The West Will Transition to a Decentralized Financial System: Nayib Bukele

Nayib Bukele – the Bitcoin-bullish President of El Salvador – has predicted that the central banking model of today’s western economies will eventually give way to a more trustworthy, decentralized system. 

In an interview with Tucker Carlson that aired on Tuesday, Bukele criticized both the Federal Reserve and the media’s reaction to his country’s Bitcoin adoption. 

Need for a New Model

During the interview, Bukele argued that the Federal Reserve’s capacity to print money is a “moral crime,” as it devalues the currency and “robs” its citizens of their savings. 

“The concept of savings has been destroyed,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense to save money anymore… If you saved $50,000 [in the ’80s] then you have been robbed of 90% of your money [by] now.”

As of September, annual CPI inflation in the U.S. was running near 40-year highs at 8.2%. While the Federal Reserve has been tightening interest rates throughout the year to help reign in soaring prices, certain groups are already pressuring the central bank to reverse course before it triggers a global recession.

According to Bukele, people are now “waking up” to the harms of inflation, and will start to seek alternative systems to escape it. 

“If we go into there, in principle, you would think you would be safe from having your wealth taken away by a political decision,” he said. 

Though he expects the BRICS countries to start their own economic system, he does not think westerners will onboard it, due to Russia’s involvement. Rather, the west will seek alternatives that are more “independent,” and “uncensored”, while being “totally decentralized.”

Embracing the Bitcoin Brand

El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender last year – a cryptocurrency renowned for meeting the decentralized and uncensorable criteria that Bukele described. 

Bukele said that adopting Bitcoin ahead of other countries has brought El Salvador many second-order benefits. These include a near-doubled number of tourists, documentaries, private investment, and a “rebranding” from its prior reputation of being a crime-prone country. 

Certain parties aren’t fond of its embracement of Bitcoin, however – namely the World Bank, Federal Reserve, and International Monetary Fund. Legacy financial publications including Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes, and The Financial Times are also guilty of spreading “bad press, fake news, and FUD,” according to Bukele. 

The President said this used to bother him, but has since realized that their audience and influence are diminishing. 

“I thought they were important. Now I see that they aren’t,” he said. “Nobody’s watching them.”