It is diminished from its heyday due to broader competition and online investment media, but it has a certain air to it. Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, Gerald Ford, and Steve Forbes have spoken at it, among many others. It is mostly a boomer/gold/resource/conservative/libertarian conference, and gets the best from that crowd, but otherwise is not huge. The guy who has run it for decades took it over long ago from the original founder, and he wants to freshen it up and modernize it a bit and throw some hand grenades into his own conference, so he invited me to talk. He is a gold guy, a resource guy, an old-school conservative, and he likes bitcoin and wishes he bought it earlier. He's open-minded, objective, and growth-oriented.
My talk was "Broken Money, Broken World".
-The first theme was that there are 160+ siloed fiat currencies. I used Egypt as my main example, and held up a physical Egyptian pound and said this is basically a national casino chip; it has very low salability outside of Egypt, similar to how a casino chip has very low salability outside of the casino. The 105 million people who live there are trapped in a fiat matrix of 20% annual money supply growth, like a treadmill that they have to keep up with in terms of their wages, price increases, rent increases, and so forth to avoid being diluted, and most can't keep up with that treadmill. And there are dozens of countries like this. I held up a Norwegian krone and said even though this is from a wealthy country, it is still a casino chip because what can I possibly do with it in New Orleans? It's too small and unsalable. This is outdated tech.
-The second theme brought it back to the US. I spoke about how the past four decades had two main trends: rising public debt/GDP and falling interest rates (see included pics below). Developing market currencies suffer while those of us in the US feel that things are stable. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, people rightly freaked out about the debt and deficit. The famous NYC debt clock went up in 1989. Ross Perot ran the most successful independent presidential campaign in the early 1990s on the debt and deficit. That was when interest expense as a % of GDP was at its peak. But what they didn't or couldn't predict, was that the next 30 years would be disinflationary. China opened up to the world. The Soviet Union fell. Western capital was united with Eastern labor and resources. China became a manufacturing hub, which was disinflationary. Russia supplied cheap energy to the German industrial base, which was disinflationary. Interest rates fell structurally, allowing more debt accumulation, and for prices to increase far more slowly than money supply growth. But then we hit zero interest rates, and then we monetized fiscal spending. We're in a new world now; debts and deficits matter again. Those guys from the late 1980s and early 1990s were right but early, and now we are facing some of those consequences. Fiat currencies including the dollar have structural instability.
-The third theme was to bring up again that there are 160+ casino fiat currencies in the world... and that every one of their gates are fucking down. Pre-Bitcoin, the only way to get money in or out of a country was 1) physical ports of entry (typically limited to $10k USD or so worth of cash and gold) or 2) bank wire transfers (highly controlled by local governments). Countries could maintain their little currency bubbles. But Bitcoin and then stablecoins blew that open. You can bring a billion dollars worth of bitcoin through an airport by remembering 12 words, or writing them down and tucking them away in your baggage, or briefly putting them in an encrypted file in the cloud. Infinite value density. Same for stablecoins- tokenized dollars or whatever the market wants in terms of global fiat currency and assets. I can pay a graphic designer in Nigeria with a QR code over a video call or email or DM in bitcoin or stablecoins or whatever she wants. All of this bypasses their currency bubble and goes around their banking system, unless their country wants to be North Korea and cut itself off or get shut off externally from the internet. And I said the investment implications and macro implications of this are massive; it's a new world that, over the long arc of time, breaks all the fiat bubbles.
