The Architect of the Trump Administration

Every administration has one. The person who isn't the President, isn't the loudest voice in the room, but is the one who actually designed the plan everyone else is executing.

For the Trump administration, that person is Stephen Miran.

Officially, he was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Fed governor. Unofficially, and it's the worst-kept secret in Washington, he's the intellectual architect of the entire economic agenda. The tariffs. The Treasury strategy. The trade restructuring. The defence ultimatums. All of it traces back to a framework that Miran built before he even had the job.

In November 2024, while still a strategist at Hudson Bay Capital, Miran published a paper called "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System." It laid out, in precise detail, the economic framework that the Trump administration has since executed almost to the letter.

The core of that playbook is a single insight that most people still haven't absorbed.

America provides two things to the world: defence and reserve assets which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known.

They're both linked. One protects global trade. The other underpins global finance. And both are funded by the same mechanism: the world buying and holding US government debt.

That's the deal. It's been the deal since Bretton Woods in 1944. You get American protection and American capital markets. In return, you hold American debt.

Miran's insight is that the deal is breaking and America needs to restructure it before it collapses entirely.

China is dumping Treasuries and backing the renminbi with gold. Foreign central bank holdings of US debt have dropped from roughly half to a third. The buyers who have funded American power for 80 years are walking away. And as Miran wrote, as global GDP grows, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the US to finance the provision of reserve assets and the defence umbrella.

America can't hold up its end if nobody's buying the debt that pays for it.

So Miran designed a two-pronged restructuring.

The stick is visible. Tariffs on countries that don't buy enough American goods. Defence spending requirements for allies who've been free-riding on American military protection. If you're a NATO country spending 1.5% of GDP on defence while America spends 3.5%, those days are over. Pay your share or lose the umbrella.

The carrot is invisible to most people. But it's the bigger play.

This is where tokenization enters the picture.

I've been writing to you all year about the DTCC beginning to tokenize over $100 trillion of assets and the biggest upgrade to financial markets in 50 years.

To tokenize assets, you have to tokenize the cash. Both sides of every transaction need to live on the same technology. The cash side is digital dollars. And under the GENIUS Act, every digital dollar must be backed one-for-one by US Treasuries.

Every digital dollar created anywhere on earth is a forced bid for US government debt.

This is the carrot. Join the new financial system and get access to the fastest, cheapest, most liquid capital markets ever built. Upgrade your economy from 1970s settlement technology to something that settles in seconds. All you have to do is plug in.

And by plugging in, your institutions start running on digital dollars. Which are backed by Treasuries. Which fund the American government. Which funds the military umbrella. Which protects the trade routes. Which underpins the financial system you just plugged into.

The loop closes. And it closes automatically, without a single negotiation, without a single Treasury auction, without anyone consciously deciding to fund American power. It happens as a side effect of adopting better technology.

That is Miran's design; a self-reinforcing system where technology adoption funds American power permanently.

Countries that join get richer. Countries that don't become poorer. Countries that actively resist get what Iran got, wallets seized, accounts frozen, financial system turned off. Miran designed the framework and Bessent is executing it.

It's already working.

Broadridge reported that 41% of global financial institutions have moved into full-scale production with tokenization. Half expect equities to be meaningfully tokenized within five years. Japan and Europe's central clearing houses are on the technology. The four largest American banks are building tokenized deposits.

None of these institutions were forced, they just adopted the technology because it's genuinely better.

But the increased Treasury demand designed by Miran is a byproduct of this.

And in six weeks, 120 central bankers from 70 countries gather at Jackson Hole, where the topic for the first time in 48 years is "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy." The Fed Chair giving the keynote held $200 million in digital assets before taking the job.

Miran's framework is about to be discussed at the highest level of global economic governance.

The companies building the technology that makes this framework function are what I cover in the Tokenization Report. The settlement layer, the custodians, the blockchain the DTCC chose, the cash infrastructure, and the transfer agents. Every piece of the machine Miran designed needs someone to build it. Those companies exist. Most are publicly traded. And most are priced like nobody's connected the dots.

If you want to know which ones they are and where I'm putting my own capital, you can join here today for up to 60% off and get a matching store credit for every dollar you spend.

In other words, my annual plan is down from $1,995 to $795. By opting for that plan, you'll get $795 of credits you can use toward other All Star Charts memberships.

Tokenization is about to eat the global economy, and this membership is one way to secure your place in that future.

Click here to sign up with that discount. 

Cheers,