Years ago--and I swear I did not imagine or dream this--I read an article about the secretive process of all the gold being carted out of Fort Knox. It had photos from the 1930s, it seems to me, of the loading dock and the trucks and massive stacks of gold bars and the workers who'd been enlisted to operationalize the transfer of all that gold. In my memory it was a Smithsonian magazine, but I can't swear to that. Frankly, I can't swear to anything, because I've never been able to relocate the article.

I must have been in my teens or twenties when that piece was published (that's 20 or 30 years ago now), and I remember thinking to myself way back then that any savings I had was, in essence, going to be worthless whenever someone with power said so...and that the system was utterly rigged. It was a stunning first exposure to the truth.

It's not getting better. Nor will it. You're right about that, @TDV.