Mark Blyth explains everything

The interview below is a podcast interview of Mark Blyth by some dude named Chris who sounds like Ira Glass somehow had a child with NPR, then raised it in a box, feeding it only the New York Times for 50 years.[1] Anyway, Chris doesn’t talk a lot because Mark just can’t stop spitting the truth. I only really disagree with Blyth about Biden’s economic accomplishments but otherwise the guy was on absolute fire. Highly recommended. I have, as usual, transcribed the bits I found to be especially good, which is, like, most of it.

Blyth is Back by Radio Open Source (YouTube)

At about 5:00, Blyth answers a silly question about how Trump’s corruption will be significantly different.

“Blyth: I would say that it’s just more public, to be perfectly honest, Chris. I mean, we think about the revolving door that’s been going on forever between the Obama administration and Goldman Sachs. We think about the tech companies rotating in and out of the Obama administration. Things changed slightly under Biden but, you know, basically we’ve had corporations and business and government in bed together for as long as I can possibly remember. In terms of the oligarchic point, yeah, I think what you’ve got now is a bigger scale, and it’s more brazen, and it’s more open, and the characters are different. Funding by Thiel, and your public face is Musk, etc. etc.

“You’ve got the sort of right-wing lurch of Silicon Valley on this. But the Obama unofficial cabinet was Eric Schmidt from Google. I mean, they’re just reshuffling the pack. There’ve just been more brazen about it. Are they going to be brazen in terms of corporate double-dealing? You don’t even need to do that. It’s not as if Musk needs to go and get the contracts and stuff like that. The market itself is pricing it in. SpaceX is up 30% because of all the shenanigans that he’s done. That’s the market just crediting the share price. He doesn’t even need to do anything corrupt—that even looks like it [corruption]. So I think all we’ve done is pulled the scab off of what America really is, which is basically a kind of corporate oligarchy with a democracy with tax purposes.”

The interviewer’s response is mind-bogglingly ignorant. He’s more used to people being ideologically driven, but—and here he says in astonishment—these people seem to be driven by money. Welcome to the party, pal.

At 13:43, a long segment about crypto schemes.

“Blyth: So, there’s a core of crypto, which, you know, in a sense, makes sense, which is essentially—you want to have some kind of assets in your portfolio that other people find interesting and are willing to buy, even if they have no inherent value. We have that already; it’s called gold, right? So, think of this as a form of gold. You don’t want to just be stuck with equities. You don’t want to be stuck with bonds. You don’t want to be stuck with gold. If all these people out there think this is worth something, I’ll have a bit of it as well. That’s your simple diversification case for it.

“Are there other use-cases for it? Yeah, you keep hearing about blockchain and all that sort of stuff, but I’ll believe that when I see it. The most important thing is everybody who’s into this believes it, and because of that, the price goes up. Now, if you’ve got regulations on that, there’s going to be a ceiling on that price. If not, it’s going to go down. If you get regulations off of that, woohoo, the price goes right through [the roof], and those are basically funding the donations. They are the ones that are sitting with the biggest wallets that are going to make the biggest gains now. How does this leave it as global banking deregulation? It doesn’t. How does this challenge central banks? In the fantasies of libertarians perhaps, but in the real world, no. Because what happens is inevitably when you get this kind of exponential rise in these type of assets, you get yet another crash. So, there’s another one on the way. It’s just a question of when. Then you get a reset. And then they’ll do it all again.

Chris: You’re speaking of it just as an investment, though. Should I put my money into crypto or not? I’m still puzzled about what is the effect of the world paying its bills and making its exchanges in this crypto non-national currency.

“Blyth: So that’s slightly different. This is basically ideas like the BRICS currency; to have a digital currency that’s kind of like, you know, well, then you’re doing things like: you’re pooling the assets—the real assets: the bonds of various different governments—you’re putting them in a fund, maybe in Switzerland, and then you’re creating a synthetic bond or an instrument called a crypto-x and then people trade in crypto-x.

“That’s miles away from Bitcoin, cuz Bitcoin isn’t used as a currency. Nobody pays anything in Bitcoin. It just doesn’t happen. It’s purely a speculative asset. The stuff that they’re trying to do is actually closer to what central banks have—particularly in China, which is a central-bank digital currency—and you know what Chris? We already have that. Do you have an Apple phone? So you know Apple pay? Right. Well, basically it uses dollars but it’s a digital currency so if you just swapped out dollars for something else, we’ve already got this.

“It tells you that, like, don’t be seduced by the fact that people are getting very excited about this and they say really crazy things about politics are going to follow from this. They’ve been saying this since 2008. None of it’s happened, so far. All they’re doing is egging a new speculative frenzy that’s going to be 10x more than they paid in donations, dead easy.

“Chris: What is the effect on the global economy, balancing the global economy?

“Blyth: Zero. Zero. Let me tell you why. Remember in 2021–2022? When crypto went to 57 and then went down to 20? Well, you remember Sam Bankman Freid? What was the effect on the actual economy of that happening? It kind of has been a big zero, okay? So what you’ve got is a 10x Ponzi scheme. That’s it. Good luck with it lads. If you’re in it to win it and you can afford to take the losses, ride the volatility, you’ll make a bloody fortune. That’s all they want to do.”

At 26:41,

“Blyth: The core of the democratic party are people who think that things are generally okay, that there are some people that are disadvantaged—they tend not to [think of] the working classes, they tend to think about other categories of folks—but you know some people are disadvantaged. But, by and large, the distribution of wealth and incomes is probably quite fair. The idea that these people are going to do massive transformations in anything, along any category, is just a complete mistake.

“And that’s the actual core of the party, the people who run the elections, the people who have the money, and the people who sit in the Senate. You take somebody like AOC and you put AOC anywhere in the European Parliament, she’d be boring center-left. Here, she’s a radical leftist, right? I mean come on. And no, she’s not radical-leftist because of the Republicans, because of the party she sits with, who literally their only vision is ‘let’s manage things as they are, no matter how dysfunctional they are for how many millions of people because we at the top 20% are doing fine and let’s not screw this up. We like our 529 plans. We like our little tax advantages. We like the fact that we can send our kids to colleges that cost $100,000 a year. For everybody else’s problems, I don’t know, maybe we got a policy for that.‘”

At 35:08,

“Chris: What’s the first test going to be of the wisdom of the election of Donald Trump?

“Blyth: I don’t think it’s a case of wisdom, Chris. Again, I mean, the choice we made, yeah, but again, think about what we say when we say this, right? We have a responsibility to do better than that. Because what you’re doing when you’re doing that is you’re implicitly scolding the people for their choice, right? The wisdom of it, right? That’s what we are doing when we’re doing this and part of the reason that we’re getting these choices is because our class collectively, for the past 30 years, has been telling everyone, in a very preachy manner, what their choice should be. And they’ve went along with our choices and they found them to be rather deleterious to their own existence and now they’re no longer listening to us tell them what to do.”

At 36:22,

“Blyth: What really has begun to frustrate me so much about the American so-called left—which is not left at all—is this idea that of, like, we define the world. We see it as it really is. And if people disagree with us, and want something else, there’s something wrong with them. The whole point of democracy is that the people make a choice. We’re not allowed to veto it. We’re not allowed to sanitize it. We can critique it. We can argue about it. But, once it’s made, you deal with it. And we’re just behaving in the worst possible way. We’re not Democrats. We’re really not. We’re defending elite privilege.”

At 39:31

“Blyth: I’ve just come to the conclusion that the Democratic party is basically the party of the top 10% management class.[2] They don’t really want anything to change. They’re willing to give fringe benefits for marginal employees, but that’s pretty much it. And, you know, that’s really who they are.”