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Peter St. Onge

lines on the record: 67
first: 2023-09-27
most recent: 2023-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure, let's see how I do daily videos on economics and freedom. I use this backdrop right here. People ask me if it's real. Believe it or not, it is. My wife put it together. So anything good about the product is hers. All the mistakes are mine. Anyway, those come out every day. I'm also very active on Twitter as all of us are nowadays. And I do a weekly podcast that gathers the videos and then also a substack where I do longer form articles, including the Fall of Rome one that we just talked about earlier.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because not enough people know about Bitcoin. There's still an institutional memory for gold, right? 50 years ago, our financial system was still operating on gold until Nixon. So it's kind of hard for people to grasp, but I mean, we had the entire menu of, you know, we had mortgages and credit cards and we had the whole thing back in the 1970s. And so there's still a lot of memory of it. Central bankers understand it. People in general understand. So if the collapse is coming in 2026, which I think is unlikely, we'll go to gold first. And then I think we continue doing what we are, which is that more and more people understand Bitcoin and they can see why it's better than gold. If, on the other hand, the collapse is not happening for 30 years or something, then I suspect we skip gold for the first time in history. We skip gold and we go direct to Bitcoin.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gold's fundamental flaw, which is that it is always vulnerable to the state. And because Bitcoin has no instantiation, it can live without the state. It does not depend on any institutions. That, I think, is why ultimately Bitcoin wins. Now, if Fiat is going to be dying in the next three years, then we have to go to hard money.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to be able to verify the gold. And the only way that you can verify the gold is that you have to know where it is. And it's very expensive if you tell everybody, I have a gold-backed currency and the gold's in my house, you're going to get visitors at night. So now you got to hire guys, you got to put up the wall. You need the sharks with the lasers on their head. You have to protect the gold. So at scale, the only way that gold works is that you have to have a central depository where you collect that gold. And then you can issue paper money off the gold as long as it's fully redeemable. That's perfectly stable. The problem is the gold is a fundamental vulnerability to any government that becomes interested in taking it. And governments do the darnest things. They will inevitably be interested in taking your gold because it's free will. Who's going to stop them? Quote-unquote, monopoly on violence over their territory if your goal is in their territory, then they can take it anytime they like. This is how the world works. So that, I think, is fundamentally the question. Bitcoin solves.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you talk to a fiat person and you're advancing goal, they'll say, okay, if gold is so amazing, why doesn't anybody use it today? Why don't we have 200 countries in the world and nobody uses gold? It's a fair question. And I think the answer is because governments are very, very good at violence. Gold has a fundamental flaw, which is that you cannot have a gold-backed currency where you tell everybody, I have the gold, but it's hidden. Impossible.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Panics, they have collapses. That opens the so called political overton window, which is when you get terrible things happen. You get changes in political systems and freedom inevitably is always at risk when you come into those moments. So inflation is very dangerous. It impoverishes us and it creates a never-ending series of crises. It creates a crisis industrial complex which basically preys on those crises. And each time it ratches up, ratches up and takes our liberty. So we have to constantly defend our liberty. Sometimes it's a little bit frustrating because fundamentally we have this inflationary regime. That's why hard money. And then the next question is throughout history, that hard money, the best hard money has been gold or silver. And so why Bitcoin? Why not gold? And I think there it comes down to you sort of zero in on exactly what is gold's flaw. Because I do love gold. And the problem with it is that”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for a first timer, I'd probably start leading with why hard money. So that's the first question. So why is our money today broken? Why is paper money a problem? And throughout history, hard money has been absolutely essential to prosperity. Because without hard money, governments will inevitably take over huge parts of the economy. They will then render that dead. Really, it's like an infection once it takes over your arm, you're done with that arm, okay? That arm is written off. So it really does spread like an infection, which is fueled by inflation. On top of that, inflation causes the boom bust cycle. So the whole central bank process of creating inflation, that's what creates the booms that lead to the busts. You can trace almost every catastrophe in history. You can link that to a boom bust cycle. World War I, the Civil War, the War of 1812, countries universally start wars. They have financial”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Wall Street has guys in the Senate on a speed dial. And so the bills are always written by the guys who just fleeced us. And of course, they wrote the bills so that they get all the goodies. So next time around, we get to permanently bail them out and there's no new entrants that they have to compete with. So we're already well down that path where the economy in many ways is captured by these profitable industries. They get a hold of the political process. They can shut out the new competition. In fact, they can sell the entire rest of the economy. They don't care about it, you know, housing, manufacturing, services, the gig economy, all this stuff, when they need to, all that stuff is ready to be sacrificed on behalf of these most profitable, most corrupt industries in the country.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There you go. Exactly. And I mean, this puts in relief. So these guys, they gamble trillions of dollars. They lose it. They keep all the winnings. And then when they screw up, we, the taxpayers, get to bail them out. And then they say, so to make sure it never happens again, let's get a bill in here to really clean up Wall Street. And as always, that's the hustle. Okay. The bankers always buy the regulation. They have the useful idiots who push for it. And then the useful idiots, the guys down in Zuccotti Square, complaining about the 1%, those are not the guys who write the bill. The guy who write the bill are paid $1,000 an hour, their law firms, and they are paid by Wall Street.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Per year for memory. Okay, so you would have kind of this spitter pattern of new banks. It was hard to start a new bank because they put all these rules in. They wanted to shut out the competition, but it was possible. You look at 2008, nothing. It's like, no, new banks started. It is, I think it might be zero over the entire time. I know Caitlin Long started a bank, but I mean, it's just shocking. She's trying to start a bank.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think now it's something like 75 years after the death of the creator. I mean, this is ridiculous. You and I both create content that like, I'm not going to shoot videos unless I have exclusive rights for me to do the math like 110 years. It's bonkers, right? But that's pure corruption. Okay. So they get that stuff bribed in pharmaceuticals. I won't get into details there, but everybody knows what happened these past couple of years in terms of government privilege. And then, of course, finance. Finance has been at this for a long time. They get these special rules put in. They can chase out the competition. You take the 2008 crisis, for example, which was caused by the major banks, right? It was not caused by hedge funds. It was not caused by small mom and pop bankers. That was made on Wall Street. And if you look at the number of new banks started in the U.S. before 2008, you would have a couple of banks, like five, seven, something like that.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, yeah, I was going to say absolutely right. And one part that Buffett's probably not going to get into is that those intangible industries also generate the kinds of profits that you can bribe politicians with. So, I mean, you can see it across those industries. For example, copyright.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specialty products that's got relationships with their clients, just kind of a special reason they're around. And other than that, who is starting new manufacturing ventures in the US? Generally, you either have to have government money or, I mean, you do a little bit of it by saying it's made in America and then a certain part of the market that's going to want that. But fundamentally, you would pretty much have to be insane. You'd have to be a masochist to actually start a manufacturing business in the United States. On the other hand, finance, pharma, Hollywood, you'd have to be a lunatic nut to start those things.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which they claim is to make sure that you can join the bounties of the developed world. And then the other two tend to be intellectual property. The US will give you anything if you give them intellectual property because as pharmaceutical patents as Hollywood. And so they will sell automobiles down the river, electronics, manufacturing, all of those industries. Good luck. You're out of luck in exchange for those industries. And so we're already getting that here where you have this hierarchy of certain industries that because they're so profitable, right? Any industry that involves intellectual property tends to be more profitable because you can charge more and charge monopoly. And so those industries are outbidding the other industries. And so, you know, if you sort of look at that out in the wild and the real world, you've manufacturing is increasingly characterized by a guy hiring seven people in some metal shop in Milwaukee or something. I mean, it's just kind of these tiny little, you know, probably really.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then other industries, even if they are run by decent people, they have to participate to defend themselves. And so you kind of get this war of all against all, where you have a corporatist system that you have to fight. And then the industries that can't muster the resources, so generally that would be the industries that are most competitive. They don't have the extra profits lying around to bribe politicians. They tend to go first. And so you get this really twisted economy. And if we transpose that onto what we have today, you have kind of this hierarchy of industries in the United States that have pull. You can see it actually whenever we do a quote-unquote free trade agreement where we will protect certain industries and then other industries get completely sold down the river. Specifically, when you look at a US trade agreement, it's going to be finance, pharmaceuticals, and Hollywood. Okay, three, very specifically. So it's going to be financial liberalization.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they definitely had that. A lot of it is once the state starts intervening in the economy, it is inevitably going to be corrupted. It's like vice police. Once you put a bunch of nice, decent beat cops on drugs, almost to the man, they're going to go over the dark side. And so governments do go over the dark side. And what happened in Rome, of course, is that you essentially had to auction on government policies so that certain people were getting massive benefits. They would then help their friends. It was sort of institutionalized corruption where you would have entire industries that would fleece the public. They would get rules passed that benefit their particular industry and that impoverish the rest of them.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That like CIA is going to do in anybody who gets off the dollar. I think those days are gone. I think the grown-ups, I'm not saying I like them, but they're... They were very serious about their work at some point, and they appeared to no longer be. They're essentially throwing it away.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neighbors, it's true. But the problem is that this administration, they have been expanding the forbidden list that's going to get you in trouble. So now it's green stuff, it's potentially labor, potentially LGBT, or other policy goals. Now, if you're Saudi Arabia, or even if you're just somewhere like Uganda, most of Africa is extremely socially conservative. They are not on board with the social policies of the Biden administration. If they are being painted into a corner where they have to approve certain social policies or have their entire banking system collapsed and ankle action going on, that is a fundamental problem, right? That is a danger for them. So a lot of these countries who should be friendly, they should be on the dollar because the dollar is the most liquid asset in the world, kind of on the merits. They ought to be all in their own dollars. And they're actually trying to diversify away now because of that political risk. So I think the idea”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the problem there is that whatever you're feeling towards Russia, okay, during the Cold War where we had hot wars going on, proxy wars going on all over the world, we never did that because the thing is you want your enemies to be dependent on you and on your system. What happened by seizing those dollars is that it put every other country in the world on notice, including China, including friends, including places like Indonesia and Brazil, and put them on notice that if we don't like what you're doing, then we will destabilize your country and try to get you hung up by your ankles. Immediately after that move, you had all these international conferences. For example, you had the ASEAN, the Southeast Asian countries. President Indonesia, who has traditionally been open to the US, he's not a pariah state. And he got up on stage and he said, we have to move away from the dollar because look what happened to Russia. Now, you might say most countries don't invade their network.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In US terms, right? So that was a large chunk of dollars. And the reason they seized them was that they were trying to start off a bank collapse in Russia in order to presume they hoped to have Mr. Putin hanging by his ankle somewhere.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The price of oil then underpins a lot of other things. And so that was kind of a lynch pin to making the dollar central to world trade. So that was one. And then the other was countries putting their official holdings into the US dollar. And so the dollar is dominant. I think it's still. And they've really been throwing both of those away, particularly since the Biden administration came in. So I assume they had some break. They didn't bring in the old Neocons, who would always emphasize that dollar demand is a policy goal. I said they really throw them away. So in the case of Russia, the dumbest thing they did was they seized Russia's dollars, the dollars that were owned by the Russian Central Bank. That was about $400 billion worth of dollars. Now given the size of the Russian economy, that would be more like seizing $4 trillion.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we absolutely do. And that's an interesting discussion. When you're talking about de-dollarization, there are a lot of people who they'll say things like if Saudi Arabia starts using the Chinese yuan or the euro, then there'll be assassinations or something. And they're basically, I think, working off a playbook that may have been true in the 60s and the 1970s or something, but I don't think that's true anymore, that today, whether it's incompetence or just other priorities, US government is no longer defending the dollar the way they used to. So if you look at kind of the old days, there were really two props that were holding up the dollar. And one of them was the petrollar. So the US was essentially providing free security to Saudi Arabia and other countries and unpaid mercenary in exchange, they would agree to price their product in dollars, and then that would provide a certain amount of international demand for U.S. dollars.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you can still reverse it in the 1970s, the government got really out of control, and then they had Reagan come in and a lot of that. Some of it came back down, a lot of it kind of leveled off and took a break for a long time. So up until now, I think things have Either haven't gotten bad enough that we get it on that sort of permanent decline, or they've gotten bad enough, but it happens so fast that the voters said, no, no, this is horrible. Let's flip right back. If we look at the World Wars, for example.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of rearguard to try and keep what slept the productive economy. When you get to that stage, that's then what gives you sort of those classic hallmarks of Rome, the barbarian invasions, the corruption in the military. In the case of the Song dynasty, there was one I thought telling episode. The army wasn't really doing its job and they had all these Japanese pirates running around marauding in the countryside. And so they said, okay, well, let's go ahead and use incentive payments to try to get the army up off their butt. and to take care of some of these pirates. So they decided to pay them whatever, one coin per boiled head. And so you can guess what the Army did, which is that it went to villages. You had to boil the head so they couldn't tell that it was children and women. Once you go down that path, it gets really, really ugly. So we are thankfully not at that stage yet. We are now at this, but we're coming to that tipping point where before.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is really the marker that you see in the money. And that's where we are now. And so you've got runaway deficits. You have, the taxes have not increased yet, not substantial, at least not in the US, in Europe and Canada. They tend to be higher. But in the U.S., they really haven't come up yet, mostly because they're still kind of letting the inflation deal with it. When they get to the limits of inflation, you know, which is really going to come out of the bond markets, then at that point, yes, they're going to go to the next man standing, which is going to be the taxes. But this sort of progressive government takeover of the economy that has really been fueled by fiat, once the cancer gets above a certain size, not only it's very, very hard to get rid of, a lot of people at that point are depending on the government being large and generous. So it's hard to get enough voters together to try and reduce the size of government. And you do cross some tipping point where at that point it's just a matter of time. You're fighting.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have gone from the healthy parasite, right, where the productive economy makes things and the government takes off a hunk and gets to go play with it, that I don't like that. But anyway, that's the best you can hope for when it comes to governments. But when they go from that to actually, they're no longer a parasite, now they're predators.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it'd be like Americans fleeing to, I don't know what's a country everybody to Bangladesh because things are so bad in America. And that was sort of rapacious government, what inevitably happens in the decline of every empire is that they will, one of the first things they come for is the money. You can almost trace, I mean, people do this with the Roman Empire. You can literally trace out on a chart the silver content of the Roman coinage. And this will give you almost like an exact marker for how bad things were getting. Now, of course, today, you know, they don't have to clip the coins. They don't have to debase them. So what they do instead is just print money. Through fiat money. And so again, the inflation rate really serves the same purpose now. So right now in the world, it's something like half a dozen countries have inflation rates over 100%. These are very, very reliable markets for governments that have completely lost the plot.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, they'd recently invented woodblock printing, and at that point you can do really cheap. If you have monks drawing out your money, it's not really going to work, right? You really need something assembly line style. So the Chinese figure that out and they went through a similar process. But that got me interested in sort of the fall of empires, specifically what kinds of things we're doing today that are really imitating these empires throughout history. And when you look at the Roman Empire, the sort of first symptoms, what got the whole ball rolling on it was economic mismanagement. So you heading government that was spending way too much and then it had actually become predatory on the private economy. So the taxes, the regulations, arbitrary seizures. There was one point where landlords and peasants were actually fleeing to the Germans, which I don't know, that would be like...”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a substatic article on that recently and kind of going through given his thesis on the decline of the Roman Empire. And that actually, I did an interview with Charles Payne. Fox News and Charles Payne is he likes the big topics. I think most of the day he's chatting with stock docies who are like, yeah, yeah, you know, rate's going to do this in the next three days. And if I'm wrong, then I bet you. He likes that big picture stuff. So anyway, he was actually one who brought it up. And I thought, okay, let me go back and look again. Remember what his stick was. And I actually did a paper on this as well about 10 years ago on sort of the Chinese version of the Roman Empire, which was the Song dynasty. And the Song Dynasty is famous because they invented paper money.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I can see that other people do it. They don't get eaten by lions. Okay, that process works. And so it's ultimately going to be in Bitcoin where normal people using Bitcoin, frankly, they're not going to need to understand it. It is much, much easier to understand than fiat, but they're not going to care. Their question is, are other people using it? Are they using Lightning or whatever other payment technology comes along? I hope there will be more. They're using Lightning. They're paying almost nothing, you know, three SaaS per transaction, whatever the number is. Good, it works. That's really all they need to know.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so everybody else uses credit cards, and I can see how it works. You buy stuff, you don't have to pay for it. When you're like 70 years old, that's kind of amazing. Like, wait a minute, let me get this straight. Okay, so you buy stuff, you don't have to pay for it. And then in the mail, they're going to ask you to pay something else, and that's going to be pretty much the same deal, a little bit of fees. Okay, good. That's all people need.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Credit card, and where does the credit card money come from? How is that born? Every time a child laughs, a new credit card balance. When you actually try to go through all those things, it is very difficult to understand. And you compare that to Bitcoin where you own it, right? I mean, Bitcoin is literally like the way that your grandmother thinks money works. Which is that you got a coin, and that's a piece of money. And if the bank puts a dollar on your passbook, that's because they got a coin in the vault. That's literally how your grandmother thinks money works. And that is literally how Bitcoin works. Away, our job is extraordinarily easy. The only reason why people are able to use fiat, despite how ridiculously difficult it is to understand, is because everybody else does it.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what he concluded is that when you go to the bank, you have to have an account at a bank in order to get a mortgage, right? You would think, well, I want to get a mortgage at your bank. Why can't I just pay you fees? And then you send me the mortgage to my account somewhere else. No, no, you always have to have an account at that bank. And the reason is because when you go in for a loan, they literally create the money on the spot. So that's very hard for people to grasp. Yeah, I mean, you know, when we compare, and notably that was a monetary expert, PhD, he'd been doing money his entire life. He's all over the place doing interviews on money. And he had to go through that with the bank to sit down and figure out exactly how it's created. So when people talk about Bitcoin's complexity now, the good news for the perspective of Bitcoin is that, you know, if you take the complexity of Fiat, the complexity of central banking, fractional reserve banking, the relationships they have with the money printers, so you have kind of the mother printer over at the Fed, and then you have the little baby franchise printers in each. All right, when you try to go through all that, and then you get the...”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. There was this, you know, like, what is it? It's debt. And I mean, what? There was this professor in Switzerland who has an experiment, is a PhD, is a monetary expert. He's widely known. I can't remember the guy's name, but I want to say Warner. Anyway, he went out and asked a bank. He said, okay, I want you to make a loan for me. And I mean, I'm just going to repay it the next day, but I want you to go through step by step exactly how that loan was created because apparently PhD monetary economists, they have not figured out whether banks, commercial banks, print the money they lend you. Okay.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's frustrating because It has, and you're right, a lot of that is intentional to make it confusing. Sometimes in Bitcoin we talk about how, or we sort of complain how difficult it is to explain Bitcoin to people. And the thing is, if you really sit back for a second and consider how difficult fiat is to explain.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unsustainable, and so they're trying to trim back on it. But in the long run, China sadly is not going to have deflation.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China is wait for it going through deflation and they sort of present it as if this is a really horrible thing. This is like the plague in economics. But in fact, deflation itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that very specific type of financial deflation, which we dodged it by a half inch in March, but that's always the threat. So right, if China, I don't think they're going to go into a long-term deflation. And the reasons that the Chinese government loves to print money just like ours do for the same reason. counterfeiting is extraordinarily profitable if you're the counterfeiter. So China will just print their way out. So we're not going to see long-term deflation over there. But in the long or in the short run, I think it's likely because of manufacturing, also because of the government right now doesn't want to do stimulus because it's afraid of the debt levels. So China's got debt levels that are actually higher than the US. If you want to feel good about something today. And so the Chinese government is, they feel like that.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. Right. Yeah. Right. Because governments like the licensed counterfeiting operations known as central banks. But the one type of deflation that is really bad is when your stuff stayed the same. You didn't have economic growth or anything. It's just the money suddenly went away. Normally, if you're printing about...”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can go through every single thing Elon Musk does and all of it was invented like in the 1880s. Computers, rockets, maglev, magnets, electricity, everything was invented back then. And that was a deeply deflationary period. So deflation itself is not a problem. If China is going to go through 30 years of deflation, then we're doomed because they will own everything. Deflation is grand. The reason why deflation has this bad name is because there's a very, very specific type of deflation that can happen. And central banks cause that. Okay, and that's when you have a financial panic. All of a sudden, remember, inflation is money chasing goods, right? So if you have deflation, it means that you got lots of goods. That's the good deflation. You got lots of goods. You got the same amount of money. And so now...”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when people talk about China going through deflation, so I think certainly in the near term, they're going through deflation in manufacturing. And that's a very specific reason because they have overproduction and then you have to cut the prices. But it's worth noting that having deflation in your economy, that's not actually a bad thing. Like deflation in general is not a bad thing. It makes people richer. The best periods of growth in American history or European history have been deflationary period. Really our golden age was the late 19th century, the so-called gilded age. Gilded came from socialist journalists who didn't like it. But that was really the golden age. Almost everything that we use today was invented in that period between about 1875 and about 1910. It's basically Wilson who killed it with the Fed, the income tax, World War I, the whole progressive moment. But anyway, if you take that 40-year period, essentially everything that we today think of as high tech was invented then.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China, Russia, the whole BRICS group is. To be that somewhere else so that they can make a lot of money providing those things. And we're actually at the point where mineral dominance, right? So the degree to which the China-led group of countries dominate the production of a lot of minerals is even higher than OPEC's domination of oil. So we are absolutely sort of giving away a hostage for the future. And China, they still have enough bureaucrats who have their heads on straight and they see that opportunity and they're absolutely taking it. Something else you mentioned earlier, Jeff Booth with deflation.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he's absolutely right on energy, but also on minerals, like on raw materials in general, China has been much, much smarter than the US or the Western general. Ukraine war sort of repositioned a lot of China or a lot of Russia's oil now, where it was aimed at Europe and now it's being aimed towards China. That was an absolute unforeseer. Once it's going to China, it's likely that it'll keep going to China. China's also been very smart about cultivating relationships with African countries to get both energy supplies and mineral supplies. And this concerning for a West, which in general is trying to destroy its own extractive industries, so they're bad for the environment, quote unquote. Now, of course, the activists will say this while they're on their iPhone that uses cobalt and zinc and all these other wonderful things, but they just don't want it to be happening at home. They want it to be somewhere else where somebody else's problem.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, their point of view is to fleece the productive sector, squeeze out the eggs. You're not even waiting for the golden eggs. You're like squeezing it to get more eggs out. So they are absolutely killing their economies in China at the moment. Yes, they're going through rough patch, but I think in the long run, they have a lot more people in the government who actually understand how to grow the economy. And so if they make corrections from what they've been doing, I think that they've got a pretty bright future ahead of them compared to the West, which I think is almost guaranteed to keep going downhill.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a big part of China's problem. But the thing is that over that 30-year period, China has really built up a lot of expertise in their economic bureaucracy so that China really in many ways looks like Singapore in terms of how it manages the economy. Now, in recent years, that was overruled by Xi's political bureaucracy, and that's why China's getting into trouble here. But if we sort of look on a 20 or 30 year timeline here, The US has almost nobody like in the bureaucracy, the US or Europe has almost nobody who actually knows how an economy works.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over to electric vehicles, and those electric vehicles require much fewer workers plus a lot of the components basically don't exist in the US at the scale. And so they're all going to have to be imported from China. So you've got all these disruptions that are coming from how the government is choosing the winners. So if you take that back to China now, before we celebrate and do our victory dance, in many ways, China is our future. I think more important than that, China. The economy under C has not been like the previous 30 years where China was kind of this free market paradise. So she is much more anti-market. He's much more suspicious of markets. He channels money to state-owned enterprises. He's definitely halfway between the free market paradise and like Mao Zedong.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, all those assembly line workers don't have enough income to go buy a scooter, the property price is going down means that households, they're not taking vacations or they're not investing in a new car. And so that's really bringing down the entire economy. So China, I think, is definitely going through a rough patch here. But a lot of people in the West, I think, are taking a victory laptop saying, ha ha, the whole Chinese miracle was built on sand. It's all fake. I think, is short-sighted. We are committing all of the mistakes that China does. We're actually doubling down. We're getting a lot worse at it. So if you look at both the EU and the US are cranking out these trillion dollar green funds that they're going to invest in the future. And so they're going to be squandering the money over capacity. That's one of the reasons the UAW is striking at the moment because this massive flood of government money is going towards forcing the car makers to”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too big to bail out. So if that starts crashing, then that's essentially Chinese household savings. I mean, they'll get wiped out, right? Years and years of saving for the kids and for their futures. So there's the potential in China for a lot of unrest on both of those counts. If you have people, young people who are laid off for manufacturing jobs and they've got everybody losing their life savings, they're not going to have a sense of humor towards the government. And those two sectors, they make up about half of the.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are in property. And a lot of what they'll do is buy an apartment. They don't intend to live there. In fact, they don't want anybody to live there because the apartment is worth more if it's never been lived in, like a new apartment. And they'll use that as a savings account. So they'll just park their assets over there. And as long as you can get a really cheap mortgage from the government, it's a great deal, right? The property is going up 10% a year. You're paying, I don't know, 3% on your mortgage. That's free money, right? You're just basically printing money. The problem, of course, is that so much, I mean, 70% of household savings, that means that if that property starts crashing and you name some of the major property developers in China that are now in trouble, they've got major debts. These are like $100 billion, I think Evergrand is like 200. These are really large numbers. $2, $3 billion. Yeah, these are potentially big enough that China can't necessarily bail them out.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interpreted that the way that you and I would. So the numbers must have been really, really bad. There's actually shadow estimates that maybe the youth unemployment is like 50%. These are shadow estimates because nobody ever really knows what's going on in China. But anyway, so manufacturing is definitely in trouble. And manufacturing is a much bigger part of the Chinese economy, famously, right? They stole all the jobs. So it's something like 25% of the Chinese economy. And then the other industry that's really in trouble is property, right? So China, again, preferentially channeled capital towards property and something like 70% of Chinese household savings.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of areas. Example in cars, so Chinese buy about 20 million cars and China can produce about 30 million cars. There's a lot of extra cars. And so there's only two possibilities. One of them is that the lines go idle, then you lose all those millions of jobs. The other option, of course, is that you crank them out more or less at cost or maybe even below cost, variable cost, so that you're using the factory you've already amortized it. And then you just pump those things overseas and you sell them potentially even below cost. So you quote unquote pump them. They're going through both of those. So there are a lot of, let's see, it was 20, the youth unemployment rate in China hit a record high. It was about 20.5 or it might cross 21%. At that point, the government stopped reporting it to save money. And, you know, people, of course.”
2023-09-27 · We Study Billionaires · BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT