Episode Details

Financial Services is all about Finance which is all about money. However almost all FS employees just accept “money” as a thing in the same way they accept gravity. Which is an odd thing if you think about it. Most of the time this wouldn’t matter but at turning points such as we are at now if can be disastrous, What money is and the regimes around it have varied widely over time and space. However it is true to say that Central Banks are a total exception – indeed the ne plus ultra of Big State Centralism (which is leading to so many problems).

Most FS-savvy folk know that a dollar when the Fed was created in 1913 is worth a few cents now – not a great testimony to the performance of an institution whose job is to “protect” the dollar. Few appreciate the intimate connection between monetary collapse and societal collapse. Examples however are  legion with perhaps the best known being Rome (see what I did there re legion? :-D) , Revolutionary France or the Weimar Republic. As the fallout from those were respectively a civilisational collapse in the West that literally took centuries to recover from and two brutal dictatorships we would be well advised to pay attention to this otherwise recherché topic.

Central Banks are profoundly antidemocratic and as we saw in 2008 in the US and the UK chose – unlike Iceland – to bankrupt their people in order to preserve the wealth of banks and bankers bonuses. Prima facie they seem to correlate to the greatest frequency of wars ever, higher inflation and government spending and a de facto tax on savers and the elderly. At a minimum there is a difficult charge sheet for them to address.

Mario who runs the highly successful YouTube Channel maneco64 is a long term student of the history and current practice of monetary policy as well as like me decades ago having worked successfully in the City without having any real understanding of money per se.

Mario joined us a year ago in LFP197 to discuss “Money in the 21stC: Ballooning Printing of Fiat/QE/”MMT”/Govt Debt, CBDCs, Crypto, Dedollarisation, Hyperinflation, Gold”. In this episode:

• Mario updates us on what has happened over the past year re money and multipolarity and where this is all going
• we dive into an assessment of – simply put whether Central Banks Are A Good Thing
• Mario outlines what he would do to rebuild society and money if in a parallel universe he was Governor of the Bank of England or indeed if western money and societies collapse and need to be rebuilt
• Mario looks forward to how Gold is becoming more important in a multipolar World. Central Bank buying of Gold was at its highest level in 2022 since 1967 and China has started releasing its monthly purchases thereof

Topics discussed include:

• Skiing this year in Switzerland
• the moves in China re money, gold, exchanges over the past year
• multipolarity growing rapidly – Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia
• comparisons of the UK losing global dominance of sterling and the US and the dollar right now
• the catastrophic impact – even to the US – of its freezing of Russian Central Bank reserves in 2023 – a jum