Hidden Repression, Human Rights & Bitcoin with Alex Gladstein

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, institutions created to help countries survive financial crises and develop into prosperous nations. But what's the reality? Are the bank and the fund fulfilling those roles? Alex Gladstein argues that their track record shows the opposite. And the reality is, in fact, exploitation sold as development. If that's the case, could Bitcoin be the solution? Let's find out.

1:26So joining us now on Open Book is Alex Gladstein. He's the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He also is an author of a book, which I thought was an amazing book, because it's a truth-telling book, Alex. It's the reason why I liked it so much. The book is called Hidden Repression, How the IMF and the World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development. Well, first of all, welcome to the show. And before we get started on the book, I think it's important for our audience to have you tell us a little bit about your background, sir. Give us some context, how you grew up and how you got raised, where you went to school.

2:03And then we can talk about the book, because I think all of this stuff is influenced by each other. Absolutely. Well, first of all, Anthony, thank you for having me on. I'm someone who grew up in the United States, outside of New York City. I was in 10th grade when 9-11 happened. I lived in a commuter town. Some people didn't come back, and that left a big impression on me. What town was that, if you don't mind me asking? I grew up in Port Washington. I now live in Manhattan. Yeah. So I grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut and between Fairfield and Wilton. So, you know, an hour outside of Grand Central.

2:38That was big impact on me. And then the Iraq war was a really interesting thing for me to grapple with as a young person, you know, trying to hear both sides of the argument, ultimately watching us go to war. I went to university up in Boston at Tufts University, and I decided to focus on that part of the world, Middle Eastern studies, international relations, because I was trying to figure out why we went to war. You know, I had a chance to live in London for a year and go to a place called the School of Oriental and African Studies, which was very, very different. It was really interesting. I had a class where a third of the class could recite the Quran from memory, and that's just not something you can get at Tufts.

3:18So, that was kind of interesting. And I think it gave me some different perspectives and different insights. I later went on to work at the Human Rights Foundation. I joined when it was kind of a startup in 2007. I've been there ever since doing all kinds of different programs around the world to help people who live under authoritarian regimes. And I guess you could say my career has been trying to figure out how to aid and assist people who live under dictatorships. But that early experience of kind of the Iraq war era always kind of loomed in my mind. And I'm always wondering, you know, are we helping to support some of these dictators?

3:54Why are we doing that? Obviously, that's something that I think most Americans know we did during the Cold War. But I think some people are like, oh, that era is over. And now we're just kind of doing diplomacy. But I kept seeing recurring instances of us supporting different dictators for different reasons. And that's kind of what led me to look more closely into the economic side of things and ultimately into the IMF and World Bank. So I have a view. I want to test it out on you. And the reason why I loved your books, So much is that your book is a truth telling book. The problem in our society though, is we get to eighth grade social studies and we learn about America and we learn about the liberation of the slaves by Lincoln.

4:35Of course, George Washington never told a lie. We talk about manifest destiny, but we leave out the fact that we killed 32 million Mexicans in the great Mexican-American war. It's a great book about that called The Wicked War. That war was so bad that Ulysses S. Grant said in his biography, it's the good Lord gave us retribution by causing the civil war as a result of that massacre that took place. But you mentioned Tufts. We both went there. There's a woman by the name of Jill Lepore that went to Tufts. She wrote a book called These Truths, and she writes about the reality of America. Now, I love the country.

5:11It's very obvious from your writings that you love the country, but we both recognize that it's an imperfect country. And I think the clash that's going on right now is some of us stopped our education in the eighth, ninth, or 10th grade. We have this hagiographic view of America. And the other people have less than a hagiographic view. And now the great culture war is about this. It's about, hey, stop picking on America. I learned that Lincoln freed the slaves and George Washington never told a lie. And you're telling me otherwise, I don't like it. Your book is eye-opening in so many different ways.

5:44And I want to start there, sir. Okay. Give us the eye opener about the World Bank. Give us the eye opener about the propping of dictators in the last 80 years since the end of the second world war. Give us the U.S. foreign policy theories. We're going to get into Bitcoin, of course, as well, but I want you to explain this to people the way you do in the book. Sure. And look, I've dedicated my career, my life to promoting individual rights. I think that the DNA of America is absolutely admirable, inspiring. I'm very happy to be an American for many reasons. But as you say, I think a lot of people's kind of insights sort of stop there.

6:20What I've uncovered with the book and my research is basically that if you look around at our civilization and all the great things America has and everything that we've been able to build, the society we've been able to build. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's very impressive, obviously, especially given history. I mean, it seems like in the last hundred years, we've made so many leaps and bounds in so many ways. But what I've come to grips with is that the United States, Europe, Japan, all these advanced economies have built themselves up, not entirely by their own bootstraps. Okay. So yes, it's because of these values that I think you and I share that we love about America, free speech, property rights, open capital markets, an independent judiciary, an ability to criticize the government, checks and balances on the executive.

7:10These are all reasons why Western civilization has done very well. There's no question. And unfortunately, a lot of critics of America descend into this abyss of basically simping for dictators. And I hate to see that. That's not the answer. So, if you don't like what America is doing, the answer is not to go support Putin or Xi Jinping or any of that stuff. I see that far too often, especially among people who have similar views as mine in this book. So I hope to like basically differentiate myself here. But what you end up realizing is that a lot of our success has come at the cost of other people's success, unfortunately.

7:44And this whole global economic order that we built starting at the end of World War II at a hotel in New Hampshire at Bretton Woods has created a lot of haves and have nots. And from the very beginning, you know, America got its way, right? The Europeans wanted the world to run on something called a Bancor, which would be an international managed currency. But America had the largest gold position and we didn't get torn up by World War I and World War II domestically. We had an incredibly powerful and resilient and unbroken manufacturing base. We had the ability to earn a lot and we attracted a lot of gold from the rest of the world.

8:24So we had this massive gold position and we basically said, no, no, no, we're going to do what we want to do. So we forced through the dollar standard, which was essentially how the world worked from 44, more or less to 71. And in the dollar standard, we had two key institutions. One was the IMF, one was the World Bank. The IMF is basically the lender of last resort for the world economy. And the World Bank is the world's largest development bank to this day. To give you an idea of their scope, the IMF has about a trillion dollar budget and the World Bank has loans on its books of through excess of 300 billion.

8:58So yes, there's other major powers here. Let me stop you for one second, because I think it's important for the listeners. It was designed, let's give the prima facie design of the World Bank, and then let's give what actually happened. Yeah. So again, these things are massive institutions. They have fallen out of the discussion in the last two decades. I think there was a lot of debate about the World Bank and IMF in the 90s, to be fair, but not recently. I just wanted to underline to the listener that these are these are major, major institutions. And yes, China has its own and Europe has its own, but they remain the two largest institutions of their kind.

9:30Now, what they were set up to do was to rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II. These were noble intentions. They were set up to make sure that if Britain, for example, got in a trade crisis where it could no longer afford imports, that someone would come and help them until they could get back on their feet. That's what the IMF was built for, was basically to basically bail out countries when they could no longer afford imports because the world didn't want to go back to the 1930s where you had all these crises of trade breaking down. The designers of the new system did not ever want the spice to stop flowing.

10:01They wanted trade to keep going no matter what. The World Bank was meant to provide investment for infrastructure in places where private capital didn't want to invest. Again, very noble, noble deeds and intentions. And for the most part, for the first few decades after their creation. That's what they did. I mean, they helped Europe and Japan get back on their feet. But what happened was towards the end of the 60s, when the major industrial powers had basically resumed their progress and had recovered from the World War II devastation, they pivoted. And they basically pivoted to making loans to poorer countries.

10:38And there's a lot of debate about how do we call these countries? Do we call them third world emerging markets developing countries? I would prefer to call them the global majority because that's where the most people live and the most resources are. And we're really talking about the seven or so billion people who live outside of the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain, et cetera, et cetera. So you have what's known as the golden billion, which is the billion people or so that live in countries that have liberal democracies and property rights and a good currency, a currency good enough that other central banks want to save in it.

11:11And then you have everybody else. And that's who I'm talking about here. So what ends up happening is the Western banking system, largely through the IMF and World Bank, but through other partners as well, starts to lend out enormous sums of money at high interest rates to a lot of these poorer countries in the 70s and 80s. One of the lead engineers was Robert McNamara, who was the head of the World Bank. Obviously, he came from a military defense background, and he was one of the most important people in expanding what these institutions would do. And what you have to start to understand is that these institutions weren't there to help.

11:43And that's the big realization that I came to through my research. They poster a giant image over their headquarters in D.C. The institutions share a big headquarters. It says end poverty. It's there frequently. They have it once in a while. And you stare at it and you're like, oh, OK, these institutions are here to help other people. But that's not true. They're here to help us. and to be very brief there's three things that these institutions do first of all they make a lot of money for the creditor countries basically when the imf world bank were set up countries joined the imf to get access to the world bank and they had to kind of pay a pay a membership fee and at the time of course they had to pay it a lot of it in gold until the 70s so the imf is still the world's third largest gold holder which i think might surprise some people they haven't sold most of it.

12:31They still hold it, which is interesting to reflect on. But anyway, these countries come in, they join, they deposit into this capital pool. And the idea is, again, when a country has trouble, it can borrow from that capital pool. But what's really happening is that the countries closest to the capital creation can basically borrow cheaply or create money, deposit it, and then make money off high interest rate loans to poorer countries. So for many decades, the average loan from the IMF was, we're talking seven, eight, 9%. World Bank loans also were high interest rate. These loans would get usually restructured because usually the debtor nation could not pay back the loan by the time the loan was up.

13:09So they would restructure it and maybe even have even higher interest rates, but they would give another 10 years. And this goes on and on and on. But the point is that every year, these institutions generate billions of dollars of interest revenue for Western countries. That's number one. And that's not understood well. People think of these institutions as altruistic. They're not. They're business operations. The second thing is political. So when a country takes a loan from the IMF World Bank, it's not just a traditional business loan. It comes with political conditions. So you have to do X, Y, Z.

13:39What this usually is, is like things such as currency devaluation, higher taxes, getting rid of any subsidies on food or health care, education or fuel, shrinking the banking sector. So basically what we're trying to do here is we're trying to reduce government spending and reduce labor costs and wages so that we get cheaper exports from that country. That's the goal of an IMF structural adjustment. Now, the people in DC will say, yes, it's so that that country can make more money. But what's actually happening to the population is austerity. And you see this in every country that takes an IMF or World Bank loan.

14:17Currently, Egypt's a good example. The dictator in Egypt, Sisi is borrowing several billion dollars, right? And in order to do so, he had to do currency devaluation. So, what that means is over the last few years, Egyptians are now only able to afford about a third of the bread that they were able to afford a few years ago. So, they're getting impoverished. So, that's important to note is that these loans come with structural adjustment policy, which again, the goal is to make their stuff cheaper for us to buy and it's to make their labor cheaper. And this is like a historical pattern. If you go back to the Great Depression, you know, a lot of people will say, well, that was because we left the gold standard too early, or we left it too soon.

15:00There's a huge debate. There's another theory that I find very interesting. And that's very simply that at that time, the world power was the British Empire. And the British Empire started to have problems looting India. I mean, that's how the British got so rich in many ways was by looting India. And in the early part of the 20th century, that started to slow down that looting. And that makes sense that they would have a financial crisis as a result of being able to, you know, not get quite as much cheap and free stuff. Now, fast forward to the crisis in the 70s. What was that all about? Well, a lot of it was that we lost control over energy production.

15:32Western companies used to control energy production through the Seven Sisters. Then colonialism was considered no longer appropriate. So, these other countries in the Middle East decided to take control of energy and that was their choice. And they raised the price of energy by a lot. So we had huge inflation in the United States. And now we have this idea of globalization, which is really the ability of like American companies and the dollar to penetrate these societies around the world. That's now starting to break down. And then we're going to, we're having issues in the West. So history rhymes, right?

16:02So, so what happens over time is that like we find ways to subsidize our societies through cheap labor and stuff, goods, commodities, food, whatever, from these countries around the world. And then that reduces inflation here and it improves our economies at the expense of laborers in those countries. Eventually, that breaks down. So this is a cyclical thing that has been happening for a long time. The third thing that the IMF and World Bank do is they engineer economies to be different in terms of structure. So for example, a country like Bangladesh might originally have a lot of farmers who do cattle and rice where they grow these things and sell them locally and eat them themselves.

16:44Okay, fine. Poor country, but at least it's sovereign. What you have now is a lot of poor countries that are poor and not sovereign, meaning dependent. They have to buy the food and they're at the whim of the global food markets. The reason is because these poor countries cannot buy industrial equipment, fertilizer, energy, defense systems with their own fiat currencies. So, for example, if you're in Ghana and you have the CD, Boeing is not going to accept CDs for planes. Like, you know, Caterpillar is not going to accept CDs for industrial equipment. So what does Ghana do? If Ghana tries to print CDs to buy dollars, it goes into hyperinflation.

17:21Cannot do that. So what does Ghana have to do? Ghana has to trade with the United States or Europe to earn dollars so that it can buy important stuff. This is not what America has to do. America doesn't have to do that. We can just print money to buy whatever we want. And that's a huge privilege. So these poor countries don't have that. And what that means is that they're limited in terms of what they can sell to us by what we want, right? So what do we want? We don't want beef from Ghana. We want beef from America. Like we want to export beef. So we put tariffs in place and subsidies so that all these poorer countries, you know, can't really export food or focus on food.

17:54So what do we do? What do we have them make? Cocoa, palm oil, tea, coffee, things like that. Things that are essentially usually non-edible exports that we consume. And that's what they focus their economies on. So to recap what these lending institutions have done over the last 50, 60, 70 years is change the global majority of countries so that they're more dependent on us for food and energy. So that they don't really have manufacturing bases to speak of so much that they have very low wages, relatively speaking, so that we get cheap stuff from them. And so that we make a lot of money off this relationship.

18:35And the result of this is staggering. And I'll just leave it with two things. Number one, the flow of resources. The result of these policies is such that since the early 1980s, the flow of resources has gone from poor countries to rich countries. I think we're led to believe in traditional economic orthodoxy, what we read in foreign affairs, all these things, that rich countries are aiding poor countries and we're trying to help them out. And maybe it's imperfect and maybe there's corruption. But generally speaking, we're trying to help them. That's not the case. We're taking from them. And it's not just a couple hundred million dollars.

19:11It's to the tune of trillions of dollars a year. The second thing is the debt trap, which was noticeable a long time ago. But essentially, if you look at a country like Bangladesh, their external foreign debt was like$100 million in 1970. Today, it's$100 billion. And there's no way they're ever going to pay that back. That's not how the system is designed. Because what happens is whenever these countries face an issue where they maybe they can't pay back the loan, the creditors who are at the ultimate end, Western bankers, they sit around and they say, okay, well, should we take a write off on this?

19:40Should we like reduce our balance sheet? Or should we make another loan and grow our balance? balance sheet. Well, they want to do the latter. That's the incentive. So these countries that can't pay back their debt get fed with more debt and they get fed and fed and fed and the dictators are happy to take the money and the taxpayers have no choice and they get saddled with a impossible to pay debt trap. So you do just a beautiful job of explaining all of this. The government of El Salvador, who has operated for years under dollarization and everything that you're describing here is because the mismanagement or the lack of availability of funds to seed and generate a great country causes this cycle that you're describing.

20:21Okay. This sort of this like, you know, it's almost like if you used it as an individual, I don't have enough money. I go out to a loan shark. He's charging me exorbitant interest rates. I start selling everything around me to keep pace. And now I have nothing, you know, somebody like Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew figured out that he couldn't get on the dole like that. And he began the process of creating a human capital nation where he could start exporting services and importing things like water and creating a very successful city state, very successful country. But let's go to the governor of El Salvador.

20:56The gentleman down there has made a decision that he wants to de-dollarize. This is President Bucolet. A few years back, he says, I'm going to make Bitcoin legal tender. Do you think that was a good idea? Why did he do that? And what are your thoughts on Bitcoin? Yeah, look, I have some criticisms of Bukele's governing style. I don't like the fact that he basically imprisons a lot of people with new due process. I don't like the fact that he's apparently going to run again for president, which goes against the constitution. But I think the Bitcoin law was great. I think that a small country adding Bitcoin is legal tender makes a lot of sense.

21:31It's not exactly clear how much Bitcoin El Salvador owns or who owns it. Nothing's really that transparent. It's not exactly clear the impact it's had so far, but I think that was a visionary decision by that government. Look, they were able to do it because they were already dollarized, right? So it's not like they're giving up monetary sovereignty to add Bitcoin as a currency. But I think that every country in the world should have it, and I'll explain why. In general, the policies I've described are in a vacuum. I would support them in as much as I'm a classic liberal, I'm a free trade person.

22:00I think those are good, the values. The problem is with the double standards. So you have countries like Britain, which have all kinds of tariffs and subsidies supporting their agricultural sector. And there's, you know, going back to the 50s, when they were rebuilding, they protected their steel industries, they protected their car industries, they have given free healthcare to their people. So all kinds of centrally planned subsidies for all parts of the economy. And then they go to little Sri Lanka, and they say, you can't give free rice to your people anymore. Or they go to some country in Africa, and they say, you can't do public health care anymore.

22:30And that's devastating. Like a lot of people starve and die. So the problem in the system has been the double standards. And what this has led to is a lot of countries that are essentially like de-developing. What I mean by that is you have countries whose economic composition has become less industrial, like Brazil, for example, over the last 20, 30 years. They're becoming more and more just like basic exports of commodities. You know, the game has always been, all right, let's lend this country 100 million to build a mine and a railway and a port and let's get that stuff out of the ground as fast as possible without benefiting the local population.

23:02We'll take 80 % of the profits. You'll hire an American company to build the thing. And the taxpayers will be saddled, principal plus interest. That's what we call development and it's kind of tragic. And a lot of this has to do with the fiat currency system, right? So a lot of this is only possible because of the double standard of having all these different currencies. So the only reason CC can take this dollar loan from the IMF and then squeeze his people is because he has an Egyptian fiat currency that he can devalue. If Bitcoin becomes a bigger and bigger part of the global economic system, like I think it will over the next several decades, if it eventually becomes a currency that you can buy energy with, that you can buy machinery with, which I think it will, then all of a sudden, you know, we start to have a global alignment around an open, neutral, single currency.