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Why is Peter Thiel Moving to Argentina?
Some Irresponsible Speculation
Billionaire Investor and ideologue Peter Thiel has publicly announced that he is moving to Argentina. Among a grab bag of explanations that included nuclear war and AI risk, along with the obvious implications of the California wealth tax on his residency, Thiel reportedly was concerned about the political direction of the United States. Given Thiel's ties to much of the American political right, what does this tell us? What should our Bayesian update be from this information?
Some possibilities:
-- Get the obvious out of the way: Nothing ever happens. This is a non-event, Thiel is moving for publicity or tax reasons, and the announcements are just him engaging in punditry.
-- Alternatively, none of this may indicate anything because Thiel himself might be stupid/mistaken/prejudiced/insane.
-- Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power. This seems like a sub implication of the action even if he doesn't believe it, because his very act of fleeing and blaming the political climate will tend to reinforce the idea that MAGA has failed and increase the odds of it failing.
-- Alternatively, Thiel thinks MAGA will be triumphant, but Thiel is on the outs with The Donald, and he is concerned about being targeted after Trump turns on him. Moving to Argentina is an attempt to hedge risk.
-- Thiel is a true believer in the Argentine project, and thinks Millei-ism will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.
It feels like something big for Thiel, who is intelligent and well informed if perhaps nuts, to make this move and publicly announce it is motivated by the state of the union.
Argentina is also on the short list of countries that will probably be 'fine' in the event of de-globalization. So establishing an existing presence there is good as a hedge even if you generally expect things to be fine.
However, I am more concerned with how much of his time he actually shifts to spending in Argentina vs. merely relocating. Theil has been mucking with U.S. politics for a while and as ever, I want our elites to have skin in the game.
If he actually believes things are going to turn sour and he pre-emptively situates himself as far from the fallout as he can feasibly get, and stays out, I would take that as a very bad sign.
Note, I don't judge the guy if he's trying to keep his kids safer or whatever, but he should be willing to face down the consequences of his political machinations along with the rest of us.
Considering he easily has the resources to make this move more surreptitiously if he wishes, I would say that him making it so public belies it being a move motivated by fear.
This would be my guess. I’m very concerned that the Petrodollar is going away, and hyperinflation will result as we can no longer maintain our standard of living and certainly not our generous welfare and social programs. This probably means that civil unrest will happen. The people who suddenly don’t get their welfare benefits for months are not going to give up peacefully, especially if prices are also inflating by double digits.
As far as our dominant status as the world reserve, there are still good reasons to think that won’t be going away for a while.
This exact same narrative could’ve been told in 2003, 2009, 2015 and it’ll be written again in the future. Everyone wants to displace the dollar. Russia is economically irrelevant; it’s smaller than both Canada and (almost) Brazil. The problem with China is they can't fully float the RMB and allow unfettered international capital flows. There’s a ‘ton’ of debate as to whether or not the Chinese banking system can even survive without direct government support. If the RMB were to become the global reserve currency, the Chinese would need to first widely open their economy and secondly, export their financial sector out into the world. That’s not happening in the next 30 years (if it ever happens). The Japanese wanted to 'yenify' the world in the 1980s and 1990s, how'd that work out?
The Euro was created in large part to compete with the USD, but the ECB has spent the last 25 years tripping over its own feet. The Eurozone itself has massive internal structural issues it needs to address before they are close to being able to look outwards. And no, don't even start on crypto.
The USD is the primary currency due to massive global structural reasons that aren't changing in the next several decades. China is the only likely candidate in the near future, but it can't open itself up without 'Japan-ing' itself.
It seems more likely that the Dollar's reserve status would be displaced by a commodity rather than any specific country's currency.
In unrelated news, "Gold has overtaken U.S. Treasuries as the World's Top Reserve Asset"
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