Is There a Third Alternative?

March 17th 2022.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US confiscated the Russian central bank’s significant monetary reserves, and banned some Russian banks from the SWIFT network. Serious questions are being asked about the survival of the postwar dollar-based world monetary order. Will Russia, China, and other countries actually build an alternative international settlement system, after years of threatening to do so? Will global central banks stop accumulating US treasury bonds and replace them with gold and commodities? Will we witness the birth of a new commodity or gold-based monetary order? In this seminar, we use the insights from The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard on temporal and spatial salability to explain why reports of the death of the dollar and the emergence of a new gold standard may be exaggerated.

Resources

• Bretton Woods III memo by Credit Suisse analyst Zoltan Pozsar
• Arthur Hayes’ blog Energy Cancelled
• Reuters report on commodities crisis
• America’s Quiet Default by Nic Carter
• Saifedean’s first book, The Bitcoin Standard
• Saifedean’s second book, The Fiat Standard