The Age of Monetary Transformation, Feat. Bruno Macaes and Tomicah Tillemann

With CoinDesk’s Consensus just a week away, we decided that this week’s "Money Reimagined" episode should focus on the big macro and geopolitical themes that will be its hallmark.

This episode is sponsored by and The Sun Exchange.

Highlights of that landmark event include Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard’s perspective on the future of money, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio’s thesis on the end of the dollar’s dominance and a discussion/debate on the inflation outlook featuring former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and CoinDesk’s Noelle Acheson. Attendees will be asked to contemplate where the global economy is headed in an age of monetary transformation and what that means for the power structures of the world as we know it.

As a prelude, we invited Bruno Macaes, a Portuguese politician, author and influential thinker on geopolitical trends, and Tomicah Tillemann, the director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at the New America think tank, to give us their take on these matters.

Some of the scenarios we discussed are challenging. They paint a picture of mass disruption of the global economic order. But both our guests had a somewhat contrarian take to a common view, held by many observers of geopolitical trends, that forces of technological change and economic stress will conspire to bring to an end to the era of U.S. financial, economic and political hegemony.

In different ways, Macaes and Tillemann both argued the U.S., if it plays its cards right, could turn this current moment of economic uncertainty to its advantage and sustain leadership of the global economy. To do so, they said, it must embrace the principles of open systems and open society that lie at the heart of the crypto ethos – and which, in theory at least, are ingrained in what are widely considered “American values.”

Image credit: Eric Prouzet/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk