When you mumbled the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school, you likely didn’t think you’d grow up to be taxed to death and a pawn in central-banker economic chess games. If you’re old enough, the dimes and quarters you did chores for were silver. You heard there was gold in Fort Knox backing US greenbacks, making them so very precious. Your parents didn’t know who was running America’s central bank or what the central bank did, for that matter.

Now, Fed chairs are maestros and persons of the year. The current chair, Dr. Yellen, would be in line to be similarly worshipped, but she, Mario Draghi, and the other central bankers of the world may begin taking marching orders from even higher powers.

Today’s Fed watchers should train their eyes on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to get an idea who will bail out the bailouters. The likes of IMF deputy managing director Dr. Min Zhu could make Yellen and Draghi yesterday’s news in the coming financial crash and ensuing monetary one world order. After all, these competing currencies are so messy, as economist Robert Mundell would say, “The optimum currency area is the world.”

The IMF was born in the scenic mountains of New Hampshire at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, an event that dragged on for three weeks, with 730 delegates from 44 nations and 70 members of the press corps overflowing the resort grounds and filling hotels miles away.

Long forgotten is the American protagonist Harry Dexter White, but the great man representing Britain remains worshipped to this day by the world’s monetary mandarins—John Maynard Keynes. Lord Keynes’ wife, former prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova, would swim daily in the frigid waters of the Ammonoosuc River and dance late into the night in her room, interrupting the sleep of US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. rooming directly below.

Maybe this is why Morgenthau delivered the opening address and vowed not to let the “slick-tongued, aristocratic bamboozler”—Lord Keynes—“near the podium on the opening day.”

Lord Keynes may have the last laugh.

The IMF hides in plain sight. The organization, writes Jim Rickards in his outstanding new book The Death of Money, “is little understood even by experts, in part because of the unique role it performs and the highly technical jargon it uses in doing so.”

Through the years, the IMF’s mission has changed; at one time, it was even thought to be useless. Then came 2008 and the financial crash, and the fund became “the de facto secretariat and operating arm of the G20,” Rickards explains, “coordinating policy responses to the financial panic that year.” Quite simply, the IMF has become the central bank of the world.

The IMF’s face (with a George Hamilton tan) is world power hitter Christine Lagarde. But the 6-foot 4-inch Dr. Zhu is Legarde’s go-to guy. Zhu earned his PhD in the US, worked in the World Bank (another Bretton Woods creation), at the Bank of China, and was an advisor to former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. “From East to West, from communism to capitalism, Min Zhu straddles the contending forces in world finance today, with a foot in both camps,” writes Rickards.

Dr. Zhu sees the world as his economic petri dish to study, manage, and manipulate. His world isn’t East vs. West, but “country clusters based on economic factors, supply-chain linkages, and historical bonds.” The IMF through Zhu’s worldview is developing a risk management model much more advanced than the central banks have. Zhu is Keynes 2.0, incorporating what Keynes left out—the role of banks—into his considerations.

Between Lagarde, Zhu, David Lipton from the United States, Naoyuki Shinohara from Japan, and Egypt’s Nermat Shafik, the IMF brain trust has the world covered. Lipton is another Robert Rubin protégé, who as a group, in Rickards’ words, “are extraordinary in the incompetence they displayed during their years in public and private service, and in the financial devastation they left in their wake.”

People may associate the IMF with loans to poor countries, but over 80% of its loans, according to the financial statements for the year ended April 30, 2014, are to Ireland, Greece, and Portugal.

The fund’s total credit outstanding has ramped up considerably, from 9.8 billion SDRs in 2008 to over 10 times that amount—99.7 billion SDRs in 2012—reflecting credit to prop up the countries that could have taken down European banks. President Obama urged Congress to approve US funding of $100 billion to the IMF in 2009, indicating the money would go to developing and emerging-market countries. Instead, in addition to European and US banks being propped up, Rickards writes, “taxpayer money would be used to bail out Greek bureaucrats who retired at age fifty with lifetime pensions, while Americans were working past seventy to make ends meet.”

A special drawing right is a potential claim on the freely usable currencies of IMF members. While the SDR has always been a fiat currency, its value was initially defined as equivalent to 0.888671 grams of fine gold—which at the time was also equivalent to one US dollar. When the Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1973, the SDR was redefined as a basket of currencies. Today it consists of the euro, Japanese yen, pound sterling, and US dollar.

Some experts say the SDR isn’t money, but it is very much a currency that can be used among participating countries… money created only for the world’s elite and can be created in abundance if the need arises. The ensuing inflation would show up in the usual places—gas stations and grocery stores—with the cause safely hidden away. As the IMF “is a self-perpetuating supranational organization,” explains Rickards, “the buck would stop nowhere.” Kenneth Dam wrote in his history of the IMF that some called SDRs “manna from heaven.”

Rickards points out that SDRs have been issued during periods of dollar weakness, but the IMF has ambitions to have the SDR replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Further SDR creation and the issuing of bonds denominated in SDR creating a deeper more liquid market are on the IMF’s drawing board. The 2009 issuance, at over 182 billion SDR (only 204 billion in total have been issued since the IMF’s inception) was a test drive toward greater ambitions.

If you’re still confused by SDRs, Dr. Zhu explains them with more candor than your typical central banker. “They are fake money, but they are a kind of fake money that can be real money.”

So what’s this fake money cum real money for? To slay the deflation dragon that keeps all central bankers awake at night. The IMF Articles of Agreement state that the allocation of SDRs “shall seek to meet the long-term global need, as and when it arises, to supplement existing reserve assets in such manner as will … avoid … deflation.”

Oh, and if a few central and big commercial banks get bailed out along the way, all the better.

Global debt and derivative and monetary levels are building to create a cataclysmic crash beyond what the central banks can paper over. When it happens, the IMF will act on Rahm Emanuel’s famous advice, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Bye-bye dollar; hello SDR. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.