Transcript: Michael Every: Stablecoins Are the New Petrodollar

Marty Bent [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts.

Michael Every [0:15] So it's all acting like safe haven.

Marty Bent [0:18] I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

Michael Every [0:28] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [0:31] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Michael Every [0:34] Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:34] Probably should be. Michael Every, welcome to the show, sir.

Michael Every [0:38] Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Marty Bent [0:41] Well, like I was saying, I'm very excited to have you on. I've been reading your research reports for years now, and I think the one that you sent in the beginning of the year about reverse perestroika, what's going on with Trump, and his global economic geopolitical strategy in his second term really impacted how I viewed the world this year, particularly as things have been unfolding. But I think to take a step back, and correct me if I'm wrong, but sort of the tenor of that piece to me was that many people are stuck in viewing the world through a lens that existed for 50 years leading up to maybe 2020, And we have tectonic shifts happening in the macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape that are going to force people, whether they like it or not, to view the world through another lens. Another way of saying things are not what they used to be only a few years ago. Is this a correct assumption of your perspective?

Michael Every [1:42] Completely, completely correct. I mean, look, I don't know exactly where you want to take this conversation. I'm happy to go wherever you would like. But literally in the background, just before starting to speak to you, I was just typing a little update of what I'm seeing here this morning. And on that basis, I'm just plucking a couple of different stories which all feed into the same thesis. So one, you've had the declaration from OpenAI that they're ahead of Anthropic and they now have a new AI, which is an AGI, so an artificial general intelligence, which is your Skynet moment. If you want to believe the hype, okay?

Michael Every [1:42] Now I'm not getting into the long grass on that because I'm not a tech guy, but I'm fully cognizant of the fact that once you pass that particular threshold, if it's true, it's a Manhattan Project moment where we've got something artificial that's smarter than we are that can teach itself. So that's one to watch because there's a lot of implications on a lot of different fronts. Elsewhere, we've got headlines that Putin said he might be interested in peace in Ukraine.

Marty Bent [2:39] Yeah, right.

Michael Every [2:40] That's as everyone thinks. mobilisation is more likely, because it would be peace on his terms apparently. Then we've got in the last 24 hours Trump being reported that potentially he might want to say that the Iran War is over. And again, I rolled my eyes saying, yeah, right. And immediately another report coming out backing what my view has been all along, which is that he will actually restart the war again after the midterms. So this is just a pause to refresh If you will, and South Korea is now in the background saying they may send military forces to Hormuz. " Maybe, just maybe, he's got his first actual ally to start sending forces to Hormuz to help try and control it.

Michael Every [2:40] So another huge breakthrough there. At the same time, and I'm going scattergun because but it all feeds in together. The Australian financial press, I think it was the day before yesterday. ran an op-ed. Now, op-eds can say a lot of different things. The Wall Street Journal has loads of crazy op-eds all the time, but it's not so common in Australia. They ran an op-ed arguing for negative immigration, not lower immigration, negative immigration. Now, I've never seen anything like that. That's against a backdrop where you've got the Australian housing market really collapsing, and yet the RBA, their central bank, is probably going to have to hike anyway.

Michael Every [2:40] That's just inconceivable for most Australians up until up until recently. And then in the Netherlands, you've had the Netherlands— I think it's the Scientific Research Council for Government Policy. I may be mistranslating that title slightly, the WRR. They've put out a policy paper saying that Europe is really caught between a rock and a hard place between the US and China with their neo-mercantilist trade policy, which is something I've been expounding on endlessly, and that Europe needs to really start making very, very hard choices. And the world that it understood is dead. And they need to think outside the box. And they strongly imply that Europe should either push for a China Plaza Accord to push the renminbi down to what on the back of an envelope would look like being around the 4 to the dollar level, or the 3 to the dollar level versus where it is now, which is never going to happen.

Michael Every [2:40] Or they should mirror China one for one, which includes the ECB pushing the euro lower. So the ECB's role would be to try and weaken the euro Versus the renminbi. Again, this is just mind-blowing stuff for people in markets. Or lastly, they need to put in place tariffs and capital controls to make sure that they can just match what China is doing on that particular front. Now, I'm not saying any of those will happen, but you are seeing in just that 2-minute little rant from me there, the unraveling of just vast amounts of the ideological and intellectual superstructure that we've built the last 45 years with, all coming tumbling down at once.

Marty Bent [5:32] I mean, I'll add to that. We have the Venezuela oil deal. We have Scott Bessent getting as close to a Draghi whatever it takes moment last week. We had Truckin Miller come out with an AI-written op-ed response to Secretary Bessent's moves in the Treasury markets. And it's very discombobulating. Where do we find any stability in this environment? Should we even be looking for stability? Is this sort of like a Game of Thrones chaos as a ladder to climb opportunity that many people have to begin to view what's happening in that way? And That's one of the most discombobulating things is you have the macroeconomic, the geopolitical, and then the tech with the AI happening.

Marty Bent [5:32] And on this show over the last year, I think the national security strategy document that the Trump administration sent out last November, if you read that, it looks like they were making moves to really go after that strategy, which is like, hey, we're going to pack things into the Western Hemisphere. We're not going to get in foreign wars. We're going to create allies in Latin America and really try to reindustrialize the US. Maduro, picking him out of Venezuela, bringing him to the US, seemed like a move in that direction. But then Iran pops up in February and it's a complete reversion of what they said in the National Security Strategy document.

Marty Bent [5:32] that, that really, I think, throw— threw a wrench in what many people expected the plan to be. And is the Iran situation, um, like a situation that the Trump administration got themselves into and are trying to unravel as it goes on, or is it something that the US and Iran Kind of like, do they like that the war is being extended because it gives them leverage in different points in the world from the US perspective, particularly against China?

Michael Every [7:50] So from my perspective, and that's all I can offer, Iran was always a target. I think ideally the US would've gone back after the midterms. so early 2027, and maybe even a bit later than that, and with a lot more munitions behind it and a lot more pre-planning. But you don't always get to pick and choose your moments. So Venezuela, it couldn't have been a more perfect example of how economic and military statecraft can coincide. There's a lot of moral arguments and political arguments and practical stuff. I'm not getting into the long grass on that. I'm looking purely at the big picture, of a grand macro strategy, as I call it.

Michael Every [7:50] That one was one we flagged. It was really obvious that would happen as part of the Dunro doctrine. Iran, I think, ideally would have been later. But the dynamic there was that, if you believe sources, and people can quibble, whatever, that things were moving too fast for them, in that Israel was already likely to attack Iran anyway, which would have triggered the war that we currently have. Plus, Some sources say that Iran was much closer to a nuclear weapon than people would have wanted to believe. Now again, that's a very controversial claim. But if you put that on the table and you think you can't afford to take that risk, you can't just sit back and say, well, we'll happily build the Monroe Doctrine and we'll lose the Middle East in the meantime.

Michael Every [7:50] Because as we are seeing play out around us now, whether you're in AI or tech or whatever, oil, and particularly diesel and refined product prices, really still matter. They matter for everyone, everywhere, for everything. And they will continue to for the longest time to come. So that's where so much of that product still flows from, either directly or in terms of the refined products. And what we currently see in the background, by the way, just as an adjunct to that, is the US probably is getting more oil out of Hormuz now and via different pipelines than many people suspect. It's not as ugly a picture as it looks just in terms of tanker trackers, for example.

Michael Every [7:50] That's not showing with everything turned off at night, ship to ship. But it doesn't provide refined fuel. Those refineries are not getting products out yet, won't do for quite some time, years potentially if this war drags on. And in the interim, you have an enormous gap between the amount of crude sloshing around the world, which is already itself not quite as much as people would like, and the refined product, which is in really short supply. And that's going to be a crunch everywhere. That's my answer in terms of where Iran fits in with this, because whoever ultimately ends up bossing this particular fight and bossing this region can turn around and say, as I linked to in that reverse perestroika piece, these are the hard commodities, which are still the essential facts of life that we effectively have underpinning our system.

Michael Every [7:50] So if the US loses all of them, sure, Monroe Doctrine with Venezuela, it's still a very nice cluster, of countries and economies and natural resources, but it's nowhere near enough if you're throwing all the Middle East into the Russia-Iran-North Korea-China axis. It's not enough. That's why they're there.

Marty Bent [11:05] And I don't think you mentioned it, but Russia came out, what was it, yesterday or the day before, saying that they were going to put their full support behind Iran.

Michael Every [11:13] Yes. No, absolutely. Apologies for not mentioning everything, but I just gave you 24 hours headlines, or actually just 5 or 6 hours headlines, rather than the entire week. Yes, Russia is openly saying they will back Iran. Now again, that's no surprise to those of us who follow these things in detail. Iran had given Russia the Shahed drones which are striking Kyiv, and more help beside. And Russia had already helped Iran with some of the targeting of US forces. in the region. It makes perfect sense for Russia to escalate via Iran to take the US focus away from Ukraine. Not that the US is focusing on Ukraine to a great extent compared to Europe, but it ties down what they see as the collective West.

Michael Every [11:13] Whether they are collective or not is a different question. And from the Iranian perspective, again, you want to help the Russians. And both of them are being helped by North Korea. And there are many fingers which point to at least dual use, if not more, Help from China to both of them too, and China has you know very openly said they won't cooperate with Bessent in this economic war operation, economic outcast against Iran. So I look, I put out a theory paper like a what if. I do a lot of these back in 2018, talking about the rise and fall and rise of the great powers and the great currencies.

Michael Every [11:13] And I said, what happens if one day China starts to move to blockade Taiwan? Which is you know something people talk about a lot in some circles. Russia moves on the on the Baltics. I didn't say Ukraine; I said the Baltics, which is you know by the way being mentioned again right now. Iran closes Hormuz. North Korea starts to move south towards South Korea, and Turkey grabs a few Greek islands all at the same time. So what happens in that environment? Well, the West. And this was in 2018. I said, he's in no position to fight on all those fronts. It's ridiculous to assume we could do that.

Michael Every [11:13] So you either step back, or you fight bloodily and badly on many of them, or you sit down at the table and say, what do you want the world to look like? And you have a Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam moment where you start drawing lines on the map. So that's been an operating principle of mine since 2018. And it didn't work out quite that way, because even within constellations of forces, for example, within the Iranian bloc, when they attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, Hezbollah didn't fire at the same time as Hamas. That was the plan. Hezbollah was supposed to fire 50,000 rockets and sweep over the border down into the Galilee.

Michael Every [11:13] And the picture would look very different today if that had happened. much to the detriment of Israel. But that didn't happen because they weren't coordinating properly. And you haven't seen the same full coordination across the spectrum from this axis up until recently. And it's now emerging piece by piece, step by step, ironically, just as the West is starting to cooperate less and less. But that is very much a viewpoint that one needs to have, or a lens one needs to be able to Put in and out of one's glasses to understand that this is not individual countries; it is more and more block-based. And even within the West itself, much of the headlines or most of the headlines that you're seeing where Trump is annoying Canada, Trump is annoying Mexico, you know, Trump is annoying Country X in Latin America, Trump versus Europe, Trump versus the UK, Trump versus South Korea, yada yada yada.

Michael Every [11:13] This is about what will a Western bloc look like that replaces the international system we have now, where it isn't a Western bloc, it's a political Western bloc, where we all have powwows and dinner parties together. And yet internationally, from an economic perspective, we're all integrated with everybody else. So it's like a polite political veneer. on top of a structure which includes everyone. So the US is attempting to say, no, no, this is going to be a dinner party only for invited guests where we provide our own food, like potluck, but it's not going to be everyone coming in. And some people don't want to do that, and some people are jostling for position within that emerging framework.

Michael Every [11:13] So those are 2 parallel lenses you have to wear, left eye and right eye.

Marty Bent [15:43] Well, this is a perfect segue into— I think we've been focusing a lot on kinetic or chessboard moving with the wars going on. Obviously, there's economic variables at play. I mean, very heavy economic variables. And that's one thing I'm trying to discern is how small is the head of the needle that the US administration is trying to thread right now? Because you have multiple things on the kinetic geopolitical front with realpolitik, but then— you have very severe economic rejiggering going on at the same time. And Scott Bessent famously in July of '24, in the lead-up to the election at the Manhattan Institute, explicitly said, I believe there's a grand economic reordering going on and I want to be in the captain's seat with the president as he's going through that.

Marty Bent [15:43] And so we're about 2 and a half years into Trump's second administration with Scott Bessent at the head of the Treasury. And it seems like the moves that they've been making on the monetary side of things have been very deliberate, very relatively quick when you consider how slowly things typically move. But you get the Genius Act, obviously the Clarity Act is a big point of contention here in the US. And obviously, like I mentioned earlier, Scott Bessent is really trying to protect the long end of the yield curve and really push people to the front end of it. How would you rate the US, particularly their handling of the economic side of things, the monetary side of things?

Michael Every [17:17] Well, I try not to give ratings per se, because that's kind of implicit in the underlying projections that I make, whether one side or another emerges battered and bruised as the victor or not. I really do think it's in the balance in terms of how this works out. But in general, I'll say I think the US has got a 2 in 3 chance of managing to put it off and a 1 in 3 chance of failing dramatically. Um, and you know, the outcomes there are so staggeringly different that the spread that you have on any particular financial market asset cross that you're looking at, um, or cross that you're looking at really, um, bear considering.

Michael Every [17:17] You know, this, this is not maybe there'll be one rate hike or two and you're therefore looking at a few basis points in the Fed funds futures. We're talking about entirely different futures. The problem is that everything they're trying to do, as I've made abundantly clear, and again, in that reverse perestroika piece, is every bit as challenging as what Gorbachev faced with the Soviet Union. And you have to do everything everywhere all at once. So you have to win kinetically. Because if you win kinetically, it encourages people to do what you want financially and economically. Financial and economic power also helps you win kinetically. So it's a closed loop.

Michael Every [17:17] Everything has to work everywhere at once. And you can make a couple of mistakes on one front, but only a few. And then you have to compensate somewhere else with something else. I would say that if we are moving towards this area in particular, let's just unpack it. In terms of the yield curve, clearly, US yields continue to march higher. And as I was just writing in the background before, Lovely to talk to you. The world I think we're in now is this, that we have a structurally higher inflation world for the moment because of this diesel and refined product shortage. That's not going to go away short of 2 things, or 3 things.

Michael Every [17:17] Number one, complete demand collapse. Okay, that's stagflationary. Someone somewhere is not going to get the vital stuff they need, which is only done by higher prices. So then you're talking about a collapse in growth somewhere alongside those higher prices. That's really ugly. Okay? So stagflation is one outcome, and that's zero-sum because the poorer people will be the ones who don't manage to consume anymore or eat, et cetera, et cetera, right? Or drive. If you're not going to go that route, you need to magically create refineries. So that's like a 5, 7, 10-year project depending on where you're building them and the permits and the environmental protections, et cetera.

Michael Every [17:17] That's not happening at the moment. That's years away. If you're not going to do that, then it's a geopolitical binary. You are either going to declare peace on these 2 different wars, Russia-Ukraine and Iran, at which point it's peace on the other side's terms. So you're going to give Ukraine to Putin, as if that could be done, because they're a sovereign country. But effectively, you say, right, there you go, yours. And you give Iran the Middle East, which again, can't be done because not all the Middle East will go with it. But you get my point. If you're not going to do that, because you don't want to or you can't, you have to have more weapons than the other side to defeat them to get energy prices back down again.

Michael Every [17:17] So you need to beat Russia, and good luck with that. Or you need to beat Iran, which I think can be done, but it's trickier. And that to me means you can't call this a cyclical inflation environment. It's a structural inflation environment until you can geopolitically tell me we have refineries, not for years, we have a decisive way to end both these wars, which are actually conflating into one and could even spread to other fronts. So, how does the central bank act? What do you do on the financial front when actually you're recognizing that just as was the case for the longest time in human history, To be a rates trader, you need to be an oil trader.

Michael Every [17:17] You need to be looking at Brent or WTI to understand where the yields are going. How does the Fed even start to model that? You need to be looking at the geopolitics and how do you control energy. So the finance becomes linked in with the refineries, with the atoms, with the geopolitics. That's the first point. But within just the finance itself, let's keep it siloed for the moment. Obviously, you can't have long yields exploding because you can't finance your debt. You can't afford to fund the Pentagon. You can't afford to do all the statecraft you want to do. Ergo, you're going to move to the short end, which is what Yellen did.

Michael Every [17:17] Clearly what Bessent is going to do too. I mean, he's openly saying it, more and more T-bill issuance. So you do that, then okay, effectively it's liquidity management at the short end of the curve. And the Fed is still there as the Fed, But people are looking at the short end, not the long end. And they're looking at the Treasury. How many T-bills are coming out? How many T-bills are coming out? How many T-bills are coming out? That's happening. Then above and beyond that, you need to do 2 things in parallel. You need to be making sure that the Fed helps get productive investment up rather than financial speculation.

Michael Every [17:17] So the way the Fed operates, instead of being all about markets, which is all it's about now, It needs to be about production. So, you need Fed chairs and Fed governors who are literally in touch with the physical side of their economy rather than the market side, and are doing everything they can through regulation to encourage people to lend productively. Okay. So, that needs to be happening into factories. And in parallel to that, and these two are linked, you need to be getting people to buy more T-bills to make sure that the short end is well supported. And I think one potential bridge between the two, and it's not been tested, and it could go catastrophically wrong, or it could go amazingly right, but frankly, we're running out of alternatives if you're the US at this point, is to then look at stablecoins.

Michael Every [17:17] Because if you issue dollar stablecoins and they take off, internationally, and you ration the amount that you are backing by T-bills versus offshore demand, you can theoretically create a structure where you have a higher interest rate for US dollar products outside the US than in, which is great because you want low interest rates and you want other people to have a high dollar rate abroad to make them attractive. You can generate couple of trillion dollars worth of investment every year. That funds the Pentagon, that funds a whole chunk of the budget. And within that, at the same time, externally, you can say to people, we're going to start paying for US imports in stablecoins, which is what I mentioned in the Reverse Perestroika piece, that you are basically taking the dollar and breaking it.

Michael Every [17:17] You're taking the Fed funds rate as a central interest rate for the world, and you're breaking it And you're hypothecating it into different buckets, which have different mechanisms, because you can control them better. And at the same time domestically, and here's the final piece, and then I'll shut up. The Fed would be looking at banks and new startups or new financing mechanisms, because frankly, large US banks don't do lending to the real economy. It's not what they're there for. You know it, I know it, they know it. Small banks do, local banks do. But you'd be looking at them and new mechanisms, new digital mechanisms to use stablecoin-backed lending into incentivized areas of the economy, which are related to the military-industrial complex.

Michael Every [17:17] Like we need to get more movement in critical minerals. We need to get more movement on drone tech, et cetera, et cetera. What financing mechanism could we use? Right, stablecoin back. There we go. Smart contracts, et cetera. If that works, we've just rewired everything all at once. And the financial mechanism is more stable. The hard power, at least short-term, medium-term, nothing works in the long term. The physical power is— the hard power is there to impose itself more on the world. And in a smaller territory, because it's not a global system anymore. The US has to contract from a global role to a large biggest dog in the pack role.

Michael Every [17:17] You have like a new model.

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Marty Bent [25:48] This is a Bitcoin podcast. I've been in Bitcoin for 13 years and I've been following what Paolo and Giancarlo and everybody at Bitfinex has been doing. It's funny, Tether started out as this pet project where they didn't even think it was going to have a $100 million market cap, and now it's become this geopolitically important asset. Not only Tether, but now you have Circle and other stablecoins. Obviously, the Genius Act is enabling as many people who can abide by the rules to spin up their own stablecoins. It's crazy to me how integral stablecoins have become in this geopolitical chess match that's playing out. The question I have though is, can they get to the critical market cap quickly enough to basically have enough liquidity to manage all these things they're trying to do on a large geopolitical international scale?

Marty Bent [25:48] The second point I wanted to bring up was In relation to the need for commercial banks to invest in critical parts of the economy, it seems like the executive is leading with investments in Dell, critical mineral companies. You have the executive in the US acting like wartime footing in World War II, where they're quasi— they're not, obviously they're not nationalizing, but they are putting— they're buying equity stakes in companies that they deem to be critical to the reindustrialization and basically sending a signal, I think, to commercial banks, like, we're going to back these companies, you should too. So we'll just start with those 2. Stablecoins, how big does the market have to get in what period of time for this potential path to be successful?

Marty Bent [25:48] And then is the executive, do you think, sending an explicit signal to the commercial banking system, we're going to buy stakes in these companies, this is where you should be investing too?

Michael Every [30:48] Okay, so let's break them down. On the first one, nothing succeeds like success. So it needs to create its own momentum quickly, and it needs to get big quickly. If this is purely a market mechanism, purely markets, I don't think it works. But if the US uses its state power in various different mechanisms, and statecraft to do what I just alluded to. For example, saying we want to pay for imports with them. Great. Everyone who exports to the US is either in or out. It's a gun-on-the-table moment in the same way that this economic outcast is versus Iran. You're with us or against us. Very high risk, very high reward if you can flip the Middle East.

Michael Every [30:48] And so for example, Saudi, Qatar, which is more questionable, but that would be a good one to flip on the gas front, You get them to say, hey, we want to be paid in stablecoins. That's the quid pro quo for us having, for example, nuclear power from the US. Then you suddenly have a global nexus of countries who have to start getting stablecoins to pay for oil. Effectively, it's the petro stablecoin rather than the former petrodollar, which is not really the thing people think it is. It's the eurodollar now, which is much broader. So you can put policy-related frameworks in place, which will accentuate that and accelerate it.

Michael Every [30:48] I can tell you, having lived in 9 different countries and emerging markets, there's going to be a chunky appetite for people to hold what is a dollar equivalent if the taxman locally can't see it. If you get paid what will not be a yield, but an incentive, which is what they're going to have to call it under the Clarity Act, I believe, which is not very clear, but that's the, I guess, the deliberate pun in it. So if you're getting paid to have that and you can keep it on an app on your phone that no one else can see via a VPN, well, then every country is going to have to close down VPN access and internet access, et cetera, et cetera.

Michael Every [30:48] And you've already seen reports from even major European banks. I don't mean commercial banks, I mean national central banks saying that, yeah, we can imagine there could be capital flight on the back of this. And in Europe, it will be limited to a degree because the euro works digitally so well within Europe. But in other emerging— sorry, in emerging markets and other economies in emerging markets, you could certainly see a lot of money heading in that direction if the US is seen as winning. If the US is seen as losing, and I don't want to get Trumpian, but yeah, You need to be winning bigly.

Michael Every [30:48] That builds momentum, which of course builds momentum. So it either goes very, very well or it goes very badly. Now, in terms of the second part of your question, it was so blindingly obvious to me when Trump was reelected the day he won that we would go the route that we have. I published a paper on it basically saying, welcome to the world of economic statecraft, which is not a new concept. I kind of have that label tagged on me all the time. It's a hundreds, if not thousands of year old concept. I was just merely banging the drum saying, guess what? Everyone will be using these 2 words going forward.

Michael Every [30:48] And everyone is. They don't fully understand it, but they're all using it. And the obvious part is big corporations have to do what's good for their national interest. I mean, there's nothing new in that, except for big corporations who have forgotten all about it, because they got very rich in the past 45 years not doing it. And I believe that there will be more and more phone calls, more and more golden shares, more and more deliberate stakes, more and more stakes similar to the ones we've already seen where the government doesn't put any money down, but you just get 10% share. And it's not that they— I mean, they want to monetize that on the way up.

Michael Every [30:48] Don't get me wrong, this is America. Everyone wants to make a buck. It's more that they want a seat at the table when they're listening to the strategic decisions, like, should we shut down all of our plants in the middle of America and send them to China or not? You want a guy at the table saying, I'm voting not, rather than it happening and you finding out about it when it's already happened, which is how we've done everything for 45 years.

Marty Bent [34:50] Well, I think that's the big question, is that 45-year period, and maybe we don't call it complacency, but that lull in viewing the world through the lens that you have to view it through now, how far does that set? How quickly do you think the American economy, particularly around this idea of reindustrialization, can reorient itself? Do you think it's possible?

Michael Every [35:13] Look, it's possible, But all the radical mechanisms and more that I've just already described to you, and which I fleshed out in that paper you referred to, we can put a link to it at the bottom or something, all that and more need to be done. And I think at minimum, it's a 10-year project. This was never a second-term Trump project. This is just the first foundations he's digging here, then you have to go up. It's probably another 2 terms. After that, I think you can start to achieve something real within that, which would be altogether, if you include the first Trump term, which was kind of hot and cold, it would be 16 years on and off, of which maybe if you take away all the COVID distractions and everything, maybe a good 12 years of it was focused on that to try and reverse 40, 45.

Michael Every [35:13] I do think it can work, but it's by no means a gimme. And at every single step of the way, There will be vested interests who have made a fortune from the past system, or who are ideologically still wedded to how things were done, which I fully understand. If you've grown up in a system when you press the red button, you get a free meal, you're going to want to keep pressing that red button and getting your free meal. You don't want to have to go and cook your own lunch, right? Or pay for your own lunch. And we're going to fight it every step of the way.

Michael Every [35:13] But I do believe that on balance, even though it's on a razor's edge at the moment, that the momentum is with the US, and that we are more likely to fall off on what for the Trump agenda would be the right side of it than the wrong side of it. But things can change. You have to monitor so many things all the time to keep an eye on it. And for example, that AGI news today, Today, my time, as I'm speaking. I don't know if that's hype. It's quite likely to be hype, right? But I'm not making any kind of equity call. But just imagine for a moment it's true.

Michael Every [35:13] Just imagine the US has managed to generate AGI years ahead of everybody else. Who else is even close to that? China claims to be. I don't know if they really are or not. Europe's nowhere. No one else is anywhere. What would AGI look like? Really, what would AGI look like in 12 months if it really is AGI? and can now improve itself at an exponential rate. What are the implications of that? Now, they're mind-blowing. But of course, you still have the physical limits that you actually physically have to be able to have the atoms to do stuff. You still need the diesel, you still need the metals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Michael Every [35:13] But who's to say AGI can't find new production systems, that it can't find new processes to accelerate a lot of these frankly, 19th and 20th century mechanisms that we use to do certain things using chemicals. I don't know. Nobody knows, but we could find out. So, it could be transformative or it could be hype just to try and get ahead, one firm get ahead of the other for an equity bump.

Marty Bent [38:13] Looking for a $2 trillion IPO here. Exactly.

Michael Every [38:17] Exactly.

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Marty Bent [38:17] But as we were building out the infrastructure, bringing that hash rate to the United States became abundantly clear rather quickly that the grid system outside of ERCOT in Texas, which is a relatively free market, is a bit brittle and has been desperately or has been critically underinvested in for 50 years. And I think that I would say I would not be shocked if AGI is here. If Astra 6's benchmark scores are what they're advertised to be, we are close to AGI. 8% AGI. They're marketing Astra 6 at 98%. So that is an incredible jump. And if it is here and we can utilize that tool to our advantage, it'll be massive.

Marty Bent [38:17] The question is, will we have the power to electrify the compute to actually effectuate the solutions that this AGI may be able to provide? I still think that's an open question. I do think American ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit has been reinvigorated in a way that makes me incredibly I'm sure you've seen it with Colossus 1, Colossus 2, this whole concept of bring your own generation. Let's spin up a bunch of natural gas turbines not connected to the grid and just run these data centers without even worrying about having to interconnect. So I think there's a view to do that and there's a way to do that there.

Marty Bent [38:17] And I am a bit optimistic towards that. But to your point, it is very high stakes. It's like a if you shoot for it, you got to hit it because if you miss, the other side of that miss is pretty bad. Bringing this back to— I'm jumping around here, but I want to touch on it too because we mentioned the long end of the yield curve, and I think it plays into this because we're talking about the financing of this infrastructure buildout. Everybody's focused on the long end of the yield curve. One thing that I've been following as the 10-year and 30-year have been drifting up is the MOVE index, the volatility index.

Marty Bent [38:17] And I'm interested to get your perspective on that. Like, do you think that's what the Fed is actually looking at? He knows that yields have to drift higher just because of the state of the fiscal situation in the United States and the national debt, and he just needs to manage that drift upwards by managing the volatility on the way up.

Michael Every [43:14] I'm not sure about that because The obstacles really, as you just mentioned, are physical. I'm not an MMT advocate. I'm a post-Keynesian in that I've always argued that MMT as it's sold does make sense if you've got empty factories and unemployed people sitting around plotting revolution.

Marty Bent [43:42] Yeah.

Michael Every [43:43] In that environment, of course, print money and get everyone employed and start making stuff. But when you're importing from everybody else, no one else can do it without the currency going down the drain. And the US could do it for as long as it was hegemon, but could only do it for so long before everyone else started to challenge that hegemony, which is where we are now. So therefore, effectively, it's a zero-sum game. You can only do that if you run a trade surplus like China behind a firewall. Then, then you can do MMT, which is effectively what they're doing into the physical economy, right?

Michael Every [43:43] And the US needs to replicate that. What I'm saying is effectively it's a physical challenge. to try and get this stuff done. I don't necessarily see that it's capital constrained in that we still are in, like it or not, a fiat system. We can still— I mean, for example, you're talking about like a $2 trillion valuation, right? For Stock X. I'm not— Stock YZ, right? I'm not giving any kind of recommendation. We have funny money figures flying around, right? And that 2 can become 3, can become 4. In what way are we capital limited? We're not. We're not capital limited. Now, you can say, okay, yeah, anything's unlimited depending on the price.

Michael Every [43:43] And certainly, in terms of the rate people are prepared to lend to the government, US government and other governments, that is moving higher. But I reflect back, that's not moving higher because people are necessarily worried about the term premium, which I don't think is that that different in the US from anywhere else yet. In fact, from Fed data, it's better than in Germany and Japan, the long-end term premium. And even breakeven inflation rates, yep, they're not particularly good, but they're not shocking either. Now, that says something about how we measure inflation as well. And I think there are big question marks over inflation and how much it really is hurting people.

Michael Every [43:43] I'm a big believer that inflation is higher than people think because you say a flat-screen TV is getting cheaper in real terms. Yeah, I buy one every 5 years. You know, I eat 3 times a day, right? So the periodicity of what you're looking at matters more for your conception and your purchasing power of inflation rather than something much, much lumpier. I don't like the way we do the indices.

Marty Bent [45:48] Sidebar.

Michael Every [45:48] The real problem is physicality. So that is where I think we have to be looking at, you know, what is the yield? What is the inflation? Like, if you don't have enough copper or nickel or yada, yada, yada to do it, Or as Elon Musk was saying recently, the big blades for these gas turbines. If you don't have any of these things, that's your problem. And to say that that is important is an understatement. To say that this is different from how we've had 45 years of thinking, even with the greatest respect, what you were just alluding to about managing volatility on the financial market front, market schmarkets.

Michael Every [45:48] I mean, they are important, don't get me wrong. It's stuff that matters. So, you can control the volatility of anything that you want. , etc. Any of these can be moved at another financial market variable cost, but it doesn't produce stuff. So, I already mentioned that if you want inflation to come down, Make peace with Russia and Iran on their terms and lose global power, then you get cheaper oil, or arm up and make sure that you can defeat them, or do a deal with them on your terms, at which point oil comes down again, and then bond yields come down, and then volatility comes down.

Michael Every [45:48] But that's just one crude, rude metric. There are many, many other geopolitical supply chains. and product markets that need to be looked at in their totality. And I think that's what Bessant is looking at. I certainly hope that's what he's looking at. Everything else, I think, is just damage control, you know, to try and make sure that the consumer isn't too shocked during this particular process.

Marty Bent [47:42] Well, the former scenario that you laid out, Iran and Russia particularly, that would align with the national security strategy that was laid out, which depending on who you ask in America, some people are like, just get us out, pack it in. Let's focus on the US and our hemisphere. I'm not going to say whether or not that's popular opinion or not, but I know for sure that there's definitely a number of Americans who are like, I'd be fine with that. Whether or not they understand the geopolitical knock-on ramifications of that is another thing.

Michael Every [48:18] They don't.

Marty Bent [48:20] Yeah. And outside, well, outside of that, again, the other big piece of the puzzle is China. And basically piggybacking on what you just said, how much leverage does China have right now in this whole situation, in this whole scenario, considering they have all the stuff, they've built out their energy infrastructure? I look at the chart of energy generation growth in China, in awe and, um, as an American, jealous that, that they've done this. But obviously they have a demographic, uh, problem, and it's a bit opaque from a Westerner looking into what's going on in China. A lot of people in our neck of the woods don't really have an understanding of how China operates.

Marty Bent [48:20] It's positioned as this communist country, but if you've ever worked with Chinese people, they're some of the most capitalistic people you've ever met in your life. And I think that's the big unknown for many people who are just watching mainstream media in the US is what is actually happening in China and how much leverage do they have?

Michael Every [49:17] Huge leverage. Obviously, they're an incredibly important economy and they're massively more important in all the areas that America needs to be focusing on, which is the physical. Because in the financial, America's the giant, but this is no longer about finance. As I said, you need that finance power. Don't get me wrong, I don't dismiss finance. I work in finance, right? You need it, but you need it to do something useful. So the fact that you can have a company coming to market and saying, we're worth $2 trillion, maybe $3, maybe $4, and people from all around the world will be giving you their money, that shows you that finance is important as a conduit, but it has to be into something that generates power based on the physical.

Michael Every [49:17] That's what I'm saying. So China understands the physical part better than anybody. They have a whole stack of problems that aren't reported. For example, now, The clarity of their data is not that good. The opacity is rising all the time. And what you can see from some reports is that even the Wall Street Journal— no, so the Washington Post was reporting on this yesterday, that there's more and more automation of this incredibly productive system that they have upstream to downstream coming through, which is even starting to see job layoffs in China. Now, they have huge demographic problems. I mean, staggering to the point that if you ask me whose population will be larger in the year 2100, I would argue the US.

Michael Every [49:17] That's baked into the cake already, particularly if immigration were to pick up again, even moderately. And if demographics, fertility were to pick up, which at the moment it isn't, but it could do, then yeah, the US will have a larger population than China in the year 2100, which people can't get their head around, but it's already— It's already happening so much. But within their current labor force, like say 750 million people, the Washington Post is reporting that around 350 million are going to be gig workers doing side jobs within the next year or 2, because they're just being laid off from their factory jobs, because everything's now being automated.

Michael Every [49:17] Now, ironically, when you throw the word communist about, that's exactly what Karl Marx was arguing was a would end up basically undermining capitalism because effectively there's no one to buy the products. So, you know, you fire all the workers in the factory to make it more efficiently, but you don't pay them anything. And as a result, they can't afford to buy your product. Now, that was debunked by economists, you know, 100 years ago, at least pointing out that it's very easy if you just share the productivity gains. , etc. So a distribution or a global flow, the circulation of capital and commodities, as Marx referred to it, doesn't work in the current system.

Michael Every [49:17] That's one of the reasons why things are breaking down. So China is flooding the world with stuff, with this incredible energy complex, this incredible manufacturing complex, but they can't absorb it domestically because people haven't got the money. And internationally, everyone is turning around and saying, well, we don't want the stuff anymore because it means we're going to follow you down that path. We will all be basically doing 3 or 4 part-time jobs without any industry, as these automated factories make everything and all the return flows to China, except China actually loses money on most of what they're making. Like, 1/3 of Chinese companies now lose money doing it.

Michael Every [49:17] So, it's effectively been propped up by subsidies. The fiscal situation in China is far worse than the US, far worse. They're just behind a firewall and you can't see it. So, again, I'm throwing in a lot of information. The point is, China is streets ahead of the US where it needs to be in some areas. But the overall package has got massive Achilles heels that aren't seen. But the US can't use what it would think would be a strength, like the financial muscle against China, because it's built a system where it's ring-fenced. And we even saw that with Iran, where the US thought they could show, look, we control Hormuz, you're not going to get any oil from them the same way that you didn't get any oil from Venezuela.

Michael Every [49:17] And China turned around and basically showed the world, hey, first of all, we can cut our oil usage by like 6 million barrels a day, which is just unprecedented. We're that electrified now, we don't need it. Like, wow. And secondly, we've probably got a year's worth of reserves. So if you want to try that geopolitical squeeze on us, we won't sell you X, Y, or Z for a year. See how you get on. So it's a standoff. And both sides have huge strengths and huge weaknesses. And the US needs to take more pages out of the Chinese book. And I don't think China is going to take many out of the US.

Marty Bent [53:47] That's so fascinating. And so how do you think the rest of the year looks? Because as you're saying, that is the interesting thing of one of the interesting variables of the US is these election cycles and we're heading into midterms here. In the next couple of months, and they typically throw a wrench in trying to make these geopolitical maneuvers because you're worried about the elections for the reps and the senators and governors. And so we have this toss-up of who's going to win the House and the Senate and who's actually going to— who's going to win the House and is the Trump administration going to be able to use Congress to push through their agenda?

Marty Bent [53:47] And does that slow down their ability to make the moves they need to move— they need to make at this particular point in time with everything going on around the world, which you've described for the first 50 minutes of this conversation? So what should we be looking for throughout the rest of the year in terms of the strategic moves that need to be made and the position that the Trump administration is in, in their ability to make those moves considering midterms?

Michael Every [55:07] Sure. I'll try and be more concise. So we have the physical, which we've discussed. We have the geopolitical. And on that particular front, the risk is that, as I said, after the midterms, which I'll come back to, or move on to in a second, after the midterms, I think the greatest likelihood, my base case, is that the US escalates versus Iran again. Because the economic war is working, it is to a degree, but you need to give it a push. And Iran, of course, is more likely to try and escalate in turn if the economic war is biting. It can start firing missiles at desalination plants or oil fields in the region, at which point the US is going to get dragged in again.

Michael Every [55:07] So expect escalation there. The word on the street is that even by the end of this month, potentially Russia could escalate against Ukraine. And again, This is just speculation, but you see people talking about not just massive missile attacks on Ukraine to deliberately try and break them over winter, which is really going to hurt their economy and their population, but to do grey zone attacks on Europe, to maybe even transgress and do something against NATO like the Baltics, just to see if NATO is prepared to say we're going to fight. Questionable whether they actually would, that's the whole point. Or even talk of a nuclear weapon.

Michael Every [55:07] a tactical nuclear weapon just to say, hey guys, we have these. We'll let one off in a field over there in Ukraine just to show you that we've got them, because that's how serious this is. I don't think China wants Russia to do that, but you can't rule anything out if Russia keeps getting its oil refineries smashed the way that Ukraine is doing at the moment. So that's geopolitically. And of course the two would happen together. If Iran escalates, Russia will at the same time. and vice versa, because you want to have that mess on 2 different fronts. And then the real tail risk is, is it only those 2 who escalate?

Michael Every [55:07] There are other players who could escalate. So it could be a really, really noisy end of year into the Christmas period, potentially. Rumors of a Putin-Trump-Xi meeting November 19th at APEC. If that's true, really, really interesting what does or doesn't emerge from that. Politically, No one knows what the midterms will look like. All I will say is this, we have had headline after headline fest for years saying it's going to go one way or the other, and they're often wrong. And I did see a poll yesterday, for whatever it's worth, that for the first time, I think the generic Republicans in the House, the likely voters, were actually +1 versus Democrats.

Michael Every [55:07] And remember, we're looking at a series of local races, not national. And while Trump himself, I believe, is unpopular looking at the aggregate polling, that doesn't mean that the alternative agenda is popular. So it wouldn't be a complete surprise if the Republicans retain both the Senate and the House, not to me anyway. But equally, the mainstream view that they lose both cannot be entirely ruled out. Either way, I can guarantee you 2 things. We'll see escalation from Trump because he'll just rely on executive orders more and more, which he's already having to do. Congress is doing very, very little. So just executive orders for the next 2 years, or 18 months, whatever.

Michael Every [55:07] No, sorry, 2 years. And at the same time, within the Democratic camp, you will have a continual move to the left. Because you've already seen this week, I believe AOC was rejected by the DSA as a prospective candidate for president in 2028, because she's not radical enough. So once a revolution starts moving, it eats its own young. And it will continue moving leftwards in the same way that politics in many other countries is moving more and more to the right. The center will not hold in that particular environment. I didn't ever think it could, because it doesn't produce policies that produce centrists. It produces policies that produce people on the far left and the far right, given enough time.

Michael Every [55:07] And that's exactly what we see coming now. So I see instability politically, whatever happens. I see instability geopolitically, with a narrow chance of some great deal being done, but I don't think that's very realistic. And so markets are going to have to adjust to that because it implies more problems in energy markets and energy prices being uncomfortably high, particularly for diesel, et cetera, going forward. And everyone else will then have to try and find whatever coping mechanism they have got. And the US has got a much bigger bag of tricks than most in that respect.

Marty Bent [59:22] I want to end it on Europe. What is going to happen with Europe? Particularly, we can tie this into everything. Obviously, you just mentioned dark horse Russia, Baltics, gray zone area in Europe. On the financial side, Van der Leyen coming out, and again, they've been beating this drum for years, but again, explicitly saying there's X trillions of euros in savings accounts throughout Europe. We need to tap into those to reinvest in the European economy. You have Canada going to a European Parliament event. You have Mark Carney going over there. Obviously, we have the US-Canada tiff going on right now. Well, we talked about the relative structural weaknesses that exist in the US because of the last 50 years of underinvestment in critical infrastructure. It seems like Europe may be in an even worse spot and less coordinated in solving their problems. Is that how you see it?

Michael Every [1:00:21] Yeah. Europe's in a very, very tricky spot. And as I alluded to at the beginning, more and more conservative with a small c, centrist organizations and think tanks and politicians are coming out and saying the same thing. This is bad and getting worse, and we really need to shake the box. It remains to be seen how the box will be shaken. By whom, and how many pieces realign within that box were that to happen. Because if Europe could manage to get out of its mess with offsites and working groups and acronyms and grand speeches, it would already be the world hegemon. But it's very, very hard to get one country to change.

Michael Every [1:00:21] It's incredibly hard to get 27 countries to change when one of them can veto just about anything. So it remains to be seen. But I do think the pressure is building there for sure. A key thing to watch, by the way, is in October, so next month, Europe is supposed to tell China, okay, either you have changed your trade policy towards us, because Europe's trade deficit with China is exploding, it's far bigger than America's now, which is completely bloody obvious that would happen, because they refused to tariff anything, or anything much. Either you change or we are going to start a trade war with you.

Michael Every [1:00:21] So watch that one. If Europe actually starts a trade war with China, if it does, then that snowball is going to turn into an avalanche because it will have to do so much more on the back of that. And if it doesn't, even when it's got an enormous and exponentially increasing trade deficit with China, then I'm not sure what it can do.

Marty Bent [1:01:56] Yeah. I feel like they don't have a lot of leverage when it comes to trying to get into a trade war with China.

Michael Every [1:02:04] Well, Europe doesn't have a great deal of leverage with China. It doesn't have a great deal of leverage with America. It doesn't have a great deal of leverage with anyone because it didn't build up an economy, a political economy that created leverage. It was built for an idealist neoliberal pacifist world that doesn't exist. So, you know, that means it has to change and it accepts that. The question is how it does it and when.

Marty Bent [1:02:24] Yeah. Maybe you shouldn't have decommissioned all those nuclear and coal power plants. nevertheless.

Michael Every [1:02:30] Well, I'm not giving policy advice, I'm just analyzing, but clearly it's asking lots of questions.

Marty Bent [1:02:35] Yeah.

Michael Every [1:02:36] Anyway, I hope that's— I hope that's covered everything you wanted to today. And we, we didn't even mention Bitcoin. I apologize, but maybe next time. But, uh, there's so much to talk about, so much to cover. And as I said, they're all integrated if you, if you choose to try and see the bigger picture. I understand many people don't because it's exhausting, you know, brain-busting, etc. But I do genuinely think— I'm not mad that there is a a thread to all this. There is a pattern there. And, you know, please, let's continue the conversation.

Marty Bent [1:03:04] Would love to. Michael, thank you for your time. This was an absolute pleasure for me.

Michael Every [1:03:08] Me too. Take care.

Marty Bent [1:03:10] Peace and love, freaks.

Michael Every [1:03:12] Okay.

Marty Bent [1:03:12] Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early and ad-free, helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.

Michael Every [1:04:02] Okay.