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In this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s “Fed Watch’,’ I flew solo without co-host Christian Keroles, but got to interact with the live stream fellows at Bitcoin Magazine, Q and Alex, and answer some questions from the live audience.
Topics for this episode were the new nominees for the Federal Reserve board, the Arizona bill to make bitcoin legal tender, Evergrande and China, and finally, the IMF forecast for GDP in 2022.
Raskin For Vice Chair Of The Federal Reserve
This month, President Biden announced his nominees to replace Rosengren, Kaplan and Quarles at the Federal Reserve, three board members who stepped down in 2021. Of most note was the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to fill Quarles’ vice chair seat and his role as head of supervision.
This is a controversial nomination, because Raskin is a radical progressive. She served at the Fed previously during the Obama administration, so is no stranger to the Fed. She is a big supporter of using Fed policies and powers over banking regulations to promote a progressive political agenda, like climate initiatives.
Raskin also draws a hard line on bitcoin and private sector digital alternatives to the USD. She favors the unrestrained use of Fed regulatory powers to control bitcoin and other innovation in the currency space. As for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), it is safe to say that she’d agree with those other progressive central bankers like Christine LaGarde, who want to pursue a CBDC.
Arizona Bill to Make Bitcoin Legal Tender
In our coverage of the Arizona bill to make bitcoin legal tender, I recapped the situation and put it in context of GDP size. The Arizona GDP is $375 billion, whereas the El Salvador GDP is $25 billion.
As for the legal issues, it is plainly unconstitutional, because the states are not allowed to make anything other than gold and silver legal tender. In an interesting turn, would the federal government actually pursue Arizona in this case, since the current USD does not fit the definition either?
We’ll have to wait and see how this turns out. What we can say now is that it is a big win already for bitcoin in shifting the Overton window to include this debate.
China Nationalizing Property Market
Long-time listeners of “Fed Watch” will know that we talk about China a lot. In this episode, I gave a quick update on things happening right now in regards to the communists, Evergrande, and real estate in general.
This month, state-owned enterprises (SOE) were exempted from the three red lines in a de facto, slow motion nationalization of the real estate market in China. This is a big change in how the real estate industry in China is structured, and marks the end of growth in my opinion.
Another development we covered is the gigantic secondary market of suppliers around the real estate industry starting to go under. Each large developer in China has an army of suppliers for furniture, plumbing, electrical, metal, concrete, landscaping, etc. These dependent companies are no small fish either. Some of them can be $1 billion companies.
I used this as an example of how central planning never works. These are the second- and third-order effects that those technocrats and authoritarians on high do not or cannot take into account.
Conclusion
I ended by using the IMF GDP forecasts for 2022 to circle back on the Federal Reserve and its predicted policy path for 2022. Will the Fed be able to raise rates in the middle of the year when the global economy is slowing and everywhere things are slipping back into recession?
This is an important time for the bitcoin economy to attract capital flight from the atrophy of the legacy economy, and show what it’s made of.
This is a guest post by Ansel Lindner. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.