BloombergOpinion/Niall Ferguson/5-1-2022
“The events of the past two years — first the Covid-19 pandemic and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine — have been sufficiently disruptive to make another shift in the global monetary order seem likely. But what form will it take?”
USAGOLD note: Not sure if Ferguson adds clarity or confusion to the debate on the future monetary order with this unusual (some would say stretched) view of a dollar-bitcoin synthesis. Charlie Munger expressed a much different point of view over the weekend saying bitcoin was “evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve system.” Like a good many others, Ferguson believes that the dollar wins the reserve currency sweepstakes by default, and bitcoin in his scheme is just another means to generating global dollar demand. He passes along a observation from Larry Summers that’s a classic: “‘You cannot replace something with nothing.’ What other currency was preferable to the dollar as a reserve and trade currency, he asked, ‘when Europe’s a museum, Japan’s a nursing home, China’s a jail, and Bitcoin’s an experiment?’”
