 Hello, I'm your last speaker of the day. I know that that makes you happy. And I'm delighted to be here and many thanks to Balaji. I am going to talk about multi-currency mercantilism. And this is the scary idea that the world moves away from the US dollar, which was 87% of all global transactions in 2021. But something broke in 2022. And now most of the world's 80 countries have decided that they are moving to local currency trade in their own currencies and away from the US dollar. Now my background, I started out at the place that creates the dollar, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And I was on the settlement systems studies group. Then I went and I dematerialized securities in London for the Securities Investments Board. And I supervised the two global depositories, Euroclear and ClearStream. And then I decided the systems we have aren't good enough. I'm going to build new ones. I mean, it's been great today listening to you guys talk about networks and charter cities and change, because I've done all that. I went to ClearStream where I got US Treasuries into Luxembourg, globalized US Treasuries, US dollar liquidity. I had co-invented Tri-Party Repo that now does $18 trillion a day in interbank secured credit. I built the first global derivatives margin optimization and got the patent on it, yay. I then went independent, because I had babies. So I went from my most productive period to a reproductive period. And I built CLS Bank as my first job as a consultant. That is now a foreign exchange clearinghouse that clears $7.5 trillion a day in foreign exchange settlements, $1,900 trillion a year. I then modernized Reuters, UBS, into three global data centers. As a weird favor for Andrew Bailey, who's now governor of the Bank of England, I built a payment system in post-war Iraq that went live in 10 weeks using data over satellite and laptops. And then Charter City, hey, been there, done that. Tick that box. Dubai International Financial Center. I went out in May of 2005. NASDAQ Dubai went live in September. We wrote the laws. We wrote the governance. We wrote the rule books. We got all of the banks on board. We wrote the settlement infrastructure. The gate was the only building in DIFC when I arrived. Just desert all around. And now it's a huge city. So yeah, Charter Cities, they work. And I've modernized 14 central banks with Intellect Design Arena, getting a central bank award. Yay. So that's where I am now. I am also a founder of a FinTech startup that's building the new global monetary order. So I'm going to walk you through how that's going to work. Basically, when the last monetary order, Bretton Woods was designed in 1944. The United States had 80% of all global gold. The largest military, dominant military on the planet. And most of the GDP, half of all world GDP. That's no longer true, none of it. Now, the greatest economic activity is in Asia. That usually circle has more than half of humanity in it. And they're growing at between 5% and 8%. And they want a monetary order that suits them. So the world's changing. I'm not going to run through the history, but history is changing very, very fast. So now we're at the new monetary order, which I called multi-currency mercantilism. When I googled it, zero hits. Well, I didn't think there were two words in English that could get zero hits. But the reason it's mercantilist is because the aim of a mercantilist system is for a state, a nation, to collectively increase its wealth through trade, through activity with other states. A capitalist system, the aim is for private wealth to accumulate, often untaxed and stateless. So that's the difference between mercantilism and capitalism. And last year changed everything because the 12,000 sanctions that the collective west put on Russia broke the system. Other states looked at those sanctions, and they thought we have to defend ourselves. We have to defend our wealth from freezing, seizure, expropriation. And the way to do that is to move away from the dollar. And the key moment was in December of last year when President Xi stood with the six heads of state of the Gulf Cooperation Council and invited them to trade oil in Shanghai for Yuan, ending 50 years of the Petrodollar. So I'm gonna give you the happy news. This is all good. It's going to be okay. I know that the United States, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury are all terrified. And yes, it's going to change for them. There will be a new balance of power. But for the rest of the world, for the seven billion people that have been largely voiceless in the institutions that ran the world under the dollar, they are going to be actually much, much better off. And the transition can be gradual and stable. It really depends on whether we have wider wars, unfortunately. If there's a war in the Levant that widens from Gaza, if there's a war in Asia over Taiwan or any other cause, the transition will still happen. It will accelerate, but it will become chaotic and unpredictable. So we're all better off if there's no war. The reason that can be transition, yes, no more, thank you. The reason that can be stable, I'll just run you through the numbers. All global trade and goods, we're talking about physical things, all global trade and goods, $46 trillion. Now I told you earlier, foreign exchange trade is $1,900 trillion. So $46 trillion is a very small part of that. And only half of that is dollar trade right now. So that's $26 trillion. So if, let's say, half of the dollar trade moves to local currency over the next decade, that's only $11.5 trillion, oh, it's $23 trillion, yes. So $46 trillion trade, $23 trillion. $11.5 trillion moves to local currency trade as a proportion of global capital markets flows. It's only about 0.04%, not very much. We probably won't even notice it unless there's a war and the shift becomes chaotic and the capital markets become destabilized. As long as there's no further wars, the capital markets will continue to trade mostly in dollar because 90% of the foreign exchange trade is against dollar, most derivatives margin is in dollar, most bond market, the treasuries are the largest bond market and they're dollar. So as long as there's no war, the rest of the capital markets can remain stable and we don't have to have a panic. Great thing about the new world that's coming, no new hegemon. We still have the United States, the United States will still try and throw its weight around by wars, assassinations, destabilizations and all of that that it's characterized the last 100 years, but the 80 countries moving towards a new world don't want a new hegemon and certainly President Xi said at the latest BRIC summit that there is no hegemonic DNA in China, that China for 5,000 years has never been hegemonic and it's not going to be hegemonic now. So that's good news. Globalization will accelerate. We hear all this stuff about de-risking, about French shoring, it's nonsense. Globalization actually is going to accelerate as the BRICS countries and the other countries of the global south do more joint development deals with each other and substitute other currencies instead of dollar. Right now, 30% of the global economy is locked out of the global economy because of dollar sanctions and OFAC sanctions. Those, that 30%, which is Iran, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, those countries can come in and engage with the non-dollar world so that shifting to other currencies besides dollar means that they actually accelerate globalization and that's a happy thing. And then initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative are having a huge effect on the capacity for productivity globally. Because there's more power plants, because there's better logistics, because there's more cooperation on development, it's accelerating globalization. Angel Paradox, named for Sir Norman Angel, I'm a big fan of his, I've rented his house three times. He built it from bits of driftwood that he salvaged. He won the 1932 Nobel Peace Prize for the insight that when developed economies, sorry, dependent, interdependent developed economies go to war and impose economic sanctions on each other that the costs are shared between the sanctioner and the sanctioned, that both lose because when you sanction somebody's credit or contracts and disrupt commerce, that affects the value of all of your own credits, contracts, and commerce. And we've seen this so clearly in 2022 where treasuries have now lost their triple A credit rating and people are avoiding, accumulating treasuries because of the sanctions risk. So it's got Janet Yellen worried, it's got Jay Powell worried, and they should be worried, but the answer is don't sanction. And we've also seen incredible blowback for the technology sanctions on China where Huawei has built an entirely new technology ecosystem in three years because of sanctions and announced their new phone, which includes satellite connectivity while Gina Ramondo was in Beijing. So the great news is there are better models for stability, resiliency, and inflation in the world that's coming. We may not like Russia, we may not like China, I actually think they're fine, but they have actually cracked monetary stability much better than the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the ECB. And Chinese bonds have been outperforming US treasuries, which is really quite impressive. They're not a big market, they don't trade much outside of China, but the fact is that there are other models for inflation, for stability, beyond what we agree on in Basel, and that I think deserves study. And the new system where we move to local currency trade can promote that. Ghana announced earlier this year that it was gonna buy its oil for gold. They produce gold, they have gold. Central banks love gold. 2023 is a record year for central bank gold accumulation. So Ghana thought, well, why don't we buy the oil we need with gold? Their inflation rate dropped by more than 80% from the announcement. So the inflation rate is still pretty high, it's like 30 something percent, but compared to where it started the year at 169%, it's a vast improvement. So new systems that are based on barter or other currencies can actually help countries control inflation, promote development. And finally, the gold standard was absolutely a brilliant way to control inflation. If we go back to gold, it's probably good for us. The graph there shows the price of a Campbell's soup can in gold. Up until 1971, it was pretty much absolutely stable. But as soon as Nixon delinked from gold, the United States has had nothing but inflation. And so if we go back to gold as the basis of international and monetary discipline, that's probably good. So gold comes back as a hegemonic asset. And we see the little cartoon is representing the fact that China is hurling its dollars at the United States. The United States is hurling gold back at China. Gold is flowing east. There have been record purchases of gold this year. China has been buying gold every month and announcing it to the world. And they are not buying treasuries quite so much anymore. They're down to the same level of treasuries they held in 2008 at 807 billion. They've been reducing their exposure. So gold demand is up among central banks and that indicates the direction of travel because they are the insiders. The biggest challenge to making the transition stable is debt. There are 307 trillion dollars of debt in issuance and that debt is becoming very expensive to service as interest rates rise. And emerging markets are feeling the pain because a lot of their borrowing is in dollars and they aren't able to service at the rising rates. So there is going to be a big problem in making the transition stable and keeping growth positive and servicing debts. I don't know how that works but I think we have to collaborate on it. Finally, good news on technology and infrastructure. The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. I built some of it. You know, I built the triparty repo system that is the interbank market in liquidity. I want to globalize that to every currency. I globalized dollars a lifetime ago. His name is Mason. I want to globalize every currency to be liquid in the interbank markets now. And that then creates a basis for a more equitable world where wealth doesn't concentrate with the 0.1%. Wealth can be more evenly distributed to those that produce it. And as the world's center of economic gravity moves eastwards, now is the time to make that a reality. So thank you if you like that. I just published the book yesterday.