We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP322: Raoul Pal - Macro Overview for 4th Q 2020 (Business Podcast)
Episode Date: November 8, 2020Raoul Pal has decades of experience in financial markets and is the Founder of the popular media company, Real Vision. During the show, we talked about all the hot macro topics going on at the end of... 2020, inflation, deflation, the idea of a new Bretton Woods, central bank, digital currencies, Bitcoin, MMT, and much more. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: Are we in an inflationary or deflationary environment? Why interest rates will turn negative in the US. Why bitcoin is consuming all other asset classes. How and why hedge funds, large corporations, and endowments will soon enter the bitcoin space. Ask The Investors: “Modern Monetary Theory” – is it valid? BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Preston and Stig’s interview with Raoul Pal about Macro Concerns. Preston and Stig’s interview with Raoul Pal about Macro Investing. Preston and Stig’s interview with Raoul Pal about Macro Economics and Global Risks. Listen to the Real Vision Podcast. Connect with Raoul Pal on Twitter. Raoul Pal's website, Real Vision TV with free videos. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: SimpleMining Hardblock AnchorWatch Human Rights Foundation Unchained Vanta Shopify Onramp Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Investors podcast.
On today's show, we got a guest that needs no introduction, Mr. Raul Powell.
Raoul has decades of experience in financial markets and is the founder of the popular
media company, Real Vision.
During the show, we talk about all the hot macro topics going on at the end of 2020.
We talk about inflation, deflation, the idea of a new Breton Woods, central bank digital
currencies, Bitcoin, MMT, and much, much more.
So without further delay, here's our interview with the one and only, Raoul Powell.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Investors podcast.
I'm your host, Prest and Pish, and as always I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson.
And today we've got the one and only, Raul Powell, Raoul, welcome back to the Investors podcast.
Such a pleasure to have you.
Always good to be here, my friend.
I really enjoy these chats.
I want to open it up with, in my opinion, the big enchilada of what in the world's going on.
And it's this binary situation of deflation versus inflation and kind of what policy is going to pop out of what we're seeing right now.
So I'm kind of curious.
just your overall thoughts when somebody says deflation versus inflation?
Deflation always have been.
Firstly, the trends in my favor.
And secondly, I just think that with an aging population, a debt dynamic like we've got,
a relatively strong dollar and technology, it's almost impossible to generate meaningful,
ongoing inflation.
And we'll come into some of the big changes that could come from fiscal and stuff like that
and we'll talk through that a bit.
But I think generally overall, that's the super trend you've got to fight.
Now, what do you call inflation and what do you call deflation?
That's the other thing is definitional issues here.
So I think that the currencies are deflating versus hard assets.
That's not necessarily price inflation.
I'm about to write a piece for a global macro investor about wage deflation versus actual
inflation.
Maybe it's wages.
because when you look at most goods versus the price of gold and stuff like that, they haven't
really changed price.
So it could be that wages are deflating, which is something I want to dig into, because
real wages haven't gone up since 1974.
So there's a number of issues here, but I'm very much biased towards deflation for now.
Michael Saylor, on the other hand, said that inflation is happening in pretty much everything
you need.
Medical would be an example.
Real estate would be a non-reuxed.
another. What are your thoughts on that?
One thing is the millennials themselves are driving it because they're trying to get into
property at the same time. They can only afford the same kind of price range. Well, guess what?
They've all pushed themselves out of it. Rich people have obviously had too much money because
they've had access to credit, unlike average people. So that's pushed up the value of those
things. We've seen, you know, fine art and wines go to crazy prices, cars, because of the same thing
of the money of the rich people.
Then there's the stuff around which corporates have power in Washington,
and that is pharmaceuticals, healthcare,
and some levels of food and stuff like that.
So, look, it's a really complicated world.
Inflation is not a straightforward CPI thing,
but you do find your fixed cost of living has gone up
while cost of consumer goods has collapsed.
We were interviewing Lynn Alden,
who, in my personal opinion, is just unbelievable.
believably smart. And she was making the case for, because at the end of the day, really,
this is all revolving around CPI and the premium in the fixed income market above CPI. And she was
making the argument, I asked her, well, how do you measure quote unquote inflation of the monetary
supply, of the currency supply? She says, well, I'm just looking at the printing that's getting
listed onto the balance sheets of the central banks. Maybe we can use that as CPI. What do you think of
that idea? As I said, there's different measures of inflation for different things.
The other thing I know is my inflation is different to your inflation.
So I just think the whole thing is arcane.
So what are we trying to solve for here?
What do we care about here?
You know, we don't have bond yields that are going to offset anything.
That game's gone, and we can get into the discussion about Bitcoin and gold and that kind
of stuff to offset the devaluation of currency.
I think the real issue is incomes don't go up enough.
And that's the real issue here.
In the 1970s, we had inflation because wages went up and pushed
up cost of goods. We don't have that. We have wages that just do not go up. And that's the biggest
problem here. So I'm not sure we're always searching for the wrong enemy. I think globalization
was one of the enemies. You know, I'm a globalist in many respects, but globalization destroyed
wages because you had global wage arbitrage. Then you throw in technology on top. What chances
anybody have? I mean, there's literally going to be no bus drivers in 10 years time. There'll be no truck
drivers in 15 years time. There will be no cab drivers. All of these jobs just get all destroyed.
Mark Androson's software is eating the world was probably one of the most profound statements I've
ever seen. And so there is this really weird dichotomy, this massive deflation. As you said,
there's the cost of living inflation, stuff like healthcare and housing. And then there's the massive
deflation in the value of fiat currencies. I mean, this is a complicated dynamic. You know, I got my
roots with this really strong Warren Buffett value investing, calculate the intrinsic value of the
company background whenever I first was learning about finance. And all of that is based on fixed income
risk-free rates of a 10-year treasury and kind of using that as a ruler and a yardstick.
But now with everything getting polarized down to 0% negative yields, how is a person to do
valuations anymore? How are you looking at that?
Well, the point being is, it seems to all be trumped by flows now, you know, passive
investing. Again, it's the millennials starting to invest and they're all passive investment
vehicles versus the baby boomers who are all divesting of active strategies. So value is
underperforming growth massively because of generational flows. That's very difficult to change,
and that's been Mike Green's point for a long time. So I think that makes it difficult.
I think zero interest rates make assets more speculative, but also, if you look at Japan and Europe,
they made them tremendously cyclical. Japan just went up and down with the business cycle.
And that's, you know, UK stock market did that for 250 years before the mid-50s,
when finally the UK stock market actually broke out of a range.
But it just went up and down with the business cycle.
And that kind of makes sense.
P expansion when people are optimistic, contraction when they're not.
But the flows from baby boomers and millennials have changed all of that.
So it's created a crazy world, a world that nobody understands and models don't work any longer.
And I'm not sure it'll ever revert.
Come elsewhere, I think, but it won't come back to these markets.
You previously mentioned this point about wage is not going up since 1974.
Is that why we've seen this increased interest in universal basic income from both voters and politicians?
So let's strip that down, right? So if the problem is wages, let's say I'm right, that somewhere
in this, and I'm still doing the work and I'm trying to get my head around it, but let's say
wages are the problem. Well, then UBI solves a lot of that. It basically is giving a premium
back to people who got destroyed by globalization. So, okay, that's interesting. Now, you know,
I know a lot of people don't like it, but I have a feeling in my work, because what you're giving
people is the ability to pay rent, pay their electricity and have health care. Now, don't forget,
in other countries, there was more of a welfare state. Now, I know Americans find this really
difficult to believe and think everybody's a communist the moment they have a free health care
system, but most countries in the world have free health care and a welfare state that supports
people should they fall below a certain poverty line. The US doesn't really have it. So UBI does
some of that, but I think Europe will have some UBI as well because so many people have been left
behind by globalization. And I think that's what the populist revolts was about globally,
was the fact that people realized that they've got poorer and they don't know who to blame.
So they're blaming everybody. Well, I think we probably try to fix the wrong problem and that was
the issue. I mean, demographic shows all of this. It shows where CPI's going and it's been forecasting
it for years. So it's all driven by demographics. Now, why did we get a debt bubble? People don't
I don't ask these questions. They just say, oh, yeah, well, the central bank's crazy. Well, they
didn't. It actually came from the 80s. So where did that debt bubble come from? Well, if you
start to think of the world in the way that wages didn't go up enough, what do we do? We borrow money.
I guess my big narrative for how we got there in the 80s was that we kept adjusting the money
multiplier. So we had a gold standard. But if you go in and you adjust the money multiply, I have
this really cool chart. I need to send you this chart. It shows how the money multiplier was
adjusted from Bretton Woods up into when we came off the gold standard in 71. And they just
kept adjusting it more and more and more. And when you're doing that, you're just expanding the
money supply until you get to a point where you can't make good on the gold that's sitting in the
vaults. So why did we see all that wage growth through that period of time? Well, I would adjust
because the central banks were manipulating the markets even back then.
Look, governance and central banks have always manipulated the markets. But I think, you know,
There's a confluence of events here, some big events that all happened.
And who knows, one was the biggest generation of people in all recorded history,
all coming into the workforce at the same time, right?
Then there's the fact that their wages didn't go up because there were so many of them.
Then you had globalization by 1996 in the World Trade Organization.
Then you've had the massive rise of technology.
Then you've had the massive rise of debt,
whether that's been driven by the central banks,
driven by people trying to cover their wage gap,
or a combination of everything, probably.
So you've got this massive confidence of events
that have created this huge mess.
The other thing was the rise of the pension system from the 80s too.
And then there was the rise of passive funds, index funds, that started in the late 90s.
And you can see the trajectory in the S&P just completely took off from 1996 onwards.
It's like a weird break in the chart.
That was the launch of all of these index funds.
So all of these things have come together and they've all compounded themselves.
To pick them apart is almost impossible now.
but to predict where they go is more reasonable.
And all the decisions that has been made
is reflexive of the decision made before.
Fiscal and monetary policies by nature
controlling something that by default
would move in another direction, if allowed.
Yeah, and don't forget, throw on top of that
the fact that all the central banks use economic models
which don't work, right?
They use linear extractions of GDP.
When even a child knows it goes up and down,
it's cyclical, right?
Not one of them has cyclicality in their models.
So there's error on top of error, and they're also trying to solve the wrong problem.
And so it's all become the law of unintended consequences.
I mean, nobody thought that index funds, cheapening the ability for people to invest was going
to create this ridiculous bubble where the entire stock market is trading on P of 30 or 40
or 50 or choose the number.
Nobody thought that was going to happen.
You know, I know there's people say, well, just raise rates, let them go to their normal level.
A, I think rates are at their normal level because of the debt bubble, because of the demographics, because of all of the other things, I don't know what you can do about it, apart from start again.
No, it's a fascinating point.
So when you start to hear MMT and talking about taking rates negative, you know, at the end of the day, I guess I might be just a really hardcore free market type person where like if your business sucks and it's not making some money, you shouldn't be bailed out.
you should fail. Because if we don't let that naturally happen, then we're just going to compound
that problem. And that was the law of unintended consequences, probably from 1997, maybe even
87. The stock market crash on the cut rates. So in Greenspan cut rates, then they needed to
support markets. And that created unintended consequences all the way through. So it's now,
as you suggest, yes, the free market thing should go bust. But now it's such a big debt bubble
that you destroy everything.
So the only answer is to create a parallel system
and try and jump
because you can't do it
by letting the whole thing go.
Nobody's going to let it go
because the devastation is too big.
And I honestly believe
that interest rates are trading
at free market levels
because even if you go to get a private sector loan,
rates maybe 10%,
but it's not wildly different.
We've seen this in Japan for a long time as well.
So I don't know
But yes, I guess if the central banks hadn't made so much capital available, rates would have been higher.
But the whole thing now is like, looking back is almost pointless because it's such a big mess.
You know, a year ago, when you and I were talking, I'm just looking at the bond market and it's in these very low yields.
And I'm saying, hey, this is a mess.
I'm not going anywhere near this.
And you were like, no, no, no, no, my friend, this is going to be a big buy in the coming year.
And you were dead right.
So I guess my question for you, and I wasn't going to be surprised if you were right.
It was just for me, it was a personal choice of risk of like, well, I just don't know when
this is eventually going to blow up or when the market's going to lose trust and all this
other things.
As we're looking at it now, it wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if we go into the summer
and interest rates on all these bond instruments are getting pushed even lower.
They're all going negative.
I mean, look, let's face it, the UK went negative first time in 400.
years of the history of the UK credit markets. That happened last month. The Bank of England will
follow suit. All of Europe's negative, i.e. in the EU. Denmark's negative. Sweden's negative.
New Zealand's been negative. I mean, basically it's everywhere, right? It's systemic in every single
place. And if the US thinks they're going to avoid this, they're smoking crack. I mean, it is coming.
And the charter said it, and I've called it the chart of truth, it is going negative because there is
nothing they can do to stop it and the market will walk them there first. And nobody believes it.
Nobody believes that US rates can go negative, but they will and they'll need to. If you've
been following what's been happening in the German Bun market, I mean, yields have been collapsing
because Europe's about to go back into the procession because of the virus and what's going
on there. The US is following suit. So, yeah, it's going more negative. I'm long bonds right
now and I think it's a good trade.
Then, Raoul, I can't help but ask, what would need to happen for you to change your
position in long bonds?
Well, we will at some point finish this recession.
I think it goes on longer than people imagine, but at the end, you then get cyclical inflation.
Are you going to create structural inflation?
Are you going to create a structural dislocation of the bond market?
Zero chance.
Zero point zero because the central bank will own it all.
tipped into the currency market, not the bond market.
So I've had this opinion that the more that they start exercising the UBI lever, the more
that we have the potential for the CPI gauge to start demonstrating some form of inflation,
do you buy that?
No, because it's a one-off annual rate of change.
What drives inflation is when wages keep going up.
That is what demand inflation is.
That's the real toxic, nasty inflation.
Once you give people $20,000 a year, you get one year, and we've seen this in Japan when
they've tried various measures like this, what you get is a massive rise in inflation.
The next year it comes out, and the inflation's gone.
Because there's no increasing wage.
Without increasing wage, you don't get structural inflation.
You simply can't do it.
When you're measuring in nominal fiat dollars.
Yes, and again, when you're not measuring it in other things.
where there's massive demand from millennials, which will drive it up, or, you know, all of those
things. When you're looking at it in Fiat dollars, yes, UBI will lower the prices of the Fiat
system. So, again, it's complicated.
Let's talk about the big topic here. The first thing that I want to cover is just, if Bitcoin
wasn't out there, this is a story about gold, really? This is a major story about gold.
But now you have this technology that's offering a counter to even that, that brings a whole lot of other qualities that gold is deficient in as far as spendability, divisibility, all of those things.
It's all right.
I'm going to go back a sec.
Actually, about three things.
Gold, it would have been.
And the other one, maybe even more importantly, and you're seeing it, is cash flow.
So the SaaS business model is all powerful because you're generating something of real value.
Now, it's overvalued right now, but it throws off cash, right?
When you've got businesses that are throwing off 70, 80% margins, whoever wants to own a bond,
why do you even want to win gold?
You're just compounding capital at such an incredible rate.
So that's the other thing.
So gold, cash flows.
That's such a great point.
Just looking here in 2020, look at NASDAQ, the margins of the fang stocks.
The stocks are just really drying the index.
They just have the fairest margins.
We've never seen margins like this before.
General Electric and Ford never had margins like this.
We've never seen this before.
So I understand it's difficult for the market to figure out how to price this stuff.
Because we just don't know.
I mean, we've never seen businesses that generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues
and have 70% margins.
I mean, really?
I mean, that's astonishing. So it's difficult to value. I get it.
Before we start going down this path, I want to talk to you about something that is kind of on a similar light.
So right now you're seeing a political movement to kind of break up some of these companies. And so many of these companies are being driven by artificial intelligence, deep learning.
And you look at the competitors over in China where the centralization of their competitors over in that geographical region are encouraged for consolidation and encouraged to be integrated with the government.
so that all that data can be harvested and manipulated and used to benefit the regime,
is the West in a vulnerable position because of the cries for monopolies and for governments
to step in and start breaking some of these apart?
And, I mean, how are we going to remain competitive against the East when they're embracing
it and we're starting to go another direction?
We're going to wall ourselves off or them off, whichever way you want to look at it.
It's the only way. The only way is to break into two internet essentially because you can't compete
with state actors because it's too dangerous and they're too powerful. Meanwhile, you know, I also don't
agree with the fact that Google has more data or more people than any other entity in the world,
far more than the Chinese government has. I mean, those guys have everything. I've never even
seen anybody ask the question, how secure is that data? And nobody even talks about the secure
of Google data, but this is a sovereign risk of the highest order, probably the most important
database in the world. And Google on their own manage it and how. So we have to be very careful
with granting these people the powers, including the private sector, because the ability of
either abuse or of nefarious state actors stealing it are, I think, too important to ignore.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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So let's talk the Bitcoin versus gold versus cash flow.
What are your overarching opinions on this?
My opinions are in life, have cash flow, and then own Bitcoin as your asset, as your hard asset, because you know, you are, if you're operating cash flow, you're generating cash, which devalues over time.
I don't believe necessarily that Michael Saylor's point is applicable to everybody because nobody's thinking about 100 years time horizons of the capsule.
But overall, look, we're in a risky world out there.
We're trying to make growth in our capital for the future.
First thing is invest in yourself.
So whether you create a business or, you know, and you've done that, right?
You create a business.
It's a high margin business.
It generates an income.
It affords you the opportunities to make investments and have a lifestyle.
Right.
That's all that matters.
For me, everything is all about the lifestyle token.
You know, that's what you live for is your life.
I don't live for my Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin creates my life, for example.
So that's how I think of it first is first cash flow.
So cash flow security gives the ability to then accumulate assets that have future value.
As you're talking about your retain earnings, you say that some of it is in Bitcoin,
do you also own big technology stocks?
I have none.
And the reason being is I fear about regulatory risk.
And I also think they're expensive.
And I don't know how to value them any longer.
But I kind of think I know how to value Bitcoin, which is it's a reserve asset with a call
attached on the future financial system. We talked about opting into a parallel system while one's
being built. So what value is that worth? Well, that's worth a lot. So I think I can get a macro
valuation. I can't for Apple. I can't get a trillion dollar company and figure out, is it worth
three trillion? I just can't do that. And that's just probably because I'm stupid, but I just don't
know how to do it. So I just stay away from it. And I put out a tweet thread today that I've now
can't even use my Twitter. It's kind of overwhelmed with this thread. Showing Bitcoin versus
every other major asset, including Amazon and Apple, right?
They're all breaking down versus Bitcoin.
Look, I've been in this game a long time.
I've also studied history.
I have never, ever seen an entire asset consume every single other asset in the world.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
And I think this is just the start, right?
Talk about the charts that you're describing, because I've seen them on Twitter,
tell the audience that maybe you didn't see your tweet.
The charts I started with is, okay,
What does gold look like versus Bitcoin? Well, gold is breaking down versus Bitcoin. Then what
does the NASDAQ look like? Because surely the NASDAQ must be outperforming. No, it's breaking down.
What about the banks? Well, the banks, you know, we've always talked about that Bitcoin's
destroying the banks. Well, the banks are all-time lows in Bitcoin price using Bitcoin
of the denominator. What about commodities? Well, if you use Bitcoin as the denominator,
commodities are all-time lows. Okay. What about Apple, Amazon?
The G4 central bank balance sheets, that's been the most powerful asset in the world.
Nope, Bitcoin's eating them all.
So Bitcoin is becoming the world's strongest narrative, and it's only just started.
The chart patterns alone all look like they're breaking.
So this is very interesting.
I've never seen this before in my life.
And just to put a little context on what Ra was talking about.
So from the start of 2020, you have the, let's see what this is.
Gold is up 24% since the start of the year.
The NASDAQ is up 30%, Apple is up 55%, and Bitcoin is up 97%.
It's crazy.
It is crazy.
And then the banks are down, what, 40, 30?
Yeah, they're negative.
Bitcoin is up 97 and the banks are down 30, right?
That's 120% outperformance.
This is incredible.
Yeah, it's mind-blowing.
So talk to us about the banking.
Your opinion is that Bitcoin's going to continue to run probably more aggressively than what the 100% we've seen year to date.
Yeah.
What does this do to the banking sector moving forward?
Well, the banking sector is reflecting something else.
And it's that theory that everyone's got bored of me talking about is the insolvencies,
is we have this bifurcated world where NASDAQ stocks were going up.
But really, everything from oil,
markets to banking stocks, we're all doing the opposite. And the old economy names, the triple
B credit companies, they're the most indebted large companies in the world. They all look the
same. They basically bounced a bit from the low and then flatlined and then started rolling over,
which is actually exactly the same as the real-time economic data. So the European economic data
is rolling over and tipping down. Guess what? The European banks are tipping down. So they're
reflecting the economy. The bond market looks the same too. So as we said, that cash flow,
racie business model of SaaS businesses kind of decoupled. Everything else is the same. But banks,
if insolvency really is the problem, and how insolvency is a problem is, if I'm right and GDP
growth stays negative for the next 12 months, there's not enough cash flow to pay for the debt.
Simple as that. Whether it's at household level, foreign corporation level, or U.S. corporate
level, small and medium-sized enterprise level. So that creates more insolvencies as kind of
companies go insolvent. And what the banks are telling you is, there's a problem here. And that's
what the bond market's telling you. And that's what General Electric's telling you. That's what AT&T's
telling you. They're all saying there's a debt problem here. So let's say that you're right,
Raoul, that Bitcoin is going to take off in 2021. And I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with
that statement. But let's say that is true. What does that do for the opportunity cost perspective
of fixed income investors? And what if it's not true? There's a reflective loop. There's a reflective
that's going to happen, it's so obvious, is the US has approved custody of Bitcoin for certain
banks, which is a code word for prime broking for hedge funds, which means the hedge funds will
see this. Most of them haven't got custody yet, but soon they will. And that means that they
will come into this space because they can trade multi-asset class. So that sucks them in. And I've
talked about this. The next is the ETF will get launched at some point. Somebody will get it
off the ground and then all the RAAs buy it for their customers because it's outperforming
everything and they love to be cheap and chase the trade. So this is going to be the strongest
trade now. So you've got the hedge funds and the RAAs. We know the family office space is already
interested and they get sucked in the more of the price goes up and the narrative goes up and more
people talk about it. Family offices tend to do that. Endowment level are next because they can hold
it because it's a long-term asset. So endowments can justify it earlier than pension funds can.
Pension funds can't do this yet.
It's quite difficult for them.
So we've got this wall of money that I keep talking about that's coming.
And if you throw in the public and the NASDAQ traders and the speculators and the Robin Hooders and everybody else, you've got a perfect storm.
And you've got the corporate treasurer.
And I think that last one's huge, Raoul.
I mean, Michael Saylor, no offense to Michael and his company, but him dropping 425 million into this, that's a small company in the grand scheme.
of things globally, right? Like, that's, it's not a big company. Yeah. Unfortunately, and I've talked about
this a few times recently, the crypto space is not very good at speaking the language of others.
We tend to impose our own language. So the corporate treasures will not buy Michael Saylor's
language because it's not the language that they speak. They don't think in those terms.
Corporate treasurer may stay at Microsoft for 10 years and then leave. You know, he doesn't think
in the same way. It wasn't his company. He didn't build it. So we need to talk about how it works as a
diversified asset, how it works in a corporate treasury portfolio of fixed income, commercial
paper, currency baskets, all of the things that they do, we need to talk that language and show
them. Once you do that, Microsoft and Apple and all these other massive cash businesses,
will own it. Of course they will. Because it's a great asset for diversification and they don't
need to buy too much of it. The pension system, okay, that's another beast. Again, everyone's like,
they should do this. Well, until you can show it to them in Barra models, Barra is the model
by which most of the pension industry builds their portfolio and risk management tools.
But we're not talking that language.
So it's like you shouting at me in French and me just shouting back in English louder saying,
I can't understand you.
That's what's going on because they can't do anything with this.
They've got a bearer asset.
They don't know how to custody that we're not telling them how it works from a portfolio
diversification or risk metrics standpoint.
So we'll get there.
And I've already been starting to beg people who understand the barrel world.
to say, listen. And now who owns that pension fund asset allocation world is consultants like
Mercer. We need to get them across the line. You need to teach them about it first. Then they go
to the pension fund trustees, and then the pension fund trustees approve it for the asset allocators.
That's a big process. And I think the key distinction between what you're talking about
across all these different mechanisms of how they could come into the market versus Michael
Sailor is it's a story about voting rights. It's a story about control inside the company. He has
complete control to just go out and do a bold call of taking his entire treasury and dropping it
into Bitcoin like he did. The brave go first. I mean, good on him, right? Because he was in a
position that he could and he got it. And there's a few other people around that got it.
But that will spread slowly, but it will come because I know everybody's going to hate this,
but the investment banks will get into this space and they know how to translate.
They know how to speak to these other people.
And that's a net beneficiary to the space, even though all of us want to protect it from
the investment banks.
But they can't screw with it, really, because it's distributed, it's not owned by them,
nothing they can do with it.
They can help create a derivative market around it, but that's coming anyway.
There's nothing we can do to stop it because humans want leverage for some reason.
Back in 2017, where this thing was really running, the big issue discussed was whether the
government would shut it down.
You almost do not hear that argument anymore.
What are your thoughts on that subject?
Yeah, I mean, I've read the IMF papers, the BIS papers, the ECB, the Bank of England, and the Fed, and the Department of Justice, all their papers.
Not one of them is saying, we need to stop this.
They're all saying, let's make sure it's regulated, make sure the entities are regulated, and by the way, let's build digital currency systems because that's where we have to get to.
And they've kind of acknowledged Bitcoin.
It's like, yes, look, this was the great invention.
And we understand they've got no reason to stop it because, I mean, the bloody foreign exchange
markets trade $4 trillion a day.
They don't care about Bitcoin.
But what it was was really interesting to them and taught them, okay, we need to move
into a digital future.
And good on them, they're doing it.
Now, how they use it in the end, who knows?
But I don't think Bitcoin's a problem.
Talk to me when it's $10 trillion.
dollars and maybe they'd try. But in a globalized world, with something that moves around on the
internet, it's almost possible to stop because somebody will allow it. But Raoul, when it's at $10 trillion,
you have so much entrenchment on corporate balance sheets all over the globe. Like, how in the world
are they possibly going to shut it down at $10 trillion? That's not going to go well with voters.
So they're not. It's the fear they once tried it with gold. Well, last time I checked gold,
been around for about 10,000 years and still works as a system of value and money, regardless
that the Fed once banned it. Yeah, Turks banned it recently. Did it stop Turkey? It's not a
narrative that's provable in the outside world. So one of the unique things that pops out of
this, if we start going down this path, if you want to take out a loan right now and you want a $100,000
loan, you have to pretty much cough up $200,000 worth of Bitcoin and put it into somebody else's
escrow account. That's not how loans work today, right? Like, it's very different than that type of
system. So when you think about this world we live in today that is so credit based,
and if everything starts moving in this direction where everything's equity based,
what does this do to the landscape of everything? You know, I don't know the answer to that
because I think this is going to be a phased affair. And it looks like this now, but in the
And Bitcoin won't look like this.
It's volatility will come down to 5%.
But at what price is that?
What market cap?
10 trillion, 100 trillion?
I don't know.
But then it's like money and then it stabilizes massively.
So I don't really know how this is all going to work.
But it will take time for that to play out.
All right, Raoul.
That's your Gierf here.
You recently had a post about the IMF and the new Britain-Words system.
Could you please talk to us about that?
Yeah, I've been flagging this for a while.
The central banks, I think the BIS were first.
Then Mark Carney at the Bank of England shocked everybody at Jackson Hole last year by talking
about central bank digital currencies.
Everyone's like, well, the main media missed it, but I'm like, what?
This is the Bank of England.
The second oldest central bank in the world.
Talking about central bank digital currency and how disrupted Facebook Libra was as an idea.
And they're not sure that they should let Facebook do this, but they should do it.
I was like, wow, okay, he gets it.
Well, then the ECB, Ben-Wa-Kure, the BIS, the IMF, and the Fed all started talking about it.
And then last week, the week before, there's the IMF on video for everybody to watch,
talking about the New Breton Woods, and they all know that the dollar standard is a problem
because the US is 25% of the global economy and 79.5% of all payments.
So there's a massive mismatch.
And the Fed have basically filled the gap, but now the mechanisms between onshore dollars
and offshore dollars don't flow either now.
The whole thing's a mess.
And people like China who are larger don't want to be held to ransom by the swift payment
system, a bunch of these things.
And nor do the Europeans, really, because they want to trade with Iran.
They don't want the US to tell them they can't trade with Iran.
So anyway, it's in everybody's interest to walk off the dollar standard and create something
new.
And the central bank digital currencies of that.
So they're talking about it in terms of a Bretton Woods of having a new.
agreement on a currency. Now, I don't think there's going to be a single world currencies,
but I think you can construct baskets. There's no reason that South Africa should get penalized
because it has a weak currency and it has to deal everything in US dollars. It's destructive.
Now, imagine if all commodities were traded in a commodity currency that better reflected
the fundamentals of those countries. It would be so much better than having to reflect it
in the dollar, which is not fair on those countries because they're cyclical. I think we're going
to see regional baskets, different types of trade baskets, anything we can create from this.
And we've only just started. And then we have the ability of central banks to use this to completely
change what monetary and fiscal policy even is and what economics is. I mean, we're going to walk
away from the standard Keynesian model and everything else, the whole lot. We're going to go into
a world of behavioral economics and big data and incentive-based systems where you get a different
interest rate to me. And, you know, they can make direct payments. And then before you know,
you're in incentive systems where they can change your behavior. Oh, by the way, your car
monitor was caught you speeding and therefore you're going to pay a higher tax rate this month.
And I don't know if it's worse or better. Look, everybody says, oh, my God, it's a police state
and everything else. Well, guess what? Surveillance state has been there forever. And if you don't think
Google and Facebook and everybody else owns you, even here we are on Skype, who's got this data?
Microsoft, right? So forget about the fact that we can get out of anonymity. Yeah, I'm on an island
of 140 people. If I don't use the internet, I'm pretty anonymous here. But most of us don't
get that. So I think it's a really exciting time because they're going to screw this up.
They're going to make some amazing changes, some great things, some terrible things.
And as investors, sounds like that opportunity to me.
So when you look at the news and you see Paul Tudor Jones coming out and talking about,
I bought Bitcoin a few months ago.
I even like it more now.
I mean, he's really kind of coming on strong.
How does the rest of the people with Goldman Sachs and everybody on Wall Street, how are they viewing that clip, that CNBC clip?
Are people rolling their eyes?
Are they taking it very seriously?
They never take people like Paul seriously.
They take his wealth seriously.
He's a trader and they don't get it.
And Paul changed his mind a lot.
But big hedge fund managers who can afford to take the risk.
I mean, many of them just left the business and went to crypto.
Famous people like John Burbank, just left.
Dan Moorhead, Dan Tapiero.
I mean, you name it.
They're all novo.
It's the supermassive black hole sucking them in too, saying, well, all the opportunity sets
and all the other asset prices are less than this one.
So HFAR managers that I speak to, some of them are famous in the world, have whole
crypto investing units for their own personal wealth.
So they get it.
And the Wall Street guys, they get it too.
Most of these guys, you know, don't forget, there's been a massive deflation in Wall Street
salaries over the last decade.
People used to earn, as a salesman used to earn two million bucks a year, now earns 500,000.
He's got a 75% haircut.
So these guys now realize that banking is not the rich job that you then get out of
and you can retire.
It doesn't happen.
So these guys are having to get the new religion as well.
So, you know, there's a lot of people involved in this now.
It will permeate into the actual investment banks themselves as they set up trading desks and all of that.
I mean, it's all coming because the customers are demanding it.
Raoul, you speak to the smartest guys in finance, and still, with your experience,
I know you always strive to make yourself smarter every single day.
What is something you heard here recently that has really changed your mind about a financial topic?
The last interesting conversation I had that made me really stop and think was with Jeff Booth.
That made me start thinking about wage deflation, and I'm only just starting that thought process.
So you're the first person to really hear it, and I'm going to be writing something up.
So that's made me think something differently.
And I don't know where that works going to lead to, what it's going to tell me, but I just know it's interesting, because it's the opposite of what everybody else is saying.
And so when you look at everything in the world, what I'm going to do is look at all asset prices in the denominator of wages.
And then let's see what things look like.
Yeah, and also the other guy that really opened my mind to stuff,
a discovery I made on Twitter, Santiago Velez,
who now does interviewing for us real vision,
but you had this incredible understanding of the kind of internet value
and the whole broader landscape.
So that was super interesting to me as well,
because he's really in the weeds of interoperability,
how we connect all of these systems together,
that is not a winner-takes-all.
And he also said a really interesting thing because, you know, you see the tribalism, the Bitcoin Maximilus versus blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he's like, good.
He said, at first I thought it was a bug and now I realize it's the feature.
He said, because everybody's fighting for their own piece of turf.
And what it's doing, and Michael Saylor talked about this, really, what it's doing is creating these super vibrant, rich, deep communities that ensure the survival of their asset.
And only the strongest will survive because it has to be invested in by the community.
It doesn't survive in its own way. It has to create network effect. So it's really clever
when you realize it. This is network effect. This is Metcalf's law happening in front of our eyes.
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All right.
Back to the show.
So, Raoul, how do you think about the whole defy movement where you have these decentralized
exchanges?
I know that uniswap was the big one that everyone's talking about on top of Ethereum.
Curious how you're viewing some of this stuff.
These are the baby steps into solving what needs to happen, which is a yield curve.
Once Bitcoin and the crypto markets solve yield curve and has its own yield curve, then we're free of the old system.
It's as simple as that.
Time value of money has to exist.
It doesn't yet.
So define whether you hate it or not, like the tokens, it's irrelevant.
It is the market struggling to price capital in the crypto world.
I love that.
And it will get solved.
And it will, because if Bitcoin is to be this pristine asset, a pristine collateral,
that I talked about, it has to have time value because I'm not going to lock it up
without time value. If I'm going to give it to you as collateral, I want to get something
in exchange, which is interest. And in whatever format that is, it doesn't have to be in money,
it can be an extra Bitcoin or whatever it is or other tokens or anything in this world.
But I just think this is really interesting. People don't really get it yet because they're
still fighting over coins. They think coins and our currency and that's the future versus not,
it's not Bitcoin. Everyone's missing what is going on, which is the low.
single financial revolution that we've seen, it is the internet of value. I mean, this whole
tokenization thing hasn't even started. And it won't be this wave, but the next wave behind this
is you and I are going to be talking about tokens in all sorts of things. And when we talk about
value investing, we'll be talking about what tokens people don't understand because people don't
know how to price the smart contract embedded in this token versus this one. People like Arka,
who have the kind of long short token funds,
are up 130 or percent this year last time I checked,
because there's alpha in that space.
So there's going to be alpha in money markets in the crypto markets.
There's alpha in tokens.
This is truly exciting because we're so bored of financial markets
that we can't even price any longer.
So you think value investing comes back once we get the yield curve back?
Yes, because you've got assets that are not now driven by the demographic issues
of the baby boomers selling all the active funds and the,
millennials buying the passive. Now we're going to create millions of new securities, literally millions.
So what a feast of an opportunity. This is like going back into the hedge fund business in the
70s when Soros started. There's no competition and there's not enough capital in the space and there
would literally be millions of tokens. And what a great thing. To figure out how to create pricing
models around smart contracts, I can't get my head around it yet, but we're going to have to.
Last question for you.
Who's the Patsy at the table in all of this?
What is really nice is that the person who's not the Patsy is the little guy for once.
The little guy is the winner.
They are going to take their share.
And that is amazing because for so long they are the Patsy.
This time, it's probably Wall Street because I think their business model is going to
change dramatically because of fintech. FinTech plus central bank digital currencies plus
cryptocurrencies is a big problem for the banks. And that will change. So they have been
abusive of their monopolistic powers for a long time. Sure, they don't make as much money as they
used to, but they're going to make a lot less, much like the oil companies make less and less now,
and they will do in the future because they now have competition. So I think the balance of power shifts.
Because don't forget, at one point, the financials was 70% of the entire U.S. stock market.
Over-financialization of the world has been the key feature of our lifetimes.
So our lifetimes, we've seen this enormous debt bubble.
And if you are the dealer at the table of a debt bubble, which is a bank, you make all the money.
Well, this is the opposite.
It's the inverse.
And that's really, really unique.
Raoul, what a pleasure to always have you on.
I'm a huge fan of Real Vision
and I'm pretty sure most of the people
listening to this are also huge fans
of Real Vision but give people a handoff
maybe highlight something that you
want people to focus on. If you haven't
seen it already, I did
a piece about
the New Breton Woods because I think
it's really important and that's why you
said, hey listen to have we got to talk about this.
It's on YouTube. Just go to
Real Vision on YouTube
free and go and have a look or listen
to the Real Vision podcast. So they're all
free, you don't have to pay for anything. And just go and check out some of that content. There's
three or four pieces of me, one where I lay out my unfolding thesis, that's on there from a
couple of weeks ago. There's this one, and then there's some of these really smart people
that you'll find interesting. Because if you like this podcast, you'll like Real Vision, because
we've always known each other, because we always realize we're in the same space. It's very
accretive to all of us to create these kind of conversations broaden everybody's mind. So we're all
in the same game. The other thing is really exciting news. We're about to do something massive
in crypto. As you can tell, I'm probably marginally positive on the cryptocurrency space. Look,
we wanted to create what we did in Real Vision and Macro for the whole crypto space. We're launching
Real Vision crypto. It's been launched internally for the Real Vision subscribers, but it's going to be free
to the world with some really big sponsors. And so everybody's going to be able to have access
to the quality of information that Real Vision does in the rest of the investing space.
space, but in crypto, and that's covering every part of digital assets from the Bitcoin
Maximilus to the weird, funky tokens that none of us understand. It's all coming. So just look out
for me on Twitter as well, and you'll see notifications of it, and you can sign up to that for free.
Raoul Powell, thank you so much for coming on the Investor's podcast. It's always a pleasure.
Thank you, my friend. All right, so at this point in time, as we're letting Raoul go, we have a
question from the audience, and this question comes from Josephine.
Hello, Preston and Sique.
First, I want to thank you and say that I greatly appreciate listening to your weekly podcast.
You're both an inspiration to me.
My request today is in relation to the modern monetary theory, MMT, which seems to be a top issue at the moment.
As far as I understand, the simplest form of MMT proposes that governments borrowing in their own currency should not worry about deficits,
as they can always print more money to finance their debt.
However, countries under the Eurozone are dependent on.
on the European Central Bank to manage the monetary policy for the member countries.
My question to you is how MMT would relate to the Eurozone countries
that are not able to independently manage their monetary policies.
Also, I would love to hear your general thought on MNT.
So, Josephine, I absolutely love this question,
and it's a very insightful question you're asking.
Unfortunately, I don't know you personally,
but I can see that you're writing from an email account belonging to a business school.
And I wanted to highlight that because macroeconomics is being taught in a weird way in business
schools today.
And that includes monetary theory or MMT, it is often referred to.
So I just wanted to shout out to you and other students listening to this podcast, how much
I admire that you're thinking so critical about what is being taught to you right now, because
we should all be able to think independently.
Of course, both you students going to school and those of us who are student of life as well.
And let me address your question first about MMT in general and then specifically talk about
the Eurozone afterwards. The idea behind MMT, as you mentioned, in its most simple form, is that
a country can print its own money and can thereby run a continuous budget deficit since they can't
be insolvent. Well, it sounds good, right? But if something is too good to be true, it typically is,
and the same goes for MMT. So let's first talk about the scenario of a non-global currency
country, and that includes most countries. Often they can issue some debt in their local currency,
but they are at the end of the day depending on the major currencies whenever they issue debt,
most noticeable the US dollar. And running continuous deficits quickly erodes the faith in that
country and its debt obligations, leading to a debasement of the currency. One of the most famous
example of that would be the Vimer Republic in 1920s, who experienced this hyperinflation
because they had to repay its debt mainly in US dollar and the surling.
A more recent example is that we've seen how the line the world still is on the US dollar.
And we've seen that just this year when we saw a dollar shortage during the pandemic
and the dollar soared.
And that happened because non-reserved currencies had to service the debt in US dollars.
Okay, so that was non-reserved currency.
So let's talk about EMT in a global reserve currency.
And as mentioned, the most important fiat currency we have, that is the US dollar,
So, not surprisingly, you could say MMT was also originated in the US and was first proposed
by a jailman named Warren Mosler.
But it was also much later validated by former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan who said that
there is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants
and paying it to somebody.
He actually said that.
And the US is in a slightly different situation because they are the main global
reserve currency. But the conclusion is really the same. Whenever the music stops, you are in a world
of pain. Now, the US, in that privileged position that the rent, can play the music for longer
due to its size and the currency dominance. But the music still stops, and the longer the music
plays, the more it's going to hurt. So, you might be asking how is it going to hurt and why.
Well, the most obvious way this is going to hurt the US is through inflation. The US can continue to issue
bonds, to finance your debt, but only as long as the world keeps trusting the value of the
US dollar as a store of value.
Whenever that stops, you will see rapid inflation in the worst case hyperinflation that
could destroy the economy and lead to social unrest.
Now, proponents of MMT acknowledge the risk of inflation, but bring the argument that
it can be countered by increasing taxes.
To me, that is just an argument that makes little sense because inflation is a tax on everyone,
it hurts the hat-nots the most. And whenever you try to make tax reforms in the country
rapid inflation, the idea of just raising taxes is really just going to be a disaster.
And so you might be thinking, why is MMT so popular even among politicians when it's obviously
wrong? Well, think about it. If you were a politician and wanted to get elected, do you get
more votes if you spend more or less money? Obviously, it's easier if you pledged to give money
to more voter groups rather than few. Because it's a pain to stay within your budget. So if you can
argue that you can print as much money as you want and you don't have to care about the budget
deficit at all, well, a lot of politicians like that idea. And voters are used to seeing actual cash.
On cash, what do you see? Well, you see it's being printed by the central bank. So the idea of just
printing more money resonates with a lot of people, but that doesn't make it true. Then specifically to your
question about M&T in Europe. And sorry for it the long way around going to that question.
It's a basic assumption. And you know how economists like assumptions that in a sovereign country,
you need to be able to control your own money supply. And as you say, that's not the case in Europe.
So M&T is not applicable to Europe. Also given that you don't have the same crossover between
fiscal and monetary policies as you do in the United States. It's sort of being tested here in 2020.
give you that with the corona bonds and raising money for fiscal spending. And so far, I'm not
impressed. And in any case, it won't change the fundamental fall of the theory. We had multiple
monetary regimes throughout the last few centuries. And it's always tempting to conclude that
as long as you don't see a complete failure in a few currency like hyperinflation, it validates
a monetary policy. I don't agree with that. And I also just want to clarify, I don't see hyperinflation
all in the US or Europe in the near future. That's not what I'm saying and that's not the point.
But I am certain that if we continue to run these crazy deficits and just print and print and
print, it doesn't matter MMT or whatever kind of theory you're going to relate to.
It won't save us. So to your question about MMT in Europe, not only in reality is MMT not
applicable in the Eurozone. Even in theory, it's hard to make the argument.
even though I'm sure you'll find some economists that will give it a fair try.
All right.
So, Josephine, fantastic question.
I think a lot of what we talked about with Raoul really kind of gets at the heart of what's going on and why MMT is going to be, in my personal opinion, a disaster.
Why are they doing this?
Why haven't they ever proposed something like this in the past?
Well, why they're proposing this is because when you look at the velocity of money, how often money is it being.
exchanged amongst all the participants in the economy. It's slowing down year after year. It has,
it has been for decades. And now it's at a snail's pace between participants inside the economy.
And what's blowing the minds of so many economists is they're saying, well, we're printing
faster and harder than we ever have historically. How come that's not driving the velocity of
money up? Well, you have to look at how it's being inserted to date and how it's going to be inserted into
the future. And if they continue to just insert it into the bond market and straight into the hands of
people who are holding all these assets, and then those people take that cash flow that's just
been recently printed, what are they going to do with it? Well, they're going to go and buy other
assets because they're already fairly wealthy or they're extremely wealthy in most cases,
and they don't need to go out and buy more things. They just need to go out and buy more equity
or they need to go out and buy more fixed income investments with that money that has just been
stuffed into their hands.
So the way that they're supplying that liquidity into the system, it's just nesting itself
straight into assets opposed to into the hands of people to conduct transactions,
which is where they really want it to go.
The problem with this long term, in my humble opinion, is you're creating an incentive
structure that is broke.
If you want to understand the incentive structure that,
printing and the inflation of monetary units as they're adding more and more units and then
the credit is just being stacked on top of that, which also spends like money. Credit spends exactly
like money. When you look at that, what that incentive structure is doing is it's forcing
the speed of technology and the speed of investment into new technology to accelerate.
Jeff Booth has one of the best books on how this investment and this incentive structure compounds on itself similar to like what we're seeing with Moore's Law.
That's why you see technology just eating the world right now.
So as they continue to double down, triple down, quadruple down on this idea of MMT, starting to take interest rates negative, it's only going to compound this technology software eating the world type event.
that we are currently experiencing and it's starting to feel like it's getting out of control,
like beyond society's ability to actually handle it.
Just look at how media is being spread and social media and all those aspects that are just
devouring our social norms.
I would suggest that a lot of these are due to these policies and they're due to this incentive
structure that is a result of these policies.
So I'm very concerned about it.
One of the reasons, and I know we just talked about Bitcoin on this show for a lot of time,
one of the reasons I like Bitcoin is because it could potentially slow some of this down.
In my personal opinion, some people will argue different sides of this.
But in my opinion, if an inflationary monetary policy, and I'm talking about them adding more units whenever I say inflationary,
inflationary monetary policy.
If you're adding more units and it creates this incentive structure, if you have
something that's pegged, it might slow it down.
That's not a reason why Bitcoin will be successful, but the reason I'm bringing it up is
because it might be a counter to all this software eating the world that we're seeing.
It could slow some of that incentive structure for capital investment into more and more
technology.
It might slow it down a little bit.
another thing that I think is huge about this is when you're talking about modern monetary policy,
what is really doing is it's keeping these zombie companies alive.
So many of these companies do not have free cash flows.
And whenever they just hand out triple P loans to companies that in otherwise would fail,
you're just keeping them alive and you're not allowing creative destruction in a free and open market to occur.
and I think that that's my biggest issue with MMT is you're not really allowing free and open markets to really exist.
And I just think that that's crazy.
So those are some of my thoughts.
Those are some of my concerns.
I get very frustrated whenever I see academia not kind of lay some of these counter arguments out like Stig and I have just done.
It seems like, you know, academia is just going along for it.
they're recommending it. They're suggesting that this is the best route to go. And I would,
I would suggest the exact opposite. Now, if we, let's just say that, I know a lot of people don't
buy into the into the Bitcoin argument, and that's fine. I would just say that if that starts
to become a reality and it would start to take hold, and I, I suspect that's what, what is going to
happen, you're going to need some type of policy like MMT in order to grease the skids for
that transition to actually occur. If central bankers just stepped back and didn't print anything,
that transition period over to something that would be a hard equity-based monetary policy
that's being delivered, completely decentralized, would be an extremely painful event for the
world. So although I like to bash MMT, in a weird way, if we are going to this Bitcoin world,
we really do need some type of MMT policy where a lot of liquidity is being provided into
the system in order to make that transition a whole lot smoother and not as abrupt.
So I know that's kind of counterintuitive to some of the stuff I was saying before,
but in a weird way, that MMT policy is somewhat needed.
for a more graceful transition if this Bitcoin world that Raula and Stig and I were talking about
actually transpires. So Josephine, fantastic question. This stuff is not easy. We definitely don't have
all the answers. We're just, we're looking at this from so many different angles. We're trying to
talk to as many people as we can. But what a great question. And for asking such a great question,
and we're going to give you access to our TIP finance tool.
This allows you to go in there, filter all the stocks on the stock market for value,
so you can find really good companies that are kicking off good free cash flows
and that are undervalued relative to every other stock in the market right now.
It also has a momentum tool, which has been extremely useful here in 2020 with the volatility
that we've seen.
And our momentum tool has been extremely accurate at,
keeping people in the market at the right time. For anybody else out there, if you want to get your
question played on the show like Josephine, just go to AsktheInvesters.com, record your question there.
If it gets played on the show, you get free access to our TIP finance tool.
All right, guys, Preston, I really hope you enjoyed this episode of The Investors Podcast.
We will see each other again next week.
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