The purpose of this article is to summarize the financial and economic state of the world and the potential for cryptocurrency technologies to replace existing financial systems. We delve into some of the many interesting new cryptocurrency startup projects that are springing up, and also explore the more esoteric and nefarious side of the growing cryptocurrency world.
As anyone with half a brain is already aware, the existing global financial system is on its last legs. For those who are not yet convinced, we would simply point to bond guru Bill Gross’ succinct 2016 tweet: “Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of neg. rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day”. In fact, Bill Gross may have been off by a factor of 10. There is some evidence that recent interest rates are actually at the lowest level in approximately 5,000 years.
After the global financial crisis of 2008, something happened that no one ever dreamed was possible… developed-world interest rates dropped to zero and then actually became negative for some market participants. As bizarre as this sounds, what it means is that many market participants are actually paying to lend out money and, likewise, others are getting paid to borrow money. It’s a topsy-turvy, upside-side down world we are living in. Suffice to say that the existing financial system is completely broken, and there is no easy way out of the financial mess that the world is in.
In some sense you could say that the financial end-of-the-world happened in 2008, and since then we have been living on “borrowed time”. So, many observers have been expecting a global currency reset (GCR) since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008. But why hasn’t it happened yet, and when and if it does happen, what form will it take? Observers like James Rickards have for years been talking about the International Monetary Fund (IMF) taking over as the world’s central bank. The story goes something like this: since all developed-world countries are equally bankrupt, they will come together and agree to “kick the debt up one level higher” to the IMF, and then the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) will become the “one world currency”. It’s also possible that individual countries will take unilateral or bi-lateral actions to reform the USD or to bring an end to the its reign as the world’s reserve currency, and indeed the process of de-dollarization is accelerating.