Ian Foster
Ian Foster has spent much of the last decade in Malawi, Southern Africa, a country he describes as ground zero for the horrors of the fiat money system. Through years of business advisory work there, he saw that any kind of economic progress is impossible in the current monetary regime. He is committed to raising awareness of this and is currently researching a PhD at the University of Manchester on the challenges of entrepreneurship in an unsound money system. He also helped start Bitcoin Boma, Malawi's first bitcoin group and is the creator of EconoKidz.com.
Session
Goats are the preferred store of value for Malawi’s rural poor. Just a few years ago, they sold for around 15,000 kwacha (the local money) but now fetch well north of 100,000. They are Africa’s answer to Saylor’s mantra that There Is No Second Best.
But this store of value destroys all value, leaving a goatpocalypse of destruction in their wake. When the staple food maize is in the field, these stomachs on legs are kept well out of harm’s way. But for the rest of the year, they ravage the land, picking off every fresh sapling that tried to replace the trees felled for firewood and brick kilns. With nothing left to hold the ground together, the annual rains now tear through villages, splitting roads in two and washing away the topsoil. This in a country where 85% depend on agriculture to survive.
But what do you do when the money gets devalued overnight, most recently by 44%, when prices of essentials rise more than 30% annually, and when the interest rate on savings is capped by the central bank at 4.3%?
Like most African nations, Malawi marked its independence with a central bank and its own currency. The new bank notes carried portraits of freedom fighters and images of indigenous heritage. They promised a new era of prosperity, confirming sovereignty even to those in the most remote villages. Malawi’s kwacha means ‘new dawn’ and began life at 2:1 against the pound. But this period coincided with the dawn of the global fiat money experiment, and there is nowhere where its failings are more apparent than in Africa. The kwacha now exchanges for around 5,000.
I’ve spent more than a decade in Africa watching experts jet in for cocktail launches of their latest targeted interventions that, despite all of this, will somehow transform Malawi into an upper middle-income country by 2063. In this talk, I will argue that anyone who truly cares about economic development in Africa should begin with the institution that drives it - the money – and that a return to sound money might offer some hope of turning the continent (and the world) around.