Trillions of dollars of phony inflationary capital people believed were real assets have disappeared, says Doug Casey, founder and chairman of Casey Research.

That’s going to continue to deplete the value of the dollar and guarantee catastrophic inflation in the future.

“If you’re relying on the U.S. dollar, you’re relying on a figment of the U.S. government’s imagination,” Casey told Moneynews.com’s Dan Mangru.

“To me, holding U.S. dollars for the long term is about the most stupid thing you can do.”

“Gold is the only financial asset that isn’t someone else’s liability.”

Casey notes there now are some $7 trillion held outside the United States.

Eventually, Casey thinks foreigners will realize they’re holding hot potatoes and begin trading their dollars for things of real value.

“Those dollars are going to come back to the United States and we’re going to be shipping out wheat and farmland and titles of companies, Casey says.

“Inflation is going to explode in this country and the amount of real wealth is going to diminish.”

“This is a really big problem, this is something of historic proportions.”

Naturally, foreign countries don’t want to see the value of their dollar holdings tank, but they don’t want to hold dollars either, which is why the Chinese and others aren’t selling dollars on the foreign exchanges but using them to buy hard assets instead.

“We’re just starting to see the beginning of what’s going to happen,” Casey says.

The U.S. has already entered what Casey calls the Greater Depression, one that will be much more serious than the 1930s.

“This depression can be as long and as deep as you can possibly imagine,” he says.

The reason most people don’t realize this is that the majority of those giving economic opinions aren’t economists describing how the world actually works but political apologists describing how they think it ought to work, Casey notes.

“Everyone’s looking to the government for a solution, but all the government does is tax and regulate and inflate the currency,” Casey says.

The Chinese economy will outstrip the United States because Chinese entrepreneurs have more freedom than their U.S. counterparts, pay fewer taxes, and working under far fewer regulations, notes Casey.

“Unfortunately, the idea of America has died and it’s been replaced by another political entity called the United States, which in essence is no different from the 200 other countries spread across the globe,” he says.