Todo lo que mueve tu dinero (y nadie te enseñó en la escuela)

There's something that nobody taught you in

school that moves every penny you have

in your pocket. It is not an

abstract theory. It's the system that decides whether

your salary is enough or not, whether the

price of bread goes up or down, whether you'll

have a job next year or not. In

the next few minutes you're going to understand how

that whole machine works from the

inside, because most people

live inside it without understanding a

single rule. And that ignorance comes at a

price. Stay tuned because what's coming will

change how you read the news

forever. Let's start from the beginning.

You're human, you want things, food,

shelter, clothes, maybe something more. The

problem is that there isn't enough of

everything for everyone. That's called scarcity. It

is not an opinion or a

political stance. It is the basic condition of

human existence and the

starting point of economics. [music]

Economics is not a

university subject. It is the study of how

we make decisions when there isn't enough money

for everything. And since there isn't enough for everything,

we have to choose. Choosing

always involves giving something up. If you spend

[music] money on a trip this month, you're giving up what you could have

done with that money.

If a company decides to produce more

televisions, it gives up the capacity it

could use to manufacture something else. The

value you give up when making a decision

has a name: opportunity cost. It's

invisible,

nobody charges you for it at the checkout, but it's

always there. And most

people who make bad

financial decisions don't do it because of a lack of

money, they do it because they never calculated

the cost of what they gave up.

If you want to see exactly how much

each decision you make with your

money costs you, in the video description there is

an opportunity cost calculator

that shows you the real number over about 5 and

10 years. So, how do we solve the

shortage? Exchanging. [music]

You have something I need. I have

something you need. We trade. We

both came out feeling better than before. That's the

[music] trade in its most basic form

and it works even when one person

is no better than another at anything. There is

a concept that explains why. Comparative advantage

[music]

. You don't need to be the best

at something for it to make sense for you to do it

. He just needs to be relatively

less bad at that [music] than at anything else

.

Brazil produces coffee more

efficiently than cars. Germany produces

cars more efficiently than coffee. It

makes sense for each one to

specialize in what they do best in

relative terms and then

exchange [music]. The result is

that both end up with more than if

each had tried to produce everything on

their own. This principle, which seems

simple, is the basis of

international trade and explains why almost

no country in history that isolated itself

from global trade ended up being

prosperous. Exchange generates wealth,

[music] isolation, poverty. Now

let's put all of that together in one place.

[music] scarcity, choices,

opportunity cost, comparative [music] advantage

. Shake them all together and

you get a market. A market is

simply the space [music] where

buyers and sellers meet

to exchange goods and services.

It could be a neighborhood fair, a

stock exchange, or the

[music] app you used to order breakfast this

morning. The rule that makes

all markets work is a single one. The

incentives. People respond to

incentives. [music]

If the price of something goes up,

buyers buy less. If the price

goes down, they buy more [music]. If the price

of something goes up, producers want to

produce more. If it goes down, [music] produces

less. This constant tension between

what people want to buy and what

producers are willing to sell

creates supply and demand.

Where those two forces [music]

meet, the equilibrium price appears

. It's the number where everyone

who wants to buy finds someone

who wants to sell. Supply increases,

prices decrease. Demand rises,

prices rise. Simple. Except when

someone decides to ignore it. Governments

sometimes set prices by law. [music]

They tell the market, "This is as far as

you go." That's called

price control. and it almost always ends badly.

When the official price is lower than

the real price, producers stop

producing, shelves empty,

the black market appears, the economy doesn't

disappear,

it hides. But how do we coordinate

millions of people making millions of

decisions at the same time? Nobody

plans it, nobody directs it,

[music] prices do it. When the price

of something goes up, it sends a signal. There's a

shortage, produce more. When it goes down, it

sends another one. There is excess, produce less.

Adam Smith called this the

invisible hand. It's not magic, it's information

circulating through the system without

anyone having to give orders. A

concrete example: in 2021, the price of

semiconductors skyrocketed.

Not because someone decided it, but because

the pandemic disrupted

production chains and the demand for electronics

exploded at the same time. The

price signal reached thousands of companies

worldwide simultaneously, and they all

began to adjust.

That's what the market does. It processes

information in a decentralized manner,

at a speed that no

central planning system could match.

Its limits are also real. He doesn't

care about fairness. It does not consider the

environment unless someone

forces it to, and it can concentrate power in a

way that crushes the competition. But

as a system for coordinating

economic decisions on a large scale, it is the most efficient one

that exists.

Now, the exchange works,

but it has a huge practical problem.

How can you trade shoes for bread if the

baker doesn't need shoes? You need

something in between, something that everyone

accepts as a form of payment, something that

represents value without being value in

itself. That's money. Throughout

history it was stones, shells, salt,

cattle, metals, paper and today numbers on

a screen. What matters is not what it's made of

, what matters is

trust. If enough people believe

something is worthwhile, then it is worthwhile. Money serves

three functions at the same time. It is a medium

of exchange. It allows you to buy without

having to exchange in kind. It is a

unit of account. It allows you to compare the

value of very different things with each other and

is a store of value. You can save it

today to spend it tomorrow. This last

function is the most fragile because if

confidence in money collapses,

money ceases to be money. That's

exactly what happened in Zimbabwe in

2008. Annual inflation reached 89

sextillion. It

's not a typo. 89

sextillion followed by 21.

They issued 100 trillion

Sinabu dollar bills and that wasn't

enough to buy lunch. The

money existed, the trust did not. And without

trust, money is just paper.

Then the inevitable question arises:

how much money should exist? Little money

and the economy slows down. There is not

enough medium of exchange for

transactions to flow. Too much

money and prices are going up. More money

chasing the same amount of

goods. Equal to inflation. Inflation

is measured using a basket of

representative products: bread, rent,

transportation, services. I keep checking the

price of that basket month after month. That's

the consumer price index.

Who controls how much money exists?

Central banks; each country with its

own currency has one. They do two

fundamental things. First, they control the

amount of money in circulation.

Second, they set the interest rate. The

interest rate is the price of borrowing

money. When the rate goes up,

credit becomes more expensive. Individuals and

businesses are taking out fewer loans. The

economy is cooling down, inflation is falling.

When the rate goes down, credit becomes

cheaper, more money flows, the economy

heats up, but if it goes too far,

inflation returns. That balance is what

central banks try to

maintain all the time. It's a tightrope walk

, a permanent one, and when the economy

really stalls, there's a

more aggressive tool: quantitative easing.

The Central Bank buys

financial assets directly to inject

money into the system. It's the

sophisticated version of printing money with

spreadsheets and suits. But there's

something that almost nobody knows about where

the money really comes from. And when

you understand that, it changes how you view every loan you've ever taken out

. But there is something

that very few people know about money.

Most of the money that exists is not

created by the Central Bank, it is created by your

commercial bank. When the bank gives you

a loan, it doesn't take money out of a

safe, it simply writes a

number into your account. That new number is

new money. Your mortgage is

new money. Your car loan is

new money. Credit card debt

also means new money. This is

called fractional reserve banking.

Banks keep only a

fraction of the deposits they receive in reserve.

The rest they lend. The system works

because not everyone withdraws their money at the

same time, but when they do, it's

called a bank run, and if the panic is

sufficient, the bank collapses. That's why

deposit insurance exists, so you do

n't need to panic, so that

collective fear doesn't destroy the

system. It is a mechanism of

institutional trust, and like any mechanism of

trust, it works as long as people

believe it works.

And how do we measure all this that is

produced, exchanged, lent, and

spent? With the gross domestic product or

GDP. The GDP is the total value of all

final goods and services produced in

a country during a year. [music]

Endings, that word matters.

Flour and bread are not counted separately,

only bread. [music] Otherwise,

you would be counting the same

value twice.

There are three ways to calculate it and all three

should give the same number. Add up the

value produced at each stage of

production, add up all the revenue

generated, or add up everything that was spent.

The spending formula is the most well-known [music]

. Household consumption, more

business investment, more

government spending, more exports, fewer

imports. Every component matters.

If families stop spending, GDP

falls. If companies stop investing,

[music] falls. If the government cuts

spending during a crisis, it

may fall even further. But we must be

careful with GDP. It doesn't measure whether

people are doing well, it doesn't measure inequality, it doesn't

measure whether that growth destroyed

natural resources or whether it was generated by

selling weapons. It measures

economic activity, nothing more. GDP per capita

divided by the number of inhabitants

is somewhat more useful for comparing

living standards between countries, but it is still

a partial picture of

GDP and does not grow in a straight line, it goes up and

down. Those are economic cycles.

When the economy grows strongly, there is a

boom, unemployment falls, companies

invest, and wages rise. When the

economy contracts for two

consecutive quarters, there is a recession. Companies

cut back, unemployment rises,

families spend less, and if the

contraction is deep and prolonged, it is

called a depression.

These cycles are partly natural,

but they are also triggered by something

specific: the relationship between

the economy's total demand and its

total production capacity. If demand

exceeds production capacity,

prices rise. That's inflation. If

supply collapses, but people still

want to buy things, prices

also rise. That's also inflation,

but with less production and more misery.

And if both collapse at the same time,

welcome to stagflation:

high inflation, low or negative growth, and

rising unemployment. It is the worst possible scenario

for any central bank because the

instruments they use to combat one

of those problems exacerbate the others.

Argentina experienced it several times,

Venezuela too. These are not

exotic cases; they are the result of

concrete decisions that any economy can

make if incentives are misaligned.

Now let's talk about governments.

Governments need money. They do not sell

products, nor do they provide services for which they

charge market price. [music]

Then they collect taxes.

Income tax, a portion of your salary;

corporate profits tax,

a portion of what companies earn;

consumption tax, a portion

of what you spend;

property tax, a portion of the value of what you

own; capital tax, a portion

of what you earned by investing. With that

money they finance what the market does not

produce on its own. Defense,

infrastructure, public health,

education, social security.

Those are the things that everyone uses,

but that no one would pay for willingly

if they could avoid it. [music] They are called

public goods. If the government spends

more than it collects, there is a

budget deficit.

If it collects more than it spends, there is a

surplus. It's rare, but it exists. To

cover the deficit, governments

borrow, [music] issue bonds,

documents that say, "Lend me this

money today and I'll pay you back with

interest in the future." If you

ever bought [music] with a government bond, you

lent money to your government. The

accumulation of all those loans over

time is the public debt. The

United States' debt exceeds $34 trillion

. Japan has a debt

equivalent to more than 260% of its GDP.

Norway has almost no debt, but only

because it found oil by accident.

Is public debt bad? Depends.

Debt is reasonable if it is used for

productive investment. A highway that

reduces transportation costs generates

growth for decades. That

justifies going into debt.

Debt becomes a problem when it is

used to finance current spending without

return, when it grows faster than the

economy, and when investors begin

to lose confidence and demand higher rates

to continue lending. At that

point, the debt feeds on itself.

You borrow to pay the interest

on what you already owed, and if the situation gets

out of control, the government

defaults and stops paying. Greece in 2012,

Sri Lanka in 2022, Argentina nine times

in its history. Each default destroys

access to credit for years.

Businesses cannot invest,

real wages fall, and poverty rises. It's

not just a number on a spreadsheet, it's

the standard of living for millions of

people. But sometimes governments

have no choice: a war, a

pandemic, a financial crisis

generated by an asset bubble

built on lies.

At that time, going into debt is not a

political decision. It's the only way to

prevent the entire system from shutting down.

Let's leave the country for a moment. No

country can efficiently produce everything it needs

. So,

countries trade [music] with each other.

Brazil has ideal conditions for

coffee, Germany for cars, and

Japan for electronics.

International trade allows each person to

specialize [in music] in what they do well

and allows everyone to access more things at a lower

cost. When countries trade

freely, prices go down,

variety increases, and technology

spreads faster. But not everyone

earns the same. When a factory

moves to a country with lower costs,

workers in the home country

lose their jobs. That's

structural adjustment, and it hurts. That's why

governments sometimes protect their

local industries with tariffs,

taxes on imported products

that make them more expensive in order to protect

local producers. With quotas,

[music] limits on the amount that

can be imported.

with subsidies, state money, so that

local businesses can compete with

[music] prices they otherwise

could not sustain. Protectionism

protects jobs [music]

in the short term, but in the long

term it raises prices for all

consumers and reduces the efficiency of the

system. The debate between free

trade and protectionism does not have a

definitive answer. It depends on what

you are willing to sacrifice and in

whose favor.

International trade takes place in

different currencies. If Mexico sells

oil to Japan, at some point someone

has to convert pesos to yen or

dollars to yen or some combination thereof.

That happens in the foreign exchange market, where

currencies from all over the world are bought and sold

24 hours a day. The

exchange rate tells you how much of one currency

you need to buy another. That number

is not fixed, it fluctuates constantly.

Free-floating currencies rise

or fall according to supply and demand.

Those that are fixed are anchored to

another currency or a reference by

political decision.

What drives the exchange rate? Almost everything:

interest rates, inflation, the

foreign trade balance,

investor confidence,

wars, scandals,

central bank statements.

If your currency depreciates, your

exports become cheaper

for the rest of the world. That may be

good for your exporters, but

imports become more expensive, and if you import

energy, food, or medicine,

that directly impacts

people's wallets. If your currency appreciates,

the opposite happens. You can buy more from

abroad, but your local products

become expensive for those who want to

buy them from you abroad. And when a country

borrows in dollars and its

local currency collapses, the debt becomes

unpayable overnight.

Mexico in 1994,

Thailand in 1997,

Argentina

almost always. Global trade also

depends on supply chains. A

supply chain is the sequence of

steps that transforms raw materials into

finished products and delivers them to

the consumer. To make a

modern car you need steel from one country,

semiconductors from another, plastics from a

third, design from a fourth, and assembly

in a fifth. It is the most

efficient system ever built for producing

complex things at low cost, and also

the most fragile. In 2021, a single

container ship ran aground in the

Su Channel. It blocked 12% of world trade. It

delayed 400 ships and cost the

global economy approximately

$10 billion per day, one ship,

one canal, a reminder of how thin

the thread is that holds everything together.

Then, in 2020, a

semiconductor shortage caused

used cars to cost more than new ones,

because automakers

couldn't finish new vehicles without

the missing chips. Globalization

is extraordinarily efficient when it

works and extraordinarily

vulnerable when something breaks down. But the

most silent fragility is not in the

ships or the chips, it is in what

happens to the jobs and wages of the

people who depend on them.

Let's talk about work now. Every

day, millions of people exchange

time and effort for money. The

labor market works just like any

other market. There is a supply, people

willing to work at certain

wages. There is demand, [music]

companies willing to hire at

certain salaries. Where they are located,

the price and salary appear. In

theory, if there is high demand for

workers, wages rise. If there is an

excess of workers, they go down. In

practice it's more complicated. Companies

hire as long as the value

a worker generates exceeds their cost. If

you generate $100 of value per hour, you can

receive $30. The rest is profit for the

company. If wages rise

too much, automation will follow.

Not as a threat from the future, but as an

economic decision of the present.

Unemployment takes many forms.

Frictional, [music] you're between

jobs looking for something better.

Structurally, your skills have become

obsolete and the market no longer needs them

. Cyclic. The economy contracted

[music] and there is less work for everyone.

And there is a type of invisible unemployment.

When someone stops looking for work,

statistically they cease to exist as

unemployed. The official rate is down, the

problem isn't. Why do some people earn

so much more than others? Skills,

experience, education, luck, heritage,

and bargaining power.

In the 1960s, the average salary of

a CEO of a large

company was about 20 times the

average salary of its workers.

Today it amounts to 350 times, not because

CEOs have become 17

times more productive in

relative terms, but because

stock options, weak unions, and

the concentration of corporate power have

radically changed the rules of

negotiation. Unions once

balanced that symmetry, but decades

of outsourcing, deregulation, and

systematic pressure have

weakened them.

The result is a labor market where

value is generated by those who work, but

power is held by those who hire. That's

unfair. It depends on who you ask

and from what theoretical framework you look at it.

What is verifiable is that the

wage gap between the top and

bottom of the distribution has grown in almost

all developed countries since the

1980s, and this gap has consequences

that go far beyond wages.

Define who can save, who can

invest, who can buy a house, or

who cannot.

Once you have money, what do you do

with it? You can save it, you can

spend it, or you can try to make it

work.

That's finance.

Financial markets exist to connect those

who have money with those who

need it. Shares are fractions

of a company. Buying a share is

buying a portion of

that business's future profits.

Bonds are loans. The government or a

company asks you for money. He promises to

pay you back with boring

but important interest. Derivatives are

contracts whose value depends on another

asset. They can be used to hedge against

risks or to bet more heavily than

any regulator should

allow. They're useful until they blow

everything up. There is a theory that says that the

price of a stock already incorporates all

available information, making it

impossible to consistently beat the market

.

The efficient market hypothesis is

partly true and partly a convenient excuse

for those who lose money. Most

people do not invest

directly; they do so through

funds, pensions, and banks. Sometimes

good, sometimes [music] like Lemman

Brothers in 2008, which went bankrupt with

$600 billion in assets and

dragged down the global financial system.

The principle of diversification exists

for a reason. Don't concentrate everything in one

place, because when that place fails, it

fails suddenly.

Why are some countries rich and

others not? The manual says to invest in

capital, build factories, trade, and that's it

. Reality says no, because

history matters. The colonies

were not only exploited at the time,

they were systematically stripped of

the institutions that make

an economy function. Clear private property,

predictable legal systems,

infrastructure, [music] education. And

when the colonizers left,

they left broken systems behind. Geography

matters too. A landlocked country

has

structurally higher transportation costs. An area

endemic to malaria has lower

labor productivity simply because

people get sick. Institutions

matter even more. If the

legal system is based on whoever has the most connections winning [in music]

, the investors will leave. If

contracts are not honored, no one invests

long-term and the poverty trap exists

. If you are poor, you cannot

save. If you can't save, you can't

invest. If you can't invest, you don't

grow. If you don't grow, you remain

poor. How do I get out? The answers that

seem to work are education,

[music] property rights,

infrastructure, political stability, and

access to markets. There is no

ideological shortcut, only sustained public policy

[music] over time. What

clearly doesn't work is depending on a

single natural resource, oil,

copper, lithium. Countries that found

a treasure and organized their entire economy

around that treasure. When the

price of a resource falls, the whole country

falls with it. [music] It's called the

resource curse.

Now, let's assume you have all

this information. Do you make better

decisions? Not necessarily, because there is

something that classical economics ignored

for a long time. Humans

are not rational, we are predictably

irrational. Behavioral economics

studies exactly that: how and

why we make decisions that go

against our own interests.

First bias, [music] the

hyperbolic discount. $ today feels better than

$50 in 6 months. Although mathematically

the wait is worthwhile, the brain

prefers the immediate, which is why

most people spend when they should be saving.

Second bias,

loss aversion. Losing $20 is about

twice as much as the joy of winning [music]

$20. That's why

people hold onto

losing investments for too long. They

don't want to accept the loss,

even though it's the rational thing to do.

Third bias, the [music] anchor. If

someone tells you a phone costs

$1,000 and then shows you one for $400,

[music] the $400 one seems like a bargain,

even though it's expensive. The first number

[music] anchors your perception. Fourth, the

herd effect. If everyone is buying something,

you'll want to buy it too. If everyone is

selling, you want to sell.

Financial markets thrive on this [music]

bias. That's why governments,

apps, and savings systems

use nudges.

Default options,

automatic enrollment in retirement plans.

Strategically

designed reminders. They do

n't force you, they just make the

right choice the easiest one. Because if you're

left to choose completely alone with all

the information and without any structure,

most people will choose poorly. [music]

And within what system does all

this take place? There are different answers to that

question depending on the country, the era, and the

political affiliation of the government.

Capitalism organizes the economy

around private property and

free markets. Prices are coordinated.

Competition encourages innovation.

The problem [of music] tends to concentrate

wealth and can generate monopolies that

destroy the very competition that

justifies it.

Socialism proposes

collective ownership [music] of the means of

production and active redistribution, more

equality, but fewer incentives to

innovate and produce more. Communism

takes that to the extreme. Total state ownership

, central planning. On

paper it's equal. In practice,

history shows chronic shortages,

paralyzing bureaucracy, and

eventual collapse. The Soviet Union collapsed.

Forced grain quotas led to

famines. The reality is that no

system exists in its pure form.

Most countries operate with

mixed economies, free markets with

state intervention in

key sectors. Sweden has a

huge welfare system and also

highly competitive private companies.

[music]

China has massive state ownership and

also markets that operate with

capitalist logic. The United States

subsidizes entire sectors, has

social security and public education, and

considers itself capitalist. All

systems are attempts to answer the

same three questions. What do we produce?

How do we produce it? Who gets

what?

No one has answered them perfectly

yet.

So, what did you learn today? That

scarcity is real and that every choice

has an invisible cost. That

markets coordinate millions of

decisions through prices without

anyone having to direct them, but they also don't

care if the result is fair,

that money is trust. And when that

confidence collapses, [music] everything

else collapses, that banks create money

every time they lend. that

central banks try to control how much

money exists and that this balance is

much more fragile than it seems, that

GDP measures economic activity, not

well-being, that cycles are

inevitable and that inflation has

very concrete consequences in

real life, that governments spend,

collect, borrow and sometimes cannot

pay, that global trade

generates wealth and also losers, that

wages reflect

bargaining power as much as productivity,

that the financial system connects the

money of the present with that of the future,

but can implode if no one regulates it, and

that we are much worse at making

decisions than we think.

Understanding this doesn't make you an economist, it makes you

someone who can read what's

happening, who can see when a

government is lying about the numbers, who

can understand why their salary isn't

enough even if they work more, who can

see the difference between what they're told

and what's really happening. And that

has a value that no system

can take away from you. However, there is a part

of this system that affects almost everyone

and that very few saw coming until it

was too late. It has to do with

something you probably thought you would be

able to have someday, a place of your

own. I have a video that explains

exactly when that stopped being

difficult and became

mathematically impossible for

most people. What decisions caused it?

Who benefited? And why did someone

very influential openly describe it

as the model of society that is coming

for everyone? It's on the screen now.

[music]