The endgame is not the crash and not the recovery — it is the transfer: a decade in which the system settles unpayable debt through inflation above interest rates, because that is the only exit requiring no vote, with a crisis episode in the 2027–28 three-wall window as the likely accelerant that converts slow fiscal dominance into crisis fiscal dominance and forces the ladder's middle rungs; the AI buildout gets completed and its junior creditors pay for it, leaving cheap compute as the dark-fiber dividend of the 2030s; value migrates to the smile curve's edges — power, foundry, and the app layer — while the middle sinks; the dollar system shrinks to a bloc with gold as the non-aligned neutral reserve and the anchor eventually repriced, by legislation, by accumulation, or by fracture, until the debt/anchor ratio is serviceable again #gold