From Permission to Possession

“If someone gives you permission, they can take it away. I give myself permission.”

– Lucille Clifton

December 11, 2025 —For the first time in history, Americans will be able to transact freely without fearing political disfavor or the legacy financial system. The architecture itself enforces neutrality. There is no “cancel” button.

The end of fiat regimes controlled by politicians and central bankers is a reasonably imaginable prospect.

This is precisely what Kirk meant by the preservation of order. The founders balanced power between branches; today’s coders balance power between servers.

In both cases, the goal is the same: to prevent centralized concentration and preserve liberty. Peer-to-peer transactions will introduce a whole new level of competition into the banking system.

Instead of putting money in a savings account with a bank, earning partly (if any) interest, you can lend directly. And then you can get a market rate for your capital, not a rate imposed by today’s big banks, which are effectively gatekeepers for the legacy financial system.

Dollar 2.0: Our Grey Swan Working Thesis

On October 21, the Fed hosted its Payments Innovation Conference and formally opened the policy spigot on stablecoins, cryptocurrency, and tokenization. We’ll continue to track and flag investable edges as the guardrails are implemented.

We’ll be watching opportunities in three categories:

The issuers — companies that create digital dollars backed by real cash or short-term U.S. Treasuries, and prove it every month. Think of them as safer, faster payment systems that don’t depend on weekend bankers.

• The builders — firms designing the plumbing and legal framework that make those payments work. They’re the picks and shovels of the new financial gold rush.

• The adapters — traditional banks that plug into the new system instead of fighting it, using faster settlement to cut costs and (in theory) pass the savings on to customers.

In short: the new money rails are coming, the infrastructure is investable, and the smart banks will ride them instead of watching from the station.

🌍 And… The Global Shift

Across the world, nation-states are taking notes. China’s digital yuan is built for surveillance; Europe’s digital euro is built for compliance. The American model is being built for freedom — a multi-issuer, transparent, competitive system anchored in law. Chaotic in its disruption.

At the Fed’s Payments Innovation Conference, Governor Christopher Waller floated “skinny accounts” to allow approved stablecoin issuers direct settlement access—a constitutional bridge between central banking and market innovation.

Hamilton meets Satoshi.

Love it.

And it’s a reason for optimism. Refreshing for me in a career critiquing the failures of fiat currencies and insurmountable debt that it encourages at all levels of society – government, corporate and individual.

🧭 Back to First Principles

Kirk wrote that liberty “endures only when linked to order, and order only when linked to justice.” That’s what’s being rebuilt here: not a new ideology, but a new infrastructure for old freedoms.

Trump’s conversion to digital money wasn’t the result of his kids following a tech fad — it was a rite of passage the nation had to witness. That is, if they bothered to pay attention to what was happening to the man behind the ghoul’s mask painted over his public face.

Trump was the test case. The debanked president who learned, painfully, that political power doesn’t guarantee financial access — and that the only real safeguard against tyranny is a system that cannot discriminate.

The lesson? Freedom cannot depend on parties or courts… but it can be preserved on digital monetary architecture.

🌄 The Optimistic View

America has consistently reinvented itself in times of crisis. The founders survived monarchy. Lincoln survived disunion. We’ve survived bank panics, oil shocks, stagflation, and disco. We’ll survive deplatforming, too.

The Second American Revolution won’t be fought with muskets or manifestos. It won’t be fought with petty violence and street demonstrations. It will be written into code. And available to those who wish to take advantage of it.

Russell Kirk called the first American Revolution “a revolution not made, but prevented.” The second will be the same. We’re not tearing down the house — we’re going to rewire it in code.

The result may not be utopia. But it will be freedom you can bank on.

Addison Wiggin

Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. This piece first appeared in our November Grey Swan Bulletin. Today, we’re continuing our review our 2025 Grey Swan forecasts and planning out our best new ideas for 2026 this week… and putting together our final Bulletin of 2025.

Next week, we’ll be back at it with a sneak preview of what we expect in 2026 and solid moves you can make before year-end.

“If someone gives you permission, they can take it away. I give myself permission.”

– Lucille Clifton

The end of fiat regimes controlled by politicians and central bankers is a reasonably imaginable prospect.

This is precisely what Kirk meant by the preservation of order. The founders balanced power between branches; today’s coders balance power between servers.

In both cases, the goal is the same: to prevent centralized concentration and preserve liberty. Peer-to-peer transactions will introduce a whole new level of competition into the banking system.

We’ll be watching opportunities in three categories:

The issuers — companies that create digital dollars backed by real cash or short-term U.S. Treasuries, and prove it every month. Think of them as safer, faster payment systems that don’t depend on weekend bankers.

• The builders — firms designing the plumbing and legal framework that make those payments work. They’re the picks and shovels of the new financial gold rush.

• The adapters — traditional banks that plug into the new system instead of fighting it, using faster settlement to cut costs and (in theory) pass the savings on to customers.

In short: the new money rails are coming, the infrastructure is investable, and the smart banks will ride them instead of watching from the station.

🌍 And… The Global Shift

Hamilton meets Satoshi.

Love it.

🧭 Back to First Principles

The lesson? Freedom cannot depend on parties or courts… but it can be preserved on digital monetary architecture.

🌄 The Optimistic View

Russell Kirk called the first American Revolution “a revolution not made, but prevented.” The second will be the same. We’re not tearing down the house — we’re going to rewire it in code.

The result may not be utopia. But it will be freedom you can bank on.

Addison Wiggin

Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

Next week, we’ll be back at it with a sneak preview of what we expect in 2026 and solid moves you can make before year-end.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called stablecoins, including USDC, “a pillar of dollar strength,” estimating a $2 trillion market within five years. U.S. Treasuries back every coin.

Bessent’s formula even suggests that a broader, more efficient market for US dollars will help retain its best use case as the reserve currency of global finance… and, perhaps, help the current administration address the nation’s $37 trillion mountain of debt.

In trying to cancel a man, the establishment accidentally reinforced the dollar, and may add decades to its life as a useful currency.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s worth recalling that our first Revolution wasn’t waged to destroy an order — it was fought to preserve one.

Political philosopher Russell Kirk called it “a revolution not made but prevented.” The colonists sought not chaos but continuity — the defense of their “chartered rights as Englishmen,” not the birth of an entirely new world. Kirk wrote:

“The American Revolution was a preventive movement, intended to preserve an old constitutional structure. The French Revolution meant the destruction of the fabric of society.”

The difference, Kirk argued, was moral. The American Revolution was rooted in ordered liberty; the French in ideological frenzy. The first produced a Constitution; the second, a guillotine.

Two and a half centuries later, the argument continues — only now, the battlefield is financial. Who controls access to money? Who defines legitimacy? Can a citizen’s ability to transact depend on their politics?

Trump and Powell are no buddies. They’ve been fighting over rate cuts all year—Trump demanding more, Powell holding back. Even after cutting twice, Trump called him “grossly incompetent” and said he’d “love to fire” him. The tension has been building for months.

And Trump now seems ready to install someone who shares his appetite for lower rates and easier money.

Trump has been dropping hints for weeks—saying on November 18, “I think I already know my choice,” and then doubling down last Sunday aboard Air Force One with, “I know who I am going to pick… we’ll be announcing it.”

He was referring to one Kevin Hassett, who—according to a recent Bloomberg report—has emerged as the overwhelming favorite to become the next Fed chair.

Here we sit — investors, analysts, retirees, accountants, even a few masochistic economists — gathered beneath the leafless monetary tree, rehearsing our lines as we wait for Jerome Powell to step onstage and tell us what the future means.

Spoiler: he can’t. But that does not stop us from waiting.

Tomorrow, he is expected to deliver the December rate cut. Polymarket odds sit at 96% for a dainty 25-point cut.

Trump, Navarro and Lutnick pine for 50 points.

And somewhere in the wings smiles Kevin Hassett — at 74% odds this morning, the presumed Powell successor — watching the last few snowflakes fall before his cue arrives.