The Pomp Podcast - #1375 Anthony Pompliano on How Stablecoins Can Solve The Debt Crisis

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Phil Rosen, the Co-Founder of Opening Bell Daily, interviews Anthony Pompliano. Topics include stablecoins, US debt, interest rates, and geopolitics.  ======================= CrossFi is the Apple Pay for Crypto. For the first time in history, anyone with a web 3 wallet like Metamask can spend crypto through a physical or virtual visa cards anywhere in the world where Visa is accepted. Be one of the first to get your hands on a CrossFi card and a prize pool of $3 Million Dollars by joining and participating in their testnet today: ⁠⁠⁠https://xfi.foundation/users⁠⁠⁠ ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up, guys? Bang, bang. Today's a really special episode. I have Phil Rosen, the co-founder of Opening Bell. He's here. He's going to interview me. That's right. He's going

to ask the questions. I'm going to answer them. We're going to talk a lot about stable coins, the US debt, interest rates, a bunch of geopolitics, all the stuff that I enjoy talking about. Phil's doing a fantastic job. Last time we did this format, you guys said you liked it. So we're going to try to do it once a week. Phil's going to have questions. I'm going to hopefully try to have some answers. What I need from you is if you enjoy this format, please leave a comment on YouTube or tweet at us and let us know what questions you want us to try to answer in the following week. We'll do our best to pick the most popular and then we will go and we will record the interview. So here is my conversation with Phil Rosen. Anthony Pompliano

runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

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Great to have you. Let's get started. So you wrote a letter to investors this week, and you cited an op-ed from former House Speaker Paul Ryan. And essentially, you were raising the issue that stablecoins could help solve the US debt crisis. Why don't you break that down, especially for people that may not be so steeped in the digital asset world? Yeah, what's interesting about the debt crisis is there's a couple components to it, right? So first of all, obviously, we're taking on many, many more dollars in terms of debt. The aggregate amount of the debt continues to rise over $34 trillion today, and that

is continuing to accelerate. So it's not just that the number is getting bigger, but it's actually getting bigger at a faster rate. Well, what do you do when you're taking on debt? You're issuing debt, right? And so who is going to go buy all of that becomes a really big question. Historically, the biggest buyers of U.S. debt has been other countries. They said, hey, we want treasuries. We want to be able to get paid with the backing of the full faith and credit of the United States government. And so, for example, China and Japan bought 22 percent of all the debt. That number now from those two countries alone is 7 percent. So from 22 percent down to 7 percent. So what you see is you see some of the major buyers of U.S. debt have actually been decreasing.

Well, the United States is not going to stop issuing debt, right? We're a debt-fueled economy. We need to continue to issue this in order to continue to fund growth. And so what we have to figure out is like where is the buyer for U.S. debt? And so one of the interesting things that has started to occur is that the stablecoin issuers have figured out through free market economics the best way for them to monetize is to take the deposits from people who want stablecoins. They give somebody a dollar, right? I go to Tether or Circle and I say, here's a dollar, give me this dollar back to Stablecoin. Well, while my dollar sits with Tether or Circle, what do they do with it?

They're going to earn yield off of it. And so what they started to do is convert majority of that into treasuries. And so collectively, all of the Stablecoin issuers today now own, depending on who you ask, somewhere between the 15th and the 16th largest holder of US treasuries. So they've gone from non-existent five, six years ago to today, they're one of the top 15, 16 holders of US treasuries. Okay, well, why is that important? Because the second that they start to hold those treasuries, they're making right now 5% or so on all that money. So they have great businesses. So the economic incentive for them is to keep getting more dollars from

deposits and buy treasuries. Here is our net new buyer, right, the demand. And the last thing that I would say that's pretty interesting is China and Japan are interest rate insensitive. They don't care what the interest rate is, right? Their whole deal was we want to have some sort of diversification and safety in our central bank reserves. So we're going to buy US debt. We don't care if the interest rate is 1%, 2%, 5%, half a percent. We're just buying treasuries because it's a safe diversifying asset. Well, as we have seen interest rates rise, there's been buying of these treasuries, but a lot of them are institutional investors. And those institutional investors are very rate sensitive. They are going towards treasuries right now because the rate is

high. But as that rate starts to come down, they are going to sell the treasuries. So you want net new demand, but you don't want exclusively net new demand that is highly sensitive to interest rates. You want net new demand that is rate insensitive. And so actually the stable coin issuers are rate insensitive, right? Their whole idea is similar to central banks. They want a safe diversifying asset. And so they're going to hold those interest or they're going to hold those treasuries regardless of the interest rates at one or 5%. And so that's the type of net new demand you want. And that's what former House Speaker Ryan was talking about, saying, listen, these people are stepping in with new demand, but also they're not going to sell when rates come

down, which is exactly what the United States needs right now. Do you think that the stable coin solution to the U.S. debt problem comes solely from demand for treasuries, or is there also a financial asset component of stable coins as an alternative to the dollar? Yeah, it's really interesting. So back in 2018, I went on CNBC, it was 2018, 2019. And they said, you know, what do you think should happen, etc. And I said, right now, the United States should go and tokenize the dollar immediately. And what I was talking about was adoption of the dollar, right? The more that we can get people around the world who want dollars to have dollars in their hand, that is good for the US, right? That is good that there's demand for our currency, the global reserve currency, etc., especially because we're a debt fueled economy. And so if you're sitting in a country like Venezuela, or you're sitting in a country like Zimbabwe, which is the extremes of the negative situation, you don't want your local currency, you want dollars. But let's say that you can't get dollars because they're not available in a digital form. But the yuan or yen or a peso or something else would be available, you may go to those currencies because they're just easier to access. And so that was my thought process was let's get digital dollars into people's hands because they want dollars. Let's make it as frictionless as possible for them to adopt it. Now, I was talking about the U.S. government doing it.

That's not what happened. Instead, the stablecoin issuers did it. And the stablecoin issuers basically filled that void. And so what has now happened is anyone with an internet connection can go and they can get digital dollars. And we have seen an explosion of interest in this. One of the things that I find most interesting is if you go and you look at Tether's transparency report, what you see is that the amount of stablecoin, dollar-backed stablecoin interest, what's the market cap, is like 100 plus billion. The next biggest currency is the euro, and it's measured like 30 million. So the difference between, you know, 100 billion and 30 million is pretty big.

The dollar is definitely the asset everyone wants. And so I think that driving more demand will help solve some of this debt stuff. But also people should be careful of like, one of the single greatest solutions to the debt problem is to stop spending more than we make, right? Like that would actually be the kind of cure-all for this is balance the budget, start paying off the debt, do all that. We're never going to do that. We haven't run a balanced budget in this country for 20 years.

And so instead, what we start to look at is, okay, if we're not going to stop spending, then maybe what we should be doing is trying to come up with other ancillary solutions who can kind of attack the problem from the edges and at least slow things down or make things a little bit less painful. Do you think that if we introduce something that's advocated by the US in the form of a stable coin, or I don't know if it's a US-backed stable coin or at least one that they start advocating aggressively, how much skepticism do you think that will receive from the American people? Because I know if you look at China's digital currency push, that gets a lot of pushback because there's a lot of, you know, surveillance

related issues. So what do you think for the US there? Yeah, so there's a difference between the dollar backed stable coins we're talking about that are kind of in existence today with Tether, USDC, and many others, or a central bank digital currency, right? And I think the central bank digital currency is people get a little maybe cautious is a nice way to put it. And, you know, a lot of people jump to the surveillance. I think the surveillance stuff is definitely a big issue. You know, right now, if the U.S. government wants to see into your bank account, they have to go through a kind of judicial process. They've got to go. They've got to get approval from a court for a warrant. They get the information. They can do that. Now, again, people will argue, you know, how much really scrutiny is there on those requests or are they just kind of rubber stamped, whatever.

But at least there is some degree of a process, right? There's some degree of transparency there in order for them to see the information. The worry with central bank digital currencies, I think in many people's mind is, well, if they can just see the whole ledger, then they can see what everyone has, what everyone is spending money on, when they're spending money, who you're sending money to, all this stuff, right? So surveillance becomes a really big issue. I think that's a big concern and we should pay attention to it, call it out and mitigate it.

But I think that there are bigger issues that people have not started to talk about yet that are worth calling out as well. One of them is a personalized monetary policy. So right now, when the United States government or the Federal Reserve decides to change monetary policy, it's a one size fits all. If they say interest rates are going to go from 3% to 4%, that is true for everyone, right? And they're setting a single interest rate.

When inflation hits, that is something that is a market-driven force, and that inflation is experienced at the same level for everyone on a broad stroke. Now, people do have different inflation levels in terms of their spending habits, but in terms of if you print trillions of dollars and inflation goes to 9%, it's not like the government stepped in and said, you get nine, I get seven, right? It's kind of a one size fits all. When a digital currency or specifically a central bank digital currency becomes available to everyone, there is a concern that they will be able to do personalized monetary policy. And so all of a sudden they can say, you know what, Phil, you keep saving a lot of money.

You have all this cash. We don't think that's good for the economy. We actually think it's better if you're spending the money, spending or investing. That is why we want to debase the currency. And so because you're saving so much cash, we are actually going to give you a higher inflation rate or a higher debasement rate. And so your money is going to lose its purchasing power at an accelerated rate. Everyone else is losing at 2%. You're going to lose at 4%. Then you're like, well, if I'm going to lose at 4%, then maybe I should spend or save, right? So they can influence behavior, but it's personalized to you and what your habits are and what their goals are. But they could say to me, you actually don't save at all. And we think

that maybe you should save a little bit. We're going to give you a 0.5% debasement rate. And so if they begin to personalize this, again, from an economics perspective, it's this fascinating theory. Could you actually personalize the monetary policy to get certain people to take certain actions which would overall benefit the economy and drive these outcomes? Theoretically sounds amazing but the concern is the government program goes wrong right like all of a sudden it becomes uh well actually why do i evaluate who gets a high debasement rate versus a low debasement rate based on who's saving and who's not what if i just do it because i don't like your politics what if i do it because i don't like you know something you said on the internet what if i do

it right and so now you have personalized monetary policy and surveillance starting to kind of merge together and then if you take this a step further you can look at things like this like kind of quote-unquote social credit score or true censorship you know they could say uh something like hey i don't like your politics you can't go somewhere you can't spend money on something um or it could be something that is uh uh presented in a less erroneous way so um for example let's say uh they actually have enough information and they say you know what phil you're in great shape uh yes you can go to the movies this weekend go ahead and get in the uber go ahead and buy the movie ticket yes you can buy that big you know tub of popcorn with all the butter on it and uh

knock yourself out. You're doing a great job. Me, they may say, ah, a little fat. You know what? Actually, we think that your health habits are not so great. You didn't work out this week. You've been eating horribly, et cetera. We're not going to let you go on that Uber. We're not going to let you go to the movie. We're not going to let you get that big tub of popcorn with all that butter. And so you can see just very quickly with a couple of examples where if you give the functionality to the government or to the central bank, there are a lot of ways that it could go wrong. It doesn't mean that that is the guaranteed path that it will take, but just the threat of it seems to be too much for people to kind of overcome. And so when they see other countries

that maybe don't have such a capitalistic, democratic, you know, kind of free speech type market already kind of going in that direction, they say, hey, it's not going to take much for that to happen here. And so what I think you're going to start to see is you're going to start to see a lot of pushback on central bank digital currencies. You've already seen that, you know, presidential candidate Trump has come out and said, hey, look, I don't want CBDCs. I think it's a horrible idea. I'm not going to be a proponent of it. Biden hasn't really come out and yet said what direction he is. But the people feel like, hey, that's a little too far. That's overreach. And so in a weird way, stable coins in terms of Tether, Circle and others are driving

the economic outcome. People are adopting digital dollars and we're getting accessibility globally. we're getting this net new demand for U.S. Treasury purchases, but we're not getting the downsides of the government controlling the currency in this form factor where there's new functionality. And so maybe that's what we want, right? Maybe actually this is the best of both worlds is what we got right now. Well, it sounds like the private sector has been doing extraordinarily well in stablecoins, but the moment the government would step in is what opens the door to all the chaos and all the potential downsides. So something I've been looking at for the past year or so and in my reporting is this deterioration of the dollar. And that's something I think

stablecoins are part of the equation of that. And you see central banks around the world buying up more gold and buying less US debt. And these stablecoin issuers are sort of stepping in to buy US debt. Let me rephrase that. What is the role you think stablecoins play in helping the dollar maintain its status as the global reserve currency and as the credible, yeah, the American strength there? Yeah. I think that accessibility is a key component of it. And if you think about accessibility, that's how do I get access. But also, if I have accessibility, then I'm going to use it if I use it, there's liquidity. And so one of the beautiful things about the dollar is that although most fiat currencies are pretty bad, the dollar is like the best of the worst.

And so there's been this strength in terms of we've actually debased the currency less than most countries, not all, but most. And then if it's globally accessible and there's lots of liquidity, people are interested. And so I do think that there is this idea of stable coins definitely helping on accessibility they actually are helping on liquidity as well um just kind of in this like digital format rather than the electronic q-sip one and so when you see i don't know countries like china and they are buying more gold they're selling off treasuries they are definitely trying to reduce their dependency on the dollar and on u.s debt um but it is still pretty marginal right it is not to the point where we're like oh my god china's not going to use the

dollar anymore the united states and china have this very weird relationship we're like we need them. They need us for the, at least for the moment being. And so we like to kind of yell and scream at each other, maybe, you know, hit each other on the wrist every once in a while, but for the most part, the world is better off for the citizens of China and America when we get along and we actually have a bilateral commerce. And so how do you settle those transactions? Dollars, right? And in many cases. And so that's really where we're starting to kind of look at and say, okay, what happens if some of these countries do try to de-dollarize? where are they going to go are they really going to go to one of their currencies right how does

that work um the bitcoin you know kind of hardcore community would argue no actually they're going to go to bitcoin right we don't see that really yet happening um and so in the central bank reserves like china gold becomes pretty important and so it's not as simple as just like bitcoin good bitcoin bad or crypto good crypto bad stablecoin good stablecoin bad instead the kind of macro environment and this geopolitical overlay is very complex. And each country is actually very different, right? And so we're even starting to see in many cases where countries are creating capital controls, right? They don't want capital to kind of flee their borders. And so in those scenarios, I really think that the dollar's digitization will just continue to strengthen

the dollar. And maybe one of the best places to see this is though everyone keeps talking about de-dollarization and the BRICS and all this stuff, bilateral trade settled in dollars is continuing to increase. I think it's now 58% to 59% of all bilateral trade in the world settled in dollars. So you think about that, you say to yourself, you know what? The dollar is actually strengthening. It's not weakening. That could change. But it's very, very important to look at the data and try to separate the data from the narrative because the fear-mongering of, my god they're gonna drop the dollar right it sounds so scary so awesome you know if you're into like the fear porn and all stuff the data suggests otherwise so uh i agree with you that

a lot of it is overhyped because it's it's very marginal essentially the the deterioration of the dollars happened only at the edges um so something back to the us debt i do you think that stable coins are the best or most capable digital asset solution to help bring that down? Or do you also see, let's say, Bitcoin playing a role in that? It depends on what you're optimizing for, right? So if you want just the U.S. dollar strength to continue, you want as much U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin adoption globally as possible, right? Demand for dollars equals a strong dollar. If you want to ensure the long-term sustainability and the resilience and the kind of internal strength or the backing of the currency, then actually that's where somewhere like Bitcoin could come in. It would not surprise me if at some point in the next 20 years, the Federal Reserve goes ahead and puts some Bitcoin into the central bank reserves.

I think that China will do it. I think that many of these countries will do it. I don't think that we're at a point or I don't see a world where in the next 20 years they say, you know what, we're going to drop our local native currency and we're going to go all in on Bitcoin. That seems a little bit harder for me to wrap my head around. But in the same way that they have treasuries, they have gold, they have cash, they have a couple of different assets in there. I think you're going to see Bitcoin eventually added. And so in a weird way, you then will have dollars backed by name your assets. And so the dollar strength or the dollar

resilience is different than the debt related, but different. And so again, like how do you solve the U S debt, right? From a first principle standpoint, what is debt? I need to borrow money because I'm spending more than I make. Right? So the first thing that they need to do is they need to stop spending more than they make. Well, the way you do that is either you stop spending or you increase how much you make. And so what they essentially are doing is not stopping spending. They're actually spending more, which is increasing the deficit, right? We went from having a couple hundred billion dollar deficit annually to now over a trillion, closing in on two trillion. The interest rate is going through the roof, right? All these issues that they're dealing with.

And so the only solution they know as politicians, well, I can't stop spending because if I stop spending, that means I take things away from people. Instead, what they're doing is they're constantly trying to increase taxes, right? And so what's fascinating is, you know, I've talked ad nauseum about the congestion tax in New York City. They were going to, in July, start this tax where if you drove below 59th Street during work hours, Monday through Friday, there was going to be this additional tax. It was like 15 or 20 bucks, whatever it was. And they thought they were going to raise billions of dollars of net new capital in implementing this tax. Well, the governor of New York struck it down. They've already implemented all the technology. Everything

was ready to go. They literally were less than 60 days away. And all of a sudden, they paused it indefinitely. But guess what happened when they did that? There was a subway being built on 2nd Avenue. And all of a sudden, they stopped building the subway on 2nd Avenue because they said we were going to get the money from the congestion tax. And so there's a very real tie between if we increase taxes in all these creative ways, we then are going to go spend it somewhere. Now, the government does not have a great track record of spending the money. So you have to ask yourself, well, if we just give them more money, but they're bad capital allocators, are we just destroying capital? Historically, that has been what has occurred. But you can

start to see like, okay, wait a second. If we want to address the debt and we're not willing to stop spending, then we got to raise taxes. And that is very unpopular with people. And so if you think about this, by having very old politicians, specifically two political candidates that are over the age of 70, they're not going to be around to see what happens in 20 or 30 years, most likely. And so when you have 20 or 30 year or less timeframe, let's call it 10, you know, 15 year timeframes, you can spend a lot, you can take on a lot of debt. It's kind of like, hey, let somebody else deal with that problem, right? And so then it brings up this really interesting thing of like, okay, well, what if they really did take it seriously? What if they

said, you know what, we're going to do the hard thing. What you do is you would stop the spending and what would you stop spending on? One of the biggest things you would stop spending on is you would stop spending on the entitlement programs. And so it's very unpopular, right? You go to people who you said, hey, we are going to promise you that you're going to get X in the future. Social security, depending on the different estimates, supposed to run out, be bankrupt by like 2034, 10 years from now, right? And so you look at that and you say, okay, well that's 10 years if i'm a politician and i got two more terms left before i'm gonna get out of this thing anyways i'll be gone in eight years not my problem and so by having this kind

of short-term you know view of okay let's just kind of perpetuate what's already happening uh i don't want to be the person to deliver the bad news i don't want to be the person to rip off the band-aid uh it becomes very difficult and so what i actually think it's going to take to address the entitlement programs which will be very unpopular is it's going to take a president in their second term at the beginning of the second term. They can't run again. So they've already had one term, do all the things, get reelected.

Now you know you got four years. You know it's a problem. You gotta have the courage to do it. Your legacy may be tarnished for the short term because you're gonna go do the hard thing. But that is how we can go and address it. And if the president comes top down and says, this is important, we need to get it done.

My guess is that the Congress and Senate We'll go ahead and they may hem and haw and all this stuff, but they'll get it done. But other than stopping spending, cutting entitlement programs, being more efficient in defense spending. Defense spending is incredibly important. We're the greatest country in the world. We've got the greatest military. We protect a lot of people, places, and things around the world. But we waste a lot of money too, right?

And so you look at these things, you say, can we become more efficient on that front? Are there departments in the government that maybe shouldn't exist? or we've hired too many people. You know, if you go and you look at these job growth charts and you look at government workers, that's the fastest growing thing out of anything in the economy. We just keep hiring more people.

And again, some of it is we need people to do certain jobs, right? That there are certain things the government does that are incredibly important. But there's also a lot of stuff that the government does that people say, yeah, that probably should be done more efficiently, right? And so when you think about that,

there's a lot of money you could save. but we're talking about a trillion dollars or more a year that we spend more than we make. You probably can find some savings in there. It's just deeply unpopular. And so we have this very weird world where we continue to raise the debt ceiling. And my favorite thing to tell people is when you hear they're raising the debt ceiling, that means they're taking out a second credit card to pay off their first credit card, right? It's just not a good situation. wow i uh i don't know how much we have left to cover here i think that that really uh we touched on every angle and um i like how you take the asset allocator mindset

talking about u.s debt um i yeah i think we're uh we're good thanks so much for doing it thank you