Here's what actually happened:

Nixon's closing of the gold window in 1971 brought us the fiat currency system that everyone has used for a total of 49 years. In 2020, the mass of all of the material that was bult by humans began exceeding the mass of the planet's biosphere, which means 2020 marks the end of the Holocene and 2021 marks the beginning of the Anthropocene. The limits to growth theory states that collapse would occur between 2030 and 2050, and it was published in 1972 by Donella Meadows et al. The reasons why the permanent collapse would occur between 2030 and 2050 is that the planet is running out of resources to sustain civilization, which would cause food and industrial production to drop dramatically after 2010-2015.