Woven Gold: The GM Podcast, Modernica, Money, and The GM Library
Woven Gold: The GM Podcast, Modernica, Money, and The GM Library
Monday October 3rd, 2022
Hello friends,
Here’s what I want to share today:
The Brian Gold Podcast
Brian Gold’s Podcast: My personal podcast that draws from this substack will be housed here. That way, you can naturally listen to essays, articles, and updates through the substack and Apple Podcast. I’ll get this on Spotify and Google soon. The goal is to use this as a YouTube video essay engine.
I particularly enjoy formats like Games & Culture & Exurb1a. It’ll be interesting to see how I can express myself in these mediums and provide you guys with better context with the cultural themes I’m seeing related to money, marketing, and cities.
The GM Podcast:
The GM Podcast will house more polished interviews with artists, founders, and friends – including significant themes I’m covering with GM.
I sat down with Jay Novak, one of the founders of Modernica, for the first interview format. I’ve long respected the company and its products for years, so when I met Jay, we quickly became friends. He was generous enough to walk me through his process and sit down for an extended interview. Visiting his factory was like seeing how the chocolate gets made at Willy Wonka. Talking with artists that are masters of their craft energizes me more than a cocktail of amphetamines. I hope to make more of these and get better at podcasting. Uploading on all these platforms is a slog, but it should get easier with time. Putting myself out there is nerve-wracking for an extroverted introvert like me, but the content game is like planting trees. The best time to plant was yesterday.
Fix the Money, Fix the World
After I published The Alchemy of Money, the dominoes that hold the global financial system started falling. The U.N. just called on the Federal Reserve and the Central Banks to stop raising interest rates, and the U.K. is also experiencing troubles with its currency. Having to be bailed out by the Bank of England (which is not a part of the U.K. and is run by unelected bankers). As I said in the piece, the gravity of the Dollar/Debt is destroying currencies everywhere besides the U.S. Rather than being on the money, I want to explain these underlying forces so we can grasp the issues at hand.
I’m working on the Alchemy of Money Part 2, but if you want to “read ahead.” Please watch all these videos in FULL.
Richard Werner is a German economist who brilliantly explains how the banking system and the financial sector work. These German economists and French philosophers are scary good.
There’s something about the global financial system that shuts people’s brains off. In the same way, people get nervous when talking about Wikileaks.
I realize money and economics are topically dry, but money can no longer be separated from our day-to-day lives. Economics = Ecology. For example, product management and marketing are already one and the same, and digital advertising exchanges are built off of the finance exchanges we use to trade commodities. These disciplines are more united than meets the political eye. Let me know if this still interests you below.
The GM Library
I usually own any books I link to in essays and articles. I’m trying to figure out a way to create a community library. I’m inspired by the artists Carla Fernandez & Pedro Reyes in Mexico City. They created a lending library through the Instagram page @tlacuilobiblioteca. I think I can set up a GM Library so I can lend you guys the books I have.
Have a great rest of your week, and be on the lookout for more.
Sincerely,
Your Secret Strategist,
Brian Gold
To clarify: the new UK treasurer send the pound into a tail spin after announcing tax cuts for the rich. The Bank of England intervened to stabilize - things would have been far worse otherwise.
Sam the man!
The thing that's interesting to me is that a simple tax cut that was announced last week, forced the Bank of England to immediately spend £65 Billion on bonds.
What does that tell you about the state of affairs?
Yes, that is what happened, and what keeps happening.
Central banks increasing the money supply and buying bad debts because things would have been far worse otherwise is always the central narrative. Why?
Stabilizing financial meltdowns is fine, and in some cases a saving grace for a central bank to take on bad debts (once in a blue moon), but if you keep increasing the money supply towards unproductive use, it increases inflation, inequality, and moral hazard. Especially if there is all this power to do so without accountability.
Norway let their banking sector collapse in the 90s, are now owned by the public. A lot more resilient for it. It doesn't even need to borrow money, ever.
We need to move towards a decentralized banking system so that these credit and debt mechanisms are used sparingly and towards productive economic output and growth. Not to save funds that were on auto-pilot and miscalculated their risks.
Aren't pension fund supposed to be safe?
I understand that pension funds rely on bonds to be stable, but this is exactly the problem, they're not, and instead, our economic policies on a global scale are building in doom loops instead of wealth.
In sum, it's better for those pension funds to liquidate their own assets to take care of whoever was on the other line, than to keep borrowing indefinitely from the young, and yet to be born.