Thanks for an interesting and important conversation. I am very glad that you provide a transcript since I much prefer to read rather than listen. Personally, I find it much easier to absorb information from the written word. I can also reread a sentence if the meaning is not clear on the first reading.
Thanks, as always, for providing a transcript. And the clear-eyed education about what has always been for me, until now, the murky world of economics. But where’s the coda?
Also, Indivisible announced a National Day of Action on August 16, 2025. Go to the following website to host or find a protest near you - and spread the word!!!
Happy that the transcript is so long. Trump will never read it, get upset, and start firing people.
It is hard to read this conversation and not conclude that Trump is tearing down the American government and the American economy to the delight of Russia and China. Any moral Congress would see this metaphorical chainsawing of our government and economy as treason. Trump is at least a little worried about another impeachment - pressuring states to try to rig results by creating more Red seats in Congress before the 2026 elections..
As a retiree, I no longer invest for capital gain, but to avoid capital loss. My IRA has been all in T-Bills for months. My stock portfolio is now liquid for the 2nd time since January. Sadly, most Americans are clueless about how our financial system works - just how to manage their debt. So, they do not know to get thier investments out of harm's way when Trump tariffs a country, finally fires Powell, or something worse. The bottom 99% today are victims of "trickle-out" economics.
Also retired, I pulled everything out on March 4th, but put a sizable investment into a gold mining etf as a hedge against the pitiful money market returns. Turns out, through luck or intuition, to be a good move. I'm reducing our debt load, and tightening budgets to avoid having our drawdown reduce the capital. The amazing run up in gold made the difference for us. I don't give investment advice, but I'm sticking to my current portfolio through January-February and if it's still a disaster, post-tariffs, I might leave some in, but we will have reached our 2026 goals by then.
My total debt load now is. what is left on our mortgage. All CC's cars etc paid off (all early) the house we pay more than minimum every month, towards principle only and we had refi'd at a 2% rate years ago. We owe 55,000 on a house now valued at almost 300,000 (we live in Michigan, our house values are not like NY or California etc) and took ALL of our money out of the markets. Yea they have gone up a bit since then but I still predict an all out market drop that will stun the nation soon with the orange man-child running the show. With that maniac in charge, a crash is inevitable, the tech bubble will burst and the rich will run off with their profits and the pensioners will be left holding the bag, like always. It's why we got out when we did. Our money now sits in safe certificates and some T. bills. I am afraid for the 99% of older people who are clinging to their pensions in the hopes they won't disappear before they get the chance to retire. While We are NOT wealthy, we we were smart with our money so hopefully we did it right.
I just spoke with one of my friends in Dallas and his monthly housing expenses are $10k a month! How is that sustainable?? American dream?? More like American Nightmare!!
It is not sustainable Gene. And the housing costs is why so many young people are so angry at the country. They know if this continues, they will NEVER be able to buy a home. And that IS the American dream down the toilet. at ten grand a month? How the heck are they able to afford that? I sure never could! Just groceries, things we NEED, not things we WANT (most of those are going to tay on the want list as the cost is too high!), are so high now that even with most of our things paid off it can still be a struggle some months to stretch my social security and my wife's salary. I can not imagine 10K a month, and you are correct, how is that sustainable?
I am not very sympathetic to GenZ whining about the economy, because every generation has to cope with some hardship. For my folks, it was WWII. For me, it was Vietnam. I grew up in a tiny 850 sqft house. I was drafted into the Navy, and 4 years later was discharged and entered grad school. I got my PhD in 1980 at age 33 - flat broke. I joined the UT faculty, and 3 years later was reactivated by the Navy to do a big study for them.
I bought my first house at age 36 - a small 2BR row-house condo unit in San Diego. Two years later, I was transferred to DC and bought a 2BR condo in a 10-story bldg off Connecticut Ave. I broke even on the first house (profits just paid closing costs). I made 30K when I sold my second place 5 years later and kept buying fixer-uppers from then on.
I always lived below my means. I was a federal employee my entire career (Navy officer - later an NIH scientist). Federal employees do not get paid much, but the work was very gratifying. I invested what little extra I could in an IRA and made good money with every fixer-upper resale. I survived the 2008 recession. Retired now, we live in a luxury 4BR house on the Florida Atlantic coast on A1A and own a 2nd house & car in Europe. We live the American Dream. The norm today is living beyond your means (P2P). That is not a lifestyle that leads to happilyeverafter.
We have never lived above our means either, EXCEPT for our annual trip to Cab San Lucas, then we treat ourselves to the high life (everyone need some kind of "Reward" to self or life becomes a drag!). The rest of the year we try to also live below our means and it is why we have saved our money for our older age (That and never having children save a ton of dough!) We carry no debt except for our small house payment. /We've obviously not had your kind of income, but at 40 years this November of marriage we have what we need to still once or twice a year live above our needs.
I appreciate how industrious you were, and how hard you worked. However, I can remember entering UCLA in '64, and by working 13 hours a week in the dinning commons, I paid for the Dorm, my fees, my books, and still had a few dollars left to take my girl friend to Pauley Pavilion and watch UCLA win another NCAA basketball championship. When I transferred to Berkeley in '67, it was essentially the same.
I will also point out that, as with many of my friends who spent two years in combat in Vietnam, you were eligible for GI bill benefits which included 1 1/2 months support for each month served. Also, you were eligible for GI loans on houses. And, importantly, free medical care through the VA.
I will also point out that the prevailing wage for a factor worker in 1969 was about $3.00/hour. Which meant that in a normal work year of 2000 hours, you made $6000 dollars (this is what I made at GM on the assembly line). A house of 1400 square feet in a decent neighborhood was about $21,000. Or, 3.5 work years.
Now, a worker in Detroit, if they are lucky, makes $20/hr. Or, $40,000 per year. Which is about the same in the bay area for routine work. My house in the bay area sells for 2.8 million! So how does that work out?
Now, my 32 year old kid is spending $15,000 per year at Texas State for tuition alone. No rent; no food; no health insurance: no... you get the point. He makes $15/hr. Luckily I can help him.
So, I can understand why the young are pissed. And I predict that when AI knocks out a whole layer of middle managers and software engineers, they too will be angry.
That was a welcome education so thank you. I thought the European Union and the European Central Bank was quite logical as something of an inter-nation insurance effort. It's something of a brotherhood of nations with a communications system and financial web to assure all exist for the good of all.
But moving on to confidence concerns, now disturbed, remember that people are squirrels. They store their acorns during the summer and fall in places they remember and it sustains them through the year until again, they seek acorns or tangible goods that give the confidence they will survive. But now Cryptocurrency, of course a criminal intent as the inventor remained anonymous, threatens that idea of the security of mind tangible things give. We seem to be halfway between the old dollars under the mattress and digital assets. We have confidence the brick and mortar banks will give us paper dollars according to our wishes. Cryptocurrency? pure risk. It's secret. When you lose it you can't complain. It's outside the brick and mortar system required to obey asset holders.
So there may be a time when the notion of fewer tangible realities or beliefs will exist, replaced by the vaporous flows of electrical current that are intangible to anyone who thinks they have paper currency or other material wealth.
Hopefully far off, I see a crisis of confidence in more than a single nation once digital assets are a significant part of economics.
Agreed, crypto will be a pyramid scheme until transparency and guardrails are introduced. And the discussion of how AI could potentially be used to break keys is also chilling. Most of our AI at work is targeting security and I anticipate more as time progresses, being in a high risk, know your customers environment. We are more and more challenged to protect our clients through time consuming and highly redundant means that they often do not appreciate until we remind them of the why and share recent cases we've identified in advance.
Since the orange devil now own his own crypto, regulation will not happen / they made sure of that by issuing a law that they can NOT be regulated for the next 10 years. It is also wnhy his net worth shot uop 2/6 BILLION dollars just since Jan. 20th. He is stealing everything he can as alll the rich are right now. It is for sure the 2nd gilded age and how long it lasts is up to us. /Br9ing back the guillotines!
AI isn't necessary to break keys. All you need is a big enough computer (Paul and Helene mentioned "super computers", which in my day was synonymous with Cray) and the sort of code-breaking programs that some of my buddies wrote for a class back in 1984.
Fifty years ago, in college, I dreamed of living in France. The dream is back but now it is considerably less romantic. Not baguettes and wine and walkability - now it is superior governance.
I've looked into moving to France -- it has some promising aspects. For me the biggest wildcard financially is the volatility of exchange rates due to Trump's policies. This interview offers lots of useful background, but it is unclear to me where they think that exchanges rates may be going.
Reading between the lines, I wonder if their take is that the dollar's value may have a higher floor relative to the euro due to its utter dominance of international finance even in the Trump era.
There’s a lot to digest here, but I think the most important point is that the threats to genuine autonomy of the US federal reserve system coupled with the attacks on our academic research institutions will have more serious consequences than Trump’s tariff follies.
Applause ... thank you, thank you. I've just gone through my first pass of the conversation and will definitely be doing a read thru or another listen. Fabulous chat, touched on a lot of things I've been wondering about and stuff I did not expect. Particularly liked the enjoyed the discussion on default currencies and reasons why the Euro is a distant second and crypto discussion toward the end. Thank you for introducing us to Helene Rey this morning.
or until and unless there is a viable alternative and Helene Rey did a superb job of outlining the steps EU would need to take to bring itself closer to being the viable alternative to the USD.
With 40 percent of our population at zero net worth and Gilded Age 2.0
upon us - a default doesn’t seem so implausible.
I didn’t see any mention of the BRICS as an alternative to the US dollar for the reserve currency of the world status . They would have some of the same troubles a Euro based reserve currency faces ( different sovereign nations ) - but the US gained the prize after WW II
at Brenton Woods as we emerged as the world’s most productive economy. Our incompetent federal
government under this administration is only partially held in check by an independent federal reserve . What could possibly go wrong on that front !
Since the end of January I've basically gone into the financial equivalent of the fetal position - selling everything long and putting it all into short-term treasuries. Why? Well, just look at all the uncertainties and risk factors out there! The government "Genius" act, stable coins, insane and ever changing tariff polices, a budget for 2026 that is possibly the worst in the nation's history, not only in its cruelty but also in its fiscal irresponsibility, and a crew in charge of the government that lives in a fantasy world bounded by Fox News and X.
That latter is the scariest part of all, because when the manure hits the air conditioner, as it always does, who is silly enough to think that this Congress and this president will be capable of handling it? Just imagine what this crew would have done in 2008. If something remotely similar to that happens again, there will be no one capable of picking up the pieces, and everything will just fall apart.
Until Trump and the Republicans are driven from office, we will be in a state of continual existential and economic crises.
Dems will need to pick up the pieces once again, rehab the govt & economy.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Then people will forget, collect some real, but many petty & false grievances against ten-ruling Dems - and begin blaming them for not turning things around quickly enough … and elect more GQP clowns for the next cycle.
Given Trump’s firing of the head of the BLS and the questions that firing raises about the likely corruption of all future U.S. government data; and given the likelihood that Jerome Powell’s days are numbered and that Trump will succeed in his project to make Powell the last chairman of an independent U. S. Federal Reserve; in other words, given that Trump eventually corrupts everything and everybody he touches, won’t he also eventually corrupt the dollar too? Can the dollar possibly survive Trump’s depredations when nothing else and no one else seems to be able to? And if it can’t, what does that mean? Does it mean that the smart money will soon (if it isn’t already) be trading in dollars for Euros? Is it as simple as that? Should the little guy, the dumb money, do the same?
Quantum computing can cut right through the encryption being used for current cryptocurrency. The current algorithms are not nearly secure enough. That hack will likely occur as soon as quantum computing become commercially available if not before. National governments already have motivation to do the hack as a matter of security policy.
Tech geek here. The security of any technology is based on human governance. Tech can always be hacked. All the failures in crypto have directly traceable to human incompetence or abuse of the technology. An, no, current AI and it's trends are not the answer.
A Cray could do the job. Remember the bit substitution encryption of 1983/84 that was supposed to be unbreakable? It took six months for someone to crack it.
Excellent discussion…..happy to hear Dr Krugman say, “ as an American who's very, very worried about what the hell is happening to my country, Europe is in some important ways a backup for the values that we believe in.” As a European I am staggered to watch this “demolition derby” of the US. I fear for you all.
Thank goodness the Marshall Plan worked. Now that we are actively self-destructing from within, it's a godsend that there are strong, functioning democratic states in Europe.
Try to imagine if Donald Trump were taking advice from Hélène Rey or someone like her instead of the groveling clowns he surrounds himself with? Of course, Trump doesn't take advice. As the world's foremost authority on economics (and everything else) he can't be advised, only obeyed.
Thanks for an interesting and important conversation. I am very glad that you provide a transcript since I much prefer to read rather than listen. Personally, I find it much easier to absorb information from the written word. I can also reread a sentence if the meaning is not clear on the first reading.
Speed of light vs. sound.
https://thehiddengenerator.com/revealing#aff=poleb22
I like to listen first then read to dig into the discussion more fully.
Thanks, as always, for providing a transcript. And the clear-eyed education about what has always been for me, until now, the murky world of economics. But where’s the coda?
Here's my selection for today's Coda by Mon Rovia:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/heavy-foot/1821773806?i=1821773807
Also, Indivisible announced a National Day of Action on August 16, 2025. Go to the following website to host or find a protest near you - and spread the word!!!
https://www.fightthetrumptakeover.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOAeiRQsA4k
not behind a paywall--thanks for the recommendation!
Thank you, Diane!👍
Thanks to ASBermant for the selection and to Diane for the non-paywall link. That is a great song.
He did draw a reference to CBGBs in the chat today!
Happy that the transcript is so long. Trump will never read it, get upset, and start firing people.
It is hard to read this conversation and not conclude that Trump is tearing down the American government and the American economy to the delight of Russia and China. Any moral Congress would see this metaphorical chainsawing of our government and economy as treason. Trump is at least a little worried about another impeachment - pressuring states to try to rig results by creating more Red seats in Congress before the 2026 elections..
As a retiree, I no longer invest for capital gain, but to avoid capital loss. My IRA has been all in T-Bills for months. My stock portfolio is now liquid for the 2nd time since January. Sadly, most Americans are clueless about how our financial system works - just how to manage their debt. So, they do not know to get thier investments out of harm's way when Trump tariffs a country, finally fires Powell, or something worse. The bottom 99% today are victims of "trickle-out" economics.
Tomonthebeach said, "As a retiree, I no longer invest for capital gain, but to avoid capital loss."
Me, too, I often quote Will Rogers' wise words - "I'm not as concerned about the return ON my money, as the return OF my money."
Also retired, I pulled everything out on March 4th, but put a sizable investment into a gold mining etf as a hedge against the pitiful money market returns. Turns out, through luck or intuition, to be a good move. I'm reducing our debt load, and tightening budgets to avoid having our drawdown reduce the capital. The amazing run up in gold made the difference for us. I don't give investment advice, but I'm sticking to my current portfolio through January-February and if it's still a disaster, post-tariffs, I might leave some in, but we will have reached our 2026 goals by then.
I did largely the same.
My total debt load now is. what is left on our mortgage. All CC's cars etc paid off (all early) the house we pay more than minimum every month, towards principle only and we had refi'd at a 2% rate years ago. We owe 55,000 on a house now valued at almost 300,000 (we live in Michigan, our house values are not like NY or California etc) and took ALL of our money out of the markets. Yea they have gone up a bit since then but I still predict an all out market drop that will stun the nation soon with the orange man-child running the show. With that maniac in charge, a crash is inevitable, the tech bubble will burst and the rich will run off with their profits and the pensioners will be left holding the bag, like always. It's why we got out when we did. Our money now sits in safe certificates and some T. bills. I am afraid for the 99% of older people who are clinging to their pensions in the hopes they won't disappear before they get the chance to retire. While We are NOT wealthy, we we were smart with our money so hopefully we did it right.
I just spoke with one of my friends in Dallas and his monthly housing expenses are $10k a month! How is that sustainable?? American dream?? More like American Nightmare!!
It's sustainable if he has a high enough income.
It is not sustainable Gene. And the housing costs is why so many young people are so angry at the country. They know if this continues, they will NEVER be able to buy a home. And that IS the American dream down the toilet. at ten grand a month? How the heck are they able to afford that? I sure never could! Just groceries, things we NEED, not things we WANT (most of those are going to tay on the want list as the cost is too high!), are so high now that even with most of our things paid off it can still be a struggle some months to stretch my social security and my wife's salary. I can not imagine 10K a month, and you are correct, how is that sustainable?
I am not very sympathetic to GenZ whining about the economy, because every generation has to cope with some hardship. For my folks, it was WWII. For me, it was Vietnam. I grew up in a tiny 850 sqft house. I was drafted into the Navy, and 4 years later was discharged and entered grad school. I got my PhD in 1980 at age 33 - flat broke. I joined the UT faculty, and 3 years later was reactivated by the Navy to do a big study for them.
I bought my first house at age 36 - a small 2BR row-house condo unit in San Diego. Two years later, I was transferred to DC and bought a 2BR condo in a 10-story bldg off Connecticut Ave. I broke even on the first house (profits just paid closing costs). I made 30K when I sold my second place 5 years later and kept buying fixer-uppers from then on.
I always lived below my means. I was a federal employee my entire career (Navy officer - later an NIH scientist). Federal employees do not get paid much, but the work was very gratifying. I invested what little extra I could in an IRA and made good money with every fixer-upper resale. I survived the 2008 recession. Retired now, we live in a luxury 4BR house on the Florida Atlantic coast on A1A and own a 2nd house & car in Europe. We live the American Dream. The norm today is living beyond your means (P2P). That is not a lifestyle that leads to happilyeverafter.
We have never lived above our means either, EXCEPT for our annual trip to Cab San Lucas, then we treat ourselves to the high life (everyone need some kind of "Reward" to self or life becomes a drag!). The rest of the year we try to also live below our means and it is why we have saved our money for our older age (That and never having children save a ton of dough!) We carry no debt except for our small house payment. /We've obviously not had your kind of income, but at 40 years this November of marriage we have what we need to still once or twice a year live above our needs.
I appreciate how industrious you were, and how hard you worked. However, I can remember entering UCLA in '64, and by working 13 hours a week in the dinning commons, I paid for the Dorm, my fees, my books, and still had a few dollars left to take my girl friend to Pauley Pavilion and watch UCLA win another NCAA basketball championship. When I transferred to Berkeley in '67, it was essentially the same.
I will also point out that, as with many of my friends who spent two years in combat in Vietnam, you were eligible for GI bill benefits which included 1 1/2 months support for each month served. Also, you were eligible for GI loans on houses. And, importantly, free medical care through the VA.
I will also point out that the prevailing wage for a factor worker in 1969 was about $3.00/hour. Which meant that in a normal work year of 2000 hours, you made $6000 dollars (this is what I made at GM on the assembly line). A house of 1400 square feet in a decent neighborhood was about $21,000. Or, 3.5 work years.
Now, a worker in Detroit, if they are lucky, makes $20/hr. Or, $40,000 per year. Which is about the same in the bay area for routine work. My house in the bay area sells for 2.8 million! So how does that work out?
Now, my 32 year old kid is spending $15,000 per year at Texas State for tuition alone. No rent; no food; no health insurance: no... you get the point. He makes $15/hr. Luckily I can help him.
So, I can understand why the young are pissed. And I predict that when AI knocks out a whole layer of middle managers and software engineers, they too will be angry.
I recommend, How Not To Invest, by Ritholtz who Paul interviewed on Substack.
For me, you (Paul) are a model of an excellent humanistic teacher and, what’s more, as they say in German, a “cool sock”!
Wonderful interview! And, in the words of Timothy Snyder…if democracy survives it will be because of the EU.
That was a welcome education so thank you. I thought the European Union and the European Central Bank was quite logical as something of an inter-nation insurance effort. It's something of a brotherhood of nations with a communications system and financial web to assure all exist for the good of all.
But moving on to confidence concerns, now disturbed, remember that people are squirrels. They store their acorns during the summer and fall in places they remember and it sustains them through the year until again, they seek acorns or tangible goods that give the confidence they will survive. But now Cryptocurrency, of course a criminal intent as the inventor remained anonymous, threatens that idea of the security of mind tangible things give. We seem to be halfway between the old dollars under the mattress and digital assets. We have confidence the brick and mortar banks will give us paper dollars according to our wishes. Cryptocurrency? pure risk. It's secret. When you lose it you can't complain. It's outside the brick and mortar system required to obey asset holders.
So there may be a time when the notion of fewer tangible realities or beliefs will exist, replaced by the vaporous flows of electrical current that are intangible to anyone who thinks they have paper currency or other material wealth.
Hopefully far off, I see a crisis of confidence in more than a single nation once digital assets are a significant part of economics.
Agreed, crypto will be a pyramid scheme until transparency and guardrails are introduced. And the discussion of how AI could potentially be used to break keys is also chilling. Most of our AI at work is targeting security and I anticipate more as time progresses, being in a high risk, know your customers environment. We are more and more challenged to protect our clients through time consuming and highly redundant means that they often do not appreciate until we remind them of the why and share recent cases we've identified in advance.
Since the orange devil now own his own crypto, regulation will not happen / they made sure of that by issuing a law that they can NOT be regulated for the next 10 years. It is also wnhy his net worth shot uop 2/6 BILLION dollars just since Jan. 20th. He is stealing everything he can as alll the rich are right now. It is for sure the 2nd gilded age and how long it lasts is up to us. /Br9ing back the guillotines!
AI isn't necessary to break keys. All you need is a big enough computer (Paul and Helene mentioned "super computers", which in my day was synonymous with Cray) and the sort of code-breaking programs that some of my buddies wrote for a class back in 1984.
Thank you for this econ lesson. donny 2 dolls is destroying the country.
GET OUT AND PROTEST ON LABOR DAY! We need everyone to raise their voice.
Do not give in to despair.
Fifty years ago, in college, I dreamed of living in France. The dream is back but now it is considerably less romantic. Not baguettes and wine and walkability - now it is superior governance.
Portugal for us.
I've looked into moving to France -- it has some promising aspects. For me the biggest wildcard financially is the volatility of exchange rates due to Trump's policies. This interview offers lots of useful background, but it is unclear to me where they think that exchanges rates may be going.
Reading between the lines, I wonder if their take is that the dollar's value may have a higher floor relative to the euro due to its utter dominance of international finance even in the Trump era.
My understanding lacks depth but I came away feeling like the Euro could be the future but maybe not in my lifetime.
There’s a lot to digest here, but I think the most important point is that the threats to genuine autonomy of the US federal reserve system coupled with the attacks on our academic research institutions will have more serious consequences than Trump’s tariff follies.
Applause ... thank you, thank you. I've just gone through my first pass of the conversation and will definitely be doing a read thru or another listen. Fabulous chat, touched on a lot of things I've been wondering about and stuff I did not expect. Particularly liked the enjoyed the discussion on default currencies and reasons why the Euro is a distant second and crypto discussion toward the end. Thank you for introducing us to Helene Rey this morning.
My takeaway is that the dollar, despite Trump, is too big to fail. But crypto is not.
The US Dollar is only big as long as the market thinks it deserves to be big.
or until and unless there is a viable alternative and Helene Rey did a superb job of outlining the steps EU would need to take to bring itself closer to being the viable alternative to the USD.
Until the USA defaults.
With 40 percent of our population at zero net worth and Gilded Age 2.0
upon us - a default doesn’t seem so implausible.
I didn’t see any mention of the BRICS as an alternative to the US dollar for the reserve currency of the world status . They would have some of the same troubles a Euro based reserve currency faces ( different sovereign nations ) - but the US gained the prize after WW II
at Brenton Woods as we emerged as the world’s most productive economy. Our incompetent federal
government under this administration is only partially held in check by an independent federal reserve . What could possibly go wrong on that front !
BRICS wouldn't work as the reserve currency for the world, but it could easily work as the reserve currency for those five nations.
It has expanded to 10 nations - including including Indonesia, Iran
and UAE . So it is a major force to
contend with . Imposing tariffs on allies and cozying up to dictators
isn’t the brightest move on the board if the objective is to secure the dollar as the reserve currency of the world.
Since the end of January I've basically gone into the financial equivalent of the fetal position - selling everything long and putting it all into short-term treasuries. Why? Well, just look at all the uncertainties and risk factors out there! The government "Genius" act, stable coins, insane and ever changing tariff polices, a budget for 2026 that is possibly the worst in the nation's history, not only in its cruelty but also in its fiscal irresponsibility, and a crew in charge of the government that lives in a fantasy world bounded by Fox News and X.
That latter is the scariest part of all, because when the manure hits the air conditioner, as it always does, who is silly enough to think that this Congress and this president will be capable of handling it? Just imagine what this crew would have done in 2008. If something remotely similar to that happens again, there will be no one capable of picking up the pieces, and everything will just fall apart.
Until Trump and the Republicans are driven from office, we will be in a state of continual existential and economic crises.
Dems will need to pick up the pieces once again, rehab the govt & economy.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Then people will forget, collect some real, but many petty & false grievances against ten-ruling Dems - and begin blaming them for not turning things around quickly enough … and elect more GQP clowns for the next cycle.
Given Trump’s firing of the head of the BLS and the questions that firing raises about the likely corruption of all future U.S. government data; and given the likelihood that Jerome Powell’s days are numbered and that Trump will succeed in his project to make Powell the last chairman of an independent U. S. Federal Reserve; in other words, given that Trump eventually corrupts everything and everybody he touches, won’t he also eventually corrupt the dollar too? Can the dollar possibly survive Trump’s depredations when nothing else and no one else seems to be able to? And if it can’t, what does that mean? Does it mean that the smart money will soon (if it isn’t already) be trading in dollars for Euros? Is it as simple as that? Should the little guy, the dumb money, do the same?
Quantum computing can cut right through the encryption being used for current cryptocurrency. The current algorithms are not nearly secure enough. That hack will likely occur as soon as quantum computing become commercially available if not before. National governments already have motivation to do the hack as a matter of security policy.
Tech geek here. The security of any technology is based on human governance. Tech can always be hacked. All the failures in crypto have directly traceable to human incompetence or abuse of the technology. An, no, current AI and it's trends are not the answer.
A Cray could do the job. Remember the bit substitution encryption of 1983/84 that was supposed to be unbreakable? It took six months for someone to crack it.
Excellent discussion…..happy to hear Dr Krugman say, “ as an American who's very, very worried about what the hell is happening to my country, Europe is in some important ways a backup for the values that we believe in.” As a European I am staggered to watch this “demolition derby” of the US. I fear for you all.
Thank goodness the Marshall Plan worked. Now that we are actively self-destructing from within, it's a godsend that there are strong, functioning democratic states in Europe.
Try to imagine if Donald Trump were taking advice from Hélène Rey or someone like her instead of the groveling clowns he surrounds himself with? Of course, Trump doesn't take advice. As the world's foremost authority on economics (and everything else) he can't be advised, only obeyed.