> A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies. I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?
When you go outside of the nice countries, local money becomes worthless. Nobody wants it, they'd much rather have dollars instead. Stablecoins for the first time offer a reasonable way for the global poor to store value in dollars, or in the form of any relatively stable currency. Obviously this comes with all kinds of issues, but it's still better than the original situation where "savings" simply didn't exist exce…
The global poor already had ways to store value in dollars. They could simply exchange whatever meager savings they had into... real dollars! And they have been doing that for decades. I don't know whether anyone in the west really believes in this bullshit of cryptocurrencies that give the global poor options.