The report that President Obama has promised Senator Elizabeth Warren “complete support” if she runs for president has the ring of truth. We read it in the New York Post under the byline of Edward Klein, author of the number one New York Times bestseller “Blood Feud,” about the relations between the Clintons and the Obamas. He calls the promise the President has made to Senator Warren “a stinging rebuke to his nemesis Hillary Clinton.”

Our interest in a Warren campaign has to do with the opening it would present to address what we see as the most important issue facing America — the crisis of fiat money. We wrote about this in the editorial “Elizabeth Warren’s Chance.” She entered public life through the door of bankruptcy law, which she teaches at Harvard. It’s hard to think of a door more likely to bring one face to face with the hardest truths.

Yet Mrs. Warren completely misses the story. She comprehends the importance of the explosion of the bankruptcy rate. Through much of our history it had perked along at under two, or even one, personal bankruptcy filing per one thousand Americans. Then it took off. It soared to something like six per thousand. For Mrs. Warren this is about the evil of rich people and the depredations of the big banks. But were that the problem, why did the rate suddenly take off?

After all, we’ve had rich people and banks for centuries. So there’s got to be another explanation. The explosion in the bankruptcy rate, it turns out, began in the mid-1970s, coincident with America’s default on the dollar — that is, with the end of the gold-exchange standard that was set up at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, at the end of the World War II. Could the soaring bankruptcy rate that has so energized Elizabeth Warren’s career be but a feature of the age of fiat money?

Or, to put it another way, could Senator Warren be failing to understand her own signature issue? Our point is simply that this question would make for a great campaign. It is an issue for her potential opponents to comprehend down to the ground. It is the great tragedy of John Boehner’s speakership in the House and of Governor Romney’s candidacy for president that neither of them has managed to bring this issue to the fore of the mainstream Republican campaign. A Warren candidacy would be a slow pitch.

The soaring personal bankruptcy rate isn’t the only tragedy that has emerged in the age of fiat money. We’ve also written — in “Yellen’s Missing Jobs” — of the soaring jobless rate. Between 1947 and 1971, unemployment averaged only 4.7%. Since 1971, unemployment has averaged 6.4%. “If President Obama had been able to deliver that at pre-1971 rates, he’d be bound for glory,” we’ve written. Instead, the tragedy of unemployment has consumed his entire presidency.

Even the 6.1% to which the latest jobs report indicates unemployment has fallen is nothing to cheer about. It is the same rate that obtained in 1978, when the Federal Reserve was given its second mandate — in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act — to promote full employment. It was given the assignment because of an unemployment crisis and a generation later, an unemployment crisis has consumed an entire presidency, even while the Federal Reserve has been running a radical, low-interest rate policy.

All this is material in which it would repay the Republican candidates — and, for that matter, Secretary Clinton — to become fluent. Yet only a few Republicans seem focused on the fiat dollar that lies at the heart of this political story. According to Mr. Klein, after all, President Obama is being advised by the First Lady and aide Valerie Jarrett that Elizabeth Warren is his “Mini-Me.” That is why, Mr. Klein reports, the president has promised Mrs. Warren his “complete support.” Comprehending the crisis of fiat money is the way to beat her on her own issue.