Egypt is one of the handful of countries joining BRICS next year.

Friends and family here who don’t normally talk about finance are talking about it a lot. They see it as a pathway to escape the yoke of the dollar and American imperialism. They ask if this could mean the downfall of the dollar, and so forth.

I’ve been writing about long term de-dollarization for the past 3-4 years, and of course Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent freezing of Russian reserves accelerated it around the margins. I touch on de-dollarization in Broken Money too, in the “Heavy is the Head That Wears the Crown” chapter.

But like most things, people got overly excited by this process. Popular gold analysts were calling for a gold-backed BRICS currency announcement here in August, which of course never came.

Some major BRICS countries don’t even really like each other, like India and China. This will be a stepwise piece by piece process of closer financial and trade integration. Over time, countries can swap currencies rather than go through dollar rails.

It’s an important geopolitical process, but beware of people hyping it up too much or making something out of it that it is not.

good morning nostr 🫡

Pump the token you printed from thin air with only a billion of derivative open interest; create tens of billions of value.

It's relatively easy too, you have proprietary info on the only liquid spot and derivatives market it trades on at the time. Futures collateralized with stablecoins and the token itself, pump it.

+4,000% in one year. $100+ billion in market cap. Your share, a mirage worth nearly $50b, materializes a mere four years after the ICO. A treasure and a trap, you enable your users to collateralize against it. Encourage this, and of course encourage them to also keep buying, this thing won't simply just support itself.

How do you capitalize? Well, first off, do NOT sell anything, that'd be too risky, as there are no natural buyers in size, you are the market. Instead, think of other ways to leverage your near immortal levels of newfound wealth, where you won't damage the exchange rate. Your own platform enables this, of course.

Access to billions of dollars of fiat flows, an international banking network, and a stablecoin issued in your name—which you even manage to rehypothecate by the billion—gives you plenty of tools at your disposal.

Your biggest competitor, who attempted to mirror your model, goes down in flames, their bluff called, with the world watching. A win at first, you shortly realize the move backfires. Regulators start circling, a precedent has been set.

Fiat rails and banking relationships get cut. Your stablecoin is ordered to wind down, and jurisdiction by jurisdiction your platform is ordered to cease. Volatility and volumes dwindle, further thinning the air.

Depleted of fiat, with most of your wealth tied to a 'Hotel California' asset that you can never sell hanging above multi-year support, you do and say anything to keep the confidence game alive.

good morning nostr, freedom tech is hope 🫡

Not great in the near term. The combination of the Fed doing QT, the Treasury shifting towards longer-duration bond issuance, and China running tight fiscal policy, are all liquidity negative.

I think we grind for a while until something snaps in the Treasury market or something adjacent, and then we do the next leg up in liquidity.

Liquidity bottomed back in Oct 2022 right after 1) the UK bond market outright broke and 2) the US bond market was really wobbly (bad liquidity, high volatility). That was fixed by the Treasury draining its cash account and shortening the duration of its bond issuance.

$34 trillion is no joke

100 Foot Wave on HBO so good. Watching season 2