BREAKDOWN: Why Debt Can’t Buy More Growth, Feat. Jeff Booth
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2020
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund.
Two powerful and diametrically opposed forces are shaping the economy.
On the one hand is inflationary economic policy, which keeps the price of assets like real estate and stocks rising ever higher, but at the expense of savings as the value of currency depreciates.
On the other is technology-wrought deflation. As technology increases its capacity exponentially, it causes everything it touches to be less expensive.
Jeff Booth is the author of “The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future.” In this conversation, he and NLW discuss:
- How today’s system came to be designed
- Why policy makers are terrified of deflation
- Why inflationary policy punishes savers and forces them into riskier markets
- How policy that prioritizes asset holders over savers has significantly exacerbated inequality
- Why each dollar of debt is producing less real economic growth than ever before
- Why proposed “solutions” like MMT and UBI paper over the root causes of the problem
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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. |
| 0:12.0 | This episode is sponsored by ArisX.com, the Stellar Development Foundation, and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. |
| 0:20.0 | The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:22.6 | Here's your host, NLW. |
| 0:27.7 | Welcome back to The Breakdown. |
| 0:29.8 | It is Wednesday, May 13th, and today we are looking at an incredibly interesting challenge |
| 0:35.2 | for the modern economy. |
| 0:40.5 | Two conflicting, contradictory forces that are shaping the economy in two totally different directions and are increasingly at odds with |
| 0:44.9 | one another. |
| 0:45.8 | On the one hand, we have an inflationary economic policy that makes currency worth less |
| 0:51.3 | over time, but assets worth more, benefiting people who have the ability |
| 0:56.2 | to invest in real estate and stocks and other financial assets over people who save, whose |
| 1:02.2 | savings are inherently worth less over time. |
| 1:05.5 | That's force one. |
| 1:07.1 | Force two is the inevitably an inherently deflationary power of technology. As technology grows |
| 1:14.5 | exponentially in terms of its capacity, its processing power, it drives prices down everywhere |
| 1:21.2 | it touches. Think about phones which didn't even exist, cell phones and mobile phones, which didn't |
| 1:26.7 | even exist a couple decades |
| 1:28.2 | ago, that now give people more power than anyone had in the world, any leader had, even just |
| 1:34.5 | 20 or 30 years ago. These things are now affordable by everyone. And if technology were allowed to |
| 1:41.1 | wreak its havoc, to have its way on every industry, would have a similar |
| 1:45.6 | deflationary force on all of the prices around us. These two forces are in huge contrast with one |
... |
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