Originally posted as a Twitter thread on August 07, 2019

Controlling currency used to mean controlling payments. You print the money as the sovereign; all payments are transacted with that paper. But non-paper payments have changed that and yielded geopolitical risk…

David Ricardo coined the term “comparative advantage” — why trade makes sense. But there’s this issue of geopolitical risk. Growing *zero* food within Country X might be a bad idea if there is a war of anything that interrupts logistics…

So it’s been well-understood, as a matter of national security, that it makes sense to have self-sufficiency in several areas in case trade breaks down

Which brings us back to how currency now has little to do with payments. Governments have very little control over how commerce and payment networks work, or rather, the ability to *keep* them working

The two largest payment networks are in San Francisco (Visa) and Purchase, New York (MasterCard). They are the routers for a huge and growing amount of commerce in *all* countries but they are domiciled in the US, subject to its laws

It’s going to be interesting to see, as paper money goes away and commerce is transacted entirely via payment networks such as these, how governments react. It’s not clear to me that they really understand what’s happening

Great example of this here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-crisis-visa-crimea/visa-mastercard-stop-supporting-bank-cards-in-crimea-idUSKBN0K40TN20141226

Now if I’m the UK or France, I might think — hmm, what if that happens to me? In 10 years, things affecting the *commerce* supply, for lack of a better word, will be more influential than anything governments have done in “currency”

China is the only major (non-US) country to have thought this through, as they have their own payment network, China UnionPay, which can interoperate outside of China. But I suspect and expect this to be a bigger deal going forward…

And generally speaking, any network that has an outsize impact on the economy of another country will start being scrutinized more under national security guidelines OR be required to have separate instances that can operate independent of the parent…

For example, imagine that everyone in China took an Uber to work (pre Didi merger). Geopolitical risk having “key economic factor” based in San Francisco — chaos if Uber or the US government cut that off

Food supplies, petroleum, and products of war were the original “national security” risks that couldn’t be subject to plain old free trade. In the 21st century and beyond: NETWORKS.
Fin.