english – David Barreto

Four scenarios for the US economy: damnation, inflation, reinvention or Japan

8 January, 20219 January, 2021 David Barreto2 Comments

Recently I’ve decided to rebalance my investment portfolio but to do it effectively I had to ask myself a hard question: What’s likely to happen in the US economy in 2021 and beyond? This analysis led me to four scenarios with different probabilities of happening: damnation, inflation, reinvention and Japan. The scenario that seems more likely will drive the distribution of my portfolio between risky / high growth assets and safer / low growth ones.

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Bitcoin explained without complicated terms

3 January, 20212 February, 2021 David BarretoLeave a comment

When I was starting my journey to understand this technology I found the literature on the subject dry and the information available online often misleading. I decided to write a simple story to explain Bitcoin’s fundamentals in technology and economics without getting into the weeds. The story itself is free of any technical jargon and I hope it’s accessible to everyone, even if the reader doesn’t have a background in technology. I did add some side notes as the story progressed to connect the dots between the analogy and real life, just in case the reader feels inclined to get deeper into a particular subject.

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Where did the inflation go?

29 December, 202012 January, 2021 David Barreto2 Comments

In a previous article I analyzed how the FED’s monetary policy compared to Bitcoin’s. An important takeaway from the article is that, since the beginning of the pandemic, the FED has printed more than 3 trillion dollars, increasing the m0 money supply by 90%. At the same time, and according to the Congressional Budget Office (source), the US economy (GDP) is expected to contract by 5.6% by the end of 2020. In a scenario where the amount of money entering the economy increases drastically but the economy contracts, why aren’t we seeing an increase in the inflation rate?

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Bitcoin’s vs FED’s Monetary Policy

28 December, 2020 David Barreto6 Comments

In the book “The Bitcoin Standard” written by Saifedean Ammous in 2018, the author claims that Bitcoin is a better store of value than the US dollar because it’s a “harder” currency. The corollary of this claim is that, if you want to save money for the future, you better use a hard currency that’s most likely to preserve (or even increase) its purchasing power over time. According to the author a simple way to analyze the “hardness” of a currency is to calculate its “stock to flow ratio”.

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