Broken Money Quotes

“In other words, the modern financial structure results in neocolonialist value extraction in a similar (albeit less direct) way to how outright colonialism did. The method involves financial coercion instead of violent warfare.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Throughout the 1930s decade, during a period of global economic stagnation, political populism grew around the world. Many remnants of World War I, which had not been fully dealt with, bubbled back up to the surface. Currencies had failed, savings had disappeared, the working class had revolted against the wealthy class to varying degrees across nations, and people in previously defeated nations had turned toward political extremism. Large portions of the public wanted “strong men” to lead them and tell them who was causing their problems, even if it meant a reduction in individual liberty and laying false blame on minority groups. These issues, along with many other factors that are far too many to list here, eventually led to World War II.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Various commodity monies serve as honest and fair ledger systems up until technology reaches a point where one group gains an unequal advantage, which then forces everyone else to adapt or lose.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Nearly 90% of currency exchange volume in the world involves the dollar, nearly 60% of international currency reserves are dollar-denominated, and nearly 50% of global trade invoicing and cross-border loans are denominated in dollars.205”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Gold itself is an asset for the holder and a liability for nobody else; it represents the accumulated energy that was used to extract it from the earth and refine it into usable form, for which it has many applications. In that type of gold-backed system, everything is ultimately underpinned by an unencumbered asset, whereas in the current system, everything is ultimately underpinned by government bonds, which are themselves liabilities.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Gold itself is an asset for the holder and a liability for nobody else; it represents the accumulated energy that was used to extract it from the earth and refine it into usable form, for which it has many applications.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Any individual bank can leverage itself by lending money or buying securities, and thus reducing its cash reserves at the Federal Reserve. However, when they make those loans or buy those securities, they create deposits somewhere else in the financial system, and those deposits result in reserves shifting from the lending bank to the bank that is receiving those deposits.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream and whose development of Hashcash in the 1990s was cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper, had this to say about Bitcoin trade-offs in a 2021 interview: There’s something unusual about Bitcoin. So, in 2013 I spent about 4 months of my spare time trying to find any way to appreciably improve Bitcoin, you know, across scalability, decentralization, privacy, fungibility, making it easier for people to mine on small devices… a bunch of metrics that I considered to be metrics of improvement. And so I looked at lots of different changing parameters, changing design, changing network, changing cryptography, and, you know, I came up with lots of different ideas — some of which have been proposed by other people since. But, basically to my surprise, it seemed that almost anything you did that arguably improved it in one way, made it worse in multiple other ways. It made it more complicated, used more bandwidth, made some other aspect of the system objectively worse. And so I came to think about it that Bitcoin kind of exists in a narrow pocket of design space. You know, the design space of all possible designs is an enormous search space, right, and counterintuitively it seems you can’t significantly improve it. And bear in mind I come from a background where I have a PhD in distributed systems, and spent most of my career working on large scale internet systems for startups and big companies and security protocols, and that sort of thing, so I feel like I have a reasonable chance — if anybody does — of incrementally improving something of this nature. And basically I gave it a shot and concluded, ‘Wow there is literally, basically nothing. Literally everything you do makes it worse.’ Which was not what I was expecting.344”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“For real freedom to exist, it must be held above any specific interest, rather than something that is easy to take away from groups that we may not like. In other words, due process should occur for the most virtuous groups and the most odious groups alike.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“A willingness for a country to ban the usage of what is basically just a decentralized spreadsheet is often an advertisement for why people in that country likely need it. A country with a robust currency, strong property rights, and where capital wants to be, is unlikely to ban bitcoin.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“A country with a robust currency, strong property rights, and where capital wants to be, is unlikely to ban bitcoin. A country dealing with a severe mismanagement of its public ledger is more likely to try to ban bitcoin, or at least add a lot of friction to it.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“A country with a robust currency, strong property rights, and where capital wants to be, is unlikely to ban bitcoin.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Saving wealth in a non-ideal form of money and being unable to properly measure or understand the supply growth of the money that you use, can have dire consequences”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Almost without exception, if you look around the world for regions with persistent double-digit money supply inflation, those regions are not very economically productive. Instead, they tend to be in disarray. In that type of inflationary environment, it is hard for businesses to plan for the long run while remaining profitable, and it’s hard for workers to maintain wages that keep up with the cost of living.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Gold can still be stored as a long-term niche asset for savings and jewelry, but due to its slow speed and lack of widespread acceptance in modern times — along with legal tender laws — gold is not a viable alternative to the global fiat currency system for payments, unless heavily abstracted via trusted counterparties.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“In a 2017 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Linda J. Bilmes”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Albert Edgar Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money, 2–5. Will Kenton, “What is a Quid? With History of the British Pound Sterling” Investopedia.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Unfortunately, most empires, once they reach their apex, don’t pull back gracefully and positively. They expend resources to try to fight and keep every inch of what they have, while factions inside the empire battle each other, and while external forces chip away at the borders.190 Large organizations in general, including both governments and corporations, rarely disrupt themselves. Institutional inertia exists, meaning once things are set on a path, they tend to remain on that path even when it no longer makes sense, until they are heavily disrupted. Empires usually end up pivoting late from a position of weakness, rather than pivoting early from a position of strength.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Fedimint”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“Many Americans assume that part of maintaining quality of life in the country means that we should do whatever we can to maintain the status quo situation of the dollar as the world reserve currency. However, I view it differently. The status quo of the dollar’s hegemony has directly contributed to the domestic hollowing-out that we’ve experienced for decades — especially after the Cold War ended. The system that has been in place since the 1970s is antiquated monetary technology and is inherently unsustainable due to the accrued imbalances that it creates. Losing dollar hegemony at this point would harm special interests in the United States, would reduce the country’s imperial reach, and would require a shift of priorities, but ultimately it would lead toward a more natural and balanced global economy and provide the opportunity for U.S. domestic revitalization. The risk comes when we fail to recognize that and thus fail to make proactive changes from a position of strength. And so far, that’s the path we’ve chosen.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“It’s not so much that a strong or weak currency is inherently good or bad per se, but rather that an artificially strong or weak currency relative to a country’s trade balance is bad. If a country has a persistent trade surplus but constantly weakens its otherwise-appreciating currency by accumulating central bank reserves (mercantilism), then value is siphoned away from workers and toward the leaders. Similarly, if a country has a persistent trade deficit but has an extra monetary premium built onto its otherwise-depreciating currency due to its imperial prowess, then its workers are not very competitive in terms of global labor rates and will likely stagnate, while their political leaders, multinational corporations, and wealthy elite will thrive.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“In many ways, the Bretton Woods monetary system and subsequently the Eurodollar/Petrodollar monetary system represent forms of monetary neocolonialism, with the United States in charge.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

“most new currency is created from either 1) monetized government deficit spending, or 2) an increase in fractional reserve bank lending.”
― Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better