Submitted by John Rubino via Dollar Collapse blog,
In a fiat currency system, perception is, by definition, everything. Paper money has no intrinsic value. So the people saving it and accepting it in exchange aren’t expressing faith in the money itself but in the competence and honesty — and power — of the institutions managing it. Let that faith erode and those slips of colored paper and ephemeral computer bits revert to their intrinsic value.