The long-term economic and financial problems of the US have greatly accelerated under America’s lame duck, but Western media sources continue saying that everything is okay. But when the crisis actually arrives, the pain that it is going to cause for ordinary Americans is going to be far greater than most of us would dare to imagine.

Just as Obama’s authority over the last eight years kept deteriorating, the US dollar, which used to be the dominant force on the international financial markets for the last 72 years, deteriorated along with it. There is no way that the US economy, which is on its last legs already, will survive the declining role of America’s currency. As national currencies of certain states keep falling, one could have the impression that dollar exchange rates are on the rise, but they’re not.

This, in particular, is revealed by the fact that Iran, Turkey, Russia, China, Brazil, India and Pakistan, which have decided to replace dollar with their national currencies in bilateral trade, are sending a clear message to the world. Washington has already brought to ruin such nations as Iraq, Libya and Venezuela, which were bold enough to announce that they were planning to sell their crude oil for euros. Nowadays, the US is in no position to punish with force any of the above listed international players, and even such feeble attempts as the recent failed coup d’etat in Turkey are causing more harm than good.

If this trend continues, US dollars that are stored in central banks of foreign states are going to be sent back home, facilitating an inevitable economic collapse, since the US national debt has already reached 19.5 trillion dollars.

During Obama’s two terms in office, the United States has been increasing its foreign debt by 1.1 trillion dollars a year on average, which aggravated the situation even further. In other words, the US empire has entered the “age of stagnation”, which will inevitably be followed by an “collapse of collapse.”

In the anticipation of the approaching economic collapse of the dollar-based economic system, an ever increasing number of states, including leading economies like Russia and China, are beginning to invest heavily in gold, since it has always been the only logical way to hedge against an event like this.

As it’s been pointed out by the Mises Institute, China has already announced that its gold holdings have jumped by 60%. The enlarged gold stockpiles held by the People’s Bank of China helped China win ascension into the IMF’s elite SDR currency basket. This was a part of a larger trend of world central banks since 2010 becoming net gold buyers to the tune of 500 tons per year.

Russia alone added 172 tons of gold in 2014 and 208 tons in 2015. By swapping some of its U.S. Treasury securities for bullion bars, the Russian central bank has become the world’s seventh largest gold holder.

China has a lot more gold accumulating to do in the years ahead. Chinese leaders aim to be regionally dominant. In order to secure that position they are moving toward owning and controlling greater shares of the gold market. The recently opened Shanghai Gold Exchange gives China a direct mechanism for controlling the physical gold market in Asia.

Experts are convinced that those steps will only hasten the decline of the US dollar and the US economy as a whole, putting America’s lame duck in a more precarious position still.