BREAKDOWN: Why Monetary Debasement Is Here to Stay, Feat. Dr. Vikram Mansharamani
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2020
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From technology to aging demographics, some of the most important trends shaping the economy have been deflationary. What happens when that rapidly changes?
This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.
Today on the Brief:
- FTX lists two Compound tokens
- Reddit partners with Ethereum Foundation on Layer 2 scaling
- Black-In Freedom Festival reimagines Juneteenth
Our main topic:
Dr. Vikram Mansharamani is a lecturer at Harvard and author of “Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst” as well as the just released “Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence.”
In this wide-ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss:
- Why our relationship with experts and expertise is leading us astray
- How COVID-19 shows the downside of both over-reliance on, and complete rejection of, experts
- How the economic crisis surrounding COVID-19 is bursting bubbles and moving us from a period defined by deflation to one defined by inflation
- Why “monetary debasement is here to stay”
- Why the U.S.-China relationship is the key backdrop for understanding the next 10 years of global economic reality
- Why inequality threatens the fabric of our economy and our society, and what might be done about it
Find our guest online:
Twitter: @mansharamani
Website: Vikram Mansharamani | “THINK FOR YOURSELF”
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. |
| 0:13.0 | This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Cipher Trace. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:22.6 | And now, here's your host, NLW. |
| 0:27.9 | Welcome back to The Breakdown. |
| 0:30.1 | It is Friday, June 19th, and today my guest is Dr. Vikram Man Sharmani, the author of the new book, Think for Yourself. It's a really |
| 0:39.5 | extending and wide-ranging conversation, and I'm super excited to share it with you. But first, |
| 0:45.1 | the brief. First up on the brief today, FDX is listing Compounds token. So what happened? |
| 0:51.8 | Compound is obviously making news everywhere. I covered it briefly on the brief |
| 0:55.1 | yesterday. It is sort of the new Defy hotness and it is dragging a number of concepts to the |
| 1:01.1 | forefront in Defy, including yield farming and all these other really interesting decentralized |
| 1:06.3 | financial engineering concepts effectively. What happened is that FTX is going to list both |
| 1:11.6 | comp and CUSDT. CUSDT is compound's interest token and comp is compound's governance token. The price |
| 1:20.0 | of comp has rocketed up. It was over $200 per comp when I was recording this. And the total |
| 1:25.9 | market cap in comp is now over what Maker is. So |
| 1:29.4 | obviously a leading defy light. Why is this interesting? I mean, for me, the real nut of it is |
| 1:35.1 | that there is clearly bull market energy around defy, and even if that doesn't reflect a new |
| 1:40.3 | influx of users or buyers to actually kind of drive those big gains, it certainly suggests |
| 1:46.4 | a real excitement that if you are watching the crypto industry is worth noting. |
| 1:51.7 | Before I leave this, I want to quickly go over who I think should care about Defi, and right |
| 1:57.6 | now I think there are really two main categories. The first is, honestly, just people who have the |
| 2:04.0 | time to dig in deep on some really novel concepts that straddle both financial engineering as well as |
| 2:09.6 | technical engineering. If you are willing to take some time and learn, and you are interested in |
... |
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