In The Mr. X Interviews: World Views from a Fictional US Sovereign Creditor, Luke Gromen recounts a conversation he had with a fictional US sovereign creditor to illustrate the current state of the US economy, including why the US dollar is losing its power. and what it will mean for Americans and people around the world.
Gromen is the founder of FFTT, LLC (“Forest for Trees”), a research firm serving sophisticated individuals and institutions that aggregates a wide variety of macroeconomic, thematic and sector trends in an unconventional way to identify bottlenecks. investable developing economics for his clients His vision was to create a company that would address the opportunity he saw created by applying what clients and former colleagues consistently described as a “unique ability to put the big picture together” over a period of time. the one that saw an increase in “isolation”. of perspectives occurring on Wall Street and in corporate America.
Now, in The Mr. X Interviews, he provides an opportunity to get an unbiased world view on the state of the economy. Although Mr. X is fictitious, Gromen has clearly researched the reality of the world economy, citing numerous studies and articles by expert economists and politicians that support his points about the future of the US dollar. This first volume of The Mr. X Interviews (a sequel is in the works) explores the conversations of Gromen and Mr. X in 2016-2017.
Gromen doesn’t dance around his subject. Right from the start, Mr. X states: “The rate at which the USD-centric global monetary system is unraveling is accelerating dramatically.” He begins by looking at the petrodollar from 1973 to 2014, when the price of oil was only traded in USD globally, and why the world outside of the US tolerated it. Now that is no longer the case. Mr. X states, “What nation would not lend to Saudi Arabia or meet Saudi Arabia’s social needs in exchange for the right to price Saudi oil in its own currency? Do you think any nation would turn down such an offer?” He goes on to explain that Americans must not forget that it was oil that made the dollar the reserve currency of the global oil monopoly, not the other way around, and that the world can “deselect” it.
Mr. X then goes on to explain why the Fed’s policies were totally discredited after 2008 because “the policies they implemented in the United States in response to the crisis were not as severe as those implemented in Russia in the mid-2000s.” 1990s, in Southeast Asia in the late 1990s, or in Argentina in the early 2000s. It was, as the protester’s sign said, “Capitalism for the poor (emerging/creditor economies) and socialism for the the rich (the US economy)”. ‘ Attention; we knew we needed the system to change.”
Mr. X continues to address the currency war and its relationship to gold and oil. Ultimately, he predicts a crisis is coming and that crisis is needed to drive change that will be for the good of everyone in the world (except politicians and lobbyists in Washington). This crisis will be driven by five historically unique factors that no one alive has seen before: demographics, geology, debt, economic reality, and the repeated arming of the dollar. He explains: “Because throughout history, all sovereigns eventually default once debts get too high. Always. They can default nominally or they can default in real terms (that is, through inflation), but always they default. There is no sovereign who has never defaulted.” He goes on to clarify that even the United States has failed and gives examples.
To be sure, the United States is already in serious economic trouble, and Gromen claims that American residents of “flyover country” die prematurely from drug and alcohol abuse and commit suicide out of economic despair. The solutions, however, exist. Economists fear that President Trump will devalue the US currency, but Mr. X goes on to explain that “it was only when FDR, Winston Churchill and other political leaders of the day stopped listening to the orthodox economists of the day and began to act on with their own means to devalue their currencies that the worst economics of the last global sovereign debt crisis (in the 1930s) began to recede”. He also clarifies that Roosevelt’s advisers were against his taking the United States off the gold standard, “but in the days after Roosevelt’s decision, when the dollar fell against gold, the stock market shot up 15%. The financial markets gave the measure an overwhelming vote of confidence.”
Ultimately, Gromen and Mr. X view the debt burden facing Americans as the number one threat facing the United States. They back this up by quoting Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that the greatest threat to US national security was not terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, or global warming, but rather the US federal debt. the US. Ultimately, Gromen argues that the only way to solve this problem is for the USD to devalue.
Much more could be said about The Mr. X Interviews, but I’ll leave it to readers to discover all the fine points of the plot. I will simply say that Gromen has written a meticulously researched and well-argued book that is understandable, a bit shocking, and very educational. Not all readers may agree with this, but regardless, it is up to all Americans to understand our nation’s financial situation and urge our representatives to resolve it before we find ourselves in a major financial crisis.