The economy feels harder to understand than ever — and Jeff Deist explains why. In this interview, he breaks down how today’s monetary system has pushed the entire country toward speculation, debt, and short-term thinking.
Jeff reveals how financialization distorts incentives, why “number go up” isn’t real wealth, and what happens when money stops being stable and becomes something everyone has to constantly navigate.
If you’ve felt like markets don’t reflect reality anymore, or that money itself has become the problem, this conversation brings clarity to the forces shaping the next decade.
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Additional Resources
Earn a yield on gold, paid in gold
Against Bitcoin financialization article
Transcript
Monetary Metals:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein of Monetary Metals. I am joined by my friend and colleague Jeff Deist, General Counsel for Monetary Metals. Jeff, you wrote a very interesting article for the print version of the Bitcoin magazine talking about financialization. Jeff, what’s the thesis of your article?
Jeff Deist:
Well, the title, Ben, was Against Bitcoin Financialization. So we’ll get to that. But I’ve written a few articles for Bitcoin magazine, much to Keith Wiener’s surprise, no doubt. They’ve reached out to me in the past. I wrote an article a couple of years ago called Against Monetary Hedonism, which was basically a lambasting of how I think monetary policy creates a lot of cultural downstream consequences.
So knowing a few people who work there, they came back to me this summer and asked for you to write something for the financial issue. And so that was a few months ago, I think in August, when I actually wrote the article, it just came out more recently in their print version.
And so at that time, Bitcoin was flying high. It’s gone down a bit since. It’s actually down below below $100,000 per coin as we record this episode. But it was as high as $126,000 per coin in the heat of the summer and early fall. And so I was fascinated by this idea of Bitcoin treasury companies, and Michael the sailor at MicroStrategy is obviously the poster boy for that. His company has announced they’re going to dump many, many, many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring more Bitcoin on the debt side by issuing more MicroStrategy bonds, and also on the treasury or the stock side by issuing more micro treasury stock.
So I wrote an article saying, I don’t love this for a variety of reasons. I think companies ought to focus on what they actually do, which is produce a good or service for society. And more importantly, I think capital markets ought to be a little more focused on moving capital to its best and highest uses, to the best entrepreneurs, and then punishing perhaps poor management that doesn’t perform well in terms of earnings or shareholder value.
So it was basically an article that touched upon a lot of the themes I worked on at the Mises Institute and elsewhere, which is that I think that the economy is dangerously financialized. And so I wrote about this in the context of Bitcoin treasury companies, specifically.
Monetary Metals:
And Jeff, is this just a symptom that has been around forever, or is this just a symptom of our current monetary age, where there’s been low interest rates, there’s been quantitative easing, Obviously, we’re no longer on a gold standard.
How much of this is just due to our current monetary incentives that people don’t often think about rather than, Hey, people have tried this all throughout time. There’s been this extra financialization on top of companies just making stuff. So how much of this is new and how much of this has been here forever?
Jeff Deist:
Well, that’s a good question. I think speculation is part of the human psyche. We’d all rather get rich fast than slow, or at least get rich, which is increasingly It’s increasingly hard when we’ve got a depreciating currency, and that’s how you save and invest in that currency.
Look, financialization is not really a term of art. I think it’s used broadly by people to say, well, the financial sector, what we think of as investment banking or lending or mortgages or that thing, have come to dwarf the more traditional sectors of the US economy, let’s say manufacturing or agriculture. And it sure seems like there’s all these guys and gals on Wall who just move money around and get rich.
And I think, broadly speaking, there’s some truth to that. There’s actually some populist truth to that. It actually aids and abets the more left-wing framing, which is that there is an undeserving class of wealthy elites created by capitalism, right? I mean, that is a left-wing narrative. And I think because of monetary policy, there is a grain of truth to that. What we’ve always understood is that individuals respond to incentives. And companies are no different.
They’re just a collective of individuals. So companies respond to incentives in the same way. And we understand this when it comes to, let’s say, the tax system or the regulatory system. Impose a $20 minimum wage, and a lot of restaurants will just throw up their arms and say, We’re not going to do this anymore. People respond to incentives. But what’s not as often remarked or considered or discussed is how companies respond to monetary policy.
Because monetary policies puts most people to sleep. But nonetheless, I would argue that the last 40 years, roughly, of declining interest rates, since Paul Volcker, interest rates have basically gone down, has actually created a huge monetary policy distortion in the way companies do business. And so my definition of financialization is when companies distort not only their business activities, but their actual capital tables.
In other words, the mix of debt and equity they use to build and finance their company in response to monetary policy. I think there’s something very new in all of this in that sense. I think micro strategy is an example of it. I want capital markets to be noble. I want them to move money to where it’s most productive so that we all get better goods and services for less, and we get richer and wealthier and happier and healthier as a result as a society.
I don’t want people engaged in financial engineering to make money. We want them making actual goods and services that help us.
Monetary Metals:
And where does someone like Berkshire Hathaway sit in this thesis? Are they an exception to this financialization trend? Are they an example of it? Where’s someone like a Berkshire Hathaway, who’s maybe the eighth biggest company in the world?
Obviously, they don’t really produce any physical things. Warren Buffett isn’t in the office every day cranking out widgets, but they clearly do something of value, right, Jeff? Where does Berkshire Hathaway or other companies like it sit in this thesis of yours?
Jeff Deist:
Well, I would say Berkshire represents that older, perhaps better or nobler version of capital markets. Yes, they’re a company, but they basically are investors. They’re a group of investors. And because since Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger were from or older from another generation, I think they view capital markets in a way that is perhaps less speculative, more rigorous.
They talk like Keynesians, but they actually invest like Austrians in the sense that they own a lot of companies that produce tangible stuff, commodities like timber or oil or Or Southern Pacific railway, for example, is one of their big holdings.
So I’m not sure that they are speculators in the sense that I’m thinking in terms of financialization. What I mean is when people really just start companies or morph companies into something apart from their original mission or purpose, strictly to play in the financial markets, and they basically abandon the underlying good or service. I think that’s the difference. And it’s pretty stark. I mean, when you think about Strategy. Were I a software engineer there? I might be a little nervous about my job because I think, well, wait a minute.
They’re trying to make all their money by being a Bitcoin treasury company. What does that have to do with me? I’m a Java programmer or something like that.
That’s what I’m really talking about. And I do think that one way that this has impacted America pretty profoundly in, let’s say, the last 20 or 30 years, is that the best and brightest of our young people have perhaps steps changed. Instead of going into medicine, instead of going into all kinds of careers, I think a lot of them have headed to Wall Street and to Silicon Valley, based in large part, I would argue, on this financialized economy.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, what % or what amount of this financialization is just a response to inflation rather than a true choice that companies are saying, Hey, you know what? We could be making iPhones or other widgets, but instead, let’s just mess with our balance sheet.
How much of this is really a necessity because of the nature of inflation today, or how much of it is just corporations saying, Hey, we’ve got excess money. Let’s play around with it?
Jeff Deist:
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s probably unanswerable, but I would argue that too much of it is the former. I mean, look, someone like Apple, clearly, Apple produces goods and services that people want. They produce devices that have sold unbelievable amounts worldwide.
So they end up with so much cash-cash laying around on their balance sheet that they go out and produce and create Brayburn capital or whatever it’s called. I believe it’s about the third largest hedge fund in the world. And who can blame them? They got to do something with all that cash. You can’t just put it all into CapEx or raise everyone’s salary way above and beyond market. So that, I think, is rational in a sense. But a lot of this is companies actually just saying, look, we have no choice. This is the monetary policy.
We have to respond to it rationally. And so if If we go back to, let’s say, the 2008 crisis, in the years leading up to it, you might say, well, these mortgage lenders were irrational, Ben. They were giving two and three and four mortgages to, like the big short, to cab drivers or to Las Vegas strippers or whatever it might be.
And that was crazy. They were so stupid to do that. It was so frothy. They should have seen it was a bubble. Well, perhaps, but also they were responding to incentives, low or near zero interest rates, that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get people speculating mightily with other people’s money. It’s just the nature of things. So it’s human nature to respond to incentives, no doubt.
But I think that we have to We have to go to the source of it all. We have to go to monetary policy first and foremost, if we hope to, let’s say, reduce what I do consider a bad trend in society of what we broadly call financialization.
Monetary Metals:
And what about this idea of paying out a dividend? We had Samuel Smith, who is a dividend investor on our podcast recently. We talked about the death of the dividend payer, if that’s maybe overstated. What about companies paying a dividend?
They say, Hey, we have all this cash. We don’t know what to do with it. Instead of us figuring out what to do with it and buying a hedge fund or adding something to our balance sheet, why don’t we just give this cash back to you, oh thankful investor?
So what about this idea of the dividend payer? Is this basically something that happened in a weird heyday of financial markets where companies said, Hey, we’re agnostic as what to do with the cash, you decide? Or is the death of the dividend payer basically a legit fact?
Jeff Deist:
I think it’s an absolutely terrible trend. If you go back to our grandmothers or our great grandmothers, a lot of them had… They might have some GE stock or they might have some IBM stock or some US Steel stock back in the day, and they would get little tiny $20 dividend checks every once in a while. When that was meaningful, you could actually pay some bills with that.
And that’s what it meant to be an owner, is that once you made a profit, you pulled some cash out of the company. And so I really, really dislike this trend And I do believe it’s because of the Fed and its policies, where by large companies don’t pay a dividend. Amazon, famously, has never paid a dividend.
Amazon has been a public company since, I believe, 1998. And people are going to say, well, come on, Jeff. Their investors are clearly happy. They put this into CapEx. They’ve built out Amazon Prime. They’ve built out one day shipping or whatever they call it. They’ve built out Amazon Web Services, cloud technology. This is what the market wants, Jeff. You’re just being a negative Nancy. No, no, no, no.
I think ownership implies income stream, right? Nobody would ever own or open a dry cleaner or let’s say a pizza restaurant and say, Listen, we’re just going to operate this pizza restaurant for the next 30 years and take all the profit we make and put it back into developing a chain of pizza restaurants. But in 30 years, we’re going to sell it for a huge gain.
No, the reason they wouldn’t do that is because the average person an opening a pizzeria actually needs to pay a mortgage and feed their children and pull some income out of the business as they go. And so we’ve developed this economy where everything’s just number go up. Everything’s just, I’m going to buy the stock, I’m going to sell it for more, and nobody even thinks about dividends. And I think this is perverse.
I think this is actually a pretty profound shift in the American economy, because that means there’s always, let’s say, a greater fool or a knife catcher who’s going to come along and pay more than you paid for that stock. It’s just number go up. And this is the mania, whether we’re talking about Apple, whether we’re talking about Amazon, whether we’re talking about Bitcoin, whether we’re talking about Tesla.
This is the mania, number go up. But number go up forever is really just a Ponzi scheme, if you think about it. Murray Rothbard wrote a book called America’s Great Depression.
And if you read one of the four words, there’s been several versions of that book. One of the four words by a man named Charles Johnson says, Look, a stock market that never that never pays a dividend, that just requires someone to come along and pay more than you paid. So it’s only capital gains, is actually a Ponzi scheme in many ways.
And so I think that is what’s happened. And as a result, you’ve got a whole lot of American investors just chasing.
They have to respond to inflation. They’re chasing yield, but nobody thinks about income anymore. I mean, everyone’s always say, well, buy some Muni bonds or something like that. But Imagine if, especially in an age where pensions have gone the way of the dodo bird, imagine if when you get into your ’60s or ’70s, you actually own several strong blue-chip dividend-paying stocks.
That could mean real income to you in your older year, so you’re not just burning your savings.
It could also be an income to you when you’re in a lower tax bracket because you’re older. So I would argue that there’s no such thing as a blue-chip stock that doesn’t pay a dividend. But I also realized that’s a pretty controversial statement, and not everybody agrees.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, what do you think about this idea when a firm crosses the line from being a firm that makes stuff into just being a macro bet? This firm is doing something with their balance sheet, or they’re trying to guess on the future. Maybe they’re just investing in CapEx or AI or data centers rather than just focusing on the business and creating what they create.
How should investors think about the difference between a firm that’s actually a firm and a firm that’s maybe been cannibalized by this financialization idea?
Jeff Deist:
Well, I think the smart way to approach it is the age-old story, never invest in something you don’t understand. And so AI companies are a dime a dozen right now. They’re attracting capital like crazy. But a lot of that is just because there’s a lot of cash out there, especially since all the COVID stimulus, and people need to do something with it. They don’t perhaps know what to do, and they just hear AI as a buzzword. But I don’t really understand how they intend to monetize AI.
In other words, will they make that into some super duper Wikipedia that you actually pay for? Will they make it into an LLM that you run parallel to your life while you’re talking to your colleagues, while you’re maybe talking to your family, while you’re reading the news, you’re going to have a parallel history and somebody talking in your ear? I mean, smarter people than me will no doubt turn AI into a very productive tool for all of us, just like software is a very productive tool for all of us.
I personally don’t believe it’s going to turn us all into unemployed surfs. I think it’s a technology that we will lever into a more technologically advanced society, higher-level-skilled jobs, and just like a A washing machine, put some dishwashers out of business.
Okay, AI will undoubtedly… I shouldn’t say undoubtedly, but probably put the information age jobs out of business. No doubt about that. But the way to look at it is If there’s not a thing, if there’s not a there, there underlying a company, I would argue that if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t put money into it.
And that’s really my approach in my personal investing, but I’m also a perma bear and pretty cautious.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, what about central banks? Obviously, central banks have reserves. Usually, those reserves are in their own currency, so they can potentially use that in a crisis. They can be the lender of last resort. But also Also, central banks diversify their balance sheet.
They do things like add gold to their balance sheet. They also do things like have dollar reserves. Where do you put central banks that diversify their balance sheet more than just their own reserve currency? Is this a speculation? Are they hoping that number go up in their assets?
Are they doing something else with their balance sheet that is not financialization? What do you think about central banks and how they diversify their balance sheets?
Jeff Deist:
Well, it’s a bit of an arms race. In other words, if another country is developing nuclear weapons, gee, whiz, we better, too. And what they really ought to be doing is focusing on their function in maintaining the stability of their currencies. They ought to be working with the treasury of whatever government we’re talking about to actually try to produce a stable, valuable currency.
Now, at present, that’s not going to be backed by any physical precious metal or anything like that. But nonetheless, I would argue that central bankers ought to stick to their knitting and try to make it so that savers can actually get by without having to hemorrhage or go out and chase yield, because I think this inflationary environment we’re living in right now is really starting to hit people where it hurts.
I mean, it is tough, especially for low income folks. Really, really tough. Things like gasoline and groceries and health care. So I don’t like it when central bankers are engaged in owning things on their balance sheets, but I understand why they do. It’s the after mentioned arm raise. So they want to own gold. Gold. A lot of central banks have been buying gold.
We have seen central banks go out and buy fang stocks in the last couple of decades. Look at the Swiss Central Bank. They went crazy with that stuff. I mean, central banks can basically do what they want. In most countries, they’re fairly unregulated in a certain sense, and they’re also fairly, not entirely, insulated from political machinations. I’m sure Donald Trump would love to get back to zero interest rates if he could politically control it, but he can’t quite do that, at least yet.
And so it’s interesting to think about, watch what central bankers do versus what they say, I think is key. And a lot of what they do is buy gold because they know that historically, gold has never plummeted against any currency in the way that they fear that their own currency might. And so they have to hedge against their own profligacy, which is the irony here. So why not just be less profligate?
Monetary Metals:
Now I want to ask you about companies or treasuries or actually businesses doing this themselves, which is just saying, Hey, we’ve got a lot of debt, whether it’s the United States. Why don’t we just do some financial trickery where we either take the gold that’s on our balance sheet at a lower price and financialize that and get rid of the debt, or we turn Bitcoin into a Bitcoin reserve asset and we get rid of our debt that way. What do you think about whole nations rather than just firms saying,
We’re going to use this financialization strategy, whether it’s MMT and minting the platinum coin all the way to using Bitcoin or gold to get rid of our US debt. What do you think about this strategy of saying, Well, listen, maybe on the household level or on the firm level, financialization doesn’t work. But what about at the country level? Maybe they How have you figured it out, Jeff.
Jeff Deist:
Well, maybe they have. And it’s pretty clear that we’re coming to some debt catharsis in this world. I mean, if you look at the amount of debt at the sovereign level, at the corporate level, at the household level, the individual level, student loans, credit cards, automobiles, you name it, every debt that exists under the sun, starting with government debt.
It’s all expanded exponentially since the crisis of 2008. So nothing’s really been solved on the debt side. We’ve got more debt than ever sloshing around. And so at some point, the world begins to look at this and say, well, it’s unpayable, especially at the national level. And so how should we fix this?
I think the United States has decided it wants to just maintain the world’s reserve currency and we’ll fix it by slowly just inflating it away and making interest payments rather than having a default. The country with less power and less might that doesn’t have the world’s reserve currency, someone like a Zimbabwe, for example, can’t do that. And so they experience some hyperinflationary collapse, which is basically deflationary in its secondary effects. And then they start using other currencies, which is what happens in Zimbabwe today.
You can go there and use the pound or the dollar or the Euro. And apparently, the merchants there are quite adept at making change and exchanging and all this. So the scenarios are really not very pretty because you either inflate debt away and pay it off slowly in depreciated interest payments, or you have some bankruptcy or insolvency type proceeding at the national level, which causes a lot of pain, but nonetheless brings you structurally into a new world.
And I don’t think minting a coin, I don’t think owning a coin. I don’t think owning Bitcoin. Even if you were to mark to market all the US federal government’s gold in its holdings, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the 38 or 39 trillion dollars in debt we’ve got right now. So it’s just not enough. And so I really think the proper way to go about this is the way that Iceland did it. After the crisis of 2008, they fired a bunch of bankers’ management.
They let the investors, which were German banks and other euros, take the actual loss. They let their currency float freely so that employers could continue to employ people. And basically, after a couple of years, they went through the pain, they bit the bullet, and they had a stable economy again.
Maybe that’s just a nice microcosm because Iceland is only about 400,000 people. Having that happen with the US government debt and the US dollar would obviously be a very different scenario.
But I mean, conceptually, the two choices are inflated away or have some serious bankruptcy and insolvency and restructuring type proceeding. And so I think we will inflate it away. And I don’t think there’s any platinum coin or there’s any amount of Bitcoin or gold that changes that.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, for a lot of people hearing this, they say, well, listen, if the strategy the United States as well as other governments is, hey, let’s just inflate away our currency because clearly there’s no way to pay this. And doing a financial scheme of swapping out the debt for a Bitcoin or like that also probably won’t work either. So for a lot of personal investors, they’re thinking,
Maybe I should be adding more gold to my balance sheet. But if they’ve been listening carefully, they don’t want to have gold be their number go up asset on their balance sheet and just another speculative play as well. So talk about how investors personally should feel about this financialization trend and what it means for their portfolios without also heating that same monetary hedonism where they say, Well, let’s just bet on the Ferraris and the classic cars and hope that it to a million dollars.
Jeff Deist:
Well, the financialization adds another layer of complexity to personal investing. There’s no doubt about it. In our grandparents’ day, they could simply look at a company, let’s say GM, and look at that industry, the auto industry. Look at the market for that in the US and beyond the US. And that was what you had to understand and perhaps make a play on when you invested in GM.
Whereas today, I think because central banks are so much more active and because monetary policy matters so much more, more than it did, let’s say, 50 years ago, you have to understand things geopolitically more.
You have to understand how interest rates work. You have to understand how money flows in and out of the US dollar. It’s really a different scenario today, and it’s tough because with real inflation, I would argue, is at least 5 %. It’s probably more like 10% on the actual goods and services we all need to consume, which includes rent, which includes health care, which includes education expenses for our kids, groceries at the store.
I would argue it’s well above 5%. But whatever it may be, it’s above what most simple yielding investments will get you.
A money market fund, a savings account at your local bank. And so that delta, I would argue, is the price we’re all paying. I call that delta decivilization.
In other words, in a healthy economy, average people can get ahead, which means put money in a way that actually holds its purchasing power, simply by being thrifty and earning a rate of interest. Let’s say their local bank or a CD or a money market, like I mentioned. They don’t have to go out and understand investing and chase yields.
Because now in the era of algorithmic traders, it has never been tougher to try to pick an individual stock or, God forbid, time an individual stock. I don’t do it. I don’t have the stomach I don’t have the brains for it. And I have no interest in that. Average people should have no interest in that, nor should they be required to. So when you’ve got grandma having to go out and buy Tesla or buy Bitcoin to stay ahead of inflation, I think that’s a real strategy. I don’t think people should do that.
I think they should hedge where they can. And maybe the number one investment for anybody who’s under 40 is in your own personal skills, in improving yourself and your income opportunities, having multiple streams of income.
Maybe finding, again, dividend stocks isn’t the worst idea. But when it comes to investing today, I don’t think you can beat the algorithms. And so I personally think that commodities have a good future. But if you really want to buy stocks and bonds, I think index funds are the way to go for sure.
Monetary Metals:
Now, Jeff, talk a little bit about gold before we end here and how monetary metals obviously offers people a return on gold in gold rather than just focusing on, Hey, the price of gold is going to explode.
It’s going to go to $5,000 and $50,000, which is obviously a bit more of the speculative casino side of the gold world rather than, Hey, we put the gold to work. We do something real with it, and you earn a return in actual gold.
Jeff Deist:
Well, I don’t like number go up. I don’t think that’s the way to live your life. And the scenario where we’re in gold is $5,000 an ounce or $10,000 an ounce or $20,000 an ounce. It might not be a world you want to be in because that might be a world where we suffered some significant inflationary event, or some significant economic crisis, or God forbid, a terrorist event, a war, or something like that.
None of us wants that. So be careful what you wish for first and foremost. And the value proposition at Monetary Metals does not number go up, it’s ounces go up. You earn more ounces.
And historically, those ounces have done pretty well against other currencies and against actual goods and services you might like to buy. I know our friend Roni Stoferly likes to tweet about various indices that his newsletter puts out. It’s called In Gold, We Trust. The price of a Ferrari 30 years ago versus today, the price of a pitcher of beer at Oktoberfest, priced in gold. He does a lot of comparisons like that, real things, real goods and services. And gold almost always holds up and performs very, very well.
So that’s the mindset that I think people should have about gold. Not number go up, not that it’s some doomsday prepper scenario, because in those type, in some terrible economy, I think gold is going to be the last thing on your mind.
Electricity, things like that are going to be first and foremost. So I think ounces go up, it’s better the number go up. I think there’s never been a time where a person died and left gold to his family, that it was worth nothing like a paper stock certificate from some long defunct company. And so it tends to really hold its own over time.
So that’s how I view it. People talk about an insurance policy, a store of value, a hedge. I just think that if you’re sitting entirely in dollars, and like me, you’re not smart enough to figure out which of those dang stocks is going to go up, that it’s pretty scary to think that you could have $5 million, and you’re 65 years old, and you’re saying, well, gee, whiz, I ought to be fined. Well, you probably will be, but you just don’t know anymore in this inflationary era.
And Really, only people in their senior years now have ever lived in a truly price inflationary era because you’d have to be an adult back in the ’70s. So there’s not too many people engaged in the financial markets today alive under, let’s say, 60 years old, who have really any inkling of what it’s like to live in and be a consumer in and especially invest in, truly inflationary market.
That’s where we’re headed. I don’t think there’s any way the US central government or the US central bank can head this off. I think the next 10 years will be like these. I think you got to think about gold in those terms and have some.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, as we come to the end of the interview, what What’s something you want to say not only to these firms who are engaging in this financialization trend, but also to the central banks who are in a way incentivizing this trend?
If you had their ear, you’re stuck in the elevator with them, the electricity goes out, just you and the central bankers, what’s something you want to say to them about this financialization trend?
Jeff Deist:
Well, I would say money should be boring. Money should be stable. We shouldn’t have to think about it. We shouldn’t have to have conferences about it. It shouldn’t need a lot of technology.
I’m all for blockchain technology technology, I think that that’s a useful tool, don’t get me wrong. But when money is complex, then everything else becomes needlessly complex. And I worry about that a lot. I mean, money is half of every transaction.
And so when you go buy a Honda Accord, which is probably $35, $40,000 now, you think about the quality of that Honda. You think about the quality of that Honda, you might look at consumer reports, you might talk to friends and family about Honda. Should I get this Honda Accord? Oh, it’s a great car, whatever it might be.
But in a sense, Honda has to look at your $40,000 and say, Is this a good currency? Is this something we want to accept? How much? So Honda has to bake in some uncertainty for monetary policy into that $40,000 it takes. And And I think that’s really too bad. And I think that we all deserve deflation. I think deflation is healthy.
I think it is what societies do when their economies are actually sound. In other words, things get cheaper because capital gets cheaper and goods and services are produced more productively, more efficiently. And things that used to be available only to the rich, like let’s say a second car or flying on an airplane, become mass consumer products.
That’s deflation, folks. That’s the way that a society ought to work as it gets wealthier, and that’s the way the US work for a good bit of the 20th century, and I fear that we might be losing that.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, thanks so much for this very interesting concept. If people want to read it, they can check out the print version of the Bitcoin magazine. Jeff, where can people follow you?
Jeff Deist:
Well, they can follow me on Twitter, all one word, @jeffdeist. I think here shortly, Monetary Metals will also publish this article titled Against Bitcoin Financialization. We’ll run it on our site as well.
Monetary Metals:
Jeff, thanks so much. For those interested in earning a yield on gold, paid in gold, they can check out monetary-metals. Com. We’ll see you soon.
