William White, former central banker at the BoE, BoC, and BIS and senior fellow at the CD Howe Institute, has been a thorn in the side of his central banking colleagues for decades, questioning their hubris and pushing hard for a paradigm shift from within. Together with legendary financial commentator Jim Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, White explores the difficulty of paradigm shifts within central banking and the overwhelming historical evidence that this easy money experiment will end badly. White also expresses what he believes to be the core problem with central bankers' analytical framework — namely, that it assumes that the global economic system is "comprehensible, understandable, and controllable" rather than a complex, adaptive system with characteristics that are not present in the models that attempt to decipher it. As well, Grant questions White on his views on Bitcoin, how he personally invests, what he would do if he were running the Federal Reserve, and if there is any possible way out of our current predicament. . Key Learnings: Central Bankers' neglect for history will be their ultimate undoing, and although new, previously unthinkable policies have been enacted recently, it can hardly be considered a paradigm shift but merely a more extreme implementation of the same flawed analytical framework. The outcome of the deflation vs. inflation debate is not cut and dry even to someone as learned as William White, and he himself has for decades implemented a barbell strategy of cash and property as a way to position for this uncertainty.
Recorded on November 16, 2020
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