even rape which is our government doing right now it's much worse than any words that might arrive to her in messages are to bring you the latest from men's school that's it for this update from our teenage q moscow kevin i'll be reporting on a super day. is your media a reflection of reality. in a world transformed. what will make you feel safe from. isolation or community. are you going the right way or are you being led some. die away. what is true what is faith. in the world corrupted you need to descend. to join us

in the depths. aura made in the shallows. has changed american lives but pharmaceutical companies have a miraculous solution. based drugs the people who are chronic pain and believe that their opioid prescription is working for them and the remedy be said to to the price that they pay closer dependency and addiction to opiates is the long term use that really isn't scientifically justified and i'll study actually suggested that the long term effects may not just be absence of benefit but actually that they may be causing long term.

welcome to kaiser report summer solutions i'm max kaiser here with stacy herbert you know we look at the solutions we love take a deep dive into the issues we've been chatting about all year now today we're going to be talking with faneuil would a more also known as n l w of the breakdown pod cast been following him on twitter for a long time listen to his pod cast you know the great thing about this whole new universe of media states is that people who might not get on media get on media and then they run to the top and suddenly they're like wow these people are awesome and i would put a sale in that camp what do you think well that's the good thing about talking to heterodox thinkers because we don't have to just stick with the orthodox guys that

are so boring on all the mainstream cable news channels we have the best guess so you know nothing i want to talk to you about one of the themes that we've presented here on reports summer solutions is that we've kind of we're coming out of a few dark ages and that this could be an opportunity for a renaissance 2.0 what we saw back in the previous round of sonce coming out of the dark ages and the black plague was that the plague did help bring in the renaissance in that it undermined the authority of the vatican nowadays we see in my opinion the equivalent of the central banks are like the vatican there is this like cabal of elites who only know all the secret information about our financial system our monetary system and our economics and they're going to rescue or save everything but there's seems to be like with this pandemic and also with the increasing like collapse of the economy and markets. and then the bailouts and

all that sort of stuff that there's an undermining of there of the already going on and that this is a moment now where we could have a rebirth i mean absolutely the only addition that i would say is that i don't think that that's just there's not just a single equivalent to the vatican in the sense that there's not just one authority that's being undermined i think there's multiple authorities being undermined you have on the one hand i think you're absolutely right to identify that the the the central banks have been exposed not as bad by definition or any way just as extremely limited in what they can do and they keep doing the same thing over and over again they ignore and this is the part where gets a little will fold ignore the the the rule that they have in issues like income inequality right by by virtue of their policies and people are reacting in really interesting ways i think it's been very notable how over the course of the pandemic when you've seen the sort of money printer gober mean it's not a bitcoin twitter thing that is on wall street baths it's on you know i mean it's

everywhere right that idea of the fed put translated to the fed's going to do whatever to keep the zombie companies alive has been manifest far beyond just the twitter sphere into a totally different realms and i think you have a lot of forces combining with that too to make people ask big questions and it's very rare that you have a situation where people are allowed to ask big questions for any suspended piece period of time and there not be major changes that come out on the other side of that or i but on the topic of central banks central banks are the basis upon which they monetization of the economy has occurred and it has sucked all the great talent out of the university system who moved to wall street to become kumquats and financial engineers and they didn't go into medicine really some of charlie. affairs or social service or become clergymen they became wall street traders

and with the fed we now historic play and as an example of an institution that is replicated in other countries around the world there is a natural interest rate of about 5 percent and the fed is their remit is to either raise or lower rates around that natural rate as a way to offer. mitigating. risk to the economy in case there's a slowdown or things that hyper inflated exciter but what we've seen is that they've taken rates down to 0. and allow the can tell an air class to buy everything up which has given the rise to the multi 100000000000 air class that's a result of what i think we can describe as a heist this is a heist engineer by the fed and further along put further along by the

concealing her class so this is this is pretty shocking disaster and a lot of ways and 1st so what's your comment on that which you do see it that way am i over my over you know dramatize ing something here and if i buy that but if that is the case that same structurally there is a very little that can be done at this point your thoughts well so there's 2 things in that question you asked one is can anything be done it's come to that one second the 1st is whether there is whether this is a heist and i guess what i would say is a couple things 1st of all the fed's remit isn't necessarily to keep interest rates around a specific level it is to keep the economy stable and more recently to also have low unemployment right the the problem is that the only tool they have is this interest rate tool or the increasingly exotic forms of q.e. 2 all right and because of that the only mechanism that they have to actually

interact with the economy has to do with liquidity injections effectively you know and what happens because of that is that the only people who benefit are the people closest to that right and that's exactly what you talk about with the container class i think what's happening now is that people are realizing that the fed the fed may backstop the markets but the markets don't necessarily offer the average person anything anymore and in fact if anything they have made it more inaccessible to actually participate in the means of getting ahead right we've had a situation happen where the deal that is being handed to regular people is everything is going to be more expensive than it was for your parents but the. but the but the bargain is that will give you cheaper credit to buy it which is a terrible deal it's an awful deal right we will let you get farther and farther into debt because the percentage rates are lower and lower and lower but you're going to have to take on more of that debt to participate in any meaningful way and this is where you have all of this inequality happening i think the interesting

thing that may be happening right now and it's way too early to be anything more than the most very basic level of optimistic about this is that there may be open space for a political conversation that isn't the same boring narratives of right and left that are presented to us right now but actually looks at this at monetary policy as a structural cause that can actually combine people across right and left and say this is something that we can wrap our heads around it doesn't fall into the same old narratives in is actually addressable and that's something that i think i've been thinking about a lot and frankly testing on my friends on both sides and i think there's more openness there and maybe that's one of the upshot of this moment that we're living right right i mean we can kind of discuss further what the remit of the fed is right but cheer point the king here is a both left and right are now focusing on the institution as a whole and what role of plays and a lot of these big issues i think that is really important stacey so let's you know

wrap some of those issues up into one overriding question and then some solutions to it you mentioned all the debt and that's been the bargain is like ok all your costs are going up health care costs living costs education costs all that stuff is going up the basic fundamental needs of your life are those costs are going up some of the chinese importing goods ok they're going down but that has been rising everywhere across all sectors so well right now in 2020 we see that the u.s. debt to g.d.p. is 136 percent i believe just in 2005 yes it was 100 it was only 61 percent so it doubled since 2005 but household that is also rising corporate debt is even rising even more paul krugman says it's just debt we owe to ourself so is this debt an issue at all. well i mean it's certainly an issue for for the average american who's who's holding that debt and i think that's what makes again

going back to what's potential in this moment i think that the average american who hears that thinks b.s. you know i mean like of course that can't be the case how is it that we live in a system where that's the case for the highest levels of government but not for for me right at in and out what where does the translation happen where all of a sudden debt becomes ok how big do you have to be for that to happen and when people begin to it they realize that there's basically no way to actually ever pay this debt back and so really we're in this weird situation where it's so strange to see that the solutions that are being presented you know you have on the one hand the m.m.t. years were kind of pushing this narrative and in a strange way i find them the most arrogant about the place of the u.s. dollar in the world there is such a an underlying assumption that nothing can change in terms of the global power system and any student of history knows that that's simply not the case right and how bet you know the thing that's crazed is that we're living in

a moment where the u.s. really is rewriting the book every day about how far you can push different things and the problem is you have exactly basically 2 opinions within that are 2 ways to look at it the one is that well it's you know we we've gotten away with it so far so we're going to be able to keep getting away with it the 2nd is at some point that's no longer the case and maybe we shouldn't have the vision of a little less hubris about the things that make us look better this is an area of american exceptionalism that could be extremely dangerous the moment that it and i you know it's there's a 1000000 different statistics a 1000000 different ways you can look at where that tipping point is right now we are still living in a world where it's not like the rest of the world is presenting a really great alternative but you have for the 1st time these really key geostrategic competitions that are explicitly coming after after the. the way that the world is organized around the u.s. dollar and basically the whole system the being able to get away with the way that

we've structured things is predicated on a continuance of a system which doesn't necessarily serve a lot of folks including i think in this is the new heterodox thought that is starting to come into the conversation maybe it doesn't serve the interests of the u.s. quite as the way that it used to write it is there a tipping point for american exceptionalism and are we at that tipping point i mean that the that's a very kind of. question and goldman sachs on the topic of the dollar it come as come out and said it believes that the dollar's days are numbered so in terms of the dollar being world reserve currency goldman sachs saying that looks like the end is near how would this factor into things. i mean it has a it has a huge ramifications and you know i think that the debates around the dollar are really interesting and also extremely extremely important you have on the one hand the folks who are focused on the narrative strength of the dollar in some ways right that goldman article that you referred to that came out as part of the gold

report was kind of trying to make sense of why a gold has had such a rise and in particular why it's not just the standard folks who are kind of re upping their allocations of gold but is in fact institutions were getting more and more skeptical of treasuries and saying maybe part of what used to be the government debt role in our portfolio should in fact be this other thing because there's skepticism around the dollar you have folks on the other side who are really focused on the fundamentals and basically the kind of euro dollar and shadow banking system and just how much of the dollar denominated debt in the world is outside the purview of the u.s. those folks are more skeptical of things like the fed's a belated actually influence the monetary supply they see the dollar's strength as predicated not on any sort of narrative but on the fundamentals i can appreciate both points of view but i always worry when we underestimate narratives when it comes to markets markets are altamont lee machines that make sense of narratives and fundamentals and some confusing combination and at any given moment they can

move very quickly between one or the other and in fact they are in some ways competition for narratives that when there are people always were going to have a benefit for the dollar to come down and some of those powers include some of the most powerful actors in the world right now so i think being dismissive of narrative shifts and a shift in the over chin window on whether the dollar can be or should be the world's reserve currency would be a mistake right well very well said well we're going to take a break and when we come back more with nothing on what i'm more of the breakdown pod cast don't go away. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy confrontation let it be an arms race is often very dramatic development only

personally i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time time to sit down and talk. been a troubled 19 seventies a group of killers rampage through parts of northern ireland that was coordinated loyalist attacks protect a population of tens of forced to flee their homes and what was striking to put these attacks was a p.r. you see the police actually took part in the attacks so instead of preventing it they were active participants in the burning of full streets in belfast at that time more than a 100 innocent civilians were. you can see in years and we found out more i was surprised about the extent to which the collusion was involved in some of those cases the killers would later be named. i think it went

to the very very top i think it is. the water where politicians you know on and give the go ahead. welcome back to the kaiser report summer solution. with max and stacey and we're talking to nathaniel what a more he's got the breakdown podcast i get it now he breaks stuff down i'm getting the benefit of his breakdown right now this guy's on the money now in the previous segment the thing you know we were talking about narratives and markets and you know how to sometimes they're insane sometimes they break when they break it can happen really quickly and you know markets are very efficient as you say they're a machine if you will they take in all the information they have price discovery

going on in the sea of price and you can kind of figure out what all the opinions are that's what they're supposed to be doing that's the beauty of them but sometimes narratives take control and markets get way out of whack and in the case of the us dollar it might be the case where the narrative is taking the dollar in a place that is not reflective of reality and that when reality asserts itself we're going to see a huge kind of move in the dollar versus some of these other currencies or not but i think it's good to kind of point out that these 2 things don't always go together stays yet nothing i want to turn to a little bit like a about what we're discussing in terms of narrative and one of the things that is really emerging is this conflict between the united states and china secretary of state pompei o called said that china he accused them of economic blitzkrieg but how much of it is really china and how much is actually the structure of the global fiat's

system whereby the dollar is the reserve currency yes it is an exorbitant privilege in some ways for some people but it does undermine our ability to manufacture and produce wealth so what do you think about that statement. well so i mean i think that it is almost regardless of what you think about the conflict i think it is the defining economic conflicts of our times even if you don't view it as as inherently or by definition adversarial inherently in some ways it is going to inevitably be such an important conflict just based on the size of these economies i think it's important to remember that the way that the the world has organized itself was not random we made a concerted push to bring china into the world trade organization and to basically aid the way that the world shifted to have such low priced manufacturing of things in china right there would be no matter what even if we hadn't done that certain

sort of power dynamic that probably china would start to bristle against as they reasserted themselves in the world that comes from the exorbitant privilege of the u.s. dollar at the center of the world's reserve currency system but it wasn't like there was just some economic inevitability of manufacturing of always moving to china and supply chains we decided those were specific decisions and i think one of the things that's most noticeable about the time that we're living through now is that you go back 10 years and the bit was the american business class big corporates basically that were the most sort of the last defenders of china right they were the ones who were saying look you know like look at how many people it's brought out of poverty this has been a great experiment and and that's not happening anymore there is a major shift and i think this is one of the most significant forces going on right now to reach shore things to bring them back home and you've you've talked about that or you've seen this being talked about for a while but the virus has supercharged it right japan when they did their 1st round

of post code rebuilding put in billions of dollars of incentives for japanese companies to come home right japan is in many ways the most worried about china outside of the u.s. they are beating down the door of the u.s. saying they need to provide an economic counterweight particularly when it comes to things like the nukes. nice central bank digital currency that's being tested but you see it in the us now to right there is you're starting to see this massive conversation and i think it's going to be supercharged by the vaccine hunt of how we redesign supply chains for national security not just economic interest so there's so much it involved in the u.s. china relationship i think the dollar is a part of it and you know the reality is that china from a narrative standpoint really has to tell the story that the yuan is is a good reserve currency because as it relates to an actual percentage of the world's reserves it's not right it's a distant distantly behind the euro and the u.s. dollar right while there is

a perfect example of narratives meets markets right so for years that the narrative was there's a symbiotic relationship between the u.s. and china they sent us a really cheap goods on we can get widescreen t.v.'s for really cheap and close really cheap and then we just send them their jobs and it's really a great relationship and it will never break it will never be disturbed because it's so beneficial for everybody and then suddenly come it happens and the entire narrative is ripped to shreds and markets assert themselves and they're being on shore and you know the troop presence saying and the case of tick tock that they they need to sell their tech tock you know there are all these crazy market reactions so that's a good example that now it was recently reported that 75 percent of americans are making more on their hands on employment benefits than they did working your thoughts on this and what does it tell you about the structure of our economy nathaniel. well there's a lot of different arguments around this you have the folks who say that

unemployment benefits are supposed to set the floor for prices and that this is a natural reset and and i think that that's one perspective there's another set of people who think that we've created a kind of perverse incentive by doing things backwards and reactionary and i think that the 1st conversation is a good one to have we should be every 4 years as part of elections having a larger structural conversation about what the social contract should look like what unemployment should be like that should be a perpetual conversation that people are having because we live in a society with other people and we get to decide what's the right in the wrong approach however what we are doing is policy by reaction we were slow to react to covert 1000 is a serious threat we deny deny deny deny deny and got ourselves in a situation where we had to do big stupid overarching things and that's what we're dealing with now and we're going to get on the same situation again right there's a battle now about should we extend these benefits for a week or 2 weeks or whatever because republicans or democrats can't get together

to figure out what they actually want and the i think that the there is kind of a broad point in a short term point a short term point has to do with just how poorly equipped to deal with dynamic situations are our system is right now and you know there's a lot of reasons we could diagnose that but it's it's to pressing to see the 2nd point which is maybe a little bit longer term it is something that i think should be a part of the debate about u.b.i. and you know any of these concepts that are coming down the pipe is what it looks like to is there any actual realistic way to implement any of these systems while avoiding political capture in some way because you kind of have a scenario now where no one feels like they can argue that no extension of benefits is the right approach or anything like that because it is just the expectation that you know people want their money so i think we're in a. very complicated moment as it relates to the relationship between government and

citizens because i think citizens rightly feel like they haven't the represented so they might as well get their stupid check and that's a dangerous spot to be it and speaking of complicated moments we've posited here on kaiser report that not only are we at a 4th turning so we see the eggs of the baby boomers who lived in a generation they were the 1st in a global pyramid scheme and they did well off of it but now we have this generation z. and it's a radical forth turning into their mindset is completely different i don't understand it all i can say we also have the 50 cities trap these are epic moments in history as well there's like 12 or 13 big ones and we're at another one of those and we have what i see as the end of the dark ages of a possibly around a science so what do you think of it does that explain like this transition all these weird big movements colliding explain that sort of like event horizon moment

that we've seen the speed get a fixation and all sort of sense economic sense whether it's you see robin hood app people piling into bankrupt companies you see negative interest rates you see negative prices on oil can you tie all of those together. sure it's actually kind of a boring answer i think so all of the generational theory i think is really really valuable and important but really what it comes down to for me and it's to so boring because it's such an obvious answer is the internet this is a thing that has totally fast forwarded the rate of sofa social evolution in a way that is radically uncomfortable for human beings and and these forces that have been unleashed right like the fact that you had you know the few weeks ago all of these big c.e.o.'s from big tech companies hauled before congress and it was a joke right i mean these guys all they had to do is not laugh in the faces of these congressmen and women as they scored their political points to bring home to their constituents to look tough because then the next day they reported earnings

that make everything else in the stock market look stupid right i mean these institutions are so much more powerful than any human institutions we've seen it's just insane and that's not anyone's fault it's not it's just a factor of what it looks like to create massive sort of network effects at scale and we have not been able to deal with it and i think that if you look at a lot of these generational differences they have to do with people who have grown up inside that versus lived through the transition versus had to come into it later in life and that's not universally applicable obviously all of those different groups are more complex than that but we don't know how to live in an internet world and right now it looks like it's going to kill us and so that's really i think at core what we're trying to figure out. you are a big call error and because inner is kind of like an extension of the internet well and a couple let's talk about it where do you fall on the big question versus goal debate that's my 1st question. i mean i don't have any issue with gold that they

think is going to be a much more appealing make sense gold to a different generation i you know my formative years were spent thinking i was going to do post conflict resolution stuff and thinking i was going to work with refugees so the according to me offers a whole hell of a lot of benefits over gold when you're talking about people who are fleeing borders and want to keep their wealth in the context of a political regime that's after them so it already had some points in my column just on that standpoint ok and now 2nd question about bitcoin and we've mentioned that goldman sachs says the dollars coming to the end will be quite in play a role in a post dollar world or is it just going to be gold. because in plays a role in a world where the dollar remains where people are trying to escape their local regimes and don't want something as as waffly as the dollar as it might get big declines going to be even more relevant in a post other world i can't see a scenario where you have competition real meaningful competition around what the

reserve currency is supposed to be that the one thing that is truly credible and is outside the realm of a state is in a major player right well said well stacy we're at the end of summer solutions i thought we got some good ones that was a fantastic series this year the thing a little more thanks for bring on summer solutions thanks for having me well that's going to for this edition of kaiser apart summer solutions lacks the stay say going to catch us on twitter it's kaiser report and a lifetime. if you go to the symphony orchestras warming up and each decision is is tuning his or

her instrument. so you hear this year all these sounds are noise but it but it's it's a constant it's disorganized and then the band the orchestra plays and you get up music so what the brain does and what the maker tubules you is organized orchestrate these one collapses. peaceful marches to looting and choosing rallies in the us to continue. store i used to shop. so for the rest of the city closing actually staying boarded up. until. you got confucianism you to wearing masks in schools just days before the.