The Dollar, the Dopamine, and JD Vance
The Bulwark · C · trust 29/100
Jonathan V. Last August 20 Upgrade to listen 18 minutes 1,215 591 81 Before we start: Earlier this week Tim talked about a family currently being held in an American internment camp in Texas. Freddys Padilla Revilla, Edgarianny Cortez Gervis, and their 7-year-old daughter came to America from Venezuela legally. They went through the system, settled in Texas, and worked legally.
When they learned that Edgarianny was pregnant this summer, they decided to go back to Venezuela. They saw the writing on the wall. So they went through all the proper government channels to execute a “self-deportation.” Because even leaving the American immigration system is a mess.
On July 6 they went to their ICE check-in appointment after being told they were approved to self-deport. Instead of being given travel documents, they were arrested.
This father, his pregnant wife, and their daughter have been held in an American prison camp ever since. Edgarianny has no access to prenatal care. Their daughter barely eats and has told her parents she wants to die.
Our government is doing this in our names. To a family that followed all of our laws and then made their own decision to leave America when it was clear that we no longer wanted them.
Freddys and Edgarianny have written to Sen. Katie Britt asking for help, since Britt told the New York Times that she’s concerned about the welfare of immigrant children. You can read their letter here .
Here’s my ask: Please reach out to Katie Britt’s office, respectfully , and encourage her to help this family. Here are a few ways to do it either over the phone or via email:
Britt’s chief of staff: Sean_Ross@britt.senate.gov
Again: Please be civil and respectful. This family needs Britt’s help.
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) 1. De-Dollarization I hope you enjoyed the candy yesterday because I’m gonna force a pound of spinach down your gullet today.
Last week a friend sent me a link to a conversation JD Vance had three years ago with the MAGA think tank American Moment. This was before he was Trump’s vice. Before the Iran war. Before the Ozempic, even. It was the halcyon days of the Biden administration when the worst thing happening in America was the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
Maybe you remember Silicon Valley Bank? At the time, people like Vance warned that it was another of Sleepy Joe’s failures and would crater the economy. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. The Biden administration handled the situation responsibly. There was no contagion.
I want to draw your attention to two things from this talk. (The relevant sections are here .)
The first is Vance’s populist view of Silicon Valley Bank. At one point in the conversation he’s asked how regulators failed to anticipate the bank’s instability. Here’s his response:
Really. That’s it. He blames a bank failure on “woke.”
After he does that, though, Vance talks about how ZIRP—the times when interest rates were set at zero—supercharged finance and tech and how bad this is:
In a super-low interest rate environment . . . capital flowed to, it flowed to two industries to an extraordinary degree: finance and tech. . . . QE [quantitative easing] was a massive, massive subsidy to finance and tech. . . .
[Y]ou can’t have a financial system that creates a massive asset inflation for the banks and for the tech companies and then when there’s a correction basically come in and say ‘Well, we’re going to protect you from the downside risk,’ right? That’s socialized risk. Socialized loss and privatized reward. That’s how you get the pitchforks.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this analysis. There’s just one problem: JD Vance is a cat’s paw for finance and tech.
Vance isn’t much more than a biological asset belonging to Peter Thiel. The world of finance was two fists in on the Trump 2024 campaign. Most of Silicon Valley—from Palantir, to OpenAI, to Meta, to SpaceX and the Elonverse—have chosen to collaborate with the Trump administration.
JD Vance has eagerly participated in socializing risk and privatizing reward at a scale never seen before.
The shamelessness of this guy is breathtaking.
Which brings us to the second thing that caught my eye: JD Vance says he thinks it’s bad that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency.
I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America. I think there is a good argument that reserve currency status is akin to coal in Appalachia. It’s a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply, right? That’s been the story of the American economy for the last fifteen or so years, even before that, is we can just borrow, basically in an unlimited way because we have the reserve currency. So that’s a massive subsidy to incurring debt. The debt is cheaper even in raised interest rate environments. That’s one of the crazy things about what’s going on right now is the market is in some ways pricing future interest rates lower than what the Fed is right now. That’s kind of weird. So we have this massive subsidy to cheap debt for the American consumer.
You guys know how obsessed I am with the reserve status of the dollar. And there is an argument to be made that the true value of owning the world’s reserve currency is less than people like me believe. I’m open to that.
But the idea that holding the reserve currency is a curse? That Americans would be better off if China controlled the world’s reserve currency?
At least on this one, JD’s actions are in line with his words. He’s helping prosecute the Iran war, which is helping to slowly de-dollarize the world.
JD Vance is a dumb person’s idea of what smart people sound like.
A couple weeks ago a friend introduced me to the idea of limbic capitalism , which he proposed as an explanation to a great deal of what we see in America today: From Donald Trump, to Fox News, to Kalshi and the ubiquity of sports betting.
Limbic…
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