Spain

Spain's decline in wealth in the mid 1600’s can be tracked by the world's influx of silver and the world silver trade. This was  very bad considering that Spain was having an underpopulation problem. Productive people were being chased out for their religious differences and plague kept killing people off. Their population actually went down over the course of this century. Food became way way more expensive, which ended up really hurting Spain. When this happened it led to major poverty and ended up killing many children.Part of Spain's decline was its reliance on an influx of gold and silver from the New World. That influx kept the elite in new money but inflating the currency caused a devaluation of the gold and silver in circulation. The price of everything was going up. They needed to release the power of the people's productivity from state controls. But states and authoritarians hate to give up their control. This is a highly relevant point because we  live in a world where, through the Obama and Biden years, our  currency has been constantly inflated to keep the elite happy while government controls money.