Antonio Navalón
Humanity is exhausted. We thought we were prepared for everything, understanding that everything meant that someone would take care of us, grow old with good medical care and good health, play golf until we were seventy or live the miracle of Viagra. In short, we thought we were going to have a life that was what we deserved at the end of the day. Wars seemed to be a thing of the past and alien to the world. Order prevailed, and we also had political and economic authorities who knew and could control the evolution of the economy and the daily life of the people.
Who has not heard about the importance of the Gross Domestic Product? Who has not trembled at the repercussions of structural or cyclical inflation? Who has not understood that, as they used to say in the 20th century, an economist was someone who could explain very well why everything was going very badly? If nuclear bombs don’t kill us, bankruptcy will kill us. Don’t worry about what you owe. Don’t try to pay it. Don’t worry about the bank’s red accounts. In the world we live in; in the world of Vladimir Putin’s wars; in the world of Covid-19; in the world of Chinese power; and, in the world of the American crisis, no one, absolutely no one, can pay their debts.
Laugh at the 1929 crisis. Chuckle at the 2008 crisis. The crises we are in are unprecedented. For example, look at the accounts of what governments and empires owe. The United States owes 30 trillion dollars, which is equivalent to more than one hundred and thirty percent of its Gross Domestic Product. The European Union, the other color, the land of freedom, democracy, and hope, together with the Eurozone, owes about twenty-five trillion dollars. China owes almost nothing; instead, it is owed to them. The same goes for India and Russia. In other words, while everything that is happening to us – which is a lot – is happening to us, the macro-accounts, the value of the dollar, the value of our houses, the cost of everything are in crisis and are reduced to nothing.
Why is this exploding on us now? First, because – it is written in history – the greater the severity of the adversity and the deeper the precipice ahead, the more human beings simply close their eyes and avoid seeing the brutality of what can happen to them. And that is always a guarantee that it will eventually occur. As things stand, one could say that the world is bankrupt, or at least the part of the world that consumes the most spends the most and possesses the most is bankrupt. And the others, the newcomers, those who are inaugurating a per capita income of ten thousand dollars, as is the case of the Chinese, owe little and are owed a lot. Although today – despite their progress in their domestic market – their economic security depends on an integrated world and our buying from them what they have to offer.
The free world, the world we know and which is currently suffering from a leadership crisis, has approximately nine hundred and fifty million people. The other world, the one that looks set to inherit the earth we have today, has more than a third of the world’s population. The problem is that we, the rich, the leaders, the heirs to power, are broke. The first obligation of today’s rulers is to prevent currencies linked to the International Monetary System from continuing to maintain their value. However, reality shows a scenario in which everything has lost its value. We have simply lost what we had, and we are in conditions that prevent us from fulfilling our obligations. There seems to be only one solution, and I confess that – except for the basics – I know very little about the crypto world.
The industrial revolution brought one currency: the sterling pound. Gold was accompanied by another supremacy: the dollar. The revolution and the power of the 21st century is technology, and it is expected that its currency, crypto, ends up being one of the possible keys to solving different problems. One of the functions for which cryptos were created was to try to technically avoid the bankruptcy we have. Beyond what crypto mining entails, the energy used, and how the value of crypto is capitalized, no one has an exact idea of how the system works. What does seem clear are two things; first, if it is a currency referring to the triumph of technology, that is the only thing that would make sense to a world that does not quite understand what is happening.
The past economy sold things: airplanes, cars, screws, food, among others. Nowadays, we have replaced screws by love or by transporters of things. Today’s economy, the one that rules, sells gadgets – in the form of the telephone – in which people deposit their entire lives and also managed to sell love in a way that allowed them to become one of the foremost economic leaders in the world as is Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg.
At some point, we have to start sorting and ask ourselves why the founders of Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, among a few other leading companies of the 21st century, dominate the world. We will have to give a correspondence between economic power and material power. And that can only be when part of the result of its birth, which is the creation of cryptocurrencies, reaches the dimension that it has today and that it seems that it is going to have at great speed in the world. Moreover, crypto offers a significant advantage: there is no way to put a valuation on it.
For many years now, since the end of the 20th century, the economy – like modern politics – has been a perception problem. And more than being bankrupt, which we already know, the problem is that bankruptcy cannot be confessed or externalized. Perhaps that is why a possible solution is to assimilate the cryptocurrency with a valuation that can absorb and convert the red numbers of the macro numbers into black numbers.
Beyond gaining or losing a lot, raise a hand who can establish an identifiable and recognizable value to cryptocurrencies. There is not one. Moreover, cryptocurrencies have a huge advantage which is that – beyond the fact that week after week, the dirty money is gradually washed through the world’s financial institutions – we could purify them all at once and give them a legal circulation, despite their origin being a result of sin.
Without an adjustment and a conversion that equalizes, on the one hand, the distribution and popularization of crypto and at the same time absorbs and acts as a clearinghouse with the ruin that we are in dollars, in euros, or any other currency, there is no salvation. If we also add to that a crazy inflation and the absence of models that allow a synchronized growth of the economies, we are destined to be eaten by the majority but eaten in misery and failure. The non-ruin of the world is something that should interest everyone, and in that, everyone includes Putin and China. This is something that should concern you and me since, in the end, we are just a number. And what comes from this disgrace is the complete liquidation of our world. So hopefully, crypto will save us.
