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Invisible Hand, social media, money & crypto w/ John August – thoughts on recent episodes – EP194

In this episode of the Economics Explored podcast, host Gene Tunny chats with John August, Treasurer of the Pirate Party of Australia and host of the Roving Spotlight show on Radio Skid Row in Sydney. Together, they discuss previous episodes on topics such as the invisible hand, Goldbacks, and cryptocurrencies. Listeners are encouraged to share their thoughts on these topics.

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored

You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

What’s covered in EP194

  • [00:02:44] The invisible hand. 
  • [00:04:27] Hidden assumptions in economics. 
  • [00:08:15] Problem with gambling addiction. 
  • [00:14:39] Soviet Union. 
  • [00:26:03] Military expenditure and Soviet collapse. 
  • [00:30:16] Social media and liberty. 
  • [00:33:37] Censorship in social media. 
  • [00:39:01] History of currency. [00:40:47] 
  • [00:44:25] Central Bank Digital Currency. 
  • [00:50:34] Crypto as a solution. 
  • [00:55:46] CBDC concerns and conspiracy theories.

Links relevant to the conversation

John’s website where you can find his writings and a link to his radio show:

https://johnaugust.com.au/

Gene’s previous conversations with John:

https://www.mixcloud.com/Johnorg/roving-spotlight-24-may-22-post-election-all-over-gene-tunny-economics-internet-purchases/

https://economicsexplored.com/2022/06/21/advertising-surveillance-capitalism-w-john-august-ep144/

https://economicsexplored.com/2022/05/11/the-pirate-partys-economic-policy-platform-w-john-august-ep138-transcript/

Recent episodes mentioned in the conversation:

https://economicsexplored.com/2023/05/12/govt-wellbeing-budgets-frameworks-useful-or-useless-w-nicholas-gruen-ep187/

https://economicsexplored.com/2023/04/29/the-invisible-hand-economic-religious-or-mystical-concept-w-dan-sanchez-fee-ep185/

https://economicsexplored.com/2023/04/12/what-are-goldbacks-and-whos-buying-them-e-g-preppers-libertarians-collectors-w-goldback-founder-jeremy-cordon-ep183/

https://economicsexplored.com/2023/03/31/odd-way-to-fix-housing-crisis-proposed-by-aus-govt-invest-in-stocks-first-w-dr-cameron-murray-sydney-uni/

https://economicsexplored.com/2022/09/18/bitcoin-books-w-author-ex-fighter-pilot-lars-emmerich-ep157/

https://economicsexplored.com/2023/03/08/crypto-arbitrage-searcher-dave-belvedere-on-crypto-and-dapps-such-as-wizards-dragons-ep178/

https://economicsexplored.com/2022/12/19/aussie-energy-crisis-net-zero-transition-w-josh-stabler-energy-edge-ep170/

Transcript:
Invisible Hand, social media, money & crypto w/ John August – thoughts on recent episodes – EP194

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It was then looked over by a human, Tim Hughes from Adept Economics, to check for mondegreens, things that otters might have misheard. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:06

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you could join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information.

Now on to the show.

Hello, thanks for tuning into the show. In this episode, I chat with previous guest and regular listener John August about some recent episodes. John is the treasurer of the Pirate Party of Australia. And he hosts the roving spotlight show on Radio Skid Row in Sydney. When he was in Brisbane, recently, John dropped into my office and he gave me some thoughtful and provocative feedback on some recent episodes. First, we discuss my conversation on the invisible hand with Dan Sanchez from the Foundation for Economic Education. John and I went on to chat about goldbacks and cryptocurrencies. They were the topics of some other recent episodes. I’ll put links to all those recent episodes in the show notes. If you have any thoughts on what John and I have to say in this episode, or previous episodes, then please get in touch via contact@economicsexplored.com. Okay, let’s get into the show. I hope you enjoy my conversation with John August.

Gene Tunny 01:44

John August, good to be chatting with you.

John August  01:48

Yes, well, you do say at the end of the show, you know, we’d like to know what you’re thinking and boy have I listened to a lot of shows. And boy, have I done a lot of thinking about your show. So so I’m here to sort of follow through on that invitation, I guess you might say,

Gene Tunny  02:01

very good, John. So yes. Good to be chatting with you again. So we’ve previously chatted about things like advertising and, and some other issues. I was on your show talking about economics and philosophy of economics. If I remember, correctly,

John August  02:15

well, I think I was inviting you to talk about three famous economist three issues, three things important. So I think there was a sort of nine things to talk about. And okay, oops, oops, I can’t remember the

Gene Tunny  02:28

Okay, I’ll put a link to it. I remember that was good fun. But you’ve you’ve had some thoughts on some recent episodes, as you said, and I mean, one of the ones was the one I did with Dan Sanchez, from Foundation for Economic Education on the invisible hand. So I’m interested in what do you think about that conversation? What are your reactions to that one?

John August  02:51

Well, in a narrow sort of way, I guess I do celebrate elements of the, you know, the invisible hand. But you know, the overall position, I guess he had just too a naive, a sunny view of things, and I’m going to maybe say, you know, things that I strongly disagree with him. But I hope at the end of the day, maybe I could buy him a beer or something like that. I don’t want it to be that negative. But yes, there’s a lot of things I disagreed with, with him on now, one of the things that he was saying is, look, you know, there are atheists out there that disagree with the whole idea of the invisible hand, just because the guy made one reference to God saying that. Now look, I can’t speak for other atheists. And maybe he has experienced some atheists who have actually said that. But I would never say that a religious view has got no validity to it. Now, I would say to the extent that it does have validity, it’s because people lived certain things. They thought about the world around us, around them, and they tried to put into writing and try to think it through. In other words, it may have some merit, but it’s not revealed truth from God, but it can still have merit. What I’m trying to say is, as an atheist, I think deeply about religion and the ideas and how they propagate. So so that’s a bit of a diversion. But what I’m trying to say is, I would never dismiss something, merely because someone mentions God once, twice or three times in developing their argument. So I would never challenge the idea of the invisible hand on that basis. But as far as the story of the pencil goes, Look, it is remarkable that there’s so much coordination to make the pencil. Okay, that’s impressive. But there’s also a decent number of hidden assumptions built in. Now one is that we’re assuming everyone in that chain are paid reasonably. We’re also assuming that there’s no particular externalities like people are mining whatever minerals they need to make the to make the pencils or they’re cutting down trees or whatever. And we won’t need to assume that. We’re also assuming that people are buying those pencils for legitimate needs. Now, let’s say someone’s buying pencils, because they’re addicted to chewing the ends of it, not because they actually want to design a building with those pencils that people will benefit from. And notice I’m, I’m sneaking in, to some degree, what I think you call in economics, a normative judgement. But keep in mind, if you say, here is this system, it is good. You’re making a normative judgement. So I think I can push back and challenge the normative judgments and say, if people are buying these pencils, because they’re addicted to chewing the ends of the pencils, and they’re addicted to that, like they’re addicted to heroin, well, is it really such a good thing that these pencils are being made. So there’s one equilibrium where things are made that people legitimately need. And, you know, the market coordinates itself in very impressive ways to do that. And I won’t deny that. That’s the good side of the invisible hand. But I think there’s other equilibrium that can also arise in the market, the equilibrium between people’s ability to be manipulated, and the market having the energy to manipulate them, because there’s money to be made from that. Now, we’ve discussed advertising before. But let’s say there’s so many things where there’s a legitimate side, and as you slide down the slope, it gets worse and worse. Now, let’s say someone makes a bet on a footy game of $10. Okay, that bet is recreation. Now, but then at the other end of the scale, you have people who queue up at the clubs at 9am, waiting to go in and play the pokies. Right. And clearly, that’s gone to the end of being addiction. So an in between, I mean, this is one of the things that Dan is also thinking, look, I guess, on one sense, I do celebrate the idea of the sovereign individual, but the psychologist is sort of unpacking the way our brains work, and realising that it’s not such a simple story. Now, we may well struggle to lose weight. And then when the cake is sitting in front of us, you know, we’ll sort of indulge and there’s in a sense there’s two people inside of us that want different things that are struggling for control. And, you know, this naive idea of here is this sovereign individual that wants X Y, Z, they know what they want. And it’s the government that is getting in the way. Now, look, I do not believe in paternalistic intervention, I suppose. But equally, the story Dan Sanchez is telling us just doesn’t seem to be engaging what I think is a much more complicated reality. I mean, let’s talk about or maybe I’ve told this story before, someone’s a heroin addict, did they go out in the market, seek amongst the options and decide and end up becoming a heroin addict because they engage with those options? You know, other stories coming out of AFL? You know, yes, notice I’ve said a certain amount of gambling is a recreation. At the other end, you can say you’re just pandering to someone’s addiction. And there’s this movement within AFL, which is saying, follow the game, not the odds. Because while people do not mind, you know, the single bet on the game sort of thing, which is adding to your experience, when the odds are flashing onto the screen, every advert while the game is playing. A lot of people I think, are getting legitimately concerned about that. And as I say, I’ve got nothing against gambling, per se, but when there’s this big feedback loop, which is I guess ceding to its excesses, then you have a problem there. So that’s one problem that I have with that sort of idea. So notice, I am acknowledging the magic of the pencil. At the same time, I’m also saying there are all these other equilibrium that can happen. And we’ve had the discussion about advertising before. And this is I guess, part of that thing, so. Okay, so we’ve talked about gambling, people queuing up at 9am. Okay, the fact that we struggle to lose weight, and that’s telling us things, okay, then yeah, I mean, it’s the perspective from the affluent society by John Galbraith. He sort of says that in the ideal, we are a sovereign people who have our, to have our wants, we go out into the market, and we satisfy those wants. But he’s saying advertising is a lot more pernicious than that advertising actually shapes our wants, rather than being something a means by which we’re informed of the options to satisfy our wants. So I guess this is a subtle philosophical point. But I would still say, advertising can inform us of our options, or basically our options for satisfying our wants, or it can actively shape our wants. And I think there’s a bit of a conceptual muddle there. So I suppose Dan Sanchez’s view is like, you go out into the world, and the world is this passive thing. And you just, you just pick and choose as a sovereign individual who knows what you want, is totally clear unstressed, no psychological hammocks. But in fact, when you go out in the world, it’s an active thing. It’s reaching out to you. Right. So I think that a lot of his story is problematic there. But at the same time, I do endorse the idea of distributed innovation, people thinking, and, you know, elements of that story. So, so what am I trying to say, look, I acknowledge part of that story of the pencil and that integration. But it’s just that I think people are going too far with it. And taking it’s past its load limit. So in a sense, this is a bit of a bigger dip point of disagreement between myself and Dan Sanchez, and perhaps others, you do say, look, there is this bad stuff going on in the economy, and maybe we need to manage it or have antitrust regulation, and so on. But it’s a matter of how we relate to it. I think, I think people on the other side of the fence, say, it’s over there, we quarantine it conceptually. And then we get on with the interesting stuff, which is thinking about the magic of the pencil, while I sort of say Hang on, it’s all very strongly integrated together. And you can’t really separate them out so clearly or neatly.

Gene Tunny  11:31

So what do you mean by on the other side of the fence? So you see yourself as philosophically different from Dan? Because you, I mean, I’ll have to go back and, you know, really pay close attention to what Dan was saying, because I will, my view was he was making a really good argument that let’s not dismiss what this idea of the market as some sort of fairy tale, because that’s what it all some sort of mystical thing. That’s, that’s what he was reacting to. He was reacting to some commentary that he’d seen where people were saying, Well, you believe in this Invisible Hand thing, and it’s something mystical or religious concept. It’s not something that is, is guiding our, it’s not something legitimate, but he’s saying, well, actually, this is this is what’s supporting the bulk of our society, really, I mean, this is what leads to a higher living standard, higher living standard than, say, in the Soviet Union, which tried a different system. And it proved not to work. So I think he’s making a legitimate point. I would I probably differ from Dan in some of the judgments as you know, what regulations needed. But broadly, I agree with him. I would say that, yeah, I take your points about what economists would call market failures they’re clearly market failures of some kind of different kinds that there could be scope for government intervention to address those. And yeah, people aren’t always rational, they’re not this idea of consumer sovereignty is that’s questionable. And that’s why we have behavioural economics now. So I would say that, largely, Dan is, is on the right track. And I mean, you you yourself, acknowledge the pencil story, there’s some there’s some legitimacy in it. And I guess what you’re saying, or my interpretation is that you think that in telling that story, you you’re not giving enough acknowledgement of these other these deviations from

John August  13:25

I guess so look, I suppose who knows, maybe I need to talk to Dan face to face to sort of get to the bottom of it. But yeah my recollection of that episode was not only was he defending the story of the pencil from unfair criticism, and I think there’s a narrow sense in which I do feel that anybody who dismisses something just because someone mentions God, two or three times, that is wrong. That’s that that’s not right. So in a sense, let’s just say, I will defend Dan against the atheists who make that claim. But then Dan goes a lot further than that. And that was sort of my recollection of the episode that, so notice, I’m saying, Look, I will defend Dan against fellow atheists who, who do behave in the way that he identifies but yeah, there’s a lot more to the story than that. But I suppose there’s some other things that I can talk about that come out of Dan’s story. Now, one of them was social media, but the other one was actually the Soviet Union. Yes. And I suppose you’ve actually mentioned that. And this whole thing of the Soviet Union does actually go into the US and Ukraine. I don’t know whether we want to park that for a later discussion. But let me get started on some stories about the Soviet Union. So my heritage is Lithuania, Lithuanian. And I did actually go to Lithuania, some time after the revolution, and they had sort of, basically they’ve gotten gotten rid of communism on the one hand, and the interesting thing is, the first government that took over Lithuania was not communist, and then they had a successive election and they actually put the old communist back in. Now depends on what you mean by Communism. Now my uncle who was seriously anti Russia and anti communist, he said, Well, if they’re willing to subject themselves to a democratic election and leave based on that, then he says, Well, they’re not really communist. Now this is madder than that. What you mean by communist? Do you mean state control? And obviously, I think the sentiment was those notional communists were Lithuanians first and communist second. And yeah, that was the sort of the way they related to the story there. But there’s this view that like the Soviet Union had shoddy workmanship, but I spoke to people. And there was this idea of, I guess, in the West, you’d call it branding. But people said, if you get a washing machine, or a refrigerator from a factory of known repute, it will just go on and on and on and keep working. Because as far as design goes in the Soviet Union, okay, quality of workmanship, may have been an issue. And it may have varied a bit with the factory. But the engineers were not constrained by what we in the West might call, you know, trade offs to make profit, or, you know, planned obsolescence or those sorts of things. Their design principle was, we make this to work, we make it to last. And if you actually got a factory that did a decent job with putting the bits together, it really did work and last, and what some other stories as you wander around, you see little country towns that have, you know, two storey brick buildings. And if you wander around Australia, you’d say you, you only get two storey buildings when there’s a sufficient density in the township. So on the abstract, you could say that’s wasteful, you know, you don’t need a two storey building in this small township. But you also have the benefits of uniformity, right, a scale, if you know what I mean. Like it’s basically they have one unit that runs around making two storey buildings and makes them wherever and so you have the benefits of scale. So for me, it’s not quite that bad. But let me also tell you a story. Now, this is I’m not sure that people on your show have exactly made this critique, but I know there are commentators who talk about Soviet Union was a place where culture went to die. And now there was a woman I know from Lithuania, who came to Australia to start a family, and she was very musically inclined. And her she actually took her family back to Lithuania, because under the Soviet system, and they actually kept this after the revolution, if your child is musically talented, they can go off to a particular school where their talent is developed, at no particular cost to the parent. Now, we can do that in Australia, but there’s private tuition going to the Conservatorium, this sort of thing. So someone actually went back to Lithuania because of that. So there’s some good things going on there. But let me say, you know, I went to those museums, where the former Soviet Union with the three stamps of the judge, you know, before they execute someone for being a political dissident or whatever. So there was that, you know, evil stuff going on there. And I suppose this is going away from Dan Sanchez, to some of your other commentators that basically I’m very strongly pro Ukraine, partially because of that, that heritage from Lithuania and, and, you know, sure, there are some people on the internet who say that they’re American and very strongly pro Ukraine and I have to take their I take them at face value, but you know, I look at it I’ve seen my my relative with her family from Lithuania. And it’s like, the US theme feels like they’re playing geopolitical chess. But for Poland, the Baltic states, you know, Lithuania, Finland, whatever the Soviet Union is, Russia, I should say is over there and they’re a geographical proximate threat. So they’re actually shall we say, Lithuanian seem more Lithuanian government even seems more pro Ukraine than the US government not to criticise, there are some very strongly pro Ukrainian individual Americans out there who are identifying themselves on the internet. But you know, there’s, there’s an interesting subtlety there. I do actually say that there are some pro Ukraine forces that are stronger even than the US not to deny the US has given us a bucketload of positive aid there. But I suppose with Dan Sanchez, you were having that discussion. You know, what is the story about the Soviet Union there? There are a few little little strange things with the Soviet Union, like compared to China, they’ve got more social capital, you stumble while you’re on the stairs, getting on the train people will be concerned and try to help you up or whatever. But the other story is, remember, once upon a time, when everyone was getting their car stereos pinched out of their cars and and people were putting in the boot and had these special connectors and this sort of thing. And then you went to the stage of having you know, encoding so if I remove it from the power you had to get the code put back into there. Yeah, the thing is you talk to people in Lithuania. And I remember my, my cousin there, you know, people were saying to Oh, why are you putting the stereo in the boot and you don’t have these like, like security keys? And she says, I know, in Lithuania, if you know if there’s money in it, and there’s some technician who can sort of blag the codes, well, you know, it’s not very secure. Now, in Australia, let’s assume that you are some sort of automatic technician that does have access to the codes. And you abuse that I’m not sure it may, maybe you’ll never end up being taken seriously by any automotive firm again, maybe you’ll end up in prison. It’s a very different deal in Australia, if you were to betray that sort of trust. Yeah. But you can see that the degree to which you submit to those sorts of regulations, you know, there were obviously some, I won’t say that. I mean, obviously, yes. Lithuanians will be concerned about you in the street if you stumbled and you know, had that sort of thing. But there was also that sort of aura of criminality, I suppose there as well. And I hope, hopefully, Lithuania is not going to take a swipe at me for saying that. But there’s, I guess, some complexities of the story about the Soviet Union. And I suppose I can but say even though I’m a lefty, I’m certainly not in favour of the Soviet Union or Russia in the way that it was. I mean, going back far enough, I’m aware of that history, you know, way back when, if you’re a dissident in Russia, you would be executed, then the next step is you’d be shipped off to a gulag in Siberia, you might not survive the trip. And then at the end of it, they they locked you up in a lunatic asylum because only the insane would not believe that the Soviet Union could not effective, then right at the end of the thing, if you’re inconvenient, but they didn’t particularly want to lock you up, they’d ship you off to an anonymous township in Siberia would sort of be like the Tower of London, you live a reasonably comfortable but irrelevant existence. So. So anyway, there’s my sort of, I guess, glib summary of the Soviet Union, acknowledging all of the sins along the way.

Gene Tunny  22:07

Yeah. Okay. So I just want to ask one more question about Soviet Union. So look, I acknowledge there were some, there were some positives, and I mean, some I think they had some of the greatest conductors. And certainly there’s some great music that came out of the Soviet Union Shostakovich, for example, or they had great dissident writers too. So that so I mean, that’s, that’s not a positive for the Soviet Union. That’s a that’s a positive for the people, and Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago about the sins of the Soviet Union. But certainly, yeah, this system did encourage the Arts and Sport. They had great sporting achievements. Some of them were assisted by, by doping, of course,

John August  22:51

Well, though, one thing, there were the Olympics in Montreal, and afterwards, they were trawling the river and they found all these syringes there. Anyway, that’s one story about the Soviet Union. Yeah. Was that the 23rd? Olympics? Well, anyway, it was in Montreal.

Gene Tunny  23:11

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

Female speaker  23:16

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Gene Tunny  23:45

Now back to the show. Well, what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in your view? I mean, partly it was because of the oppression and partly it was because of the inability to deliver the consumer goods that the people needed and wanted. I mean, would you agree with that?

John August  24:02

Partially Yes. Well, I would say broadly speaking, it was corruption. And I guess endemic corruption was what what I would say was the downfall of the Soviet Union. I know that I think it may have been Dan Sanchez, but I know that one of your guests was talking about the price mechanism and the great things about the price mechanism. And goodness me I don’t want to go down. Well, I guess my my endorsement of the price mechanism is somewhat guarded. But yeah, I guess I would focus on corruption and lack of democracy and lack of transparency as being the things that undermine the Soviet Union, rather than a lack of price mechanism. But I suppose it’s, that’s a matter of judgement. I acknowledge.

Gene Tunny  24:51

Well, maybe I’ll do a another episode where I look at the economy of the Soviet Union because I acknowledge that it’s, yeah, it’d be good to get the nuance in there and just understand exactly what was going on and to what extent these stories about the bread lines, people queuing for bread, the shortages to what extent they were true. I mean, it looks like they were in many circumstances…

John August  25:13

Well, going off on quite a tangent. But there’s, you know, Hugh White, who’s the Australian academic. And I know, he’s someone who says that he did actually see the downfall of the Soviet Union before it happened, because he looked at it, did his economic calculation, thought, hang on, this is not sustainable. And maybe it’s worth checking out his analysis. But the very interesting contrast is, he’s an academic and like whether the Soviet Union collapses or not, he’s still got a job, right? Yes. But the very interesting thing is that there were all these people from the CIA, who were saying the Soviet Union is a threat, and will continue to be a threat. And this, this Australian academic with a degree of objectivity could actually see clearly that the collapse of the Soviet Union was coming. So I think that’s a very interesting contrast.

Gene Tunny  25:59

I’ll have to have a look at his stuff, whether was he making the argument that it was because of the economy that was just unsustainable, was it because of the big increase in military expenditure that they had to undertake to match what the US was doing? I mean, this is the this is the story. The the the Americans tell, isn’t it that I mean, Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, because he just massively ramped up US defences

John August  26:22

Well there was also, there was also SDI, which I think was, you know, basically, you know, lasers in space lasers on Earth, whatever, which was ultimately ineffective. But you could say that it was a propaganda ploy that prompted the the Soviet Union spend all this money on stuff that they didn’t need to do so. And that that was one of the things that broke the Soviet Union. Well, let’s just say all these things are possible. Notice I mostly tell the story about Hugh White because it’s a cute story. I don’t carry around all of his conceptual detail, although I’m sure he’d made quite a considered judgement at the time,

Gene Tunny  26:58

I’ll look into it. I’ll look into it. Okay.

John August  27:01

So I suppose the last thing Dan Sanchez was also talking about was social media and the government getting its mitts in and causing problems. And let’s just say, Look, if you are into social media, if you were into the internet, and you understand the development of the Internet, now, look, I actually, as a pirate, I’m certainly concerned about government surveillance, I’m concerned about the protection of whistleblowers, more obviously concerned about companies sort of harvesting data and that sort of thing. You know, that rubric of thing. I mean, I am concerned about government and I’m concerned about business. But let’s focus on social media. The the history is, even of people who are very much, shall we say, anarchist inclined in the way that they relate to social media, the big problem has always been that a positive forum gets taken over by trolls, and you know, people who want to abuse the situation, it basically gets taken over by bad actors, if you’re not careful. And you need moderation to control that. And that is something that elements of the internet, you know, anarchist inclined elements on the internet, have struggled with to get on top of yet. And in a sense, if you set up a chat group, a forum, you know, you’re gonna have to be careful about trolls, to some degree, you’re going to be careful about obnoxious people, or you’re going to have to be careful about, you know, people trying to take over your website and promote gambling or something on it, you know, all those threats. But the idea that the government might come in, and censor you, you know, I just think that that just seems to me to be so naive compared to the lived experience, if you’re actually on the internet, trying to manage these things. Now, one of the things that has actually happened on the internet, it’s a concept they call it, this is the environment here is an amicable dinner party. Right? And this is the thing I do not want to send to someone based on what ideas they’re putting forward. But it may be appropriate to, to call someone out if they’re being obnoxious. And, you know, I thought I, you know, Facebook is a bit controlling and whatnot. Let’s go to some of the alternatives. And rather than the alternatives being a hotbed for interesting political debate and divergent opinions, they tend to get taken over by conspiracy theorists. And that’s my own lived experience on the internet. And it just seems polls apart from Dan Sanchez’s view and look, notice, I’ve told you a few things. You know, I’m not really impressed with government censorship. I’m not really impressed with lack of transparency, protection for whistleblowers, all those sorts of things. Those are a part of the things that I bring to the table. And I suspect we’ll get into it later on. But while I’m not totally against government involvement in society in the economy, by golly, there can be some obnoxious bureaucracy developing very easily. Yeah. And we’ll perhaps get to that.

Gene Tunny  30:04

Yeah. Can I ask you about social media, John? Because I’m actually surprised that your point of view on this, I want to make sure I understand it fully. Because isn’t the biggest threat to our liberty, really the government or government overreach or, you know, factions taking over the government and wanting to impose a totalitarian state? Isn’t that the biggest threat to liberty? Not some trolls online? I mean, you can ignore the trolls, can’t you? And isn’t it better to have a robust debate to have that exchange to? This is why Voltaire didn’t what’s the line from Voltaire about how I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend, to

John August  30:47

defend to my death your right to say yes, yeah, the person Voltaire was talking about. He was probably saying something Voltaire disagreed with, but he was probably doing it in the context of an an amicable discussion over dinner. Okay, right. And remember, I’ve just I’ve just said, I guess I’m repeating myself. I’m not against people who disagree with me, I am against people who are assholes. And there’s a fundamental difference there. And my concern is not over ideas. Or to some degree, there’s an idea, like someone over there thinks blah, okay, they can think that I don’t care. Are they in my face yelling at me telling you this stuff? Okay, then I have an issue. But I don’t have an issue with someone over there thinking x y Z. So as far as like threat to Liberty now look, maybe you’ve got a point in terms of threats to liberty. Okay. Let’s see now that forget the social scientists who were sort of talking about the state having the monopoly on on violent coercive force, violence, being able to jail people, and so on. So one of the things is you got to understand there are corporate platforms, who are making choices, and some people call that censorship, I tend to think censorship is only something that government does, because the government is backed up by its legal monopoly on force. Right? So So when corporations make a corporate choice, to allow something on their platform, or not allow something on their platform, that’s more of a commercial choice than censorship. But when you have, let’s say, Facebook, or whatever, and there’s only one place you can go to to express yourself, then they’re starting to give state like power, because there’s only one place you can go to. So that’s where things start to get a bit murky. But, you know, let’s say that if there’s multiple platforms, and this platform decides, well, we’re not going to allow blah, for commercial reasons. And there’s other platforms you can go to, then I guess, you know, that’s the old thing of, you know, the, the world of possibilities. And that’s not really a problem. But it’s sort of like what’s, what’s the sentiment, you know, this is a, this is a private entity, but it’s becoming like a public utility. And even though it’s privately run the fact that it’s like a public utility, that makes it more complicated. So let me try to engage with what you’re saying in a more complicated way. If you’re talking about freedom, and the fact that government is the one with the legal, the legal monopoly on force, and that is something we should be concerned about. Okay, I agree with you. If you are saying here is this thing called social media, we want social media to be a social good, that does good things in our world, and is pleasant to use. Maybe that’s a different issue to whether we are free or not. But it is still a legitimate concern, that here is something going on in the world that basically shouldn’t have barbs or we shouldn’t be, we should be able to pick the roses without getting our thumbs sort of on the thorns or whatever. You know, it’s, it’s, as I say, it’s not an issue about freedom. But it’s an issue of is this thing actually worth doing? Is this effective? And I still think that then maybe if Dan Sanchez just wants to bang on about freedom, and ah the states got its legal monopoly on force, blah, blah, blah, okay, if that’s his argument, well, there’s a degree where I’ll back off and say alright if that’s what you want to say, but if he’s want to say, look, here’s this wonderful thing called the Internet, and the major threat to it being effective is the state and I’m sort of saying, no, that’s not the major threat to social media being effective. There’s other things going on that you’re totally blind to. So am I making sense there if you want to narrow your argument to freedom government with coercive monopoly on coercive force? Okay, but that what I guess I’m trying to say is, you’re confusing two different arguments there. And who knows, maybe Dan started out talking about personal freedom and then somehow sort of oozed into is social media effective or pleasant to use and he’s confusing those two concepts. Am I making sense there?

Gene Tunny  35:02

I think you are. Look, I mean, my view would be that we want to be careful how much we censor social media. And if there’s demand for that platform you’re talking about, then you would expect someone would try to set that up. And therefore you would sign up for some sort of moderation. So I don’t mind if people sign up for that, if they go into that. And there’s, you know, when you’re going when you join a platform, you’re conscious that yeah, there will be some moderation because people who are coming to this platform, they want to go to that dinner party you’re talking about. So I guess LinkedIn’s sort of like that, where people are talking about their professional accomplishments, and they’re sharing things on that, that seems to be well more behaved. And they they are expressing some opinions, it seems to be a lot better behaved than say, Facebook or Twitter. I mean, Twitter is bad, because it’s anonymous, isn’t it? So that’s one of the problems there. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my view would be to look, I see the problem with trolling. I think the best thing is to ignore it. And you know, you can block trolls, can’t you?

John August  36:10

Well, look, there are ways of engaging with this. But I’m just saying I guess it’s making the whole thing a bit bit more difficult to use. And let’s just say it’s betraying the promise of social media I suppose would be my sentiment. And yes, whatever problems there are, there are workarounds. But the fact that you need to apply workarounds, I think is perhaps telling.

Gene Tunny  36:32

Right. So, John, we’ve had a good chat about your thoughts on the invisible hand episode with Dan Sanchez. And I’ll have to let Dan know, and I might see if he has any reactions in, in reply

John August  36:45

Yes maybe it would be a bit simpler if we basically just had a face to face discussion some time. Because as I say, I’m yes, I strongly disagree. But I hope at the end of the day, maybe I can buy the guy a beer you know, I hit that.

Gene Tunny  36:56

Yeah, I think he might be in Atlanta, but we could certainly have a, we can certainly have a catch up on Zoom. Or if he’s coming over here to Australia. Or if you’re in Atlanta, you could get in touch with him. Okay, so we chatted about the invisible hand. You also had some thoughts on the goldbacks episode that I did with the gentleman who was who’s setting up the he’s got his goldbacks in the state in, in Utah, which is quite fascinating. Yeah, Jeremy Corden. That was, that was a conversation I really enjoyed. And I learned a lot. So what were your reactions to that conversation? John?

John August  37:32

Let’s just say as a as a pirate, and I say people can do whatever they damn well, like, you know, that within reason, I suppose obviously, the within reason is the big rider. But if people want to have these goldbacks, well, good luck to them, they can do that. And I suppose that it’s more people who were in terms of challenging the current norm. I think that was more something to do with crypto, but let me try to focus on on the goldbacks. I sort of scratched my head over whether this really is that useful? Or whether the mainstream monetary system is that corrupt that we need to bail and go down a different path. So in that sense, I wonder about the motivation. But at another level, I say people can do that whatever they damn well, like, and I don’t think anyone who’s buying goldbacks or trading goldbacks is hurting anyone. So good luck to them. They can they can do that. Now, if people want to have goldbacks, like for, like the imminent political crisis, when money becomes worthless then all the institutions of the US unravel, and they’re sort of survivalists, and that sort of thing. And that’s the way they relate to things. Well, I guess that’s your choice, you can do that. But one of the things where I do actually defend what was the gentleman’s name, Jeremy Corden, Jeremy Corden now one of the things where I defend Jeremy Corden and this goes back into the history of currency and the history currency more relates to modern monetary theory but nevertheless, I’ll talk about it now is that once upon a time you had coins, okay, and and the thing is, before you had coins, you actually had lumps of gold or lumps of silver or lumps of whatever. And when you use them to buy stuff, you’d actually have some scales and every time you bought something’s people would weigh out the gold or the whatever. And what you then had was the king would run a stamping unit and probably stamp their their impression onto the coin. And and what you did then, basically by counting out a given number of coins, you have confidence that that was a given weight of gold. So those coins you’re gonna understand it wasn’t theat currency it was obviously the the underlying value of the metal was what made this coin valuable, but the fact it was stamped made it more convenient than the metal itself. So that was the benefit you had. But let’s look at this stamping unit the Emperor running it. Now keep in mind, we didn’t have advanced economies with like, you know the amount of money you need for anything, because like, let’s just say even if people have got the proverbial licence to print money, even if they’re forging currency on their colour printer, the colour printer costs some dollars, the paper costs, the ink costs some dollars, the the electricity costs some dollars. So even if you’re forging currency, yeah, it still costs you some stuff. And going back to the Emperor with his stamping rig, you know, someone is sitting there, measuring out the gold, putting it there applying the stamp, and I guess they probably whacked it with a mallet or something to form it into a coin. That’s a labour intensive activity. Right. So that is a reasonable thing. So the thing is that this gentleman was charging for his goldbacks. And I think that was legitimate. The other thing is that the another metaphor here is, this goes back to the time of coal, okay, you someone will buy 10 tonnes of coal, and then sell it off in bags of coal. And basically, they’d buy those 10 tonnes of coal at a very cheap rate by volume. And because they were segmenting it out into smaller amounts, you know, you’d pay basically more per lump of more per pound of coal, I guess it would have been then. And the service was taking a large amount and turning into small units. Now, let’s say you go down to the service station and buy some petrol. Now I’m sure the person who runs a servo buys that petrol at a very cheaper amount than you would put in into your car, but you are buying the, the petrol one tankful at a time, that’s convenient, that is the service that the service station is providing you, they’re taking something of a large volume, and segmenting it into smaller amounts, smaller quantities that you as consumer can then officially use, and they are charging for that. And okay, they’re going off on quite a tangent, you know, farms will actually have a very big container of petrol. And you know, they’ll have a truck that visits you know, once every, I know, weeks or months, and that will fill up the container. And that’s because for someone who is on a farm, it’s a lot of effort to drive down to the servo to top up, yeah, right. So they have to go through that. But you and I can buy our petrol one tank at a time. And the servo person running the servo is charging, and I think they’re charging legitimately, it’s a reasonable thing to do for them to charge for that. And so running all these things back, it’s a legitimate thing for this gentleman to charge for the goldback in the same way as all these things. The only issue is, is he making a monopoly profit, who is competing with him? Is that a legitimate amount of money he’s charging. And, you know, if he actually wanted to be transparent about these books, we could all sort of look at that if he wanted to be that public about and then go Oh, yeah, okay. That’s a fair return. Okay. Fair enough. If he wanted to be that transparent, the thing that would keep him totally honest, would obviously be other people competing, then again, look, notice I said, Oh, it doesn’t hurt people, people can do what they damn well, like, blah, blah, blah. But I would still say this guy has been innovative. He’s putting himself out there. He’s trying something out. I guess there’s a legitimate moral return for taking that sort of risk and just having a go. Yeah. And that’s the thing, some things, you know, you wonder, is this a monopoly profit? Or is it a legitimate return on your creativity? Bit of a rubbery distinction between those things, but I don’t know how much he’s morally entitled to charge. He’s certainly morally entitled to charge something there.

Gene Tunny  43:35

Well, I mean, that whole question of what’s he morally entitled to charge? I mean, who’s to say, I mean, this is, that would be a value judgement, wouldn’t it? So? Yeah, I mean, I asked the question, I asked him a question. Because when he will, how much of the value of the goldback is due to the gold? And it was a half? Was it a bit a bit under half? Or maybe half? Oh, okay. And I wasn’t, I should have thought more of the time. Okay. So he’s this, he’s got this new process, and he’s got some equipment, and he does need to earn a profit. Of course, I don’t have a problem with him earning a profit. And I guess this is a sort of thing where yeah competition that potentially this is something where there could be competition from other providers of goldbacks a similar type of currency.

John August  44:23

And you wonder if he’s got a patent on the technology. And yeah, my whole concern about IP, that is a pirate thing that for another time,

Gene Tunny  44:33

what about your thoughts on crypto? You had some thoughts on the crypto episodes that I’ve had recently had? Well, in the last several months or so?

John August  44:41

Yeah, yeah. Well, I suppose one of the things is that I guess I do have some understanding of the mathematics of it but I know you had one gentleman there who was trying to say, look, Bitcoin is good and Ether is about some sort of oligopoly controlling the flow of money. Yeah, and I will would differ with that based on what I understand. Now. Let’s also say there’s something called the central bank digital currency. And let me tell you some banks are actually doing trials in association with the Reserve Bank doing a central bank digital currency. And let me tell you, there are some people out there that are freaking out about this. They’re, they’re really going down the conspiracy, the conspiracy theory, rabbit hole. And I can but say, I tend to think it’s too contentious, you want to increase seriously increase the level of trust in government and the financial affairs, because a lot of people are going neurotic about this stuff. But the thing about Central Bank digital currency, and I think your guests identified this too. Central Bank digital currency is not crypto, metaphorically, it is a spreadsheet somewhere in the bowels of the Reserve Bank. And you’ve sort of put up your hand and someone changes the entry in in that spreadsheet in the Reserve Bank. Crypto is much more distributed. Like in order to run Bitcoin, you have computer many, I don’t know how long well have, let’s say, 1000s of computers around the world, but don’t quote me on that one. And the thing is, for something to be validated, more than 50% of those computers have to agree that x y Z is the case. Yeah, now that makes it very resilient against failure, very resilient against fraud, you know, various things like that. And yes, there has been fraud and dodgy stuff happening in crypto. But that’s been exchanges, not in, you know, the actual crypto itself. So your reserve bank, digital currency is a spreadsheet. Bitcoin is basically a consensus thing where you have to have more than 50% of those computers to say that certain thing is the case. And what that mean, that means it’s resilient, it means that it’s actually not subject to the whims of government policy not subject to the whims of the Reserve Bank, crypto is or bitcoin is, and it will continue to roll along, according to its algorithm that was predetermined however long ago. So so that’s a story with crypto. That’s one that’s a story with Bitcoin, I should say. And at the other end of the scale, you’ve got your central bank digital currency, which is just in so notice this thing, it’s a single point of failure. If someone hacks into the reserve bank, it can be compromised. You cannot meaningfully hack Bitcoin, the only way you can turn bitcoin is to control more than 50% of the computers around the world are doing Bitcoin. Right? Right. So and then the thing that’s in the middle is Ether. And my understanding is ether is still run by a pool of like, you know, let’s say 1000 1000 computers. And what you can say is that, okay, it’s in between the two, it’s not a total dispersion like Bitcoin. But equally, the idea that ether could somehow be swung by vested interests is hard to believe, right? Let’s, let’s say for the sake of argument, 500 people, and Ether is mostly running by its predetermined algorithm. You know, it’s hard to believe certainly, you had a guest who was critical of Ether as a quid, I sort of say it’s in between the point is, now the other thing that’s also an issue is, is our mainstream financial system that corrupt or that bad? Now, your guests were basically they were expressing their concerns. But I tend to think, look, you can say that this financial system, our democracy is messed up, and you can bail or you can say, Well, why is democracy not working to the point where we might have these dodgy policy outcomes and spend some time thinking about that? You know, it’s I have this feeling that they’re, that they’re, they’re bailing without due consideration, I suppose, right? In a sense, if people are free to do that. Now, the other thing they talk about, they do talk about the threat of banks suddenly denying us access to our funds. And people have some concern about that. So far, banks haven’t done that. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. But there are narky things like garnishee orders, like if you have a debt, yeah, you can actually make an arrangement. And the banks will sort of basically grab some, grab some of your money as it could flow through your account, and you have no control over that. That happens, but maybe that’s a legitimate thing for the government to enforce. But the point is, the stories of the banks being in some way arbitrarily abusing their power. I don’t think that really happens. I think the concern is overstated, but it’s a matter of judgement. If you really are that upset with the banks and you want to go your own way. Well, fair enough.

Gene Tunny  49:48

John, just on that, I mean, there have been some cases where the banks have denied access to funds to people, where the US Treasury has issued one of those what does it call the, there was that Russian businessman or was he? was he killed? Yeah.

John August  50:05

So it’s the whole thing of Ukraine being pulled out of the SWIFT network. There’s a few dodgy things like that. But, but yeah, okay. You’re, you’re telling me something new? I must say,

Gene Tunny  50:14

No. I mean, so one of the one of the reasons people would, they’re concerned, and maybe this is something that’s a bit of an edge case, or it’s an extreme sort of scenario. But there are situations where government can tell banks deny people access to the funds. And you might argue, Well, okay, well, that’s a good thing, because these people are siding with a dictator, or they’re associated with a rogue regime. So fair enough that

John August  50:42

well, if that is a concern for you, then maybe crypto is a way of dealing with that. Now, let me say that there is there’s there’s one legitimate use case I can think of for crypto, that let’s say you’re a Filipino worker working in Saudi Arabia, or United Arab Emirates, or something like that, you want to get your money back home? My understanding is if you can play the game with crypto, you can actually do it with a much lower overhead than a means of international money transfer. Yeah, I mean, there’s cute stories about in Africa, I think telephone credits on mobile phones become used as currency. Now, again, that’s a centralised currency, like the spreadsheet at the Reserve Bank, but it’s still an interest in digital currency that sort of used instead of money. So there’s a use case there. Now the other thing I would say is that maybe crypto is keeping Visa card and so on honest. Now one of the things about if you’re I want to I’m not sure on the exact details, but if you are I wanted to transact in crypto would probably have to pay the miners like $100 to process our transaction. But that’s a fixed amount. These sorts of charges you a percentage, while you would imagine the amount of computational power to process my purchase of $1, or $1,000 is the same. While with crypto, it’s a fixed charge. Also, the banks run some pretty strange trade offs involving fraud because the calculations are there’s a nonzero quantity of fraud, which is acceptable, because otherwise you just make life too difficult and things don’t happen. So there’s some complicated trade offs that banks are making. And what I’m saying is maybe crypto is keeping the banks honest, is keeping Visa honest. But what I will also say the thing weird thing about crypto is once upon a time, you had all the evangelists, the people who really believed in an alternative currency that wasn’t controlled by the banks, or the government, and they really believe that whether they were right or wrong, they really believed it. But now I think you’ve got a lot of snake oil merchants, you know, people who just want to make dollars. And the scene has become dominated by the get rich quick people, rather than the genuine evangelists. And for me, that sort of changed the whole feeling of it. Yeah, you know, if it never left the, you know, you’ve got to be a nerd to really get into crypto. On the one hand, it’s limiting the market, but it would also have been kept its purity, you know, so yeah, there’s some stories there. Okay, so that’s a bit of a ramble. But I hope I’ve sort of said said some useful things about crypto.

Gene Tunny  53:16

It’s made me think, John, I like it. I’ll just ask one more question, because we’ll have to wrap up soon, unfortunately. But I know we could keep on talking. The thing I was thinking of was the Magnitsky Act. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, which was there was a bill passed by US Congress and reading from Wikipedia signed into law by Obama in December 2012, intending to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009, and also to grant permanent normal trade relations status to Russia. Hang on. And then there’s another act of 2016 it authorises the US government to sanction those foreign officials worldwide, that a human rights offenders freeze their assets and ban them from entering entering the US. Now, I don’t have a problem with any of that, because some of these people probably deserve it. Yeah. But there is this concern that the banking system could be subject to political influence.

John August  54:11

Well, the thing is, at some level, how corrupt is democracy? Do we have faith in democracy? Do we have faith in the means by which the US government makes those decisions? Now this is going off on a whole ruddy other rabbit hole, but the US government has form in terms of meddling in global affairs. You know, there’s Diego Garcia. Goodness me, I think there was, you know, in El Salvador, that’s right. 1986 there were US trained trained soldiers that killed some priests and nuns, a whole family. The list will go on in terms of like the US doing dodgy shit around the planet. And it’s sort of like you know, they give a lot of foreign aid but equally they like, they like they run a protection racket. You got to pay your protection money along the way to participate in the rules of US rules based order and they, you know, they ignore the International Criminal Court and yada, yada yadi. So, look, the US does have a dodgy record. But notice I’ve shifted the ground a bit I’ve sort of said, look, what is the legitimacy of the US in broader terms, and it’s got its things to criticise, maybe those decisions you are making are valid decisions for the US government to make. And yeah, this is I guess, I’m not really answering any question. It’s getting a bit messy and awkward but yeah, if you think that participating in this global framework, and giving the US that sort of discretion is too much, then maybe crypto is the way to go.

Gene Tunny  55:43

Or any government. I mean, I don’t mean to pick on the US. It’s just that it’s the you know, the dominant country. And that’s, that’s very topical. Finally, because this will have to be the last question. What about the concerns people have about CBDC?, you mentioned, I’m trying to understand what your response is. You said, well, there are some people who may be there. You know, there are conspiracy theories about what it is. But you also said that this is CBDC, but you then also said that, are you concerned about political stability? Are you concerned that this is something that will make people more distrustful of government?

John August  56:21

Yes, I guess so, let’s say, look, this may not be what government is up to but there are people who are out there who are saying the banks and the governments are trying to wean us off cash, yes. So we do not use cash. And whatever, whatever these people are thinking they’re thinking government does not have good reasons for having that agenda. They wanting to wean us off cash, so they have more control of us. Right now, there’s a certain conspiracy theory, rabbit hole here, but a reasonable number of people. I don’t know what the proportion is, you’d have to talk to people who know more than me, but some proportion of people are very concerned about the government trying to stop people from using cash. And they see that as part of an agenda. And obviously, you can have your international connections. I do want to do not want to go there. But you know, there’s this whole constellation of conspiratorial concerns, and the government going down the route of central bank digital currency is feeding these people’s concerns. And whether you say that’s right or wrong, people are going to get very neurotic and conspiratorial about this.

Gene Tunny  57:28

Okay, yeah. All right. John August. Any any final thoughts before we wrap up, but it’s been great hearing your reactions to recent episodes, and it makes me think a lot more about these issues. So I appreciate it.

John August  57:43

Okay. Well, I’ve got many more things to say. But that’s probably the appropriate for the present, I think. Yes.

Gene Tunny  57:49

We’ll catch up again soon. John, for sure.

John August  57:55

Sounds good.

Gene Tunny 57:59

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Righto thanks for listening to this episode of Economics Explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact@economicsexplored.com Or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.

58:42

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Credits

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Podcast episode

Exploring the US Banking Crisis with Addison Wiggin – EP192

Economics Explored host Gene Tunny interviews Addison Wiggin, a New York Times bestselling author and market economist, about the US banking crisis. Addison shares insights into the origins and impacts of the crisis, and discusses the future of the US economy and financial markets. Listeners can download Addison’s recent report “Anatomy of a Bust: Winners and Losers in the Banking Crisis of 2023” for free via a link in the show notes. 

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored

You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

About Addison Wiggin

Three-time New York Times best-selling author, Addison Wiggin, is a 30-year market economist with a passion for the real-world impact of financial markets on our lives.

Addison is the author and host of The Wiggin Sessions, a podcast that connects key thinkers and industry experts for a deep dive into history, politics, and economics. Some of his most accomplished works as a writer, publisher, and filmmaker include the New York Times Best Seller The Demise Of The Dollar and the documentary I.O.U.S.A, an exposé on the national debt crisis in America.

What’s covered in EP192

  • Addison’s background and how he came to the conclusion that the US financial system is in danger of collapse. (1:53)
  • Will the Reserve Bank of Australia increase rates again? (10:46)
  • The uncertain lender of last resort: The Federal Reserve. (17:11)
  • The Fed’s job is to make sure fewer people have jobs. (21:52)
  • Banking crisis and the failure of regulation. (26:21)
  • FDIC and confidence. (32:00)
  • Why it’s important to understand how booms and busts even take place. (37:07)
  • Cryptocurrency as part of the story. (41:47)
  • What has happened to the dollar since 1913, when the US Federal Reserve was established. (46:41)

Links relevant to the conversation

Special download link to Anatomy of a Bust for Economics Explored listeners:

https://jointhesessions.com/ee/

Presentation by Addison that Gene mentions early in the episode:

Anatomy of A Bust: Banks Go First | Special Presentation by Addison Wiggin 

Transcript:
Exploring the US Banking Crisis with Addison Wiggin – EP192

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:06

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Hello, thanks for tuning into the show. In this episode, I chat about the US banking crisis with Addison Wiggin. He’s a New York Times bestselling author and market economist and commentator with three decades of experience. Allison has his own podcast the Wigan sessions, in which he talks to key thinkers and industry experts for a deep dive in history, politics and economics is the author of the best selling the demise of the dollar, and one of the writers of the 2008 documentary I O USA. Thanks to Addison for providing economics explore listeners with a free copy of his recent report, anatomy of a bust winners and losers in the banking crisis of 2023. I’ve included a link in the show notes so you can download it as well as sign up for Addison’s content if you’d like to read and hear more from him. Personally, I think Addison, someone with following if you’re interested in the US economy and financial markets, and if you’re listening to this show you probably okay, let’s get into the episode. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Addison Wiggin on the US banking crisis. Addison Wiggin, thanks for joining me.

Addison Wiggin  01:53

Yeah, no worries, I’m happy to actually meet you. As I was saying before, I’ve been forwarded some of your material in the past. So I know your name. And I feel like it’s a good opportunity for us to banter a bit about economics.

Gene Tunny  02:07

Absolutely. Thanks, Addison. And I’ve, yeah, I’ve seen the very know your research. And you’ve, you’ve been doing a lot of deep analysis of what’s been happening in banking and what’s been happening in financial markets. And you’re very keen to chat with you about that. In particular, I’ve come across a recent presentation, you’ve given anatomy of a bust, banks go first. And in that presentation, you make the argument that, well, we’re in a panic of the panic of 2023. America’s financial system is in danger of collapse. We’re here to protect ourselves. Would you be able to take us through what leads you to this conclusion? Addison, please. And also, perhaps maybe to begin with, what a bit about your background? How’d you? I mean, you’ve had, as I mentioned, you’ve had deep experience of this, it sounds like you’d be looking at these issues for decades. Can you tell us a bit about your story and how you come to this conclusion, this threat of collapse, please?

Addison Wiggin  03:17

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been studying booms and busts for a long time. Since the mid 90s. This is literally the only work I’ve done in my adult life. And just to do a shameless plug right at the beginning, I just published a book called The demise of the dollar, which looks at booms and busts as they pertain to fiat currencies in the world. And US dollar is deeply connected to the Aussie dollar. And I addressed some of that, and also, the dollar is a reserve currency of the world. So like even the Aussie banks or New Zealand or Japan or European banks, US and China as well, which is a big part of the story, use the dollar to store their wealth in. So there’s, there’s a symbiotic international connection between my currency and yours. And that’s what that’s what I’ve been interested in for this particular book. But I’ve also been studying booms and busts going all the way back to the famous ones like the tulip bubble and the Mississippi scheme from John La, back in the early 1700s. And then the South Sea bubble which the bankers from from London just ripped off John Maas idea and then they went bust too. So booms and busts are pretty common in the financial cycle of of our lives. And we’re we have just gone through one and that’s what anatomy of a bust. It’s just a special report we put out because it was interesting to have our very own movement boss how Ben right in front of our faces, it starts really in 2018, where a lot of people were using low interest rates that the Fed was fed had kept interest rates low to recover from the 2008 bus for such a long period of time, that there’s like a whole group of traders who grew up in a world where interest rates were at zero or less than that. And so money was free, and they were speculating on all kinds of things. And one of the things they speculated on was cryptocurrencies in 2018. We had this massive bubble in, in cryptocurrencies and a lot of the banks that started failing in March of 2023, which we’re still I maintain, we’re still in that crunch. And I’ll explain why I think we’re still in it, and why we don’t talk about it that much anymore. But a lot of the banks like Silicon Valley Bank grabbed the headlines when they went bust in 48 hours, because they had invested all of the money they were getting from tech entrepreneurs. They had invested it in treasuries, and then the Fed started trying to battle interest rates. And they didn’t account they didn’t either believe the Fed would they didn’t have any risks. There actually was no risk officer on the payroll at Silicon Valley Bank at the time. And they didn’t realise what the impact of an aggressive rate rate hike policy by the Fed was going to be. And that was happening simultaneously with the collapse of X FTX, which was the crypto currency trading firm that a lot of tech startups had their money, had their money. So when they when FTX went bust, they had to pull their money out as fast as they could, or they just lost their money. And in the meantime, the startups were being also financed by Silicon Valley Bank, notably, and they needed their money back to keep their their startups going. So the conflicts of different trends follow the theme of booms and busts that we’ve seen throughout history. So when when it was happening, I was like, Oh, my God, this is our very own like we could write about, it’s actually happening right in front of us. So it’s, that’s what the special report is about is like how that actually happened. And when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, it collapsed in 48 hours, because all these people wanted to take their money out to cover their own losses in crypto, that was technically what was robbing and they were just yanking their money out. And even though as you know, as credible bankers, we would look at the way that Silicon Valley had put their assets, more than 50% of their assets were in treasuries, which are meant to be, you know, the risk free asset that banks should hold anyway. But they didn’t calculate for the rising interest rates from the Fed to combat inflation. And then when there was a run on the bank, that’s what we call it. It wasn’t I mean, it’s a modern day, extraction of digits really. But when people started taking their money out, Silicon Valley Bank had to sell their treasuries at a loss. And it it happened very quickly. No one thought that with the FDIC, which is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that was set up by the Treasury to like help small banks, stay solvent help, depositors stay solvent, nobody thought that can actually happen anymore. The FDIC was set up in the 30s, to combat some of the forces that were going on in Great Depression. And then the Treasury itself gets together they get all the Wall Street banks together, and they then they construct these bailout plans like what they did for first republic. So those, all of those things happen, and they were grabbing the headlines from March until like the beginning of May. But then our debt, what we call the debt ceiling debate. I prefer to call it the debt default debate over the dancin, and nobody’s really paying attention to the banks anymore, but the underlying issues of the Fed fighting inflation and over capitalization in treasuries. There’s 36 banks in the US that are still under FDIC protection, watch conservatorship, whatever you call it. And then there’s a bunch of other banks that are borderline if what happened in March where people started pulling their money out of banks as a sector in on Wall Street than those banks are going to be in trouble too. There’s a couple others that I’ve been keeping an eye on that that have the word PacWest was one of them. And they’re just banks that are lending to more risky clients. And then depending on the depending on treasuries to rule out there, or to keep their their investments safe. And depending on how long the Fed keeps raising rates, which I think they’re going to raise them again, because inflation is not under control. It’s not only under control here in the US, it’s not under control. In Australia, I think Australia was getting really aggressive recently. Why don’t they? Well,

Gene Tunny  10:46

they increased rates more than people expected. There was a surprise rate hike. And now the the question is whether they will increase again, we’ve got a Reserve Bank meeting next week, there’s it’s a bit unclear, there’s a lot of debate about what the bank will do. Everyone expects that they’re going to have to increase at least one more time by the end of the year, possibly two. It all depends on what’s happening with inflation, we’ve got a monthly indicator that on through the year terms has, has increased or as worsen. But there’s a debate about well, what it’s it’s very noisy month to month. So it’s difficult to read much into that we need to see what happens with a quarterly figure. They’ll be watching services, inflation, so goods inflation has been coming down but services inflation is has been rising. So that’s and now we’ve got a minimum wage hike of six to 8% or something, depending on the actual, whether you’re right on the minimum or if you’re on an award. So yeah, there are, there are concerns about the future of inflation.

Addison Wiggin  11:52

I’d like to ask you a question. I spent some time in Australia. And also we had an office there for a while. So we were trying to manage our own finances there. And it might just be a myopic point of view of my own, because I am an American and the Federal Reserve is what it is. But when the Fed makes moves, often the Ozzie bank or like Japan or EU will follow, like a month later, if to you to think that that’s true. I don’t want to sound like an arrogant American, which I probably am, but But it always feels like the Fed is sort of like the central banks of the world.

Gene Tunny  12:30

Yeah, that’s true. It’s not automatic. It doesn’t always happen. But certainly one of the things that our central bank is conscious of is what’s happening with the exchange rate. And if if we keep our interest rates too low, then that leads to a depreciation of the the Australian dollar. And that’s bad for inflation. So we start importing inflation. So that’s something that they are conscious of. And when the Fed started lifting, was it last March or March?

Addison Wiggin  13:04

A little over a year ago? Yeah. Yeah. And

Gene Tunny  13:07

so the first few rate moves increases by our central bank, we’re pretty much in line with what the Fed was doing. And I mean, my take on an Earth in Michael Knox, who’s a commentator here, and he’s, he’s Morgan’s financial chief economist. I think he’s one of the best market economists in Australia. That was his view on it that, you know, by essentially copying the Fed that they had, the Fed was moving. So our, our guys had to I mean, we read our, our central bank, really, I don’t know if asleep at the wheels the right way to phrase it. But our first rate increase didn’t happen until I think it was May last year. And so it was a couple of months after the Fed, the Bank of England had gone earlier. I think Reserve Bank of New Zealand really got on to it early. But yeah, I think our central bank just wasn’t concerned enough about the risk of inflation. They were too much in that secular stagnation paradigm that they had, prior to the pandemic and those that decade or so they thought, Oh, well, we’re in this world of permanently lower interest rates, and there’s no no concern about inflation. We don’t have to worry about that anymore. For various reasons.

Addison Wiggin  14:23

I mean, that’s literally what thought some of these regional banks, asleep at the wheel was the Fed got really aggressive picket quickly, and even in the books that I’ve been writing? So I have this one, but I’m also looking at another one that’s kind of like the political analysis of how we got to a position where we have 31 trillion in debt, which is just ridiculous, right? Looking at the trajectory of Fed policy from really from 1987 When, when there was a stock market crash and Alan green The internet just become our Fed chair, he dropped rates as a response so that people could get free money in and prop up their balance sheets. That has been the response since 1987. Until now, and no one I like they caught a lot of banks sleeping, when they started raising rates as aggressively as they did, and they were afraid of 1980 81 scenario where inflation would just get out of control. There’s no anchor to the dollar. And everything is based on the dollar index, which is a basket of currencies and including the Aussie dollar that determines what the value is. There is a tone. It’s just astounding to me, actually, with all the history that we have with banking, and even the Federal Reserve since 1913. Like there could be backers who still have jobs. what was gonna happen? Yes. Well,

Gene Tunny  16:04

I mean, it’s an but they play an important role in the economy. But yes, there’s a lot of monetary mischief with a lot of mistakes that a an aid for sure. Absolutely. I like to ask Allison about. You mentioned that this started in? Was it 2018? So you think this started before the pandemic? Is that right? And then the pandemic, all the policies during the pandemic made it worse or contributed to the instability?

Addison Wiggin  16:30

Yeah, well, I would say, though, is that there were separate events, I think that the policies really started in about 2012, when we were seeing QE two, meeting that the Fed was still buying bonds in the market, or in even actually buying up mortgage backed securities in response to what the federal what the, what caused the crash in 2008, which was a global event also, because all the big pension funds and hedge funds, they’re all interconnected globally. So when when we ran into our housing crisis in 2008, it affected everyone. And we saw the ripple effect really quickly. And what the Fed did to head that off, was they dropped the interest rates, we had zero to negative interest rate real interest rates for a number of years between 2012 and 2018. But they were also buying up assets in the market, they were buying bonds in the treasury market to support bonds, because they needed to fund the government. And then they were also buying, they were actually buying assets on Wall Street, which is like, that’s an extreme measure. The bank is not supposed to be buying assets to prop up the market. But anyway, so there was a period of time where we had zero, I mean, money was free. And there was the like, I like to phrase the, the uncertain lender of last resort, that’s what they call the Federal Reserve, you never know what they’re going to do. But in the end, they’ll come in and bail out, you know, they, if they had to, they bail out, gee, JP Morgan, which has literally the fifth largest GDP of any economy of the world, and it’s a private bank. So they would come in and bail them out. That’s just thinking

Gene Tunny  18:25

that on that point about had this, what was it the unexpected lender of last resort?

Addison Wiggin  18:32

Charles Charles, my book I forgot his last name, but he wrote us. Yeah, he wrote an entire book about there needs to be a lender of last resort, but it has to be uncertain. You can’t count on them. You just have to know that they’re there in case the shit hits the fan. And yeah, and that’s what the Fed has been trying to do. But what they’ve been telegraphing what they telegraphed from 2012 until 2018, was we’re gonna keep rates low, and we’re gonna keep buying assets to keep the market propped up. And the beneficiaries of that policy are Wall Street banks, big ones, you know, yeah, Oregon, Citigroup, Bank of America, those companies, those those corporations are beneficiaries of just an extended period of ridiculous monetary policy. And a whole generation of bankers grew up in that in the environment where they believed that the money was just going to be free forever. So when the Fed turn, turned around and started trying to combat inflation, then we started having a serious problem. And the first people that got taken out, were the regional banks who weren’t paying attention to risk policy at all. So that’s why I say it started in in 2018, because there was a big boom in cryptocurrencies stable coins. We’re coming out. Bitcoin had already like fluctuated up to 60,000 and then dropped and like it was already an object of speculation and Aetherium was sort of like its step cousin, you know, it was doing its thing. But there was a lot of money getting pushed into the market because of low interest rates, that tech firms and Wall Street banks the like, and new new banks, like the FTX exchange that that was built, that was only founded in 2017. Like it became one of the largest traders have actual money, dollars to crypto currency in like, under two years, there was a lot of money flowing into the system. And that’s when if you follow Austrian economics, like I do, but a lot of other people do, too. I’m not making any kind of claim to it. But all the mistakes that are made get, they happen in the blue, when there’s money, that’s cheap credit, and people are spending money on things that they don’t understand. That’s exactly what tech entrepreneurs especially were doing, because they were excited about this new money that we could trade. It wasn’t traceable. And then banks grew up around it, that silver gate was one Silicon Valley Bank was another first republic was another pack glass was involved. And so when the tech entrepreneurs started getting nervous about their, their investments, or even their own companies, they wanted to remove the money from banks, and was sort of targeting Silicon Valley Banks specifically because they were getting a lot of deposits. And they didn’t have to loan out money to make money. So they were buying treasuries. And then when the Fed started tackling inflation, which itself, inflation itself was a result of 10 years of, of low interest rates, like we had, of course, we had the pandemic, and then we had the war in Ukraine, which cut off some supply chain, so it created like pain points. But at the same time, there was so much money flowing around in the system, that the natural outcome just in economic terms of that much money flowing into the system is that prices go up. The amount of money chasing goods is more than what the goods have, in what I would call intrinsic value. So it just costs more if you want gas, it cost more if you want eggs, eggs were a big deal. In the US. They were in, in Australia, but they were a big deal for like two years, because they went from like, I don’t know, an average of three bucks for 12 eggs to something like seven bucks. And people were like, What the hell, you know, I need an egg a day. And now it costs Yeah, three times as much. So that’s that’s the way that people feel inflation, but the cause of inflation, inflation is rising prices, but the cause of it is money supply money going in to the system. And they did that in reaction to the 2008 housing crisis, they were pouring money into the system and making it cheap for years to a degree where people just started thinking that was the new norm. But when Powell got in place, and he started raising rates, there was a lot of bankers, especially who were like, Oh, he’s not going to do that. Because this is the new norm. And it wasn’t the new norm, because there’s they still don’t have inflation controlled. So my guess is they’re going to raise another quarter point and they meet again. And then that’s going to ripple out to banks in Australia, in Japan. And mostly, those are the three that I looked at Australia, Japan and EU. Yeah,

Gene Tunny  24:14

it’s quite quite possible. I saw that the US had a good was a good jobs figure was was that what I saw? Yeah. And so that they’re saying the economy is more robust than they expected. And so yeah, they’re doing isn’t it? conundrum a little bit that the feds job is just to make sure that less people have jobs. Yeah, well, that’s the Yeah, that’s the Elizabeth Warren take. And then she was trying to pin it really gets stuck in a jay Powell over that, I think in the in Congress, wasn’t she? Oh, I’m trying to remember. Was it Powell or was it she was given?

Addison Wiggin  24:53

That was a couple of weeks ago, she was giving a speech in front of Congress, but she was taking Jay Powell to test. So he wasn’t actually even talking to him. Right. But that’s just a weird thing that that the feds job has suddenly become too slow the economy down, make sure that more people are unemployed, so that the government can then take care of them. It’s like, it’s, it’s not a free economy, like we like to think that America runs a free economy, we don’t run a free economy at all. And their goal right now is to slow everything down. And then we got the jobs report that you’re talking about. It was, I believe, is yesterday or the day before, it was more robust than what they were expecting. So they’re saying, oh, yeah, the economy is still growing, we gotta raise rates more to slow it down. Like, if we got a jobs report that wasn’t as positive as it was, then the stock market would have actually rallied. But when the draw four came out, down because people were like, Oh, that means they’re gonna raise rates again, we can’t borrow money cheaply again. It’s like, yeah, Pretzel Logic to me. But it’s kind of fun in a way to follow it, because it’s like, it doesn’t really make that much sense.

Gene Tunny  26:19

Yeah, yeah. I better get back on to banking, because I want to ask you about where we’re going there. And this banking crisis. There are a couple of things I just wanted to just quick things a good to get your views on. So you mentioned that this SBB didn’t have a Risk Officer. Is that right? Which I find extraordinary. Is that a failure of regulation? Yeah, I

Addison Wiggin  26:42

only found it in passing. So there were two kind of oversight errors that took place. They didn’t have a Risk Officer evaluating what the impact of rapidly rising interest rates would be on their the holdings that were like the core of the bank. That was one thing. And I think it was just in transition or some of the there wasn’t somebody in that position at the bank for like a year. And that was the year that the Fed started aggressively raising interest rates. And at the same time, no, nobody in the bank thought that the Fed actually pretty much nobody in the economy, though did Wall Street banks didn’t think that they would do it either raise interest rates as aggressively as they did. So even while it was happening, we were like, Oh, they’re going to stop. So there was a lot of speculation of when they were going to pause or when they were going to pivot. I remember back in even before the banking crisis started, the big phrase in the headlines was, when is the Fed going to pivot, meaning they’re going to stop raising and they’re going to turn around and start dropping among regional banks anyway, the first ones to get under stress. They didn’t have people that were taking the Fed seriously at their word, the Fed was saying we’re going to we’re going to fight inflation until it’s done, which is a tough battle. And nobody believed that. So when the cost of treasuries went down, and the interest rates went up, it was harder for a bank, like I just use Silicon Valley Bank, because it was so pronounced. It was harder for them to raise the capital to pay back their depositors when they wanted their money back. And a lot of those depositors had just lost money in the collapse of fts. So it was just sort of an act of boom and bust, you know, a line of love crumbs from what was going on in the crypto market to what happened to the regional banks. And then you saw the entire banking sector get whacked in the market, like, there were other banks that were reasonably sound that were getting taken down because everyone was trying to get out of the banking sector. So when their stocks get are getting punished by institutional investors and by pension funds, then that messes with their balance sheets, as well. And the only reason we haven’t been hearing about it in since I actually tried to pinpoint it was May 18, that the debt ceiling debate sort of took over the headlines. All the issues with the banks still exist. And that was really just a speculation on my part. But if they didn’t, for some stupid reason, come to a political agreement. On the debt ceiling, we would have seen a massive wipe out of bets because Treasuries are supposed to be risk free ish. I mean, they’re about as risk free of an investment you can make other than maybe gold or precious metals, and banks had piled into treasuries for so long because it was cheap. And it was easy and it was risk free. If we had a debt ceiling debate, I mean, that the vault if that debate failed, and we had a default, then treasuries would have been become an object of speculation, like other assets in the market, people would be like, I’m betting they’re going to do this, I’m going to bet that they’re going to do that, and the risk free part of that, where you store your money would have disappeared, that would have been a nightmare for a lot of smaller banks. And then the thing that is kind of a nightmare too, would be that JP Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America, the big Wall Street firms would have just gobbled up all of the, those assets at pennies on the dollar, which is exactly what they did with SBB. And with first republic, they just went in and just took all the assets for like, it was three cents on the dollar.

Gene Tunny  31:04

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  31:39

Now back to the show. So can I ask Allison, where are we going? Now? I mean, over the next six months or a year or so will we see more banks fail? Will we see a contagion? Or will we see impacts on the broader economy? Where do you think this is all going?

Addison Wiggin  32:00

Well, I’ll answer that in two ways. There is a certain level of confidence in the FDIC to like bank to back individual depositors. So like the fear of bank runs is probably abated a bit. Because the FDIC and Janet Yellen to the Secretary of Treasury, she has been going out saying no, we’re not gonna bail everyone out. But if it gets bad, we’ll bail some people out like she’s being that lender of last resort. So I think that the crisis part has abated. But that hasn’t fixed any of the the challenges that banks are facing right now with rising interest rates, and the battle against inflation in the uncertainty of of how committed the Powell Fed is going to be to that. So it would. So that’s why I say I’m going to answer in two ways. One, I detailed all of this special report that we were talking about anatomy of the anatomy of a bust, this is exactly how it happens. And I actually got that phrase from Garrett Garrett, who was writing about how all the banks failed from 1932. Until about they were still failing into the 50s. So they failed for a long time. But the three banks that failed in march into the early part of May, were larger in capital by percentage than all 25 banks that failed in 1932. So like, that doesn’t happen by mistake. And that also doesn’t happen without repercussions. And I expect that that we’re going to be talking about banking places like three years from now, because it hasn’t worked itself out yet. And they’re still trying to fight inflation. So so I don’t know if we’ll have a panic or a crisis period like we had between the beginning of March and mid May. But I think the tension is still there. And it’s definitely something that we want to pay attention to. Because the banking system is the the bedrock for all of the other stuff that we get, like when we buy and sell stocks, when we get mortgages, when we buy cars, send our kids to school and stuff like that that system needs to be. We need to have confidence in that system. And I don’t think it’s there yet. Brought we get a paper version of the confidence from speeches from Janet Yellen. And we forgot her name already, but that was the woman who runs the FDIC. But it’s just a fact the FDIC has like 300. Now they have $37 billion to support $17 trillion worth of deposits like it’s It’s, it’s absurd. Other than me and I’ve written this to this is it’s a competence game. Like, just like the way people, you know, take advantage of retirees because they gain their competence and competence gain is what it is. It’s a it’s a sham. Yeah. Yeah, right now the government is running a competence, that literally people have confidence that the government will figure this out. And so they’re they’re just biding their time. And what are they going to do next? My, my guess is they’re going to drop interest rates. As soon as there’s like a real crisis, they’ll drop interest rates, and now get another speculative boom going on Wall Street. And usually what happens when, when that happens is that mutates into bubbles in other markets, too, like Australia always benefits from booms in the commodities market. And China always benefits from new tech development and the Europeans benefit from new speculation in travel and tourism. Like it’s it’s almost predictable. What’s going to happen next,

Gene Tunny  36:11

abroad. Okay, so this is your report anatomy of a bar stock and put a link in the show notes to that. Can I add in just trying to think about what the risks are? I mean, you make the case that more banks are probably going to fail. What do you think the chances of something like 2008 happening again, or something worse than that? What would you put the probability of that ad in the next couple of years

Addison Wiggin  36:36

right now, I’d say it’s pretty low. Because one of the things that happens is like human beings that the people who run the government also learn. And they did what they thought they had to do in 2008, I’ve written about this many times, the Paulson, delivered a three page memorandum to Congress and said it at like midnight, and said, You have to bail out these banks, otherwise, the entire global economy is going to fall apart. There’s three pages, and they just followed it. So I think they’ve learned that through monetary policy, and also working in concert with other federal, like the Federal Reserve system of the world, that they can mitigate crises. But that doesn’t mean the problems aren’t still there. So that’s why it’s important to understand how booms and busts even take place, you can’t keep interest rates at zero for 10 years, and then expect that no inflation is going to pop up. But it is ridiculous. But it’s worth understanding the mechanisms behind the banks and whatnot, because that’s the that’s where the money flows, if that’s how the markets work. That’s how, you know, they determine interest rates for all kinds of things, credit cards, and student loans, and banks and cars and all that kind of stuff. The economy functions on credit. And banks are the source of that credit. And they’re all connected to the Federal Reserve System. So it’s worth paying attention to what they say. And I hate that. I don’t like politics. And I don’t like the banking system. But I warn people that they ignore those things at their peril. Because when you need to do something financially in your lives, you’re sort of dependent on decisions made by people who live far away from you, and don’t have your interests in mind.

Gene Tunny  38:45

Yeah, yeah, I just want to try to understand what this all means. So does this mean that, like, we’re in a situation where the Federal Reserve and the government is going to have to continuously? Well, maybe not continuously, but every now and then bail out the banks? And, you know, we’re gonna keep trying keep interest rates low, keep the flow of credit going? And therefore, ultimately, this is inflationary? Are we back in? Because we had a period of very low inflation? Are we going to be in a period of higher inflation for for longer than we expect? Is that one of the arguments was that a conclusion?

Addison Wiggin  39:22

Yeah, my conclusion is that we would, it’s not a conclusion because it’s an ongoing story. But we’re going to be in a period of inflation longer than, you know, the headline news tells us like, you can’t just stop inflation. And once it starts, it’s very hard to stop. And I actually got that quote, I, I interviewed, I did a documentary about 15 years ago, and I interviewed Paul Volcker, who was famously the inflation fighter of the early 1980s. He was the Fed chair at the time. And when he said to me, he said two things that have stuck with me he said a lot of other things and I published all buddy But, but he said a couple other things that are two things that have really stuck with me one he’s like, actually, I’m going to set the stage. So this is after walking past a couple of cartoon pictures of him that he had framed in his office of him like turning off the inflation spigot. And then another one where he was like wielding a sword and a shield, and he was like fighting inflation. So he was kind of like a caricature of that time. And that was the worst inflation that the world had seen in since the late 1800s, since the panic of 1893. And the reason was, we had gotten off the Bretton Woods, dollar peg to gold that there was a lot of reasons why it happened. But when I spoke to him, and this is on camera, and in the interviews that I’ve published, he’s, well, first of all, once inflation gets started, it’s very hard to stop. Because it, it creates, like a psychosis in people where they start thinking, if I don’t spend my money for that refrigerator, in June, by September, it’s going to be 30, Luxmore, or something like that. And they start thinking like they have to spend their money now. And that creates inflation, psychosis of sorts where people are just spending more money more quickly, because they think it’s going to be worth less later. And you’d like if the Feds goal is to slow down the economy, that inflation psychosis works against any Fed policy that they can put together.

Gene Tunny  41:43

Okay, just a couple of things. Because yeah, it’s great conversation quickly. What about crypto? You mentioned crypto as part of the story?

Addison Wiggin  41:51

Well, I have a theory about crypto. And it’s the same thing that it’s the same philosophy I have about the internet itself is that we had in 2001, we had a big boom in Internet stocks, like even Toronto, like right now. But the company that makes insulation for houses was doing fibre optic and they dropped the.com on the end of their name. They weren’t even a tech company. And they they exploded in value. Yeah. What’s the pink insulation that we all use? But I don’t even know why I’m drawing a blank on the net. But it’s because it’s a big installation. The point I’m trying to make is that during the.com, boom, there were just ridiculous investment being made. Yeah, all kinds of things. And then they busted. But we were, in the end, after all, the detritus fell to the floor, and people sort of like woke up from their hangovers. We ended up with internet and things like zoom, like I’m talking to you from Australia. Right now. I’m in Baltimore. And these things are possible because of that massive innovation and the investment that went into that period. Like that it even with a Gora, the company I’ve been working with for a number of years. We exploded when we went online, and we benefited greatly from the innovation of email, or changed our lives. So I have the same sort of perspective on crypto, is that I think it’s speculative. And I think there’s booms and busts and we saw that 2018 was crazy. Yeah. And then we saw another spike in in different like Bitcoin and Aetherium. And some of the stable coins in like 2021. Last year was a nightmare. We called it crypto winter, because the underpinning actually doesn’t part of the story I’m telling to is that two of the stable coins that FTX and Alameda research were investing in the traders that were supposed to be pegged to the US dollar, but the traders on pegged them without telling anyone and that started the FTX. So I think you’re gonna continue to see that kind of speculative nature in crypto. And we’ve got this spectre of central bank digital currencies coming up. We don’t know where that’s gonna go. Suppose there’s going to be a vote in the US in July, on whether the Federal Reserve should adopt one or not. But they keep saying that to that story is going to be ongoing, I think the real benefit of the the innovation and the spikes in the highs and lows and, and, you know, the turbulent market that Kryptos has gone through up to this point will ultimately be beneficial because we’ll we’ll end up with Blockchain as a more efficient way to to conduct transactions in the financial markets. So you can make money you can lose money in crypto. I’m not a crypto evangelist. Like I believe that it’s going to be a substitute to the US dollar or the world banking system. But I do believe it efficiencies that are brought to transactions are going to be beneficial to everyone. And that’s kind of how I look at it even from an investment standpoint, I’m like, oh, bitcoins at 15,000, neither should buy some, and then it’s at 27. And then it’s at nine. And it’s like, no, I’m not getting somebody tried to buy some property from a couple years ago, I think it was in 2021. And but they would only do the exchange and in Bitcoin and I’m like, I don’t know if my property is going to be worth less or more if I take your Bitcoin, but I do know what the value of the property is. Yeah. So I think the speculative nature of it is, it’s too early to, to like I prefer gold and silver to Bitcoin or Aetherium. At the moment, maybe there’s a time when, when it makes sense to like use it as a banking tool, but not right now. too speculative for me, and, but I do think that the benefits of blockchain are going to be like email to us a couple years from now, where everyone’s going to be using Blockchain for efficiency, which I think is great. In the boom, bust cycle, that’s what happens, people invest a lot of money quickly into innovative projects, and a lot of people get burnt, a lot of people get rich. And then what we end up with is the core technology that benefits humanity as a whole. I love technology.

Gene Tunny  46:31

Yeah. One thing I wanted to cover too, is this demise of the dollar you talk about? So is that a this is this is a long run concern of yours about where the US dollars going. And I mean, this is related to the point you’re making about.

Addison Wiggin  46:43

Yeah, the thing is, like, I mean, I could slip through the book is that one great chart that shows what has happened to the dollar, I’m not going to be able to find it and make it make sense to your viewers. But since the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, the original goal of the central bank was to stabilise the currency, and maintain its purchasing power in the economy, for payment, currency users like me, like it’s supposed to be able to, I’m supposed to be able to figure out what my dollar can buy and for how long. But it’s lost more than 97% of its purchasing power since 1913. And it’s, it’s a steady slope downwards, the more money they pour into the system, the like every dollar that you print becomes worth less than the one that was printed last. And the entire banking system of the world is dependent on the dollar as a reserve currency. And at the same time, we’re losing the value of its purchasing power, every debt, and it’s been going on for more than a century. There, their main task was to preserve the purchasing power of the currency that we use in the payment system in the economy. And they have done anything but that it’s, it could be its historic fiat currencies never worked. It accelerated after 1971, with the Bretton Woods system fell apart, the only thing you can do is understand it and then try to move your money around into assets that accumulate value over time. That’s why I like gold and silver, because yeah, there’s a little bit more speculative, but gold when I was younger, and first trying to understand how these things correlate. Gold was trading at like 253 bucks an ounce in 1999, I think and now it’s trading on average, a little bit above 2000. Over that time, he has to be 500. It’s outpaced the s&p 500, which is a broadest measure of big stocks. It’s just been a better investment over time. And that’s that’s just generally what I think is it’s a reverse correlation to the dollar, which is supposed to be managed by the bankers who keep sort of forgetting about risk and inflation and those kinds of things.

Gene Tunny  49:20

I might have to come back to fiat currencies. Yeah, it’s a big, big topic, but another time, because I’ve really picked your brain and it’s been I don’t mind it. We’re very good. That’s great. And yeah, maybe if you if you wanted to sum up your the broadly, the anatomy of a bust. Would you like to summarise it? Or is there anything else you’d like to say before we wrap up?

Addison Wiggin  49:43

No. I mean, I would just say that it’s it was my attempt when, when I was already following the story of FTX and I knew there would be a knock on effect, and I had starting in about December of 2022. So like six months ago, I was like this story is not going to go away. And there’s going to be a knock on effect in other parts of the market that we’re not aware of right now. And that was in December. And then by March, we started having banks fail, which nobody thought was even possible anymore. With the Federal Reserve System and the FDIC backing out small depositors, like nobody thought we would have bank runs ever again. And and then we had the three largest ones within a six week period. So I had already been kind of following the story, and trying to just try and understand how it would even be possible. So that’s what’s in the report is like, here’s what happened, here’s why it happens. Here’s what you need to pay attention to. And here’s how it fits into the historical perspective of booms and busts, the credit cycle is a real thing, even if the government is trying to mitigate it. It does exist and impacts everyone. Because you need a bank, to save your money to borrow to do things that we want it to, to run your business you need, you need a bank that works with you. And if they’re making dumb choices with the assets that they have, it’s better to know that in advance. So that’s what the report is about. And then there’s a couple of recommendations on investment investments you can make. Once you understand what’s going on. We actually recommend bank.

Gene Tunny  51:31

Yeah, yes, it’s for US banks, a lot of to have a lot of have to have this conversation. I don’t know if you look at Australian banks, if I don’t, I

Addison Wiggin  51:40

haven’t looked at Australian banks, except for in a macro sense, where I’m aware that the Federal Reserve decisions that move rates also has a knock on effect in Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan and Europe. Those are like the big ones. Russia was at two until they decided to destroy their neighbours. Yeah, the

Gene Tunny  52:09

general view here is that our our banks are in a much better position than

Addison Wiggin  52:14

it could be. I haven’t studied them closely enough to know, I think their requirements are different in Australia than in the US too.

Gene Tunny  52:23

Yeah, there. There are definitely differences. So you might have to I’ll have a close look at that myself. But look at us. And it’s been terrific. Yeah, probably more time than you might have expected, delving into it. Because I think what’s great is you you do deep research, and you make a big calls, I suppose what you make you make you really let us know what you think. And I think it’s great. And yeah, it’s it makes me think about what’s going on so much more. So really appreciate all the work you do. And I’ll put links in the show notes to your work. And, and thanks for making that. That report available for listeners. That’s terrific. Yeah.

Addison Wiggin  53:03

It’s information that I like, I would just caution people that I’m learning about it as fast as I can. But I’m also passionate about it. That’s why I do it. This whole project that I have the Wigan sessions is a passion project. I like talking about this stuff. And then it makes me think just like you’re saying, it makes me think. And I want to give away the report just to spread what I’ve learned, because I think it’s important stuff for, especially if you’re trying to manage your own money, it’s really important for you to understand the bigger trends. And, you know, I have a philosophy degree and I studied literature in school and stuff. So I’m interested in the stories of what’s going on. It’s late sound perverse, but I was actually excited when we started having our own banking crisis. It’s happening right in front of my face. I just have to read the news.

Gene Tunny  53:59

Yeah,

Addison Wiggin  54:01

get the report. It’s it’s interesting. And it’s helpful to like, make sense of what’s happening in the news, too.

Gene Tunny  54:07

Yeah, certainly, I guess it could be exciting, stressful. I remember being in Treasury. And here in Australia during the world of financial crisis. We didn’t have it as bad as it was in the States. But it was still quite, quite stressful at a time when we started seeing the drop in government revenues. And yeah, borrow lots more money. And yeah, well, my

Addison Wiggin  54:28

biggest concern, and I put this in the report to but my biggest concern right now is, we were talking about the savings rate during the pandemic. I think the same thing happened in Australia to the savings high because there was a lot of government stimulus, like direct payments to citizens. So the savings rate and then nobody could go anywhere. So the savings rate went really high. It actually peaked above consumer credit for like a, you know, like, a month, and then as the economy started opening up and people started travelling and Like making decisions I, oh, we’re free, we can go to one, the savings rate plummeted. And then the consumer credit rate for all of the things that I’m only talking about the US, but I’m sure it’s mimicked in other Western economies, the consumer credit rate, skyrocket skyrocketed before the Fed started raising rates. So like, all these people are taking on adjustable rate, credit cards and loans and mortgages and things. And then suddenly, the the debt service that they have to pay on those rates went through the roof, it’s tripled. So you had a plummeting savings rate, and at the same time that you have a service to debt ratio going through the roof. It’s not a good scenario. And we haven’t even really seen that impact on, like earnings in the s&p 500, the big retailers and stuff like that. We haven’t seen what that impact is going to look like yet. So that’s not kind of like, I guess, yeah. So other than the banks themselves, because they do it for there’s two points there that I’m keeping an eye on.

Gene Tunny  56:09

Yeah, fair point. We’ll definitely I’ll keep an eye on it, too. I think they’re really good points. Okay, Addison, we’re gonna thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed that. That was terrific. Good luck to you, man. Very good. Thanks, Addison rato thanks for listening to this episode of economics explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact at economics explore.com Or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if you’re podcasting outlets you then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.

57:10

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Credits

Thanks to Obsidian Productions for mixing the episode and to the show’s sponsor, Gene’s consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au

Full transcripts are available a few days after the episode is first published at www.economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.

Categories
Podcast episode

French Journalist Guillaume Pitron argues the Digital World is Costing the Earth – EP189

French journalist Guillaume Pitron discusses his book “The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World is Costing the Earth” with guest host Tim Hughes. The book explores the environmental impact of the digital world. Pitron delves into concerns about energy usage, e-waste, and the carbon footprint of the internet. The episode concludes with a debrief of Tim by regular host Gene Tunny on the conversation. 

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored

You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

About this episode’s guest

Guillaume Pitron is a French journalist, author and filmmaker. He has written two books, published in some fifteen countries, about the natural resources needed for new technology. He has been invited to share his ideas in the French and international media (Le Figaro, BBC World Service, Bloomberg TV, El País, La Repubblica) and at international forums and institutions (Davos, IMF, European Commission, Unesco).

Link to Guillaume’s website:

https://www.en-guillaumepitron.com/

What’s covered in EP189

  • Introduction to this episode. (0:06)
  • What is the dark cloud? (1:27)
  • There is no digital life without rare earths. (3:54)
  • What is the real cost of digital technology? (8:06)
  • What’s the cost to the environment? (13:07)
  • What can we do as individuals to make this better? (17:38)
  • Facebook’s Lapland data center. (22:22)
  • Facebook uses hydro-electricity to run its servers. (24:25)
  • What happens if there’s no water? (28:05)
  • What is the future of the internet going to look like in 10 years? (33:18)
  • Are there any governments around the world that are taking steps forward to regulate the internet? (41:02)
  • What can be done to address this issue? (43:59)
  • What were the main takeaways from the conversation? (48:11)

Links relevant to the conversation

The Dark Cloud book:

https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/the-dark-cloud-9781922585523

Digital Cleanup Day:

https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/

Jevons paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It appears the Amiga hard drive Gene’s neighbour in the late 1980s had was a 20MB hard drive:

https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=534

Transcript:
French Journalist Guillaume Pitron argues the Digital World is Costing the Earth – EP189

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:06

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Thanks for tuning into the show. This episode features an interview with French journalist Guillaume Pitro, about his new book, The Dark Cloud, how the digital world is costing the Earth. Guillaume visited Brisbane a few weeks ago for the Brisbane Writers Festival. I was in Adelaide when he visited and so Tim Hughes stood in for me and interview VR. I’m very grateful for Tim. First, I’m going to play the conversation between Tim and Guillaume. And then I’m going to catch up with Tim for a debrief on the conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Tim Hughes  01:27

Okay, so welcome to Economics Explored. I am Tim, you’re standing in for your host, Gene Tunny. And we’re very excited to have with us today Guillaume Pitro. I’ve pronounced that correctly. Very well. Thank you. And Guillaume has a couple of books out that we’ll discuss. But the main one at the moment is called the Dark Cloud. So again, without any further ado, would you mind just letting us give an overview or give us an overview of the Dark Cloud?

Guillaume Pitron  01:56

Well, again, thank you for receiving me here in Brisbane, I am giving Bitcoin, just to introduce myself in a very few words, a French journalist based in Paris, I am an on the field reporter. That’s what I do most of the time, do documentaries and also write books. The Dark Cloud is my second book published by scribe in Australia. It’s basically a worldwide investigation, which took me two years on the trail of my email. Yeah, if I do send an email to you, for example, you’re sitting just less than a minute away from me, where does my email go? What is the real trip of my email between you and I, and actually, the real distance between you and I is that one metre, it’s several 1000s of kilometres, because this data will actually travel through 4g antennas, Wi Fi boxes, but also submarine cables, constellations of satellites, it will be stored in data centres maybe all around the world. So it’s a huge infrastructure that has been built over the last decades by the digital industry, in order to make us live connected. And we are not aware of the physical impacts of the so called virtual life, and also of the environmental costs of being connected. This is what the book is all about.

Tim Hughes  03:18

That some really interesting because I know that this is a subject that has been talked about quite a lot. And one of the areas that I mean, for instance, particularly here in Australia, so we have a lot of rare earths rare metals at our disposal for mining. So some of the areas that you talk about the the environmental cost, the human cost of our digital technology, our use of digital technology. What are the biggest pitfalls or what are the biggest problems? So you talk about, for instance, you know how far that email goes, for instance, what are the costs of us environmentally and a human cost.

Guillaume Pitron  03:54

For the rarest extraction? Yeah, okay. First, there is no digital life without rare earths rares is you find rare earths into your smartphone. And this is the magnet of your phone, which vibrates is made of iron, boron, and a rare earth, which is called neodymium. So you wouldn’t be able to be on silent mode, if you didn’t have rare earths to make your phone vibrates. Basically, this earth is in a way being extracted in Australia, in the Western Australia region. And most of the barriers are being extracted in China, where I’ve been several times I’ve been in rare earths mines and refining areas north of China, south of China for the last years. So I can tell you that extracting these resources is nothing but virtual, everything that is called virtual stems from a scar in the ground which are called a mine. And the refining process of the rare earth is actually very, very dirty. You need to separate the rare earth using water and chemicals. The water which is very polluted is just being rejected directly into, into the nature, it causes cancers, a lot of problems right for the human health and also for the environment. And you have in your phone not only one rare earths, but you have 60 metals in your phone, whether it’s cobalt and lithium and graphite to run the battery, but also a silver, a bit of gold, you have Indium in your phone, on your phone in gym is a mineral, which in the form of powder, makes your phone tactile, so you wouldn’t be able to leave your modern life without having an tactile screen, which is made six to indium, once again, this is being studied in China. So basically, all these metals come from mine, and it comes at an environmental cost.

Tim Hughes  05:45

So is the is the issue of the processing of those minerals. Is that where the impact is largely found mostly? Yep. And so does that vary around the world, I mean, what was the percentage of where these minerals and metals come from?

Guillaume Pitron  06:02

On the initial basis, these metals would come from third world, underdeveloped countries with less strict regulations and the one we would have, if we were in Australia, or in Europe, or in the United States and Canada, we’ve been offshoring the production of this metals for the last decades, we haven’t wanted to have this metals being extracted on our ground, I may make an exception for Australia, because you’re the world’s most producer of lithium. But most of the time, we just have preferred to let poor countries extracting these resources in a way, which is just not consistent with an environmental standards, not sustainable. So that we could just get the metal refined, cleaned. And we could say how we can use this metals for virtual and clean technologies. This is where the paradox is, I wouldn’t be able to precisely give you a figure like in terms of percentage, it depends from a metal to one another. But most of the time, you will find this resources in China, in Burma, in Indonesia, DRC in Africa, and also in South America, for instance.

Tim Hughes  07:12

So DRC, that’s predominately cobalt. Is that right?

Guillaume Pitron  07:15

Yeah, from the Democratic Republic of Congo DRC, you may extract, this is a country, which extracts and trades about 60% of the world’s cobalt production. And you have no smartphone without such a cobalt, which is being used for batteries.

Tim Hughes  07:33

So it’s really the processes in the extraction and the processing of those minerals and metals. That’s the issue.

Guillaume Pitron  07:41

Most of the environmental costs of the digital world comes from the manufacturing of the tablets, the screens, smartphones, sorry, 4 billion units are being used and speak to you right now around the world. Each of them requires such metals. So manufacturing these devices, these electronic devices, is the main cause for digital pollution. This is very first and foremost, a material pollution or resource production pollution.

Tim Hughes  08:14

I think that leads us into one of the other questions which I was going to ask, because part of the this unseen, this invisible side of our digital technology. One thing is the hardware. And then the other one, which he started off with, which is that you know that an email, for instance, appears to be of very little consequence or very little energy needed. However, that’s not the full story. The energy consumption is one of the big issues as well as that right.

Guillaume Pitron  08:40

So once I’ve said that, making a phone stands for the most important part of the digital pollution, that doesn’t mean then that watching video on streaming, or sending an email doesn’t have a cost, right? Basically, I can give you a figure of if you send an email to someone with a big attached piece like one gigabyte, we roughly consider that sending it emits about 20 grammes of co2 into the atmosphere. 20 grammes is as if I was driving 150 metres with my car in for one gigabyte, for such an email. Yeah, so basically, you see, it’s not that much, but it’s not nothing. And if you keep sending emails and emails, and we send every day 363 billion emails, mostly spams, still. And if you add to that, well, you know the costs for the environment or of you know, swiping on a dating site or watching a video, listen to music. I’m not saying here is that we shouldn’t do that. I’m no the Taliban and coming here to tell you don’t listen to music because it has enormous environmental cost. But I’m just saying, even if it’s the short impacts, little impact for each and every tiny action that you have on your phone, if you multiply that by the 4.5 billion users of internet multiplied by the number of digital interaction that they have every day, that starts meaning something,

Tim Hughes  10:12

The invisible part of it is that normally when there’s a resource involved, water, electricity, etc, we have to pay for it, you know, we pay for them as utilities. And, and so it’s clear, if we leave a tap running, we’re going to have to pay for that. So even though it’s, it’s poor management, it’s expensive. And we can see that. So it seems to be there’s a bit of a disconnect with our use of digital technology. And like I say, understanding really the real cost of this because it’s taken up elsewhere. It’s out of sight, all that information. I mean, I was thinking, for instance, I’ve got 20,000 photos on my phone, I don’t need 20,000 photos on my phone, I got 800 videos, I mean, it just accumulates. So that is sitting somewhere that’s taken up,

Guillaume Pitron  10:58

Actually, the photos on on your phone, there are in the cloud. Yeah. So I mean, you believe that these are on your phone, that may be actually, they may be stored on your phone, but they may be on your Apple drive or whatever things and actually you connect yourself from your phone to an account, which is a server, which is somewhere sitting into data centre, wherever it is. So you access the cloud, because you access the pictures, which are once again outside of your phone.

Tim Hughes  11:29

So there’s a there’s a cost to that.

Guillaume Pitron  11:32

The cloud is a data centre, whatever you use your phone, whenever you want to send an email, you’re not sending an email to someone else’s phone, you’re sending an email to someone else’s account, your Gmail account, which is stored somewhere and this person will connect herself or himself from him his phone or her phone to such a server which is stored with other servers in huge warehouses, which are called data centres. And a data centre can be can be as big as dozen soccer size of a dozen of soccer fields. And you find hubs of data centres all around the world. Washington, DC, Sydney, Paris, Frankfurt, London, Beijing, it says a commonly accepted figure that there are around 3 million data centres around the world where all of our data are stored. And these data centres, you know, cannot break down there cannot be any electricity breakdown. Because that means that you can’t access your emails. And you don’t want that right. So if you want to make sure that you get an access to whatever device, whatever internet service for 24 hours a day, you want to make sure that the data centres are running all the time that the data is being replicated in another data centre. So that if the first data centre runs out of electricity, another one is just working instead of the first one. So you duplicate the infrastructure in order to just you know, secure the service continuity of the internet. And this needs electricity to run. And this is where we realise that there’s some points where the cloud touches the ground. And when it touches the ground, it needs to be fed with electricity, which comes either from coal, or from oil, or from a solar power plant or from a nuclear power plant. And this, again, is a cost.

Tim Hughes  13:28

That currently stands at 10%. Is that right? Yeah,

Guillaume Pitron  13:31

10% of the world’s electricity is being used for digital technologies. And that figure is going is increasing at such a fast pace, that there are some, you know, estimations saying that these 10 person may become 20 persons within a decade.

Tim Hughes  13:48

Okay, so it appears to me that like it seems to be, amongst other things, it’s very much an efficiency situate or an efficiency problem. So for instance, like, if emails and pictures and everything was physical, and we could see them, and we were to put them in our backyard, our backyard would become very messy very quickly, we would be compelled to tidy up. This is out of sight. It’s somewhere else we need to as consumers be aware that there’s a cost to this, which is I guess where you’re coming from? Is that right? This is a sure this is a big message. I mean, very much it opened my eyes massively like this. I had no idea. I knew it was something but again, I didn’t really know what understand these terms cloud, etc. A very fanciful or ethereal, whereas in fact yet as you’re pointing out, they’re real.

Guillaume Pitron  14:36

And this is what’s interesting what you’re saying because that maybe that makes me rebound on Education Day, which has been created a couple of years ago by an Estonian lady. She’s an activist, and she created I forget her name right now, but he she created the first World Digital cleanup day. So basically, you’re not going to go into the streets to clean the rubbish on the sidewalk. You’re going to go back to your phone and your computer, and you’re going to follow a course it’s going to take you a couple of hours during that specific day, usually takes place in March depends from countries to countries in my country, France, it takes place in March. And basically, they’re going to tell you how to clean, not your room, or the sidewalk, but to clean your email to clean your cloud. And you’re going to realise that on the rubbish of your cloud, there had been for years old pictures and old videos, yeah, which were still being, you know, kept in the cloud, running thanks to electricity, and you just didn’t know them. So how do you clean that? And how do you actually make a good contribution to the environment by following such a course. But as you said, it’s about cleaning your digital world in a way. The name of the girl is Anilee Overal.

Tim Hughes  15:51

So could you say that again.

Guillaume Pitron  15:54

Anilee Overal, the Estonian militants who created this world digital cleanup day.

Tim Hughes  16:01

That’s really cool. Because it strikes as being an education, which I guess is a big part of your message is like to let people be aware of it, because people will generally do the right thing. If they know,

Guillaume Pitron  16:12

Oh, yeah, we’re turning virtual. Everything is dematerialised, your paycheck in is a cloud. Okay, why not about the cloud, you know, people don’t really understand what that really means. They don’t understand that all these virtual things are really material, very physical. And the first challenge here, as you say, is to educate. And we are just at the beginning of this process, where we just try to understand what this reality is all about. And how do we educate the young generation, the climate generation, they want to do good, they’re on strike on the Fridays, telling me not to take planes and not to eat meat. But actually, they’re spearheading such kind of a pollution. And they’re just not really aware of that. And so the very first challenge is to make people understand that this is becoming big.

Gene Tunny  17:03

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

Female speaker  17:09

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Gene Tunny  17:38

Now back to the show.

Tim Hughes  17:42

Part of this is this efficiency, you know, reducing the waste and stopping the habits that produce more waste, you know, so, for instance, if you’re taking photographs to delete the ones you don’t want and try and minimise the ones that you keep thinking about what you send as an email, trying to minimise all of that. And should we be deleting as we go far more because I know that my email for instances and there is this with spam, and all sorts of other things. It’s a massive, I can’t imagine what percentage if it’s easy to put a number on it, it’s okay, if you don’t have one, but spam obviously contributes a lot to it. There’s so much unnecessary information being stored, it’s clear. So we can do some things as individuals, are there any technical or is tech coming to the party with this to try and make it a little bit more efficient.

Guillaume Pitron  18:32

First, where you could do run the next World Digital cleanup day course, maybe all the picture that we’re talking about, I’m just talking about my own example. Yeah, my phone is an iPhone seven, I don’t have much space into my iPhone seven, which is a good thing. So I don’t change my phone. So that, you know, I’m running out of space at some point, so that I have to take my pictures out of the cloud. And I just put them on a hard drive on an external hard drive. And that doesn’t cost much more to the environment that just storing it in this device that puts less picture on the cloud. What you could do personally, individually to, which is a very important thing is to keep your smartphone and other computers as long as you can. Yeah, I mean, once again, my example iPhone seven, I bought it three years ago, it was a secondhand phone already. And for the last three years, I’ve broken it seven times, four times the screen twice, I had to change the battery. And one time I had to change the main button. But that could be repaired. And actually, I still have the same phone and maybe I can keep it for three more years. And maybe once I don’t want it anymore. I can resell it. If we all do this rather than changing our phones on average, every 18 months, 24 months. Yeah, it’s a huge it’s makes a world of a difference because this main pollution impact, which is once again, the manufacturing of the phone, you can developer to issue keep your phone twice as long. So that’s a very important thing to do. And then you ask me another question, which I forgot

Tim Hughes  19:59

well I was going to, part of that was what the tech companies are doing. Like if they’re on board with this, I mean, because clearly, so for instance, in that regard, they’re looking to sell phones, you know, as a business, they’ll be looking to sell their hardware. So, and I know that, in many areas, the quality of many things has dropped in our printers, for instance, like it’s cheaper to buy a new printer than No, nobody gets one fixed anymore, which is an awful waste of resources. And it’s a really bad way of, you know, going around business for us as custodians of this planet, if you like, you know, so is there anybody in the tech space that’s looking to make this better.

Guillaume Pitron  20:39

It starts being something which companies care about, and they care about it, because first, it costs money to change devices every two years, it costs money to run your data on electricity for service company, the digital devices, and running the digital part of the company may account to 30% of the consumption of electricity of such a company. And it’s also becoming a reputational issue you want to have in your company’s new brains from the new data generation very much worried about the, you know, environmental impact of everything they do. You need to have a message here, and you need to do actions. And I’m very much invited myself by companies, which are just like, we want to be better in a way. And suddenly we realise that there is this new chapter of human pollution, which is digital, how do we cope with this? What do we do? And obviously, they’re starting to understand that. And Google and Facebook and Amazon are very much into these things now, because they don’t want to be seen as being ecologically non friendly companies. You know, when you have Greenpeace, you’re flying a huge balloon over the data centres. And the headquarters of Google in California. And what’s printed on the balloon is How clean is your cloud? That is the good for the reputation. So they want first to green, their electricity mix. They want to say, oh, okay, we need electricity. But this electricity come from solar panels and wind turbines. It doesn’t emit any co2. They do offsetting also, which is kind of a problem, in a way kind of a scam. Because you never know, where’s the trees being planted in? I can tell you many more stories about that plane is claimed, basically, yeah, very much. And also, what Facebook is doing is very interesting. Facebook has been moving some of its data centres for European consumers to Lapland, they moved it close to the Arctic Circle to cool your data, because your servers, the servers where your data is, are actually heating to 60 degrees Celsius, that need to be cooled back to 25 degrees. So either you use an air conditioning system, which is very much energy intensive, or why don’t you move the cloud to places where it’s just naturally cold. So your exercise videos of cats and other emails are literally sleeping under metres of snow in the nose of Lapland, where I’ve been? Alright, I’ve been there. I’ve been to send a data centre not inside I was just outside of it. Yeah. But basically, I was where my Facebook account is. Well, the good news for Facebook is to say, well, not only is it cold, so I use less electricity. I don’t need air conditioning devices. But the thing of the thing is, they say whatever electricity I use, it comes from agile electricity plants.

Tim Hughes  23:21

So this is they’ve got one in Sweden. This is face but would you like to tell us more about about that the hydroelectric plants so I’ve

Guillaume Pitron  23:28

been there. I took a train from Stockholm crossed the Lapland in order to meet my friends, because we’re all there. literally speaking. Yeah, there was a lady in the train. And she came to see me she was just she just wanted to discuss her number. She was a tourist. And she said to me, okay, you want to travel? What are you doing here? And I said to her what I was doing and she looked at me she was just like, this is gonna cycle literally speaking, I went to this data centre couldn’t get in and took my stuff on a picture with all this huge warehouse behind thinking my WhatsApp account is here. My I don’t have an Instagram account. Our Instagram accounts are here. My Facebook accounts are here my 600 and something friends are literally here. This is where all of it is. It’s not for the European, the African Middle East consumers, okay for your designers truly, I believe they are storing US States probably in Oregon, where Facebook is. Okay, the data centre from Facebook is in Oregon. So basically there was a story and then I figured out but so the electricity comes from the Lhuillier river. And this is on that reverse that back in the 60s, some electricity dams. Hydroelectricity dams have been built, not for Facebook because no one at the time knew that Facebook would come to an existence, but Facebook is still using this electricity infrastructure in order to actually run my Facebook account. And I found out by travelling through Lapland, that back in the 60s Is the Swedish state had dried up. So small little river for about 15 to 20 kilometres. And this is the driest. This is the longest river ever dried up by human activity in Western Europe, in order to change the direction of the water and feed this hydroelectricity dam, there’s a guy here, a horrible Mo, I had an amazing countering with him because he’s no is in 60s, but even for the times back in the 60s, where suddenly from one minute to the other, this part of the rivers a smaller river just ceased to exist. It’s just disappeared, and is still crying for this Lost River. And is writing is trying to attract Facebook attention, saying, Have you got a single ID about the impacts of running the electricity that makes today your infrastructure work? So that was amazing story that was in place before? Yes, Facebook is not responsible for the, for the building of such an infrastructure. But Facebook does still today use such an infrastructure. And it keeps this river still dried up today.

Tim Hughes  26:15

I mean, I guess, um, any hydroelectric plant that was in Australia, there’s the Snowy Hydro plant down the snowy mountains. I think it’s 2.0. Now, I’m not too sure. But that has been going since the 50s. I believe like a you know, it’s and now they are big, any damage or anything is gonna have consequences, I guess for downstream. It’s the waterways of the world are getting very much challenged by agriculture and the taking of lands and everything. So it’s sort of getting into into different areas in some ways. But what we’re talking about in many ways is resources and not not wasting those resources. And so the amount of electricity used to fund our digital technology, our habits is significant and growing. So water is also one of those resources. Yeah, that’s getting that’s getting challenged. Sorry, gone.

Guillaume Pitron  27:10

No, no, because we are surfing on internet, we are looking videos and streaming. But let’s take it literally these expressions, these phrases, literally, we literally wouldn’t be able to surf on internet, if there was not water for real.

Tim Hughes  27:28

And now when you mean as a resource,

Guillaume Pitron  27:32

as a resource for making the electricity producing the electricity as part of the process as a resource for refining the metals that are being used in your phones and other servers as cranes as a resource for running the air conditioning systems, the data centres, a big data centre may use as much as 600,000 square metres of water every year. So you need such a water for making internet work. And yeah. Is there risks that at some point, you couldn’t serve anymore on internet? Because there is no water?

Tim Hughes  28:06

Well, this is I guess, with any resource, it has to be managed wisely. And with water. There was something with the NSA in America. So we had a quick chat about this before we started recording. So would you mind? Sure, just telling the listeners,

Guillaume Pitron  28:20

the National Security Agency stores that are from everyone. And back, I think it two sons 13 as they started to run their biggest data centre, and they made it run in the city of Bluffdale, which is in the state of Utah. As you will understand this data centre needs water in order to run the cooling systems. The thing is, we are in Utah, which is the secondary states of the United States, some local journalists started to ask the question to the NSA. But what is your consumption of water? The NSA would first reply, I don’t want to tell you because if I tell you how much we are consumed, that will tell you information about how much data store, okay. Eventually, they found out and the NSA replied, and it was clear that the NSA was not consuming that much water, taking water out of the Jordan River, which is just running through Bluffdale city, Byrd suddenly some NGO militants, and we’ve had the moment where it was Snowden hadn’t made the revelations about all this surveillance politican stuff. And they start to think but if the NSA doesn’t have water, there is no operations anymore. What if we strike an action on courts in order to forbid the state of Utah to make water available to the NSA? What if we could afford or to the NSA? Maybe this is the actual tool of the NSA. And if there is no water, we just stopped as a server and stuff, because this is the resource that is being needed for surveillance, which is an amazing story, right?

Tim Hughes  29:58

So with that, so Same with the water would be diverted towards civilian use or towards the NSA is that there

Guillaume Pitron  30:05

was no such a conflict of usages. Okay. So once again, there wasn’t so much question of consumption, so the water would have probably remained in the Jordan River and whatever kind of things. But once again, if the water cannot be fueling the NSA the same way as oil can be fueling a motor of a car. You don’t run this system anymore. And there was a thing a bit crazy ID that this NGO militants were having. They were being supported by also by a local senator or local parliamentary member to stop the civilians literally by by just stopping the availability of such an important resource for such a panopticon.

Tim Hughes  30:48

Right. Okay. So the implications are far reaching, basically. Yeah. Okay. I want to circle back to the question of efficiency. So cryptocurrency? I guess that’s included in our digital technology very much. I know that the the energy consumption for cryptocurrency to perform is really high. I’ve heard statistics that it takes the same amount of energy as Portugal, as a whole country does for all the transactions to happen, especially for the Bitcoin. Yeah, because last year, I think it was last year Aetherium managed to develop a new way of doing their transactions where it’s massively undercut, I think it was 99.9% reduction. That’s right. So that kind of tech, technical, technological improvement, if you like that efficiency, is there anything on the horizon in other areas where we might be able to clean up our act by just reducing the amount of power that we need to run our digital technology,

Guillaume Pitron  31:47

the data centre industry must no respect some specifications, which are being called the P e, u e, the power unit efficiency. So basically, it is a ratio that tells you how much power you need, in order to run a server to run a certain amount of data. And this PUE can be very high, maybe close to two. And then you can go as low as as low as 1.2, which shows that your data centre is kind of more eco friendly. And the more we are going with, you know, investments in researchers, the more the PU E is going down, and the more it’s a good news and the more the industry can say, Look, we’re doing efforts in order to store our data and to run the internet in a more efficient way in a more ecologically friendly way. And once again, this is important that is good. This industry tries for reputational reasons for money reasons to do better, I think is we can take that for granted because we consume more and more and more data. So at the same in the same by the same token at the same time. We keep discovering new ways of using the internet. Yeah, this is new cryptocurrencies. This is maybe tomorrow creating new avatar in the metaverse this in requesting, asking questions to the chat boat chat GPT for Yeah, that’s

Tim Hughes  33:12

the new thing. AI is a massive new one. Definitely arising introduction to this.

Guillaume Pitron  33:18

Yes. And, you know, 10 years ago, we would not have thought that we would be speaking in 2023 about you know, Metaverse and Chad GPT. For what is internet going to look like in 10 years? Nobody knows. But it’s going to be crazy. We are just in the, you know, very early ages of the internet. We’re just turning. We’re just discovering this new technology. Where will it take us in the future? I don’t know, what I’m absolutely sure about is that is going to make us produce more and more and more data. And this is what a techno profits from the Silicon Valley, an American techno profits, cause the Internet of Everything is advocating for the Internet, everything, the internet, the internet of everything is basically we’re going to connect everything, my glass will be connected, your body will be connected with sensors, animals will be connected trees will be connected, we’re going to connect everything because everything that is connected, produces information, produces data speaks to someone else, or some or something else, which is connected. And that is information, which is money and which is power. So we are in a world where on one hand, technologies are getting much better, and much more efficient, very good news. But on the other hand, there is a rebound effects. Oh, because I don’t have any impact on the internet because for each data I produce, it has less and less impact. Why don’t I just you know, produce and consume more data. And the other dynamics here is the fact that in the next 15 years, humankind with will probably produce and consume 50 times more data than what it does today. So there is a race here between the tech nology, which is getting much more efficient, and the fact that our usages of such technologies are getting exponential. So this is where the big story comes. figures tell us that in the next 10 years, the 10%, electricity consumption of the digital world might become 20. And the four persons of co2 emissions, which is more than planes might become eight persons. Yeah, I’m not sure. But if these figures are true, that means that the race is being lost by the technology, and that we consume more new data than the technology is able to offset them in a way,

Tim Hughes  35:35

how much difference can we expect to make through changing our own habits? Like is that just not going to be enough like, because I can’t imagine the way that you say that the way that data is coming to us, it’s coming more and more from different directions. It’s unmanageable, in many ways, on a personal level, to sort of having a habit all in order. What’s the best we can do here? I know, we know, we sort of touched on this week we go back to it. And do we really have to depend, for instance, on the technology changing to suit us, you know, like, rather than us changing our habits to try and manage that amount of data.

Guillaume Pitron  36:12

You’re asking me a difficult question. Yeah. And I wish I would be able to answer to you in a clearer way. But when I look at the way we are using Internet today, when you want to look at the ways young generation is spending, its time, you know, sticked to talk in other kinds of devices. I don’t think there is anything here that relates to the very basic wisdom we should be having while using such devices. And I don’t think any of these new technologies are being offered to us in the future. Whether it’s Metaverse new cryptocurrency is the niche, next version of chat boat would make us use the internet in a more sober way. So I’m a bit worried in a way that we behave like child’s in front of this technology were so much impressed by what they can do. And we don’t want to change our habits. Now, there are limitations, which are starting to appear into the debates, limits to the way we will be using internet in the future. The first one can be ecology, as I speak with you right now, okay, so whenever I am on such devices, I have an impact on the planet. So that may, in the future, play a role in changing your habits, first and foremost, keeping your phone longer. Second, is democracy. We have seen states, including in Europe, trying to, you know, frame the use of certain social networks, because it spreads hatred, because it’s pray to fix news. And we want to protect a beautiful value, which is democracy. So you want to make sure these social networks don’t go too far in the face of such a value, which is democracy. And there’s certainly mutations that I see coming, right now is health, whether it’s your physical health, spending your days on your couch, watching a video on your phone, or whether it’s mental health, and we can’t count today, it’s the number of scientific studies, which are being produced, telling you how that much affects your attention capacities, such tic toc and other kind of things. I would like to believe that ecology, health and democracy may be some hurdles to just keep using these devices, without any real thinking about the impact that they may have. That makes a

Tim Hughes  38:43

lot of sense, because it can feel very insignificant as to what your own contribution might be to a solution such as this problem. But the reality is that we shouldn’t underestimate market pressure. So you know, companies, individuals, demanding or asking of the tech of the companies who are providing the services in this hardware, that they’re not happy with it, they’re not okay with it, and they want it to change. So that kind of pressure coming from the bottom up, is quite likely the thing that will most likely change what happens,

Guillaume Pitron  39:15

I very much agree with you. And we live in such a contradictory age in a way because on one hand, what I’m telling you, in my view, make sense is debatable. But I think we know we can understand this message. And on the other end, everyone understands that the country which in the future will be the most powerful in the cyberspace, cyberspace will, you know hold many strings of the future of geopolitics. So if you want to keep running in this race that we’re all watching right now between the United States and China, you need to be up to date with these technologies. 5g has come to France. And there’s not been such a big debate over the impacts of the environment of 5g antennas. The French that said, but we need to have our own 5g devices. Why not because they know what 5g will be used for. We have no ideas or roughly an ID. But because we don’t want to have Chinese 5g networks installed in France, with potential spying capabilities. So it’s all about geopolitics, accelerating towards the 5g is just because you want to remain independent, sovereign, technologically, independent from the countries, and you will still want to play an important role in the future of geopolitics. So, in a sense, what you were saying just a minute ago is so interesting, because we are codes in this contradictions involved in makes sense, but geopolitics. And independence from other powers makes a lot of sense, too. And I would like to be Macomb my president, or I would like to be Albin ease, and be able to see clearer in the future. How do I make a choice between these two contradictory messages?

Tim Hughes  41:02

That some as funny because that leads me into volley one is going to be one of my, my final questions. So I appreciate the time you’ve given us today. Is there any other any governments that are doing anything in this space, are making positive steps? In my view, what usually happens is what we mentioned before where it’s like, it’s the pressure from the voters, the people at the market demand, you know, that is often the most powerful things. And I think governments around the world are struggling to keep up with this, the speed of this technology. So things are being implemented before legislation can catch up with it. But are there any governments around the world who were making steps forward to try and take responsibility for the direction that this is all going in

Guillaume Pitron  41:45

from an environmental standpoint? So

Tim Hughes  41:47

all all of it really like? Health? Because I think the health perspective you mentioned is really, really valid, because the health implications from this are really quite strong, mentally and physically.

Guillaume Pitron  41:57

I have in mind the example of China, where, you know, there has been some regulations enacted by the state saying that when your Chinese teenager I think I’m not sure when you listen, under 1414, one four years old, you don’t have the right to use tick tock more than like 40 minutes a day.

Tim Hughes  42:17

And is that a regulated it within the household? Or is it on the devices? That’s I wouldn’t be able to tell you because there’s a parent, I know how challenging it is, but it’s not that they can’t be done. But I know, there’s challenges

Guillaume Pitron  42:30

the fact that the state says so in a know how the SLO is being respected. Yeah, tells you something about how the Chinese government can care in a way about the mental health of the young saying, all right, it’s fine to a certain extent with after that, you might get into trouble from mental viewpoint. In the United States, an average a young in the United States is spending seven hours and 22 minutes on internet every day, outside of school. So I would probably mention the Chinese state in terms of environment, the French are doing something right now they have passed a law, which is the first law in the world. I don’t say that they could infringe on here. But basically tackling on a general manner, globally is a question of the impact of internet on the environment. And so there have been many things being decided, whether it is that, you know, the tech companies must inform their consumers about the number of data that have consumed and what it means in terms of co2 emissions. There are some specifications to the data centres, and all this kind of thing. So that is, I think, a good thing that’s just starting, mostly North European countries, Germany are very much in advance when it comes to regulating such kind of ways of using internets, including on the environmental angle. But for the rest of the world, this is just an unknown subject. Yes.

Tim Hughes  43:59

And then that’s good to know that those things are happening in those countries, which is, which is a good start. And I guess it’s sort of points towards the fact that whatever needs to be done, clearly hasn’t been done on any level at the moment, just yet. But whatever can be done. Well, one of the things I guess about this as building awareness, which is what you’re doing is educating, making people understand what the issue is, and what the implications are around the world. The problems with the environment and the human costs that come with this. So that then we can take responsibility for this individually and as communities and countries etc.

Guillaume Pitron  44:36

Yeah, and this is why I quote Stephen Hawking in the beginning of the book, when he says the future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we’re going to be able to we’re going to be able to use it. And the such wisdom can only start with understanding with education. It’s a paradox that the knowledge economy and the knowledge technologies don’t make you knowledgeable about the way the work kind of products is going to take years before we understand all these technologies, which are being up in the air, or donor their feet buried into the ground in the form of wire networks, or laying in the depth of the oceans, in the form of submarine cable optics is going to take years before we really, you know, put some names figures and descriptions over this Leviathan, which we just don’t have an idea of because we haven’t sensed it with our senses. It’s huge battle coming in here, in order to to understand that enormous ecological challenge coming for the decades to come.

Tim Hughes  45:44

Well, that sounds like a good place to wrap this up. Do you have any further closing comments on that gear?

Guillaume Pitron  45:51

Pretty much. I don’t want to be looking like someone was coming to make lessons of normal. Because I use internet every day. I need internet’s to write my books. And I need you to podcast what I’m talking to you about. So I’m going to tell you, you know, you should feel guilty whenever you open your email account, or whatever kind of things. That’s not the position I can hold. And I really would like to make you understand that I’m adopting every day myself, I’m questioning myself all the time. But I keep always in mind this ID, this which is new to us, which is that whenever we will use internet in the future, we’re going to have to make something which we have never done, which is a cost benefit analysis.

Tim Hughes  46:38

Actually, that’s a really good question that I will put to Jim, because that’s his area of expertise. And so the book that you have is the dark cloud. Yep. And that’s now available, we’ll link to everything in the show notes, with some of the things we’ve talked about. And the Estonian activist will make sure she gets a link there. And you also have the rare metals war. So you have you’ve got my first book published was truly a couple of years ago. And I just want to thank you for the work that you do. Because I think it’s so important, you know, and it’s so easy to not be aware of this, I for one was somebody who had a feeling you get a general feeling that things aren’t always as they appear, and that there’s a cost. But thank you for bringing to light, the cost of our digital technology. And also, I would encourage all of us to have these conversations more and to know that it is something that will grow. And that we have a responsibility as we’re here now on this planet to ourselves and future generations to try and sort out this issue sooner rather than later. And if that then comes to how we might vote and what we might do with our personal practices with digital technology. We have the power. We have the power, we have the power. So Graham Photron. Very, merci beaucoup. Merci. Merci. And and thanks for everyone for listening. We’ll have everything in the show notes. And we’ll look forward to seeing you next time. Pleasure. Thank you.

Gene Tunny  48:11

Tim, he is good to be chatting with you again,

Tim Hughes  48:14

playing good to be here, Mike.

Gene Tunny  48:15

Thanks for filling into me for the conversation with Guillaume that was, that was great. I really appreciated it. You had a good conversation with Gam about his book, The Dark Cloud.

Tim Hughes  48:27

Yes, it was fascinating. I really enjoyed it really enjoyed it. Thanks for giving me that chance. And

Gene Tunny  48:32

overall, I mean, how do you think? Or how do you think it went? What were the main takeaways for you?

Tim Hughes  48:39

I was fascinated by what he had to say. And I really appreciate the fact that he was able to bring attention to this issue, because it’s clearly a big issue. And it’s growing. And I thought it was a really good thing to talk about. And to continue talking about because no doubt this is an ongoing problem that we need to work with.

Gene Tunny  48:57

Yeah, it’s important to raise this as an issue. It’s still unclear to me exactly how big a deal this is and how much we should worry about it. I guess what he’s highlighting is that the digital world is not necessarily providing the environmental benefit that people 30 years ago or 20 years ago may have thought it was we moved away from having paper, you know, paper based offices and, and also having more services delivered online rather than us having to travel somewhere or, you know, travel or conferences or whatever. So he’s highlighting that this increasing digital footprint that’s having an environmental impact. I think that’s an important point. It’s still unclear to me exactly. How big a deal this isn’t how much we should be concerned about. I mean, clearly we should be concerned about environmental damage, environmental impacts, and we have various regulations that are that are at attempting to resolve those. There is an issue with climate change, of course. And we know that internationally many countries aren’t really agreeing to on or they’re not they don’t have the framework or the policies in place to really do much about that. I mean, there’s a lot of talk. There’s not a lot of action. Yeah. So that’s, that’s possibly an area where you could argue that better policies are needed. You know, in other cases, there is, well, at least in Australia, there’s very stringent environmental protections. I guess the issue is, well, what if they do you know, that’s what Guillaume was talking about mining in the impact of mining in emerging economies, wasn’t he? So there there are issues. And so perhaps that’s something where it’s worth focusing attention on. And there needs to be there could be some international pressure to improve conditions in those those countries. Did he mention Congo? I’m trying to remember now. Yeah,

Tim Hughes  51:01

he mentioned DRC. And cobalt, most of the cobalt seems to come from there. And without a doubt, it’s the processes with getting these rare earths out of the ground, that are the issues, environmentally, and the human cost of that. So there was really, I mean, I thought it was very clear that there was some big impacts from our digital technology, our digital habits, that we should be aware of. And that can be improved on that was the big, I thought that came over really strongly. So just to repeat some of the figures, he said, 10% of the power that we use currently is running our digital technology. And that’s understandable, there’s going to be an amount that goes into it, we’re highly linked to the internet, really dependent on the all of this new technology. So it’s not surprising that there’s a cost there. However, the rate that that is expected to increase up to 20%. Within the next decade, it currently accounts for 4% of the carbon emissions, and that’s looking to double as well. So this is the tip of the iceberg in the way I guess, there were two main areas that I could see where this inefficiency was a problem. One was in the use of electricity with storing data and unnecessary data, which is, and it was something we were talking about a little bit before we did this wrap up. It’s unknown, I guess as to how much of this data that’s being stored currently in 3 million data centres around the world that Guillaume mentioned, how much of that data is necessary or not, which is, you know, can update for conjecture. But I think personally, we could all see from our own habits, there’s a lot of data that we have, that has been saved, that’s completely not necessary. So there’s an efficiency problem there for sure. That can be improved upon. And whether, you know, for any of us to go through our phones, or whatever storage, we have to retrospectively go through our photos videos is a daunting task that is unlikely to happen to be fair. So if technology can come to the help AI, with some kind of solution with this, which I know they have, they can detect duplicates, and this kind of thing. So that that kind of technology is already there, technology could hopefully come up with something quite clever to try and either compress the amount of data that we have, which is one possibility, I guess, or to somehow diminish the amount of storage that’s needed, because it’s clearly unnecessary for a lot of personal use, we don’t need anywhere near as much as we currently use. You mentioned before that it’s cheap data is cheap, which I think is great for the consumer. But this is, I think, allowing us to have bad habits of just being wasteful with the amount of things that we hold on to just in case or just can’t be bothered to delete because it’s too clunky or too time consuming currently,

Gene Tunny  53:50

well, I think you made a good point there. It’s too. It’s too time consuming. So therefore, if you’re doing this efficiency calculation, you should take into account the fact that if you were to go and clean it up, you’d have to spend all this time doing so. And yeah, I did mention when we were chatting, storage is cheap. And as an economist, I mean, as long as people are facing the irrelevant, or the proper prices at prices, which fully incorporate all the costs, then what’s the problem? I mean, if we want to have a lot of data stored online, there’s no real problem with that. I guess the issue does come if we’re not properly if businesses and are not internalising all the costs that they’re imposing on society if there are these environmental impacts that aren’t properly costed and then priced into the product so that your look that could be an issue, right? I’m not I’m not denying that. But in terms of the you know, the photos I mean, I don’t know how big a bigger deal that is and how big a part of the problem it is. And this 3 million data centres. factoid, that’s not the huge Google or Facebook data centres, there are 3 million of those around the world, he must be talking about various computers, various servers that are associated with different websites around the world. That must be what he’s talking about.

Tim Hughes  55:17

Yeah, I mean, we didn’t go into any detail of the sizes, but clearly, they vary in size, as some of the ones we did talk about with the bigger ones Facebook. Yeah, it’s an Oregon and was it Lapland I forget now, which country was part of that plan? Yeah. And Finland, one of the one of the colder regions, which makes sense, as far as energy expenditure goes, however, I thought it was really clear, like if that were those figures, as they stand 10% is a lot of power. And so there’s a real environmental impact from generating that 10% of electricity. So I think it was really clear that there were impacts big impacts already, which were only expected to grow. So I think whatever inspections can be done, they do need to be considered important, and also to be done as soon as possible. And but I do think that the big steps most likely will be technology steps, you know, somehow of reducing our capacity or not our capacity, but I need to source so much data. So if it’s a compression issue, I don’t know that

Gene Tunny  56:17

well, there is compression already. I think we’re probably solve the compression problem. They’ve got very good algorithms for compressing data. I don’t know how much more efficient we can get on there.

Tim Hughes  56:28

I mean, I’m coming from a non technical background. So I mean, you know, how, for instance, the initial computers were massive, and they became smaller and smaller to the point we had, you know, a small computer in our pocket that can take cameras has all this capability. That is amazing. Yeah. I don’t know how that happens. I just trust that, you know, it has happened. So I just go with it. And I just wonder, like, you know, hopefully, there might be some future leaps and bounds that we can do in the forms of storing data. You know, if that might be something if we might go through the same process of efficiency and finding better ways to to manage this before it gets more of a problem.

Gene Tunny  57:03

Yeah, in terms of storage technology. Yeah. Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, I’m not an expert on that. Either. You were talking about the, the size, I mean, the compression comes into it, where you reduce something that is 10 megabytes down to two megabytes or whatever. That’s the compression. So it has a smaller storage requirements in terms of storage technology becoming better and, and cheaper. I don’t know. I’m presuming it will. I mean, I remember, back in 1989, my neighbour, Simon had a hard drive for his Amiga computer. And I think it’s stored a couple of megabytes. That was like a big deal for saw.

Tim Hughes  57:48

And that’s the thing, like, you know, neither of us are equipped to sort of see, I mean, clearly, there were constraints. And there are, you know, people are trying to no doubt make this as efficient as possible. Yeah. You know, so if, in, you know, in the meantime, what we can do, though, which are made some really good points is that, you know, we have a couple of options, you know, to store our photos or videos on external hard drives, which, like you said, rightly, before we started recording again, but that would come at a cost, to create that harddrive, etc. But the point being that, once it’s on that it’s not consuming electricity, to keep it stored, it’s not stored in the cloud, etc. So that’s one of the areas I thought was worth mentioning. And again, the digital cleanup day. So he mentioned, I think we worked out it was Anneli overall, as the Estonian activist, and, again, with whatever is at our disposal, now, we can use that technology or that little bit of time, or like, it’s okay. You know, we do the same with our gay marriage, or whatever storage we have at home, I think it’s okay to put a bit of time into into making our digital storage habits more efficient and less, less cluttered. So there’s good information on what does it digital digital cleanup day.org. So if anybody wants to check that out, there’s some good information there. So the other part of the efficiency process was back to what you were talking about with the rare earths and DRC, etc. And that was a big one big takeaway I felt was to hold on to your phone. So that’s in the hardware element of our digital habits, so phones, laptops, tablets, etc. The production of those is where all of this comes into it. And so if we can hold on to our phone, get it fixed. I think GM said he had an iPhone seven, and getting it fixed, meant that he wasn’t then getting the latest one, they’re all perfectly good. I don’t have to have quantum leaps of technology. With these things. You can do everything with, you know, a model that’s a few years old. And so there are definitely things we can do to to help with these current issues and to try and slowed down that dependence on requiring more energy to store and the issues that might come from extraction of these rare earths from different parts of the world.

Gene Tunny  1:00:09

Yeah, I’ll have to look up and put in the show notes. What that the size of that Amiga hard drive was it probably, I think it was a bit more than a couple of media or

Tim Hughes  1:00:19

anything I just said, Jane, are you just thinking about that? You’ve been thinking about that for a while. Sorry. That’s totally fine. I’m used to it. I’ve got three kids. But yeah, so quantum leaps in that regard in a relatively short period of Yeah, exactly.

Gene Tunny  1:00:41

Exactly.

Tim Hughes  1:00:45

That’s another big point, I thought was really interesting was the value that you put on democracy, you know, that we have the opportunity in democratic societies to make change. I thought that was a good point.

Gene Tunny  1:01:01

Yeah. Yeah, I think well, certainly is. Yeah, we hope that the changes are sensible. So I guess the challenge here is to come up with sensible policy recommendations and not just react to the fact Oh, there’s a lot of data, we’re using a lot of energy for the digital world? Well, of course, we are because we’re role online now. So what’s the actual problem? I think we’ve got to make sure the policies are addressed at where the so called market failures are addressed at tackling those who were not properly pricing the costs of, of the environmental impacts. So that’s what I would say.

Tim Hughes  1:01:44

I think one of the main points was this is out of sight. So we’re not we’re not aware of this cost, in power, or in environmental and inhuman impacts. It was just bringing it to the fore to bring it into view, I guess, you know, with with rubbish that we do household waste, etc, we can see that it gets picked up. And it’s it still goes into areas that we may not be so aware of. But we’re aware of that daily. Yeah, contribution to. And I guess this is like there’s a digital landfill that we need to be take some responsibility for. And I guess that was what I felt from from.

Gene Tunny  1:02:24

Yeah, look, I think he makes some good points. So I think it was a good conversation. And from doing the some reading on this, in preparation for our chat, I discovered that there isn’t really a lot of information or a lot of analysis of this. And there’s a great article I found on data camp.com that I’ll link to that goes through the impacts of digital technology in it right. And in that they write despite recent progress to improve corporate transparency, there’s still significant data gaps and blind spots and the evidence of environmentally relevant digitalization impacts, which I think is true. So it’s something that further research would be useful on.

Tim Hughes  1:03:04

Yeah, yeah. It’s a big subject, and no doubt one that’s going to stay with us for as far as we can predict at the moment. So yeah, it was it was good to get that perspective on it.

Gene Tunny  1:03:15

Very good. And one thing I liked about his book is he, he does talk about the economics of it. He talks about the Jevons paradox. I don’t know if you came across that I needed and talk to him about about that. But the idea is that as we become more efficient in something, rather than using less of it, we can actually end up using more of it because it’s, it’s cheaper, so electricity as we become more efficient, and well, if we become more efficient with electricity, so the use of electricity, more efficient lighting and refrigerators and washing machines, then those savings we just ended up, you know, getting more appliances in we that gives us some room to to use more electricity. And it can be that we ended up using more sounds like

Tim Hughes  1:04:03

Parkinson’s Law where yeah, we fill up the available space to do whatever we can. So if we have more money, we spend it if we have more, fill it.

Gene Tunny  1:04:12

Yeah, so I’ll put a link in the show notes on the Jevons paradox, which was originally discovered by a British economist Stanley Jevons. Thing was William Stanley Jevons in the 19th century with regard to coal. So I’ll put some I’ll put a link in about that. And that might be a good topic to cover in a future episode.

Tim Hughes  1:04:34

And there was a cost benefit analysis that Guillaume mentioned.

Gene Tunny  1:04:38

Well, I think he was saying that you really need to do a cost benefit analysis on any measures to deal with these issues. Was that what he was saying? Or you’d want to do a cost benefit analysis of our use of digital technology? Now my feeling is, it’s going to come out in favour of the use of digital technology,

Tim Hughes  1:04:54

for sure. And he was very clear with that, that he’s not against it, like he uses it. And so it’s not a question of, for or against, it’s a question of better use of and better practice in how we, how our hardware is made, and, and also being mindful of how much power is being currently used. And to see that, you know, wherever we can be more efficient in that whole process that we do what we can. And that was where the democracy sort of comes in, you know, we can, as voters, you know, this is something through discussions through this kind of discussion. And the kind of, you know, I guess this is the awareness that Guianas bringing to us. And it’s just making sure that we can have these conversations and talk about it so that, yeah, at some point, it can be better, or we can be less wasteful.

Gene Tunny  1:05:48

Absolutely. And I think he does the point that we’re not going to solve all these environmental challenges. If we just move to renewables and EVs, there’s still going to be environmental impacts that we need to think about. I think that’s a that’s a good point. So anything else, Tim, before we wrap

Tim Hughes  1:06:03

up? No, I really enjoyed it, Gene. And thanks again for giving me the guest spot. I really enjoyed it.

Gene Tunny  1:06:09

Oh, of course. Thank you, Tim. And one thing I should note, as you please check out the show notes, I might put in the the capacity of that Amiga hard drive for 1989. I may have underestimated underestimated that but it was very low relative to what they are now is quite incredible. Was it eight or 20 megabytes? I’m struggling to remember, but I’ll do some research on that. Very good. The 80s wonderful time. Okay, Tim? Yes. Thanks for your time. today. It’s been a pleasure. Right. Oh, thanks for listening to this episode of Economics Explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact@economicsexplored.com Or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.

1:07:29

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Credits

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Podcast episode

Crypto arbitrage searcher Dave Belvedere on crypto and dApps such as Wizards & Dragons – EP178

Dave Belvedere is a software engineer who searches for opportunities to make the crypto market more efficient and to make money at the same time – e.g. by exploiting arbitrage opportunities. Dave gives show host Gene Tunny and his colleague Tim Hughes an overview of cryptocurrency and also talks about NFTs and decentralized applications (dApps), such as Wizards & Dragons.

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored

You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

What’s covered in EP178

  • What is Dave’s role in the crypto market? [1:10]
  • What is a chain and how does it work? [3:39]
  • How long does it take to make a transaction? [9:26]
  • What does a crypto exchange (e.g. FTX) do? [15:30]
  • What do we know about miners? [20:20]
  • What’s the future of crypto currencies? [25:44]
  • What is Ethereum and how does it work? [45:57]
  • What are the pros and cons of crypto? [52:07]
  • What are dApps? [57:01]
  • What are the use cases? What would motivate you to have crypto? [1:06:33]

Links relevant to the conversation

Bitcoin creator:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

Wizards & Dragons game:

https://dappradar.com/ethereum/games/wizards-dragons-game

Transcript: Crypto arbitrage searcher Dave Belvedere on crypto and dApps such as Wizards & Dragons – EP178

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:06

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Dave Belvedere, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excellent Dave, joined by Tim Hughes. Of course, Tim, good to have you here too.

Tim Hughes  00:43

Hey, Gene. Good to be here mate.

Gene Tunny  00:44

And Tim, thanks for introducing me to Dave, who is involved in crypto and crypto is something that Tim and I have chatted about before, and we’re conscious that we need to know more about it, we’re at a certain level of understanding of it, and it’d be good to increase that understanding. So to kick off with Dave, could you talk about your involvement with crypto, please?

Dave Belvedere  01:10

Yeah, so I’m what I do is I’m classified as a searcher within cryptocurrency. So a searcher is somebody who looks for opportunities to make the market more efficient. So one of the classic examples is arbitrage. So when somebody adds a cryptocurrency to one side of a pool, so those get created by automatic market makers, which we can talk about, so yeah, yeah. So if they add, say, you know, 20,000 ETH to one side of the pool, and the other side of the pool holds USD t, then there’s an offset of the balance of how much USD T costs versus what the general market says.

Tim Hughes  01:48

So David, USD t is,

Dave Belvedere  01:50

it’s so sorry, yeah, the USDt is tether. It’s backed by sort of the organisation that runs it to maintain a level pay going against the US dollar. So it’s one to one to the US dollar. Okay. So there’s a couple of coins like that, that are referred to as stable coins. So this is within Ethereum, which is USD T and USDC. So us coin but it’s not the US market coin. So it’s not connected to the US government at all. Okay, so ETH is Ethereum and if there’s a theory, okay, and then you’ll have BTC, which is Bitcoin? Yeah.

Gene Tunny  02:29

And is there a simple way to explain the difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin?

Dave Belvedere  02:34

Yeah. In essence, the cryptocurrencies. So it’s cryptocurrency really is just a digital asset that’s backed by a cryptographic hashing algorithm. Digital Asset is something just like a bank account, or something like that. So yeah, we see it every day. Yeah, technically, all Australian dollars, when you start to pay with your credit card, that’s really just a digital asset. In this case, it’s a digital asset that is then secured by cryptography. So when you go visit the bank, you’ll usually see HTTPS, that s stands for secure, and that’s backed by cryptography. So same sort of mechanism. And in this regard, when we talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum , they’re actually two independent cryptocurrency chains. So they’re not really connected together. And what that means is that they operate a little differently. So Bitcoin was the first one, they came in around 2009. So a lot of people would have heard it, because, yeah, that the market value quite, quite hugely, I think, a couple of years ago, it was up to like 80,000, US or 80,000, Australian. And it’s come back down now. But yeah, head has gained a lot of popularity. So when we get into a chain, there’s a couple of things when we talk about what a chain is. So we would have all heard of the classical blockchain. And that’s what sort of secures Bitcoin and Aetherium. So blockchain is really an ledger, we probably always, always heard it. So transactions just get added, and you can’t go back and modify the transactions. And one way, well, the guarantee for that is the consensus mechanism that gets used. So let’s just say I make a couple of transactions on Bitcoin. So I’m sending some bitcoin to somebody else, that transaction gets added to a block. So there can be many transactions or none, no block. Yeah. And then that block then goes through all gets consensus with the rest of the network. So one of the differences are that, I guess one of the big differences with blockchains is that for most of the blockchains, that distributed systems, so nodes all around the world make up the actual blockchain. So there’s no one entity that can control the blockchain itself.

Tim Hughes  04:53

So this is the decentralised term when it’s used. This is what the what they mean by that.

Dave Belvedere  04:57

Yeah, yeah. So that’s sort of like you can shut down, say everything in the US, but the chain will still operate because you know, it’s in Europe, it’s in Asia, it’s in Australia. So you can’t really shut the chain down.

Tim Hughes  05:09

And is that just on that subject, is that one of the reasons that so much energy is needed for a transaction? Is that where that consumption comes in?

Dave Belvedere  05:17

So to a degree, there’s a couple of things that will maintain the security of the blockchain. So a couple of blockchain. So in this case, Bitcoin itself is actually vulnerable to a degree to the 51% attack. So when we talk about distributed systems, it’s different control most of those systems, you can do whatever you want in the system, which is classified as the 51%. Yeah, so I haven’t heard that term before. So if I control 51% of all miners, and let’s just say in Bitcoin, then I can make any transaction valid, because I control the majority. Yeah, the consensus mechanism that gets used as always a majority, if the most of the nodes agree that this transaction is valid, it’s valid, and there’s no going back once that transaction, that transaction has been committed, there’s there is a couple of nuances to that. So you can challenge a block if it hasn’t been finalised. But for the most part, we you can always just assume, as soon as that transaction gets committed into a block, and it’s on the blockchain, it’s there forever.

Gene Tunny  06:19

Yeah, but because it’s so decentralised. And there are so many 1000s I don’t know how many 10s of 1000s of people around the world who are they’re mining or whatever they’re doing. They’re overseas, so they’ve got a stake in it, then the probability of having that 51% attack is extremely low, isn’t it? 

Dave Belvedere  06:40

Yeah, you need sort of a lot of a lot of materials and a lot of money, honestly, to get to that point. Yeah. So when something small, obviously, it’s easy. But yeah, given its past sort of popularity, and its nature, yeah, it gets gets very hard. And yeah, so the Yeah, it’s, it’s extremely hard to try and try and get that in a bunch of, there’s a collection, so you might not be able to create the block. So when we, when we talk about these miners, yeah, suddenly, to I guess sort of to lead up to is why miner are unnecessary in Bitcoin, now and previously, in Ethereum, is that they are looking for the next block. So they’re trying to get consensus on the block. Yeah. So when somebody commits a transaction that doesn’t get added to the blockchain, automatically, it goes to the miners. And what they’re doing is running the consensus algorithm. So the algorithm is just really cryptographic hash. And what it includes is the hash of the header of the previous block, plus all the transactions plus a random number. And what they’re trying to do is run that hash it such that they get a viable block, the block is valid in accordance to the consensus algorithm. That is where all the power is spent all that time, because you’re running a cryptographic algorithm, which is usually quite computationally heavy. Yeah, in the best of times, and they’re trying to beat everyone to the block. Because if you create a block, you get a reward for it. So you might get one Bitcoin, or something like that. So it is viable to try and create as many blocks as you can to get those rewards.

Tim Hughes  08:16

That’s the reward for being a miner. Is that right?

Dave Belvedere  08:20

That’s the reward for creating a block. You spend all your time mining, not create a block and get nothing. Yeah, so one of the things that they’ve done, because obviously, that sort of starts to lean towards people with more money, more resources can deploy more things, is they’ve created these mining pools, such that you can contribute to the pool, and it might make up say, 25% on the network. And then if the pool itself creates a block, you get a you get a little piece of that based off of you know, how much you contribute to the pool.

Tim Hughes  08:57

Quick, quick question with that. So with the people who don’t manage to mine the block, is that part of the excessive amount of energy needed for a transaction because it’s basically wasted energy, they resource is a bit like an Olympic bid or how it used to be. So all that money is spent was for nothing, because it went to wherever

Dave Belvedere  09:18

Somebody else. Yeah, so they’re basically you know, running these things as quick as they can and they might get beaten by nanoseconds.

Tim Hughes  09:26

Yeah. And how long would a transaction normally take roughly?

Dave Belvedere  09:29

So it depends on the on the chain being used, I think at the moment with Bitcoin because they’ve like they’ve mined so much it takes you know, 10s of minutes to actually create a new block in Ethereum. They switched from proof of work the consensus of proof of work, which is what Bitcoin still operates on, to proof of stake which is less computationally heavy consensus mechanism and it also you can argue it distributed through the miners a lot cleaner to, and they’re fairly quick. So compared to Bitcoin, so they generate a new block, I think, every second pretty much and the transactions that get included are just transactions there.

Tim Hughes  10:14

Because yeah, this sorry, Jamie, because this is something like last year or isn’t it when Ethereum. So this is the change that they did way? I think it’s only 10%? Or is it like a 90%? reduction on 99.9%. Wow, okay, of their power, which is enormous. I mean, that’s because that was the we’ve talked about it before with outrageous amount of energy spent. And to hear it, they’re like is completely wasted? Any delegates not necessary for that transaction. So it’s wasted energy. Yeah. So Ethereum have made this quantum leap, basically, to make it far more efficient. Yeah, pretty

Dave Belvedere  10:46

well, efficient in terms of memory. Sorry, in terms of power. Yeah, like the contestants. So proof of stake, the way it works is like a scheduler just goes, you’re going to create the next block. And so only one person is effectively going, here are the valid transactions and pushes the block out, you still got validators that will be like, That’s a good job or challenge to do it. So I guess sort of a little difference between proof of work and proof of stake as the consensus mechanisms. Proof of Work is just really run, like find that cryptographic hash match. Proof of stake is you put up X amount of capital, or for this, in this case, it’s 32 ETH, which is about 80,000 Australian, and you say I will behave correctly and properly. And if I generate a block, you get sort of the rewards for that. Now, in order to avoid bad actors, or just somebody coming in with a massive amount of ETH. And being like, I’m just going to do this, they have challenge periods. So if somebody like, let’s just say, misbehaves as the node and puts in a bad transaction, somebody, anyone on the network, so like, you could be just a little guy on the network and these big, big mining groups around you can challenge the block. It’ll force everyone to go through and actually, like, compute this at a sort of hashing level. And if you’re right, and they did misbehave, they lose all the capital that they put up. So they get slashed, 32. And so the node gets bounced, and then that 32 ETH comes back to the network. Because you challenged it, I think you get like, 90% of that, and a bunch of it gets burnt offs. Yeah. So it’s sort of the that’s the mechanism to make sure everyone is behaving correctly.

Gene Tunny  12:39

Don’t can’t ask a basic question. Yep. Say you bought a couch off, Tim. And you wanted to pay Tim in cryptocurrency? I mean, maybe bitcoins the example to use, since that’s what most people are familiar with? How would it work? I mean, would Tim have to have a wallet, a crypto wallet?

Dave Belvedere  13:01

Yeah, so crypto will only really send to what we call wallets are really just public keys and private keys. So it’s the public key infrastructure that sort of backs a lot of lot of internet, mobile, a lot of sort of infrastructure around the world at the moment. And you have a public key and a private key. Okay, so most people might have heard this, like, somebody’s private key got lifted, and crypto got drained. If you’ve got a private key, you can decrypt anything that gets encrypted with the public key. So in this case, I’m sending it to Tim’s public key, and then only Tim will be able to, to get that from his public key if he’s got the private key.

Gene Tunny  13:43

So who sets up the public key? Tim need to do that?

Dave Belvedere  13:46

And Tim needs to do it. So in order to generate a wallet, you’ll get both the public key and its private key.

Gene Tunny  13:51

Okay. And who are the players that do that for you that is that a an exchange? A crypto exchange?

Dave Belvedere  13:56

Yeah, there’s, there’s a, like, you can do it through an exchange. But then typically, like, there are exchanges out there, okay. They might like to hold the private key or, you know, be able to recover private keys and things like that. Yeah, you can do it through a bunch of, sort of specialised applications. So we call them just wallets. So the most common one in Ethereum is Metamask. So it can you can just plug it in, it’s just a Firefox Chrome app, and you go create new wallet, and it’ll generate that those keys for you.

Tim Hughes  14:29

Is that user-friendly Dave or is that something that you’d need someone like yourself to help set up?

Dave Belvedere  14:36

No, it’s it’s it’s pretty easy. User friendly now. So yeah, like a couple years ago would have been like, what’s going on what’s up, but now, you know, they’ve made many changes has been very user friendly, like to go through you instal it. It’ll be like, how you like recovering your existing wallet. And if that’s the case, you got to provide the private key, or the seed phrases to generate the key Um, ball. It’s just like, okay, cool. Finding a new wallet, you click a button creates the wallet for you. Yeah, it stores the like, you won’t see the private key, but I’ll give you the seed phrases that are used to recover that private key and record these because if you don’t have the private key, this is the only way to get this back.

Gene Tunny  15:20

Okay, so who would do the transaction? Is that through the exchange? If you understand money to Tim, or is the exchange doing is FTX? I mean, what did a company like? FTX do so

Dave Belvedere  15:33

FTX was primarily changing, like currency for cryptocurrency. So they, they act as the middleman. Okay, so you know, I’d give them Australian dollars from the bank, okay, and then I could buy on their market at their rates, x amount of crypto that they’re holding in their wallet, okay. And then from that I can either like so as a part of that, typically, you’ll find an account with the exchange that will have like an embedded wallet associated with it, or whatever their infrastructure needs. And then I can transfer that to say, my wallet, and then I can transfer some to Tim or I can use that exchange to transfer it to Tim directly. Okay, so exchanges are primarily there for transferring currency. So, so transferring dollars to currency, or transferring between cryptocurrency across chains, or transferring between cryptocurrency on the same chain. So when we talk about an Ethereum is not just ETH it has a bunch of coins on the same chain. And yeah, you can use an exchange to say transfer one Eth to USD C or USD t. So the two stable coins you’re talking about before. Or I can, you do that what they call on chain through DEX’s. Okay, decentralized exchanges. Okay. So they create pools or what we call automatic market makers. Yeah, so they usually have a pool, which is, this is a 50/50 pool. So it has Ethereum and USDC. So the pool itself, ideally, at any point is trying to maintain half of its quantities Ethereum and the other half is USDC. And now what sort of I look for on chain is when somebody then dumps 20k Ethereum into that pool, means there’s an imbalance between the side. So yeah, who would automatically want USDC or getting rid of ETH. So it’ll make eath very cheap to buy, so wants to get rid of it to maintain the balance, yeah, or give me a really good price to put USDC into the pool, because it wants more of that to try and maintain that 50/50. And that sort of is the classical arbitrage from that I can buy low at some other pool or on the decks itself, and then put it into this. And what makes that possible is decentralise exchanges. Don’t look at you know, a fee that says the market price for ETH is x to what exchanges use. So exchanges will typically have, you know, the current market price of ETH is whatever $1,600 And that’s based off of, you know, what’s happening now what’s happening on other exchanges, like Binance and things like that, and they sort of get a get a market price for that. Whereas decentralised applications, their market price is literally what the pool says. So yeah, you can sort of get really good deals. And yeah, when you sort of try and make that market efficient on the decentralised side it Yeah, can can open up a bunch of opportunities.

Tim Hughes  18:55

Can I just ask Dave? So with winning that transaction in your, you know, for that particular situation, is that all about speed? Or is so what are the factors in being able to get that transaction?

Dave Belvedere  19:06

Yeah, so there’s, there’s a couple of things that will impact that transaction. So on Ethereum, it’s not necessarily about speed, you certainly have to be there when they’re trying to create the block. So let’s just say the timing window for creating a block is 100 milliseconds. So as long as my transaction to do that is in that block time creation window, I have a chance to potentially win that transaction. And what it comes down to on Ethereum is you can tip the miner to be like, you want to put my transaction first. So let’s just say I’m going to make three ETH. From this transaction, I can tip the miner 2.5 of that ETH so I get half of that if I can give the miner 2.5 If they put my transaction first, so which means the Miner is getting more money to make sure that my block Isn’t there first my transactions in there first, and then they can put the rest of the transactions. And so that’s sort of making up what we, you know, sort of what gets identified as MeV. So mine extractable value. So they’re looking for the most profitable transactions to put inside their block in order to make the most money. Yeah.

Gene Tunny  20:20

So what do we know about these miners? There are professional miners aren’t there? And are there amateur miners? I mean, is it guys in the basement? Or is it? I know there are some dedicated companies aren’t there that are doing the mining and they’re all around the world? Do we have any here in Brisbane, I’m just fascinated with these miners are.

Dave Belvedere  20:40

Ya know, it’s really it’s, it’s anyone that has the computer with the resources and is running the algorithm, you can be a miner at that point. Yeah, mine is there to operate the chain it does. Under proof of work, it is better to be with other miners, like around other miners, because you want to broadcast the block that you find to the network as quickly as possible, because two people might come up with the same solution or like different transaction orders. But both of the blocks that they produce pass the consensus algorithm, it’s whoever can saturate the network or saturate 51% of the network they’re blocked in is the next block. So you might do all this work, find a block, create the block and then still miss out.

Tim Hughes  21:29

 Right, which was the original problem, anyway. So yeah, just is it? Well, as far as energy consumption goes. So with the changes that Ethereum made, it’s the same process, but just quicker, and with fewer people vying for it. Is that right?

Dave Belvedere  21:41

Just just one person vying for it. So it’s like, with proof of stake, it’s like, it’s your time to create the block. And you have to answer within a certain timeframe. If you don’t, there is a little bit of a penalty, like you lose, start to lose some of your stake, and they just go to the next person.

Tim Hughes  21:56

And how do you be in that little group or chain? Or?

Dave Belvedere  22:00

Oh, it’s just really running the node software, So the actual node software is executing, you just connect to it. And and you’re pretty much in it.

Gene Tunny  22:09

Yeah. What do you know about the profitability of the mining? Because is it something where there’s such low barriers to entry, there’s just, you know, lots of people have come into it seeking the profit. And then that gets, you know, that those opportunities get dissipated? Or? I mean, I’m guessing there are some players in the mining game who have, they’ve just got such great computer capability, or there, they’ve got a better algorithm, that they could get a lot of the winnings, but what do you know about the profitability of mining? And the, I guess, the market structure, I suppose you call it?

Dave Belvedere  22:48

Yeah. So um, under proof of work, mining profitability, I think sort of, when we talk about Bitcoin is starting to fade away very quickly, because you need to spend all this energy. And I’m, I’m pretty, pretty sure that they’ve dropped the block rewards, quite recently. So what you get for actually creating a block that’s come down, so you’re getting less and less, sort of Bitcoin for creating that block now, right? So the profitability is starting to go away. In Ethereum, it’s still kind of there, it’s sort of like a random random shoot, if you get a really good block, where let’s just say something skewed pool a lot. And you’ve got these searches, trying to like get money out of the pool to make it market efficient, you might end up with a block that might pay you say, 50 EtH, in those tips. So that’s random. But the problem is, is that there’s a lot of like, nodes around the world for a theorem, because now it’s just super, super, super basic to set up and those sort of requirements are starting to fall away a little bit. That yeah, it is hard to like, get to that block, like it is pretty much a random chance. Okay.

Tim Hughes  24:04

But, Dave, you mentioned a couple of terms, actually, you have Bitcoin operate and how Ethereum operate, which is essentially then the difference that made it possible for Ethereum to use so much less energy. What was that again?

Dave Belvedere  24:18

They’re their consensus mechanism. So proof of work versus proof of stake.

Tim Hughes  24:22

Yeah, right. Okay. So Bitcoin have proof of work, Bitcoin and proof of work? Yep. Is it possible for them to do the same thing as a theorem and move to proof of steak?

Dave Belvedere  24:33

It is they would have to change how the chain would not have the chain, well, how the miners would operate. So the actual software that the miners run. One of the things with Bitcoin is there are very big miner groups now. So there’s a lot of sort of power in these groups because they don’t want the status quo to change. Because they they’re making they’re making money. So proof of work, works for those miners. Yeah. And so you have to convince like majority of the miners or like 90% of the miners that this is the way forward. Otherwise, what will happen is you’ll get a hard fork. So you’ll potentially see if you’ve looked at sort of some of the crypto you’ll see like, Bitcoin classic and a theorem classic. Yeah, these are hard forks of the chains where miners have just disagreed. Okay, and so, you know, a group of miners went one way. And other group of miners went the other way. People yeah. Always soiling it.

Tim Hughes  25:34

Humans always do. Okay, so, um, because with that, I mean, it looked like such a big change for Ethereum that Bitcoin might have its days numbered, like, Is that a fair assumption?

Dave Belvedere  25:44

I think so. Like, I think bitcoins done really good stuff and trying to like break into the businesses and operate as like, Hey, here’s a digital asset coin and sort of challenge the status quo that was previously that it’s days to look, you know, pretty, pretty bleak. In terms of future it is just a coin, and it’s just a digital asset. And you’ve got other sort of crypto currencies like Ethereum that operate as a coin, but then also have these decentralised exchanges, as you know, on chain games that you can play and like, do stuff with, they’ve building out an entire ecosystem over top of them. So they’ve now got what what gets referred to as layer two chains. So chains that operate on Ethereum. So you can bridge assets, I can take what I’ve got on a theorem and hold it up to this layer two chain, and that layer two chain is secured by Ethereum. So typically, you’d like to take arbitrage, for example, it’s a really popular layer to chain on a theorem, what they do is they’ve got their own. They’re a centralised chain. So the way that they validate and sequence blocks is controlled by off chain labs. But what they do is when they’ve got a bunch of blocks, they roll them all up. So they have a rollup mechanism. And they send that data back down as a transaction on layer one. And so when it gets committed into layer one, I can essentially rebuild the layer two chain from just layer one. And that’s where I sort of think Ethereum is going to head towards the future, is that a Ethereum , what we call layer, layer one will end up being more of a security mechanism, rather than sort of what exists today with DEXIS and coins, that will still be around, but I think the majority of us will start to go towards layer two and potentially even layer three, because they can upscale the amount of transactions they can handle. So that’s, that’s the other one. That’s pretty key, if this was going to take over sort of like, a digital asset is how many transactions you can compute per second. So you know, take Visa, for example, I think can do like, what 4000 transactions a second. And so yeah, that sort of puts a minimum requirement on how many transactions you can compute per second, in order to like, not really notice, it’s like you don’t notice, like when you tap a credit card to go pay a delay of like, hang on, gotta mine that block.

Gene Tunny  28:22

This is where we need quantum computers. And are they, are they something that will actually happen?

Dave Belvedere  28:28

Potentially, yeah, it depends on like, what gets used. So hashing is always a weird one for quantum computers, because hashes are typically not vulnerable to, I guess, you know, Shor’s algorithm, which says, basically, sort of at a high level, anything that’s secured by, say, just a cryptographic algorithm, you can break with Shor’s algorithm. Yes, yeah. it all up. So cryptography today depends on the fact that when I make like input equal output, if I have to break that output, it’s a brute force attack. So I have to just iterate through all possible inputs to try and find what input gave me that output. It depends on that that is pretty much impossible. You need a lot of resources. And it’s going to take a lot of time. Not to say it’s not impossible, but it’s so far out of just, it’s 100 years to like, try and work out what this input equals that output, that it’s just not worth it. So that’s what fundamentally secures all cryptography today in those sort of algorithms. What the concern with quantum is, is that you’ll be able to do that a lot quicker. Yeah, but with hashes, not so much. It’s still just run through how the hashes work.

Gene Tunny  29:56

Right? Okay. Yeah, fair enough. I had another had another question about this proof of work versus proof of stake. One. Criticism I heard at the time when this merge occurred was at the merge, like the merge. Yeah. Was that Well, the great thing about Bitcoin and I think I had Yeah, I had a guest on the show, who was a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he was also a writer of thrillers. Lars Emmerich. I think it was, yeah. It was interesting. Guest fun. Yeah. All right, is excellent. And former fighter pilot and oh, yeah, writes thrillers. And he’s, we talked about crypto among other things. And he’s a big Bitcoin enthusiast because he sees the risk of he’s concerned about the US dollar hyperinflation, etc. So we had a good conversation on that. But he was saying the great thing about Bitcoin is decentralised, the proof of work means that there’s benefits from having proof of work, and it is, I guess what I’m asking is Ethereum  still crypto, is it still, I mean, there’s moving to proof of stake move away from the benefits of having to do that proof of work.

Dave Belvedere  31:23

I mean, oh, yeah. Yeah. No, not Not really. So okay. It is still crypto. It’s still cryptographically you know, okay, locked in and secured, as is still decentralised, still decentralised.Yeah, so absolutely. So it’s even some people can argue it’s even becoming more decentralised than say, Bitcoin. So Bitcoin itself is moving towards centralization, because you have the big miner groups that start to control more and more of the chain, sort of moving towards a centralised figure. And so that’s that 51% attack that we talked about earlier, with moving to a proof of stake in order to control or sort of start to centralise the chain, I have to control 51% of all Ethereum. So every single ETH that’s ever been issued, I need to hold 51% of that, which is, you know, starting to become trillions and trillions of dollars. Yeah, so it is less viable for me to actually try to attack at the network. And yeah, it’s sort of proof of stake kind of starts to push more of a distributed type of feel to it doesn’t stop big groups coming together and like, obviously, trying to pull the chain towards centralization. But I’d probably argue that proof of stake makes that harder than say, proof of work.

Gene Tunny  32:51

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  33:26

Now back to the show.

Tim Hughes  33:31

Can I say what would happen with layer one, layer two, if someone was to get that 51% ownership? Do they then become the layer one? They’ve got their? They’ve got the conch as it were, you know, so is that where the layer one status is? Is like yeah, because the majority.

Dave Belvedere  33:49

so yeah, pretty much like yeah, if somebody can control, you know, the, the layer one and you’ve got layer two, and layer three is built on top of it. They call the shots, they call it. Yeah, they effectively have the control of the network.

Tim Hughes  34:02

Because it’s an interesting part of how this seems to be unfolding is that the decentralised nature seems to be one of the big attractions and I’m sure it still is. But as far as confidence in the currency, it seems to be the downfall of, so it’s it looks quite possible that so for instance, Reserve Bank of Australia or Bank of England may want to bring up their own cryptocurrency which would then be centralised that would be layer two as you were saying so if they did it with Ethereum it would for instance, you know, hypothetically will come on as a layer two and be centralised. Yeah. What are the is that the direction we’re heading in? Is that seem to be most likely?

Dave Belvedere  34:47

Yeah. Maybe. I think because they would want to control the chain. So one of the reasons I guess that a lot of people are still You know, fairly excited is that cryptocurrencies do bring some anonymity to the game. You’re just identified by a wallet, not by name, address or anything like that. Yeah, right, sort of what the banks need. So you don’t get KYC in exchanges, KYC so know your customer.

Gene Tunny  35:19

Yeah, that’s the stop money laundering. Dodgy transactions, technically, they’re supposed to know their customers. And this is where some banks have got into trouble. Yeah, he is that they actually didn’t know their customers and all of the money laundering through the Westpac ATMs. I don’t know if you remember that.

Dave Belvedere  35:39

It was it Westpac? There was a little I remember stuff with Commbank, they’ll doing.

Gene Tunny  35:43

maybe it was Commbank, I actually have to check that in the show notes. So I don’t get sued. But I thought it was Westpac is one of those four. Yeah. So

Tim Hughes  35:58

Good to know, because I’ve got to deliver a CAPTCHA apparently. So. Good thing to know.

Dave Belvedere  36:03

Yeah. So So currently, sort of government regulations, sort of say like, Okay, if you are transferring currencies and things like that, you have to KYC. So you have the customer have to provide details. Yeah, and one of the great things about digital coins is, you know, you just identified by a wallet on the network. So, you know, is that really you? I don’t know. So, you know, this is where, yeah, recently I had to go through tax in a year, which is, which was always fun. And yeah, you got to provide like, his wallet addresses, these are all the wallet addresses I touch. These are all the transactions I made to, obviously, ATO, so they can make sure that you are getting taxed correctly.

Tim Hughes  36:48

That’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought of that. So how does this work with a tax return? Like, you know, with your transaction, what you own what you dont own.

Dave Belvedere  36:56

Every transaction is considered an investment or sell, buy or sell order, basically. So cryptocurrency still is considered, well, it’s a high risk investment, right? It is extremely volatile. And yeah, and there are many dodgy things that do happen on chains. And, you know, one of the classic examples is you can’t even trust exchanges, because FTX, for example, they were messing around with customer funds and things like that.

Tim Hughes  37:27

So yeah, sorry I was always going to ask at some point, now is obviously that time, I guess, what happened?

Dave Belvedere  37:33

So sort of the story that we got for the collapse of FTX customers are obviously putting in the money FTX I believe that the time offered, you know, futures options, traditional sort of trading markets that people could play around with. However, they also sort of had a behind the doors deal with one of their sub companies, I think is Ella Mira or something, something similar to that, where they will lend them a bunch of money at them was backed by customer money from an FTX, FTX perspective. And they played around with it and lost, I think it was they lost billions and billions of dollars. And so when customers started to lose confidence in FTX, I can’t remember what the particular event was. And they tried to withdraw their money. They couldn’t, because FTX didn’t have that money anymore. So and that’s sort of what led to the collapse. And what Yeah, ultimately forced the US government to start to step in. And that’s where I think we’ll start to see more changes. I think crypto is here to stay. But in its current form, probably not. I think governments will start to get involved. And yeah, you’ll start to see sort of a traditional securities market approach, I think, come over the top of it. So yeah, whether you’re more KYC or, you know, more rules around what you can and can’t do in particular countries, which makes it quite hard because there is no one thing controlling crypto, and it’s all decentralised. So it’s like, well, if we see you’re coming from the US, you gotta use this. If we see you’re coming from Australia, you got to do this, which, yes, is it’s hard to make that work well.

Tim Hughes  39:27

So that was a failure of the exchange, not the currency.

Dave Belvedere  39:30

Yeah, that’s, that’s purely a failure of the exchange. So the people running the exchange are doing Yeah. Yeah, questionable. Questionable things.

Gene Tunny  39:38

 Yeah, because they should have just been exchanging or holding that money on behalf of their customers. And they were going to use that to purchase cryptocurrencies were they?

Dave Belvedere  39:51

Yeah, so effectively, like, yeah, they would purchase cryptocurrencies and then they would sell it on so they, you know, if starting up they would prop we’ll be running at a bit of a deficit or like have a raw, somebody’s given them a bunch of money too, and have that initial crypto. Yeah. And then yeah, as people come in, and they, like, give money for that crypto, obviously at a particular market margin. Yeah, they start to be able to add more crypto and sort of become profitable in that regard.

Gene Tunny  40:22

Yeah. But they went in, did they go and lend that money that they should have held in trust, or they shouldn’t they were looking out for customers to that. That other company was run by his ex girlfriend. By Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend. Yeah. Yeah, it was a daughter of an economist, economist. MIT economist, I think, I think he’s a professor at MIT or one of those schools. Really good school. Yeah, that was a debacle. The other thing I hear about is the rug pull. Rebuild, goes on about rug pulls. And when coffees Zilla, you probably follow Him or you say he’s really sceptical of crypto. Have you seen coffee Zilla? I will flick you some videos.

Tim Hughes  41:07

I love the fact that rug pulled got a conversation. I’ve never heard of this. About this.

Dave Belvedere  41:13

It’s a funny term. So obviously there with with anything new and like, Give somebody a little bit of anonymity, they just go wild. You know, there are at the moment, a lot of yeah, a lot of good actors that people are trying to, you know, accomplish and create new things. But there are also a lot of bad actors. So classical pump and dump schemes are not uncommon. And yeah, one of the other ones is what gets what got its own name, which is a row pool. So let’s just say, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a token that I’m releasing, people buying that token, so they’re sending me money, and I’ve given them the token back, and then on the owner, cool, I can just like swipe all that money out of the account, and then that token is now worthless. That’s, that’s effectively a rug pull. So the people who created that, that have control of that sort of asset, because the assets on an Ethereum are controlled by contracts. So if you’ve got the private key to the contract, you effectively control the contract. And you can just take all the money that’s in that contract, and then the token then becomes worthless.

Tim Hughes  42:20

Actually, on that note, so this, this brings up the question I was going to ask, who started these? Obviously, they’re, you know, whoever is behind bitcoin or Ethereum? Are they known?

Dave Belvedere  42:33

So, Bitcoin, no. There is a famous paper that is written but no one knows the true identity. Within Ethereum, it’s Vitalik. So he traded a theorem and then it’s now run by the Ethereum foundation. So the people who sort of operate and try to improve the chain and things like that are known as a foundation whereas Bitcoin it’s, it’s murky, who started.

Tim Hughes  43:00

It’s very James Bond, the whole thing of like, you know, having something like Bitcoin with, you know, who’s behind it is fascinating that it’s anonymous at that level with potentially a lot of power.

Gene Tunny  43:11

Well, it was this person with a pseudonym was it’s a Satoshi

Dave Belvedere  43:16

Satoshi. It started with Okay, yeah, but yeah, Satoshi, something

Gene Tunny  43:19

like that. I’ll put links in the show notes. And what they did I think they published a white paper. So they publish the code or the rules for Bitcoin and then people read it and thought, actually, yeah, this would, could work. This is a great idea. Let’s go ahead with it. So it’s obviously a computer scientist of some kind, potentially. Yeah, I think is there an Australian who claims that he invented it? I think, as well?

Dave Belvedere  43:44

Yeah. There are claims that the Australian is Satoshi. Ah, right. Yeah, so sort of he released the white paper with the chain already there. So one of the things that you have to do to I guess, you know, start a chain, is you got to create the Genesis block. So the first block that then things build on top of, and typically, if you’re going to create the Genesis block, well, you might as well just create a good fundamental base. So I think, I think Satoshi has like, a ridiculous amount of bitcoin, because you’re effectively controlled. The base asset right at the start, and then you sort of like, give yourself as much as you need as you’re building these blocks, like you might release the chain to the public, say, and it’s got like, 200-300 blocks. So you’ve got all the rewards for those blocks are doing no work, no competition, but now you’re going to release the chain. And so I think, from memory, reading papers, like everyone knows which coins because obviously the coins effectively get numbered based on the block that they were minted in.

Tim Hughes  44:52

And on that note, Dave, there’s a certain number of Bitcoin and then that’s it. Is that right? And was that determined at the very beginning?

Dave Belvedere  45:00

yeah, so that would have been determined by the actual algorithm that that got generated for Bitcoin.

Tim Hughes  45:05

How many other?

Gene Tunny  45:07

21 million, isn’t it? Yeah, I’ll put it in the show notes anyway.

Tim Hughes  45:14

So that’s part of the strength of it, though, that it’s a finite number.

Dave Belvedere  45:18

 It is a finite number. Yeah. So it’s like it is the strength. So once everything’s been mined, you know, that’s it, then it just becomes transactions passing between to and fro.

Tim Hughes  45:28

You need a level of scarcity for it to have a value.

Dave Belvedere  45:31

Scarcity will drive the wealth of the actual element up, or potentially not, depending on which way it flows. But yeah, that’s, that’s the sort of appeal for it is that it’s running out, so if you’re going to grab it.

Tim Hughes  45:45

And Is that comparable to how many Ethereum there are in the in circulation? No. I knew as I was asking the question, this is not right.

Dave Belvedere  45:57

So what gets classified as Ethereum? Has, it does have a max value, but it’s quite big.

Tim Hughes  46:05

So sorry, I mean, this is coming from a very base level of understanding. But I’m sort of fascinated by this. So how does that work? Then with Ethereum? How many? Like what do you call? So Bitcoin is a Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin isn’t what Ethereum? Worked with? ETH. So yes, okay. Yes. So the number of ETH isn’t determined, it’s not finite.

Dave Belvedere  46:28

It, there is a there is a finite, but they can always add more. So it’s, yeah, it’s backed by a contract. And you can always change that contract. Sort of as an example. Like, right at the start, it was ETH. So ETH, is the classical. Everyone knows, sort of what gets defaulted to, technically, it’s not ETH anymore. It’s actually wrapped ETH. So three or four years ago, I think, the foundation or or one of the one of the partners that works with Ethereum, closely, they published the standard that every token should follow, because a token is really just a contract on chain, and you’re calling methods on that contract to say meant, you know, how many does this address have? If everyone is, you know, everyone just goes, I’m going to create a new contract, that API of like, what do I call to, like mean to what do I call the burn could change from token to token. So what got published was what was being classified as ERC. 20 So it’s a standard that every token follows. So an ERC 20 token follows that standard. ETH at the time, didn’t meet that standard. And so they created a contract that did create that didn’t meet the standard called wrapped ETH and you can transfer ETH and wrapped ETH at a one to one. So I can have like eight ETH and automatically make it a wrap ETH, okay? It’s just like taking that asset and making it different. But it’s still what you know, it’s still what we call ETH on chain.

Tim Hughes  48:13

Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Gene Tunny  48:14

Here’s another basic question that just occurred to me. So a Bitcoin. I’m not sure what its value at the moment, but is it around 20,000 USD?

Dave Belvedere  48:23

26,00US. 

Gene Tunny  48:27

Okay, yep. Yep, can I have a fraction of a Bitcoin? Can I or, but I How does that work? I mean, all because I thought if it’s in a wallet, does it have to be one Bitcoin? Or can it be gonna be a fraction?

Dave Belvedere  48:40

It can be a fraction of Bitcoin. So typically, with the tokens they’ll have? Like, we call it decimals on chain, but it’s really just precise. Okay, gotcha. So like, I think Bitcoin has a precision of six, I think six or eight. I’d have to double check that. So which means I can have point 000001 of a bitcoin. Right. Okay. Yeah, as long as it’s within that, that precision element, it doesn’t matter. You can you can still operate and work on it. Gotcha. Yeah, so as an example, ETH has a precision of 18. Right. So one eath, actually on chain is one times 10 to the power of 18. That’s what it looks like on chain.

Tim Hughes  49:23

Okay. And what’s a ETH worth nowadays? I think it’s around 1600 USD at the moment. Okay. So, as far as affordability goes in a single as against a Bitcoin.

Dave Belvedere  49:37

An ETH is more affordable.

Gene Tunny  49:40

Okay, can I ask you about smart contracts? So as an economist and speaking with other economists, and just reading about crypto and, and all of that, I mean, there seems to be increasingly there’s a view that will crypto might that There’s a lot of scepticism about crypto itself, but they’re saying, well, the blockchain is great, and smart contracts are great. So, can you explain what a smart contract is? And it’s linked to Ethereum? Is that correct? Yeah. How does that work?

Dave Belvedere  50:13

Yeah. So, um, a smart contract is really just code that’s on the chain. And so one of the one of the sort of, I think, very fundamental things that makes a theorem quite good is that I can store more than just the coin on the chain, I can create code, I can put it on chain, and then that’s the code forever. And so that code can no longer be changed, which does lead to some interesting problems, like, Oh, crap, that’s a bug. How do I actually, you know, patch and fix that bug? And you know, that’s, that’s kind of, we’ve seen consequences of that already. Yeah, somebody’s found a security flaw and just like, stolen millions and millions of dollars from contracts, or from DEXIS in particular. So they’re sort of the common hacks that are in theorem. So whenever you see somebody’s hacked, say, a bridge, or a Dex, that’s typically somebody’s found a flaw in the code and been able to exploit that code. Yeah, so a contract is written in solidity for the most part. So solidity is the most common language used for writing smart contracts. And it’s just, it’s just really code at that point. It’s just structured code. So similar to obviously different but like, similar to as if I was to read a C programme. So well, you know, a Ross programme or anything like that. It’s just common, it’s just code. So that’s why if you’ve ever heard coders law on some of the sort of the defences of hacks, that’s, that’s where that’s coming from, is that this is written as code. And the code allowed me to take millions of dollars, therefore, am I really responsible for it? My view is yes.

Tim Hughes  52:07

That is not a strong defence.

Gene Tunny  52:12

It’s like, if you get a million dollars deposited into your bank account, you can’t go out and buy a Ferrari.

Tim Hughes  52:20

The doors open, so I went in and took what I could carry. With that, as well, because I was zooming out a little bit as well. Dave? Yeah, you know, financial markets. There are so many issues like that may influence like a human emotions, like greed, panic, fear, these things happen all the time, you know, cyclical, or whatever it may be. And banks get robbed, you know, like, you know, cash was stolen, whatever. This doesn’t seem to be answering too many sort of problems, you know, they can get hacked. Yeah. So as far as, as a few questions that I guess, because the number one thing with all of that is trust, in my view is like, you know, if people trust something more and more, then it’s a stronger sort of system, and less likely to be driven by greed, panic, fear, etc. What was the pros and cons, if you like, of crypto, like if we ultimately heading towards something where we might be able to have more trust in a financial system than we currently have?

Dave Belvedere  53:23

Yeah, potentially. So I think if the people in on this so you know, sort of Ethereum, you know, who’s who’s running the show to agree.

Tim Hughes  53:35

So there’s trust there as well, compared to some phantom person with a white paper? Yeah. is less, less trustworthy, I guess. But yeah. Yeah.

Dave Belvedere  53:44

Sort of, yeah. Human nature, we sort of trust. If we can see somebody like that. That’s actually a real person. Yeah, there rather than like talking to a computer screen, we’ll be like, Yeah, who are you actually really talking to on the other side of that? So I think inherently, we will trust, obviously, the traditional market setups more because they are run by people. And that’s where, hopefully, you know, something like Ethereum can start to come in and sort of do that. But while you still have people who can misuse, I guess, the environment of like, these rug pools, and, you know, just doing pump and dump schemes and things like that, it does get hard to trust. Yeah, is everything on there. Really a scam or not? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it’s sort of a double whammy where it’s like, you know, for myself personally, it’s like, yeah, I trust a theorem like I don’t think the Ethereum ecosystem or anything like that. It’s going to go away anytime soon. The changes that they’re making to it a sensible and things like that, and you can actually see and talk to the people at conferences. However, that contracts and like opportunities that then can be a part of Ethereum, yeah, that’s where it gets a bit dodgy. And that’s where you need to sort of like, okay, I trust this exchange more than the others, you know, uni swap, for example has been around on Ethereum for so long. Well, probably since, uh, since it started, right. And they’re, they’re a decentralised automatic market maker. I trust that, you know, they’ve been around for so long, you know, probably so many people have tried to hack their pools. Nothing’s really happened to it. So if I’m dealing with any swap as a DEX, I’m pretty, pretty confident that nothing’s bad’s going to happen, other than I might not get the best price on chain for my tokens.

Tim Hughes  55:45

But that’s the most likely weak link in that chain is the exchanges or that the middle the people in the middle between the consumer and the Ethereum safe using us? 

Dave Belvedere  55:56

Yes. And so sort of the users of Ethereum people are actually creating their own what we call DAPS. So decentralised applications. Yeah, that’s that’s where I think that that trust will start to fade. And and because crypto itself is, you know, it’s it’s quite volatile hasn’t had the best sort of, sort of time it’s been ups being down. It’s dumped to come back and don’t again. Yeah, a lot of people I think a lot of people look at and go cool, that might be a good way to, you know, make easy money because it’s just like going left, right and centre. But it can also backfire very quickly. Yeah. Where, where it sort of blurs the line is that it’s not treated as a traditional investment. Like because it is digitalized. And I can interact with it. And I can like, spend money on it. Like people treat it as money. But it’s really volatile money. 

Tim Hughes  56:51

If you’re willing to take advice from Matt Damon and Kiefer Sutherland. I mean, like, it’s so you know, yeah, they are very confident of it being a good move. 

Gene Tunny  57:01

Yeah. I’ve got a couple of two more questions. Dave. We’re probably getting close to time. Have you got a couple more Tim?

Tim Hughes  57:07

I’ve? No, I’m good. Thank you. I’ve been I’ve been enjoying as it’s gone on. And my big ones are gone. Thank you.

Gene Tunny  57:16

Yeah, I’ve learned a lot. It’s, it’s great. Would you have any examples of DAPS? That what are some daps that we might want to look at just so we can understand what what they are? 

Dave Belvedere  57:28

Oh, yeah, um, a couple of pretty, pretty fun ones. So there’s a game called wizards and dragons. Okay, it’s a it’s a decentralised application, but it’s also a game. It’s pretty fun. It released, I think, a couple of years ago. And what it is, is, you meant an NF T, and it has a chance to be a wizard, or dragon. And then based off of, if it’s a wizard, it can, like interact with, you can stake it. So you can actually say to the contract, hey, here’s my wizard, which is staking, and it might earn certain rewards. So there’s a coin that’s associated with the game as well. So there’s a coin called windy. So it’s wizards and dragons. And that coin can then be used to spend on the contracts to interact with the actual game and stuff like that. So it’s not like I’m continually having to feed ETH it’s just like gas fees at that point. Or if you get a dragon like you have chances to steal wizards when they go and stake and non stake . It’s, it’s it’s pretty, pretty fun.

Gene Tunny  58:36

This is a computer game, is it?

Dave Belvedere  58:38

Yeah, it’s a game on chain. Yeah. So it’s a game that actually happens within the blockchain again, So the game is happening per transaction. So I send a transaction to do something with the game, like the contracts that make up the game are there. And then I like create a transaction to say, stake, my wizard, and then there’s a chance if dragons are staked, that my wizard goes to a dragon.

Gene Tunny  59:08

But okay, I’m gonna ask a really dumb question. But do I see a wizard on the screen? Or do I see dragons?

Dave Belvedere  59:15

Yeah, you can see both. So like, depending on what you’ve meant it, you get an NFT, which is a type of token so a non-fungible token so yeah, they were the ones that got talked about, I think, why the last couple of years because like, yeah, okay, and then the punks and the apes they’re all worth stupid amount of money. 

Tim Hughes  59:37

So these are basically like, it’s an in the form of like having something that’s identifiable as being unique, even though it can be copied. So taking the Mona Lisa as an example of one painting, but there’s millions of copies. And so it’s basically a digital form a non fungible token or nifty I’ve heard them called Tim Ferriss calls them nifties. But so base Having something that can be identified as being the original and owned by a person.

Dave Belvedere  1:00:06

Yeah. And so we see that as like a token. It’s just really like a coin is not quite an NFT. Because there are many coins. But it’s like an NFT, sort of superset. There’s only like one coin that represents this thing. And so yeah, so like, it’s just a token. And yeah, that that has things. So like, I can go interact with the contract, you know, meant for a bunch of ETH. So that’s sort of how they get their startup is like, hand over like point zero seven ETH or point zero five ETH, to mint and have a random chance to generate a wizard or a dragon. And then they all sort of give you that NFT. So you’ll get that token back. And then yeah, you can use that token to then interact with the rest of their contract on the actual Ethereum chain.

Gene Tunny  1:00:54

Right. Okay. And are they used in these massive multiplayer games as well, online?

Dave Belvedere  1:01:01

The coins could be. Yeah. So I think they’re starting to come out. I think I read recently with like, digital coins. Yeah. But to sort of looking to go to be fair, that sort of already was kind of going there place anyway. So like, I could pay a bunch of money to the Microsoft store and have like, xbox credits. That was sort of already the lien. And then yeah, what, you know, one of the good things that has come about sort of what’s happening with blockchains? And things like that is Yeah, sort of companies are realising, actually, that’s, that’s a pretty nifty way of like, dealing with this sort of securing that data and making sure like, oh, okay, we can’t accidentally do something. Like, you can’t go back and try and change those records. It’s sort of there permanently. And you can follow a transaction at a time. For bookkeeping purposes, or, yeah.

Gene Tunny  1:01:59

I’m gonna have to come back to smart contracts in a future episode, because I think that’s probably its own episode, is it? 

Dave Belvedere  1:02:07

There’s a lot yeah, there’s a lot, a lot of things to talk about, I guess, in contracts, and yeah, sort of, you know, that’s how that how they get built, you know, how they sort of interact. And you know, that’s where these bugs can can arise. And, you know, people might accidentally do something and somebody takes money.

Gene Tunny  1:02:27

Yeah. And I’d be fascinated to know who the parties to the contract are. I mean, could Tim and I have a smart contract where if certain conditions are met or if the then Tim transfers Ethereum. To me, so if, I mean, is there a way of programming, it’s so that if it’s, say, let’s take the weather, for example, if the maximum temperature for Brisbane ends up being over 35 degrees on one day in the future, then the smart contract, picks that up, and then transfers, I don’t know, one ETH from me from Tim.

Dave Belvedere  1:03:01

Yeah, it can do. So there’s, there’s a bunch of things that need to happen and be in place for that. But yeah, you can store like money. So you can store ETM with the smart contract, because it is itself really just an address. And then yeah, you like a transaction is usually always going to be the trigger just can’t do stuff automatically. You always have to trigger it with a transaction. And yeah, you can just be like, Oh, okay, cool.

Gene Tunny  1:03:27

All you have to trigger it with a transaction. Okay. So it’s not, it’s not going to automatically. It’s not a way of automating transactions. And I understood that.

Dave Belvedere  1:03:35

Yeah. Yeah, everything that happens on the chain has to have triggered from a transaction. Okay, so transaction might trigger a bunch of things to happen. Yeah, and interact with a bunch of stuff on chain. But yes, every everything will come through from a certain transaction has triggered this thing, which might then trigger events, but, you know, cascade of roll on.

Gene Tunny  1:04:00

Okay, I might have to look at that in a future episode. I promise. I’ve only got one more question. You got any more, but,

Tim Hughes  1:04:07

you know, I just want to comment, um, not surprisingly, to hear that wizards and dragons entered the conversation seems to be a natural progression from the smartest of the smart in, you know, the 80s or whatever it is, whatever they’ve come through to this point. And no doubt behind some of this technology or this, these theories.

Dave Belvedere  1:04:31

We’re all we’re all nerds on the inside. Right. So

Tim Hughes  1:04:33

yeah, but it’s great. It’s sort of like a bit there’s a human element to that as well, which is nice to see.

Gene Tunny  1:04:39

Great. Final question, Dave. For you. What are the use cases for crypto Why do you think it’s good to for you personally to be in crypto?

Dave Belvedere  1:04:51

It’s it’s a fairly exciting field. So I’m I’m a software engineer by trade. I studied as a computer systems engineer And it’s can be difficult to try and see how technology technology progresses through the years. So that, you know, unless you’re sort of, say deep in with Google and working on their, you know, bleeding edge stuff. For the most part, it’s all kind of pretty much the same. And so it’s pretty cool to see something. So you know, there’s this whole blockchain theories and the cryptographic proofs and stuff. I think we’re around since I think the 80s. So it’s always interesting to see how that is getting transformed and evolved into something new. And then yeah, then being used and sort of one of one of the cool things, I think that’s coming, a part of this, it’s sort of attaching itself to sort of a wider push of everyone should be and I think, you know, I think if you look at the world today, most of the kids growing up today are very computer literate. And it is sort of continuing to push that, like, computers are just going to become more and more part of it. And I think the common school like programming, or reading or writing code, should be sort of start to become one of the fundamental things just because of the heavy involvement that we start to have. So understanding why things are doing things, right. Yeah.

Gene Tunny  1:06:21

Now, the other part of that is your you personally, so assuming I may be incorrect, but I’m assuming you own some crypto of some kind. So do you what are the use cases? Why? What value do you see in having it all? So Lars Emmerich, for example, he’s concerned about the value of the US dollar, he’s concerned about all of the money printing, he’s concerned about hyperinflation, what are the what are the use cases? Or what would motivate you to have crypto?

Dave Belvedere  1:06:52

Yeah, it’s, I guess, you know, personally, I’m pretty, pretty basic. For me, it’s just a fun, high risk investment. So I see it as something that that might pay off. Or it might not. You know, personally, I don’t have a lot of money in it. But it also, because I’m in the area, it helps me like interact with chains. And yeah, play around with like, games, such as, like wizards and dragons. sort of have

Tim Hughes  1:07:18

There as a confession. Yeah. But

Dave Belvedere  1:07:21

I still see it as a very high risk asset. Yeah. Yeah. I’m still relatively young. So to me if I lose, lose what I’ve got, personally, I’ve only got about 20k. There. It’s not gonna hit me hard. Hit me hard in terms of I’m gonna make that back over my lifetime of work. Yeah. But you know if it if it goes and like, whoo, and yeah, all of a sudden that 20k goes to 100k. Yeah.

Gene Tunny  1:07:47

Right. Yeah. 

Tim Hughes  1:07:49

But that’s actually a good point. Because none of this is in any way. investment advice from us. Oh, goodness, exactly. You know, like, it’s not investment advice. And the one thing that gets mentioned all the time, it’s like going to the horse races or something like that, you know, if you’ve got something that you can afford to lose, then go for it, because there’s a high risk investment and see what happens.

Dave Belvedere  1:08:09

I honestly look at this and go, it should be treated as a casino like, yeah, you gotta walk into a casino going, like, I have money. If I lose it, I’m not gonna, like get carried out by security. Yeah. Sounds like you can afford to lose the money. It is. Yeah, extremely high risk. And I think, like, especially now with the sort of scenarios that happened, like the FTX collapse, and you know, some of the other things that are happening there. And like the US government sort of taking notice, or like the SEC, taking notice more parts and like, pulling out rulings and stuff, it will become a little bit of, like, no one is really certain what’s going to happen in the area. Yeah. So it’s probably, you know, at this point still, quite, it’s probably riskier than it was before, because, you know, the SEC might turn around and say no, crypto goodbye, and like, you shut out the entire US market, like, that’s not gonna play well, for crypto.

Tim Hughes  1:09:07

Sec? The Securities

Dave Belvedere  1:09:08

and Exchange.

Gene Tunny  1:09:10

Okay, that’s been terrific. I mean, we’ve learned so much. I mean, I’ve never I’ve been blown away with all this info. And I think it’s helped me understand more what’s going on and it’s dispelled some, or it’s got rid of some ideas or misunderstandings I had. So that’s been really good. Are there any final thoughts? Any final words before we wrap up?

Dave Belvedere  1:09:37

No. Like, yeah, I encourage everyone to like, play around with it. Obviously, I think it’s an interesting technology. I think it’s going to be around for a long time. But in its current form, hard to say. I wish I would probably say I’m confident that as we know crypto today is probably not what we’re gonna see in the future. Yeah, this is sort of the first building block towards something that will become widespread.

Tim Hughes  1:10:08

Terrific. Now Dave, I really appreciate it because so we’ve often talked about this gene and I and it we we have fumbled in the dark somewhat. And I’ve been looking forward to the time where we can get somebody on and talk in depth, as we have done today. So yeah, I’ve really enjoyed that and got a lot from it. So thank you for coming in.

Gene Tunny  1:10:28

Dave Belvedere, thanks so much for your time. Thanks. Right. Hi, thanks for listening to this episode of economics explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact@economicsexplored.com, or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.

1:11:19

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Credits

Thanks to Obsidian Productions for mixing the episode and to the show’s sponsor, Gene’s consultancy business, www.adepteconomics.com.au

Full transcripts are available a few days after the episode is first published at www.economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.

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Podcast episode

Investing for success w/ Paul Mladjenovic, author of Stock Investing for Dummies

Paul Mladjenovic, CFP is the author or co-author of several dummies guides on investing, including Stock Investing for Dummies and Investing in Gold and Silver for Dummies. Paul shares his views on what makes for successful investing with show host Gene Tunny in episode 133 of Economics Explored. They discuss what types of companies to look for, an often unappreciated benefit of investing in gold and silver, and what Paul thinks about real estate and crypto assets.

You can listen to the conversation using the embedded player below or via Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher, among other podcast apps.

This episode contains general information only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Please consult a financial planning professional for advice specific to your circumstances.

About this episode’s guest – Paul Mladjenovic

Paul Mladjenovic, CFP, is a certified financial planner practitioner, writer, and speaker. He has helped people with their financial and business concerns since 1981. You can learn more about him at ravingcapitalist.com. He has authored or co-authored several popular Dummies guides on investing and affiliate marketing. You can learn more about Paul and his online courses at https://www.ravingcapitalist.com/

Links relevant to the conversation

Some of Paul’s books mentioned this episode:

Stock Investing For Dummies

Investing in Gold & Silver For Dummies

Transcript of EP133 – Investing for success w/ Paul Mladjenovic

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:01

Coming up on Economics Explored.

Paul Mladjenovic  00:04

The bottom line is, Gene, is that healthy quality companies will keep zigzagging upward no matter what you throw at them.

Gene Tunny  00:13

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host, Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia, and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is Episode 133, on investing for success. My guest this episode is the author of several of those yellow dummies guide that you may have seen in bookstores, Paul Mladjenovic. He’s written Stock Investing for Dummies, High Level Investing for Dummies, and Investing in Gold and Silver for Dummies, among other books. Paul Mladjenovic, CFP is a certified financial planner, practitioner, writer and speaker. He has helped people with their financial and business concerns since 1981. You can learn more about him at ravingcapitalist.com.

The usual disclaimer applies to this episode. This is for general information only, and nothing in this episode should be interpreted as financial or investment advice. Please consult a financial planner for advice specific to your circumstances.

Please check out the show notes for links to materials mentioned in this episode and for any clarifications. Also, check out our website, economicsexplored.com. If you sign up as an email subscriber, you can download my e-book, Top 10 Insights from Economics. So please consider getting on the mailing list. If you have any thoughts on what Paul or what I have to say about investing in this episode, then please let me know. You can either record a voice message via SpeakPipe – see the link in the show notes – or you can email me via contact@economicsexplored.com. I’d love to hear from you. Righto, now for my conversation with Paul Mladjenovic on investing for success. Thanks to my audio engineer, Josh Crotts, for his assistance in producing this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Paul Mladjenovic, welcome to the programme.

Paul Mladjenovic  02:20

Thank you kindly. What a pleasure to be on.

Gene Tunny  02:22

Yes. Thanks, Paul. Yes, it’s good to be chatting with you today about investing. You’ve written several books on investing. One of your books I’ve been reading is Stock Investing for Dummies. I’ve been getting a lot out of that. I think it’s a really great book and has a lot of sensible things to say that are consistent with economics. Really, really positive about that book. I’d like to ask, just to start off with, what is your general approach to investing? Does that vary over the lifecycle? Would you be able to take us through that place?

Paul Mladjenovic  03:04

Oh, absolutely. First of all, as you know, probably one of the most important foundations of investing is good economics. You’re on the right topic in many respects. If people make good choices, and with some economic reasoning, they could prosper, among the many choices you can make out there. And it also depends on many other things, such as politics and that kind of economic environment, etc. For me, I prefer looking through things through the prism of value and fundamental analysis.

Like many folks, when the people who make sense about this, whether it’s economics from that gentleman who’s behind you there, Mr. Friedman, or in my case, somebody more in the narrow vertical of stock investing, someone like Benjamin Graham, who was like the father of value investing. And I think it’s an important concept, because many things have to make sense. In economics, once you understand the basics of your own chequebook and household budget, it’s not that far-fetched to understand choosing good companies to invest in, etc.

I’ve been teaching about investing since the 1980s. I find that if you have common sense and have some basic of economics and grasping long-term success in stock investing and other assets as well, it’s not that difficult. You are much more proficient. It’s when you understand that. Common sense and value, it goes a long way in the world of investing.

Gene Tunny  04:34

Okay, so you’re looking for companies that are reliable over the long term. Am I reading that right?

Paul Mladjenovic  04:46

Absolutely. Actually, I’ll give you a few points from my investing class that I love. You’re a very astute man, and the people in many of my classes, many of them are beginners or beginning intermediates, and the first thing I tell them is, select… I say, remember two words, when you’re choosing your investments, whether it’s directly in stocks, or indirectly through ETFs and mutual funds, two words, human need. Think about all the products and services people will keep on buying, no matter how good or bad the economy is. And I think that especially for beginners who are looking for long-term success, human need will really, I think, crystallise it very much for folks moving forward.

For example, some of the greatest companies in the last 20 years that have been chugging along, no matter what, with the crises and market crashes and booms and busts and all the rest, companies that are profitable, involved in things such as food, water, beverage, utilities, etc. This is where you start. You start with human need before you start going into other pursuits, such as growth investing, or speculating, or everything else for that matter. The first thing is get to the right category.

The second thing is, I look for companies that are profitable and have low debt. Those may sound common sense to maybe folks like you and I, but when I’ve seen the kind of selections people have made for their portfolios over the last, I don’t know, ever since I’ve started teaching, my eyes bug out. People go for the flashy stocks, big names, glamour headlines, and that kind of thing. Those stocks may go up or down in a short term. But if they don’t have star power, in terms of their fundamentals, good profitability that they’ve done year in and year out profitable… Very important.

To me, profit isn’t just a cornerstone of a good stock. I can make the argument that it’s the cornerstone of a successful economy. I was born in a communist country. They obliterated the concept of profit, which means you obliterate the incentive to produce. That’s why you invest in companies because these produce goods and services. That’s the hallmark of a successful company, so profitability.

Again, anybody in our audience, you look at your own budget, what do you look at? If your income is greater than your expenses, you’re doing fine, especially whether you’re a billion-dollar company, or you’re a household budget. That’s one aspect of it. The second one is I like companies that have good balance sheet. And again, assets exceeding liabilities, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Many people think when you’re looking at stock investing, you have to have a degree from the Wall Street school of analysis, but no. A lot of them have gone wrong, because they went beyond the scope of good economics and good common sense.

Those are the things I look for, human need, profitability, do they have good balance sheets, in other words, making sure they’re not overloaded with debt, etc. Of course, they have to be in a free market economy, because obviously, the free market is a very important and very powerful part of any successful economy out there. Beyond that, I look at other things as well, does it pay dividends and so forth.

A lot of these things, obviously, I detail that in my book, Stock Investing for Dummies. I try to also crystallise that in my courses online, etc, whenever I’m doing live programmes or recorded, because I think people, I don’t know, to me, the more they understand about good investing and their own situation, the better choices they make, not only for their portfolios, but also when they walk into the voting booth, believe it or not. I feel that’s part of it. People forget that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, people forget that many people unwittingly voted for the Great Depression, because they voted for policies,  because they didn’t understand economics, and those in turn, created just wretched conditions in many respects. But anyway, on to your other points, my friend.

Gene Tunny  09:09

I’m interested in this concept you mentioned, value investing. That’s contrasted with what’s called growth investing, if I remember correctly. This is one of the things you write about in the book. Would you be able to explain what those differences are, please, Paul?

Paul Mladjenovic  09:28

Well, value investing means that you’re not going to be putting your money into a company that’s overvalued right now. And how do we mean about valuation? You see, when people are buying a stock, they’re buying the company, and if they’re buying a stock that’s very overvalued, then you have less chance for it to grow or do well over the long term. You’ve seen that happen very frequently. I look for something like is it a fair valuation, because I can look at a company and see things like its book value, the price-to-earnings ratio. Again, I’m happy to explain all of these to folks that need it. But there are some very key ratios that tell you if you’re paying too much.

How often have people saw a company that was say losing money, but it had a very hot sexy technology, people kept on bidding up the stock, bidding up the stock, and all of a sudden, you’re paying a fortune for a company that’s not making a profit, which means that the moment the economy starts to get a little bit worrisome, unstable, recessionary, these are among the first that that see that stocks fall. If people are paying a fair amount for the company itself…

Here in 2022, it isn’t like the way it was when I first started investing. You had to go to the library and dig through 27-pound books just to find some of the right numbers. But now you’re online and on your smartphone, and you can find out the key numbers and the key metrics very quickly. And so it should be easier than ever before. But I think people get waylaid because they see all the financial commentators and everybody is… There’s that sales pitch from Wall Street, etc. But my thing is, you always go back, the way you look at the ingredients of a good recipe, you look at the ingredients of a good company, and then say to yourself… One of the things I mentioned was the price-earnings ratio. I like to find a price-earnings ratio of under 25, because that’s a fair valuation. But people buy these stocks where… Would you like me to briefly just explain the P/E ratio for the audience?

Gene Tunny  11:36

Yes, please. Yes, I think that would be great, please, Paul. And yeah, what it roughly means.

Paul Mladjenovic  11:44

The price-earnings ratio tries to make a relationship between the stock, what you’re buying, and the essence of the company. The essence of the company is its profit, of course. And what we do is take a look at the price per share and the earnings per share.

Let’s say for example, you have a company that makes a million dollars net profits, and they have a million shares outstanding. Well, that’s a $1-per-share profit. The earnings per share is $1. Okay, so we can understand it. A million shares, a million dollars. It’s $1 earnings per share. Great. But now, let’s say that company’s stock is $10. Alrighty, so basically, you’re paying $10 for the stock, and you’re paying for $1 of earnings. So that’s a 10-to-one ratio. But that’s a P/E ratio of 10. Very fair valuation. Of course, if the stock is $15 or $20, you’re still in the ballpark. I think that’s a good price that you’re paying for it. In that case, if it’s 15, you’re paying $15 per stock, and you’re getting $1 of earnings.

What happens is this. If everyone’s excited about the stock, and they bid that stock all the way up, but the earnings are still down here, then you start getting into dangerous territory where you’re over, that there is an overvaluation, the price is much higher than what the company has in basic intrinsic worth. Back when the Internet stocks crashed, many of those P/E ratios were not 15 or 20 or whatever. They were north of 100. Some of them were over 1000, which means you’re paying an awful lot of money for the company. When it’s a nosebleed territory, then it’s in greater danger of a pullback.

The reason why they bid up the stock is that they’re assuming, oh, that’s a great company, the earnings are going to come in. They’re assuming that they’re buying up the stock, that the earnings are going to eventually rise, but you don’t know that. You’re basically speculating. You’re buying stocks today, hoping that tomorrow or next year, they can have a sensational profit, but that doesn’t always materialise. So at that case, you’re speculating. You’re not investing. Investing means you look at the reality of the moment, what you’re paying for, and the actual key components that a company are in a good price range, a good valuation, and the price is closer to it. Then it’s less risky.

I prefer people starting off with value investing, because it brings out much of the risk to begin with, because if you’re paying a lot of money for a stock, then the risk is, what happens if the earnings don’t materialise? What if they start to have losses? What if the economy slows down, and 100 other variables. Then that stock gets up here. It could easily be in bubble territory, pop and come back down and you’re sitting on a loser. That’s the issue with this. You want to go for valuation early on.

It’s like if you buy a dozen eggs, if they’re on sale for $1.99 for a dozen eggs, it’s a lot cheaper than if you were going to pay 10 or 20 bucks for the same dozen eggs. The eggs don’t change, but the price in the relationship does matter. This is among the things I emphasise, hopefully, throughout the book, and to casual readers everywhere. Hopefully that are not that casual with their money.

Gene Tunny  15:03

Yes, yes. I was just checking the P/E ratio for Tesla at the moment. I’m just looking at this one site. It says it’s 193.24, March 22, 2022. That’s a P/E ratio well in excess of–

Paul Mladjenovic  15:24

Exactly. Now, I have no problem with people investing in that type of stock. But they need to tell themselves that they’re not investing. They’re speculating. Could Tesla stock keep going up? Sure. Could it crash? Yes. And if there’s a slowdown out there, and less people are buying automobiles, and that puts a drag on the entire automotive industry, that’s going to put a drag on Tesla as well. Plus, it doesn’t pay a dividend. It’s not that you’re getting paid to hold the stock. For me, that’s a speculative choice. Nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with people speculating. But they need to know that there’s a very material difference between an investment and a speculation. And they need to know that.

Gene Tunny  16:06

If my portfolio was heavy with stocks like Tesla, I would be a growth investor, rather than a value investor. Is that how I should be–

Paul Mladjenovic  16:21

If they all have that kind of valuation, you’re hoping for growth. But the thing is, in reality, you’re speculating, because you’re expecting a stock with a 200 P/E ratio, that you’re hoping that it goes to 250 or higher, translation meaning that their income is coming in and the stock price is going up. They’re bidding it up, and that way you’re holding it, and your stock went up. But you don’t know that. To me, there’s a greater risk in those kinds of stocks. But the thing is this. Fortunately, it’s not all or nothing. There’s nothing wrong with having a few aggressive speculations in your portfolio, but they better not make the majority of the foundation of your portfolio, otherwise you’ll be at risk, especially since when you juxtapose it today’s macro economic environment, it is riskier out there.

I don’t see anything here that’s going to say that a particular automotive company are going to double the number of their cars they’re going to sell next year, when there’s a lot of debt out there. Interest rates are rising. A lot of people buying automobiles. Some of them, fine, you could buy it all cash, well, good for you, I cheer you on. But the majority of the market out there would tend to be borrowing money. And if interest rates go up, then they may not choose that Tesla. They might choose a competing model for now. I think there’s a lot of fragility in today’s economy, if a lot of these things continue the way they’ve been going. I was expecting inflation and everything else over a year ago, and it’s materialising now. Gene, from what I know about you, you’re a smart guy. You were probably there even before me, and hopefully people have benefited from some of your insights months ago.

Gene Tunny  18:10

Our mutual friend Darren Brady Nelson and I were chatting about this, definitely last year, the potential inflation, just because of, as you would have seen, all of the money growth that we’ve been experiencing associated with quantitative easing, and the housing credit boom that we’ve had in here in Australia, and then in other countries. So yeah, certainly something we’ve been expecting. I’d like to ask all about the P/E ratio again. Clearly, it’s relevant to particular stocks. Are you also looking at it from the whole market point of view? There’s a measure of the P/E ratio for the whole market is in there. Is it the cyclically adjusted P/E ratio?

Paul Mladjenovic  18:58

Exactly. Whenever I see that, what is the cumulative P/E ratio for the S&P 500, for example, which is considered obviously a major yardstick and a major barometer of the general health of the stock market. I haven’t looked at it lately, but I do know that it is elevated. It is higher than it should be the last time I looked. That is also a cautionary tale.

For me, because I like to invest in human needs stocks, they tend to have a lower P/E ratio. And so that’s a measure of safety for me. Not the only one, but certainly one of the primary ones. The other side I like to look at, again, especially when I’m dealing with beginners or beginning intermediates, one of my criteria is also they should be investing in stocks that are paying dividends. We call them stock dividends, but they’re really company dividends, because a dividend that’s being paid out by a company. Obviously, if it’s a successful company, the dividend tends to rise, over an extended period of time, like years and decades. And it’s a sign of health. It’s a clear, tangible measurement of the company’s financial success. If they’re having a dividend that’s rising every year, that’s a good sign. So I like that.

And the other point of it is too is that whenever there’s a market crash or a major market event and stocks go down, you’ll find out that dividend stocks tend to be among those that tend to recover a little bit sooner. For me, if my stock goes up or down 10 or 20%, but my dividends are coming in, quarter in, quarter out, I’m not that worried about it. For many reasons, including in family accounts, we talk about having the cash flow coming in. I have clients and students that I remember from decades ago, that today, they’re getting annual dividend payouts greater than their initial stock investment from decades ago. It’s gotta make you feel good.

If a stock falls, then what happens is that… For example, again, using a simple example, if I have a $20 stock, and it’s paying a $1 dividend, that’s the equivalent yield of 5%. 5% of 20 is $1. All right. So let’s say that today, the market is crashing big time, and my $20 stock went to $10 a share. All right. Obviously, I’m not happy. But the thing is, now that $10 stock, if it’s still paying a $1 dividend – again, I’m looking at the health of the company, it’s making a profit or whatever – if it’s still paying $1 dividend and the stock is $10 now, that tells me that the dividend yield at this moment would be 10%. That is a very attractive yield. So what happens is other investors will go in and bid it back up again. And so it has an easier time recovering.

The bottom line is, Gene, is that healthy, quality companies will keep zigzagging upward, no matter what you throw at them, whereas companies that are not financially stable, don’t have all the numbers, are losing money, they’re going to be zigzagging downward. So, which zigzag you want to be part of? You look at these things, because they’re not mysteries. This is public data.

Gene Tunny  22:18

Yeah, I think it’s great advice. And it’s consistent with what David Bahnsen recently told me when I chatted with him, and he was talking about his views on dividends. He’s very pro dividends. I think it’s also consistent with Warren Buffett, isn’t it? I mean, Warren Buffett looks for those companies that deliver reliable earnings over the long term. And in his day, I’m not sure if it’s still the case now, it was Geico, the Government Employees Insurance Company, and also Coca-Cola, I think. So those are the sort of dependable companies that… Not that I’m making any particular recommendations, but it’s those sort of companies, I’m guessing.

Paul Mladjenovic  23:06

And by the way, the human needed investing, as much as I love it for beginners, etc, in the generic sense, also it tends to be a great approach and strategy during inflationary times. The last year and a half, especially with my end with the Federal Reserve, printing up trillions, look, people forget that inflation is not the price of goods and services going up, it’s the value of money going down. When you over-produce something, and you have more units of it out there, chasing the same basket of goods and services, then don’t be surprised that the prices go up.

Plus, in addition, during the pandemic, and people were worried about their economic situations, etc. , when people are worried, and there’s anxiety, and there’s a declining or low consumer confidence, then people will not invest in their wants. They won’t spend on their wants. They’ll spend on their needs. They may want fancy whatever, trips and vacations and snazzy restaurants and so much more. But if the economy is contracting, and there’s more worry on the radar screen, and people are worried about their companies, their jobs, etc, then they’re going to shrink what they’re spending on that that is want-driven. And they will keep on buying things that are need-driven, so that they’re trying to adjust accordingly to the economic environment.

So all of a sudden, you start to think that those things that we do need, all of a sudden in an inflationary environment, it’s almost like they’ve switched hats to be more growth-oriented. You have found that in the last 3, 6, 9, 12 months, the things we’ve invested in that we needed, all of a sudden, they become spectacularly solid  things to put your money in. Grains, for example. I spoke to some of my students last year. I said, “If you’re investing in money, where it’s tied to things that are rising in price such as human need, and you’re talking about energy, gasoline, you’re talking about groceries, which means food and commodities, those things have performed very well.” So, in many cases, I tell people out there and yeah, yeah, good, you can keep complaining about inflation, but part of your action plan is to be invested in those things that benefit from inflation versus being hammered by inflation.

Gene Tunny  25:34

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  26:08

Now back to the show. Now with an action plan, Paul, I’d like to explore that, what that means for an individual or for a household, because we need to think about how diversified should your portfolio be, and then also how actively or passively you should manage it. Do you have views on those that you could take us through, please?

Paul Mladjenovic  26:35

Yeah. There’s the simple 80/20 rule, if you want. All things being equal, I’d love to see people put 80% of their foundational investment money into human need things, food, water, beverage, utilities. Again, it’s a very simple question. Ask yourself, what will people keep on buying, no matter how good or bad the economy is. If people are unemployed, they’re still going to eat, they’re still going to turn on their lights. And that’s where you should have your money, especially if you’re a beginner, and especially if these are worrisome times.

And I like the dividend portion, because then I know that, in many cases, especially many brokerage accounts, they give you the ability to reinvest the dividends. So even if you don’t need the money, if the stocks are down and contracting, the dividends will buy more of it. Then on the other side of it down the road, when you’re ready to have the money being sent home to you, it’d be good to know that over a period of years, and you started with 50 shares, now you have 75, 100, 150, and now their dividends are higher, plus there’s more shares, which means you’re going to have more money coming in to make yourself more financially secure in your later years.

A lot of stock investing, it doesn’t have to be mysterious or crazy. A lot of people think that to make the real big bucks got to be extra risky and extra speculative and extra growth-oriented. Well, that might be true with a portion of your money, but it shouldn’t be the bulk of your money. Absolutely. So 80% value to human need. And I’m saying this real time too, March 2022. And I think a lot of people’s experience with human need is bearing these points out. There, at least 80%. How’s that?

Gene Tunny  28:24

So yeah, 80% on investments–

Paul Mladjenovic  28:27

Of your investable money should be in human need things.It doesn’t have to be just stocks. There are ETFs. There’s actually excellent dividend ETFs, where they’re tied to human need and pay dividends. Again, I can’t get specific with this audience because I don’t know who I’m talking to. But everybody knows they can go on a search engine and find dividend ETFs. They can find ETFs.

For example, when the economy is doing very well, and everybody is flush with cash and they’re positive, then they might go for, I said wants, and that basically is a reference to consumer discretionary. When you have extra cash, what do you do? Fancier restaurants, vacation, take the missus out for the weekend somewhere, all good stuff. When you’re talking about a contracting or problematic economy and commensurate issues in the stock market, then you think consumer staples, that’s where a lot of those human needs are going to be.

There are ETFs that invest just in consumer staples or utilities. You don’t have to worry about trying to choose one winning stock. Why not a winning ETF or winning mutual funds? There’s a lot of sector mutual funds out there. There are food and beverage mutual funds. There are food and beverage ETFs. And these would make a lot of sense in today’s environment, for 2022 and probably for the remainder of this year, because I don’t see any spectacular rebound coming in the economy. And if they’re going to raise interest rates, because they’re fighting inflation, somebody’s going to win, somebody’s going to lose.

Right now, there’s people out there who have a lot of fixed bond. That bonds market is huge. You can have a spectacular problem with the bond market, because if there’s a lot of fixed debt, and interest rates are rising, what will people do? You want to get rid of your, whatever, 2.5% bond and buy a 5% bond? That’s fine, but then that means a lot of selling. And so in this environment, I tell people, if you are going to be in bonds, make sure they’re high-quality AAA, and that they’re adjustable rates. And that could be another component of your portfolio, if you want something diversified away from the stock market. Those are the kind of choices, AAA, high quality, and adjustable rates involved so that you’re not stuck. You don’t want to be stuck with a fixed interest rate, like say, 30-year bonds, and rates are going to be driven upward. That’s going to be like a hammer to the value of the bonds you’re currently holding. Okay, so adjustable rate, quality, AAA, if you can have that, that’s the kind you should have.

Gene Tunny  31:03

That’s 80%. There’s another 20%, is there?

Paul Mladjenovic  31:09

Yeah, exactly. If you’re ultra worried, and you don’t want growth, then maybe 20% should be an adjustable rate, high-quality bonds.

Gene Tunny  31:16

Oh, gotcha. Right. So that’s a really safe part of it.

Paul Mladjenovic  31:20

That’s a possibility, exactly. If you’re more growth-oriented, then put 20% into growth-oriented stocks or ETFs, again, depending on… See, the interesting thing is that investing and speculating can be something in a generic, but in many cases, it depends on the person involved. If I’m talking to somebody who’s a year or two from retirement, then you’d bet they’d have to be much more so into very secure things, human need, high-quality, adjustable rate bonds, money in the bank, low debt, and a few other features. That would be important. But if you’re talking to a 25-year-old, I’d still say, keep the bulk in your human need, but now you could put your money into growth-oriented things that are out there, some types of commodities, because inflation is pushing some of these things up. If people have seen the price of gasoline and wheat in recent months, then they get a good idea about the kind of things that grow in an inflation-driven environment, as we’re in right now.

Gene Tunny  32:18

Yeah. What are your thoughts on real estate, so both your own home and also investment properties? Do you have any thoughts on that? One of the challenges we’ve got in many advanced economies is just the very high cost of housing at the moment. And I’ve seen some commentators questioning whether buying your own home actually does make sense for a lot of young people. So yeah, I’m interested in your thoughts on that.

Paul Mladjenovic  32:48

First of all, obviously, owning your own home I think is fine. I see no problem with it. Obviously, I don’t argue with real estate folks. I know some people who will rent a cheap apartment, then they have their money and invested it and buy rental real estate. That’s fine. Some of this is a personal proclivity. Me, for example, I love real estate, but I don’t buy fixer uppers or other type of thing. My favourite type of real estate investing is true real estate investment trusts that I can buy with a few mouse clicks through my brokerage account. Those people who want to be beginners in the world of real estate, and you’re nodding your head so I think you generally agree, that I think real estate investment trusts is a great place for the beginners to be.

I like the idea that with a few mouse clicks I can get in, and a few mouse clicks, I can get out. The same rules of real estate apply when you’re talking about real estate investment trusts, REITs. You look at the type of real estate, and you look at the location, very important. For me, I like that there are a couple of hundred different REITs out there, certainly in the American market. I’m sure there’s more. I’m sure there’s some in your neck of the woods, etc. But REITs are a way that I can buy a few shares, whether it’s 5 shares, 50 shares, 100 shares, or more, I can participate in a real estate property, get my dividends, CD appreciation, but somebody else is… You have an executive team that’s managing all the properties and that’s their specialty. I prefer that.

Keep in mind, real estate investing, think about the types of real estate. Right now, in the last couple of years, I’ve told my students that I would avoid things like office building real estate investment trusts, because I think if the economy’s going to shrink, and you got pandemic residual issues, why do you want to be there?  I would be invested in REITs that are in the residential complex. For example, the last few years I’ve avoided like the plague shopping centre REITs, and instead I’ve been looking into REITs that specialise in data storage. They still pay dividends. And you see more movement there. There are REITs that are cell tower REITs. In other words, their property is cell towers. They pay good dividends. And cell towers won’t go out of style anytime soon. And if you have teenagers, you know what I mean.

Gene Tunny  35:23

That’s interesting. I’ll have to have a look at some of those. I wasn’t aware of those. That’s fascinating. Paul, can I ask you about gold and silver? You’ve written on gold and silver in the past.

Paul Mladjenovic  35:36

I’ve written two books on precious metals. And I’ve been very bullish on gold and silver and other metals over the last few years. And I feel that when everything finally shakes out, I see no reason why gold and silver couldn’t be at new market highs in the coming months. I have associates of mine who feel that these things will go to new multiples of where they’re at now. That remains to be seen. But the bottom line is, I do think that gold and silver will be appreciating for a variety of reasons. And I think they’re part of a portfolio that’s really…

Let me tell you, I can give one important reason why everybody in your audience should own at least a little bit of gold and silver. Are you ready? I’m going to give you a reason that you won’t hear very often. And by the way, if your financial advisor talks you out of them, tell them to call me. And this is what I meant. Okay, so anybody within the sound of my voice, remember the following phrase, counterparty risk. Counterparty risk. That’s the number one reason why you should have some. I’m not asking you to head for the hills and live in a cave and have a tonne of either one. No, not really. You should be diversified away from the risks of paper assets.

Me, I love gold. I love stock investing. I love the paper assets, definitely. But I favour gold and silver, the physical, because gold and silver are two assets that  are among the few assets on the landscape of choices, of investment choices that do not have a counterparty risk. You talk to your financial advisors about this, see if they know this point. It’s very important. Years ago, I remember I used to even teach financial advisors, and I think this is an important factor.

What is counterparty risk? See, here’s the thing. If you invest in any type of paper assets, you’re undergoing counterparty risk. For example, if I buy stock, the counterparty risk is the performance of the company. In other words, counterparty risk means that if you invest in an asset, the value of this asset is directly dependent upon the promise or performance of the counterparty. If I buy stock, and that company is doing great, my stock will be fine, I’m sure. At the moment that counterparty fails, falters, goes into debt, goes bankrupt, what’s going to happen to the value of my stock at that point? You follow? There is counterparty risk with stocks.

Bonds, perfect example of counterparty risk. If I invest in a bond, the first risk I think of is that, will the payer of this bond pay back the principal and the interest as stipulated in bond agreements, to me as the bond holder. There’s counterparty risk there. What if that entity defaults? Many times in history, especially during bad economic times, people have defaulted on bonds. And so you have to understand that, but also to currencies.

Right now, inflation means that that money is losing value. And that’s a counterparty risk, because a currency is only as good as the counterparty being the central bank of that country, managing, hopefully, properly, that money supply. And we’re seeing that there’s inflation everywhere, the ruble falling apart in Russia, because of the conflict, runaway inflation in Venezuela, etc. In many cases, the currency of a country is similar to the dynamic of the stock with the company. When the company is doing well, the stock does well. If the country is strong and doing very well, and they’re managing their currency, then that currency will be strong. But once you mismanage that, and the currency goes into hyperinflation…

By the way, you’re talking to a guy who has experiences personally with my family. In 1963, as a four-year-old with my family, we escaped communist Yugoslavia. And by the way, communism is a horrible thing, but that’s a different conversation. But they, in 1993, 1994, tried to help out their own economy with inflating the currency, the dinar, and you had one of history’s greatest hyperinflationary catastrophic incidents occur in Yugoslavia, and it collapsed into nothing basically. No more Yugoslavia as of 1994 . I got married in 1993. So my wife and I were thinking about going to Yugoslavia for our honeymoon, but as the civil war it was going through and collapse, these things ruin a good honeymoon. So we opted for the Caribbean instead. And in retrospect, am I glad I did.

Gene Tunny 40:18

Absolutely.

Paul Mladjenovic 40:19

Currencies have counterparty risk. Virtually every paper asset you can think of has a counterparty risk. Its value is directly tied to the promise or the performance of a counterparty. Gold and silver have their own intrinsic value. Gold and silver have never gone to zero. They had value thousands of years ago, they have value now, and likely, gold and silver will continue to have value far into the future. So precious metals, and I mean, the physical, look into bullion coins and the like. Do your shopping. As you know, I did the book Investing in Gold and Silver for Dummies. It’s a whole book on how to choose and shop for it, etc. But gold and silver, again, are a diversification away from currency mismanagement, away from the risk of paper assets, away from geopolitical and other risks. And I think that that is an important fact. And let’s face it, you hear about the rich over the aeons, the centuries, they always had gold and silver. The people are in the know. They know something, I think that’s something for you, that should be a clue to you to start figuring it out and seeing if a small portion does make sense in your overall picture. And I think given today’s economic realities, a portion of it doesn’t make sense.

Gene Tunny  41:38

What about NFTs and crypto that everyone’s talking about? Have you had any exposure to that or do you have any thoughts on that? There’s a lot of excitement about it.

Paul Mladjenovic  41:52

Let me tell you, a few years ago, I was asked about writing a book on cryptocurrency. And the point is, I think I’m good at what I know, but I know the limits of what I know. And I got them a great author on that book. So my publisher does have one called Cryptocurrency Investing for Dummies, and she does a great job with it.

Again, I feel the same way, having a small portion of it is not a bad idea. But there’s been just a lot of, I don’t know, overwrought speculation about it in recent years. And the thing is this. Part of the success of cryptocurrency, again, was the idea that it’s limited in scope. And, and so obviously, if you don’t over-produce it, and more people are buying it, then of course, you’ve seen how well it’s performed. I mean, it’s been amazingly volatile, crashing here and there. And I think investing small amounts here and there, again, as a small diversification away from everything else, is not a bad idea, but a lot of these people who are going whole hog into it, etc, we have to be careful. You have to remember that the governments of the world look at cryptocurrencies as a competitor, and nothing stops them from waking up one morning, passing a few laws and regulations, and all of a sudden, your cryptocurrency becomes problematic versus being an asset. So again, tread lightly here. Obviously, you may get a cryptocurrency expert on who will have a totally different opinion. And I’m not here to argue with those folks.

Again, I think having some cryptocurrencies is fine. And for me, some of my clients, I say to them, why not get some of the blockchain technology companies, because that way, you’re indirectly working with it. And that worked out to be a pretty good speculation. But again, same feelings as with gold and silver, have some of it, not an overwhelming amount, because you never know, because cryptocurrency… Everything we’re talking about has some kind of risk. With cryptocurrencies, what happens? I mean, it’s extremely dependent on electricity. What happens when there’s a power outage? Can you trade with it then? I doubt it.

The whole point about guys like me, in my industry… I was a certified financial planner for 36 years. I retired it a year ago, but I’m still active with education and teaching about this and I love my topic. I doubt I’ll retire anytime soon. I love what I do too much. However, the world of CFPs and financial advisors, they live and breathe the word diversification. Every asset has some type of risk attached to it, if you have money in the bank, fine, you’re away from financial risk, but now how about inflation risk, purchasing power risk, and a few other ones out there? What if the bank closes its doors because there’s a national crisis with the central bank, etc?

This is why you have a little bit across the board. That diversification just makes you stronger and not dependent on the goodness or wellness or the speculative success of an individual entity or asset class. Again, have some cryptocurrencies, fine. Have a couple of different ones, fine. But don’t have your life savings in it. Don’t put too huge of a percentage of your investable assets in it. Same thing as I would say with many other things that are out there. And of course, everything mitigates things. If you are a real estate expert, then having more of a portion of your assets in real estate is not that big of a deal, because your personal expertise is mitigating the extra exposure, but that’s fine. Knowledge is always the thing you should be accumulating the most, after accumulating your wealth, because the both of those things are tied together.

Gene Tunny  45:40

Yeah. Very good observation there, Paul. A couple more questions on how actively should a person be managing their portfolio. Typically I’ve just sort of said, maybe I made some decisions, like a couple of years ago, I’ll invest in this ETF or I’ll have these investments. And I’ll just commit to putting a certain amount in every month or whatever. And you get that, they call it that dollar cost averaging technique. You’re not worried about what the prices are at any particular time. And then over time, you do better out of that. How do you think about how actively investors should be managing their portfolios? How frequently should they be reviewing their selections? Any thoughts on that?

Paul Mladjenovic  46:36

Again, everyone’s a little bit differently, but if you’re not reviewing monthly or quarterly statements, if you’re not speaking to whoever you trust at least once a year or once every half year, then there’ll be issues, obviously. The more you’re aware about what you have, the better. I mean, I look at decisions every day, for my family. And the interesting thing is, if there’s one thing that people need to understand also, it is that to be successfully monitoring your situation, keep in mind that successful investing isn’t just what you invest in, but how do you go about doing it. If your positions are residing in a brokerage account, then nothing stops you. I highly encourage everybody within the sound of my voice to speak to your customers, to your brokerage firm’s customer service department, ask about things, about tutorials and things like stoploss orders, trailing stops. Sometimes you could do some, again, to a small extent, things such as covered call writing, which gives you income. It’s a hedge on a position as well, in some cases.

For example, trailing stops, I’m a big one on this, if, if you’re nervous about what you’re holding, alrighty, then again, it’s not just what you invest in, it’s how you go about doing it. Then you should consider trailing stops to minimise the downside. Now, what does that mean? Well, well, first of all, the generic about a stoploss order. If I bought a stock at 20, and I’m nervous about it, then I should put a stoploss order in at 18, 10% below, just as a generic point. 10% lower, you give it room to fluctuate. My stock at 20, if I bought it, obviously, there’s no upside limitation. But at 18, I now have downside limitation. In other words you’re adding discipline to your situation. You’re not just blindly watching this stuff. You could put that stoploss order in for the day or make it good until cancelled. It could sit there for three months.

If you’re worried about the coming weeks and months, go through your portfolio. If you need to go with your financial advisor, by all means, and say, I’m nervous about position x over here, what should I do? Well, they should be telling you. First of all, if it’s quality, that should remove some of the anxiety. But if you’re still worried, then either, A, sell it if you need the money, or if you don’t need the money, then put in a stoploss order in it. And then what happens? Let’s say your $20 stock zigzags up to 30. Okay, well, now what? That $18 stoploss, cancel it, like it says, good until cancelled, and replace it with one at 27, as an example. Now, what happens? The stock is at 30, you put a stoploss in at 27. Well, now what? Now if there’s a market crash, stock will go down, will trigger a sell order at 27, and you’re out. And you kept 100% of your original $20 plus a $7 per share profit. You added diligence and safety and discipline to your situation, not because you were expecting it, but because you started worrying etc. Then put those on. What’s the worst that happens? You’re selling and protect your money and keep a portion of your profits. Well then, that’s the very essence of prudent investing. You follow?

So in other words, everybody within the sound on my voice, if you have a brokerage account, go to their site. They’ve got to tutorials and other things. Call them up. Ask them, hey, what can I do if I’m worried about my stock dropping? What can I do? Have that conversation. But I find that a lot of people don’t have those conversation, and then what? Then when there is a market crash, and your positions plummet all the way down to the bottom or whatever, or lose 50%, then you do could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, you have anxiety, and so much more.

Right now, as I’m talking to you, the markets are generally in good shape today. But that could change next week. You could have a 1,000-point drop on a Monday morning, because you have trillions flowing in and out. You’ve got sanctions and unintended consequences. You don’t know when the next crisis is going to blow up, which in turn will blow up point A, point B, point C, and all of a sudden, you wake up one morning and your position or your broker has been hammered to pieces. Again, diversification. Remember that you have many tools and tactics in your pocket with these brokerage firms that you should be fully aware of. When you’re fully aware of these and you start applying some of these things in a very modest way, your confidence grow, your knowledge grows, which means more importantly, your financial security does better.

Gene Tunny  51:18

Yeah. Okay. I might ask one more question before we wrap up, Paul. There was an interesting passage in your book on Stock Investing for Dummies, where you’re asking what school of economic thought does the analyst adhere to? So this is things you should ask about analysts when you’re assessing the value of their contributions, what they’re saying, what their advice is. You make a point that if there was one that adhered to the Keynesian school of economic thought, that’s analyst A, and analyst B adhered to the Austrian School. Guess what? I’d choose analyst B, because those who embrace the Austrian School have a much better grasp of real world economics, which means better stock investment choices. Could you explain what you mean, there, please?

Paul Mladjenovic  52:05

Well, it’s funny, you brought up an interesting point. I mean, I love the Austrian School. And as you know, Darren is a devotee of that. It doesn’t necessarily mean the Austrian School… There’s a couple of other schools that are pretty good. There’s the Chicago school, Milt Friedman, I admire his work. It’s just that there are many financial advisors out there who… Obviously, Maynard Keynes, I don’t think highly of him. I mean, if I had a financial advisor who loved Karl Marx, I would be terrified, because that tells me they know nothing about economics. I’m serious about this. Yeah, I’m very serious about it.

By the way, to me, it’s not that I look for a financial advisor who’s into these particular schools. Question number 17, that helps me hone my selections. I want to make sure that they’ve been around for a few decades, they’ve seen bear markets and bull markets. That’s a much more important criteria for me that they understand these things. But if it ever comes down to the school, I’m going to make sure they understand, because remember, it was the free market schools out there were warning about the Great Depression, they were warning about stock market bubbles, and they were warning about these things. I found out that these disciplines helped me be a better tactician and strategist with the money.

I mean, I remember when I read an article about the stock market bubble in 1999, and that was from the point of view of the economics. That just cemented some of my concerns about the stock market. What did it mean? For those students and clients who were your conservative, retirement-oriented, made sure they were in safer waters. But those people out there who were speculators, like me, for example, I made sure that I was not invested in the internet stocks of 2000, because the first wave, you don’t know which ones are going to survive or not. They were all losing money. So in terms of investment, I stay away from them. However, my speculative side, I was buying long-term put options on these. So when these things collapsed, my speculative put options garnered some very nice gains. And that was my speculating.

Understanding basic economics and following some of these schools of thought would just enhance  your ability,  because obviously, understanding the macro picture makes you a better choice of which micro choices, which stocks and ETFs are going to either survive or thrive in that kind of economic environment, and it actually gives you another leg up. When you understand the big picture, it just makes it better choices in your own portfolio, so you could sleep better at night and serve the family that you love.

Gene Tunny  54:48

Okay, that’s a great point, Paul. I was just thinking about Keynes. Keynes himself was a rather good investor and made a lot of money for King’s College in Cambridge. However, I think there’s some speculation that he may have benefited to an extent from insider knowledge he gained while working for the Treasury.

Paul Mladjenovic  55:13

That’s very possible. And actually, when you think about it in the 1920s, look him up, there was an economist called Irving Fisher. When the stock market was in bubble territory, he was notorious for making the call that he feels that they’ve reached a permanent plateau. And this was whatever, like six or nine months before the crash of 1929, and he had been filing for bankruptcy. So no one should have listened to Irving Fisher, including Irving Fisher.

Gene Tunny  55:42

Exactly. Okay. Paul, any final points before we wrap up? I think this has been great. You’ve given me a lot to think about. And I mean, I think we could chat for hours on this stuff. But I think I’ll have to wrap up now. And yeah, I’d be keen to chat with you again.

Paul Mladjenovic  55:57

I really appreciate it. I mean, obviously, you mentioned Stock Investing for Dummies, I’ve done a lot of books out there. So I certainly invite people to see if those things help them with theirs. And if people want to find me, I’m at ravingcapitalist.com. But the point is this. Knowledge is really so important with all of this, and the idea that you’re a better consumer or a better investor, it also makes you a better voter, too, , and it also makes you much more aware of what policies out there will do harm and which ones will do right, and which investments will go up or down accordingly. It’s all about the knowledge. Ignorance is going to be extremely problematic in the coming months. So I invite them to get as much knowledge as possible, apply it, talk to everybody, you’ll be much better off. If they keep on listening to gentlemen such as Gene Tunny, then I think they’ll be served well, and thank you again and again. God bless your audience, and I wish them all prosperity.

Gene Tunny  56:54

Thank you. Paul, it’s been a pleasure. Really appreciate your time. And yeah, I hope to chat with you again soon. Thanks so much.

Paul Mladjenovic  57:02

Continued success to all of you. Take care, Gene.

Gene Tunny  57:04 Thank you. Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com And we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye.

Credits

Big thanks to EP133 guest Paul Mladjenovic and to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode. 

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. Economics Explored is available via Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.

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Economic update

Crazy Crypto charts

The forthcoming EP120 of Economics Explored includes a discussion of the massive price growth seen in some cryptocurrencies over 2021. In the conversation, to be published at 12am UTC+10 on 1 January 2022, show host Gene Tunny refers to a couple of great charts from data service provider Macrobond showing just how incredibly crazy that growth has been.

The first chart shows the percentage growth in the value of different types of assets, including Bitcoin, gold, and stocks on the Nasdaq, relative to their levels at the start of the years they arguably each became the subject of a “bubble”. This clearly shows just how much of an outlier Bitcoin is. Note all data in this chart and the next one were current as at 29 December 2021.

Chart from Macrobond comparing Bitcoin’s price growth far exceeding that of other assets which have allegedly been subjects of speculative bubbles since the seventies, including gold, Japanese stocks, and tech stocks.

The second chart shows the mega growth in the value of a range of cryptocurrencies, including the Gala and Axie Infinity cryptocurrencies associated with their respective online games.

Chart from Macrobond showing incredible growth in the value of particular cryptocurrencies over 2021, particularly Gala (+31k%) and Axie Infinity (+17k%).

This post is for general information only, and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Please see a qualified professional regarding any investment decisions.

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. Economics Explored is available via Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.

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