Most Americans have serious challenges when it comes to critiquing or, worse, understanding their country and its role in the world. For me, in many ways, Mr. Hayes' very substantive yet tendentious analysis of the direction of the dollar and the USA provides a classic example of many of these.
But first, let’s get out of the way the giant elephant in the room: Arthur Hayes was charged with running a crypto exchange that enabled money-laundering and pleaded guilty. I feel for him and the circumstance he found himself in. I can even imagine that he was made an example of. Sadly, this happens and that he was swept up in a rapidly changing legal environment is just bad luck. I might even feel as he does if it were me.
Nevertheless, it's troubling to see HackerNoon publish a story that uses the Pepe the Frog image which is primarily associated with anti-semitism and secondarily racism. As a HackerNoon shareholder and in the spirit of what I critique as a flaw (free speech) I would expect HackerNoon to accept this for publication.
As much as I think the foregoing is important for any of his readers to know, I don’t actually believe his entire motivation to write this article for HackerNoon was this. Lots of people in the crypto space believe in or devotedly hope that the USA in some fashion crashes and burns.
The reason for this is not always apparent to folks who’ve not spent a lot of time in the space, but going back to the early ZeroHedge days (for those who know) in 2009 and the creation of BitCoin, it has been a near obsession to prognosticate not just the demise of the USA’s central role in the world’s economy, but the whole of the western liberal democratic order.
Important in this context is the fact that ZeroHedge has an extensive history of malfeasance and a very close association with Russian disinformation efforts. There is substantial documentation of this beyond Wikipedia, but it’s a fine place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge
Mr. Hayes and I come from work worlds where ZeroHedge arose and its early high-profile cheering on of the Greek exit from the Eurozone. I was at Merrill-Lynch running Rates and Credit technology and he worked at DeutscheBank and Citigroup as a trader. I also had worked earlier at an equity strategy hedge fund. I was pointed to ZeroHedge by traders at both the fund and Merrill. I was appalled almost from the start. Now the background is out of the way, on to my profile of Mr. Hayes and the “American Wrong Way”.
Americans more than any other citizens of western liberal democracies are raised on belief systems, starting most of all with religion and, very commonly, being raised in religious families.
However, even those who are not religious are fed a steady diet of ideologies/non-empirical belief systems. These start with the “American religion”: freedom, free speech and the holy writ of the U.S. Constitution.
All of these are above empirical analysis or any reasonable or obvious critique. Even the most empirical of our public actors and even many intellectuals believe in and propagate these things without question. There is much of this that is also frequently fellowship-signaling and simple unquestioned shared belief. However, almost as often these tokens of belief are embraced out of cynical ulterior motives such as politicians of all stripes must.
Other Western liberal democracies have their flaws, too, that largely derive from their nationalistic histories. However, these flaws never inhibit the central operative infrastructure of empirical social and political agreement: France, Italy, or Germany’s right wing may be racist or “anti-American”, but internal policy regarding the social state is as sacrosanct as it is with the left. And this flows from the fundamental outlook that ideology plays no role in what political parties believe when it comes to “capitalism” and “socialism” and what the primary purpose of the state is: make life better for its citizens.
This is a fundamental stance that completely disallows anything remotely “Libertarian” or hyper-capitalist, out of which cryptocurrency arose. And, most of all, creates a thought space in the social and political realm that demands an empirical mindset.
For this reason, no European (except for a tiny extreme fringe) would think of getting rid of the Euro and wish for or prognosticate avidly for its demise.
So, now back to Mr. Hayes. Much of what he writes in his article has a factual basis. The U.S.A. is mightily over-leveraged, it has the worst income inequality of all other Western liberal democracies. It’s at the bottom of many social and economic performance metrics (that REALLY matter) of the OECD.
However, seeing all this, Mr. Hayes only sees the monetary/budgetary/ financial/trade problems and appears to lack an understanding or concern for what really underlies these: libertarian economics, most of all. And this takes us right back to ZeroHedge, Grexit, Brexit, and who is really behind these, as is well-documented: those hostile to the liberal democratic project. This includes a very large number of institutions both in the USA and, of course, in the non-democratic world at large, Russia and China first and foremost.
I don’t know the circumstances or motives behind Mr. Hayes exiting what should have been a very lucrative and rewarding career. I don’t know if he left willingly and what took him and his substantial talents into the crypto world.
What I do know is that he is aggrieved and very aggrieved at the country and system that produced him. And like so many Americans whose life and work trajectories took a downturn from what looked like a promising life, his grievances aim at the political and social system that took him where he’s landed.
And I sympathize. But I also see in it more a vehement rejection of a belief system than anything approaching a reasonable perspective. So my hat is off to Mr. Hayes in much of his description of the state of the U.S. dollar's role and possible route to disaster. But I feel sad that the tenor and degree to which he prognosticates the worst may be too colored by his unfortunate circumstances.
So much talent should not be wasted.