Tag: money

As I argued in my previous post the financial system is broken, and it shows itself for example as the poor are getting poorer and the rich getting richer (US gini co-efficient 1990 – 2020). At the root of the financial system is the US dollar, which is no longer backed by anything else than ‘the might of the US army / IRS’, every dollar is an IOU to some-one else.

The message we hear in main-stream media is that spending is driving the economy, that the ‘mighty US consumer’ keeps the economy rocking and that ‘2% inflation’ is something the Fed should target as a worthwhile goal so that the economy can ‘grow’. Hold those thoughts in your head for a moment.

Does that work on an individual level? If one person spends all their money, and doesn’t focus on their earning power or saving anything – will that work? No, you will go bankrupt.

Does that work on a household level? No of course not – that family would end up on the street sooner or later.

Does that work for a company? A company spending tons on fancy offices, employee salaries, growing like a weed. Sounds like WeWork, and we know how well that worked. It ONLY worked as long as the company was growing.

So WHY in the world do we think that that advice, those policies are good for a nation?

The current consumerist, wasteful, opaque, spend it now messaging is due to the demands of constant growth, which is inherent in a debt-based, inflationary system.

We saw a small deleveraging happen in after the Financial crisis and the whole system almost came crashing down – because otherwise the costs of servicing debt will become un-tolerable.

I predict that the inflationary, fractional reserve, constant growth mandate will sooner or later inevitably meet the limits of a finite, resource constrained world. We are seeing overconsumption of natural resources, overconsumption of calories / energy, leading to climate change and chronic indebtedness – both public and private. There is only so much debt that households and countries can take on – this is shown even by mainstream economists like Rogoff and Reinhart.

The alternative is a deflationary currency that incentivizes actors to save for the long-term – to adopt a ‘lower time preference’. A lower time preference encourages actors to plan long-term, postpone immediate gratification and encourages global collaboration.

A deflationary currency that is immutable – such as gold or Bitcoin, have inherent properties that are favorable for bringing about a lower time preference. The Gold standard worked well for a long time, and IMO a Bitcoin Standard would work fine as well.

Imagine a nation where politicians were not able to spend money willy-nilly, and budgets actually had to be balanced? Increases in bureaucracies would actually be questioned, instead of just pawned off on consumers to pay – eg 95% of new hires in health-care since 1990 have not been doctors, but administrators.

Imagine a nation where wars actually had to be paid for, and you would have to raise taxes if you wanted to go to war? Eg in World War I – the first thing the combatants did was drop the Gold standard. We’ve just seen how we can spend Two Trillion $ in Afghanistan, without real oversight or deliberation. How many less wars do you think we would have had, and could be avoided in the future?

Imagine a financial system where savers, wage-earners, pensioners were able to keep their earnings, savings in the base layer money and actually earn yield on that, instead of being pushed into equities and junk bonds in a reckless chase for yield, chase to keep the value of your ‘monetary energy’ intact.

And finally as as an investor which asset would you prefer to build your financial house on? The Fed balance sheet has almost 10x since 2007, and the USD is getting devalued at the rate of $120 Billion per month. Meanwhile Bitcoin is algorithmically set to get scarcer (new BTC rate is halving every four years), and has a cap of of 21M coins by 2140.

That’s algorithmically set, immutable, open-source money.

Different people in different locations and times have used different instruments – seashells, squirrel hides, large stones and metals to conduct trade. The first commodity money – coins – were minted in Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago.

The key thing here is that money is a human agreement – based on a narrative that recognizes its value. The narrative exists only in a network, and the larger the network the stronger the narrative.

Over time precious metals (mainly gold and silver) emerged as the best monetary instruments – freely chosen by the market because people agreed so, because the monetary metals had these main criteria:

1. Recognizable
2. Divisible
3. Durable
4. Incorruptible
5. Scarce
6. Fungible
7. Units of account

The First point to understand about ‘money’ is that its value primarily exists due to its salability – to transfer Value over Time and Space.

In a free-market humans have over time selected gold and silver to be used as money, mainly due to the aforementioned criteria – and because you can’t easily find/create more of it compared to existing stock (ie Gold has a High ‘stock to flow’ ratio).

The Second point to understand about Money is that Money is a Network. The more nodes in the network, the more valuable the network becomes – this is often called ‘Metcalfe’s Law’. Only with money in a network can it be used as ‘currency’ or a medium of exchange.

With these two main points established:

• Currency / money is a network between humans
• Desirable qualities of money resemble those of gold.

..We can then contemplate how should we act should a better money emerge? In a rational, free market humans would choose the money which best fulfills the criteria of money (ie that Best transfer Value over Time and Space).

The case that Bitcoin is better than Gold at being the ‘base layer’ of money is elegantly argued by the Winklewoss Twins in their piece “The case for 500k Bitcoin“.

For example this table shows that in many aspects of being money – Bitcoin is better than gold:

So why do we need a new money or alternatives to the fiat moneys – USDs, Euros and pesetas of the world? Because money is at the base of the financial system, and the current financial system is broken.

The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting left behind -and I will argue in the next post – that no amount ‘UBI’, ‘MMT” or ‘taxing the rich’ will resolve the fundamental issues.