Proponents speaks passionately about a digital miracle that can save the world from financial ruin. The Bitcoin story starts off like a gospel revelation. ibid.
The block-chain technology: a global open ledger which can be used to share much more than just money. ibid.
Since 1971 the US dollar and the global financial system have been based solely upon faith: faith in the guardian of that currency and of that system: the American Central Bank, the Federal Reserve. As the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar is how we measure our time, our products, our self world. Ours is a system based on trust and confidence, both of which began to disappear in the Fall of 2007. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve, 2013
According to many economists and senior Fed officials, it was the Fed itself in the eye of the storm. ibid.
In 1910 Senator Nelson Aldrich summoned New York’s most powerful bankers to an island off the coast of Georgia to secretly negotiate plans for an American central bank: Jekyll Island. ibid.
In the 1920s the Fed reached beyond its original mandate and began to use this new-found power to steer the US economy. ibid.
‘We would have the kingdom of heaven right here in the United States of America.’ ibid. Jim Grant
At Bretton Woods the US had promised to be the world’s reserve currency backed by gold. But the Fed had created far more dollars than it could ever redeem in gold. And now the US could no longer keep that promise. ibid.
For the first time in history the dollar was just a piece of paper backed only by faith in the Federal Reserve and its policies. That promise was only as good as the Fed actions behind it … The dollar lost more than half its value. ibid.
What followed was the longest economic expansion and largest stock market boom in US history. ibid.
The Trouble with Bubbles: Japan was a cautionary tale of what can happen when stock market real estate bubbles explode in a frenzy of speculation, as they did in Tokyo in the 1980s. ibid.
Greenspan’s ideology won out … The nation’s most powerful banking regulator considered regulation itself obsolete. ibid.
He quickly responded with a series of interest rate cuts to soften the blow. ibid.
‘The Federal Reserve ended up encouraging a housing boom.’ ibid. Bill Poole
The greatest credit bubble in history. ibid.
Able to borrow money for nothing and earning huge fees for lending it out, Wall Street began simply giving money away. ibid.
‘It was a Ponzi scheme connived in by federal agencies. ibid.
‘The Bernanke Fed really blew it. They didn’t see it coming.’ ibid. commentator
The Problem with Models: A bank run but one that bore relation to those of the past involving not just the banks the Fed was created up to protect but the hedge funds, investment banks and insurance conglomerate the Fed had allowed to hide from its oversight. ibid.
Our lives revolve around money … Who ever controls the money, controls us. Dark Net s2e3: My Money, Showtime 2016
This is a new kind of mining: not for gold or silver but for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a form of digital cash used on the internet. It appeared on the net as a monetary manifesto … No-one knows for sure who created it. ibid.
We’re on the trail of an organised crime gang that laundered British drugs cash around the world. We reveal how the financial system failed to stop the dirty money. We expose the big city firm that covered up evidence of crime. And we meet the whistleblowers whose lives were destroyed after speaking out. Panorama: Following the Drug Money, BBC 2019
Transitioning from an inflationary world to a deflationary world – people should be scared. There is going to be disruption and that disruption is coming no matter what. There is nothing fundamental that governments can do to stop the rate of technology progress. Jeff Booth, interview The Keiser Report August 2020, author ‘The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future’
You have technology moving at an exponential pace driving prices down, and governments all around the world [are] caught in an inflationary trap that they created themselves out of monetary policy, fighting that force. And I would ask a simple question – isn’t it good when the value of your money goes up, and prices go down? ibid.
The abundance of technology would be broadly distributed. ibid.
It’s not going to go on for ever no matter what … It doesn’t matter until it does. One giant thing they miss that this is they assume a reserve currency goes on for ever, right, and you can just keep printing and people just trust in your currency. ibid.
What if a country, let’s say China, created a currency and decided to keep on printing for ever, and they used the currency and they used it to buy the world? … Would we trust that currency? ibid.
And so you can see from that thought experiment that if you just keep on printing money, people lose faith in your currency, and so you don’t have a reserve currency any more. So there’s a whole bunch of people like I think are like brainwashed in this ‘debt doesn’t matter’, that this can go on for ever. And it’s going to happen gradually … There is nothing that can that stop this. We are going to have deflation for sure. Structurally, technology requires it. The path to get to deflation could end up through hyper-inflation first – currency default, debt default – it could happen a whole bunch of different ways but we are going to have deflation anyhow. ibid.
The concentration of wealth because you’re fighting a natural force – Capitalism can’t work, right, so effectively the Government is the market today. Free market principles don’t work any more. ibid.
Deflation we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. What if next year everything around you got cheaper? All it does is increase the value of your savings, and decrease the value of your assets. ibid.
Why do you think the top five technology companies are at historic heights? ibid.
Everybody knows it. ibid.
More band-aids on a systematic, a structural change that has to take place. And so what they’re really trying to stop is a revolution, right, but they’re making the revolution more likely. ibid.
The Myth of Money: It’s a myth, something so insistent, as Barthes put it, that we accept it without question. Once, money was worth its weight in metal; today, it’s flimsy paper at best. An abstract idea with value only because we’ve so used to it being something valuable. To buttress money’s authority, banknotes are adorned with symbols of the nation state and the face of prestigious historical figures conveying a legitimacy and stability. 21st Century Mythologies with Richard Clay, BBC 2020
What happens if you subvert the myth and protest, maybe by using art? ibid.
M1 money supply has increased yet another $210B in the week between Nov 23 and Nov 30 on top of the $500B the week prior, that’s over $700B in 2 weeks. M1 Money supply of the United States has increased by 64.5% since the beginning of 2020. There is no history for this. None. Sven Heinrich, NorthmanTrader twitter December 2020, cited Keiser Report
Are you good at saving money? Could you retire at 50? How some highrollers are investing their cash. And are savers being treated fairly? Tonight: Spend or Save? Making Your Money Work, ITV 2021
For the past thirty years politicians in Britain have tried to build a new prosperity. They wanted to make an old nation that had fallen behind in the world recapture the glories of its past. They turned for help to what they believed was a science of money. One after another Labour and Conservative governments believed that if they followed what they thought were a set of scientific laws, the economy would grow faster. The perceived tide of decline could be reversed. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box: A Fable from the Age of Science III: The League of Gentlemen, BBC 1992
Politicians came to believe there was a technical way to make Britain great again. ibid.
In 1961 the Conservative government set up NEDDY, the National Economic Development Council, in what had been a gentlemen’s club in Westminster. It was advised by young economists convinced they could make the economy grow much faster. ibid.
They saw themselves as followers of the economist Maynard Keynes. He had shown how to manage an economy by increasing or decreasing demand. ibid.
Labour promised a national plan run by a separate department of economic affairs under George Brown. It would make Britain grow by a quarter in just six years … But Labour had come to power just as the boom the Conservatives had begun was overheating. Imports were flooding in and wages were rising. ibid.
The economists who had began to realise the economy was far beyond their control; they were being used. ibid.
The attempt to plan growth had failed. Britain was left with little expansion and political disaster. Most economists blamed it on the government’s failure to devalue. ibid.