Her thoughts are dominated by the catastrophic events of 1971 and 2008. Looking back, she sees the End of Bretton Woods—when Nixon severed the dollar's tie to gold—as the original sin. This act of printing money without backing created a system she views as a ticking time bomb, leading directly to the Bubble Burst depicted in her mind's eye; an era of towering skyscrapers built on debt, shattered by the collapse of an over-inflated balloon.