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Phillip Leslie
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Executive assistant to Jamie Dimon šŸ‘‡ Book a free 15 min Self dev coaching call to find your purpose in life. https://calendly.com/phillipleslie/selfdev

The financial system is broken

Wonderful interview #jeffsnider discussing how the #dollar system is chronically broken. Can’t sell a solution if there is no problem, and Jeff is a master at sketching out the mechanical problems inherent to the system.

https://www.youtube.com/live/Y-ogR56HzgM?si=4sS_GbLJZkPFBYy4

its 1926. i am a wealthy stock market trader. the market keeps going up, americans keep getting richer, things are, as some say, "roaring", and everyone everywhere is having a great time. the overall outlook is that this trajectory remains steady!

take me to 1933. what was i wrong about?

assuming you arent a 57 yr old

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

As developed nations continue to enter sovereign debt crises akin to the 1940s, there are a few main outcomes.

Option 1) In a world without bitcoin, or if bitcoin fails, central banks and their governments recapitalize themselves with gold, devalue the people, and do another cycle of this inflationary policy for the next few generations. The Treasury/Fed handbook literally has a written option for this, although it is stated more opaquely. It can be done in the US (and probably many other countries) based on current laws if shit hits the fan. Denmark's central bank and China's economic ministers have also written similar things regarding extreme outcomes. It's pretty straightforward based on the past.

Option 2) We go into a centralized technocratic future. Centralized AI and CBDCs win. People have cuck money that the AI+government control. It's like Brave New World, 1984, take your pick. Hard to say, but not free.

Option 3) Open source money wins. Bitcoin and its ecosystem win. Governments get defunded from their fiat printers, and have to be more honest with their ledgers or default and get reconstructed since they can't print what their people hold as savings, or in the hegemon's case, can't print what the world holds. Probably a world of chaos for a time during the transition, but also an opportunity for peace and building the next era. Keeping track of the nukes would probably be a big deal, like when the Soviet Union fell. It's actually kind of remarkable that they collapsed economically and politically but in an orderly enough way to keep track of and secure most of the nukes.

I don't know which one will win, but I consider Option 3 to be the honorable method; the path of transparency. That's the one I am rooting for and building for.

If I fail, I would like it written that it's the method I tried for, but realistically the AI+government will probably delete most of the records of all of the failures anyway, since that is how history works, without any sort of objective truth keeper. Our best hope is to hide records in a distributed way and hope they can remain undisturbed for a while. At least bitcoiners have a tendency to write stuff in steel and make low time preference things. Some psychopath will hopefully carve a life work in steel in a cave or something, but who knows, lol.

And ironically, if Option 3 wins, any of the losing factions could still insert their ideas and paths into the Bitcoin blockchain, now or in the future. It's the most immutable database that we know how to build, and would preserve their ideas as it does our ideas. Like, you know what? I *want* the Communist Manifesto to be in the immutable Bitcoin blockchain, because I want people in the future to know how *bad* it is. It might already be in there; I don't know. I wouldn't want people centuries from now to think about those ideas and believe they came up with something new; I want to preserve my enemies' texts because I believe I can win through markets, force, virtue, and truth.

I think that's almost always what determines the winning side. Losers want to burn their enemies' texts to ensure that their good ideas don't spread too much. Winners want to preserve their enemies' texts to ensure that their bad ideas are never repeated.

the 1940s debt was from ww2. assuming we enter a ww3 scenario in the next couple years, the debt will only balloon more lol.

new gens have less tolerance threshold, they buck the system they are born into. the pendulum swings back and forth.

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

I used to believe in political incrementalism- the idea that you can change things gradually through better election outcomes.

But maybe it was also just youth, I don’t know.

After spending many years studying how the current monetary system works, studying how past debt and currency cycles ended, and based on practical realities from the past two election cycles, I dropped any notion of incrementalism, at least for the big economic things.

Incrementalism works for minority groups to gain social and political rights. Religious people to practice without interference, women to vote, gay people to marry, etc. Immigration policies. Things like that. But it doesn’t work for the financial system.

Instead, history and current affairs suggest that things generally point in the same structural financial direction, uncontested, until there is a massive fiscal crisis, geopolitical crisis, and trend change. And that is when politics becomes critical in all aspects- as chaos develops, the group that has enough power to set the next order *really* fucking matters. They either build a platform of virtue toward the next cycle, or they fall into the unfortunately common paths of communism or fascism.

And it is not just ideas that triumph, but technology too. Technology plays a big role in which ideas are even workable. Both ideas and technology are important.

So when I realized incrementalism wasn’t working, I sought out other methods.

The weaker method is just social- I try to put things out there with my platform to encourage reason, empathy, human rights, etc. Not partisan but also not necessarily moderate, but rather grounded in firm principles of virtue ethics.

The stronger method is to play some small part in building something better. Alternative money. Alternative communication methods. Either explaining and recommending them to people, or directly venture investing in companies that build on them and help improve the UX and solve new problems.

That’s my goal. I want to do whatever tiny part I can to bring about more peace, more fairness, more opportunity, more growth, and less destruction.

im reading Lowenstein's book America's bank on the formation of the Federal Reserve. Yeah it was the panic of 1907 that finally provided enough openness and support for the idea of a european-styled central bank. It's typically crises that spark the momentum required for financial institutional change. Every idea has its' time. the difficulty is in waiting for that moment to arrive, nursing an idea whose time has not yet arrived.

maybe we can swap the draft with shirtless in public..

Hi joe glad to be connected ! Always looking to grow my network - feel free to zap me zaps