alt Hacker NewsYou could read The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi.
Fiat money is not the problem, the financialization of economy is actually a common by-product of aging great monetary powers. The US chose to become a monetary power in 1945, rejecting Keynes' Bancor proposal.
Then in 1971, it found it couldn't keep it working, due to the very reasons Keynes explained to them at Bretton Woods. Arrighi argues this has happened 4 times already.
So Fiat money and the financialization of life is just an outcome of something else - that being a monetary superpower is just not sustainable.
I don't live in the US but I'm definitely feeling the negative effects of the fiat system really harshly. From my perspective, I believe that the effects would be similar regardless of which country had the superpower status. Interlinked fiat currencies are just a perfect mechanism to allow militarily or economically dominant countries to manipulate the global economy in their favor. As a superpower, you can leverage corruption in foreign countries to load them up with debt denominated in your currency to allow you to export your inflation to them... You can also leverage foreign corruption to sign large, unjust trade deals or oversized military contracts which will prop up your currency.
Still, at the root, I blame the system itself, not specific participants.