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On The Brink with Castle Island


Mar 14, 2022

Former FT Alphaville Editor and founder of The Blind Spot, Izabella Kaminska joins the show. In this episode: 

  • Izabella’s pre-FT career
  • Izabella’s Polish ancestry and how that informed her monetary worldview
  • Why Izabella was a skeptic about Bitcoin – and why she revisited her stance
  • Izabella’s interest in anacyclosis and cyclicality in political systems
  • Jeremy Bentham and his views on utilitarianism
  • Consequentialism and its influence on contemporary elite ideology
  • What Covid-19 policies revealed about freedoms in the West
  • The flaws inherent in bureaucracy
  • Izabella’s changing view on the politicization of finance
  • The failure of AML/KYC rules in the West
  • Reflections on the FT’s Wirecard story
  • Izabella’s view on stablecoins and why she first compared them to Eurodollars
  • Why stablecoins are mini central banks
  • The paradoxes of Web3 and DeFi and the veil of decentralization
  • Do crypto systems end up inherently recentralizing
  • Why Central Banking is so obscure and difficult to penetrate
  • Bitcoin narratives in the context of Bitcoin’s apparent failure to be a real rates hedge
  • Is gold genuinely a good inflation hedge?
  • Are there Bitcoiners Izy pays attention to?
  • Izabella’s thoughts on Bitcoin ESG questions
  • Is Bitcoin security worth paying for?
  • Why Izabella is leaving the FT and starting the Blind Spot

Learn about The Blind Spot and follow Izabella on twitter.

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