Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US. * Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans. * Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not con…
Isn't this part of why crypto has been so successful — at least outside the U.S. where the fiat currency isn't as stable?
But crypto has also made US dollar stable coins popular, which are arguably better than holding some hyper inflating currency like the Argentinian Peso, but the holders of those stablecoins are still "taxed" when the US government/banks inflate the currency (and are worse off than US citizens who should at least benefit a small amount from whatever the printed money is spent on).
The holy grail is a new internet-native stable coin that keeps a relatively steady price but can't be easily inflated away by a small group of people (e.g. backed by a basket of assets), but so far most attempts to do that have failed. I bet eventually we'll have a popular one that works, though.