📈Billionaire Brain Freeze

Last week was by far our most successful post. Thank you to all who shared my story. If you missed it you can find it here. And now back to your regularly scheduled memes and sarcasm.

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There is a lot of debate about billionaires in today's society: are they paying their fair share of taxes? How much money is too much money for one person? What does this mean for our society moving forward?

Those debates may be important, but they are tiresome. I am here to ask a simpler question. 

Are billionaires just as dumb as the rest of us?

To try and answer this, let’s take a look at a recent tweet from Jack Dorsey, the billionaire founder of Twitter and Square. 

Now before I explain how dumb of a question this is, let’s give you a little background. Jack has embraced Bitcoin over the last several years, saying back in 2018 that Bitcoin would overtake the US Dollar.

As I have previously mentioned I believe in Bitcoin as a useful monetary experiment but this is quite the statement. Undeterred by the fact this hasn’t even come remotely true Jack doubled down at the end of last year. Keep in mind Bitcoin was trading around $50k when he said this, and it now sits around $30k.

Now, it’s not entirely surprising that an internet founder who created a way to bypass using cash via Square has big-time “It’s the future, bro” vibes when talking about crypto. Even less surprising when you see he looks like a Frodo x Gandalf love child who just got told his favorite Juul flavor got discontinued.

But I digress. The real point of this article is to highlight what the world’s reserve currency is and why the US Dollar most certainly is the world’s reserve currency.

Essentially a reserve currency just means money that is held by foreign nations and central banks. This money is used for financial obligations, allows for foreign trade, and is used to price commodities like gold and oil. If you notice both of those, and even Bitcoin are all priced in US Dollars and have been for decades.

Being the dominant reserve currency gives the United States a great deal of power and the ability to trade/negotiate with foreign nations. So if the dollar had already lost its reserve status as Jack suggested, that would be very bad for our economy and would have massive ripple effects throughout the world. 

Fortunately for us, that is not even remotely true. In fact the US Dollar is the dominant global reserve currency and there really isn’t a close second.

And while this percentage is lower than it has been in the past, the strength of the US Dollar vs other major currencies is stronger than it has been in years.

What’s the Upside?

It is currently en vogue to take shots at the US economy and specifically the US Dollar given issues with inflation. But as we have shown, the economy and the dollar have strengthened relative to other alternatives, including Bitcoin.

So just because a billionaire tweets something, do not take that as fact. Or even some enlightened observation. They may in fact just be coming down from an ayahuasca trip or just so plugged into the internet they forget that people do in fact still covet US Dollars.

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For Your Weekend

Read:

‘Top Gun’: Why a Depressed America Actually Needs Tom Cruise by Derek Robertson (Politico Magazine)

No one would mistake Top Gun: Maverick for social realism, or even (maybe especially) a lifelike depiction of Naval air combat. But rather than the hyper-masculine, Reagan-era militarism of Tony Scott’s 1986 original, this film’s appeal comes from the mere fact that it’s about normal people, doing things within the plausible boundaries of reality. Cruise’s twinkling, weirdly ageless visage conveys a real-life dynamism otherwise absent from mainstream pop culture in our era of sci-fi and superhero domination.

Chuckle: