The subtitle is Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better, and the author is Lyn Alden (2023).
I feel like I have read books like this one before, which deconstruct the problems with a fiat monetary system and the issues of inflation / rampant money creation. That said, the author does a nice job of supplementing the traditional view.
-The story over history is that hard money eventually wins out over weaker money. Until now. And the reason that fiat currencies won out in the recent era is because telecommunication systems introduced speed as a variable to the competition. Gold/commodities inherently take longer to transport and authenticate, an inconvenience in the digital age.
-The short-term view that every politician has to take means that the problems of perpetual debt growth can never really be addressed. It is not a problem that can be attributed to one politician or party.
-The reason that 2008 did not cause inflation was because the bailouts went to the banks and the average person did not have more money. But the expansion of broad money during the pandemic did end up in the hands of average people, which meant that more money was chasing the same amount of goods and services.
-Bitcoin represents a solution to the speed gap between transactions and settlement. And it has the added virtue of maintaining characteristics which resemble hard money (decentralized, no one else’s liability, high stock-to-flow ratio).
