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EP104 · Economy · first published 2021-10-23

Money Tsunami and Freedoms | Tuomas Malinen | Neuvottelija 104

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

GnS Economics CEO Tuomas Malinen and Sami Miettinen work through three levers whose combination they consider dangerous: growth in the money supply, production bottlenecks, and state control over individual behaviour. Miettinen adds the third lever to the frame, and Malinen takes it up. On inflation Malinen sets out a mechanism the indicators failed to see: the shuttered service sector contributed zero or less to the consumer price index while goods ordered with stimulus cheques were congesting freight markets. He names two historical conditions for hyperinflation, and in his view central banks are trapped: the Fed's balance sheet grew from about four to eight trillion dollars in two years. The second half covers China's social credit system, Italy's covid pass and disputes between US states. Miettinen says openly that he is double-vaccinated and still asks what follows from a mechanism that divides citizens into two classes via an app. It closes on what would be worth owning in such a world. Published 23 October 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy

Money Tsunami and Freedoms | Tuomas Malinen

Summary: In episode 104 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Tuomas Malinen, CEO of GnS Economics and by far the most frequent guest of the channel’s first season. The episode is built on three levers whose combination the speakers consider dangerous: growth in the money supply, constraints on production, and the state’s growing control over individual behaviour. The first half is monetary analysis — why inflation stayed hidden from the indicators and why central banks are, in Malinen’s view, trapped. The second half deals with China, the covid pass and constitutional freedoms, and it closes by asking what would be worth owning in such a world. Published 23 October 2021.

A note on reading this. Malinen is a well-known critic of central bank policy and offers forecasts and assessments of political motives in this episode; Miettinen agrees with him on much of it. Views are attributed by speaker here and forecasts are marked as forecasts, and this article takes no position on them. The episode was recorded in October 2021. With hindsight, hyperinflation did not arrive, and central banks raised rates considerably further than the episode’s “trap” thesis suggested they could.

The starting point: Handelsbanken pulls out

The episode opens on the news of the day: the day before recording, Handelsbanken had announced it was leaving Finland and Denmark. Miettinen reads it as a sign that being a small banking-union and euro-area country is not as fine as people believe: less profit is made here and the risks look larger than in the countries the bank keeps — Sweden, Britain and Norway, all floating-currency countries.

Malinen is more cautious. Just before the broadcast he had spoken to someone who follows these matters closely, whose view was that it is mainly about profitability. He recalls that Nordea’s move of its head office to Finland was justified partly by the banking union, but adds that the banking union also “loads quite a lot of charges up here in the north” for what might happen in the southern euro countries. Miettinen’s point, he says, cannot be dismissed.

Why the indicators missed inflation

Miettinen shows a slide from a Macrobond representative: the US consumer price index (CPI) is running at about 5.4 per cent, and transport has flipped from a negative contribution in the covid year to the biggest swing factor in inflation. He notes himself that the CPI is not a perfect gauge.

Malinen goes further: on some other measures, he says, US inflation would already have “two digits before the decimal point”. The mechanism is the episode’s best analytical passage:

Americans were sitting at home, and then they got the stimulus cheques as well, so what do they do at home? They started ordering stuff from China.

The freight fleet was not ready for the demand, and prices rose fast. At the same time the shuttered service sector contributed zero or even less to the index. Part of the basket was rising steeply while a large part was absent, so inflation showed up in only one place. According to Malinen, the IMF had warned the previous November that inflation measures might not work while countries were closed, and GnS Economics predicted in its March report that inflation would jump when economies reopened. “Now that has happened.”

Freight costs, he says, have risen fivefold and on some routes even tenfold in a couple of years, and shipping delays are at record levels. The day before, someone had written to him about a cargo ship stuck off the US coast, unable to unload.

We now know very precisely that you cannot put the world economy on stop and restart it. It causes really serious problems.

His examples are truck drivers who left for other work during the lockdowns and are not coming back, and the British fuel shortage. Miettinen had been in Britain the previous week: the fuel shortage was not very visible, but shops were missing products.

The course, and an audience that woke up

Malinen describes the course he teaches on preparedness and protecting assets. It grew out of the flood of questions after the covid year about how the crisis would unfold and how to protect wealth. Based on feedback, a lecture was added on which signals might indicate a crisis’s timing, and next comes a course on central banks and crypto — and, with it, the economic “great reset”.

Covid, in Malinen’s view, has woken people up:

The state will not necessarily take care of them.

The two conditions for hyperinflation

Miettinen recalls that in last year’s Corona Black Swan discussion Malinen gave two criteria for extreme inflation. Malinen repeats them:

  1. A substantial amount of money in circulation, usually central-bank financing
  2. Production stoppages or gaps that constrain productive capacity

Miettinen offers Venezuela as the example: production bottlenecks and excess money led to hyperinflation, 75 per cent of the population ended up in absolute poverty, and the economy dollarised. He asks whether the size of a system protects large economies from the same mechanism. Malinen’s answer: “It perhaps slows it down up to a point, but it certainly does not protect.”

Malinen continues with Europe: Germany’s big unions, he says, are demanding 5.5 per cent pay rises, well above the ECB’s inflation target, and research on the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation of 1919–1924 found inflation expectations to be a central driver. “If they start to run away, money loses its value.” There is now so much money in circulation, he says, that it is chasing a limited quantity of goods through the bottlenecks.

It is worth being precise about what is being said: Malinen describes historical conditions and a risk, not a direct forecast of hyperinflation in Finland or the euro area.

Why central banks are trapped

Central banks are in a massive bind now, because all that talk about it being somehow temporary was just a desperate attempt by the central banks to talk inflation down.

In Malinen’s view it is becoming clear that the “transitory” story is finished. Next the purchase programmes would have to be wound down and rates raised — “and how will the financial markets survive that?”

He returns to the point later. Financial markets were close to collapse in March 2020, but central banks took everything onto their books: the Fed’s balance sheet was, as he remembers it, about 4,000 billion dollars and is now 8,000 billion, in two years. If inflation runs away, the central bank can no longer rescue anyone. He used to worry about a single banking crisis; now about several at once — inflation, banks, financial markets, sovereign and corporate defaults:

We have the possibility of a perfect economic storm.

Behind this lies his more general view: market pricing is a self-correcting mechanism, but it has not been allowed to work, because politicians have not dared to take the hit and central bankers have got themselves tangled up in the situation. History’s worst crises, he says, come from trying to postpone the crisis as long as possible. This is an assessment of the future, not an observation.

The third lever: state control

Beyond money and bottlenecks, Miettinen adds a third, “nasty” lever to the frame: state control that starts to steer and restrict people’s behaviour and movement. China, he says, was a negative surprise in how quickly it has moved towards totalitarianism.

Malinen agrees. He had just been studying China’s corporate social credit system for GnS Economics’ December quarterly, whose special report deals with the great reset and global dystopia. His reading is that facial recognition is being tied directly to the social credit system, which already affects, for example, access to bank credit, and that the purpose is to keep the country under control when the economic crisis hits and China’s debt bubble bursts. He quotes an unnamed China scholar who said a revolution of some kind comes roughly every 70 years — and 72 to 73 have now passed.

Miettinen adds examples: China banned for-profit tutoring — a Western tutor might teach more than Spanish — and imposed gaming quotas on children. Limiting gaming may have its good side, but to him it is “quite drastic suppression of private behaviour”.

Malinen shares a personal example. He was due to teach a course on China’s economy at the University of Hong Kong in March, through a consultancy, but it was never held. Even the course outline came with guidance from a British contact that criticism of China had to be expressed “smartly” — which Malinen read as meaning evasively. When Xi Jinping came to power, expectations of more freedom were high, but things soon slid back, he says, towards the totalitarianism whose dismantling began in 1979.

The narrow corridor

Malinen sums up the lesson of history:

If you give the state too much power and take away too many freedoms, at some point they will take that stranglehold.

The frame is Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, discussed on the channel before: civil society must push back against state power. Europe, he says, should look at the Chinese example “with the hair on the back of its neck standing up”, because the state’s task, in his words, is to accumulate power, and the idea that politicians think only of the people’s good is “shockingly naive”.

The United States: states against the federal government

On the US, the conversation first notes that a weak administration tempts China to try taking Taiwan as it did Hong Kong. Miettinen points out that the US has the world’s strongest fundamental rights, free speech first among them — he is less keen on the right to bear arms — and asks whether the states are now “more or less at war with each other”.

According to Malinen, some 22 to 23 states led by Texas are holding firmly to constitutional freedoms. In his account, the Biden administration’s legislation has been struck down in state courts, and the president’s rhetoric towards governors is harsher than anything heard since the Civil War; this weakens the US from within. He also notes that Finnish media report little of it. These are Malinen’s assessments and have not been checked here.

Miettinen notes that Tesla moved from California to Texas: the confrontation, in his view, is not just Trump-era rhetoric but reflects real movements. Malinen adds that Texas has banned vaccine mandates.

The covid pass and the constitution

Europe is not safe, Malinen says. His example is Italy, where the covid pass is becoming a condition for working. He compares it to the 1930s and 1940s and says the historians he has spoken to are “quite horrified”.

Miettinen states his own position openly:

I have the two vaccinations, and I appreciated the ease with which I travelled from Finland to England without any bureaucracy at all.

His question is not about the vaccine but about the mechanism: once you hand out an app that divides people “into black and white, or sheep and wolves”, the dividing line is secondary, and it easily grows into all sorts of other things — and suddenly you are close to a social credit system. To Malinen, the covid pass is only a small leap from the Chinese system. His concern is the constitution: if an order from an authority such as a regional state administrative agency can restrict services for one part of the population, the constitution “practically ceases to exist”. Miettinen sums up his own worry: all three levers are strong, and even with good intentions all round they can still lead to dystopia.

Totalitarianism came from the left as well

In Malinen’s view a “victor’s justice” has taken hold in Europe: the far right is rightly regarded as dangerous, but far-left and far-green-left ideologies, he says, are allowed to run free. He recalls that totalitarianism historically came from the direction of the Soviet Union and socialism too. He has never in his life been this worried — nor, he says, has a close relative who has followed history for a long time.

What would be worth owning

Miettinen asks what would be worth owning in such a world. Malinen’s answer is cautious: central-bank purchase programmes have produced “an incredible asset-price bubble” in which practically everything is inflated — from housing to equities and junk bonds. Over a long horizon, owning forest land may not be a bad idea, given Finland’s strong forest industry, but forest plot prices have risen too. “You have to be quite careful there.” Miettinen adds an example of bottlenecks from publishing: book paper had suddenly run out. Malinen recalls the summer’s lumber price spike.

The logic of a personal portfolio comes from Miettinen, not Malinen. He has never wanted to hold bank cash, because it is effectively zero-duration debt in the euro system and high inflation eats it. His owner-occupied home has given some real security, though it is not riskless. His concern is the legal framework: the state can decide otherwise, and Berlin, for example, has seriously considered socialising rental flats. Malinen replies that after East Germany and the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought this was behind us.

On crypto, Miettinen says its advocates’ argument is precisely that it is an “off the grid” instrument — but he is unsure of its fundamental value. Malinen regards crypto as a risk in itself: because of value, liquidity and legality, since central banks may start defending their turf aggressively. Miettinen recalls that China removed the miners and bitcoin ownership rights — under totalitarianism something is simply declared illegal. He also sketches a softer scenario: the euro could be melted away by debt as the rouble was in the Soviet Union, in which case owners of homes, forest and shares might come through dry. The closing summary is that the things to watch are production bottlenecks, the money supply and individual freedoms — and the legal framework: whether we are heading towards lawlessness.

The oracle of Kalevankatu

Miettinen mentions that the comedians Heikelä and Koskelo had called Malinen “the oracle of Kalevankatu”, and claims partial credit, since both men live on that street. Malinen’s closing message is for civil society: the covid pass affects everyone, jabbed or not, and citizens should wake up so that decision-makers do not “drive this country into the ditch”. He had been “too close” to the political system during the recovery fund debate, and came away with a poor impression of it.

Miettinen ends with an observation on how such packages always go: first a hard fight and reassurances, and once the decision is made, “of course this just had to be done”. He recommends the channel’s earlier debates on the recovery package, such as Vote Down the EU Package in Parliament.

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list. The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context. The earlier version had given Malinen passages that, on the transcript, are Miettinen’s: it is Miettinen who adds the third lever (state control) to the frame, who offers the Venezuela example, and whose reflections on cash, an owned home and the legal framework, and on China’s ban on miners, these are. The speaker of the passage on Taiwan and a weak Biden administration remains uncertain and is written neutrally. An earlier episode on control of the monetary system that Miettinen refers to could not be identified from the audio and has not been guessed. Malinen’s claims about US state court cases and Biden’s rhetoric have not been checked here.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 104, published 23 October 2021, running time 36 minutes 24 seconds. Guest Tuomas Malinen (guest page and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 104 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 23 October 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews GnS Economics CEO Tuomas Malinen on inflation, central bank policy and freedoms. Key findings: the episode is built on three levers — growth in the money supply, production bottlenecks and state control over individual behaviour — the third of which Miettinen adds to the frame; Handelsbanken’s exit from Finland and Denmark is to Miettinen a sign of a small euro-area country’s weakness, while Malinen sees mainly profitability behind it; inflation stayed hidden from the indicators because the shuttered service sector contributed zero or less to the consumer price index while goods ordered with stimulus cheques congested freight markets, and freight costs rose five- or even tenfold; US CPI was about 5.4 per cent at the time of recording; Malinen’s two historical conditions for hyperinflation are a large quantity of central-bank-financed money in circulation and a simultaneous constraint on production, with Venezuela (Miettinen’s example) and the Weimar Republic 1919–1924 (Malinen’s); the Fed’s balance sheet grew, by Malinen’s account, from about 4,000 to 8,000 billion dollars in two years, and in his assessment central banks are trapped because breaking inflation would require rate rises the financial markets could not withstand — a forecast that did not come true in that form; the second half covers China’s corporate social credit system, a Hong Kong course that was never held, the book The Narrow Corridor, disputes between US states and the federal government (Texas, Tesla’s move), and Italy’s covid pass as a condition of work; Miettinen says he is double-vaccinated but finds a mechanism that divides citizens into two classes via an app troubling; Malinen argues the constitution practically ceases to exist if an administrative order can restrict services for part of the population; Malinen regards crypto as a risk, sees everything in a bubble and forest land as a possible long-term holding, while Miettinen stresses the legal framework of ownership. Related episodes: Corona Black Swan 2 | Tuomas Malinen, Vote Down the EU Package in Parliament | Tuomas Malinen and The Great Reset 2.0 | Tuomas Malinen.

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