BREAKDOWN: Ben Hunt on Markets and Narratives in the Age of Coronavirus
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2020
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The week of February 12, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was reaching new all time highs. Meanwhile, China’s quarantine of the 11 million people in Wuhan was three weeks old and expanding to other parts of the country.
While the global equities markets have finally started to catch up to the fear of a global pandemic, the Coronavirus has been one a profound case study in the power of narratives to shape behavior. Even now, those seeking to contain the spread in the US are fighting against narratives from leadership that range from “it’s just the flu” to “it’s a hoax from the media.”
On today’s episode of The Breakdown, NLW speaks with Epsilon Theory co-founder and market theorist Ben Hunt, who makes it his business to understand how narratives are shape and shaped by the world around us.
Since the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak, Ben has been a clarion voice in the chaos. This episode is no exception.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. |
| 0:15.0 | The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:20.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown. |
| 0:22.6 | It is Wednesday, March 11th, and today we have a very special show. |
| 0:28.0 | Ben Hunt is the author of Epsilon Theory. |
| 0:31.9 | He is a market theorist. |
| 0:33.9 | He is a political scientist. |
| 0:36.2 | He has been in venture capital and hedge funds. And he has an extremely |
| 0:40.2 | acute sense of how the narrative is shaped by and shapes our actions in the world around us. |
| 0:48.2 | Regular listeners of The Breakdown know that I share this interest in narratives. For me, |
| 0:56.2 | narratives are the way that we make sense of complex phenomenon. And they're also the way that we try to project our beliefs about the world |
| 1:01.5 | to other people and try to get others to see the world the way that we see it. Now, usually when I'm |
| 1:06.9 | talking about narratives on the breakdown, we're talking about something like whether Bitcoin will act as a safe haven in a recession, or what the latest Ethereum narrative |
| 1:16.7 | is, is it Ether's Money or World Computer or something else. It's something about |
| 1:20.4 | crypto specifically. Today we're talking about something a little bit different. We're talking |
| 1:26.3 | about markets and narratives in the |
| 1:28.3 | age of the coronavirus. In early February, Ben wrote a post about the coronavirus called body count |
| 1:34.8 | that argued effectively that the attempt to control and propagate a specific narrative was outweighing |
| 1:43.5 | whatever the right policy was, in effect that |
| 1:47.1 | policymakers at the time just in China were trapped by their own narrative construction. Ben further |
| 1:53.8 | argued that this is what policymakers have been doing effectively ever since the Vietnam War, |
| 2:00.2 | where the narrative itself starts to dictate |
... |
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