The Breakdown - How the U.S.' $2 Trillion Stimulus Will Expose the Monetary System’s Flaws

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

CoinDesk’s Chief Content Officer Michael Casey and Head of Research Noelle Acheson join for a lively debate about the new $2 trillion stimulus package and era of “unlimited” QE, including: Whether (and on what time scale) fiscal and monetary stimulus might lead to inflation Whether the Fed buying corporate bonds amounts to a nationalization of the bond markets Why the appearance of a ‘digital dollar’ in an earlier stimulus proposal was a huge surprise How a digital dollar in the form proposed would upset the balance of power between the Fed, commercial banks, and citizens  Why trust in governments and financial institutions is likely to achieve new lows in the wake of COVID-19 Why people are reevaluating the meaning and purpose of money   

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Wednesday, March 25th, and last night, news broke that a huge stimulus package had been reached in principle agreement between the White House and lawmakers. It is set to provide some $2 trillion to individual citizens affected. by the coronavirus in the form of $1,200 checks, as well as, of course, a huge amount of corporate support and bailouts that make the $1,200 look tiny in comparison. I don't know if the government expected a chorus of cheers or pats on the back, but it is not

what they're getting. I don't know anyone who is happy about this from a regular citizen's perspective. Looking across the crypto scene, you have Meltem Demiris from coin shares writing multi-tweet threads that end in, if I seem like I'm angry, it's because I am. I'm in my mid-30s and my government is selling my future to bail out their buddies who run banks, hedge funds, airlines, cruise lines, casinos, and donate to their campaigns. It's a load of horseshit. Pomp says, so let me get this straight. The government shut down small business and forced record levels of unemployment in a matter of weeks, but Wall Street gets the majority of the aid. Average person gets $1,200 and still has to

pay all their bills on time? What a joke. These are dyed in the wool capitalists. These are investors through and through, and this is radicalizing even them. Now, we are going to be debating the specifics of the stimulus for years to come. We are in a moment of fundamental change. But on this episode of the breakdown, I wanted to get some more perspectives and debates and discussion about just all of the stimulus that we've seen this week, both from the fiscal level, as well as from the Federal Reserve level. And so Michael Casey and Noel Atchison from CoinDesk are back, And where we start the conversation is with a surprise inclusion of a digital dollar in one of the proposed bills earlier this week. The digital dollar was put in, it seems, as a mechanism to distribute this aid efficiently and effectively to citizens in need.

And it wasn't long for this world. As we get into, there are many reasons why the way that it was proposed basically made it DOA. But I do believe that we are seeing a radical increase in acceleration of the timeline at which we will be debating things. like a digital dollar. Now, of course, these debates will be in the context of a much larger, systemic discussion of the way that governments and economies function together that is going to set the tone for the next decade or more, I believe, end the wake of this. This is a wide-ranging conversation, as I said, it starts with the digital dollar. It ends with my utter frustration at the cynicism of the government saying, on the one hand, that

there's going to be 30% unemployment potentially within weeks and on the other having a $1,200, one-time check be their answer. But if you want both informed, thoughtful analysis from Noel and Michael, but also some just utter frustration from me, this might be the episode for you. So as usual, with a long interview, it is edited only very lightly. It's very free-flowing. So I hope you enjoy this. And I will be back tomorrow with another episode of the breakdown. Until then, stay safe and figure out what you're going to spend your $1,200 on. Peace, guys. All right, everyone, Welcome back. I am joined again by Michael Casey and Noel Acheson. Thanks for being here, guys. Nice to be here. Thank you to have this, Nathaniel. This week has been phenomenal and unthinkable.

Every week is less thinkable than the week previous, it seems. And this week, you know, as we're actually seeing this incredible stimulus package come to fruition, it is fundamentally calling into question a number of relationships that we have historically understood as just fixed and permanent in terms of citizens vis-a-vis their banks and vis-a-vis the Federal Reserve and vis-a-vis the Federal Reserve to the stock market. And all of these things seem up for grabs in this moment of crisis. And so where we want to start the conversation today is around a very unexpected moment on Monday when Nancy Pelosi's stimulus bill had a digital dollar introduced within it. And the idea of this digital dollar was that it would be a mechanism to distribute stimulus funds directly to the citizens who are going to get them.

And this actually didn't last long. It was only about 24 hours before this thing was ripped out. And there was a huge variety of outcries that I think we're going to get into a little bit about this. But the idea that a digital dollar might be a mechanism as part of this stimulus was something that I don't think a lot of people saw coming. In fact, as we speak and as we record this, although it moved away from the ultimate stimulus bill, it did get reintroduced by Sherrod Brown as a separate independent bill, which is floating somewhere off in the ether right now. So it's still very up in the air, but I think that it has accelerated the conversation around what digitization of the dollar and the relationship between regular citizens and the Fed might be. So this was a different problem that a digital dollar was trying to solve

than we've previously spoken about. Actually, Michael, this is something you've been tracking for a while. Maybe you could just give us a sense of how this digital dollar was different, maybe than the digital dollar we were talking about three weeks ago or four weeks ago. For those of this who have been sort of covering the crypto world and the digital currency world for five or six years now, to have suddenly have seen this thing land in a public forum like that in the context of a bill that was like as important as this, it was just stunning. There will be a before and after of this moment, even though, you know, whether or not this thing gets killed or not, it is now part of the public debate and that is a critical thing. We have to also line that up against what China's doing. You've got China taking its digital dollar, now there's things out there. But you're absolutely right.

This is not to be thought of as a Fed coin, I think, right? As something that is necessarily going to be the digitization of the dollar itself. I think it needs to be thought of at least for now because it will evolve if it goes forward at all as a mechanism for distributing. essential emergency fiscal stimulus funds in a very targeted way. And I think that this actually dovetails with some of the projects that emerged, you know, maybe three or four years ago, early conversations around how the technology that Bitcoin had introduced could be taken on board by governments. There's a project called Govcoin that I think is still vaguely alive in the UK that was

about welfare distribution and it was all about, okay, how could we use this as a much better way to avoid middlemen, have better control over where the funds are going. It's actually much more of a sort of control mechanism than it is a freedom of access thing, possibly antithesis in certain respects to a kind of a more libertarian view of currencies. But the point was this is a much better effective way to deliver value to the recipients. And I think that's kind of where the thinking is here. It goes in a little bit to what, you know, Rashid Talib's, What seems like a crazy idea of the trillion dollar coin, Bitcoin has hated. I think it's not as crazy

as people think it is. It's just a way to sort of put funds in the hands of the government can then be distributed effectively. We're in a crisis mode. The money has to get out quickly. That's kind of where I think the thinking around this digital dollar actually was. So I mean, to use crypto terms, this is an air drop mechanism, right? It's a mechanism to distribute that money quickly to tons of people. Now, one of the parts of the proposal that was in that original bill was that every citizen would get a Fed account. They called it a Fed account all one word. And this was one of the big pieces of consternation for a lot of the folks who quickly came out against this was this seemed to them to effectively, totally bypass the normal relationship between commercial banks, the Fed, and U.S. citizens.

So maybe you can walk us through just the implications of that and how to contextualize it, right? Because there was an immediate reaction, and your point, it seems, I think, is that there's a couple different ways to look at really what the implications of this new system were. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, all digital currency proposals that are out there, these CBDC, Central Bank digital currencies, that is precisely why they are important. And there's many reasons why it actually could be a very good thing, right? I mean, forget the level of control and surveillance and all of that. If there's ways to resolve that, that's important. But the other one is the banks are these intermediaries. They impose friction, they impose costs.

They have all sorts of political. The 2008 crisis was all about the fact that we depend upon these too big to fail banks to keep our payment system running. If we didn't depend on them for payments, we wouldn't care whether they collapsed, right? So removing banks from the system isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just raises all these other concerns about it is the government surveilling me and so forth. My sense is that whole structure was badly worded. I mean, I don't know why it needed to be called a Fed account.

I think that was just totally leaping the gun because regardless of whether or not, you know, we think it would be good to bypass banks in payment systems. I actually do think it would be. The act of getting there is so, so, so disruptive to the banking system, which we unfortunately still depend upon that the transition would be horrible. I mean, you'd have a run on the banks and everything else, right? And as much as that might eventually be a good thing, happening fast, would undermine everything else. So I'm surprised that they even, I mean, it really should be a direct account to the federal government, not a direct account to the Federal Reserve.

That's where I would have thought those funds were being distributed from, which means the relationship that I'm having is with my government, not with this other amorphous thing, which is the central bank, which is the monetary authority. It's a very different relationship. But by calling it a Federal Reserve account, it really was leapfrogging to this more radical idea of the future. Yeah, so it almost made it DOA. It's like the type of debate that maybe there's a good debate to be had. But in this context, when the idea theoretically is that you're looking for a fast solution that we can all kind of get on board with, it's unlikely. The implications just seem too great to even dive into, you know. Yeah, I would imagine that the Federal Reserve had a hand in killing that, right?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, so I think the meta theme in some ways is maybe it didn't get there, but it would have the part of the reason that it couldn't is that it proposed such a different relationship and structure than the way the system works now. But this is not the only time this week that we've seen changes in how these different parts of the market and the government interact with one another. Earlier in the week, we saw the beginning of unlimited QE, right? So, Noel, maybe you can walk us into how we went from what we were talking about last week in terms of 700 billion of stimulus, you know, 500 million in treasuries and 200 billion in mortgage-backed securities, to where we are now, which is effectively unlimited QE across a huge array of asset classes. Yeah, sure. But before I start going into that and remind me to come back to this point, pulling on what we are talking about now, the Fed account thing, I think part of the problem that it had to start off with is that so many people don't really fully understand the difference between the federal government and the federal reserves.

So calling it the Fed account is going to keep a lot of confusion there. When it comes to the surveillance, a very small handful of us care about that. My concerns about that are slightly different, and I'll briefly outline them before we get into the QE thing because it is actually kind of related. They would also like to push back on the general sentiment out there that while there is so much whiplash this week, you're totally right in that. And sure enough, the sudden appearance of a digital dollar in the stimulus package,

that is whiplash. This isn't too far removed from what we were looking at three, four years ago when we started looking at CBDCs. The Fed coin proposal originally did talk about enhancing the Fed's ability to manage monetary policy. And I believe it was even hinted that the time would come when we would need that. Little did we expect it would be so soon and little did we expect it would be because of a virus. But that was one of the reasons why a Fed account in everyone's hands was touted as being something that would help with economic management, monetary management. above everything else, because it does make it possible to have negative interest rates. If we can have cash, you can't really have negative interest rates.

However, that's a totally different discussion. My problem with the approach of the Fed account is who gets one, who decides who gets one, and how is that going to be isolated from political interference? I mean, even if we just decide that everyone with a Social Security number gets a Fed account, that I guess by extension means that no illegal immigrants would, even if they have been there for 20 years and paid taxes. And that in itself is a political decision, which I'm sure the Federal Reserve would very much like to stay away from. So that's a different thing to look into. The QE that you brought up, there's a minefield to unpack there.

This is an extension of that, a necessary extension of that. I think we mentioned last week or maybe in some other conversation that the QE that we know and love, and I live in Europe and we've been living with it for as long as you have, if not longer, even at no end in sight, is not about putting money into the hands of the consumers. It's about supporting markets. That's all that QE can do. QE can do nothing but support capital markets. That's a good thing to do.

But it doesn't help put food on the table. And we have to get our heads around the fact that we are at war. a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. This is a very sad fact of the shutdown that we're seeing across the world at the moment. I don't know if you guys saw the paper or the essay that James Bullard from the head of the St. Louis Fed put out, I think it was yesterday, day before, days are blurring. I don't know if that happens to you, where he's expecting 30% unemployment in the US. 30% unemployment in a country that doesn't have a great welfare system is going to push people to the brink of starvation. So this putting money into people's hands is necessary to avoid the social revolt that, let's face it, we know could happen and we definitely want to avoid.

So how do you do that? You put money into people's hands. One thing that in Europe we marvel at is that in America you still use checks. I mean, is the government really going to mail checks to people? I haven't seen a check in decades. Mailing checks to people means you need to have an address that already reduces the potential impact. people who don't have an address, arguably perhaps, are the people that most need this help. So, okay, everyone can have a digital wallet, the problem that I just raised. Okay, but who? What about the people who are unbanked, underbanked, that kind of thing? Yes, they're taken into account in this, but exactly how do you get them a digital wallet?

Maybe they don't even have a phone. Maybe they're not technologically savvy. Maybe they're not even legal in the country. And again, arguably perhaps those are the people that most need this kind of handout. But, and then I'll wind down on this rather sobering thought, if we are putting money in the hands of the consumers, however necessary it may be, at a time when supply is tight because of various supply chain restrictions, that is inflationary. That is inflationary at a time that the government has, that the Federal Reserve has no tools with which to combat that. I'm not so sure that it is at this stage inflationary, Noel. Well, I think that this is, there's also a massive demand shock underway, right?

I mean, we know that it began with the supply constraints, but all of those conferences that have been shut down, all of those travel orders that have been shut down, all of that's a massive demand constraint, right? So the excess supply of money is going to be meeting, I could have a shutdown and demand as well. Without that demand, then the inflationary impact doesn't happen. Where I think the inflation comes is down the road, right? I'm not saying that they're not inflationary risks in this.

What it does to faith in the entire system itself, such that when demand does come back and the Fed is suddenly sitting there with a massive balance sheet of everything, it owns America, right? It now is sitting on all of that credit risk, and its independence has been challenged by the fact that it's been buying up everything. That then is where we move into what I call my sort of Argentinization of America. And that's a scary thought. I'm not saying it's going to get there, but that's the inflation vehicle to me.

Not right now because I was thinking about this as well. And I was thinking, oh, my goodness, there's going to be inflation because we have a supply shock. And so there's no goods to be purchased. I actually think you've got a kind of synchronous kind of collapse and demand and supply at the same time. And therefore, it's not now. It's in the future. It's more about the institutional breakdown that creates inflation rather than the macroeconomic circumstances of the current moment. And it's therefore a laid effect rather than an immediate one.

Yeah, I don't disagree with you that's going to happen later. It's certainly not going to happen now, not in the US and not in Europe. But it has already been happening in many of the emerging economies, which are increasingly important in this globalized world. And the withdrawal from globalization, the unwinding of globalization, has already started to push prices up. Globalization brought prices down. You unwind that.

Prices of manufacturing are going to start going up. We haven't started to see that yet because the supply chains are constricted. And as you say, there isn't the demand. But the demand that the handout that the Fed is contemplating here in its stimulus package isn't about let's go on holiday, let's go to the movies, it's about let's not starve. And so that is going to have a kind of different impact on the price of food, which is in the inflation basket. The price of a lot of the things that QE is pushing up, for that they're not in the inflation

basket. The technology is not reflected adequately in the inflation basket. A lot of it is going to be an accounting thing. But that doesn't matter because there's so many policies that are still linked to that number, however badly it may be calculated. The of the banking system going forward like you had in Argentina, it's very safe to say that most of the U.S. banks and European banks are much stronger now than they have ever been. Even now with the credit crunch that we have coming, there isn't much of a doubt that they'll be okay through their capital requirements as something that you didn't get in Argentina. But it also it's a payments thing. We've talked about that before.

It's going to be a get money into the hands of people thing so that they can pay for things, is what we've been talking about here. And the major concern is that should inflation come up, be it soon, be it later, what's the Fed going to do? Key debate, right? So I don't know, I've had, and Noel, you've had this conversations with economists for years as well, but I've always had them to say, okay, what is inflation, right? So there's a one-off inflation, right, which just,

which is something that may well and deference. We could see the CPI jump, certainly because of that food basket thing you're referring to. That's always a possibility. That is not inflation, right? That's an increase. The question is, does it then get baked into the cycle? So that higher prices, beget higher wages,

beget higher prices and wages, and it just gets this vicious cycle. And that's why, you know, Milton Friedman always said inflation is, what is it always, and everywhere a monetary phenomenon or something? The end of the day, it's how much money's out there. And my view is that addendum to Freedman and say it's that plus institutional confidence in the system of managing that money, such that its entire political framework is one that those who use that money trust. And so, yes, the inflation gets fed by the process of price rises, but if it doesn't have the framework of aggregate demand to perpetuate it, it doesn't continue. and that then becomes a question of this institutional question.

Where I'm really worried is as much as I agree, the banks are in much better shape than they were. I'm not sure that's even the question right now. I actually think the real question is, is the institutional framework of the federal government's management of its money, and by that I mean both the Federal Reserve and the federal government itself, the entire American structure for managing the dollar, is it something that we can have confidence in?

And I really think now is the time to ask that question. I know it's a scary, big major question, but the fact that the Fed is buying up everything, that it is conceding that it doesn't have any tools left to manage this problem, is one plank, if you like, of the question of confidence in that system. The other is the actual federal government itself, the inadequacy of Washington's response to this crisis, the sheer lack of planning.

Its model of capitalism doesn't have the vehicles for actually imbueing the confidence, of its population. So the fact that we don't have a welfare safety net is actually at times of crisis a question of how valid this political structure actually is. So the dollar existed as the world's reserve currency because the world believed in America, it believed in its strength, that believed in the fact that it would always be there, stand up its property rights, stand up its court, stand up its consistency, and that it would defend the world from all of its various maladies, right, which we thought of as something largely around communism for much of the 20th century. Now, if we look at the United States and all of that structure, does it represent

that in the context of coronavirus? That's a big question, and I think it's worth, I think it's one we actually have to ask. That's where I see the sort of Argentinization thing coming, is because that's, having lived in Argentina for the six, because that was it. Nobody trusted the government. No one. You never paid your taxes because why would you pay your taxes? Because the government would steal it. So, of course, you wouldn't trade taxes. I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen in Washington, but the question of trust is still relevant here. And then the question in Argentina, when you'd have these periodic every 10 years crisis, people would, the thing that would happen is you'd buy dollars, because that's what you trusted. If you're in the United States and

you get to the same sort of crisis mentality, you don't trust the system, what do you buy? And maybe I'm being extreme and dystopian and everything else. And I'm prepared to suggest that I, you know, I'm not fleeing the country and buying a bunch of spam and guns right now. I'm actually believed that we can get out of this. But I just think that we've never had a moment like this with that fundamental question of the underlying structure of our monetary system is actually that question. I agree. In fact, I think it goes even deeper and I think it's quite healthy to wallow in some dystopian scene scenario setting because it does give us an idea of what could come and also how we could get out of it. I agree with you totally on the fractures that we're seeing and trust in the institutions that are supposed to be taking care of.

I would say it goes even further as in the trust in money. Right now, money is being thrown around? And is that going to protect people's health? No, it's not. Is that going to keep families intact? No, it's probably not. Is that going to put food on people's table? Maybe.

But what kind of food and for how long? I would say that this is going to bring up some very interesting questions in money. What is it for? Is it what we need? And while we can argue that the. institutions that we know and love have done a great job so far in keeping us pretty safe. Now I think nobody really feels very safe out there no matter how comfortable we are in our social isolation. So the questions are going to go very, very deep, and the answers that we're going to

come up with are going to be troubling. They're going to cause turmoil, no doubt, but let's face it, this is something that those of us that have been looking at the cryptocurrency sector for a while have been wrestling with for a while. What does an alternative look like? We also have talked about since we got into this sector, what would it take for global attention to focus on the idea of a not of a sovereign currency? We agreed back then that it would be a pretty ugly world. Were that to happen, I think we can also probably agree. I'm not saying we're there now, but we're the closest we've been since Bitcoin was unleashed in 2008. I do hope that we actually have a chance to think about what money actually is out of this, right?

Because I think that's ultimately it. And that's where it gets really interesting. and potentially very hopeful because, you know, we can start to think about money differently. The idea that money is something that we accumulate, and some respects, you know, virtue signal my power, my strength, as opposed to what I always think money is a tool. Yes, yes, it's a store of value, but most importantly, it is a medium of exchange that enables society to actually integrate and deliver the goods and services that we need to each other in a constructive way. That's what it is. It's a tool. And right now, it is not functioning in that tool because what does society,

society doesn't need money, society needs food. Society has always needed food. But outside of crisis, we think we need money, right? So it's almost like the mindset about what money's purpose is. It's a mind sharing, it's an imagined mechanism for how we distribute our debts and our debits and credits around society. So if we can actually get to a world where we can go, hang on, what do we actually need now?

We need systems of value exchange. We need systems of trusted value exchange. that have to function in a modern digital economy in a decentralized architecture where the governance is very different from what we currently have in nation states. Then we get into cryptocurrency. Then we're like, that's why it exists.

So I find this really kind of potentially hopeful discussion. It's just that like society is not there, right? I mean, we've built this sort of mythical notion of money. We've raised it to this level of obsession. And now's the time to go, actually, you know, what do we care about? What are we trying to achieve? You say society is not there yet, definitely, but a month ago, we would have said society would never shut down. It would never order everyone to stay home.

And man did that happen fast? As I'm talking to you from Spain, where we've been in mandatory lockdown now for a week and a half. I mean, literally, the police will stop you if you go outside. It is like that serious. We thought that was totally unimaginable. In the ideology that you mentioned as well, that, and you talk about whiplash, ideology is swinging all over the problem. place. We had Boris Johnson in the UK proposed some issues that Corbyn, whose left of left, was excoriated for just a few months ago. The exact same things, if not more so. We also have

drawing back to QE. We also have what is almost the federals are buying the debt, buying bonds of heavily leveraged private corporation. We have what's tantam up to the nationalization of the bond market. Again, ideologically, that would have been unthinkable. a month ago. In February of 2010, the Onion put out an article called U.S. economy grinds to halt as nation realizes money just a symbolic, mutually shared illusion. So of course, the Onion got there first.

I tweeted out the other day, this changes everything or this changes nothing. What do you think? And I got like 100 million responses, right? Because it purposely didn't have any in between. And I am firmly in the everything camp. I don't think that a single person on this planet is going to come out of this crisis with a higher,

opinion of government than they had three months ago in any part of the world. Now, they may be glad that they had a particularly, you know, good light in the dark. I think New Yorkers are feeling happy to have Cuomo in office right now as a four example, but they still had the chance to watch this. You know, Noel, you said that a month ago we couldn't have imagined lockdown. Well, we certainly could have because hundreds of millions of people in the supply chain capital of the world were in lockdown or just coming out of it. And we chose to ignore it. And media chose to ignore it and focus on whether Silicon Valley was being silly about handshakes and the entire U.S. leadership on both sides of the aisle chose to ignore it and just hope that

somehow American exceptionalism extended to airborne viruses. Like, this is just an absurdity. And the anger that people are feeling right now, I mean, I can barely hold my tongue even having this conversation with you guys about the root baseless cynicism, 30% unemployment and a $1,200 check. you kidding me? Are you kidding? Where in America is a $1,200 check going to get you more than one trip to the grocery store and rent? In most places, it's not going to get you even close to that. It's unfathomable, right? And it is, I believe, to your point, both of your points, going to call into question everything that we think. And the question is just how we orient that conversation, because the thing that's so difficult in these times of radical upheaval is that

what comes into those vacuums isn't nuance and complexity and all this sort of stuff. It's political memes and overreactions. And I don't know how to address that. But I hope at least that there's the conversations like one of the things that's nice, I think, for everyone who's been in this Bitcoin and crypto space for a while is that these are theoreticals that are now becoming real. But at least we have some context to have that conversation, you know? And it's now, I guess it's a matter of inviting the rest of the world into that and seeing where we land. Yeah, I totally agree. And this is not something that anyone who works in the sector is happy about. We would really, really rather not have gotten to this point at this stage so fast and have so many people really

suffering out there. And we all know it's going to get worse as well. So this isn't something that we're happy about. But it's here and it's going to change everything. I am definitely in that camp. It's going to change more than just finance. As Michael said, we need food. It's not that we need money, we need food food. I would add, we also need each other. That's one thing that this crisis is teaching us. We actually need each other. And I think the kind of society we emerge into is going to perhaps be scary for most, but at the same time, we're going to have different priorities. I imagine that's something I'm looking forward to seeing. Looking at this crisis and sort of seeing whether or not how we get out of it, you kind of inevitably start thinking about what society

is and how it functions. I had this thought experiment about, I'm now sort of distancing with my family for 14 days. Do I have other families in my neighborhood that I can trust who've done exactly the same for 14 days? Can we then build a little kind of commune around that of gatherings and reconstitute our relationships, have dinner parties mixed again, but all under this sort of trust that we're all doing the same thing, right? And I thought like, okay, that's an interesting way to think about how society actually formed itself, like where the trust bonds started to be built when we first sort of emerged from the trees, we formed tribes and everything else. This is a fact.

fascinating moment to think about the reconstitution of society itself. What I found really inspiring, and I think this is where I flip to the more focal side of it, is the speed with which people have formed distributed organizations to try to grapple with some of the core challenges, the most immediate needs we have. I mean, the PPE one, the protective equipment and clothing stuff for healthcare workers, all the masks, right? So there are all these factories that are retooling to do things and yes, they don't always know whether they're doing the right thing and maybe some of them are battling with garment work at garment companies or saying, no, we need that for the future of suppliers. But at the end of the day, there's people doing this. And then though, you realize,

okay, there's a logistical problem. How do we get to where we need them to be and who are not? All of a sudden, all of these supply chain experts and a lot of people in the crypto community who naturally act in these decentralized environments are stepping in and forming these alliances of distributed systems to actually manage the data so we know how we can, without any everybody steering it. There's no federal government. This is a kind of a network of people figuring out logistics so that all of the hospitals that need it desperately can get it. This is what's interesting in some respects. We know that the centralized structure of control of this mechanism of the distribution of emergency needs and foods is incredibly inefficient in this environment

because it doesn't have the vision. It can't actually be there and it has all that bureaucracy in the middle of it. But we're now sort of flattening it all and fearing out how it's going to do it through the system. Will it happen fast enough? I hope so, but either way, I think it would have been worse if these mechanisms didn't emerge. And that's what I find inspiring, because this is organic stuff. This is no one telling them what to do. These are just communities that are popping up and forming these alliances and getting material where it needs to go. The human capacity to organize in that regard, the sort of Yuval Harari idea of storytelling and how we actually manage to organize around just a common idea,

as it is playing out in sort of real time in front of us right now, is fascinating and I think actually quite inspiring. Yeah, I thought I was going to spend my life in post-conflict reconstruction. And the reason that I was so interested in that is that when you go and rub your nose and the worst things that people have ever done to each other, you also find the most inspiring things that people have ever done for each other. So I do think that there is a bright side. it's just going to be a lot of pain first.

And it's especially frustrating when so much of it could have been mitigated. But we've gone way, way far from the digital dollar as is want to happen with these guys. I appreciate you being here. Let's do it again. Because next week, who knows, there'll probably be something new. With some whiplash thrown in for sure. Yeah, exactly.