← Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
News Block: Trump Floats $2,000 Tariff Dividend, 50-Year Mortgage Proposal, JPMorgan Predicts $170k Bitcoin, Strategy Launches $STRE
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Welcome to the Coinstories news block, powered exclusively by LEDN. I'm Natalie Brunel, and in about 10 minutes or less, I'll provide you with insightful updates on bitcoin, financial markets and the global economy. Everything you need to know in one block. Let's go.
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Bitcoin is rebounding. After another week of sell pressure, it briefly dipped below $100,000 before bouncing back above 106,000. But price chop aside, there are plenty of reasons to be bullish right now. Let's look at sentiment. Some of the loudest Bitcoin bears now frame 75K as their doomsday scenario. Think about that. 75K is the new worst case in a lot of people's minds. For years, bitcoiners joked we'd see headlines about bitcoin crashing to $100,000. And here we are. The Crypto Fear and greed index is flashing extreme fear. And bitcoin is still in the six figures. This is what bitcoin winning looks like. Moments like this are when you need to return to first principles. Ask yourself, has Bitcoin's value proposition changed? Are governments and central banks going to stop printing money? Is bitcoin still the scarcest hard asset on earth? The answers, of course, are no, no, and yes. Lately, we've seen plenty of signs that the Fed and the government are pivoting from more restrictive policies to more accommodative ones. In other words, they're preparing to provide more liquidity to markets. Last week, we noted that a majority of central banks around the world are already cutting rates. And the Fed announced it will end its quantitative tightening program at the end of the month. Now, this week brought another development that hints at where things are heading. First, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that He's considering a $2,000 dividend to most Americans funded by tariff revenues. Now, like many of you, my mind immediately went to the stimulus checks during the pandemic, which proved to be highly inflationary. After all, what's more inflationary than depositing cash directly into most Americans bank accounts? That money eventually gets spent into the economy, pushing up prices for goods and services. Years ago, Lynn Alden wrote a masterpiece called Banks, QE and Money Printing, breaking down what truly constitutes as money printing. She wrote, quote, we have division of fiscal and monetary powers, and only when the powers combine, like in the 1940s and again in 2020, where the treasury runs massive deficits and those treasury notes are accumulated by the Fed and banking system, does it become outright money printing. So today, the Fed is ending qt, which historically points to QE or something like it, resuming at some point. The question isn't if, but when. At the same time, the government continues to run multi trillion dollar fiscal deficits just as Trump floats another version of stimmy checks to nearly every American. This is the fiscal and monetary combination Lyn was referring to, meaning that it looks like the money printer is about to turn on again. We'll see how it plays out, but it's not hard to see where the puck is going. As the Fed and fiscal authorities add liquidity to the system, broad money supply should rise and with it, asset prices. To understand what might happen next, look no further than the last round of stimulus. If someone took that $1200 check and bought Bitcoin, it would now be worth More than $18,600. If Trump and his team follow through with this tariff dividend, this is exactly the kind of environment where where Bitcoin tends to thrive. Need cash, but don't want to sell your Bitcoin? LEDN is the global leader in Bitcoin backed loans, issuing over $9 billion in loans since 2018, and they were the first to offer proof of reserves. With Leden, you get custody loans, no credit checks, no monthly payments and more. Visit Leden IO Natalie to learn more and get a quarter percentage point off your first loan. The second development showing how authorities are scrambling to keep the DEB based financial system afloat came from Bill Pulte, the US Director of federal housing, who said they're working on offering Americans 50 year mortgages to make housing, quote unquote, more affordable. As money has flooded the system since 2020, real estate prices have soared. As a result, housing affordability has reached historically low levels. The majority of Americans, especially young Americans, simply can't afford to own a home now. Proponents of the 50 year mortgage argue that longer loan terms lower monthly payments and help more people qualify homeownership amid high interest rates and persistent inflation. But critics counter this by arguing that a it barely lowers monthly payments, b nearly doubles the amount the bank will ultimately receive, and c that it will only push home prices higher as cheaper monthly payments allow buyers to take on more debt. When you dig into the numbers, a 50 year mortgage doesn't fix the problem at all. In reality, it only offers borrowers a temporary illusion of relief because over the long term they end up paying much more in interest. Let's run the numbers. On a $400,000 house, a 50 year loan at 6% cuts the monthly payment by only $300 versus a 30 year mortgage. But by the end of the loan, the borrower pays about $400,000 more in interest. So the end result is not really more affordable housing. It's a lifetime of debt servitude. The question to ask here is why are they proposing 50 year mortgages at all? The real solution to restore affordability would be to let home prices fall fall, AKA deflation. But in a highly levered debt based system where housing is the core of household net worth, broad price declines would trigger crisis. They simply can't let this happen. As my friend Jeff Booth often notes, deflation is incompatible with a system that requires ongoing inflation to stay afloat. So the result? More debt and more debasement. By proposing innovative mortgage solutions like this, leaders are showing their cards. They cannot let asset prices fall without crashing the system. So they'll do whatever it takes to prevent this from happening, including debase the currency and extend household debt from 30 years to 50 years and maybe one day 100. With that macro backdrop in mind, short term price moves are just noise. Morgan Housel author of the Psychology of Money, an amazing book that was published by the same house as my upcoming book Bitcoin Is for Everyone put it perfectly when he said, quote, during the last 100 years there have been more 10% market pullbacks than Christmases. Everyone knows Christmas will come. Think of volatility the same way. Price corrections are normal, expect them and just like Christmas morning, view them as a gift. Because Bitcoin's long term value proposition remains as compelling as ever. All right, let's close with more evidence that Bitcoin's fundamentals keep improving despite recent price action. One corner of the ecosystem that's been absolutely thriving in is mining. Bitcoin miners have been major beneficiaries of the AI boom thanks to their power access and scalable infrastructure. A big pillar of the Trump administration's goals is a weaker dollar to reshore manufacturing and rebuild American industry. So owners of hard assets, energy production and tech infrastructure are likely to outperform treasury bondholders. In fact, few sectors are better positioned to benefit from this than energy and data infrastructure, the backbone of both AI and Bitcoin. As AI models devour exponentially more computational power, the US will need vast new data centers and cheap, reliable energy. Bitcoin miners who have spent years monetizing stranded or surplus energy and building high density compute are set to play a meaningful role in this build out. A example is Iron's recent $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft, which will lease part of its data center capacity for AI workloads, a clear sign of the convergence between high performance computing and energy markets and digital assets. The future will favor those holding neutral reserve assets and real goods bitcoin energy and hard infrastructure over paper claims like US Treasuries. Meanwhile, on the institutional side, recent SEC filings show that JP Morgan increased its holdings of Ibit Blackrock's Spot Bitcoin ETF by 64% since last quarter, signaling continued private client demand. They now have more than $300 million of IBIT on behalf of clients and and this past week JP Morgan analysts projected Bitcoin could reach $170,000 per coin over the next six to 12 months based on volatility adjusted comparisons to gold. This sentiment was shared by Fidelity's Director of Global Macro who has been on Coin stories, Urian Timmer, who recently suggested that after gold's latest outperformance, Bitcoin may start to pick up the slack here. Speaking of Fidelity, after two and a half years of offering Bitcoin exposure, it just enabled spot Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals for self custody directly from platform. This is a big step for anyone who wants to hold Bitcoin in a sovereign way. And let's not forget about the Bitcoin treasury companies, of course, strategy continues to buy Bitcoin and innovate. Last week it launched its first euro denominated perpetual preferred equity offering called Stream. The IPO was a huge success. It was upsized from 350 million Euro to 620 million Euro on strong investor demand. Also Strive launched its own Perpetual Preferred SATA, which was upsized on demand and raised $160 million. SATA offers a 12% monthly dividend with investor protections if a payment is missed. All of this underscores a simple point. Builders are not worried about Bitcoin's drawdowns. Companies keep launching Bitcoin products and services, expanding access for investors of every size. When the money printer flips fully back on, Bitcoin will be more accessible than ever before. The orange lifeboat is getting larger for anyone looking to preserve wealth against currency debasement and the policies driving. If that doesn't make you bullish, I don't know what will. All right, don't forget to join us next week, November 18th for the official launch of Bitcoin Is for Everyone. We're going to be having a public gathering at PubKey in New York City. I hope to see you there.
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That's it for the newsblock, your weekly Bitcoin and economic news update. Powered exclusively by ledn. I'm Natalie Brunel. Make sure you're subscribed to Coinstory so you never miss an episode. This show is for educational purposes and should not be construed as investment advice. Until next time, keep stacking.