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The Breakdown

The End of an Era? Why Bitcoin and MMT Won the Week

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8786 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On The Breakdown’s Weekly Recap, NLW looks at the shifting sands of the global economy. He says Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole this week was an argument that an era that began in the 1970s is now closing.  At the same time, he argues Powell did very little to provide a vision for what comes next. Instead, it is the alternative economic philosophies – Modern Monetary Theory on the one side, bitcoin on the other – that are attracting people for a different vision of the future.

Transcript

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0:00.0

And inflation is something which most people's experience of belies what CPI-type measures

0:05.8

tell them.

0:07.0

In other words, you can squawk all you want about how there's not enough inflation,

0:11.8

but when people have spent 10 years feeling like they're getting farther behind, it doesn't

0:16.9

ring true.

0:18.6

So it was a major, major narrative misfire to focus on inflation rather

0:24.3

than growth, and in particular, a type of growth which would have been more inclusive.

0:31.5

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.

0:41.6

The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

0:50.3

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, August 29th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

0:57.0

And today I wanted to try to tie together the threads that we've been talking about all week that

1:03.5

connect the dots between Bitcoin and Jerome Powell's speech and really try to get a sense of

1:10.3

where we are big picture.

1:12.7

I'm calling this episode the end of an era.

1:16.6

So Jerome Powell this week tried to bookend an era that started with the 1970s.

1:24.2

Part of why he pointed to that time, I believe, is that Paul Volcker has risen to folk hero status

1:31.8

in economists and politicians and business people's minds, right? He was the person who was willing

1:38.1

to raise rates during a recession to wrestle inflation to the ground. Of course, he had the backing of his president to do so,

1:46.1

which puts him in a very different position to where Powell is now. But you could still see

1:51.2

this sort of sense of historicity in the presentation from the Fed chair. He tried to make the argument

1:57.8

this week that, while back then it was inflation that was the

2:01.5

problem, it is now the lack of inflation. This was, in fact, the absolute centerpiece of his

...

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