 Thanks all of you for coming It's Terry Saturday afternoons with us. We appreciate it very very much got an interesting seminar for you today a Few notes beforehand. I spent yesterday at a free market medical Association conference in Dallas Which is a fantastic group of doctors and self-insured employers everything who were trying to create a cash medical system And what was interesting about the conference is that the traditional medical system? Cost-wise is totally out of control Costs are going up 10% a year completely unsustainable and at this point for a typical family of four Their portion of their so-called health insurance their employer's portion plus the out-of-pocket deductible and co-pays is about $25,000 a year now Which is totally unsustainable. I can tell you from my own experience my family of four spends far less than 25,000 a year on health care even at these inflated prices, which we suffer under today so with the U.S. population over 65 Years of age set to double by 2060 that those are the years when people tend to consume more health care services So clearly that system is unsustainable and the fact that we have now Probably really double digit inflation is not helping matters to put it mildly So when we talk about the aging of the U.S. Population some of you may know the name of an economist named Lawrence Kotlikoff I brought him up in some shows in the past. He's at Boston University He's not an ideologue not a libertarian free market guy necessarily, but a very good guy And he has taken upon himself to do some calculation About a statistic he calls the fiscal gap the fiscal gap is basically When we think about all the outlays that Uncle Sam is likely to owe to these elderly people In next 20 40 50 years in the form of Medicare and Social Security in particular You know, what are those numbers look like versus? What is the U.S. federal government likely? Realistically to bring in and tax revenue during that same period So you take a discounted present value of those two numbers and the outlays Exceed the tax revenue coming in in his calculation by about two hundred and twenty trillion With a tee dollars Okay, I don't know where two hundred and twenty two trillion dollars comes from but it doesn't come out of thin air so When we look at the thirty trillion that's number actually sounds good now thirty trillion in U.S. debt What's enabled that debt to be serviceable by Congress because every year Congress has to have a budget and spend money and Part of that expenditure is interest on all of that Treasury debt outstanding And if you look at all that Treasury debt and some of it is short-term some of it is longer term If you take all that outstanding Treasury debt and you weight it by the amount of the underlying bond And you say what's the average interest rate that Uncle Sam's paying on all that debt it turns out It's only about one point five or one point six percent Okay, that's the interest rate that Congress has to wrestle with every day every year to service the outstanding Federal debt, okay, that's a pretty nice low number to put it mildly if that were simply to triple To four and a half percent or five percent which is far closer to historical averages of Treasury debt Treasury debt interest rates You know very quickly that five hundred something billion in Congress's budget would go to one point five trillion a year Which would be the single biggest item in The budget would be larger than so-called defense who would be larger than Social Security Medicare, etc So Congress doesn't want that to put it mildly so you know we talk about all this and it feels and seems unsustainable It feels and seems like we're coming up against some sort of inflection point but to be fair to our critics a Lot of people who think like us have been saying this sort of thing for a long time since 1971 as a matter of fact and yet it has sustained itself somehow and in large part that is because the US dollar enjoys world's reserve currency status and also because There continues to be an active market for US Treasury debt Why that is how that is is a long complicated question. You would think at some point people would say I'm not going to loan money To this insane group of people anymore Unless I get junk bond rates of 20% or something because they're insane and they'll never ever ever get their fiscal house in order But nonetheless, we have our friends at the Fed there to say hey Don't worry about it. Congress if there's not a ready market for US Treasury debt will be there to come along and Suck it up. So there's still a market for treasuries and how long that lasts. I don't know But the the impetus behind the book that dr. Murphy Authored and that is really the subject of our talk today was that you know There's so much money and debt out there floating and circulating that we were almost starting to lose sense of what money is Conceptually, it's almost getting difficult to grasp it because it's so Enormous, you know that we have all of this Sovereign debt household that business that individual debt We have so much Spending by Congress that is deficit funded. We have all this fight fiduciary media out there non-banked Excuse me non-backed money substitutes. We have all of these derivatives and exotic financial instruments Which are hard to track and understand and of course You know, we have interest rates that are it become a policy tool For the Federal Reserve in other words interest rates are something that government uses as a policy rather than something that the marketplace Determines as an exchange ratio between people's desire to borrow money and people's desire to save money so everything seems almost surreal and it you know even Our critics of course poo poo this and say it doesn't matter and that we can have deficit spending forever and Some of those critics are on the right people like Dick Cheney, for example, because the deficits don't matter And even some of our friends, let's say in the Bitcoin community I think have added to this obfuscation when they talk about well, you know Bitcoin money is an energy system or it's an information system and we've gotten away from any conception of what Certainly Mises and Manger and other great economists understood as money as arising from a commodity. So When Bob Murphy and I started discussing this book project We thought we really need a book that will get into the mechanics and the basics of all this because there's actually a Fed Publication which is now out of print called understanding money mechanics and it's pretty dry It's pretty technical, but it addresses almost the plumbing of the money system. How money is created How does the Federal Reserve interact with the Treasury has the Treasury interact with Congress? How do they all interact with the so-called primary dealer banks and then the commercial banks? So how does all this money and debt and government bonds get created? And so that's always been a criticism of more theoretical economists Particularly Austrian says that well you guys live in this nice world of theory And it would be great if money worked that way But you don't really understand how money actually works in the real world in the banking system And I said Bob we need a book To disabuse people of this and so the book that Bob created as a serialized Set of articles on Mises.org it goes at first through the actual origins and history of money itself Which is very valuable to anybody it goes through how gold And other commodities arose as money and talks about the gold standard the classical gold standard and of course what happens to it It talks a lot about the history and development of central banks The history of the US dollar particularly the development of that with the Bretton Woods Agreement in the 20th century and then of course Nixon's actions in 1971 And the shock there it talks a lot about The the various crises that the dollars had the the 2007 crisis Of course Bob has a particular section in the book about what then developed what we now call extraordinary Monetary policy of asset purchasing by the central bank It talks about all of these financial intermediaries that we call shadow banking So that sounds interesting right, but shadow banking is actually in many ways a very frightening thing because there are institutions which don't take deposits, but nonetheless create credit and The left doesn't like them so much because they're unregulated We don't like them so much because we don't know how much You know debt and money they're creating out of thin air and whether that's going to be weaponized against us So when we think about shadow banking we think of it sounds nefarious like some brilliant quant kid at golden sacks Is coming up with some scheme to enrich him and his partners and like that But it's actually it's not that shadowy at all a quick and loans rocket mortgage Quick and loans Owens rocket mortgage. That's the biggest shadow banking institution in the world They create billions and billions and billions of dollars of mortgage debt and they do it almost every day and of course Bob's book contains a section on crypto currencies and Bitcoin so it really is a fantastic up-to-date survey of Money and everything that I think a layperson would need to know about it I used to tell people if they read that little pamphlet by Murray Rothbard. What has government done to our money? I think it's about 88 pages or so depending on that size of the print and I think we have some here It's just a fantastic book especially for people who might be younger or people who are really You haven't thought or read much about this It's a it's a great gift for people and I I always used to say you know if you just read that book if you spend two hours You'll know more than you know 95% of people out there walking around about money and I think Bob's book in in the very same vein You can't read it in two hours. It's a little longer than that But nonetheless if you just consume Bob's book and that's all you consume you will know more about money Than virtually then most economists actually to be frank So I think it was a fantastic book I'm very pleased with the way it came out serially and the way it worked out that the organization of the chapters The way it works conceptually. I think it's very clear And I think it's a real feather in Bob's cap that he was able to produce this in a in a Style and a format that's very accessible for lay readers So I'm excited to hear him talk a little bit about what's going on with money and markets today But first we have a great panel for you of some of our senior fellows and some of our former summer fellows Who are all working in the money space in one way or another either in the crypto industry In the think tank industry as a professor and so I'll ask though Bishop to come up and introduce them So please a round of applause for though