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 Sunday, July 25th, and that means it's time for Long Reads Sunday.

And today we have a bunch of my favorite things. First, we're reading a Nick Carter piece.

Always good. Can't miss with that. Second, we get to talk about history. Third, we get to fight a little fud. All in all, excellent Long Read Sunday. Glad to have you

here. The piece is called why central bankers invoke free banking to attack stable coins. And it's a

specific response to a paper from a sitting fed lawyer

as well as a professor at Yale who recently wrote a pretty anti-stable coin paper. So, without any

further ado, let's dive into why central bankers invoke free banking to attack stablecoins.

If you're going to warn people about stable coins by citing 19th century history, you should

at least include the full record.

If you pay attention to central bank gadget prop, you may have noticed an interesting trend.

Central bankers are increasingly fond of making references to monetary history, specifically

the pre-Civil War period in the US.S. That was when the U.S.

entered a monetary era known as free banking. As it's characterized today, this was a

rollicking time rife with bank failures and monetary instability, in which banknotes traded at a

discount to par reflecting the creditworthiness of the bank. As the central bankers tell it,

if you were to take

a Tennessee banknote to New York, for instance, your money might not have been accepted at par.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the vast majority of banknotes were issued privately by banks

mostly regulated by individual states. Our monetary elite has become fixated on this period recently. In May, Federal Reserve

...