I know many still don't believe the Fed can stop QE, no less shrink its balance sheet, and because of that the refrain, "You can't taper a Ponzi," can be heard from every corner of financial media.

I tend to agree with that sentiment because, of course, all Ponzi schemes require new money to constantly come in to prop up the asset values of of the previous round of funding. This is the definition of a Ponzi scheme, after all.

But in a world of Ponzis built on top of Ponzis built on top of Ponzis the idea that the biggest one, on which all the others are built, can't save itself for a time by popping all of the daughter Ponzis is a bit disingenuous, if not outright obtuse.

And it's not because debt-based currency regimes aren't inherently Ponzi schemes. They are. It's because once the pile of currency is created it has the ability to move where it is treated best and away from those assets most vulnerable to liquidation.

So, the situation in the real world, as it unfolds in real time, is far more complicated than just "You can't taper a Ponzi." In the long run, yes, that is correct. But in the time frames where people actually make decisions on where to put their money to provide them a return, it is absolutely not true.

And this is the hardest thing I've tried to teach my readers and my patrons over the years. It's one thing to accurately state what the end state of a particular system will be. In the case of the U.S. dollar reserve system, total and complete collapse is inevitable.

It's quite another to put a time on when that will occur and in what order will the system collapse.

This is the fundamental problem I personally had to overcome during the early years of my financial writing career. When publishing a newsletter where you lay out an investment thesis and give people your best ideas it simply isn't good enough in 2013 to say, "in ten to fifteen years all of these losing picks in gold or oil will be winners because the dollar is doomed."