take Fiat from another source as payment for the loan.

So, now you have 3 huge problems.

One, you owe "money".

Two, if you had a financial issue before, you're going to have to work 2x as hard to recoup enough profit from the endeavors you spent the money on to pay normal bills, plus pay the interest and principle.

Three, because (and here, finally is the answer to your question) the Eastern european bankers are unscrupulous, and have the gov't in their pockets, they are constantly regulating the ratio of fiat to specie. Such that, even over a few months, the value of the fiat goes UP, so that to acquire specie equivalent to fiat, you need a lot more of the specie.

And, since specie doesn't HAVE value (it is, by definition value), the fiat must therefore be the value-containing item, and is therefore tightly controlled, and always fluctuates in value; the value change dozens of times per minute.

The Great Depression of the 30's was a bank reaction to the amount of specie (gold and tangible real world objects, foodstuff, commodities, and labor) being greater than the amount of fiat that had been created, making banks obsolete and under utilized, or or some areas not at all.

The Eastern euro bankers then caused a panic, and worked with the stock market to force a collapse of the specie, by pushing a fiat-only payment system, (i.e. federal banking notes) which nobody anywhere had any of.

There has been over the last 70 or years a mini-depression, where to pay back a $X dollar loan taken out in 1940, you would need about 100 times as much specie to pay that back, which deflates the specie availability, and allows the banks even tighter control over the remaining specie.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread