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Price of DJIA today ~17,100 (call it 17,000)
Return: ~24.7x in ~40 years.
Your chart has the CPI being at somewhere between one and three in 1910 (call it 1.1) and is at roughly 27 now (call it 28). That means the CPI has gone up by 25.45x in 102 years.
If someone had taken one dollar in 1910 when the fed was created, kept it in a mattress, then invested it in the stock market in 1975, they would have come close to beating 102 years of inflation in just 40 years and this does not count dividends which would be substantial (several percentage points per year).
Yes you could have beaten inflation over 100 years by investing a dollar from 1910 in 1975, because the ponzi scheme only started in 71 and we all know if you get in early in a Ponzi scheme it's great
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
... But get in after the peak and it's not so great
![Undecided](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/undecided.gif)
Thanks to central banks the current global money system is like musical chairs, yes the musics still playing and the players are still dancing around, but there's only one chair left, and there's a loaded gun on it, the game wont end well.
The most brittle aspect at the moment are the derivatives markets where all the book excesses have been pushed into.
There are five "too big to fail" banks in the United States that each have more than 40 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives. Today, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of about 17.7 trillion dollars, so when we are talking about 40 trillion dollars we are talking about an amount of money that is almost unimaginable. And unlike stocks and bonds, these derivatives do not represent "investments" in anything. They can be incredibly complex, but essentially they are just paper wagers about what will happen in the future. The truth is that derivatives trading is not too different from betting on baseball or football games. Trading in derivatives is basically just a form of legalized gambling, and the "too big to fail" banks have transformed Wall Street into the largest casino in the history of the planet. When this derivatives bubble bursts (and as surely as I am writing this it will), the pain that it will cause the global economy will be greater than words can describe.
SOURCE:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/tag/derivatives-crisis