The most terrifying wealth shrinkage isn't a crash — it's the slow boil of a frog in warm water.
There's a term in sociology called "the banality of evil."
When Hannah Arendt observed the post-WWII trials, she argued: the deepest disasters are often not caused by a few devils, but by countless ordinary people who never think, who only "follow orders" and "do things by the book," pushing together.
In the financial world, there also lives a kind of "banality of evil."
It doesn't shout, doesn't crash — it just silently carries the purchasing power out of your pocket.
1. 🔑 Cognitive mediocrity is the first scene of wealth's disappearance
Most people's wealth logic is a mediocrity fed by "path dependence."
Everyone buys property, so he buys property; everyone buys wealth products, so he buys wealth products. Hidden behind it is a loophole: the belief that following the crowd is safe.
But in financial games, the crowd is often the price. As Master Nao has said many times, the essence of wealth is competition for the right to allocate resources. When a system's rules start tilting toward debt expansion and credit dilution, those who honestly clutch cash and worship single-currency assets are, in fact, collectively paying for the system's "banality of evil."
Inflation was never a number — it's a silent great transfer of wealth. It quietly moves the purchasing power of law-abiding savers into the hands of those who hold assets and wield debt instruments.
2. 🌏 The information cocoon makes people oblivious to shrinkage
Why do many feel no pain from wealth shrinkage?
Because they're trapped in an information cocoon. In a specific online environment, most receive filtered second- or third-hand news. They hear only "steady and improving," see only "local fluctuations," and rarely can anyone pierce the barrier to see what foreign media and think tanks really think about the global monetary cycle.
Having worked in the industry for twenty years, I read first-hand foreign media every day. It lets me get used to seeing the world from another dimension:
- When here people discuss rate cuts for stimulus, what inflation anxiety are the world's mainstream financial centers actually experiencing?
- When the offshore RMB fluctuates, where is the truly smart money flowing?
Mediocrity often begins with total acceptance of information; wealth awakening begins with questioning the truth. Only by jumping out of a single perspective do you discover: what you thought was "prudent" is, in the eyes of multinational capital, actually an extremely high "risk concentration."
3. ⚖️ The drift of the anchor — who is stealing purchasing power
There's a cold reality: wealth shrinkage isn't just inflation; there's also "the drift of the anchor."
If all wealth is anchored to a single currency, you've bet the family's future on an uncontrollable variable. Exchange-rate swings in recent years have proven: even as book-asset figures rise, compared to USD or global core real assets, real purchasing power may have already shrunk by more than 30%.
This shrinkage is "banal" — no one directly robs you; the system merely redefines, via the printing press and the exchange-rate valve, the value you worked hard to save.
If you don't actively seek a breakthrough, you become an accomplice to this banality of evil. To ignore risk is to be irresponsible toward the family's wealth.
4. 🏛️ Allocating to Hong Kong is resistance against the banality of evil
I often tell people: allocating to Hong Kong was never about chasing that tiny interest spread.
At its core, it's a personal rebellion against the "banality of evil."
- Switching the anchor: via Hong Kong, move a slice of wealth out of the single-risk system into one pegged to global mainstream currencies (USD, HKD). This isn't simple wealth management; it's fitting a "hedge" onto purchasing power.
- Institutional premium: as discussed in the previous piece on the "force foundation," Hong Kong's rule-of-law environment gives another kind of institutional security. Wealth is no longer a piece of data in the system that can be redefined at any moment, but private property under the tight protection of common law.
- The dividend of vision: opening an asset account in Hong Kong is, in effect, truly owning a "forward post" to observe global financial dynamics.
When I entered the industry twenty years ago, everyone talked about "growth"; twenty years on, I talk more about "guardianship."
This series hands a set of weapons to those high-net-worth friends unwilling to be eaten by the banality of evil. Wealth shrinkage isn't scary; what's scary is clutching an escape ticket yet, because you "followed orders," missing the last departure.
In an age of double fragmentation — information and wealth — guarding wealth is essentially a contest of cognition and vision.
Next, we pull the camera back: in the bull-bear cycles of civilization, geography no longer decides destiny, yet still decides wealth safety. Behind this, what kind of map is it?