If that point is that a lot of money goes to chasing stupid things for the sake of making more money,

not making society better and more productive in the future, well, yeah, that's sort of part of

the deal when it comes to free market capitalism. I think it's a fundamental type of financial

ludicism to take this point of view too far, and certainly to apply it to Bitcoin.

In fact, I think one could pretty compellingly argue that Bitcoin's main function for many

of its users is to preserve the capital available to be deployed for future productive purposes.

If a person is holding to preserve their wealth in the face of inflation, that means they're

going to be able to deploy that capital to other things instead of seeing its value evaporate

to the benefit of no one.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin,

and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, July 12th, and we're going to kick off this week with one of our sort of extended brief editions, where instead of going massively in depth on one topic, I'm going to hop and skip across a few.

One note, if my voice sounds a little janky, I have whatever sickness every kid on the planet

Earth has right now post-COVID as it comes back. But either way, let's dive in with our title

story. The Wall Street Journal does a regular poll of economists, and you can more or less guess

the gist of the sentiment from the headline. Quote, higher inflation is here to stay for years, economists forecast.

This set of Wall Street Journal surveyed economists now expect inflation excluding food and

energy to be up 3.2% in Q4 of this year, and they expect the annual rise to hover around

2.3% in 2022 and 2023. If that plays out, it would mean an average annual

inflation rate of 2.58% from 2021 to 2023, which would be the highest since 1993.

...