Jim Grant, Depression, FED discussed on Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Is that why you believe that? So, you know, Jim grant has done beautiful work in this arena. He has studied closely, the depression of 1920 21. That was truly a depression. GDP declined to that great of an extent. The bad credits were expunged from the system and on we went to the roaring 20s. There was no intervention. Yeah, there was no intervention. So there is precedent. There is indeed precedent and this was at a time, by the way, I looked all the way back into the archives of Federal Reserve, and in the very early 1920s, there were bad banks that did have to go to the discount window. It's hard. It's going out of business is difficult. But if you make bad loans, you pay the price, or at least you did more than a hundred years ago in America. So the Austrians are correct, the question today becomes one of what that depression would look like because the stakes are so high. Right. Because they've kicked the can down the road so much. They didn't let it unwind. Yeah. And it is inevitably inevitably and always the little guy who suffers the most. Yeah. And seeing that through, all of this being said, we're talking about non banks and banks. If the regular banking system is impaired, the non banks have no exit route. There's no junk bond market. There's no IPOs. There's no mergers. There's no acquisitions. There's no way to keep the non banking system alive. If you impair the banking system, that to me would be the greater victory. Wow. Well, when you look back at the last, I would say 40 or so years, we had this secular bull market and we saw interest rates get down to zero. Now you're saying that Jerome Powell might be might be the leader of a new regime, right? Who's trying to fix some of these systemic problems? Can you explain to people from all your experience and your perspective from working at the fed, what that did really to the working class? Because right now, millennials and the generations that came after, they're frustrated. To me, it's literally no surprise that they're trying to escape the legacy system they're trying to build this new one in crypto and they just want a seat at the table and they want to be able to somehow afford a house and their vacations and their avocado toast and all of that. And I just want to get your take on from a macro level as a society where we got to because now we're more polarized and divided and we have these populist uprisings happening and it's no surprise because the wealthier have gotten so wealthy and more have gotten so poor. And you're right. And who are the wealthiest among the wealthy? These are the people who run the non banks of the world. They don't get paid what a CEO gets paid. They get paid ten, 20 times that. And they really do sit at the very, very top of what has gone wrong in a quality run off the rails.