BREAKDOWN: The History of the Dollar System From Bretton Woods to QE Infinity, Feat. Luke Gromen
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2020
⏱️ 76 minutes
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Summary
QE infinity. Corporate bailouts. Nudgin UBI. The incredible economic phenomena going on now didn’t happen out of the blue. They are the byproducts of a key events spread across the 70 year history of the US dollar led global monetary system.
Luke Gromen is the founder of Forest From The Trees, a macro/thematic research firm. In this episode, Luke provides a TL;DR on those key events that got us to where we are today, including:
- Bretton Woods and why the world went on a USD-based system rather than Keynes idea for a non-sovereign ‘bancor’ world reserve currency
- The move to the Petrodollar in the 1970s
- The financialization of commodities that started in the 1980s
- The monetary policy vacuum after the Cold War ended
- How a shift in executive compensation rules led to many of today’s problems with Wall Street
- The export of Treasury Bills as a business model
- The fallout of 2008 globally and domestically
- The end of Treasury Bill buying in 2014
- Why the Fed is the only sugar daddy left
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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. Welcome back to the breakdown. It is Wednesday, April 22nd, and boy, oh boy, do we have a good one |
| 0:26.2 | today. We are all of us living in fast forward right now. Things that we thought unthinkable |
| 0:33.6 | just weeks or months ago are now normal and are now being preceded and followed by even more |
| 0:39.4 | unimaginable things. One of the goals of this show of the breakdown is to try to contextualize |
| 0:46.9 | these incredibly fast-moving events, right? To help you place them in a framework that makes them |
| 0:53.3 | make more sense, right? That isn't just random vagaries of |
| 0:56.9 | the universe and the economy and all that sort of stuff. This requires having guests who can speak |
| 1:02.8 | not only to Bitcoin and crypto, and not only to the larger markets in their current setup, |
| 1:09.2 | but the larger historical context, including the key |
| 1:13.8 | events that got us to where we are today. My guest absolutely crushes on that front. |
| 1:20.2 | Luke Graman is the founder of Forest from the Trees, which is a macro-thematic research firm. |
| 1:25.3 | He has decades of experience in macro research. He has been featured on |
| 1:30.0 | real vision, on macro voices, basically everywhere you'd expect to hear really interesting, |
| 1:35.4 | thoughtful, big picture macro thinkers. And in this epic episode, we go deep and give you a serious |
| 1:41.9 | 70-year context on the dollar system, the role of the Fed. |
| 1:47.1 | Basically, everything that helps understand, helps explain how we got to where we are today |
| 1:52.6 | and what might come next. So we go through the Bretton Woods system and the decision to have |
| 1:58.3 | a U.S. global reserve currency system where the rest of the world's |
| 2:02.9 | currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was pegged to gold. We move on to the rise of |
| 2:08.0 | the petro dollar in the 70s and why it was a product of losing or at that time feeling like we |
| 2:13.9 | were losing the Cold War. We talk about the financialization of commodities |
... |
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