Lyn Alden: Nothing Stops This Train. Not Even AI.

Lyn Alden argues that stablecoins could speed up expensive, slow cross-border payments, reducing the capital businesses keep tied up in financial pipelines; she says faster business cash turnover could also modestly increase money velocity. She identifies demographics and wealth concentration as larger drivers of velocity.

Lyn Alden says tokenized assets could help people in developing countries access equities when brokerage accounts are difficult to open, extending the lower-cost access enabled by online discount brokers. The host and Alden also discuss tokenization paired with an agent as a way to make home-equity borrowing—currently described as paperwork-heavy and potentially taking 60 days—faster and more flexible.

Lyn Alden argues that mechanization and AI can make goods and services more abundant and make some people much more efficient, but says time saved may lead to more projects rather than shorter workweeks. She also attributes longer hours for some people to the fact that one income buys less.

Lyn Alden says high switching costs allow large banks to pay less on deposits while smaller banks offer higher yields to attract customers; she argues AI-guided switching could pressure providers that depend on customers leaving cash in low-yield accounts. That account-switching mechanism is another example of technology lowering barriers to accessing financial services, alongside the potential for tokenized assets to widen investment access.

Lyn Alden expects average money-supply growth of roughly 7%, with inflation below that if productivity remains positive, and says her near-term base case is gradual, generally flat-to-up money printing unless a shock prompts a larger increase. She also argues that deficit spending can help lift nominal GDP, so nominal debt and GDP may both rise while the debt-to-GDP ratio stays roughly stable; in her view, deficits can also support earnings growth partly by increasing the money supply.

Lyn Alden says the U.S. deficit is roughly 7% of GDP, or about 6% in a good year, and links its persistence partly to demographics; she argues that when debt exceeds 100% of GDP, higher rates can widen the deficit by more than they slow private-sector bank lending. Because recessions reduce tax receipts and widen deficits, she expects downturns in this high-deficit setting to feel milder and more stagflationary than deflationary busts.