Thread by @otisa502

1/29 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): “I guess my question to you is, Mark: What is the central bank's next move? Because the framing of the macro is, we're in an era of money printing and we've been doing a ton of it. What happens next? How do we get prepared for this decade?

2/29 “What's Powell's next move?"

MARK (@MarkYusko): "He's going to print more. Look, the history on this is very consistent: All empires fail, every single one, reserve currencies end. The final throws of those empires is rife with this type of cronyism, this type of taxation

3/29 “without representation, so to speak, this type of rampant inflation and money printing. Go back to the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, there are some quotes from Marcus Aurelius that could have been written yesterday, literally; they just talk about rampant government

4/29 “spending and lack of discipline and people being too lazy and not wanting to work and wanting to pay people not to work, all the things we talk about today; universal basic income, what a crock; modern monetary theory, what a crock. It just means producing more of a wasting

5/29 “asset. So, Roman Empire had these dinaries, these gold coins, and then underneath it they had silver coins, and what they did is they would clip the coins, literally they would clip the edges and steal the silver. That's why quarters have ridges on the side, so you can tell

6/29 “if you've been clipped. And so, what happened with the Roman Empire? It failed. So then go to the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire. The British Empire, the sun never set on the British Empire. When we were an emerging market run by a gang — if you've seen the movie

7/29 “'Gangs of New York,' 1860 is not a fun place to live in the United States; you walk down the street, you get killed. It was tough. The British Empire ruled the world until... what happened? 1913 they invaded Mesopotamia, incurred a bunch of debt, pound sterling collapsed

8/29 “and the dollar ascended. it took 30 years for the dollar to ascend to Bretton Woods and for us to become the world reserve currency. I know people are tired of hearing me talk about the world reserve currency, but the world reserve currency was historically held by the

9/29 “company with the most powerful navy. So let's start with Portugal, because they had the tallest trees, so they had the faster ships; Spain took them over, cut the trees, taller ships; and then France; and then The Neverlands; and ultimately the steamship was invented in the

10/29 “U.K., which became the superpower; and then we invented nuclear, and so we have subs, so we became the most powerful navy. Now, what's interesting is, world reserve currencies last about 70ish years, so our run is about over. And everybody says #Bitcoin is going to be the

11/29 “next. No, no. There's a step between #Bitcoin, I think, and the dollar, which is the renminbi. I think China figured out 10 years ago that the next war will be fought with chips, not ships. And I can't believe it took me this long to actually watch it, but I’ve been

12/29 “watching 'Mr. Robot' for the last couple weeks. Oh, my gosh. Blown away, blown away at the genius of the writing, the accuracy of the story lines and this whole thing about China rules the world. They do, right. 10 years ago, you had to choose, what do you want to be best

13/29 “in. And the United States decided we're going to be best at social media, and we rock at Instagram and Facebook, we are the best. China said, you know what, I think we're going to be the best at AI and 5G, it's better; one of them sounds more sustainable, one of them

14/29 “sounds more important. So China has literally been ruling the world and they have this long plan, this 30-year plan. So the previous 30 years, from 1990 to 2020, their 30-year plan was a harmonious rise to drag 700 million people out of abject poverty into the middle

15/29 “class. Now, 'harmonious rise' sounds very nice, it doesn't sound very threatening. Well, their next 30-year plan is to become a global superpower; stated goal, global superpower. And so, that's why all this cold war 2.0 rhetoric has popped up and why China is the enemy.

16/29 “Now, it also helps to have an enemy. The military-industrial complex works better if you have an enemy. We had the USSR way back when, and now we got China. But it's really more about this: That the next war isn't going to be fought with ships, it's going to be fought with

17/29 “chips. The next war is all about cyber; it's all about technological prowess. And it's why China will be the first with a central bank digital currency; they are way ahead in AI, they are way ahead in crypto. Americans suffer from this problem, I joke that Americans are

18/29 “like Notre Dame football fans — you see my 'Fighting Irish' picture behind, I'm a Notre Dame guy — and Notre Dame fans think that we win the championship every year. The fact is we haven't won since '88. It's a long time. If you talk to my father-in-law, he's like no, we

19/29 “win every year. I'm like, no, George. When you were there, we won every year; because after the war, we went overseas and we got all the guys from the army and the navy to come back as 28-year-olds and we had a pro football team for four years, and we went undefeated for

20/29 “four years at Notre Dame in the '40s, and we won 4 national championships — no, we actually won 3, they stole one. But bottom line is, you don't get to do that anymore, except at BYU. So now you actually have to play the game with 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds. And Notre Dame is

21/29 “not irrelevant but we're not the superpower. Now you have to cheat, like Alabama does — I shouldn't say they cheat; they bend the rules and over-recruit. But they're the superpower. China has figured out that the war is going to be won in cyber and digital. So it all

22/29 “goes back to this idea of the American Empire, which Americans think that we rule the world. We're 20% of crypto globally, maybe 20%, maybe 25%, it's not 100%. So we're important, but we are grasping at straws from a legislative and regulatory perspective, talking about,

23/29 “oh, we're going to ban #Bitcoin. OK, first of all, you can't ban it; it's like squeezing a balloon, the air just goes someplace else. China tried to ban it in 2017 quote/unquote. They actually didn't, but they said they were going to. What happened? The price fell 40%, and

24/29 “the exchanges said, oh, we'll just move to South Korea and Japan. They're like, bring 'em, we'll tax you, it'll be great, good for us, and South Korea becomes a leader. And now U.S. is talking about overregulating. So what's going to happen is, instead of embracing

25/29 “technology, instead of embracing the movement to digital currencies, we're trying to fight it. Why are we fighting it? Because we like our legacy system, we like being in charge, at least the people at the top like being in charge. The people at the

26/29 “bottom don't like it as much. The people at the top really like the fact that they own all the assets. As someone was saying the other day, there is this threat of raising taxes, and someone said, are you kidding, Pelosi is never going to vote for that, because she and her

27/29 “husband are really rich, so they don't want to pay more taxes. But they'll exempt the Congressmen and Senators, just like they exempt her from insider trading. Can you believe that? It's legal for Congressmen and Senators to insider trade. And when they asked

28/29 “them about it — this is great. When they asked — and this is not a political statement one side or the other. But when they asked one of the Congressmen, one of the Senators a number of years ago: Like, of course, it's part of my compensation. They were saying, do you

29/29 “think it's right for you to vote to hold up something that increases the profits of MasterCard and you're a big holder? Well, of course that's OK; it's part of my compensation."

Timestamp: 24:33

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