Brent Johnson and John Butler have been arguing about the dollar for years, mostly in private. Now they do it once a week, on camera and in writing.
TransAtlantic TakeAway takes one question — a market, a policy, a geopolitical break — and puts it under real pressure from two people who have done their own work and reached different conclusions. It is not a long-form interview. It is not a host nodding along. It is an argument, conducted between friends who intend to stay friends.
The mission, in their words: to make participating in hard arguments while remaining open to changing one’s mind respectable again.
What arrives in your inbox
Each week, the argument distilled — both cases stated at their strongest, the point where the two of them genuinely part company, and the question left open. Not a transcript. Ten minutes of reading in place of forty of watching, on your own schedule.
The TakeAway
After the debate, each of them goes away and records separately, without hearing the other: what he learned, what he would change his mind about, and what he would actually do about it.
No scoreboard. No verdict. Nobody is declared the winner. Markets hand everyone a hot streak right before the turn, and a running tally would only crown whoever got lucky most recently.
Who is arguing
Brent Johnson runs Santiago Capital, where he manages money for private clients, and is the author of the Dollar Milkshake Theory — one of the most argued-over frameworks in macro. He spent more than a decade on Wall Street at DLJ and Credit Suisse before going independent. He reads markets through power as much as economics, and his starting point is that the map is no longer fixed.
John Butler was a managing director at Lehman Brothers and at Deutsche Bank before the Austrian School reshaped how he reads the world. He is the author of The Golden Revolution. His starting point is the US current account deficit — the one imbalance, he argues, that rules them all.
Gene Morris produces, and is the third point of the triangle: London, San Juan, and the middle of America.
What it costs
Nothing, for now. Every post is free. If a paid tier arrives later, the debate stays free and the written TakeAways — what each of them would actually do — go behind it.
Subscribe, and the next one lands on Sunday.
