Defi is a “Bona Fide Financial Revolution” Says Niall Ferguson
February 17, 2022 6:28 pm
"Niall Ferguson, one of the most prominent living historian of finance, has called decentralized finance (defi) a genuine revolution.
“DeFi looks like a bona fide financial revolution, taking advantage of new technological possibilities to reduce transaction costs in exciting ways,” Ferguson said. . .
[. ] His point seemingly being that finance is more than just currency in as far as a dollar or gold, it is also instruments that facilitate the movement of that currency or its attribution.
“DeFi defies the skeptics to unleash a financial revolution as transformative as the e-commerce revolution of Web 2.0,” Ferguson said without providing much detail on how exactly he expects it to do so.
His primary aim so seemingly being to provide a counter-voice to the crypto sceptic doom shoutings of Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini. Stating:
“Economists have generally been unreceptive to cryptocurrency, if not downright hostile to it. I suspect this is because their discipline implicitly prefers the structures of financial intermediation to remain static, to avoid overcomplicating the mathematical models they are so fond of. Financial history, by contrast, enables one to discern both long-term trends in prices and revolutionary changes in markets.”
Markets. His argument being that one has to look at both substance and form, that while gold is ‘money,’ IoUs are money too, just a different sort. And thus while eth or bitcoin might not necessarily be ‘money’ for coffee, they are a financial instrument for the market.
He calls bitcoin an option on gold, but ethereum seems to excite him more, stating that “ethereum offer something different: the possibility of re-engineering the financial system on the basis of ‘smart contracts.'”
Re-engineering. So bringing us back to his example where the increased availability of cheap paper led to a new method of representing value that greatly benefited commerce.
The invention of code, and code based money, which has significant advantages over paper, will likewise revolutionize finance, Ferguson says, with one potential key area being the peer to peer lending and borrowing of value with automatic and autonomous interest rates which fluctuate by the second based on the increase or decrease in demand on borrowing or lending.
The establishment of money pools or liquidity pools in Uniswap further allows for the direct exchange of different assets which gradually may extend to other areas outside of crypto to lubricate general commerce.
Thus while some economists speak of a crypto winter, Ferguson sees something more fundamental and say:
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Rampant inflation, foreign policy fiascoes and failed sanctions — is America back in a national malaise?
It is just over a year since some eminent historians were comparing Joe Biden to Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson and hailing the advent of a “transformative” presidency. My response at the time was that it was more likely to be a reprise of Jimmy Carter’s. This is starting to look as good a prediction as my Jan. 2 call that war was coming to Ukraine.
It was on July 15, 1979, that Jimmy Carter delivered what came to be known as his “malaise” address to the nation — though the word did not appear in the text. Intended as a bold, broad-brush speech about “about national concerns, the energy crisis, reorganizing the government, our nation’s economy, and issues of war and especially peace,” it has gone down in history as a political suicide note. . ."
Putin’s Ukrainian War Is About Making Vladimir Great Again
Current conditions are ideal for a Russian invasion, but the historical inspiration is more tsarist than Soviet.
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Putin is looking to rebuild Russia’s empire
Peter the Great is his hero, much more than Stalin
“War,” in Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous dictum, “is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” A generation of Democrats — the American variety, but also European Christian and Social Democrats — have sought to ignore that truth. Appalled by the violence of war, they have vainly searched for alternatives to waging it. When Vladimir Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Barack Obama responded with economic sanctions. When Putin intervened in the Syrian civil war, they tried indignant speeches.
When it became clear that Putin intended a further and larger military incursion into Ukraine, Joe Biden and his national security team opted for sanctions once again. If Putin invaded Ukraine, they said, Russia would face “crippling” or “devastating” economic and financial penalties. When these threats did not deter Putin, they tried a new tactic, publishing intelligence on the likely timing and nature of the Russian assault. Cheerleaders for the administration thought this brilliant and original. It was, in reality, a species of magical thinking, as if stating publicly when Putin was going to invade would make him less likely to do so.
Those who dread war approach diplomacy the wrong way, as if it is an alternative to war. This gives rise to the delusion that, so long as talks are continuing, war is being averted. But unless you are prepared ultimately to resort to force yourself, negotiations are merely a postponement of the other side’s aggression. They will avert war only if you concede peacefully what the aggressor is prepared to take by force.
Putin decided on war against Ukraine some time ago, probably in July when he published a lengthy essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he argued tendentiously that Ukrainian independence was an unsustainable historical anomaly. This made it perfectly clear that he was contemplating a takeover of the country. Even before Putin’s essay appeared, Russia had deployed around 100,000 troops close to Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders. The response of the United States and the European Union was to make clear that Ukraine was a very long way indeed from either NATO or EU membership, confirming to Putin that no one would fight on Ukraine’s side if he went ahead with his planned war of subjugation.
Over the past few months, Putin has used diplomacy in the classical fashion, seeking to gain his objectives at the lowest possible cost while at the same time carefully preparing for an invasion. Western leaders have achieved nothing more than to remain united in saying they will impose sanctions if he invades. But a Russian invasion of Ukraine beyond the Donbas will create an entirely new situation. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic may express a common outrage, but it will not take long for their unity to be eroded by the altered reality and their fundamentally divergent interests. The US does not need Russia’s natural gas. At least in the short run, Europe does. . .
[ ] True, Russia’s economy may be smaller than South Korea’s, and just a fifth of America’s. But using the same method to estimate defense spending — allowing for the fact that Russian soldiers and hardware are significantly cheaper than their western equivalents — reveals that Russia is, in the words of a 2019 study, ‘The world’s fourth largest military spender, behind the United States, China, and India… The Russian General Staff gets a lot more capability out of its military expenditure than many other higher-cost militaries” — including those of Britain and France.
Russia under Putin has become a great power once again. That is precisely why he has been able to fight and win wars in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. That is why he is in a position for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine today.
It has long been clear that Putin aspires to much more than the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics,” entities that he himself summoned into existence in 2014. The “separatists” in those cities have been Kremlin proxies all along. So anyone who thought this is the limit of Putin’s ambitions was delusional. Recognizing their independence was the prelude to a much larger military incursion — the first step of which came almost immediately, with the deployment of Russian regular forces to the Donbas, supposedly to defend the locals against Ukrainian attacks.
Already the Kremlin has announced that it is recognizing the independence of not just the parts controlled by separatists but the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk administrative areas — a much larger expanse. It also evacuated its embassy in Kyiv and issued an ultimatum to Ukraine that amounts to a demand for surrender: the country should be neutral and demilitarized; it should accept the annexation of Crimea and renounce its constitutional aspiration to join NATO. No doubt there will be further desperate, diplomatic Hail Marys by western leaders, but Putin’s televised national security council meeting on February 21 confirmed that he is set on war. He even mocked the US with his ironical allusions to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. . .
The Russian president’s most likely strategy is a blitzkrieg designed to inflict maximum damage on Ukraine’s armed forces and other military assets, followed by a regime change that replaces Volodymyr Zelensky with someone more in the style of Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt satrap overthrown exactly eight years ago in the “Euromaidan” revolution. . .
Read more >> This article was originally published in The Spectator
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/vlad-invader-putin-rebuild-russia-empire/
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