Contrarians

“It’s just the business cycle”

❓ Maybe nothing is structurally broken?

Business cycles are real. Alden’s claim is that the monetary substrate biases toward claim growth, bailout asymmetry, and saver dilution across cycles. You can reject her normativity and still accept the mechanisms.

“Fiat with inflation targeting works”

❓ Didn’t Volcker/Greenspan/Bernanke prove manageable fiat?

Advanced-economy CPI can be stabilized for decades while asset inflation, debt stocks, and periphery crises worsen. Targeting consumer prices is not the same as sound long-term savings money. 2021–22 CPI break was a reminder that fiscal-monetary combos still matter.

“Cantillon is crank”

Addressed in §08: magnitude debated; crisis backstop channel stronger than continuous fine-tuning channel.

“Bitcoin is a speculative toy / energy crime / will be banned”

Speculation is large. Energy is real and economically bounded. Bans are partial and leaky; full global ban is a political extreme. None automatically restore gold-speed settlement or hard fiat.

“Banks are the solution, not the problem”

Banks are essential credit and payment firms. The critique targets monetary base politics + soft unit + too-big-to-fail selection, not the existence of maturity transformation in all forms.

Boundary of the book

Alden is not a complete theory of productivity, demographics, or industrial policy. Money is necessary infrastructure; it is not the only broken system. AI-era labor and collateral shocks (user interest elsewhere) would layer on this substrate—they do not replace it.