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In this episode of Bitcoin Magazine’s “Fed Watch'' podcast, Christian Keroles and I sat down with Sam Rule for the first time. Rule is a new addition to the Bitcoin Magazine team, researching and writing on its Deep Dive letters and series. His areas of interest are macro and long-term debt cycles so, we tackled topics like monetary versus fiscal policy, Federal Reserve tapering, inflation versus deflation, consumer price index (CPI), labor market and bond markets.
Rule provided a great slide deck of charts that we focused on for much of the discussion, you can find those here[8] or at the link below, or watch along on YouTube. If the link doesn’t appear where you’re reading these notes, please find this episode’s post on BitcoinMagazine.com.
Monetary Vs. Fiscal Policy
Our discussion started with a recap of Ray Dalio’s long-term debt cycle, and Rule applied it to our current situation. He pointed to the phases of the cycle, placing us currently in an inflationary impulse before a terminal deflationary decline. He is well versed in all of the macro statistics and metrics which show the economy is being herded into a period of high inflation.
Rule mentioned a famous speech[9] by Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Fed, made in 2015, in which he called for fiscal policy to be used when monetary policy is up against the zero lower bound (ZLB). We do see the U.S. government spending much more money in an attempt to bolster the effect of monetary policy. I asked him if he thinks this coordination is explicit or unplanned, to which he answered
