The Geopolitical Implications of a Too-Strong Dollar, Feat. Brent Johnson

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2020

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You know the meme: Money printer go brrr. It means inflation right? Not necessarily, says Brent Johnson. Since 2016-2017, Johnson has been arguing the big economic issue of our time isn’t inflation of the U.S. dollar due to excess money printing, but the havoc caused by a global system where the dollar keeps getting stronger and sucks up liquidity from the rest of the world. As the dollar has strengthened over the COVID-19 crisis, his ideas look more prescient than ever. In this conversation with NLW, Johnson discusses: What the “Dollar Milkshake Theory” is Why the implications of the theory stress him out, even though he created it Why everything is relative and no asset can be analyzed in a vacuum Why we could see the dollar, bitcoin and gold rise at the same time Why we can’t discuss macroeconomics without discussing geopolitics and even the military

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.
0:28.1	Welcome back to The Breakdown.
0:30.4	It is Thursday, May 28th.
0:32.2	And one quick thing before we dive into the interview,
0:34.4	I was really excited to see how many of you have responded to my request yesterday for beta testers for some new bonus content, newsletter content, mini podcast,
0:43.6	micro podcasts. I basically just have a bunch of ideas of things that I want to experiment with
0:47.7	with the breakdown listener community. So if you are interested in learning more about that,
0:52.7	participating in some content beta tests,
0:55.4	email me at nLW at whittamore.io, or hit me up on Twitter DMs at NLW, and I will get back to you
1:02.4	later this week. But with that said, let's move to our main topic for today, which is the geopolitics of
1:09.6	the dollar milkshake theory. My guest today is Brent Johnson.
1:14.1	Brent Johnson is the CEO of Santiago Capital. He's a really well-known thinker around the dollar
1:20.0	and just macroeconomics writ large. He's been on Real Vision. He's frequently featured as a
1:24.9	commentator in economic and political media. And I was really excited to get to talk with him about his theory of the dollar milkshake.
1:33.1	And so basically, this theory is all about how the dollar and the U.S. economy in general is in this
1:39.5	position to basically just suck up all the liquidity from around the world with huge implications for
1:45.7	asset prices, for emerging economies. And it's really interesting. As you'll hear, there are a lot of
1:51.5	people who get frustrated with this theory, including Brent himself. He talks at one point about
1:56.7	how this theory came out of a lot of intense study, not him wishing that were this way. So
	...

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