저자: Dr.CraigWright · 외국인
요약 보기
패널 토론에서 Craig Wright 등이 세계 경제의 위험(미중 디커플링, 브렉시트, 중동 지정학, 포퓰리즘 반발)을 논하고, 중앙은행의 부채 기반 통화 발행과 은행의 정보 비대칭을 비판하며 비트코인을 대안으로 제시한다. 금융위기는 예측 가능하다는 주장과 블랙스완 투자 위험 언급도 나온다. 자막 일부(파트1)로 구체적 자산 가격 예측은 거의 없음.
다듬은 글
Well, isn't that amazing? We seem to have made the impossible happen. Can you actually think of these people not just sitting at the same table with us here, but in one room? It's amazing, isn't it? I'd like to give applause to our panelists. It's a very special occasion, and believe me, a lot of effort, time, and energy went into making this happen. It's not something you do on an ordinary, daily basis. Thank you very much indeed for coming here, and I'm very pleased to host you.
Okay, if I may kindly suggest, each of you obviously needs no introduction, because people know you very well indeed. But how would you briefly introduce yourself and highlight your major achievements? Professor Rini, can I start with you, please?
Well, I'm an economist. You're a communist? An economist. An economist. Don't say that in Great Britain.
Okay. Brock Pierce: a janitor, a plumber, a carpenter. Oh, that's very unusual already, isn't it?
I'm Bobby Lee. I got into Bitcoin in 2011. I previously co-founded and was CEO of BTC China and BTCC. Now I've just started my new startup this year called Ballet. We make cryptocurrency physical wallets for the whole world. So far, you're the only one doing anything serious here. Is that correct?
Yeah, yeah. I know you ruined it for everyone, because I wrote the Satoshi white paper. I'm Tom Vas, by the way. We have a booth in the back, so please come visit us. Ballet wallets.
Craig, so I'm the cause of all this. I'm an eternal student. And no, I'm sorry, but you didn't write it, and I'm sorry, Tone, you don't even understand it. You have this concept that you can't take cryptocurrency, this whole idea that miners vote to change the protocol. The white paper doesn't say that. The last line says that miners enforce the rules. As an economist, you—what rules? Kind of suggest that we just can—to a very short—
That was by way of introducing yourself, is that correct? Okay, yes. Let's keep it concise. We'll come to the points, don't worry. Don't jump the—
I've never been called concise. Don't worry.
Okay. Now that the panelists have been introduced, I'm more than happy to ask some more, funnier questions. Starting with you, Professor Rini: what do you think is so wrong with the world economy, and why should we all be so scared of the upcoming recession? I know we're going off a bit of a tangent, but presumably we have one of the most authoritative experts in macroeconomics to date, and I'd be pleased if Nouriel could share his views on this first and foremost. So why is it a scary time for the world economy?
Well, there are a bunch of tail risks in the global economy. The first is the risk of a trade, currency, technology, and cold war between us and China. The last 40 years have been a period of global integration: more trading of goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information. We could be at the beginning of what I call deglobalization, or balkanization of the global economy: fragmentation, decoupling, the splinternet. That's a permanent negative supply shock.
Here in the UK, there is a risk of a hard Brexit that will lead to a recession, not just in the UK but, in my view, in the rest of Europe too. There are geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. If there were a war between us and Iran, all would go above $100 a barrel, and that will tip the global economy into recession, like it happened after the Yom Kippur War in '73, the Iranian Revolution in '79, or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
And there is a broader issue: a populist backlash against trade, migration, globalization, and even technological innovations that become capital-intensive, skill-biased, and labor-saving. We've seen it in advanced economies and emerging markets. So there are lots of things that are potentially wrong in the global economy, in brief.
Okay, Brock, do you have anything to add to that, or do you think it's all good and well in the world economy, or are you not concerned?
Oh no, I'm very concerned. I tend to agree with Nouriel 90% or more of the time. I'm one of the few people in crypto who agrees with most of what he has to say. And clearly, as we look at the global economy, yeah, it's a rather scary world right now, especially with China being the primary driver of this. US-China, and what can be triggered. There are a hundred things right now that could go wrong, and it's not just one thing. So I'm very, very nervous about the outlook. I'm a big advocate for gold as a result of that. I'm a big advocate of cryptocurrency, which is still not ready for prime time. It's not ready for the average consumer. But I still have great hope that we'll continue to innovate and make these things easier to use for, call it, the average consumer. But right now I'm a big fan of hard assets. I'm not a fan of stocks or bonds. I'm very nervous.
If I go back to 2008, allegedly the year that gave birth to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, what tools were you using, Nouriel, when you were predicting, if I may say so, the financial crisis of 2008? Did it happen on the spur of the moment? I don't think so. There has been some really deep, profound thinking behind it. So how did you manage to figure it out back then?
Well, I spent the last 30 years of my academic career, and I also did work during the Clinton White House doing policy work, studying the phenomenon of financial crises. There are various aspects of them: currency crises, balance-of-payments crises, sovereign debt crises, corporate debt crises, banking crises. There can also be household debt crises, or any combination of them. Usually they are the result of a buildup of asset and credit bubbles that reach a peak, and then a boom and bubble turn into a bust and a crash. So anybody who has done work on them, theoretically, empirically, or on policy, for the last few decades sees them coming.
My good friend Nassim Taleb wrote a book about black swans and thinks of crises as black swans. But in my book about crisis economics, I refer to them as white swans. He thinks of a crisis like an earthquake or a tornado, which cannot be predicted. In my view, it's more like a hurricane: a buildup of financial, economic, and policy vulnerabilities that eventually reaches a point of crisis. So they're more predictable than things like earthquakes.
In other words, predicting a world financial crisis is easy peasy for you? Is that correct?
In reality, it's never easy to get the timing right. But you see a buildup of vulnerabilities that eventually reaches what people refer to as a Minsky moment. Those who have studied them for a long time have the tools to understand why they're coming. They're not just random events, not just a distribution with fat tails where something like a tornado or earthquake happens. So the global economy is now, to say the least, rickety. There have been financial crises every few years, both in advanced economies and emerging markets.
The title of this panel that I suggested runs: "What are the flaws of the global financial system as we have it today?" It's a bit provocative, because no one sitting here would deny that there are concerns, and growing concerns, about it. No one is going to sit pretty.
So, Bobby, how would you define the most crucial flaws of the centralized global financial system as we see it today? And then perhaps we can discuss how we might overcome that by introducing blockchain technology and perhaps crypto.
The biggest problem today is the money system we use. Money is used in every part of society, all over the world, in every economy. The money we use today is not just paper or coin, but also the digital money that circulates in banks and transfers and so on. That money system is no longer asset-backed. Rather, we're using a debt-based money system that can be inflated, printed, and increased without our cooperation. Central banks around the world unilaterally decide to increase the money supply in their countries, and they do it in the name of preventing the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and so on. But the reality is that by having that control, central bankers have tremendous power over the people.
None of us here are enslaved. I don't see shackles on anyone's hands. But if I tell you that your work and labor over the last three years, or the last 30 years, can be arbitrarily taxed by the government, which can take out your earnings through inflation and money printing, then we might as well be working for the government. That's the problem. Today we're invisibly shackled to the system. We all go to work, today, tomorrow, this year, this month. If the wages for that work can be arbitrarily taken away from us without our permission, as humans and as citizens of the country, then I think that's a big problem. That's the problem with today's debt-based money system.
Could you substantiate that argument?
Yeah. I completely agree with Bobby that the biggest problem is the easy money printing of governments all around the world. Bitcoin fixes that. But just Bitcoin, not shitcoins, not Ethereum, not other cryptocurrencies, not fake Bitcoin forks, fake Bitcoins coming off of forks like BCC and all the other ones. Bitcoin helps to fix that, and that's what I'm looking forward to.
As for the black swans Nouriel mentioned, yes, they're there, and they come up way more often than statistics tell you they should. But if your investment strategy is to invest in a black swan, I can tell you firsthand you are going to lose all of your money. You're supposed to invest in things that are trending and then hedge that. There are lots of financial tools to hedge against black swans. Don't get overleveraged, and don't assume you're right. You can't predict black swans. You can try, and you'll be wrong on your timing unless you get lucky, and you can't invest for that. But what you can do is opt out of the current financial system through Bitcoin and protect yourself that way against those black swans.
Craig, if I might kindly add something to that. Bitcoin was really developed to look at Minsky's instability hypothesis and asymmetry in information. Bitcoin is a tracing system. If you read Menger's idea of money, money needs to be traceable. This is not an aspect that a lot of cypherpunks run around and admit, yes, but money requires traceability. This goes right back to the 17th century and includes cash and all the rest. Now, the key aspects of the financial crisis that no one really talks about come from information asymmetry in banks. They have a monopoly on information. They get to own our information, and they capture what we can do, so we can't easily move between banks. We can't share information between organizations. The information asymmetry extends to CDOs and L
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