The Quiet Unwind
Disruption of historic scale does not destroy value. It relocates it. The pattern is repeating, in plain sight.
The fortunes of the 1930s were not built by the people who waited for the all-clear. They were built by the few who could read the disruption while it was still happening. The pattern is repeating, in plain sight.
Disruption of historic scale does not destroy value. It relocates it.
The leaders who saw the relocation early built the next generation of American wealth while most of the country was still trying to understand what had happened to the old one. This gets framed as an inspirational story, but it is something more useful than inspiration. It is a historical pattern that has repeated, with remarkable consistency, through every structural disruption of the last hundred years.
We are inside another transformational era of business, industry, global commerce, and innovation, and it is the most significant reimagining of business since the Industrial Revolution.
Most of what is being written about the global economy right now reads as a warning. Higher rates, geopolitical fracture, the dollar under pressure, supply chains breaking under their own assumptions. None of those warnings are inaccurate, but they are also incomplete. Inside every structural disruption of this scale, value relocates rather than disappears, and the leaders who can see where it is moving before the consensus arrives will define the next era. The ones who only see the disruption will spend the next three years defending positions the new map has already made obsolete.
The data the financial press is not yet sitting with seriously enough.
Foreign central banks have been net buyers of gold in record volumes for three consecutive years. The World Gold Council confirms 1,136 tonnes purchased in 2022, 1,037 in 2023, and 1,045 in 2024. Three straight years above 1,000 tonnes, against a 2010 to 2021 annual average of 473. The pace has more than doubled, and the buying is concentrated in the same handful of sovereigns whose US Treasury holdings are visibly declining.
The People’s Bank of China held US Treasuries worth approximately $1.32 trillion at the 2013 peak. As of November 2025, that figure is $683.9 billion, a reduction of nearly half. The dollar share of global central bank reserves has fallen from 72 percent in 2001 to 56.9 percent in the third quarter of 2025, the lowest level in three decades. Gold’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from below 10 percent in 2015 to over 23 percent now.
Reserve managers are voting with their balance sheets while the financial press is still debating whether the dollar is truly in trouble or whether we are prognosticating a doom the data does not support. After all, none of us has known a world where the dollar was not the king currency.
The shift has a starting point. When the United States froze Russian central bank reserves in 2022, every sovereign in the world received the same message at the same time. Holding US Treasuries became a political decision rather than a purely financial one, and the sovereigns who internalized that message have been quietly building parallel infrastructure to operate without the dollar where they can. The infrastructure has been built. The UAE’s recent exit from OPEC removes the last political constraint on using it.
We are not going back to normal because normal was the problem. The conditions that produced thirty years of cheap capital, predictable inflation, and unlimited foreign appetite for our paper were the conditions of a world that no longer exists. We are rebuilding the plane in flight.
The historical pattern, and why it matters now.
The fortunes built in the 1930s belonged to the few who could see, while the rest of the country was still in shock, that the disruption was producing the next economy rather than delaying the old one. They moved into the categories the new map made visible while their competitors were still navigating by the old map. Every structural disruption since has produced the same pattern, and the leaders who define the next era are the ones who can read what is coming out of the chrysalis before the rest of the market sees the wings.
Disruption of this scale produces its own opportunities, and the ones worth taking are the positions it is opening up between sectors, in the unexpected dots most institutional investors are not yet connecting. The next twenty billion dollars in any emerging category will not look like the last twenty billion. It will be raised through different channels, distributed through different relationships, and underwritten by people who got there before the rest of the market figured out what was happening.
Why reinvent the wheel? My answer to that previously rhetorical question is, why not? Because the wheel is being reinvented whether we participate or not.
What separates the leaders who define an era from the leaders who follow it has very little to do with access to information. The information is broadly available. The differentiator is the willingness to look at the system rather than the headline, to act on what the system is showing before the consensus arrives, and to hold the conviction long enough for the rest of the market to catch up.
There is nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.
Just ask Kodak. Or Blockbuster. Or Nokia. Kodak always assumed we would need film. Nokia always assumed the primary function of a phone was for telephone calls. The smartphone arrived from a direction neither company was watching, and knocked them both out.
The pattern is consistent across industries. The hotel industry did not create Airbnb. The taxi industry did not create Uber. Disruption came from outside both industries, and from people who could see what the people inside could not.
Disruption almost never comes from inside the industry it transforms. That historical pattern should be sitting at the center of every strategic conversation right now, and almost nowhere is.
Where this leaves us.
The next era of business will belong to the leaders who are looking outward with a twenty-year vision and figuring out how to bring twenty years to today. The companies that survive the next decade will be the ones who invite the outside in before they need to. The ones who do not will be packing up their desks.
I have spent twenty-five years sitting with principals and leadership teams at the moments when they had to decide whether to keep operating from the old map or to commit to reading the new one. The leaders who define eras have access to the same information everyone else has, are not necessarily smarter than their peers, and are not better resourced. What distinguishes them is the discipline to see what the system is doing rather than what the headline is saying, and the willingness to act on that read before the consensus catches up.
That discipline is what produced the fortunes of the 1930s. It will produce the fortunes of the next decade.
The question worth sitting with this week is which assumption your own industry is currently holding that the next decade is about to break.
Larisa B. Miller is the CEO of Phoenix Global, a specialized advisory firm with operations across the US, UAE, Africa, and Europe. She advises a select group of principals and leadership teams on structural realignment, capital reallocation, and the strategic decisions that define eras. Inquiries: Larisa@LarisaMiller.com | larisamiller.com