Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:
Debt is a major reason the US monetary system is collapsing with a new monetary system on the horizon, but there are other reasons too. Derivatives of the debt-based system show how the old monetary system is failing and a new system is emerging.
For example, the extractive tool of the banking system, mutual funds, which individual investors are now doing their best to avoid through ETFs.
It is a sign of a much bigger trend. It is a shift away from placing power in the hands of Wall Street into the hands of the individual.
In his book, ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,’ authors Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson write:
“The most common reason why nations fail today is because they have extractive institutions.”
They explain what extractive institutions are…
“Extractive institutions are those that concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a small elite, while depriving the majority of people of rights, opportunities, and access to resources.”
Practically, this looks like setting up the system to benefit you and your friends more than the people the institutions are supposed to serve.
“The basis of these institutions is an elite who design economic institutions in order to enrich themselves and perpetuate their power at the expense of the vast majority of people in society.”
A monetary revolution is already swinging back the other way. A quiet power shift away from the economic inclusivity of the individual – away from banking institutions toward the individual taking ownership for their earnings.
You’ve seen it happening over the past two – three decades. Technology has allowed individual investors to start taking control of their own investments. Online investment platforms, a plethora of subscription investment research (instantly downloadable), and now more people are investing in digital tokens (Bitcoin, and altcoins).
Individuals are making decisions for themselves. This can be seen in one of the most recent investment trends over the past five years. It has been a capital shift from mutual funds to ETFs (exchange-traded funds).
2025 will make the second year in a row where US ETF inflows will move beyond $1 Trillion.
Bloomberg reports:
ETF Inflows Smash $1 Trillion Mark in Fastest Run on Record
“Every market jolt this year — from April’s tariff scare to September’s tech pullback — has met the same reflex on Wall Street: more ETF buying. That collective impulse has now pushed US exchange-traded fund inflows past $1 trillion, the fastest asset haul the industry has ever seen.
The wrapper once built for quiet diversification has become the market’s loudest statement of confidence — and the pulse of 2025’s bull run.”
For decades, mutual funds were marketed as the default vehicle for ordinary investors. They looked safe, professional, and respectable — “the responsible way” to invest.
But behind that friendly facade was a structure designed to benefit the bankster elites. By naively placing your savings into the hands of fund managers, broker-dealers, and the financial institutions, it gave them permission to skim a percentage off every dollar flowing through the system.
Now, the rise and popularity of ETFs are exposing how much of that old model was built on extraction over financial inclusivity.
Mutual Funds: Live, Laugh, Loot
Here’s how banksters do it so they can live their best life now – “Live, Laugh, Loot” style.
A mutual fund pools investor money and turns it over to a professional manager. You don’t trade it like a stock — you buy in directly with the fund company and wait for the end-of-day price, the net asset value (NAV).
In the 1980s and 1990s, they were able to glaze the fees over with “services.” That was because the average investor didn’t have the tools or access to build a diversified portfolio. But it also nailed a financial hierarchy: money stayed locked inside centralized institutions collecting fees benefiting the few.
And those fees aren’t small.
Here’s a breakdown of typical Mutual Fund costs:
| Fee Type | Typical Range | High-End Examples / Notes |
| Expense Ratio (management fee) | 0.50%–1.50% | Some funds charge 2%–3%, or even 5%+ for specialty products. |
| Front-End Load (sales commission) | 0%–5.75% | Up to 6% of your money can disappear before it’s even invested. |
| 12b-1 Marketing Fees | 0%–1% | Ongoing “distribution” fees that pay brokers for selling you the fund. |
| Trading Costs (hidden) | 0.3%–1%+ | High turnover eats into returns — silently. |
That structure has quietly transferred billions in investor wealth to positive numbers on the profit loss sheets of America’s biggest banking institutions.
It’s not just the fund companies that benefit — the banking system benefits too. Circular profit is created.
Because mutual funds hold vast pools of deposits, they keep money inside the traditional system — flowing through the same large custodians, clearinghouses, and Wall Street money centers that rely on predictable fee-based revenue.
Every basis point skimmed in fees, every management charge, every delayed redemption — it all reinforces the same circular loop: you provide the capital, they extract the yield.
ETFs: Escaping the Fool’s Game
The shift toward ETFs has been a long, twenty-five year shift.
An ETF works like a mutual fund, except you can buy and sell it throughout the trading day, just like a stock. You see what’s inside. You choose when to trade. And you keep more of your own returns.
Here are the differences:
| Cost Component | Mutual Fund | ETF | Power Dynamic |
| Expense Ratio | 0.50%–3%+ | 0.03%–0.25% | ETFs slash the cut middlemen take. |
| Sales Fees | Up to 6% | None | No commissions or “loads.” |
| Access | End-of-day trades only | Real-time trading | You control timing — not the fund company. |
| Transparency | Quarterly reports | Near real-time holdings | You see exactly where your money is. |
| Tax Efficiency | Low | High | Less tax drag, more retained returns. |
The past 25 years, mutual funds have been on the decline. As more individual investors were able to take control of their personal finances via personal, online trading platforms, they did the obvious. They did their best to reduce fees in their own self-interest. As a result, fewer and fewer mutual funds are being created every single year since 2011.
Since 2020, the creation of ETFs has massively accelerated each year. Over those five years, the number of US ETFs more than doubled.
There are currently 4,117 ETFs listed in the United States up from 3,512 one year ago pic.twitter.com/0hhb03mg3x
— ETF Tracker (@TheETFTracker) October 9, 2025
In fact, this year, US ETFs are so popular they outnumber US-listed stocks. After the pandemic, commodities like gold and silver became more popular, and people started rushing into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And because of this, more people are being exposed to how the global financial and monetary system actually works.
For the first time ever, there are now more ETFs in the U.S. than stocks. pic.twitter.com/nHkdY6Ol8x
— Brew Markets (@brewmarkets) August 25, 2025
Those who were ignorant enough to still think the US dollar was backed by gold are shocked to learn that debt rules the world. Now they’re figuring out how to manage their savings, what to buy, and where. Many are finding out the hard way, by losing their hard-earned savings by leveraging it for maximum profit in a major alt-coin bet.
Individual Investors in the Era of FAFO
For the past several years, we’ve been in an era of “F*ck Around, Find Out.” Gold and silver have mostly been overlooked because of the almost overnight millionaires in the crypto space. While at the same time, the ETFs everyday investors and fund managers are dumping their client’s money into the biggest, focused US ETFs. Whether knowingly, or unknowingly, investors are pouring money into AI.
Ruchir Sharma at the Financial times writes, “AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025. That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.”
These same AI and tech stocks take up a huge percentage of the S&P 500’s market cap, and fill some of the United State’s largest ETFs. Investors still consider Vanguard’s (VOO) ETF safe.
For example, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSE: VOO).
MarketWatch reports:
The entire stock market is being carried by these four AI stocks
“Nvidia and three other Big Tech names have been responsible for 60% of stock-market gains this year. Still, the rally could keep on going
The S&P 500’s gains have been driven by just a handful of Big Tech stocks.
For investors today, it feels like there is no alternative to buying tech stocks.
After all, the S&P 500’s SPX rebound from its “liberation day” lows was mostly thanks to the massive run-up of just four Big Tech names as artificial-intelligence enthusiasm again gripped markets.
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), Meta Platforms Inc. (META), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) have contributed a combined six percentage points to the S&P 500’s total year-to-date appreciation of 10%, according to a note from DataTrek Research. That means 60% of the index’s gains are from these AI megacaps, highlighting just how narrow the stock market has become.
Nvidia alone accounts for 26% of the S&P 500’s year-to-date advance.”
Individual Investors Also Have Easy Access to Gold
One of the easiest ways individual investors have been getting into gold is through ETFs.
Inflows into Gold ETFs have been fairly consistent.
For most of the past year the price of gold has been pushing higher and faster than ever before, but in the big picture that has not changed much.
https://x.com/LynAldenContact/status/1975912706541834569
Most people, worldwide, have yet to allocate anything into gold. They are more attracted to the crypto millionaire lifestyle and the old ways of clinging to the USD and fiat money than anything else.
Just like the number of car companies during the era of Henry Ford, digital monetary innovations are everywhere. For example, over 90 crypto / altcoin ETFs are waiting to be approved for the market.
There are over 90 crypto ETF's waiting to be approved in the US 👀 pic.twitter.com/OodtiMtZxa
— Rand (@crypto_rand) October 9, 2025
The elephant in the room is the IBIT Bitcoin ETF from Blackrock. With the smallest fee on the market at 0.1%, it is hard for anyone to resist. It is growing faster than anyone could have ever anticipated. Compare it to the growth of Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF (NYSE: VOO). Investors have plunged into the IBIT ETF to accumulate the near same amount of assets as the Vanguard ETF in less than a 10th of the time – 250 days versus about 3000 days, below.
Prior to all these alt-coin ETF approvals came another round of FAFO in the crypto world. Thousands of individual investors decided to leverage the crypto / altcoins they had on exchanges to buy more. When the price dropped, the exchanges “reconciled” their losses.
Via _CheckonChain
Some investors lost everything, others… just millions.
Have a friend that was close to 30M net worth
Has almost a decade in crypto
Lost the whole 30M yesterday in 10 minutes on cross margin
An entire decade and multiple generations he could have retired all gone in 10 minutes
— Cozy ⓣhe Caller 🔥💃🏻 (@cozypront) October 11, 2025
Bitcoiners: "Did you buy the dip?"
10X leveraged shitcoiners… pic.twitter.com/3uK0PBbARm
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@MarkJeftovic) October 11, 2025
While one person (some speculate Baron Trump), decided to short Bitcoin just thirty minutes before Trump’s tweet storm, which tanked the markets and crypto, initiating all the losses.
This crypto crash is fascinating.
Thirty minutes before the Trump post someone created a new wallet.
That individual then shorted the crypto market and made $88 million.
This was insanely good timing.
I see people speculating that it was someone who had insider info on the…
— Lee Roach (@leevalueroach) October 11, 2025
How this all turns out is beyond me, but the era of FAFO for the individual investor is far from over.
The Quiet Revolution Is Already Underway
The exodus from Wall Street’s extractive machinery isn’t loud — it’s silent, steady, and unstoppable. It’s unfolding through every ETF trade, every Bitcoin wallet, and every ounce of gold quietly withdrawn from the system.
Gold, once dismissed as a relic, is now reasserting itself as the anchor of personal monetary sovereignty. As fiat currencies drown in debt and digital illusions multiply, investors are remembering what real money feels like — heavy, tangible, and unyielding to policy manipulation. ETFs have made gold accessible again to the average investor, but the deeper truth is that even these instruments hint at a growing awareness: the ultimate form of wealth is the one you hold outside the system.
This is the new financial literacy — forged not in classrooms or brokerages, but through the hard lessons of the “FAFO Era.” Those who ignored the warnings of leverage, centralization, and paper promises have already “found out.” Those who’ve learned to hold value directly — whether through ETFs, Bitcoin, or bullion — are building resilience in a system built on sand.
