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 Saturday, December 16th. And instead of doing the traditional

weekly recap, as I usually do on Saturdays, instead I'm going to do something that's a little

bit different. So tomorrow I have my last long read Sunday

of the year. I'm reading one of the most popular pieces from CoinDesk's op-ed section for the year. But

after that, through the end of the year, it's the breakdowns end-of-year extravaganza.

This is a chance for me to interview people that I think are super interesting about the year that

was in 2021 and

about what they expect to come in 2022. And as part of that, I write down a whole slew of

questions that I find interesting and then sort of bob and weave through them based on

whoever's in the interview. I thought it would be useful, at least for myself, to kind of

wrap my head around what I think about these things, is to actually

go answer these questions in something of a similar order. So what I'm going to do is I'm going

to go rapid fire through this set of questions that I have that are the pool that I draw

these end-of-year questions from. And I've done no prep for this. So the goal really isn't to interview myself for anything

weird or indulgent like that. I kind of just think it's fun to answer these questions in

rapid order, and it will also give me a chance to not spend too much time on my own point

of view when I'm interviewing everyone else. So let's dive into this barrage of questions from

the end of year question pool.

What was the most important economic story of 2021? I think you can take this in a couple different

...