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, August 8th, and that means it's time for Long

Read Sunday. And this week, since we've had so many big, heady things, I thought I'd do

something light and little for Long Read Sunday, so, of course, I picked an essay about the

end of the dollar's global

reserve status and what comes next. It is specifically called the end of exorbitant privilege,

inflation, the global dollar, and what comes next. It's by David Z. Morris, the man the myth,

the legend himself, Coin desk's chief insight writer, and it's actually the first of two points. So if you

like it, I'll read the other one in the weeks to come. I think it does a great job of setting up

a huge amount of what's going on in the larger macro context, so I hope you enjoy it.

The year has been rife with anxiety about inflation. Economist Lawrence Summers sent up an

early warning flare in March, speculating

that debt-financed government coronavirus pandemic relief payments could overheat the economy.

Summers got some vindication from consumer price index numbers this summer, including 5.4%

annualized CPI growth in June. Inflation terrifies people for a lot of reasons, including its

erosion of the purchasing power of wages and the value

of dollar-denominated debt. But in May, a leading foreign exchange trader named Stanley Druckeniller

warned of an even bigger long-term risk of inflation, that it might threaten the U.S. dollar's

status as the world's dominant reserve currency. The U.S. dollar is overwhelmingly the preferred

currency for international trade. For instance,

...