David McWilliams

I'm thinking these are around the figures.

Now, what are the global implications?

for an increasingly globalized world where banks that are not regulated by the United States have been issuing dollars.

We saw the UAE last week.

We spoke with the UAE on this podcast very recently, about three or four weeks ago, rang up the Fed and said, you know what?

We would like you to open these swap lines with us because we're worried that we might not necessarily have enough dollars.

What are the implications for America of the fact that it has...

Well, I'm almost sure that's going to happen given the way things have gone in the last while.

But that's fascinating.

That's the idea of weaponizing the dollar, weaponizing the vulnerabilities of the system.

And as you said, attaching political and our geostrategic

consequences to the rest of the world needing dollars let's talk about the difference between currency and finance and again i know listener this might sound like a big jump but these are really fundamental parts of understanding the nature of money and you have delved into this you've gone into the weeds you've figured this out explain the difference between money and finance

Well, it's fascinating you say that, Brendan, because a lot of Irish listeners will know that in the past in Ireland,

There was a reason why in most villages, the grocer, the publican and the undertaker were one and the same person.

So this was part of the class, the commercial class that existed in Ireland after the famine, before the famine, all the way up until the 1950s and 60s.

What those people were doing, in effect,

was they were the bank of the village.

They provided the credit for the punters in the grocer.

They provided the credit for the punters in the bar.

And they financed the funeral.