October 25, 2024 • 34 mins
Author and economist David McWilliams joins Merryn to discuss his latest book Money: A Story of Humanity, and how the evolution of currency is central to the rise and fall of civilizations.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to Meren Talks Money, the podcast in which people
who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Meren sums
that web. This week I'm joined by author David McWilliams
coming on to talk about his latest book, Money, A
Story of Humanity. David is an economist and fellow podcaster.
He's worked both as a central banker and on the
financial markets in various ways, so he brings a unique
and I think very interesting perspective to the history of money,
(00:33):
which turns out to be the history of everything. In
the book, David walks readers through time from the day
the first gold coin was minted to the modern incarnation
of money, or maybe not as money, today's bitcoin. He
explores ideas on how society's fate is closely links to
the strength with its currency, and how you can destroy
a state by destroying its money. Welcome David to Merin
(00:58):
Talks Money, Maren.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It is an absolute pleasure to see you again. Has
life all good?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
All the better after reading your book?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Oh? Thank you David.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
One of the first things I thought when I was
reading your book was that I have read and I'm
sure you have as well, so many books written by
someone with an obsession about something. They look at their
obsession and suddenly they can explain the whole world, with
that obsession being the collapse of the Roman Empire, the
extinction of the Azteks, the French Revolution, Christianity, wealth of
medieval literally, whatever whatever it is. And then they say, well,
(01:25):
this was caused by my obsession, which could be salt
gut bacteria, the invention of stirrups, weatherhivemind, demographics, have many
young men there are in a population that sort of thing.
But your book, I think is actually correct. It is
maybe money that is the thing that explains everything.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well, you're you know, wouldn't say it's an obsession, but
you know, when you end up doing economics in university
and then you do a bit of an postgraduate because frankly,
you don't know what to do. You've got a degrees,
Oh my god, what I do now? And then you
kind of you find yourself working in a central bank
as a monetary cast, as a young flow, and then
you realize, okay, okay, so this is quite interesting. This
is the place where we kind of magic up this
(02:05):
thing called money. Okay, fine, and then I went to
investment banking and saw the way credit was being pushed
around the world and how the basically the private banks
were creating money out of fresh air. And I thought
to myself, Okay, this is interesting. And then in Ireland
we've had exactly a the UK, we've had our boom
bus cycles, you know, And I just thought to myself
(02:25):
that I've spent thirty years kind of observing the relationship
between humans, ourselves and this strange thing called money, and
that was the initial idea. And then the idea was like, well,
why not look at money as this miraculous technology that
(02:45):
has enabled humans to do extraordinary things and see whether
or not if you go back to the beginning that
you can actually thread that particular argument convincingly to yourself
first and then on the page. And yes, I think
you're right. I think it was one of It wasn't
a Eureka moment, but it was like it was one
of those moments you just thought, actually, this is the thing,
(03:05):
this is the social technology that has really acted, as
as I say in the book, a sort of a
Promethean force for humanity, for good and hil and and
that I that as that argument becomes developed and becomes
a little more nuanced, are becomes a little more pronounced
in certain for certain stages, you begin to think, yeah,
(03:26):
this is this is the technology that humans invented to
cope with complexity. And where you see complex societies and
you see complex relations, you begin to see the coincidence
of money or a form of money emerging. And then
with that form of money, you also see what I
would describe as the coevolution of many other things that
(03:48):
I suppose we would regard as pillars of human civilization.
So numbers, empiricism, writing, legal systems, organized religions, all these
things all come at around the same time.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I mean, the key idea behind the book is that
money is a shortcut. It's the ultimate life pack. That
money allows you to have prices inside which all the
information you require to understand a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Is available immediately exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
And so that shortcut allows innovation, allows social and economic flexibility,
and gives us every Every big change in the nature
of money or the understanding of money, or the way
that money is used can and often has led us
to a new level of prosperity or a new level
of innovation. That's the basic key, right, that's the basic idea.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
And it doesn't seem like anything except common sense really
when you think about it. But I do think that
what has happened in our particular business, in the business
of economics, and again I speak as a former central banker,
which is the kind of holy holy grail of monetary
economics should be at least anyway, I kind of got
the impression that economists don't tell the story where not
(05:02):
because they're unwilling, but maybe because they're unable. Now that
is a big charge. I mean, I teach more for
economics at Trinity. I teach economics to postgraduates. And over
the years I've thought, Lolo, there's more to this, you know.
And I think in a way economics has shied away
from these much bigger notions of money as this miraculous
(05:24):
what I say, wondrous technology, a product of human imagination.
It's sat to see. Then you got into a little
bit of evolution, a little bit of biology, a little
bit of history, and try and try and see the
creature that is money in its totality, and I just
I don't think our profession has done justice to what
is an extraordinary human creation.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, we haven't done enough to talk about, as you said,
the social aspect of it. All right, let's talk about
some of these big turning points. Where do we begin.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
The Sumerian civilization is where we see money emerging, not
particularly different actually conceptionally to what to to to what
we have now, which is kind of interesting. And I
think what you see there is the coevolution of money
and writing. For example, And I know it doesn't sound
very heroic, but writing started as an adjunct tool for accountancy. Again,
(06:13):
you know, we would have thought that writing was some
great sort of hero some great poet, some great piece
of literature. No. Actually, in fact, it was just basic
writing stuff down, who owed, who what and when were
they going to pay it back? And then of course
you see when you go onto the Lydians that probably
the next big civilization, they really innovate with coins, and
(06:35):
they introduce gold coins and gold coins. I think coinages
is very interesting because coinage is essentially a very democratic
notion that if for example, think about it, you're in
a very hierarchical structure in terms of the way in
which societies are organized. But with this bizarre thing coin
a prince's fiver and a pauper's fiver are worth the same.
(06:58):
So this is a very weird, weird idea that suddenly
you get almost a leveling out of social hierarchies with
this bizarre technology. And of course the other invention the
Lidians came up with was they introduced smaller and smaller coins.
You're allowing commerce to seep into the tentricles of society
(07:19):
in a way in which previous of civilizations didn't do.
And of course the Greeks then take that button and
do what the Greeks did all across the across the world.
They make it better. And so the Greeks are the
first really heavily financialized society that we that we we
we come across. And also, I don't know about you,
(07:40):
but years ago, though you know you're doing this stuff
in history and schooling things, why were these Greek fellows?
What made them sort of smash the sort of intellectual
glass ceiling when it came to philosophy and art and
democracy and republicanism and all these incredibly sophisticated notions. And
it strikes me that it's inconceivable these things would have
(08:02):
happened without a monetarized society, and the reason is because
money makes you count, it makes you think empirically, it
makes you think precisely. And if you see the shift
even from the Homer to xenophone two hundred years like
big philosophers, Homer's talking all about myths and Xenophones talking
about logic. So the Greeks made this kind of intellectual
(08:24):
leap in a very very quick period of time. It
also happens to coincide with the mass circulized circulation of
the dragma, which, ironically or not ironically, I just think fascinating.
He was called the dragma then, and was the dragma
up until about eighteen years ago, which which means a
handful in ancient Greek.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, look at that. Another thing. The EU destroyed the
oldest current in the world.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So think, well, ye, why did for example, Christianity emerge?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Ah, yes, no, I'm really interested in this one, really
interested in this one. This is one of the bits
of the bit that I've an particularly compelling, this this
idea that Christianity was a result of this huge increase
inflows of billion and silver into Roman first century.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, no, it struck me that, you know, I've again
these things interest you in a sort of odd conceptual
way between pints, if you're having a chat in the
back of a bark. Why did Christianity start where it
did and when it did, and why did it catch
on so quickly? Because it's a really radical idea. You're
talking about a world which was very macho and gods
who were super alpha males and alpha females. Okay, this
(09:33):
was a pre woke world. Let's just say right. And
suddenly this skeezer comes along and says, no, no, I
see those powerful people, they don't inherit the earth. You
do the weak person. See that rich man, he's not virtuous.
You were virtuous. And it struck me that this is
such a radical idea that could it have been a
sort of ideological counterweight to the emergence of a meritocracy
(09:56):
which were being forced by this technology money? And I
think yes, because it is a very radically different philosophy,
so it must have been incredibly attractive to people for
whom the monetary economy wasn't going their way. Okay, for
the losers in effect, which is I always think why
(10:16):
Christianity is quite interesting because it's it's a religion for losers.
It's quite an interesting you know, take it's the people
who lose out.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yes, it gives you, It gives you some compensation for being.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
The compensation you need. You need a countervailing narrative that says, well, look,
it might be working out here, but in the next life,
I'm going to be sitting up beside Peter.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Everything's going to be fine. The next life.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, Saint Peter, angels gonna be good. And I thought,
I thought that that was an interesting observation to think, Wow,
you know, could it have been a response to the
commercialization of the ancient world? And is it any doubt
or is it any coincidence that, you know, Christianity was
(10:57):
an entirely urban phenomenon, as to it was commerce, as
too is the marketplace. So these are these are the
sort of things that I think are are interesting And
once you begin to think about them again, they they
I don't make these big claims. I just think it's
it sounds plausible.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, And Rome comes up a lot in the book,
and a lot in the history of money in general.
And one thing that I hadn't read very much about
before was the story of the Tiberius's credit crunch.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It's a good one.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
That's a great story. Tell us a little bit about that,
because of course it's going to resonate with people today. Perhaps.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
I mean again, you know, like you and I have
been writing about money for many years, and I think
you're always fascinated at our endemic repetitive stupidity when it
comes to booms and busts. And this time is going
to be different. And I'm gonna make money. I'm gonna
get out first, La la la, Right, And so you
go back to Tiberia. So it's a D thirty three
and Tiberius is sitting in Capri. He's had a very
(11:53):
good reign, reasonably peaceful. They've conquered Egypt, loads of flows
of grains of floads of bullion in from Egypt. All
is going well. Surprise surprise, interest rates fall as they
would do in the modern world, and surprise surprise, you
get a boom in assets. And the asset of choice
is the property market, and in particular second homes in
(12:13):
the provinces that were recently conquered. So it's basically the
Roman equivalent of Irish people buying property in Bulgaria in
the boom. Right, and our British people buying property in
Fein Tener, et etcetera. And so what happens is like
in all good Roman stories, there's a coup, there's a pretender.
The pretender galvanizes some support. The emperor waits on the
(12:36):
sidelines for a while, then comes back, then kills the pretender,
and then rounds up the pretender's followers, and lo and behold,
he realizes that a huge amount of the senatorial class
were prepared to jump ship. Why because Rome was an
empire of money, and if you back the right horse,
you may well have been personally enriched phenomenally if this
new emperor came in. So what he does is basically says,
(12:57):
I'm going to hit them in their pockets, and he
in effect Titan's monetary policy. What he says is you're
going to have to set aside x amount of your
property in cash, and as a result of that, you
get a credit crunch. As a result of that, we
know what happened in the UK to the credit crunches,
which is amazing, is that money kind of disappears because
it's hoarded. And once it's hoarded, as the prices fall
(13:20):
and as asset prices fell, Tiberius did what I suspect
Ben Bernanke should have done eight maybe taken a slice
of the action in return for the cash for trash
scheme that he unveiled. But what I love about this
baron is the fact that we're back to the same place.
You know, the Romans were dealing with credit crunches. We're
(13:41):
dealing with credit crunches. The Romans were operating a monetary policy.
We're operating the monetary policy. The Romans acid of choice
was foreign property. Our asset of choice is far and property.
So and fascinatingly, the contagion that we see in international
markets now was evident. Then that also interested me because
(14:02):
money is social, it's psychological and panic and hard behavior. So,
as I say in the book, I think economists, when
they see a price, they see a number. When most
of the rest of the world sees a price, we
get a feeling, and that feeling is what drives the
animal spirits, and the animal spirits are what drives all
the good stuff and the bank.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
When we talk about Rome, there is the general idea
that the Roman Empire fell in the end because of
not treating its money with proper respect. Yes, the continual
debasement of the currency in the end is what has
destroyed the empire.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah, and so much so that towards the end they
could only print the emperor's head on one side of
the coin. They were so thin and there was no
proper hard metals in it are very very very little
the ratio and again and that story were going to
Dante in the book we go to Renaissance, that story
of debasement, counter debasement, all that sort of stuff is
ever present. And I think it's a fair point. I
(14:58):
look at the survey and I think it came up
with it's in the book. I think two hundred and
fourteen reasons were have been given over the years by
historians for the fall of the Roman Empire. But ironically
money isn't one of them. That is amazing, isn't it.
I would have told the list I was thought to
be central to understanding, you know, did the Roman Empire
(15:20):
fall because they debased money or did they debase money
because the empire was falling, you know, which which just
happened at the same time. But I would have thought
at least it should be on the list, you know,
at least at least we should explore that because it's very,
very evidently that the data on the debasement of the
currencies is really ubiquitous, you know. So so those sort
(15:40):
of things. Again, I suppose the book tries to take
these stories and give them a little bit of historical
flavoring and residents. You know, if you debase your currency,
we started the book talking about Hitler trying to debase sterling.
If you debase your currency, what you actually do is
you mess with people's heads. It's more, which more than
(16:00):
just prices going up and down, right, And as you
said at the start, you know, the price is like
an encyclopedia of knowledge, the greatest short could we have.
It tells you enormous amount things. If you mess with that,
you're messing with the very foundations of the way in
which we see the world.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Right about that when you talk about destroying money, So
when money dies, trust, instability and society breakdown. So we
take this organization organizational technology that we used to make
sense of really an incredibly complicated world. But you know,
you can go in nab shops and you can buy
things because all the information you need is is contained
in the price. So kick that away and everything becomes
(16:35):
completely unmoored.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
People freak out.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, And there's a lot, a lot of a lot
in the book about the various stories around it. You know,
you can use the way that money can destabilize society
in wartime endlessly. So another story I didn't know seventeen
ninety three William Playfair counterfeiting French money towards the end
of the French Revolution to time destabilize things further. But
let's go back. Let's go back to Italy, which pops
up again and again and again and again, and the Renaissance,
(17:01):
because one of the one of the really great connections
that you that you draw in the book is that,
you know, it's not just it's not just about economic
innovation and economic change that comes as a result of
changes in the money system or advances in the money system.
It's artistic innovation and change that comes as well. In
their inniscence is a classic example of that.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Absolutely, and and and again. You know, there's there's a
character in the book called Leonardo of Pisa, who's better
known from mathematical students as Fibonacci. But I make the claim,
or at least again suggestions these are these are these
are polite nudges rather than sort of boisterous claims that
you know, without Leonardo of Pisa, there's no Leonardo da Vinci.
(17:42):
And the idea is that da Vinci comes at the
tail end of an economic and financial revolution that was
anchored in Florence by a currency, the Florin, the hardest
currency of its time, in a way like the dollar
would have been over the years. And there is a
(18:03):
direct connection not only to Fibonacci, but ironically Leonardo da
Vinci ended up going to a reckoning school, and the
reckoning schools were schools that were involved in empirical analysis
and accountancy, which were in effect the nbas of the day,
and Da Vinci went there. So I thought, this is
fascinating that Da Vinci's education was actually an economic education,
(18:28):
an accounting education based on the numbers of sequencing of Fibonacci,
who learned his mathematics from the Arabs in Sicily, who
borrowed their mathematics from the Persians, who borrowed it from
the Indians, and those things really fascinate me. And the
fact that you know, the Westerners, and I mean the
(18:49):
Christian West, referred to zero and algebra as Saracen magic,
so they believed that somebody was whispering some magic, for one,
was whispering inside the heads of Arabic merchants who were
simply doing mental arithmetic, because they were much more sophisticated financially, mathematically,
(19:09):
numerically than we were. And of course once you break
that again glass ceiling, you open up a huge, huge
amount of change. And also I think social change. That
the emergence of merchants as a countervailing power to kings
and warriors in and around this period, armed not with
(19:33):
lances or spears but with money. It has a profound
catalytic impact on things like the Enlightenment, which come later.
But for me, there's a reasonably direct link between them all.
And of course the Reformation pop that in there just
for a good measure. Yeah, you know, an Irish person
as Scott having a chat, we could not throw in
the Reformation. So again these are as, I said, gentle
(19:56):
nudges rather than boisterous claims.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well, I mean, I found all that that particularly interesting
because I've always been very taken by research that suggested
that wealth in that early period in Italy was a
result of a more equal spread of wealth, a concentration
of wealth that was less intense than much of the
rest of the world, and that was one of the
things that led to the ability for people to invest
(20:20):
in the ability of people to get rich, etcetera, etcetera.
Of course, back to your point, that couldn't have happened
without the changes in the money system backing it up. Yeah,
so it all comes back to your string that runs
the whole way through.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
And the fascinating thing is if you look at Dante's
Inferno right in the comedia, which is obviously the text
of that shift from the dark ages into the light
of the re nation, so from darkness into light. What
really intrigued me. I was in Florence but three years ago,
and I was doing your student tourist guide. I just
paid up some guide and this guy came along and
(20:54):
he was very interesting, and they asked me what it did,
and I saw what I'm interested in economics. I'm into
there's money in the florin And he said, that's interesting.
He said, did you know that Dante reserved possibly the
worst punishments for a counterfeiter? And I said no. He said,
so strong was the Florentine political and economics establishment behind
(21:22):
the hard currency. That an actual effact, a real counterfeiter.
An English chap called Adam tried to actually debase the
florin and was punished severely in real life for his efforts,
and Dante placed him in the eighth circle of Hell,
just one above Lucifer himself. So that's how they really
thought about money. They thought, back to your point, if
(21:45):
you destabilize the currency, the money, you destabilized the system,
and the system is bringing us to a place, this
Florentine enlightenment. So these things are fascinating. It's funny the
things you pick up or when you're doing in the
you know, a five euro tour of Florence in an
r and then of course you got down your rabbit
hole and you find out about all these things.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Cheap tour, David five euros.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
It was probably twenty It was probably twenty euros. Probably.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Let's move forward a little bit. QUI and the Great
Financial Crisis? Is that a turning point in money? Does
that change the nature of money in the worst I.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Think it has changed a lot of things. I think
it's changed the understanding of what can be done by
central bankers. I don't think even in their more dreamlike states,
they could have imagined that a cash for trash scheme
of such a monumental phase could be introduced without totally
(22:42):
debasing the system. But what it has done, of course,
as you write about on a weekly basis, it has
profoundly changed acid prices, and acid prices have profoundly changed,
changed the sociology of money, who gets what, And it
has led to the amplification of inequalities simply because people
(23:02):
who depend on assets for their income as opposed to
the vast majority of people who depend on wages for
their income, those people are being rewarded and and a
lot of social problems. You mentioned Brexit, We could we
could argue that Brexit might not have happened had not
been for Que. The Trump might have had not have
happened to it not been for Qi. That very wedge
(23:24):
that's driven between let's say the working man or the
left behind, or whatever you want to describe them and
the elite was certainly amplified by easy money. So I
think that, you know, I think it was it was.
It was. It was it some Chinese premiere who said,
you know, what do you think of the French Revolution?
He said, it's a bit too early, I think, with
respect your question about QUE, I think it's possibly too
(23:44):
early to really understand what it has done to the
global financial system and also to global inequalities and the
subsequent and evident political backlash.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
It's interesting, isn't it, Because it does it doesn't it
should change the way central banks behave. I mean, I
remember at the very beginning of QI, someone cleverer than
me pointing out to me that Q is not really
a monetary policy. It's a fiscal policy because it changes
the distribution of wealth and that changes everything, and therefore
central banks shouldn't be allowed to do it at all,
(24:17):
because it uses the powers that a democratic government should
be able to use, and that we've now been at
it for you know, a decade and a half.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Yeah, and there's no sign of it been consigned to
the bottomshelf.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
And when you look at that, you might you might
wonder whether we are treating money with the respect that
it deserves. Going back to our earlier conversations about many
different times in history of money has not been treated
with respect. Are we doing it again?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah? I think that's a very very good point. I
think that both of us are moving in a similar
direction that you know, you're you're not so much of
your debasing, but you are certainly taking away some of
the steadiness. And steadiness is a strange words and a
boring word. It's a very whiggish word, you know, It's
(25:03):
like the sort of thing Edwin Burke would come up with, right,
But it's a very important thing to be steady and
to be transparent and to give people. I mean, one
of the interest things about money, and I think you've
probably written about it too, like money is one of
these weird tools that allows us to live in the future,
you know, like when people are taking out of mortgage,
they're kind of envisaging who they might be in thirty
years time and what they might No other there's nothing
(25:25):
else we use on a daily basis that allows us
to do this. And as you say, you know, if
you go down the road of every time there is
a an acid crash, which you and I know happened
with extraordinary regularity, the way in which you will actually
plug that particular gap is by a bribe in effect,
to asset holders, and you debase, you debase this this
(25:48):
brilliant technology, and as you say, you debase that your peril,
you know, yeah, and you take a bit.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Of trust away in it. So that's that's an excellent
point for us to move out to bitcoin, which I
say you kind of started the book because you talked
about the Ashanga bone, which is effectively a type of
ledger money. Right there, you can see it like that
kind of ledg you of money, a bit like the
thing you didn't write about it in the book that
I simply cannot believe you didn't put in, which is
the Ryse Stones of Yap, which is one of my
(26:14):
you know, my favorite, my favorite money stories.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
The y App story was just told too many times, I know.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
But it's such a good story, right.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
This is a good story. It's a great story.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
And once you've read it, once you've read it, you
can't stop going around the world looking for Rye Stones.
I've just been in Tokyo. There's one in one of
the parks in Tokyo, and a just looking for it.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
You know, I love it. I love it. So yeah,
you're right. I mean the blockchain thing. When I hear
the tech bros telling me the blockchain is new, right,
that the ledger is a new idea and I'm looking
at this, and I went to the Belgian last summer.
I went. When I was just putting the finish in
touches of the book, I decided to go over to
Belgium and go to the Natural History Museum in Brussels.
And like all museums in second rate cities, and I
(26:55):
don't mean that in the sense of Brussels, but they
don't really look after it. So basically it's a couple
of weirdos and you know, like me looking at things,
and hundreds of really bored school children right other blocking
school tourg and oh my god, what are we doing here? Anyway?
Point is this little baboons femur and it's very shrunken
(27:17):
now because it's so old, little notches suggestive of basic accounting,
of a basic ledgure. Don't tell me that the blockchain
is anything more than a digital version of something that Africans,
our ancestors were messing around with twenty thousand years ago.
And it brings me to bitcoin. I suppose what fascinates
(27:38):
me about money is its ubiquity, this very counterintuitive idea
that although you can debase it in order for the
technology to work, it can't be scarce either. It has
to be bountiful and plentiful because it is a network technology,
and the more of us who use it, the more
of us coming to the network, and the more powerful
money is. So it's got this slightly paradoxical element at
(28:01):
its core, which is that scarcity, whether it be the
gold standard or Bitcoin, is actually the characteristic that makes
money less attractive and ubiquity, like in a language I
compared to a language. So we're speaking the English language.
We were talking about going to Barra before we came
(28:24):
on in Scotland. Many people in Barra continue to speak Gaelic,
many people in Irish speak Irish. But the usefulness of
the English language is because the rest of the world
uses it, and we use it to communicate on Bloomberg
and we can talk to many people. Money is the same.
A scarce money like a bitcoin is effectively the Esperanto
(28:44):
of money, right.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
I love that I saw that phrase in the book.
It's one of my favorite phrase. I'm going to use
it all the time.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
But you know what I mean. It's like, if you
meet anybody who speaks esperanto, it's incredibly important to them.
They can't stop talking about it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
But they can't talk it to anybody else because none
of the rest exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
You know, I'm the same carry on with bitcoin.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
One more thing before we end, is the other thing
that a lot of cryptocurrency people like to think is
new is this idea of a conflict between public money
and private money. And of course that's not new at all,
because you know, we think siege coins, corporate script I mean,
all the many, many types of private money we've had
in the past, and of course money is far too
powerful for a government to give that power of the
(29:23):
money away. So in the end, these private moneys, they
do disappear, exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I mean the you know, look, one huge fact, and
I call it a fact that comes out from researching
thousands of years of the history of money, is that
the state owns money, whether we like it or not.
And they're not about to give that power away to
a couple of tech bros. Right, Okay, no matter how
(29:50):
much they lobby the sec. What I've said, bitcoin is
just like it. It reminds me of a very very
well financed residence committee. Only residence committee are always lobbying
the government. You can't build here, you can't build it
about right, to my view, bitcoin is like it's like
a lobby group, right, and the more people who are
in it, the more the wing to lobby, the sec
to this and that. But my point is it's not
(30:11):
money in any sense that I understand it. Like by
all means, go and buy bit. I've bought bitcoin because
for the crack, because I like to see this thing
jumping up and down. But it ain't money, very very simple.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
So what if that's not money? What is the next
big leap forward in money?
Speaker 1 (30:26):
What do you see? I think, I think what we're
going to see. I think what the book all says
that leap forwards we don't really do. We do gradual, iterative,
almost evolutionary process. And I come back to language. You know,
the English language is most useful primarily because it's most promiscuous.
It has adopted and taken on board bits of French
and bits of German and all that sort of stuff, right,
(30:48):
And it's and it's comfortable with its promiscuity, right, and
that's what gives us its richness. And exactly the same
way in money that there's no great leap forward in
the language, and there's no great leap forward in money.
What there are little small iter of process, always marrin.
And this is the key solving some problem. Right. Our
problem with crypto is there ain't a problem big enough
(31:10):
to be solved. The global financial system warts and all.
Like the English language, it's not perfect, but it is
and that's the key it is it exists. So I
end the book as I started the book in the
democacocratic republic of Congo, and I started the book in
Congo twenty thousand years ago. And the emergence of a
(31:34):
fascinating little monetary technology called empeeser in Africa which has
really interested me. I was doing some work in Kenya
and I was looking down the road and there were
hundreds of people outside where was an effect a mobile
phone hawking station. It wasn't even a shop, it was
a lad telling it. Then I said to the person
who was with me, I said, ye know, what's all this?
And he said, oh, that's on pezer. I said, what's that?
(31:55):
He said, it's our currency. I said, I mean it's
your currency. I've got this shilling in my pocket. Says
this is your current. Do we use that? Right? We
use that for buying beer and things. But actually the
currency we use to trade is mobile phone credit, Jesus,
And they said, yeah, And who would have thought ten
years ago that mobile phones would become banks and mobile
(32:18):
phone credits would become money. And it solved a problem
of a non financially sophisticated country. They leaped from non
banking to banking. But their bank is their mobile phone,
and that I find fascinating.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It is amazing. I've used it myself in Kenya. It's
amazing renovation. It doesn't solve a problem for me, It
doesn't solve a problem for you, but it solves a
problem for the majority of canyons, which is what's so interesting. Yeah, exactly, David.
Last question, I can guess your answer, but I have
to answer it. I have to ask you anyway, ten
years one asset gold, a bitcoin, gold, any other asset
(32:57):
you would definitely hold over ten year period.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
I think unfortunately, things like very boring things like everybody
holds property, bricks and water. Basically it moves along. Our
societies have made it so cheap, ironically to put money
to property with also the tax scams you might call
them that that is again a construct of society, and
(33:22):
I would say, I mean the interesting. But bitcoin, it's fun,
but it's not real.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
That's a great place to end it. Hate mail to
the usual address, everybody. David, thank you so much. Thanks
for listening to this week's Marin Talks Money. If you
like us, show, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen
to podcasts, and you can keep sending questions and comments
to Merrin Money at Bloomberg dot net. You can also
follow me and John on Twitter or x I'm at
(33:48):
Mariness w and John is John Underscores Stepic. This episode
was hosted by Me Maren Sunset Web. It was produced
by Society and Isabella Ward. Production support and sound designed
by Moses and and special thanks course to David McWilliams
for that fascinating chat.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to Meren Talks Money, the podcast in which people
who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Meren sums
that web. This week I'm joined by author David McWilliams
coming on to talk about his latest book, Money, A
Story of Humanity. David is an economist and fellow podcaster.
He's worked both as a central banker and on the
financial markets in various ways, so he brings a unique
and I think very interesting perspective to the history of money,
(00:33):
which turns out to be the history of everything. In
the book, David walks readers through time from the day
the first gold coin was minted to the modern incarnation
of money, or maybe not as money, today's bitcoin. He
explores ideas on how society's fate is closely links to
the strength with its currency, and how you can destroy
a state by destroying its money. Welcome David to Merin
(00:58):
Talks Money, Maren.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It is an absolute pleasure to see you again. Has
life all good?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
All the better after reading your book?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Oh? Thank you David.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
One of the first things I thought when I was
reading your book was that I have read and I'm
sure you have as well, so many books written by
someone with an obsession about something. They look at their
obsession and suddenly they can explain the whole world, with
that obsession being the collapse of the Roman Empire, the
extinction of the Azteks, the French Revolution, Christianity, wealth of
medieval literally, whatever whatever it is. And then they say, well,
(01:25):
this was caused by my obsession, which could be salt
gut bacteria, the invention of stirrups, weatherhivemind, demographics, have many
young men there are in a population that sort of thing.
But your book, I think is actually correct. It is
maybe money that is the thing that explains everything.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well, you're you know, wouldn't say it's an obsession, but
you know, when you end up doing economics in university
and then you do a bit of an postgraduate because frankly,
you don't know what to do. You've got a degrees,
Oh my god, what I do now? And then you
kind of you find yourself working in a central bank
as a monetary cast, as a young flow, and then
you realize, okay, okay, so this is quite interesting. This
is the place where we kind of magic up this
(02:05):
thing called money. Okay, fine, and then I went to
investment banking and saw the way credit was being pushed
around the world and how the basically the private banks
were creating money out of fresh air. And I thought
to myself, Okay, this is interesting. And then in Ireland
we've had exactly a the UK, we've had our boom
bus cycles, you know, And I just thought to myself
(02:25):
that I've spent thirty years kind of observing the relationship
between humans, ourselves and this strange thing called money, and
that was the initial idea. And then the idea was like, well,
why not look at money as this miraculous technology that
(02:45):
has enabled humans to do extraordinary things and see whether
or not if you go back to the beginning that
you can actually thread that particular argument convincingly to yourself
first and then on the page. And yes, I think
you're right. I think it was one of It wasn't
a Eureka moment, but it was like it was one
of those moments you just thought, actually, this is the thing,
(03:05):
this is the social technology that has really acted, as
as I say in the book, a sort of a
Promethean force for humanity, for good and hil and and
that I that as that argument becomes developed and becomes
a little more nuanced, are becomes a little more pronounced
in certain for certain stages, you begin to think, yeah,
(03:26):
this is this is the technology that humans invented to
cope with complexity. And where you see complex societies and
you see complex relations, you begin to see the coincidence
of money or a form of money emerging. And then
with that form of money, you also see what I
would describe as the coevolution of many other things that
(03:48):
I suppose we would regard as pillars of human civilization.
So numbers, empiricism, writing, legal systems, organized religions, all these
things all come at around the same time.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I mean, the key idea behind the book is that
money is a shortcut. It's the ultimate life pack. That
money allows you to have prices inside which all the
information you require to understand a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Is available immediately exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
And so that shortcut allows innovation, allows social and economic flexibility,
and gives us every Every big change in the nature
of money or the understanding of money, or the way
that money is used can and often has led us
to a new level of prosperity or a new level
of innovation. That's the basic key, right, that's the basic idea.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
And it doesn't seem like anything except common sense really
when you think about it. But I do think that
what has happened in our particular business, in the business
of economics, and again I speak as a former central banker,
which is the kind of holy holy grail of monetary
economics should be at least anyway, I kind of got
the impression that economists don't tell the story where not
(05:02):
because they're unwilling, but maybe because they're unable. Now that
is a big charge. I mean, I teach more for
economics at Trinity. I teach economics to postgraduates. And over
the years I've thought, Lolo, there's more to this, you know.
And I think in a way economics has shied away
from these much bigger notions of money as this miraculous
(05:24):
what I say, wondrous technology, a product of human imagination.
It's sat to see. Then you got into a little
bit of evolution, a little bit of biology, a little
bit of history, and try and try and see the
creature that is money in its totality, and I just
I don't think our profession has done justice to what
is an extraordinary human creation.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, we haven't done enough to talk about, as you said,
the social aspect of it. All right, let's talk about
some of these big turning points. Where do we begin.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
The Sumerian civilization is where we see money emerging, not
particularly different actually conceptionally to what to to to what
we have now, which is kind of interesting. And I
think what you see there is the coevolution of money
and writing. For example, And I know it doesn't sound
very heroic, but writing started as an adjunct tool for accountancy. Again,
(06:13):
you know, we would have thought that writing was some
great sort of hero some great poet, some great piece
of literature. No. Actually, in fact, it was just basic
writing stuff down, who owed, who what and when were
they going to pay it back? And then of course
you see when you go onto the Lydians that probably
the next big civilization, they really innovate with coins, and
(06:35):
they introduce gold coins and gold coins. I think coinages
is very interesting because coinage is essentially a very democratic
notion that if for example, think about it, you're in
a very hierarchical structure in terms of the way in
which societies are organized. But with this bizarre thing coin
a prince's fiver and a pauper's fiver are worth the same.
(06:58):
So this is a very weird, weird idea that suddenly
you get almost a leveling out of social hierarchies with
this bizarre technology. And of course the other invention the
Lidians came up with was they introduced smaller and smaller coins.
You're allowing commerce to seep into the tentricles of society
(07:19):
in a way in which previous of civilizations didn't do.
And of course the Greeks then take that button and
do what the Greeks did all across the across the world.
They make it better. And so the Greeks are the
first really heavily financialized society that we that we we
we come across. And also, I don't know about you,
(07:40):
but years ago, though you know you're doing this stuff
in history and schooling things, why were these Greek fellows?
What made them sort of smash the sort of intellectual
glass ceiling when it came to philosophy and art and
democracy and republicanism and all these incredibly sophisticated notions. And
it strikes me that it's inconceivable these things would have
(08:02):
happened without a monetarized society, and the reason is because
money makes you count, it makes you think empirically, it
makes you think precisely. And if you see the shift
even from the Homer to xenophone two hundred years like
big philosophers, Homer's talking all about myths and Xenophones talking
about logic. So the Greeks made this kind of intellectual
(08:24):
leap in a very very quick period of time. It
also happens to coincide with the mass circulized circulation of
the dragma, which, ironically or not ironically, I just think fascinating.
He was called the dragma then, and was the dragma
up until about eighteen years ago, which which means a
handful in ancient Greek.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, look at that. Another thing. The EU destroyed the
oldest current in the world.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So think, well, ye, why did for example, Christianity emerge?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Ah, yes, no, I'm really interested in this one, really
interested in this one. This is one of the bits
of the bit that I've an particularly compelling, this this
idea that Christianity was a result of this huge increase
inflows of billion and silver into Roman first century.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, no, it struck me that, you know, I've again
these things interest you in a sort of odd conceptual
way between pints, if you're having a chat in the
back of a bark. Why did Christianity start where it
did and when it did, and why did it catch
on so quickly? Because it's a really radical idea. You're
talking about a world which was very macho and gods
who were super alpha males and alpha females. Okay, this
(09:33):
was a pre woke world. Let's just say right. And
suddenly this skeezer comes along and says, no, no, I
see those powerful people, they don't inherit the earth. You
do the weak person. See that rich man, he's not virtuous.
You were virtuous. And it struck me that this is
such a radical idea that could it have been a
sort of ideological counterweight to the emergence of a meritocracy
(09:56):
which were being forced by this technology money? And I
think yes, because it is a very radically different philosophy,
so it must have been incredibly attractive to people for
whom the monetary economy wasn't going their way. Okay, for
the losers in effect, which is I always think why
(10:16):
Christianity is quite interesting because it's it's a religion for losers.
It's quite an interesting you know, take it's the people
who lose out.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yes, it gives you, It gives you some compensation for being.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
The compensation you need. You need a countervailing narrative that says, well, look,
it might be working out here, but in the next life,
I'm going to be sitting up beside Peter.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Everything's going to be fine. The next life.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, Saint Peter, angels gonna be good. And I thought,
I thought that that was an interesting observation to think, Wow,
you know, could it have been a response to the
commercialization of the ancient world? And is it any doubt
or is it any coincidence that, you know, Christianity was
(10:57):
an entirely urban phenomenon, as to it was commerce, as
too is the marketplace. So these are these are the
sort of things that I think are are interesting And
once you begin to think about them again, they they
I don't make these big claims. I just think it's
it sounds plausible.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, And Rome comes up a lot in the book,
and a lot in the history of money in general.
And one thing that I hadn't read very much about
before was the story of the Tiberius's credit crunch.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It's a good one.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
That's a great story. Tell us a little bit about that,
because of course it's going to resonate with people today. Perhaps.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
I mean again, you know, like you and I have
been writing about money for many years, and I think
you're always fascinated at our endemic repetitive stupidity when it
comes to booms and busts. And this time is going
to be different. And I'm gonna make money. I'm gonna
get out first, La la la, Right, And so you
go back to Tiberia. So it's a D thirty three
and Tiberius is sitting in Capri. He's had a very
(11:53):
good reign, reasonably peaceful. They've conquered Egypt, loads of flows
of grains of floads of bullion in from Egypt. All
is going well. Surprise surprise, interest rates fall as they
would do in the modern world, and surprise surprise, you
get a boom in assets. And the asset of choice
is the property market, and in particular second homes in
(12:13):
the provinces that were recently conquered. So it's basically the
Roman equivalent of Irish people buying property in Bulgaria in
the boom. Right, and our British people buying property in
Fein Tener, et etcetera. And so what happens is like
in all good Roman stories, there's a coup, there's a pretender.
The pretender galvanizes some support. The emperor waits on the
(12:36):
sidelines for a while, then comes back, then kills the pretender,
and then rounds up the pretender's followers, and lo and behold,
he realizes that a huge amount of the senatorial class
were prepared to jump ship. Why because Rome was an
empire of money, and if you back the right horse,
you may well have been personally enriched phenomenally if this
new emperor came in. So what he does is basically says,
(12:57):
I'm going to hit them in their pockets, and he
in effect Titan's monetary policy. What he says is you're
going to have to set aside x amount of your
property in cash, and as a result of that, you
get a credit crunch. As a result of that, we
know what happened in the UK to the credit crunches,
which is amazing, is that money kind of disappears because
it's hoarded. And once it's hoarded, as the prices fall
(13:20):
and as asset prices fell, Tiberius did what I suspect
Ben Bernanke should have done eight maybe taken a slice
of the action in return for the cash for trash
scheme that he unveiled. But what I love about this
baron is the fact that we're back to the same place.
You know, the Romans were dealing with credit crunches. We're
(13:41):
dealing with credit crunches. The Romans were operating a monetary policy.
We're operating the monetary policy. The Romans acid of choice
was foreign property. Our asset of choice is far and property.
So and fascinatingly, the contagion that we see in international
markets now was evident. Then that also interested me because
(14:02):
money is social, it's psychological and panic and hard behavior. So,
as I say in the book, I think economists, when
they see a price, they see a number. When most
of the rest of the world sees a price, we
get a feeling, and that feeling is what drives the
animal spirits, and the animal spirits are what drives all
the good stuff and the bank.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
When we talk about Rome, there is the general idea
that the Roman Empire fell in the end because of
not treating its money with proper respect. Yes, the continual
debasement of the currency in the end is what has
destroyed the empire.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah, and so much so that towards the end they
could only print the emperor's head on one side of
the coin. They were so thin and there was no
proper hard metals in it are very very very little
the ratio and again and that story were going to
Dante in the book we go to Renaissance, that story
of debasement, counter debasement, all that sort of stuff is
ever present. And I think it's a fair point. I
(14:58):
look at the survey and I think it came up
with it's in the book. I think two hundred and
fourteen reasons were have been given over the years by
historians for the fall of the Roman Empire. But ironically
money isn't one of them. That is amazing, isn't it.
I would have told the list I was thought to
be central to understanding, you know, did the Roman Empire
(15:20):
fall because they debased money or did they debase money
because the empire was falling, you know, which which just
happened at the same time. But I would have thought
at least it should be on the list, you know,
at least at least we should explore that because it's very,
very evidently that the data on the debasement of the
currencies is really ubiquitous, you know. So so those sort
(15:40):
of things. Again, I suppose the book tries to take
these stories and give them a little bit of historical
flavoring and residents. You know, if you debase your currency,
we started the book talking about Hitler trying to debase sterling.
If you debase your currency, what you actually do is
you mess with people's heads. It's more, which more than
(16:00):
just prices going up and down, right, And as you
said at the start, you know, the price is like
an encyclopedia of knowledge, the greatest short could we have.
It tells you enormous amount things. If you mess with that,
you're messing with the very foundations of the way in
which we see the world.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Right about that when you talk about destroying money, So
when money dies, trust, instability and society breakdown. So we
take this organization organizational technology that we used to make
sense of really an incredibly complicated world. But you know,
you can go in nab shops and you can buy
things because all the information you need is is contained
in the price. So kick that away and everything becomes
(16:35):
completely unmoored.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
People freak out.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, And there's a lot, a lot of a lot
in the book about the various stories around it. You know,
you can use the way that money can destabilize society
in wartime endlessly. So another story I didn't know seventeen
ninety three William Playfair counterfeiting French money towards the end
of the French Revolution to time destabilize things further. But
let's go back. Let's go back to Italy, which pops
up again and again and again and again, and the Renaissance,
(17:01):
because one of the one of the really great connections
that you that you draw in the book is that,
you know, it's not just it's not just about economic
innovation and economic change that comes as a result of
changes in the money system or advances in the money system.
It's artistic innovation and change that comes as well. In
their inniscence is a classic example of that.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Absolutely, and and and again. You know, there's there's a
character in the book called Leonardo of Pisa, who's better
known from mathematical students as Fibonacci. But I make the claim,
or at least again suggestions these are these are these
are polite nudges rather than sort of boisterous claims that
you know, without Leonardo of Pisa, there's no Leonardo da Vinci.
(17:42):
And the idea is that da Vinci comes at the
tail end of an economic and financial revolution that was
anchored in Florence by a currency, the Florin, the hardest
currency of its time, in a way like the dollar
would have been over the years. And there is a
(18:03):
direct connection not only to Fibonacci, but ironically Leonardo da
Vinci ended up going to a reckoning school, and the
reckoning schools were schools that were involved in empirical analysis
and accountancy, which were in effect the nbas of the day,
and Da Vinci went there. So I thought, this is
fascinating that Da Vinci's education was actually an economic education,
(18:28):
an accounting education based on the numbers of sequencing of Fibonacci,
who learned his mathematics from the Arabs in Sicily, who
borrowed their mathematics from the Persians, who borrowed it from
the Indians, and those things really fascinate me. And the
fact that you know, the Westerners, and I mean the
(18:49):
Christian West, referred to zero and algebra as Saracen magic,
so they believed that somebody was whispering some magic, for one,
was whispering inside the heads of Arabic merchants who were
simply doing mental arithmetic, because they were much more sophisticated financially, mathematically,
(19:09):
numerically than we were. And of course once you break
that again glass ceiling, you open up a huge, huge
amount of change. And also I think social change. That
the emergence of merchants as a countervailing power to kings
and warriors in and around this period, armed not with
(19:33):
lances or spears but with money. It has a profound
catalytic impact on things like the Enlightenment, which come later.
But for me, there's a reasonably direct link between them all.
And of course the Reformation pop that in there just
for a good measure. Yeah, you know, an Irish person
as Scott having a chat, we could not throw in
the Reformation. So again these are as, I said, gentle
(19:56):
nudges rather than boisterous claims.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well, I mean, I found all that that particularly interesting
because I've always been very taken by research that suggested
that wealth in that early period in Italy was a
result of a more equal spread of wealth, a concentration
of wealth that was less intense than much of the
rest of the world, and that was one of the
things that led to the ability for people to invest
(20:20):
in the ability of people to get rich, etcetera, etcetera.
Of course, back to your point, that couldn't have happened
without the changes in the money system backing it up. Yeah,
so it all comes back to your string that runs
the whole way through.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
And the fascinating thing is if you look at Dante's
Inferno right in the comedia, which is obviously the text
of that shift from the dark ages into the light
of the re nation, so from darkness into light. What
really intrigued me. I was in Florence but three years ago,
and I was doing your student tourist guide. I just
paid up some guide and this guy came along and
(20:54):
he was very interesting, and they asked me what it did,
and I saw what I'm interested in economics. I'm into
there's money in the florin And he said, that's interesting.
He said, did you know that Dante reserved possibly the
worst punishments for a counterfeiter? And I said no. He said,
so strong was the Florentine political and economics establishment behind
(21:22):
the hard currency. That an actual effact, a real counterfeiter.
An English chap called Adam tried to actually debase the
florin and was punished severely in real life for his efforts,
and Dante placed him in the eighth circle of Hell,
just one above Lucifer himself. So that's how they really
thought about money. They thought, back to your point, if
(21:45):
you destabilize the currency, the money, you destabilized the system,
and the system is bringing us to a place, this
Florentine enlightenment. So these things are fascinating. It's funny the
things you pick up or when you're doing in the
you know, a five euro tour of Florence in an
r and then of course you got down your rabbit
hole and you find out about all these things.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Cheap tour, David five euros.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
It was probably twenty It was probably twenty euros. Probably.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Let's move forward a little bit. QUI and the Great
Financial Crisis? Is that a turning point in money? Does
that change the nature of money in the worst I.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Think it has changed a lot of things. I think
it's changed the understanding of what can be done by
central bankers. I don't think even in their more dreamlike states,
they could have imagined that a cash for trash scheme
of such a monumental phase could be introduced without totally
(22:42):
debasing the system. But what it has done, of course,
as you write about on a weekly basis, it has
profoundly changed acid prices, and acid prices have profoundly changed,
changed the sociology of money, who gets what, And it
has led to the amplification of inequalities simply because people
(23:02):
who depend on assets for their income as opposed to
the vast majority of people who depend on wages for
their income, those people are being rewarded and and a
lot of social problems. You mentioned Brexit, We could we
could argue that Brexit might not have happened had not
been for Que. The Trump might have had not have
happened to it not been for Qi. That very wedge
(23:24):
that's driven between let's say the working man or the
left behind, or whatever you want to describe them and
the elite was certainly amplified by easy money. So I
think that, you know, I think it was it was.
It was. It was it some Chinese premiere who said,
you know, what do you think of the French Revolution?
He said, it's a bit too early, I think, with
respect your question about QUE, I think it's possibly too
(23:44):
early to really understand what it has done to the
global financial system and also to global inequalities and the
subsequent and evident political backlash.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
It's interesting, isn't it, Because it does it doesn't it
should change the way central banks behave. I mean, I
remember at the very beginning of QI, someone cleverer than
me pointing out to me that Q is not really
a monetary policy. It's a fiscal policy because it changes
the distribution of wealth and that changes everything, and therefore
central banks shouldn't be allowed to do it at all,
(24:17):
because it uses the powers that a democratic government should
be able to use, and that we've now been at
it for you know, a decade and a half.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Yeah, and there's no sign of it been consigned to
the bottomshelf.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
And when you look at that, you might you might
wonder whether we are treating money with the respect that
it deserves. Going back to our earlier conversations about many
different times in history of money has not been treated
with respect. Are we doing it again?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah? I think that's a very very good point. I
think that both of us are moving in a similar
direction that you know, you're you're not so much of
your debasing, but you are certainly taking away some of
the steadiness. And steadiness is a strange words and a
boring word. It's a very whiggish word, you know, It's
(25:03):
like the sort of thing Edwin Burke would come up with, right,
But it's a very important thing to be steady and
to be transparent and to give people. I mean, one
of the interest things about money, and I think you've
probably written about it too, like money is one of
these weird tools that allows us to live in the future,
you know, like when people are taking out of mortgage,
they're kind of envisaging who they might be in thirty
years time and what they might No other there's nothing
(25:25):
else we use on a daily basis that allows us
to do this. And as you say, you know, if
you go down the road of every time there is
a an acid crash, which you and I know happened
with extraordinary regularity, the way in which you will actually
plug that particular gap is by a bribe in effect,
to asset holders, and you debase, you debase this this
(25:48):
brilliant technology, and as you say, you debase that your peril,
you know, yeah, and you take a bit.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Of trust away in it. So that's that's an excellent
point for us to move out to bitcoin, which I
say you kind of started the book because you talked
about the Ashanga bone, which is effectively a type of
ledger money. Right there, you can see it like that
kind of ledg you of money, a bit like the
thing you didn't write about it in the book that
I simply cannot believe you didn't put in, which is
the Ryse Stones of Yap, which is one of my
(26:14):
you know, my favorite, my favorite money stories.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
The y App story was just told too many times, I know.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
But it's such a good story, right.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
This is a good story. It's a great story.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
And once you've read it, once you've read it, you
can't stop going around the world looking for Rye Stones.
I've just been in Tokyo. There's one in one of
the parks in Tokyo, and a just looking for it.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
You know, I love it. I love it. So yeah,
you're right. I mean the blockchain thing. When I hear
the tech bros telling me the blockchain is new, right,
that the ledger is a new idea and I'm looking
at this, and I went to the Belgian last summer.
I went. When I was just putting the finish in
touches of the book, I decided to go over to
Belgium and go to the Natural History Museum in Brussels.
And like all museums in second rate cities, and I
(26:55):
don't mean that in the sense of Brussels, but they
don't really look after it. So basically it's a couple
of weirdos and you know, like me looking at things,
and hundreds of really bored school children right other blocking
school tourg and oh my god, what are we doing here? Anyway?
Point is this little baboons femur and it's very shrunken
(27:17):
now because it's so old, little notches suggestive of basic accounting,
of a basic ledgure. Don't tell me that the blockchain
is anything more than a digital version of something that Africans,
our ancestors were messing around with twenty thousand years ago.
And it brings me to bitcoin. I suppose what fascinates
(27:38):
me about money is its ubiquity, this very counterintuitive idea
that although you can debase it in order for the
technology to work, it can't be scarce either. It has
to be bountiful and plentiful because it is a network technology,
and the more of us who use it, the more
of us coming to the network, and the more powerful
money is. So it's got this slightly paradoxical element at
(28:01):
its core, which is that scarcity, whether it be the
gold standard or Bitcoin, is actually the characteristic that makes
money less attractive and ubiquity, like in a language I
compared to a language. So we're speaking the English language.
We were talking about going to Barra before we came
(28:24):
on in Scotland. Many people in Barra continue to speak Gaelic,
many people in Irish speak Irish. But the usefulness of
the English language is because the rest of the world
uses it, and we use it to communicate on Bloomberg
and we can talk to many people. Money is the same.
A scarce money like a bitcoin is effectively the Esperanto
(28:44):
of money, right.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
I love that I saw that phrase in the book.
It's one of my favorite phrase. I'm going to use
it all the time.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
But you know what I mean. It's like, if you
meet anybody who speaks esperanto, it's incredibly important to them.
They can't stop talking about it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
But they can't talk it to anybody else because none
of the rest exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
You know, I'm the same carry on with bitcoin.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
One more thing before we end, is the other thing
that a lot of cryptocurrency people like to think is
new is this idea of a conflict between public money
and private money. And of course that's not new at all,
because you know, we think siege coins, corporate script I mean,
all the many, many types of private money we've had
in the past, and of course money is far too
powerful for a government to give that power of the
(29:23):
money away. So in the end, these private moneys, they
do disappear, exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I mean the you know, look, one huge fact, and
I call it a fact that comes out from researching
thousands of years of the history of money, is that
the state owns money, whether we like it or not.
And they're not about to give that power away to
a couple of tech bros. Right, Okay, no matter how
(29:50):
much they lobby the sec. What I've said, bitcoin is
just like it. It reminds me of a very very
well financed residence committee. Only residence committee are always lobbying
the government. You can't build here, you can't build it
about right, to my view, bitcoin is like it's like
a lobby group, right, and the more people who are
in it, the more the wing to lobby, the sec
to this and that. But my point is it's not
(30:11):
money in any sense that I understand it. Like by
all means, go and buy bit. I've bought bitcoin because
for the crack, because I like to see this thing
jumping up and down. But it ain't money, very very simple.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
So what if that's not money? What is the next
big leap forward in money?
Speaker 1 (30:26):
What do you see? I think, I think what we're
going to see. I think what the book all says
that leap forwards we don't really do. We do gradual, iterative,
almost evolutionary process. And I come back to language. You know,
the English language is most useful primarily because it's most promiscuous.
It has adopted and taken on board bits of French
and bits of German and all that sort of stuff, right,
(30:48):
And it's and it's comfortable with its promiscuity, right, and
that's what gives us its richness. And exactly the same
way in money that there's no great leap forward in
the language, and there's no great leap forward in money.
What there are little small iter of process, always marrin.
And this is the key solving some problem. Right. Our
problem with crypto is there ain't a problem big enough
(31:10):
to be solved. The global financial system warts and all.
Like the English language, it's not perfect, but it is
and that's the key it is it exists. So I
end the book as I started the book in the
democacocratic republic of Congo, and I started the book in
Congo twenty thousand years ago. And the emergence of a
(31:34):
fascinating little monetary technology called empeeser in Africa which has
really interested me. I was doing some work in Kenya
and I was looking down the road and there were
hundreds of people outside where was an effect a mobile
phone hawking station. It wasn't even a shop, it was
a lad telling it. Then I said to the person
who was with me, I said, ye know, what's all this?
And he said, oh, that's on pezer. I said, what's that?
(31:55):
He said, it's our currency. I said, I mean it's
your currency. I've got this shilling in my pocket. Says
this is your current. Do we use that? Right? We
use that for buying beer and things. But actually the
currency we use to trade is mobile phone credit, Jesus,
And they said, yeah, And who would have thought ten
years ago that mobile phones would become banks and mobile
(32:18):
phone credits would become money. And it solved a problem
of a non financially sophisticated country. They leaped from non
banking to banking. But their bank is their mobile phone,
and that I find fascinating.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It is amazing. I've used it myself in Kenya. It's
amazing renovation. It doesn't solve a problem for me, It
doesn't solve a problem for you, but it solves a
problem for the majority of canyons, which is what's so interesting. Yeah, exactly, David.
Last question, I can guess your answer, but I have
to answer it. I have to ask you anyway, ten
years one asset gold, a bitcoin, gold, any other asset
(32:57):
you would definitely hold over ten year period.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
I think unfortunately, things like very boring things like everybody
holds property, bricks and water. Basically it moves along. Our
societies have made it so cheap, ironically to put money
to property with also the tax scams you might call
them that that is again a construct of society, and
(33:22):
I would say, I mean the interesting. But bitcoin, it's fun,
but it's not real.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
That's a great place to end it. Hate mail to
the usual address, everybody. David, thank you so much. Thanks
for listening to this week's Marin Talks Money. If you
like us, show, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen
to podcasts, and you can keep sending questions and comments
to Merrin Money at Bloomberg dot net. You can also
follow me and John on Twitter or x I'm at
(33:48):
Mariness w and John is John Underscores Stepic. This episode
was hosted by Me Maren Sunset Web. It was produced
by Society and Isabella Ward. Production support and sound designed
by Moses and and special thanks course to David McWilliams
for that fascinating chat.
Host
Merryn Somerset Webb
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