Lessons Learned from a Canadian Trucker, Rate Hikes, and More ft. Benjamin Dichtor - FED 86

In this episode of the Fed Watch podcast, CK and I are joined by Benjamin Dicktor. He’s a trucker and bitcoiner who has been intimately involved in the Canadian peaceful protest earlier this year. We got an update on the donation status, the individuals’ legal status, and what bitcoin can do better to face similar attacks in the future. After that we roll into a Fed Watch update, talking about the Fed rate hike and increasingly aggressive and hawkish tone from Powell. Lastly, we cover the Russian sanctions from a different angle, but pointing out the growing clash between Wall Street and the Davos crowd. We ran out of time before getting to all the Fed Watch specific news, so stay tuned for a mid-week episode! Fed Watch is a podcast for people interested in central bank current events and how Bitcoin will integrate or replace aspects of the aging financial system. To understand how bitcoin will become global money, we must first understand what’s happening now. Canadian Trucker Debrief  After getting an update on the situation in Canada, the first question we ask Benjamin is how all of these financial attacks have affected Canadians’ trust in the financial system in general. His answer is very practical. He points out that the Bank of Canada has printed more as a percentage of GDP than the Federal Reserve, but from his point of view is that the vast majority of the public simply is ignorant of the monetary system and what is needed is more education. As people get more educated that is all the more bullish for bitcoin. Dichtor then lays out the mechanics behind these financial attacks. They happened on three levels, the municipal, provincial and federal. On the provincial level, the attorney generals went after the banks to freeze all proceeds of the fundraisers as illegal in some way. Then they went after people’s whole finances by freezing banking services. Benjamin says that it wasn’t enough to freeze the specific donations, they de-banked people in an attempt to starve them out. I follow this up with a question about what can the bitcoin space, with its open source ethos and entrepreneurial spirit do or build that would mitigate these types of attacks in the future. His answer is two fold, one is narrative and the other is integration. For the narrative, Benjamin thinks it’s important to market bitcoin uses instead of its technical capabilities. “People don’t know how their car works, but they still drive it.” Marketing bitcoin as a hedge against overzealous authorities as a way to protect your rights is more important than explaining why and how it’s better money. On the integration side, Benjamin leans toward the Bitcoin Beach model down in El Salvador. Getting fuller integration by packaging it with business opportunity. Fed Hikes Rates, What Next? Since this is a central bank oriented show, we next make a hard pivot into Fed news. First and foremost on that agenda is the Fed’s rate hike. Last week, the Fed raised its target Fed Funds Rate up from 0-0.25% to 0.25-0.50%, in the first hike since 2018. Along with the hike came more aggressively hawkish language about further hikes, even a 50 bps hike soon, and beginning Quantitative Tightening as early as May.