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.

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What's going on, guys? It is Friday, August 27th, and today is one of the big days for central bankers.

It's the day of the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.

This is an event that the Kansas City Fed holds each year, and as I mentioned earlier

in the week, it's sort of like TED, but for central bankers. It's a chance for them to get a little

bit more big-brained and meta than normal policy speeches. That can be making big, wild arguments

like outgoing Bank of England Governor Mark Carney did a few years ago. He proposed the

end of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency and the introduction of what he called a synthetic hegemonic

currency. Effectively John Maynard Kean's idea of a bank or which he proposed at Bretton Woods

as an alternative to U.S. dollar hegemony, and effectively Libra without Facebook.

However, Jackson Hole can also be a chance to signal a new direction in monetary policy for those

in power. That is certainly why there has been so much anticipation this year around the Jackson

Hall event. The question on everyone's minds,

indeed a question that has been on everyone's minds for some time, is when the taper begins.

Now, Taper refers to the idea of the Fed starting to pull back its incredibly dovish monetary policy.

That would mean reducing bond purchases and especially eventually raising interest rates.

The word taper itself also references the famous taper tantrum, where markets got extremely mad at the

pullback of QE after the great financial crisis. Throughout much of this year, there has been

disagreement between the Fed and the markets around how

long the Fed can sustain current policies. Basically, the Fed has said that there is still a ton of

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