Guest
Founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy · Author of Broken Money
Lyn Alden is the founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy and the author of Broken Money, a history of money through the lens of technology. An electrical engineer by training, she researches the monetary system and global markets. She has appeared on TFTC four times since 2020, discussing fiscal constraints, energy and Bitcoin.
Alden founded her research firm in 2016 while working in engineering, then moved into investment research full time. Her engineering background shows in the way she asks which part of a system limits what the rest can do. Broken Money follows that method through monetary history: communications could move instructions quickly long before final settlement could move at the same speed. Her public research applies the same attention to the mechanics of dollar debt and the energy system.
The TFTC conversations pair a long-run concern about the monetary order with resistance to easy collapse forecasts. In March 2023 she argued that the Fed was using a familiar unemployment-and-inflation framework in a different fiscal environment. In May 2025 she applied the dollar-system argument to tariffs and reindustrialization. Two of her four feed interviews have written TFTC pages here. Her Unchained, What Bitcoin Did and MacroVoices appearances are separate conversations, listed below rather than counted as TFTC interviews.
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Macro analyst Lyn Alden on why reserve-currency status quietly costs the US its industrial base, why there's more inflexible demand for dollars than there are dollars to repudiate, and where gold and Bitcoin fit as neutral reserve assets once the system shifts.
Lyn Alden explains why Jerome Powell's attempt to be the Volcker of his era is terribly misguided.
Positions drawn from Lyn’s TFTC appearances, grouped by theme. Quotes are from TFTC’s own recordings and are dated.
Alden frames the dollar's position as an exchange of benefits and costs. Under Bretton Woods the pressure appeared as gold leaving the United States. In the current arrangement, she argues, an overvalued reserve currency favors imports and financial assets while making domestic production less competitive. Her May 2025 explanation ties the trade deficit to the demand for dollar assets abroad. Rebuilding the industrial base therefore requires confronting some of the advantages Americans also receive from the existing system.
“So for example, back in the Bretton Woods era, the cost was that we kept draining our gold reserves.”
“And in the current formation, instead, we kind of pay for it with our industrial base.”
She rejects the idea that dissatisfaction with the dollar is enough to make it disappear. Debtors need dollars to meet dollar obligations, which creates demand independent of whether they like American policy. In the May 2025 conversation she used that mechanism to explain why near-term dollar-collapse forecasts repeatedly fail. She also treats reserve status as a share that can change gradually. A more diversified reserve system can develop while a very large stock of dollar debt continues to be serviced.
“And part of that, so all of that debt creates demand for dollars.”
“It's really a percentage thing.”
Alden separated the 2025 tariff project into its mandate, its plan and its execution. She considered addressing the trade deficit a legitimate objective and had been writing about it for years. Her criticism sharpened as she moved from the objective to the design and then to the speed and scale of implementation. That structure allows her to support rebalancing trade while questioning whether a particular measure or rollout makes the intended result more likely.
“One is kind of the mandate, two would be the plan and three would be the execution.”
“So I think when you go from plan, like when you go from mandate to plan to execution, each step was kind of a little weaker than, than the prior one.”
Energy is the constraint she keeps putting underneath the trade argument. In May 2025 she pointed to stagnant American electricity production alongside China's expansion, then to the difficulty of rebuilding capacity when important equipment is itself made abroad. Tariffs cannot produce a power plant or a functioning supply chain immediately. Her preference is to start building rather than wait for the monetary or political arrangement to become ideal, because the physical lead times remain either way.
“As part of our stagnant industrial base, we've had stagnant electricity production in the US for decades, whereas China has ramped up to unfathomable degrees.”
“There's no benefit from waiting, only cost from waiting.”
In March 2023 Alden questioned the Fed's reliance on a tight relationship between unemployment and inflation. She argued that restricting demand could damage interest-sensitive parts of the private sector without fixing energy and transportation constraints. Her comparison with the Volcker era also depended on who was creating money: private-bank lending had a different role from large fiscal deficits. The point was that a familiar tool can have a different effect when the source of the pressure changes.
“It's basically a very demand driven lens.”
“But basically that tight monetary policy made sense in an era where banks were doing most of the money creation.”
Alden's fiscal argument was already present in the March 2023 interview. A government carrying a large debt load pays more interest when rates rise, which changes the politics and the economic effects of tightening. She compared that environment with the 1940s, when the Treasury's financing needs constrained monetary policy. Her expectation was that public finances would make interest-rate decisions increasingly political, rather than allowing the Fed to treat the Treasury's balance sheet as an unrelated issue.
“So the 1940s banks weren't lending much, but instead the government was running absolutely massive monetized deficits.”
“They had to keep them low despite high inflation.”
Her March 2023 discussion distinguishes a neutral settlement asset from a market already large enough to serve every sovereign need. She thought Bitcoin could become relevant to reserve diversification as it grew, while noting that its market depth and volatility still limited that role. This is consistent with her broader approach to monetary transitions: the direction can be meaningful without the new system being ready to replace every function of the old one immediately.
“You know, if Bitcoin gets big enough, you know, that gets interesting.”
“And, you know, the depth of the, the Bitcoin market is not really in line yet with global trade numbers.”
Alden is interested in what people can do with a new monetary technology, not only how many exchange accounts exist. In March 2023 she warned that adoption concentrated in a few large custodians could create a single point of failure for millions of users. She was interested in tools that spread custody risk and make community-scale alternatives possible. That is also where her optimism enters: identifying a broken mechanism is useful when people can build a better one.
“And so there's this gigantic global centralized honey pot.”
“And so both in energy and in money, you know, there are severe problems in the present, but there are, you know, technologies that make this better over time.”
Notable appearances on other shows, newest first.
The Peter McCormack Show · Jun 2024Will Bitcoin End Central Banking? With Lyn AldenThe historical role of central banks and the question of whether faster settlement changes the need for them.
Unchained · Feb 2024Breaking bitcoin models to the upside with Lyn AldenBitcoin ETFs, custody and institutional access, in an Unchained conversation that TFTC summarized separately.
Macro Voices · Dec 2023MacroVoices #408 Lyn Alden: Broken EnergyHer energy framework with Erik Townsend, distinguishing reliable supply from headline generation costs.A history of monetary technology and the systems built around it.
Her public essays, newsletter archive and investment research service.
Her near-future science-fiction thriller, separate from her financial research.