 The global movement against free trade and capitalism that first came together at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization coalesced around the idea that western elites had led third world nations to get ensnared in a debt trap as a way to coerce them into adopting neoliberal policies. When poor nations couldn't afford to repay what they owed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these Washington-based organizations agreed to restructure the loans of debtor countries if they would agree to move in the direction of privatization, deregulation, and free trade, a policy agenda termed shock therapy. Leftist leaders like Hugo Chavez claimed that this was part of a pattern of elite subjugation of Latin America that stretched all the way back to Christopher Columbus. Chavez used this as evidence in support of Venezuela's turn toward Cuba-style socialism. Colombia University's Joseph Stieglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank, and a Nobel Prize-winning critic of free market capitalism promoted the same narrative. He blamed the Washington Consensus for pushing policies he deemed too radical and wrong-headed to ever get through in the U.S. What is your criticism of the World Bank and the IMF and all that they were doing? In many ways they were pursuing policies, pushing developing countries to have policies that were very different from the policies that we were working for or supported at home. I mean, for instance, privatization of social security. So, generally speaking, IMF programs are designed to prevent Western-style social democracies. They're designed to prevent free healthcare and education. They're designed to prevent even modest subsidies on basic goods. Unlike Stieglitz, Alex Gladstein identifies as a classical liberal, and the Human Rights Foundation, where he works as chief strategy officer, condemns the crimes committed by socialist dictators like Chavez. Yet in his recent book, Hidden Repression, how the IMF and World Bank sell exploitation as development, Gladstein argues that the story told by the radical left about these two organizations is largely correct. His work over the last few years has focused heavily on monetary colonialism or how the U.S. and European nations use their control of global currency to override the sovereignty of the poor nations in Latin America and Africa. The fix, he says, is for the world to transition to Bitcoin, a form of freedom money that no country or corporation can manipulate or control. Reason sat down with Gladstein at the Miami Bitcoin Conference in May to talk about his new book. Why did you write Hidden Repression? What is monetary colonialism and why is it bad? I wrote Hidden Repression because I had a lot of questions about the IMF and World Bank. I knew that a lot of people in the global south didn't like the IMF. I knew that it had a bad reputation. I didn't have the same view about the World Bank. I felt like most people talked about the World Bank as maybe a neutral institution, maybe had some issues, but generally speaking, did good things. But I started to just notice that they were tied to certain practices and certain phenomena that I was writing about, most notably monetary colonialism in West Africa. I noticed that the IMF was the instrument that the French used to impose currency devaluation on its subject post-colonial countries there. And I started to look around for resources last summer. And I noticed that there was no kind of pop econ book about the IMF that was approachable. Like there's no big short for the IMF. There is nothing. I mean, seriously, there's really nothing. There's the shock doctrine and there's like confessions of an economic hitman, which are just not really what I needed. The second one is like highly exaggerated and who knows how true it is. And they're just, they were very kind of one-sided political texts. So I just started to say, all right, well, let me dig into this. And I started to read everything I could find on the IMF World Bank, like lots of books, tons of JSTOR articles, like a lot of credit to Psyhub. I definitely support the communist in Kazakhstan who runs Psyhub. You can give her Bitcoin to get all those free articles that otherwise are behind this insane firewall. But just tons of JSTOR articles from the 60s, from the 70s, from the 80s, lots of books written in the 80s and 90s. And then there's just like it just sort of ended. There just wasn't a whole lot of interest it seemed in these institutions. Like starting about 20 years ago, it just seemed like public interest went elsewhere. But they didn't go anywhere. In fact, they became even bigger. Now they may not have the same influence in the world economy that maybe they had in 1975, but they're still the largest lender of last resort and the world's largest development bank. And China tried to copy what they did, but it never reached the same peak that they have. So I was like, again, I'll dig in. And I started to read everything I could get. And most of it is leftist criticism. Most of it's Marxist or leftist thought. But there's some really good libertarian stuff too that was written in the 90s, especially around the 50 year anniversary of Bretton Woods. There's a lot of retrospective. Conservatives too wrote some stuff. They were mainly focused on their argument basically, and this was popular in the 90s, was that these institutions were like a waste of taxpayer money. That was kind of their argument, right? Libertarians were saying, well, they're harmful and we shouldn't fund it. And the leftist had a different point of view. I feel like the libertarian and conservative arguments are incomplete, is what I started to realize in my mind at least, that they weren't just inefficient and wasteful. In fact, that was not accurate. I started to realize that the IMF and World Bank were incredibly lucrative for creditor nations like the US, Germany, the UK, Japan, France, and that they really delivered big, big benefits for the creditor nations. And I started to realize that the aid and assistance that I had thought about, like I just had this natural kind of inkling that rich countries gave aid to poor countries. And there was an aid industry, and I'd even written about that before, and I knew it was corrupt and inefficient. But I thought generally we were giving them stuff. I didn't realize that we were stealing from them. I didn't realize that the flow of resources and money every year goes the other way. I didn't know that. So when I started to learn about that, I was very shocked. And I wanted to know what kind of role the IMF and World Bank played in that transition. And I had questions. I wanted to know why did the debt of poor countries go exponential after 1970? Like what would happen? So that's kind of what I started to explore with the book. And actually the reason I went down the rabbit hole in the very first place was the dictator stuff. I was like, why is the IMF bailing out the most brutal dictators that ever lived? You talk about Zaire as a really good example. I talk about Zaire. Democratic Republic. I'm going to open my talk about Zaire tomorrow. I spent a few minutes on it. And I'm just looking at Mabutu. And I'm like, okay, I understand the Cold War stuff. But if the IMF and World Bank, if they're supposed to benefit poor people, I mean, they often have this thing draped on their headquarters in DC that says end poverty. If that's true, what are they doing funding this guy who totally impoverished their country? And then you start to realize that's not what they're doing. They're not creating loans for these countries to benefit people there. They're doing it to benefit us. And that's the thesis of my book, which I realize is radical, but it's something I just can't shake. Well, so enablement is such a big theme throughout all of this. And you have the really interesting statistic in there. I believe it is Argentina has been given 22 structural investment loans since 1959 by the World Bank and IMF. Just by the IMF. Okay, just by the IMF. And yet Argentina has a place that's experienced so much hyperindication. How does this enablement get cut off? And what are some of the worst examples of this country? To be fair, the libertarian analysis has pointed out that it's not effective, basically. Like, it's like, wait, these countries that have received so many adjustments, they don't pay back the debt. I think, again, what it misses is that it's not a waste. It's been very effective at delivering real benefits to the West. But in any event, those benefits come in three ways that we as Americans, let's say, benefit from institutions like the IMF and World Bank and other kinds of lending to what we would call whatever you want to say, the Third World, Global South, developing countries and emerging markets. Basically, there's a billion people in our world and then everybody else, 6.7 or so billion elsewhere. The first one is interest. And this is something that I didn't even really think about too deeply. I don't even know. Like, when you're just thinking about the IMF and World Bank, maybe you think they're charity. No, they're like predatory lenders, basically. They charge very high interest rates, especially now. I mean, maybe not so much during the Zerp era, but certainly in the 70s and today. I mean, there's also a spread. Rich countries park money there and they get paid for the pleasure at a rate. And then there's a much higher rate that's charged to the poor countries. So there's this cantaloupe effect thing where the countries that are closest to printing the money, they benefit. And the countries that are further away have to pay more. And I know you can explain some of that around geopolitical risk and everything, but it's a big, big part of the system. So the first thing we get is interest payments. So billions of dollars a year flow in interest. Repaying principal and interest from the debtor countries to the creditor countries through IMF World Bank and all their little arms. Okay. So that's the first thing is interest. The second thing is cheap resources and labor. And this is part of my thesis about how the IMF and World Bank were originally created to do pretty sensible things in the world economy. Like they were originally created to stabilize exchange rates after Bretton Woods, which makes sense. Like all the world was pegged to the dollar, which was pegged to gold. And if you fell outside of that band of exchange rates, like the IMF would deploy capital to stabilize you, because we wanted trade to flow. We didn't want what happened in the 30s to happen, like competitive devaluations, autarky, like we didn't want that. We wanted the spice to flow. That was like the idea. But after 71, we went on a floating fiat standard. We no longer had to peg to the gold. So all these economists at the time were like, well, why is the IMF still in business? Especially libertarian economists were like, what's going on here? And what really ends up happening, I think my thesis is that like, again, got the IMF created for a reasonable cause that may work under a sound money standard. Again, lender of last resort, in case there's a fire. And you have the World Bank as a development bank to put money into infrastructure where private capital doesn't want to go. And they funded, were turned Europe and Japan, and they stabilized Britain as it was coming out of its crisis. And that kind of worked until 1970 or so. And then what you started to see happen in the late 60s and early 70s was like a pivot. They started to pivot their attention to what are in poor countries, basically. And that's where I think they started to replace like what I would call the colonial drain. I mean, this is like what colonialism did was basically get really cheap labor and resources from the periphery and delivered to the core. This is something that Marxists have noticed. I think it's entirely true. I think their solutions are disastrous. But I think their analysis is good in terms of, I mean, Marx himself, he observed this. Like this is what big imperial powers do. They go out to the world. I mean, they think about the conquistadors and they find stuff like gold and silver and timber and oil and they steal it or they get it for very cheap and they bring it back so that the home country can be enriched. And so our standards of living can be raised. And that's so that we don't get overthrown because most of us are by this point democracies. So I think that that imperial drain or colonial drain or whatever you want to call it, largely ended in the early to middle part of the 20th century. And I think it was a major factor in the Great Depression. It was a major factor in the inflation crisis of the 70s. If you think about why we had the inflation crisis of the 70s, a big part of it was the rise in price of oil, which is credited directly to the fact that the OPEC countries now control the oil instead of us controlling it through the Seven Sisters. And like instead of us colonialy controlling the energy, they controlled it and they decided to raise the price of oil and that created inflation over here. So I think a lot can be seen when you start looking at the colonial drain. And the colonial drain just started to run out by the 60s. So we managed to recreate it by replacing the old school warship and gun and bayonet with debt. And we would just extend debt with conditionality to these countries. And it started with a trickle and then it really began with a flood in the 70s. McNamara, he really had the World Bank, he really, really realized that we could get a lot more influence in the world by dramatically increasing the amount of loans we could give out. And this was like expedited by the Petrodollar system, like there was just so much money parked in Western banks from the OPEC countries. And we were able to loan it out to all these poor countries. And there was just like, if you look at the percentage of loans to poor countries from rich countries in the 70s, it's insane. Like you had like a 400% increase between like the mid-70s and early 80s. Well, so explain briefly just backtrack for people who are watching this, who haven't read your excellent book. What exactly are structural adjustment loans? Sure. What are the characteristics of them? Yeah. So like, let's say if you're Suharto in Indonesia in the 70s, and you're going to take a loan from the IMF, the IMF officials would fly out first class, if it's longer than 10 hours, I think. It's the same as some of the DEI consultants, like the Ibram Xquendee, Robin D'Anton, it's always, they have to fly out first class. I mean, working for the IMF was a sweet gig. I mean, you would stay in five-star hotels, they used to fly in the conk, they had a deal to fly in the concord. Anyway, they fly out of these countries, they never go out to the field. They like stay in like the nicest Sheraton or whatever. And they do deals with the government and basically they say, look, you're running out of resources. You have a problem with your balance of payments, like you're importing too much and you're not exporting enough, like you're running out of money. Your reserves are dwindling, will give you a loan, like will give you $50 million, $100 million, whatever it is. In exchange, you have to do these things. And it's very important to note that normally, like for the great majority of the loans that were given out, they were given to dictators, to unaccountable leaders. So it's not like Suharto was like, okay, let me take this deal. Let me go check with the people and see if they consent. This was never the case. So like, hey, they were like fine, like essentially, and I'll explain the conditions, but like, they were like, we'll implement the conditions, just give me the money. They never planned to pay it back. They knew that they, they didn't have to pay it back, in fact, and they would spend the money on weapons and on security forces and on palaces and on just general petty corruption. And then maybe a small amount would get left over to actually fund infrastructure and like good things for the people. But most of it was just like drained away from them. And in return for taking the money, they had to do, the country had to undergo what is known as like structural adjustment, which is basically austerity. I mean, it would start with like devaluation of the currency was always like key, restriction of the banking system. So like raising interest rates and subsidies on any food or energy. There would be, for example, raising taxes was very common, like like aggressively raising taxes. So this is basically austerity or basically like you'd want to like plunge the country essentially into a recession. And the general idea was like you want these countries to be really efficient at exporting the goods that we want. So you don't want them to have like high wages with healthcare and education. You want them to be really streamlined and to be like cheap. And we want those resources very cheap to make our lives cheaper on our side. So like generally speaking, IMF programs are designed to prevent Western style social democracies. They're designed to prevent free healthcare and education. They're designed to prevent even like modest subsidies on basic goods. But there were also frequently free trade stipulations in there too, right? Tell me more, what do you mean? Well, isn't the idea to increase trade between these, you know, frequently former colonial powers and their old colonies and other countries. The idea was to increase what's known as unequal exchange. So for example, the idea was to keep the conveyor belt of stuff coming from there. But like those countries aren't allowed to trade freely. Like America has aggressive, so the whole like hypocrisy, I have a chapter in my book about this, the double standards are really the crazy part. Because as someone who's like identified as a classic liberal, I don't necessarily think subsidies on food and energy are a good idea. Yeah, that was the other thing I was going to push back on. And I don't think nationalization of companies is a good idea. But when you have this double standard, where you have the rich countries doing aggressive agricultural subsidies and totally subsidizing healthcare and education, and then turning to like little Britain, for example, with like the healthcare system they have, the NHS, and then they turned to a little Sri Lanka or Ceylon as it was called, and they would say, no, you can't give free rice to your people anymore. I mean, that's a double standard that creates inequality. That's what's sort of just unequal, right? And that is what really exacerbated the issue. I mean, if everybody was like judged on the same standard, then maybe it would be different, but that's not how it was. I mean, one of the main reasons Africa imports 85% of its food is because the United States aggressively subsidizes food production in the United States so that it crowds out African producers. And I think another really, really important part of the Bretton Woods system, and then later the Petrodollar system is that the United States basically created military and political packs to force producers of really important things to only sell in dollars. So like for like little Malawi, they are like Ghana, let's say. Ghana can't print CDs to buy oil. Like the American, we can, we can just print money to buy oil. Saudi Arabia won't accept CDs. So what is Ghana do if it wants oil? Well, contrary to what the MMT people believe, they can't just print CDs for dollars. If they do that, they go into hyperinflation. So they have to export stuff to earn dollars into their capital account, and then they can buy oil. Or dollars or euros or some sort of dollar substitute. They basically have to structure their economy to earn dollars. It's the only way they can buy fertilizer, oil, tractors, industrial equipment. They cannot print money out of like from their own printing press to buy the stuff. So this structures their economy in a particular way where they have to focus their national energy on exports so that they can get the dollars to pay off the interest, buy the oil, buy the weapons. Like Boeing is not going to accept CDs. Sorry. So it's like, this is just the way it worked. So all of these countries ended up getting engineered by us. So again, the three things that we got out of the IMF and will bank over the last 50, 60 years were interest payments, cheap labor and resources, and political control. I mean, some of the political control stuff is so shocking. I'm going to show a slide from the New York Times from 1978 tomorrow from Zaire, what was then Zaire. And it was very plain. The headline just said, Zaire takes like large loans from IMF and gives up economic control of its country. So basically the IMF staffed the Treasury Ministry of this country with its own people. Like we basically would take over these countries. It's completely wild. We sound like we're rooted in another era talking about like Zaire and Ceylon and all these things. I know, but the people who live there today were alive then. Like it's important to remember that we're not that far away from that and that these policies, instead of like, it's not like they just ended in the 90s. The energies of, I mean, the energies of the IMF did shift like about 15 years ago, but most of their energy has been spent largely on the developing world. It's true that they shifted to help Europe. Like the IMF's loans to Europe were way bigger than any loans it had ever given to Latin America or Asia. But it was a similar thing if you look at Greece, which was bailed out, right? One of these enormous bailouts. I mean, if you look at Greek wages, Greek wages are negative since 2008. So like the IMF programs brought wage deflation to Greece. So like the elites did well in Greece and they were bailed out, but the average person has had a really rough time. So like poor European countries were basically treated like the global south in this example. And that's just been a brutal reality for workers and laborers in these countries in Southern Europe. Like literally their wages have been deflated. And that's kind of, that was the point of colonialism. And that's sort of the point of the IMF and World Bank is to again get cheap resources and cheap labor. You talk a little bit in your book about how there was a lot of criticism directed at these institutions back in, I believe the late 90s especially. The late 90s was huge. Seattle protests like everything. Did anything change as a result of that? Or are we just saying waves of criticism? Because it seems like if the things that you are writing about are in fact true, this is a scandal. This is an outlet. No, I mean it was very clear. There's just many, many reasons why it's an outrage. I mean another part is another reason is that like the people making the loan decisions like didn't come from these countries. There's a stat I use in the book from the early 90s where again this is 50 years of IMF from World Bank to that point. Less than 1% I believe of the decision makers making the loans to Africa were Africans. So it was just a very colonial construct to begin with. But in general, yes, there was a ton of criticism by everyone from Stiglitz to the protesters in Seattle to libertarians writing for Atlas and Cato. I mean there was a lot of discussion and debate about do we need these institutions. And a lot of global south leaders created conferences like Arusha and others where they would get together and basically condemn the IMF. And I would say it reached a fever pitch in the late 90s. And as a result in reaction, they did pledge to reform certain things. The very, very, very poorest countries can now qualify for basically what they call debt relief where maybe they can get loans that don't have interest and maybe they can also get actually write offs on some of their debt. But what you have to remember is that these are like 20 or 30 of the poorest countries in the world that constitute a small minority of the total lending of the IMF. Like the IMF and the World Bank target the big juicy media industrial global south countries. Like most of their lending historically is to Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan. It's not to Bhutan. Like it's to these big industrial countries that have tons of resources. That's where we milked the most out of where these bigger, bigger countries. So it's true that there was some reforms for like some of the very poorest countries in the world but they still have to undergo structural adjustment to get the money. That has not been reformed. And again, like in a way they changed because their focus shifted for a decade or so to Europe. But after COVID all the lockdowns happened, they re-upped and as a result of the lockdowns and the money printing and now the raising of interest rates in the United States, now you're seeing a whole new spate of bailouts. It's just in the news every day, right? So Egypt's currently getting adjusted. Argentina's getting adjusted. Ghana's getting adjusted. Bangladesh is getting adjusted. So you're seeing a whole new round of conditionality and people know. Like it's not like, like my book was written for Americans and for Europeans. I don't need to teach anything to someone from Ghana. They know quite well what an IMF structural adjustment is and they associate it with lower living standards and just like general recession. It's just like, they know this. They lived it. They don't need me to tell them. But Westerners I think need to understand this because we just like, we don't learn about this. That's why the book is called Hidden Repression. It's not known. But now we're seeing it, that was an additional incentive for me to write the book is that you're seeing a whole new wave of IMF bailouts all around the world of some of the most brutal regimes. I mean, CC in Egypt, the guy who's committing war crimes in Ethiopia, they got hundreds of millions of dollars from the World Bank. I mean, you name it, there's tons of dictators getting tons of money right now. And I just was like, what is going on here? And it's kind of like, again, like it's like a self-fulfilling cycle because like we have an inflation crisis in the West. You know, we have a monetary crisis here. So the Fed raises rates. The world is not on the Fed's mandate. Like the impact of raising rates on Indonesia is not part of what Jay Powell has to consider when he raises rates. It's entirely self-interested domestic thing. So we raise these rates, we jack rates from like zero, close to zero to 5% or whatever. And this just causes like massive starvation and suffering across the world. Like if you look at, the FT actually does great reporting on this. And I say actually because they would never publish like something like I've written, but they'll point out the data though. They'll show you that over the last two years or 18 months as rates have risen and as structural adjustment has been introduced, the price of bread in Egypt to skyrocketed. And it's really, really hard for people to get the same amount of food that they used to get. Like basically what happens in wage deflation is that the amount of time it takes you to earn a thousand calories of something like beef or rice or bread goes up instead of going down. And this is contrary to what you'd expect with human innovation and technology innovation. So like during the early 70s to the early 90s in a lot of these poor countries, I mean the data is crazy and I have a section of the book about it, but I mean you had countries where like that the amount of time it took you to earn as an average laborer, like a thousand calories of rice would go up by 50%, 100%. Instead of getting more rich and wealthy and prosperous and efficient, we were squeezing these people. And Zaire is the extreme case because and this is shocking, like so the structural adjustment began in the early 70s. So really in 72, it really started moving under Mabutu. And then he was ousted in around 95. Okay, so during that time, the country went under a lot of structural adjustment and received about $2 billion from the IMF. And during that time, the Zaire, which is the currency of the country, which was worth $1 in 72, was worth one billionth of a dollar in 1995. Now of course there's a lot of reasons for that, but a major underlying reason is because the country was squeezed and an enormous amount of resources were taken out of that country for, I mean they have just like the most incredible resources of rare earths, minerals, fossils, all kinds of stuff, rare timber, everything. And that was all taken out of the country, primarily through debt. A ton of diamond mining too, right? I mean just when I say minerals, that's what I mean. And I mean loosely, I don't know exactly what Black Panther is based on, but I think it's clearly like a colonial reaction to what happened to countries like the Congo, which really should be Wakanda, if you think about it. I mean the amount of uranium in there, I mean it's like, there's a lot of parallels there, right? Between Mabutu and Kabila it seems so that will not in fact be happening. Yeah and you know, every loan requires someone to dance with and that's the crazy part is that these loans propped up these dictators. Like if the INF didn't exist, and I know we had Cold War reasons, you know we had the African, Vietnam, we were at the proxy war in Angola, like there were reasons for us to support Mabutu, but like if the INF didn't exist, Mabutu would not have lasted till 1995. There's just no way. But you know, you look and you look at just the Marcos and Suharto and Portillo and you just look at all these dictators and you realize like the INF prefers to work with undemocratic clients because if it works for the democracy then there's like property rights and a Supreme Court and there's counter suits and there's protests and it's messy. No they just want to work with someone who can just implement the structural adjustment and then they can move on. So this is partly what explains why they were working with the CCP and I also didn't find the Cold War thing fully explanatory because they funded a ton of left regimes like Miere and Tanzania, Kuchescu and Romania, Mingistu, Marxist guy, Marxist-Leninist guy in Ethiopia. So you look at it and you realize it's not just, they weren't just funding American allies. So I mean there was a really great libertarian book called Perpetuating Poverty written I think in like 93, 94 under the Cato and they wrote something that was very stuck with me and it said basically like the IMF never met a dictator it didn't like and I was just like what? So again that originally sent me down this rabbit hole but then you realize that this isn't just a situation harms poor countries, it benefits us tremendously. Yeah. Well so how does Bitcoin fundamentally threaten this? Yeah so does Bitcoin Right that's a great question. I mean the short answer is we don't know but we do know is that there are a couple things. What we can notice is is Bitcoin adoption data. So when you look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption data which is overwhelmingly Bitcoin and stable coins of what we're really talking about here you start to notice when you look at like just data over the last couple of years that the rate of adoption of these things in countries that have been structurally adjusted is just like way higher than in the United States which is much closer to like the global average which is like Internet users between the age of 16 and 64 10% in America or so that have in some way used cryptocurrency. Okay but then you move over and you look at Indonesia and Nigeria, Brazil and the numbers are much closer to 18, 19, 20, 21, 22% and then they're increasing dramatically. So you know that's the big picture like what kind of theories could explain that is that people are escape. I mean this is one of the reasons why when the IMF you know in its ongoing adjustment of Argentina it included a clause recently saying that like one of the conditions of this loan is that you try to crack down on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency usage and this is one of the reasons why the IMF was not super happy that El Salvador adopting Bitcoin something that you know was announced here right here two years ago. They don't like things that can like disrupt their ability to like essentially farm people under a weak currency. They don't want any escape. They don't want people buying gold. They don't want people getting access to dollars. They want them to stay in this weak currency so they could squeeze it and get wage deflation. So Bitcoin's an escape for that. So people are escaping via Bitcoin and stable coins and I think that's really cool. Can it change the overall system? Nobody knows. Obviously we can speculate but what we don't need to speculate on what we're seeing real evidence of is that people have an escape that they didn't have in the 1980s. Like if you were being structurally adjusted in Peru in the 1980s there was no way to sort of escape like the currency was the currency and it was being devalued and that your cost of living was going up and up and up. Today you don't have to be stuck in Peru. You can escape into Bitcoin or dollars without ID and you can preserve your purchasing power or even increase it over time. That's not something that people had 20, 30, 40 years ago. So that's really cool. Again does it change the whole system? We don't know but like one would expect that if I mean if you look at what's happening in China right now China's encountering issues because it can't print the reserve currency. So when a country defaults on a loan from China like I mean they have to basically take something as collateral. They have to like take over a telecom or something. It gets messy and China doesn't necessarily want to do that. So their loans are drying up if you look at the data of like their infrastructure loans to poor countries. I mean it was absolutely gargantuan up to like 2016, 2017, 2018 and then it's really falling off. So they're encountering a lot of issues and I think that that's evidence to show that the countries that issue the reserve currency who control the IMF World Bank like we can do this in a much more sustainable way because it's just paperwork for us to give 30 billion dollars to Brazil. It's not paperwork for the Chinese to give 30 billion dollars worth of currency to Brazil. That's a really serious thing they have to think about. But for us it's like paperwork. So if we're in a world where we eventually shift to Bitcoin being a reserve currency then yes we no longer can like do paperwork to bail out Brazil. We have to be quite prudent about it because it's a scarce resource and we have to actually think carefully about it. So I think yeah, I think there'll be a lot less of these like infinite bailouts and less debt traps or at least I'm quite hopeful of that. I'm curious about one other sort of related frontier is the lightning network going to fundamentally change the sending of remittances and receiving of remittances? I mean I think this is an interesting area because one of the reasons why there's so much unequal exchange in the world and so much disparity in labor is because of the currency divisions. If you have Naira over here and dollars over here you can effectively like sort of cut these labor markets away from each other. If everybody's using the same currency and lightning is an easy way to use Bitcoin in an instant way that's relatively cheap. Now it's certainly nationed and needs a lot of work before it could get to the scale that would actually change the world. But for individuals and corporations it's making a big difference already. But if all of a sudden you've got this global community or company let's say that's all on the same currency standard I mean that's a game changer. I mean I think you start to have arbitrage and labor like big time. One of the reasons you have arbitrage and global labor is because of the currency divisions. Again like if you have everybody's earning the same type of currency there's going to be a tightening of the spread. You can keep that spread artificially wide by having different currency regimes there's like 180 currency regimes right now. Africa has 45 currencies it's one of the reasons it's so poor. It's like no one gets it's like not connected it's terrible. But if Africa had one currency and that was the same currency we used here I have a firm belief that that would really tighten the spread on labor and it would make exchange much more equal. I mean obviously that's pure speculation but like no one knows but that would be in my view that would make a lot of sense. Well so what's the fix? Specifically with these institutions do you believe that they are so far beyond reform and fundamentally ought to be abolished and ended? Or is there a better solution that you've stumbled upon? What do you see as the end? Because clearly this type of almost like predatory lending as you term it is something that I probably shouldn't continue. I don't... Look I wrote the book just as almost like an exorcism type exercise to just like get it out. Like I don't... I tribute the book. I dedicate it in the beginning and I say it's for the victims of development they may never get the justice they deserve but they may get a way out and that's how I feel. I don't think any of these people who perpetrated structural adjustment will ever go to prison. I don't think... I mean we're talking about if you think about the fact that under adjustment the country's GDP goes down 10, 20, 30 percent sometimes over a decade. And if you consider that based on studies on large countries like Mexico, for every 2 percent decline in GDP mortality rate goes up 1 percent. I mean we're talking tens of millions of people were killed by these policies and no one... I don't think Larry Summers will ever go to prison for this. In fact no one even knows that he was involved in this. He was chief architect of the economic wing of the World Bank in the early 90s. He went to the White House and now he's like telling us what to do on Twitter. Like he's living in a mansion. Like he's not going to go to prison for this. None of these people will ever go to prison for structural adjustment that they perpetrated on the global south. So I don't think we're ever going to get justice. But I do think that like people in the West should be more aware of what these institutions do and if they disagree with my thesis let's have a debate. Like I'd like to hear them explain why poor countries have exponentially rising external debt and I'd like to hear their view on that and how would they recommend that we adjust that. I know a lot of leftists like this idea of like the debt jubilee and it's an interesting one. I think that is certainly something that should be discussed as far as options. It'll of course never happen and I'll explain why. When you lend something when you lend money to Mexico let's say in the 80s the reason why we went in and bailed out Mexico wasn't to save Mexicans it was to save our banks that had lent that asset that they traded an asset on their balance sheet by lending to Mexico right. And then when that was at risk of going into default they could do one of two things they could take the right down and have that go to zero on their balance sheet or they could lend another loan and grow their balance sheet and the incentive is always for these creditors to grow and grow and lend and lend and lend rather than accept basically a shrinking of their balance sheet. So you know we would always go in not out of altruism. None of these bailouts Mexico Argentina Korea Thailand Indonesia they were never done out of altruism they were done to save our banking system and prevent it from you know going into a crisis. So I think that that's sort of important to realize and I think that this sort of prevents any sort of big big reform. There's no even though the Jubilee might make sense and there's a concept called odious debt that actually was invented by Americans back 100 years ago when we defeated the Spanish and Cuba there were policymakers in America that basically said that the Cubans shouldn't owe the debt that the Spanish Empire had incurred because they were subjugating the Cubans why should the Cubans have to pay? But we but the INF and World Bank have never followed that precedent. So for example when a colonialist got overthrown or a dictator gets overthrown that people still have to pay back the debt that the dictator borrowed. So I use the statistic in my book but in in the middle 80s in the Philippines when Marcos was hosted by a people power movement the next year 40% of the national earnings had to go to pay back interest that Marcos had borrowed. So there isn't an incentive to change based on how the system works and if you look at the IMF structure it's a colonial power structure meaning it's based on colonial 1944 power arrangement it's not based on population. So the quota or the voting share is such that China has a similar voting share to Italy right now and Britain has a similar voting share to India. I mean obviously we know that their economies and populations are not the same anymore. America retains a unilateral veto of 18% they can veto anything they want and they even have essentially a practical unilateral veto over micro loan decisions which require a 50% veto because if you add up America and all of its allies we can easily do that. So there's no I don't think you'll see internal reform so I think as much as I'd like to suggest options like that we do odious debt cancellation like JP Morgan is not going to like that if we were to go out and cancel all of the odious debt and we'd have to define it somehow it's not like all the debts odious but clearly the debt that was lent to Mabutu and Marcos and Suharto was odious you'd of course have to have some sort of line because libertarians would argue that money that democracies just borrow is odious so you have to find a line but maybe you could find a line and just say like hey at least we all agree that this horrible dictator like those people shouldn't have to pay that. Ironically the US did it with Iraq after we invaded but like that's an exception we usually don't allow that so that would help certainly if you were to actually write off debt. The problem is that would shrink our banking system so we don't have any incentive to do that. So again I don't have like high prospects for reform I do think as global Bitcoin adoption increases I think the power of these institutions wanes and eventually they are forced to become smaller and more core to their original mission as opposed to like sort of resource extraction machines I think that they turn back into potentially like collaboratively managed funds that do things in the common interest like put out fires when countries have issues. I think that that's possible but I think that's only possible if there's a reform of the monetary paradigm if we remain on this dollar hegemonic system like there's just no one no one has an incentive to change this it's just there's no I use this metaphor in the book but it's like a drug dealer like the western creditors are dealing drugs to largely unaccountable governments and authoritarian countries and there's no one there to like put you in therapy like there's no one there to say maybe you shouldn't take this debt and I mean you have the additional moral complication of like what if you're starving in Kenya or like you may just want the debt like you may just want the debt it's a short-term fix it's like being an addict like what like if you aren't addict like taking more drugs makes you feel better for like a day or whatever an hour or a minute or whatever so you do more of it even though you know long-term it's destroying you so if you're living in Peru or Kenya or Bangladesh or Ghana I mean it may be even though you know that this is killing you and killing you meaning like literally like killing a lot of people you're going to take the debt maybe and who am I to say that you shouldn't you know it's just a very very difficult moral conundrum I think so why would countries gravitate toward use of bitcoin instead of just using the dollar I don't think any country is going to like voluntarily move from control over monetary policy to not being able to control monetary policy Saifidjina Moose has a great quote it's something like the only thing dictators would hate more than the dollar is giving up control over their own currencies so if you look at Bukele you have to understand that that was a dollarized economy like he already lost he didn't have control over monetary policy so to add bitcoin wasn't a huge sacrifice for him do you know what I mean so I think maybe you expect dollarized countries to think about bitcoin also or countries that are partially dollarized maybe they add bitcoin maybe I don't know but I think it's very unlikely that countries that control their own currency that they would voluntarily dollarize or bitcoinize is unlikely I mean I would really recommend Lawrence Larry White's new book on this topic it's really good and he's got a lot of expertise looking at dollarization in Latin America there were some instances where it was bottom up and there were some instances where it was imposed it's much more likely that any kind of big like I do think you're going to see more dollarization first of all like in the next decade like other fiat currencies are collapsing so more people are just going to use dollars whether they get them via stable coins or via bank accounts or via just cash I don't know but like I think you're going to see more dollarization both top down and bottom up but mostly bottom up but I think if we're going to think about what would it look like for countries to actually bitcoinize I think we have to study Larry's work and we have to look at what happens when countries grassroots dollarized like Cuba in the 90s or Venezuela or Ecuador for example and I think what starts to happen is you start to have this sort of Gresham's law scenario where you have the legal tender and people don't want it it's like not great meaning they don't want to save in it they know it's weak so they'll save in something else so they'll hoard gold or dollars or whatever this comes from the days of like coin clipping with kings where they would like clip out the gold and the citizens would notice which coins were clipped and it would save those and use the others the others would circulate the bad money would drive out the good I think that that's kind of like probably going to happen with bitcoin for a while like if you can afford to save your bitcoin you're going to save it like you'd rather spend the fiat right it's sort of obvious like I would much rather spend fiat than bitcoin if possible but I think eventually this changes if you study Larry's work with dollarization you'll see that what eventually changes this is merchants one day the merchant is going to say like for example today some merchants like prefer cash to digital cash and they'll say oh I'll give you a discount if you pay me in cash like you're doing work on your house and you've got a guy coming in to do your floors he may actually accept a small discount if you pay him in cash because people like the finality of cash there's certain benefits of cash obviously taxation other things but they'll actually like prefer cash to a check often right so I think you could start seeing this with bitcoin eventually like once merchants are like you know what I want the bitcoin in fact if you pay me in bitcoin I'll offer a small discount and eventually the merchants in these countries might just say no I just I don't take fiat anymore I just want your bitcoin that's how you'd have hyper-bitcoinization it would it could only be through this process of merchants demanding it and and spreading through the economy and that's something called tears law which is the opposite of Gresham's law which is the good money drives out the bad and that's ultimately I think what you'd have you'd have to have something like that happen to see something like actual bitcoin spread in an economy and I think it's a grassroots thing I don't think it's possible to impose as we've seen in El Salvador I don't think it works like people people don't like to be bitcoin's weird it's different it's totally strange and mysterious and they think it's a scam and in general like they don't necessarily want it like they like all these people who got the handouts in El Salvador most of them just sold it for dollars like they're just it's just weird and different when I went down there I met people who like they were taking their tips and saving it in bitcoin but like their salary they wanted dollars like and maybe they were smart to do that like short term right so I think that it's gradual and I think that over time it's it's it's probably a bottom-up process like I don't think you see governments choose to top down dollar eyes or bitcoin eyes unless they really have to and I think that when they have to is when you start seeing them collect tax revenue in a different currency that's when they've given up so in Venezuela they actually gave up and they're changing it now that they're going back and forth based on their economic condition but when the Venezuelan government was taxing people in dollars that's when you know they've given up on the fiat and it dies so you just have to see what happens like will one day governments just say we're going to tax and pick on them then you know that then you know the fiat's dying but I don't know I mean we may never get there thank you so much thank you I really appreciate that