My parents bought their first house in the 1980s for $30,000. That same house today is worth $150,000 — the same street, the same walls, just 40 years older and five times the price.

Most people recognize this as inflation. Prices rise over time, and as long as your income keeps pace, you absorb it. It feels like the natural order of things.

But what happened in 2008 was not the natural order of things.

Over months, governments created trillions in new money to bail out the banks through balance-sheet expansions that most people never heard about and could not vote on. The money entered the system at the top, and prices adjusted throughout the system. Ordinary people paid for it through rising costs, stagnant wages, and savings that quietly lost their purchasing power. Nobody sent a bill, and nobody announced it. It just got harder to keep up.

That is what Chapter 2 is about.