In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Wolf Richter discusses:

• Worried Central Banks
  • The risks of financial instability are mounting
• The Cryptocurrency Conundrum
  • Can the central banks afford not to contain it?
• Too Much Leverage
  • When credit tightens, the system will crash
• Housing Harm
  • Many regional real estate markets are poised to burst

Wolf watches the minutes of the Fed and ECB closely, and concludes they are (finally!) becoming very concerned about the market imbalances that years of central bank liquidity and intervention have resulted in. They desperately want to cool things off, but have no idea how to do so without pricking the massive asset bubbles they have created. Whether they figure out a graceful way to do it or not (and he and Chris bet "not" is much more likely), he sees a fast-approaching sudden end to the era of ever-rising asset prices.

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In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and John Rubino discuss:

• End-Of-Cycle Signals
  • Long-standing trends are changing
• Big Trouble In Saudi Arabia
  • Now a powderkeg with a short, lit fuse
• Central Bank Culpability
  • It's scary how such powerful entities are so clueless
• Bitcoin Today, Gold Tomorrow
  • Hot capital will seek trusted shelter when crisis arrives

In this podcast, John enumerates the growing number of market indicators he sees that suggest major trend changes are afoot in the economy. He believes the long-standing bull cycle, now at bubble-level extreme asset valuations, is set to reverse.

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Executive Summary

• The critical value of scarcity
• Understanding the utility of the blockchain
• Will (can?) governments ban cryptocurrencies?
• A coming geometric explosion in the price of cryptocurrency?

If you have not yet read Part 1: Understanding The Cryptocurrency Boom available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we surveyed the exciting but confusing speculative boom phase of cryptocurrencies. Here in Part 2, we will contextualize this mad swirl by running it through two filters: scarcity and utility.

What’s Scarce? Scarcity Creates Value

Regardless of one’s economic ideology or system, scarcity creates value and abundance destroys value.  When we say supply and demand, we’re really talking about scarcity and abundance and the rise or fall of demand for the commodity, good or service.

In classical economic theory, scarcity is met with substitution: ground beef too expensive due to relative scarcity? Buy ground turkey instead.

But this model has weaknesses.  There aren’t always substitutes, or the substitutes are more expensive or problematic than what is now scarce. 

As a general rule, profits flow to any scarcity of goods and services with high utility value.  We value what’s scarce and useful, and place little value on what’s abundant and of limited utility.

Currency has three basic functions: a store of value (it will retain its purchasing power over time), means of exchange (we can use it to trade goods and services, pay debts, etc.) and as an accounting mechanism to track assets, debts, income, expenses and exchanges/trades.

We assume all currency has this function, but only currency that is easily divisible and easily tradable enables easy accounting.  If a notched stick is a unit of currency, and one stick buys a pig, what do I use for purchases smaller than a pig?

In today’s world, a currency must be….

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Executive Summary

• Why No Nation Truly Has Full Control Over Its Currency
• Why Sovereign Efforts To Control Currencies Is Driving Capital Into Digital Currencies
• The Driver's Of Digital Currency & Value
• Calculating Bitcoin's Fair Value

If you have not yet read Part 1: Why The U.S. Dollar And Bitcoin Keep Rising available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we reviewed the dynamics of demand and utility that drive the valuation of any tradeable good, service, commodity and currency.  We established that it’s impossible to understand how a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar can retain a value above its tangible value of zero unless we accept its utility value and its non-tangible sources of value, i.e. the wealth and wealth generation of the issuing nation and state.

We now turn to the second half of the question posed in Part 1: Why isn’t the market value of a digital currency such as bitcoin zero?

Or perhaps more interestingly: How high might the price of bitcoin go?

To answer this question, we must investigate another question: Can any state control the value of its currency and its place in the global economy? I suggest the answer is no. Beneath a surface veneer of status quo continuity, nations and states are losing the ability to control their role in the global economy and thus the utility of their currency.

To understand why, we turn to socio-historian Immanuel Wallerstein.

Who Controls a Rapidly Changing World-System?

Wallerstein is recognized for advancing the concept of world-system, his term for what I call a global Mode of Production, i.e., the political, social, financial and economic system that governs the relations of power, labor, capital, trade and resources (broadly speaking, our understanding of Nature and the extraction of its resources).  In a recent essay China is Confident: How Realistic?, he observed that "countries (have lost the ability) to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system."

These two paragraphs get to the essence of his analysis…

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