Lyn Alden Investment Strategy; Book: Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

I post this about Lyn Alden because I am seeing that she is an innovative researcher into the history of money through the present day. (I can imagine that maybe only a few of my Subscribers are interested in the contents of this post.) She is informing me of things I have never heard. She is friends with Saifedean Ammous who appears to me to be the most innovative Austrian economist writing and speaking today. On the back cover of the book, The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization, authored by Saifedean Ammous, PhD, Joseph Salerno, PhD, of the Mises Institute, and considered the heir to Murray Rothbard (passed away in 1995), wrote the following:

“I HAVE SPENT MY ENTIRE CAREER studying wroks about monetary theory, the gold standard, comparative cometary systems, central banks, and proposals for monetary and financial reform. I would rate a tiny fraction of the books I have read about any one of these topics as excellent. Dr. Ammous’s book The Bitcoin Standard contains an excellent treament of all these topics in addition to one of the few enlightened and enlightening accounts of bitcoin that I have come across. It is essential reading for anyone interested in learning the role bitcoin could play in a future regime of free and sound money.” [copied exactly as written on the back cover]

Joseph Salerno, Academic Vice President, the Mises Institute, on The Bitcoin Standard

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Lyn Alden’s background lies in the intersection of engineering and finance.

Alden has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in engineering management, with a focus on engineering economics and financial modeling. Lyn oversees the finances and day-to-day operations of an engineering facility.

She has been performing investment research for over fifteen years in various public and private capacities.

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Lyn Alden Investment Strategy

And her book: Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

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Who is Lyn Alden? Get to Know Bitcoin's Biggest Voices:

“Lyn Alden is a full-time investor and independent financial analyst. She has been performing investment research for over fifteen years in various public and private capacities, and founded Lyn Alden Investment Strategy in 2016. Her goal is to provide institutional-level research in plain English, so that both institutional investors and retail investors can benefit from it. Her work has been editorially featured or cited on the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Marketwatch, Time’s Money Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Street, CNBC, US News and World Report, Kiplinger, the Asia Times, the Huffington Post, and other media. She has appeared on Kitco, Real Vision, The Investor’s Podcast Network, The Rebel Capitalist Show, Macro Voices, The Market Huddle, What Bitcoin Did, and many other shows and podcasts. She has also served as an advisor or consultant for start-up companies, hedge funds, and executive committees of large institutions. Her site, LynAlden.com provides investment research and strategy, covering stocks, precious metals, international equities, and alternative investments. She analyzes advanced topics for institutional investors, and also breaks many of those topics down for retail investors to keep track of what’s happening in terms of global macro.”

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Lynn Alden is associated with and a friend of Saifedean Ammous

The Saif House books (publishing) includes Broken Money:

Open link for The Saif House books

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Amazon review of Broken Money:

“A Comprehensive Overview of the Past, Present, and Future of Money

Broken Money explores the history of money through the lens of technology. Politics can affect things temporarily and locally, but technology is what drives things forward globally and permanently. The book's goal is for the reader to walk away with a deep understanding of money and monetary history, both in terms of theoretical foundations and in terms of practical implications.

From shells to gold, from papyrus bills of exchange to central banks, and from the invention of the telegraph to the creation of Bitcoin, Lyn Alden walks the reader through the emergence of new technologies that have shaped what we use as money over the ages. And beyond that, Alden explores the concept of what money is at its very foundation to give the reader a framework to analyze and compare different types of monetary technologies and monetary theories.

The book also takes a distinctively human look at how money impacts the lives of real people, and how new monetary technologies shape the power structures within society.

In the modern era, energy abundance and technological enhancements have broadly improved human well-being, but the global monetary system has been slow to keep up. There are over 160 active currencies in the world, each with a local monopoly over its own country, and with little or no acceptance elsewhere. Many of them are rapidly diluted, which continually devalues the savings and the wages of the billions of people who live and work within those jurisdictions. Being born in the "wrong" country makes saving money far harder than it needs to be.

Nigeria has a population of over 200 million people and has averaged 13% annualized inflation over the past decade. Egypt cut its currency in half relative to the dollar twice over the past decade, which instantly devalued the savings and wages of its 100 million citizens. Dozens of countries have experienced at least triple-digit year-over-year inflation within the past four decades, including Brazil that outright hyperinflated in the 1990s while it was the fifth most populous country in the world.

Europe and Japan had $18 trillion worth of negative-yielding bonds in 2019, right before a wave of inflation wiped their purchasing power away. In 2021, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve dismissed the idea that the sharp rise in the money supply from the pandemic stimulus would lead to price inflation. By 2022, as major inflation emerged, the chairman rapidly changed his outlook and tightened monetary policy so quickly that it led to the failure of some of the largest banks in the country.

How did we get to this point? Why isn't our money better than this in the 21st century? Broken Money answers these questions by examining the current mix of technology that has led to these limitations, and then explores emerging technologies that may be able to provide us with a monetary system that is fit for the modern era.”

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