The Catalysts by Amanda Wick is a strange beast of a book. The introduction, of all things, is fascinating. That never happens. Wick, a federal prosecutor of no party, found herself lawyering for the January 6 congressional investigation. So in the introduction, she has lots to say about people like Liz Cheney and Jamie Raskin, who she worked with closely throughout its run. She was also involved in the additional research using all the private data collected on everyone to predict domestic terrorism before it happens, and prevent it from happening in the first place. She claims it really works. But the very ugly and public politics of the J6 committee meant that program was shelved and few have even heard of it. This is great stuff! Tell us more!

But that’s not what the book is about.

Instead, Wick has gathered all the factors she can think of and divided them into groups she calls catalysts. A catalyst is a change agent, and these catalysts are ushering the USA out of its dominance in the world. It’s not nearly as engaging as the January 6 committee insights.

Because there are so many catalysts, the book is top line only. Nothing gets even a full page treatment. There’s a segment summarizing various laws that shape the single global financial system, for example. One paragraph each for regulatory bodies like the SEC, FDIC, SIPC, World Bank, IMF, et al., and the various statutes they operate under. What they all have in common is that the USA is abusing them, or ignoring them, or destroying them. And without them the USA is no longer the global top dog. The book is an overview collection of things we hear and read about individually, pretty much every day now, but grouped here as catalysts for bypassing the USA.

Where Wick sees the USA really vulnerable is the New World Financial Order, which does not yet exist. This new WFO is dominated by crypto, blockchain and decentralized finance. Before J6 she worked in crypto, and also founded an international group called Women in Crypto, so that women would not be left behind in this up and coming shift in the way finance works globally.

The USA is not embracing crypto, aside from Donald Trump personally profiting from foreign exchange into and out of his own Trump coin. He is the real life money changer in the temple. He is making billions from it. To keep doing that, he has to keep crypto as lawless as possible. The result is no rules, no boundaries and no framework to make cryptocurrency a tool of the United States’ foreign policy or banking system. She says “The greatest threat to America’s future is America itself.”

The dollar is on its way out of being the world’s reserve currency. Every country stocks dollars because they hold their value, and US government debt is guaranteed right in the constitution. The American government uses the dollar as a weapon, forcing other nations to bend the knee, do its bidding and fit its vision. From sanctions on whole countries down to individual people, to freezing dollar accounts, the USA has an easy time running things in the rest of the world. It doesn’t need to physically invade or occupy for example, like the Romans or the Germans did. The American empire just issues edicts about who can sell their oil in dollars or which banks cannot be part of any dollar transactions. The dollar is so important to every country that they put up with American foreign policy to keep afloat.

But traders, dealers, cartels, billionaires, criminals and governments are finding crypto as the way around all that by simply dealing directly with each other from secret account to secret account with no bank involvement at all. The SWIFT messaging system between and among them is going the way of the Pony Express. And the USA is doing nothing to stop the shift. It will not be long before the USA plays no oversight or management role in finance, and is just another trading partner – and not a very good one, either. It is isolating itself politically, ceding the world to China, and is unwittingly ceding its financial rule to a completely decentralized system that has no need for the USA at all.

It is also attacking and reducing its middle class, which was key to its success until now. Meanwhile, China’s middle class has grown to where it is bigger than the entire population of the USA. The USA will become another Great Britain and nothing more. Wick is hardly the first to predict this.

She explains the power of these various catalysts clearly enough, and there are perhaps more of them than readers would have guessed. So there is real education going on here.

But the book suffers here and there from it lack of depth and style. Just one example, in a chapter on social engineering as a catalyst, Wick describes the manipulation by politicians and governments to make people vote against their best interests, and accept reduced rights, privileges and services. Unfortunately, she employs the example of the famous Stanley Milgram experiments where he got subjects to torture people with ever-increasing electric shocks if they gave wrong answers. I say unfortunately, because Milgram’s experiments were a total fraud. So many people refused to perform, so many walked out on him, that he had to manipulate his data to make his point (and his ensuing professional empire). It is right there in his notes, hiding in plain sight. So Wick herself was social engineered by lies as proof that people can be led by the nose to do anything an autocrat specifies. Just a little unintended irony. That’s all.

It get predicable and annoying that every chapter seems to offer a bold new charge from her, but before readers can see it in action, she intervenes with: But first let’s look back 250 years, or let’s look at the groundwork , or let’s look at how everything came to this point. And it’s a while before the reader can get at what is actually going on today, which undermines the impact significantly.

She also overuses catchphrases until they become grating. Again one example: she loves concluding a thought/paragraph by saying it is not possible to overstate its importance:

“…and it’s impossible to overstate its consequences.”
“It’s impossible to overstate the precarity of the situation.”
“It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of the statutes passed during this period.”
“The ramifications of tokenization on global finance are impossible to overstate.”
“The consequences of filter bubbles are impossible to overstate.”
‘The consequences of this potent catalyst on the new world financial order are impossible to overstate.”
“It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the subsequent scandal.”

Surprisingly shabby writing from a powerful lawyer, I think.

But she does make the reader understand that the USA is its own worst enemy, and that its empire is doomed. This complements a number of other books I have reviewed, which focus on the political and social. Wick is attacking from the financial end, which is different, and helps complete the picture of the decline and fall now under way.

Things are moving fast, and the USA is standing still, issuing orders as if nothing has changed or will, ever. She could have said it much more succinctly without all the historical developments and the inner workings of everything financial. The book is not very deep, but it is a mile wide.

Then towards the end there is another reference to her time on the January 6 committee, and the reader wonders why that couldn’t have been the basis of this whole book.

The conclusion is rather uninspiring. After listing all the catalysts that are quietly dragging the USA into oblivion, Wick says, of course, there is hope. All the USA has to do is correct all these situations: build a world-class crypto framework, build a set of new financial tools and laws, beware of and fight social engineering, beware of and fight extreme right autocrats, don’t accept nationalism, and so on. Sure thing; consider it done.


David Wineberg

The Catalysts is a sharp and timely analysis of the forces reshaping the global financial system, institutional distrust, polarisation, and the decline of U.S. dominance. Amanda Wick brings insider experience without falling into establishment apologism. As someone who is interest in systems and power, I found her insights into social engineering and institutional collapse particularly compelling.

The book occasionally drifts into dense detail, but overall it’s accessible, urgent, and thought-provoking. I only wish it had pushed further in critiquing the deeper capitalist structures beneath the chaos.

A valuable read for anyone trying to make sense of our shifting economic and political landscape.