🪖 Lessons from World War II

On today’s episode of Supply Shock, recorded at Korea’s Origin Summit, Pete Rizzo sat down with BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom CIO Arthur Hayes to get his take on why fiat is doomed, the end of central bank independence and how political elites will continue to preserve capital structure over fairness. 

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Hayes believes the US is heading straight for yield curve control — basically printing loads of money to fund government spending while capping interest rates, similar to what happened during World War II. 

"Politicians aren't very imaginative. If it worked during World War II, why can't it work now?" he said. Hayes’ view is that the Fed is no longer truly independent and this shift will debase fiat currencies even more. 

Hayes is still ultra-bullish on bitcoin, seeing it as the best-performing asset in the face of money printing — even if it’s not “ripping” right now. On the crypto side, Hayes is highly bullish on DeFi and stablecoins, noting how stablecoins are becoming a tool of US dollar dominance globally. He thinks most new stablecoin projects are worthless unless they have strong distribution (like big platforms or exchanges), and the real opportunity lies in infrastructure to support small businesses using them. 

Hayes is also watching the DEX space closely, noting that platforms like Hyperliquid sparked a race to zero fees, but only one or two will survive and eventually dominate. "At the end of the day, the trader wants the cheapest price. It's a perception issue — they think they're trading for free, even when they’re not.”

And will the robots save us? Hayes is skeptical that AI-driven productivity will protect us from economic collapse. It’ll likely just fuel more inequality unless governments step in, which he doubts they’ll do in any meaningful way. 

"It's going to be very difficult for the government to politically expropriate assets from those who are in power already to allow everyone to live this utopian lifestyle because of AI,” he told Rizzo.

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

This newsletter was created with assistance from AI tooling.