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In Episode 266 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with financial historian, journalist, and author Edward Chancellor. For the last twenty years, Chancellor has been arguably known best for his book, \\u201cDevil Take the Hindmost,\\u201d which is a fantastic history of the last 400 years of financial speculation. Yet, that streak may be soon coming to an end with the publication tomorrow of his latest book, \\u201cThe Price of Time,\\u201d an absolutely brilliant philosophical exploration of interest and its essential role in valuing and directing the allocation of capital, labor, and resources in the economy over time.

Interest rates have sometimes been described on this podcast and elsewhere as the \\u201cprice of money.\\u201d While this definition is useful, it fails to capture the temporal dimension of interest rates and the role that they play in expanding the continuum of economic activity, cooperation, investment, and consumption beyond the immediate grasp of the present moment. The ability to accumulate capital in the form of money enables us to operate outside of entropy\\u2019s constraints\\u2014we aren\\u2019t limited in other words by the decomposition or decay of a sack of barley, a barrel of oil, or a concrete building. But in order to value that capital through both space and time, we need something more. And that something is interest: the price you pay to borrow money or the cost you charge to lend it over time.

Over the last two decades the price of time has plummeted to levels never before seen in human history and with it have arrived a multiplicity of asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, rising wealth and income inequality, a discouragement of savings, a growth in supply chains, and an excessive amount of risk-taking encouraged by the acrobatics of yield-starved investors in search of decent return.

In this excellent and timely conversation, you are going to learn about the history of interest and its historical role in promoting human cooperation, economic activity, and advancement. You are also going to learn about how interest is priced, where it comes from, and the difference between the so-called \\u201cnatural rate\\u201d of interest and what central banks have claimed as their policy lever to control the scale, scope, and distribution of capital in society.

In the second hour of our conversation which is available to premium subscribers only, Edward Chancellor and Demetri Kofinas apply the framework that they develop in the first part of the episode to help you understand where we find ourselves today, whether or not central banks and governments can indeed use their policy tools to fix the very problems that those tools have to help create, what some of those solutions and the path forward could look like, and what all of this means for you and your portfolio.

You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report to this week\\u2019s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 08/09/2022