Ten31 Timestamp: Growth Mindset

Marty Bent (0:00)

Mr. Arnold, it's Labor Day, but the situation needs monitoring. No rest for the wicked here.

John Arnold (0:06)

The situation never sleeps. It doesn't take holidays.

Marty Bent (0:10)

It doesn't, neither do we. It's a relatively quiet weekend, though.

Outside of Bitcoin land, I mean, we were just mentioning it, we don't have it on the list, so maybe there's acknowledgement at the top of the episode. Liquid, the side chain produced by Blockstream, which is a federated side chain of Bitcoin. Looks like some white hat hackers may have moved 4,000 Bitcoin out of liquid, which is, I believe, 95 percent of all the Bitcoin that's been pegged in. So a situation that is unraveling. We're monitoring the situation, but I feel like we should make the audience abreast of the situation as it's unfolding.

John Arnold (0:49)

Yeah, active situation, unclear how it's all going to play out. We'll probably have more to say on it next week. Hopefully, if some of it gets resolved or clarified, allegedly a white hat hack, we'll see if that's true. A very, very odd situation on a variety of fronts.

But hopefully, it does not end up actually being a long-term loss of funds scenario.

Marty Bent (1:10)

Yeah. So we'll probably touch on that more next week, but that situation's unfolding right now. Situations have come and they've passed, and we've got to talk about them. The G20 meeting, the second meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors was held in Asheville last week.

And you highlighted control F growth in the PDF of the minutes of this meeting. Why did you do that, sir?

John Arnold (1:37)

Yeah. I mean, it's the story of the whole meeting pretty much, right? Like if you go and look in the statement, it's fairly short. It's got about, I think, 20 points in it, most of which were agreed upon by everyone, one of which was disputed by a certain member of the G20 that did not appreciate the group's focus on the unsustainability of heavily export-driven economies that under-consume internally. We can let people guess who objected to that. But otherwise, there's also an interesting reference in there. One of the points is specifically carved out for digital assets, quote-unquote, and stable coins, which I think is, maybe we'll talk about that at the end, but just an interesting signpost as well that they carve out space for that in the statement. But generally, this, if you read through, there's its growth, growth, growth all over the place. I went back and looked anecdotally just a few prior G20 statements, just to see if that's like aligned with baseline. And generally, it does not seem to be.

These statements historically in the last few years have not foregrounded growth in quite the same way. So I do think it's notable that you got 34 references here, and what is basically just a few page document to ramping up growth. And Besson himself, Treasury Secretary Besson, succinctly summarized it for everyone, everyone in the room that, as he put it poetically, the world is awash in debt, and the only way for us to get out of it is to grow our way out. So something that we talked about for pretty much the last year, that this is going to be the playbook. The various administration officials, especially Besson, have not been shy about that over the past year. But interesting to see it take center stage at this multilateral meeting where everyone is basically being told to get on board.

This is the way that it's going to have to go.

Marty Bent (3:17)

Yeah. That's a big question. Can we thread the needle? I think that's on everybody's mind is paying attention, particularly in the administration. And it is a high stakes game where you got to get a lot. You got to do a record with Michael Every. Last Thursday, John helped me with some show prep with Michael Every, the chief strategist, head strategist at Rabobank.

We talked about his reverse Parastroika piece in the beginning of the year, which is, I think, probably like the best start of the year piece I've read in quite a while and has been like a lens through which I've viewed everything. I highly recommend you go back and read that. Not everything has come to pass, but I think directionally, he's very on target there. And one thing he said in our conversation on Thursdays, that to do everything all at once and thread multiple needles at the same time growth is imperative and it's refreshing, actually. I mean, it's obviously high stakes and a bit unnerving at times, but the fact that they're focused on growth after we had the era of ESG, DEI, Net Zero, it looks like during that period, we're building up all this debt and now there's more sensible people in charge, maybe not in charge, but in positions of power. They're saying, well, that was probably a mistake. We need to grow our way out of that. One of the ways you can do that is by lessening regulation, when it looks like Scott Besson is calling for less regulation to help small banks.