#789: Stablecoins Are Replacing the Petrodollar with Michael Every

SPEAKER_1 (0:07)

You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.

When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

SPEAKER_1 (0:29)

I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Marty Bent (0:36)

Michael Every, welcome to the show, sir.

Michael Every (0:38)

Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Marty Bent (0:40)

Well, like I was saying, I'm very excited to have you on. I've been reading your research reports for years now. I think the one that you sent in the beginning of the year about reverse perestroika, what's going on with Trump and his global economic geopolitical strategy in his second term, really impacted how I viewed the world this year, particularly as things have been unfolding. But I think to take a step back, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the tenor of that piece to me was that many people are stuck in viewing the world through a lens that existed for 50 years, leading up to maybe 2020, and we have tectonic shifts happening in the macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape that are going to force people, whether they like it or not, to view the world through another lens, another way of saying things are not what they used to be only a few years ago.

Is this a correct assumption of your perspective?

Michael Every (1:42)

Completely, completely correct. I mean, I don't know exactly where you want to take this conversation. I'm happy to go wherever you would like, but literally in the background, just before starting to speak to you, I was just typing a little update of what I'm seeing here this morning.

On that basis, I'm just plucking a couple of different stories which all feed into the same thesis. One, you've had the declaration from OpenAI that they're ahead of Anthropic and they now have a new AI, which is an AGI, so an Artificial General Intelligence, which is your Skynet moment, if you want to believe the hype. Now, I'm not getting into the long grass on that because I'm a tech guy, but I'm fully cognizant of the fact that once you pass that particular threshold, if it's true, it's a Manhattan Project moment where we've got something artificial that's smarter than we are, that can teach itself. So that's one to watch because there's a lot of implications on a lot of different fronts. Elsewhere, we've got headlines that Putin said he might be interested in peace in Ukraine. Yeah, right. That's as everyone thinks the mobilization is more likely because it would be peace on his terms apparently.

Then we've got, in the last 24 hours, Trump being reported that potentially he might want to say that the Iran War is over, and again, it rolled my eyes saying, yeah, right, and immediately another report coming out backing what my view has been all along, which is that he will actually restart the war again after the midterm. This is just a pause to refresh, if you will. South Korea is now in the background saying they may send military forces to Hormuz. All the pressure that he's been placing on them and saying, well, maybe I'm going to scale back support in Asia. Maybe, just maybe, he's got his first actual ally to start sending forces to Hormuz to help try and control it. Another huge breakthrough there. At the same time, and I'm going scattergun, but it all feeds in together, the Australian Financial Press, I think it was the day before yesterday, ran a op-ed. Now, op-eds can say a lot of different things. The Wall Street Journal has loads of crazy op-eds all the time, but it's not so common in Australia. They ran an op-ed arguing for negative immigration.

Not lower immigration, negative immigration. Now, I've never seen anything like that. That's against a backdrop where you've got the Australian housing market really collapsing, and yet the RBA, their central bank, is probably going to have to hike anyway. It's just inconceivable for most Australians up until recently. And then in the Netherlands, you've had the Netherlands, I think it's the Scientific Research Council for Government Policy. I may be mistranslating that title slightly, the WRR.

They've put out a policy paper saying that Europe is really caught between a rock and a hard place between the US and China with their neo-Mercantilist trade policy, which is something I've been expounding on endlessly. And the Europe needs to really start making very, very hard choices. And the world that it understood is dead. They need to think outside the box. And they strongly imply the Europe should either push for a China plaza accord to push the renminbi down to what on the back of an envelope would look like being around the four to the dollar level or the three to the dollar level, versus where it is now, which is never going to happen. Or they should mirror China one for one, which includes the ECB pushing the euro lower. So the ECB's role would be to try to weaken the euro versus the renminbi. Again, this is just mind blowing stuff for people in markets. Or lastly, they need to put in place tariffs and capital controls to make sure that they can just match what China is doing on that particular front. Now, I'm not saying any of those will happen, but you are seeing in just that two-minute little rant from me there, the unraveling of just vast amounts of the ideological and intellectual superstructure that we've built the last 45 years with, all coming tumbling down at once.