The Great Financial Reset Has Begun | Marieke Flament & Nicolas Colin

Demetri Kofinas (0:00)

What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guests in this episode of Hidden Forces are Marieke Flament and Nicolas Colin, co-authors of Currency of Power, a newsletter exploring the new monetary order that they argue is emerging in the form of stable coins, programmable money, agentic commerce, and the commodification of compute.

By the end of today's conversation, you will have a much richer understanding why the global financial system may be on the cusp of a structural transformation comparable to that which accompanied the Nixon shock that ended convertibility of the dollar into gold and the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s. This includes a discussion about how the maturation of the digital economy is creating the conditions for new waves of financial innovation, why dollar-backed stable coins and programmable money sit at the center of that transformation, what China's parallel efforts to build insulated financial rails means for the future of dollar dominance, and how the rise of machine-to-machine commerce and the commodification of compute could reshape the monetary order in ways that most policymakers and investors have yet to fully appreciate.

Marieke, Nicolas and I spent the episode's first hour discussing why they believe we are living through the initial phase of a great financial reset, and the similarities between the present era and that of the 1970s and early 80s, when a convergence of geopolitical shocks, financial innovations, and technological revolutions transformed the global economy and capital markets in ways that would have been otherwise unimaginable. The second hour turns to what has made my guests more cautious about the pace of dollar-denominated stablecoin adoption, including China's decade-long effort to build insulated financial rails and the diminishment of American soft power under the Trump administration. We discuss the dynamics of capital repatriation in Japan and Europe, the prospects for financial repression and capital controls, and the potential for the US military to be used as a source of leverage in negotiations between Tokyo and Washington. We end the episode with a discussion about machine-to-machine commerce and the emerging agentic economy, why existing financial infrastructure is poorly suited for AI agents, how stable coins could become the default payment layer for autonomous systems, and what this means for dollar dominance in a world where compute replaces oil as the most important economic commodity. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation, become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like earned-a-mit dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io.

And I or someone from our team will get right back to you. Lastly, because this conversation deals with investing, nothing we say on this podcast can or should be viewed as financial advice. All opinions expressed by me and my guests are solely our own opinions and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly timely and important conversation with my guests, Marieke Flament and Nicolas Colin.

Welcome to Hidden Forces.

Nicolas Colin (3:54)

Thanks, Demetri. Great to be here.

Demetri Kofinas (3:55)

This is a sort of partial welcome back because Nicolas has been on the show before. He was also at our recent Genius Retreat on the Greek island of Syros.

Marieke, this is your first time coming on the podcast. You two have been collaborators for some time, at least publicly, on Currency of Power. Not for that long, maybe two or two and a half years, but I assume your relationship goes far back. Before we start, just give us some background. Marieke, why don't we start with you since the audience already has some background on Nicolaou?

Marieke Flament (4:25)

Yeah, sure. By background, I'm a computer engineer. I guess that's how I would define myself. I've been working in technology, more precisely in financial technology for the last 10 years or so. My first work in financial technology was actually for Circle, which is today the issue of USDC.

Then I led the Digital Neobank. Actually, Nicolaou, that's when I was at Circle that we met. It was in 2018

That's how far our work together goes back. We met in 2018 Then I was the CEO of a Digital Neobank in the UK called Metal. Nicolaou was actually my advisor back then, so we worked together back then. More recently, I've been leading layer one protocol, blockchain protocol. For the last year and a half, we've been collaborating on Currency of Power. In my day-to-day, when I'm not writing with Nicolaou, what I'm doing is actually advising different companies. One is Kivalis, which is a European consortium of Stablecoin, a digital Neobank in Germany called N26, and another group called IG Group. Anyway, I'm on boards of company. I write with Nicolaou and I think a lot about the topics we're going to talk about today.