Jeff Booth and Aaron Segal joined “Fed Watch” to discuss the pitfalls of the common inflation narrative purported by Bitcoiners.
Listen To This Episode:
In this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s “Fed Watch” podcast, we, your hosts Christian Keroles and Ansel Lindner, had the privilege of sitting down with Aaron Segal of Bitcoin Magazine and Jeff Booth, author of “The Price Of Tomorrow,” to discuss some of the pitfalls of the current dominant narratives in bitcoin and sound money.
Segal is somewhat new to the bitcoin space but has already made a splash with two great essays for Bitcoin Magazine. The first is “Bitcoin Information Theory: B.I.T.,” and the second and the main subject of this podcast is called “Thinking Too Small And The Pitfalls Of The Inflation Narrative.” In both of these essays, Segal gives a fresh take on the bitcoin space from an insightful, new entrant perspective.
In this episode, we tried to flesh out the deflationist perspective, or at least why the inflationist perspective is not a given. Segal and Booth began by saying it is important to peel back the onion and not rest on surface-level monetary memes, like “money printer go brrr.” Segal does not want to get caught up on labels, instead concentrating on the underlying mechanisms of technological deflation meeting monetary inflation.
We pushed back slightly, asking, “Isn’t it important to be right for the right reason?” Many Bitcoiners are heavily invested in the space, and if they have been right for the wrong reason (inflation), labels become important to understanding why. What followed was a very broad, wide-ranging discussion on the topics involved.
In the second half of the podcast, we dove into some specifics about Federal Reserve policy, like quantitative easing (QE) and reverse repo (RRP). We answered questions like, “Can the Fed taper QE?,” “Is RRP like a taper?,” and “Is the Fed in charge of anything, anyway?” The simplistic, 1970s-style inflation narrative cannot explain the nuance of what we see from the Fed and the global economy today. The Fed is trapped by the inertia of the reigning monetary paradigm, the only answer it has is to increase reserves through QE, but in doing so, tie the deflationary anchor of debt to the ankle of the economy.
It was a great conversation and mandatory listening for next-level bitcoin understanding.
