Marieke Flament is a two-time CEO, financial-infrastructure operator, FTSE 100 Non-Executive Director, and co-founder of Currency of Power, a publication and advisory platform she launched with Nicolas Colin on geoeconomics, stablecoins, and the future of money. She brings an unusual blend of hands-on experience building the new financial rails, board-level perspective, and long-standing engagement with China: she studied and lived in China, has returned recently, and has remained a continuous student of the country’s economy, technology, financial system, and role in the global order. Marieke was an early executive at Circle, serving as Managing Director for Europe and Chief Marketing Officer from late 2015 to 2019, including through the launch of USDC. She later served as CEO of Mettle, NatWest Group’s digital bank for SMEs, and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, where she helped scale a frontier blockchain protocol and its ecosystem from roughly 50,000 to more than 14 million monthly active users. Today, she sits on the boards of IG Group, N26, and Qivalis—the European euro-stablecoin initiative backed by 37 banks—and is a senior adviser to MKS PAMP’s digital-gold initiative, DGLD. A frequent speaker on global stages, she writes and speaks about the intersection of money, technology, geopolitics, tokenisation, AI, and the changing international financial system. Nicolas Colin has spent more than 15 years watching the current paradigm shift from inside the machine—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as co-founder and director of a London-based investment firm during peak Silicon Valley optimism. This unusual path shaped his evolving perspective. In 2013, he was captivated by software eating the world. By 2019, he questioned whether manufacturing still mattered (spoiler: it does). By 2023, he declared “the door is closing on startups.” Today, he sees we’ve entered technological maturity—where strategy matters more than innovation, where manufacturing eats software, and where China builds tomorrow’s infrastructure while the West clings to yesterday’s playbook. Living and working across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, and Munich 🇩🇪 revealed Europe’s predicament: it abandoned manufacturing without capturing tech, leaving it stranded between paradigms. Watching China 🇨🇳 firsthand showed him where real transformation happens—not in apps, but where software embeds in atoms. His framework—Late-Cycle Investment Theory—emerged from these observations and draws heavily on Carlota Perez’s work on technological revolutions. He shares this evolving analysis in Drift Signal and recently launched Currency of Power with Marieke Flament to track the emergence of a new global monetary order. Today he oversees a portfolio of investments across three continents—a vantage point that reinforces daily how late-cycle dynamics reshape value creation. He serves on several boards where these same dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. Apart from his newsletter, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted, and Politico Europe. From Europe, he tracks patterns most miss: why innovation no longer protects, how institutions fragment under technological pressure, where the next revolution emerges. After 250+ editions of Drift Signal, he is more convinced than ever that understanding where we are in the cycle changes everything.
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Episode 497
Marieke Flament & Nicolas Colin
The Great Financial Reset Has Begun | Marieke Flament & Nicolas Colin
Marieke Flament is a two-time CEO, financial-infrastructure operator, FTSE 100 Non-Executive Director, and co-founder of Currency of Power, a publication and advisory platform she launched with Nicolas Colin on geoeconomics, stablecoins, and the future of money. She brings an unusual blend of hands-on experience building the new financial rails, board-level perspective, and long-standing engagement with China: she studied and lived in China, has returned recently, and has remained a continuous student of the country’s economy, technology, financial system, and role in the global order. Marieke was an early executive at Circle, serving as Managing Director for Europe and Chief Marketing Officer from late 2015 to 2019, including through the launch of USDC. She later served as CEO of Mettle, NatWest Group’s digital bank for SMEs, and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, where she helped scale a frontier blockchain protocol and its ecosystem from roughly 50,000 to more than 14 million monthly active users. Today, she sits on the boards of IG Group, N26, and Qivalis—the European euro-stablecoin initiative backed by 37 banks—and is a senior adviser to MKS PAMP’s digital-gold initiative, DGLD. A frequent speaker on global stages, she writes and speaks about the intersection of money, technology, geopolitics, tokenisation, AI, and the changing international financial system. Nicolas Colin has spent more than 15 years watching the current paradigm shift from inside the machine—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as co-founder and director of a London-based investment firm during peak Silicon Valley optimism. This unusual path shaped his evolving perspective. In 2013, he was captivated by software eating the world. By 2019, he questioned whether manufacturing still mattered (spoiler: it does). By 2023, he declared “the door is closing on startups.” Today, he sees we’ve entered technological maturity—where strategy matters more than innovation, where manufacturing eats software, and where China builds tomorrow’s infrastructure while the West clings to yesterday’s playbook. Living and working across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, and Munich 🇩🇪 revealed Europe’s predicament: it abandoned manufacturing without capturing tech, leaving it stranded between paradigms. Watching China 🇨🇳 firsthand showed him where real transformation happens—not in apps, but where software embeds in atoms. His framework—Late-Cycle Investment Theory—emerged from these observations and draws heavily on Carlota Perez’s work on technological revolutions. He shares this evolving analysis in Drift Signal and recently launched Currency of Power with Marieke Flament to track the emergence of a new global monetary order. Today he oversees a portfolio of investments across three continents—a vantage point that reinforces daily how late-cycle dynamics reshape value creation. He serves on several boards where these same dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. Apart from his newsletter, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted, and Politico Europe. From Europe, he tracks patterns most miss: why innovation no longer protects, how institutions fragment under technological pressure, where the next revolution emerges. After 250+ editions of Drift Signal, he is more convinced than ever that understanding where we are in the cycle changes everything.
In Episode 497 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Marieke Flament and Nicolas Colin, co-authors of the Currency of Power newsletter, about why the global financial system may be on the cusp of a structural transformation comparable to the Nixon Shock and the collapse of Bretton Woods, the central role of dollar-backed stablecoins and programmable money in that shift, what China’s construction of parallel financial rails means for the future of dollar dominance, and how machine-to-machine commerce and the commodification of compute could reshape the monetary order in ways most policymakers and investors have yet to appreciate.
The first hour covers why Flament and Colin believe we are living through the initial phase of a “Great Financial Reset” and the parallels they draw between the present era and the 1970s and early 1980s, when a convergence of geopolitical shocks, financial innovations, and technological revolutions transformed the global economy and capital markets in ways that would have been otherwise unimaginable. They discuss how the maturation of the digital economy is creating conditions for new waves of financial innovation and why dollar-backed stablecoins and programmable money sit at the center of that transformation.
The second hour turns to what has made Flament and Colin more cautious about the pace of dollar-denominated stablecoin adoption, including China’s decade-long effort to build insulated financial rails and the diminishment of American soft power under the Trump administration. They discuss the dynamics of capital repatriation in Japan and Europe, the prospects for financial repression and capital controls, and the potential for the US military to be used as leverage in negotiations between Tokyo and Washington.
The episode closes with a discussion of machine-to-machine commerce and the emerging agentic economy—why existing financial infrastructure is poorly suited for AI agents, how stablecoins could become the default payment layer for autonomous systems, and what that means for dollar dominance in a world where compute replaces oil as the most important economic commodity.
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Marieke Flament is a two-time CEO, financial-infrastructure operator, FTSE 100 Non-Executive Director, and co-founder of Currency of Power, a publication and advisory platform she launched with Nicolas Colin on geoeconomics, stablecoins, and the future of money. She brings an unusual blend of hands-on experience building the new financial rails, board-level perspective, and long-standing engagement with China: she studied and lived in China, has returned recently, and has remained a continuous student of the country’s economy, technology, financial system, and role in the global order.
Marieke was an early executive at Circle, serving as Managing Director for Europe and Chief Marketing Officer from late 2015 to 2019, including through the launch of USDC. She later served as CEO of Mettle, NatWest Group’s digital bank for SMEs, and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, where she helped scale a frontier blockchain protocol and its ecosystem from roughly 50,000 to more than 14 million monthly active users.
Today, she sits on the boards of IG Group, N26, and Qivalis—the European euro-stablecoin initiative backed by 37 banks—and is a senior adviser to MKS PAMP’s digital-gold initiative, DGLD. A frequent speaker on global stages, she writes and speaks about the intersection of money, technology, geopolitics, tokenisation, AI, and the changing international financial system.
Nicolas Colin has spent more than 15 years watching the current paradigm shift from inside the machine—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as co-founder and director of a London-based investment firm during peak Silicon Valley optimism.
This unusual path shaped his evolving perspective. In 2013, he was captivated by software eating the world. By 2019, he questioned whether manufacturing still mattered (spoiler: it does). By 2023, he declared “the door is closing on startups.” Today, he sees we’ve entered technological maturity—where strategy matters more than innovation, where manufacturing eats software, and where China builds tomorrow’s infrastructure while the West clings to yesterday’s playbook.
Living and working across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, and Munich 🇩🇪 revealed Europe’s predicament: it abandoned manufacturing without capturing tech, leaving it stranded between paradigms. Watching China 🇨🇳 firsthand showed him where real transformation happens—not in apps, but where software embeds in atoms.
Today he oversees a portfolio of investments across three continents—a vantage point that reinforces daily how late-cycle dynamics reshape value creation. He serves on several boards where these same dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. Apart from his newsletter, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted, and Politico Europe.
From Europe, he tracks patterns most miss: why innovation no longer protects, how institutions fragment under technological pressure, where the next revolution emerges. After 250+ editions of Drift Signal, he is more convinced than ever that understanding where we are in the cycle changes everything.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
