Fiat is Built on Trust and Governments Have Broken It.
“(Fiat) is a promissory note on a future good and service…and it’s backed by the strength and stability of a geopolitical system, legal system, and the economy…So when you hold a Bitcoin beside that, why would I hold (it)?” Dave McKay, CEO of Royal Bank of Canada.
Well, Dave McKay is right about one thing: fiat is a currency backed by the government. But on a deeper level, it reflects a contract of trust between the government and its people. By using it, the people trust the government to protect its value. However, he’s wrong in assuming that this is always a good thing.
For example, 7 countries were at the brink of declaring bankruptcy in 2015: Belarus, Argentina, Jamaica, Belize, Venezuela, Greece, and Ukraine. In 2016, Venezuela’s rate of inflation was at a shocking 254.95% while South Sudan’s hit 379%. In fact, Andean Capital Advisors’ Daniel Osorio recently went on CNBC and suggested the “Bitcoinization” of Venezuela in order to fix its financial system. Being told that fiat is backed by the “strength and stability of a geopolitical system” while living in these countries would not be reassuring in the slightest.
The U.S. is also an example, albeit a less extreme one, of a government that has broken its trust with its people in two specific ways:
- By creating, fostering, and maintaining an unequal playing field between financial institutions and the Everyman
- By creating a culture of financial enslavement.
1. An Unequal Playing Field
There is an uncomfortable “elephant in the room” regarding the relationship between the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and banks…but no one wants to talk about it. And when they do, they’re ignored. One prime example of this was the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. This controversial Act authorized the U.S. Treasury to bail out U.S. banks in a plan which Forbes has estimated at around $16.8 trillion dollars.
Despite the fact that:
- Protests were carried out in over 100 cities
- The bill was opposed by over 100 university economists
- Paulson, who proposed the bill, had a clear conflict of interest as a former employee of Goldman Sachs who recruited Goldman Sachs advisers to write the bill
The proposal was the only one seriously considered and passed after several revisions on October 3, 2008.
But how exactly was this financial crisis even created in the first place? Because financial institutions like Goldman Sachs gambled on the market by purchasing stocks, futures, and mortgage-backed government securities in the derivative market and lost.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you, the Everyman, could get bailed out if you lost on the stock market?
“Everyman” is a reference to a 15th century morality play. It explores the life of a man named “Everyman” who seeks help from others to improve his chances of getting into heaven. In the end, he eventually realizes that he is alone and that all he is left with is his own good deeds.
This relationship between the banks and the U.S. government gets further complicated, and the conflict of interest more apparent, when we consider both their involvement in futures trading and the derivative market.
The derivative market, which is built around options that are tied to underlying assets and are bought according to their speculated future value, includes a wide variety of assets. This includes agricultural products, U.S. and foreign government securities, and U.S. and foreign stock indices. Currently the world-wide derivative market is at a speculated $1.2 quadrillion world wide. I say estimated because no one really knows how to exactly define, measure, or even regulate it an international level due to Over-The-Counter (OTC) trades. Not even the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that regulates it.
Well the question that still remains is who trades on these derivatives markets? Billionaires, investment funds, and, you guessed it, banks.
That money that Everyman keeps in his bank account? It’s not actually there, it’s simply credited to his account. In reality, his bank is actively trading that money in the the stock and derivative markets.
Oh, and did you know that there’s a federally imposed limit of 6 withdrawals per month from your savings account called Regulation D? I wonder if that has anything to do with trying to restrict the amount of money that banks are using to gamble in the derivative market where U.S. and foreign government securities are being traded on.
The disproportionate advantages financial institutions have over the Everyman is further amplified when we consider two specific bank-related policies of the Federal Reserve:
- The first is called discount rates which are unavailable to the general public- The Federal Reserve (not the market) sets a rate by which banks can borrow money. If it lowers the rate, banks can access more. If it raises it, banks can access less. In this way, the Fed is supposed to help maintain a stable economy but its integrity is in question when banks can use this loaned money to trade government backed securities.
- Lender of Last Resort- The Federal Reserve’s job is to loan money to banks who are experiencing severe financial difficulty to prevent a financial catastrophe. This means large banks have free license to play on unregulatable, Over The Counter(OTC) derivative markets, and never have the fear of losing because it’s the Federal Reserve’s job to bail them. This is essentially what we saw happen in the ’08 financial crises.
In a land of supposed equal opportunity, it is abundantly clear that those in power and who have wealth are given luxuries that simply aren’t afforded to the average U.S. citizen. In fact, banks don’t play anywhere near in the same league as the Everyman. Instead, they get to gamble in Vegas with house money on the derivative markets while Everyman is stuck working the game of life.
2. A Culture of Financial Enslavement
With credit, we are convinced to buy things we can’t afford and spend money we don’t have. This mentality is so embedded in our society that debt itself has been normalized.
For example, loans are required to obtain life essentials (such as a house) and puts Everyman in life-long contracts of financial slavery. Mortgages alone totaled $8.25 trillion in debt as of 2015 and grows every year. That’s approximately $60,000 of debt per household and is higher than the reported U.S. average income of $55,775 at that time. In other words, it would take Everyman about a year and a half to pay off his mortgage even if he doesn’t eat, buy clothes, or pay for gas because, oh yeah, he has to pay an income tax too.
The concept of loans has also infected education, the supposed path towards a better future, with a student debt that totaled $1.3 trillion in 2016 averaging $37,172 per student. Statistics show that students are estimated to spend the next 20 years of their lives paying off this debt with the average starting salary at $50,556.
In this way, the Everyman has been socialized to live in a culture of credit and loans. This is a method by which financial institutions and the people in power keep Everyman from accumulating wealth. They tie financial contracts of slavery to supposed avenues (education, businesses loans, houses, cars) of a better life that consequently leave the Everyman disempowered and perpetually in debt.
So by what metric and by what measure does the Everyman have left to trust the government when financially the deck is strategically stacked against them? Especially when the U.S. rates of inflation have doubled in the past year and exceeded the Federal Reserve’s own controversially high 2% target rate of inflation?
Fiat is built on trust and the U.S. Government has broken it.
The truth of the matter is, these people who live comfortably in their privileged stations in life feel threatened. They see cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Litecoin and know full well the potential that lies within a globalized blockchain-based economy. This is why on one hand Jamie Dimon shouts that Bitcoin is a fraud and yet buys it for his customers the same day it plummets without being charged with market manipulation. This is also why opponents of Bitcoin claim that you can’t “make money out of thin air” yet fail to publicly acknowledge the Federal Reserve does this every year. In fact, it has requested a $233.4 billion budget for 2018 which is approximately 2.4 times the market capital of Bitcoin (coinmarketcap.com 10/23/17)
So yes Dave McKay. Yes Jamie Dimon. I, as an Everyman, fully understand that fiat is backed by the government. But fiat is built on trust and the government has not only broken it, but has taken advantage of it on several levels:
- It has created and maintained a biased financial infrastructure against the Everyman by which YOU shamelessly benefit from
- It has helped foster a culture of financial enslavement
- It is currently devaluing the very currency that it has sworn to protect.
That’s why when I hold a trustless, decentralized, and consensus-driven blockchain next to fiat, I choose the blockchain.
Recommended Reading
If you’d like to learn more about the type of impact blockchain technology is making in the world, read The Internet of Money. Andreas M. Antonopoulos is an absolute stud in the Bitcoin education sphere and explains the need for cryptocurrency and how it’s “disrupting antiquated industries to bring financial independence to billions…(and) changing our approach to solving social, political, and economic problems through decentralized technology.” Also if you’d like to learn more about Litecoin, I invite you to check out my publication “The Litecoin School of Crypto.” Finally, I leave you with a fellow redditor’s profound historical perspective on the need for Bitcoin.
*Special thanks to Kyle Racette for editing
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