D (5:21)

Did we lose Mike, can you hear me?

A (5:23)

I lost Mikey. Went totally frozen there. So he's back kind of. We're in the glitch today. Okay. I guess Mike, you got frozen. I don't know if you can hear us. I was just bringing up his gold versus Bitcoin two hot rock versus waning risk on. And Dave, before you jump in, a lot of takes here. So obviously everyone thought gold was topping well now gold looks great again today. And pushing the highs, it changes the narrative. But we have analysts warned gold trade overheated, says capital could rotate to undervalued alternatives including bitcoin. And then a chart that's been going around the top of Gold in 2020 was basically exactly the end of the consolidation of Bitcoin in 2025. It actually does look very much like rent right now. The caveat here though is that you have to believe that gold is topped. I don't know where the consensus that gold has topped has come in, but that seems to be the.

D (6:16)

So I'm going to be, I'm going to be count contrarian here. I don't think gold is topped. I won't think gold is topped until we get two or three weeks of loss of momentum. And what's interesting here is I think that gold is having its moment where the players that used to be able to control the price can no longer control the price. And that is a very big deal. So I was talking with quite literally arguably the best position person on the planet to understand this. He runs market making for one of the largest global market makers on in. And he was telling me about what he found out going to Dubai and going to this conference that was an FX conference.

A (7:00)

Does it rhyme with.

D (7:02)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's been a friend for years and you know, it's like, look, I used to run, I was one of his competitors. I used to run the market making business for two Sigma. But he, he now has expanded beyond equities into a global role. And in the global role he's responsible for providing liquidity to the cfd market. The CFD market stands for contracts for differences. And it has exploded in size to the point where you can trade a contract for difference. Basically is a swap, it's an OTC swap, but it's well, well understood. So you can buy in a REIT from retail firms all around the Middle east, some in mainland Europe, but certainly in Eastern Europe and certainly in Asia retail can get into the market. So when you look at retail from ETFs, that's us. That's not the same thing. We're talking about massive leverage. We're talking about leverage that's actually larger than in the crypto market. Think about that. Now look, volatility adjusted. It used to be, you know, people would accept it. But the fact is you're talking about massive leverage. We're talking about thousands of people queued up to talk about gold and silver buying on leverage. And this is something that has been happening and it's been gaining steam. So if you're going to look at gold as a boomer rock, understand that there are thousands upon thousands of people trading gold like a meme and they're trading it like a meme based on the demisement trade or whatever. And so don't expect it to top as a financial asset until that crowd doesn't think it's hot money anymore. And we it's a tale as old as time. It's like, you know, bitcoin can do what bitcoin has done and will do again as when, when the hot money joins the steady bid. So you've had a steady bid from central banks outside of the G7. We're not talking about the Fed buying gold. We're talking about markets and, and countries that want an alternative to US dollars. To be blunt, it's highly likely that China owns a lot of gold. It highly likely that China behind the scenes is buying bitcoin. But people don't want to talk about it because they don't see it. Whatever they're buying, they, they are looking to it gives them more, the more they own of both things, the more leverage they have and that. So you have to assume they're stupid if you think they're not doing that. And this is all a geopolitical game. But within that backdrop, when you have thousands of people jamming the retail button to buy contract for differences, what the market makers are going to do is they're going to buy futures and they're going to keep pushing the damn thing higher. And that's what you're seeing. And so when that stalls out then that hot money ball and there'll be a lot of it with a lot of profit by the way, to jump back into bitcoin and that becomes a tailwind that could create a face melting rally. Is it likely to happen soon? Actually, I don't think so. If bitcoin rallies from here, it's going to be on the basis of the fact that selling starts to wane. But you know, I just think it's hysterical. You know, I'm gonna make it clear my disdain for crypto influencers. If you're following these crypto influencers, you really have to have your head examined. Most of them, I mean, there are a few and I don't want to name them because it, it will, I'll get all sorts of backlash and they'll.

A (10:17)

Whatever, but name names.

D (10:19)

You know, I am so tired of seeing people one, you know, within two days saying, well, I told you why we should long it here or I told you we should short it. Like there's one influencer who came out and said, I, I'm all in stable coins because this is it, this is the end.

A (10:35)

That was it James Wynn?

D (10:37)

No, not James Wynn.

A (10:39)

Because James had a post.

D (10:41)

Yeah. Then she comes out and says, well, you see, I told you there was going to be a route. I mean, look, I am so tired of these people who delete their old posts that didn't work. You know, they make crazy things and people follow it. Look, bitcoin is still in a distribution phase, full stop. We're still in a trading range, full stop. Markets will do what it's going to, what they're going to do. And you know, it's not going hyperbolically lower. It's not going hyperbolically higher until there's catalysts are seen more likely higher because of the catalysts we've talked about. But understand the hot money is not coming back into bitcoin until it shows a breakout. And until gold stops. Gold's up 3% today. I would expect the hot. There's not any hot money. And you see this, the data is overwhelming. The funding rate on Bitcoin and Ethereum are a third of what was, quote, normal. And so it's just not going to be there. Now that doesn't mean it can't go higher. It doesn't mean it can't trade differently. But this is the world we're living in. If you don't make, if you don't understand that, what's going on, it tells me that, yeah, you know, when I talked about with Mike, I didn't know any of this stuff. This new information, you know, this makes me think that my Gold 5000 this cycle is highly likely because we will see a blow off top of gold. For all we know, it's starting today, you know, with a 3% rally. But when this money chases stuff and the denominator keeps doing what it's doing with them printing money and we're going to talk about liquidity in a second, it's going to have to go somewhere. The last thing I'll mention before I tee James up because James wrote a great piece and he's going to talk about what's going on inside of the Fed and the mechanics. But you have to put on the backdrop of that. And Mike, you didn't mention first brands in your morning meeting but there is a serious problem going.

C (12:30)

They did talk about the auto stuff. So you know, they did a derivative.

D (12:34)

Right. But, but the point is that their private credit is very, very interesting. But when credit spreads break, break out and you start to try to figure out why private credit is trading the way it is and why things are happening, there are some, some stresses in the system. So if you wonder why Powell said what he did, it's because, remember, he does not want to be the cause of the stresses that cause things to break. Yet I think he knows he is the cause. And so mostly because they were, he did the wrong thing. Right. You know, he encouraged the punch bowl and then when you try to take it away, what happens? Anyway, James, you should talk about that. But there are a lot of stresses in the private credit market and if you think you don't care about that, you should because that's why the Fed, and not just the Fed, that's why the Fed and other central banks are injecting liquidity right now and why you're likely to see a very interesting market. You might get a crack up boom over the next six months.

A (13:30)

I just got Pomp's email by the way and the title is Is the Great Rotation from Gold to Bitcoin upon us Just in case anyone was wondering what we're talking about these days. Yeah, go ahead.

C (13:39)

Not yet. A lot of people on Twitter are talking about that. You know, it's not there yet.

D (13:45)

Nope.

C (13:46)

Obviously. Yeah, I mean I think you had a lot of people selling bitcoin to go into gold over the, the last, you know, probably six or eight weeks. But yeah, I mean look, the, we're not, we're not at crisis level in liquidity, but there are Some cracks that are showing. And we, we've talked about these for a long time. And it all started with the reverse repo, you know, back when we printed $5 trillion. And, and two and a half of it, or 2.4 trillion of that ended up in what's called the reverse repo fund, which is basically just a place to park cash if you're, if you're an institution or if you're a money market to, to get a return overnight on your, on your balances with a high amount of liquidity and keep going down. You'll see a chart of it. And so, yeah, right there. So that's a reverse repo bounce. You could see that topped out about 2.4 trillion. And now it's been draining all along the way over the last few years, and now it's down to about 8, $8 billion, which is essentially nothing. It's down, you know, it's, it's been drained. How did they drain it? Well, you know, we're running $2 trillion deficits and so got to find capital somewhere to, to find, to, to buy up Treasuries. So what do we do? We went to the front end of the curve. You know, this is where Yellen, Yellen screwed up big time by not terming out the debt way back when, before the Fed started raising rates. Okay, so what did she do? She turned around and said, okay, well there's a, there's a slush fund over here we can drain. And this is just a reverse repo. It's the bank sitting on massive amounts of cash. I don't know what to do with it, you know, and so they park it in what's called the reverse repo, which is they, they basically just give cash to the Fed and get a Treasury like return. Well, so Yellen figured out, well, we could grab some of that by just making the T bill rates a little bit better than, you know, than the reverse repo rate. And money markets are basically using T bills as cash and they turned around and started buying T bills instead. So, and that was funding, and it has funding government deficits for years. And this is what is inflationary. This is capital going into the market. Just like just this is a capital that's going back in through, you know, via the treasury spending, via the, the, the fiscal deficits. Anyway, so that's gone. So what's important about that? Well, now that that's gone, we're getting to the point where are, do we have ample bank reserves, which is a word that the Fed Likes to use. Powell likes to use it specifically. Do we have ample federal, you know, bank reserves to have enough liquidity in the system that we don't have something break like 2019. We've talked about 2019 before. It's often overlooked. People just ignore it, most likely because we had that massive event right afterwards called Covid. And so. But in the fall of 2019, we had. We had bank stresses that went through the roof, and you had overnight rates jump from, you know, basically 0% to 6, 7, 8% overnight. And. And how did that happen? Well, it happened because you had institutions looking for dollars that couldn't get them. And that happens when you. When your bank reserves are too low. So if you pull that back up, Scott, pull that. Or I. I can share this. I got it easier for you guys to see.

A (17:34)

I got it. I just don't know which.

C (17:36)

Yeah, no, I'll do it. So then you guys can see it easier. You. You see it.

A (17:41)

Go ahead. Yep.

C (17:42)

Okay. So, you know, what happened is you've got the bank reserves. They've drawn down, I think they ticked up over the weekend, but they drew down to under $3 trillion. Why is that significant? Well, it's significant because, you know, the Fed is looking at what is ample in bank reserves. If you look at gdp, this is the kind of their measuring stick, and they said they want to stay somewhere around 10 of GDP as ample, you know, and if it drops below that, it's no longer ample. It may be sufficient, but it may not be. Well, this is what happened in 2019. You can see the bank reserves drawing down, drawing down. What was going on here? We were doing QT. We're doing QT after the massive print of 2008, and that was continuing through. And we were. We were, you know, the Fed was selling bonds off its balance sheet, selling bonds off its balance sheet. And then suddenly we get this. This we have where we get below 10 of GDP, we're down about 7% of GDP. So this blue line is 10 of GDP. This white line is the bank reserves. And so we got below that, and. And it froze up and we turned around and literally overnight, we started doing Q. We started doing QE again. So this is before the stressing of the system. This is where you got the bank reserves below 10%. And then, boom, we get QE. This is before COVID This is the significant part. This is at the end of 2019 that we're doing Q E before we even get to the crazy levels of QE of this, which is what, everybody talks about this $5 trillion, but we were doing QE beforehand. So where are we now? Well, we're back at that spot where we're below 10 GDP. And that's why you're starting to hear Fed officials saying we may or may not have ample reserves right now, which means that QT is effectively done. You know, they're gonna. It's only $25 billion a month right now, but it's still significant enough where it's, you know, a quarter of a trillion dollars a year or more, $300 trillion a year. So that's, that's where, when do we pivot, though? Well, we're, we're looking at things like the SOFA rate minus effective funds. Meaning what's the spread between the, what you, what's effectively libor, what banks lend to each other versus what the Fed Fund's effective rate is, you know, financial institutions lending to each other versus what the banks will lend to each other, basically overnight, unsecured. But this is the sofr. This is, what's so important is this. SOFA rate is a secured overnight financing rate. That's where banks are using their, their Treasuries as collateral to borrow from other banks or other financial institutions. Hedge funds use this. They'll, they'll dump their, you know, their Treasuries overnight. They need some capital to make margin calls or whatever. They'll do that. And this is what they pay, the SOFA rate. Well, it's jumping up over, you know, the Fed funds rate where they should stay pretty much right on top of each other, just within a few basis points. Well, now they're almost 20 basis points, which means that there's beginning to get stressed in the system. Is it, is it DEFCON 1, DEFCON 4? No, it's, it's somewhere around DEFCON 2 where it's like, hey, this is, this is significant enough that you ought to be paying attention to it, because look at how, how noisy it's getting and how it is gravitating up. That effective rate spread is gravitating upward. Have we had something break it? No, no, we haven't. But it literally happened overnight in 2019 that we had stresses in the system that caused this. Well, it was tax payments. It was the need for capital overseas. It was the dollar. It was like, there was a few things. And then it was, of course, the, the Fed or this, excuse me, the treasury coming out with an unexpected need for, for issuing Treasuries and need for more dollars, basically. And so the spreads blew out and that just means that they turn around overnight. They literally turn around overnight and started doing qe. This is what happened that night. That day it went from just about a percent of the overnight repo rate to, you know, about 7%. And it happens so quickly. And that's what we're looking for. We just got to be be aware of that. And that's what the Fed is aware of. So I think they're going to stop QT pretty imminently. When do they pivot to qe? Well, if something like this happens or they just start easing into it somehow with some sort of acronym to avoid something like this and that's what we're looking for when it happens, is it, you know, I mean, again, where, what I hate, what I don't like about Twitter is everybody is on this, this timeline of, of minutes to, to hours of expected outcomes. Like look, I, we, the, the guys, you on the screen here have been doing this for, for like three decades. We've been doing this for so long that a week, two weeks, three months is not like, that's nothing to it. Like that's, that's a normal, you know, timeline for us. Is it going to happen tomorrow? No, I don't think it's imminent, but it could and you just have to be aware of it. That's just something to be aware of. And if you think gold is not sniffing this out, you're not paying attention. Of course gold is sniffing this out. Gold has been and will continue to be a flight to safety asset for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean bitcoin won't be. We saw what happened back in Silicon Valley, bank stresses. We don't know what happens if the market falls apart. Like why did it fall apart? What was the issue? What was the black swan? Well, that's going to determine what bitcoin does. Most likely bitcoin draws down along with everything else. That's the most likely scenario. If we have something like this occur again and you get stresses in the system, but on the back side of it, you're also going to get this and a whole lot more of it than that in on the backside of which means that gold and bitcoin will rip higher off of it. That's just reality because the expansion of the money supply and expansion of liquidity. So that's kind of a top, top line overview of that. Oh, and one other thing. So people are saying that, yeah, but you've got the standing repo facility. You've got the standing repo facility. Let's solve this. It doesn't solve it. It may extend it, it may soften it overnight. You may not have, you may not have this happen overnight, but that could, this could happen gradually over time because it doesn't solve the problem. And you know, I'd love to hear Mike's thoughts on that and all of it because he's, he's been in credit and, and debt for his, you know, the bulk of his career. And this is just kind of what, what I see from my viewpoint.

B (24:58)

Can I piggyback on that one, Scott?

A (25:00)

Please let me bring up your screen.

B (25:02)

Yeah. Let me show a few charts. The key thing is gold's already figured it out. And this is what I show you is this is a ratio of gold versus a 60 month moving average. You know, it's a good measure. 60 months is standard in commodities. It's five years. It's, you know, it's basically two times its 60 month moving average. Compare that to the peak in 19 and 2008. Dave talks about this a lot. From that high was gold popped up to around 1000 and corrected above 30% and the peak in 2011 which lasted for about 10 years. We're way overextended. The big difference is I find so much disconcerting is gold was rallying back then when stock market volatility was going up. This is just a 90 day volatility stock market. When gold peaked the last few times that 90 day volatility first was around 25% and then 2011 it was running 35%. Right now it's 10%. I'm like okay, this is a problem. Have to be very careful. Just the situation is so scary and that's why I have to push back a little bit. I think bitcoin will only go higher with gold as long as the stock market goes up. When volatility is this low in the stock market, I say good luck. So I have to tilt over a little to that bitcoin and gold cross. Now there's no trend in the bitcoin gold cross, at least not for a while. Only a few years. Here I show it's bouncing at 25. Maybe that's going to hold. Hopefully it will. But it's the same chart as that 10 year note yield at 4% right at 399 at the moment. At some point I think it's going to break down. But as a trader you're supposed to buy that. I mean it's just a fact. The key difference is again, 90 day volatility is buried. It's not thing that's ever happened. Last time the bitcoin point coin, the gold cross bottom was when volatile peaked. Right about before. Remember volunteers a lagging measure and I just want to show you key things is sure right right now bitcoin has dropped to its 200 day moving average. As a trader sure you're supposed to buy that, it's supposed to go up. Is it just going to be one little trade? That's it, you're done, go straight back up. That would be wonderful. The thing key thing is I overlay this with the key thing we were looking for earlier. Just that VIX had popped above 20. This same time Bitcoin dropped to its 200 day moving average. I still think bitcoin is going to get to the hundred thousand dollar level but right now everything's fine. 200 day moving average is higher. Bitcoin's drop VIX has peaked. VIX is just hovering at 20. And I just want to show you one key thing that's changed this year. This is Gold ETF Holdings. They're up 18%. That's in ounces. So it's not distorted by price. Got to be very careful when things are distorted by price. And one thing that's really shifted, this is just the measure of gold divided by its S&P 500. It's popped up to the highest since 2013. So to me this is a macro big shift. I just want to end with one thing. Everything is fine for bitcoin and cryptos currencies as long as that stock market stays strong, stays elevated, volatility stays very low. And that's where I point out it's just very risky. You just don't want to be getting long risk assets which cryptos are with the stock market volatility slow this time of year. So that's why I'm just worried and I'm worried about all assets, even gold. You don't want to be an overweight. Long goal here and I point out what Dave points out the reasons but I always get to the point where there's always reasons. Be careful digging in and just as a astute, rational risk manager, money manager, you just don't want to be overweight gold here, let the, let the you know the pylon trade happen and back off a little particularly if you've been overweight.

D (28:13)

So can I show, can I show a couple screens? Scott?

A (28:17)

Awesome. I love this.

D (28:18)

Hold on. Share screen. Let's start with this. This is world money supply. So when gold made Its last peak at 2000, it was one third the amount of money sloshing around the system there is now. So you can do math without denominators, but you'll be wrong. You know, it's high school. Not even high school. We're talking middle school math. So if in fact gold as a representation of global monetary aggregates got too far ahead of itself when it hit 2000 and 2011, that means that just very simple math says we should be north of 5,000 towards 6,000.

C (29:00)

And I would add to that, Dave, I would add to that is that it's not just global monetary, it's global leverage.

D (29:07)

Okay, hold on. Go to the second chart. Where are we? Nope, that doesn't work. Stop. Okay, let's go back to this. Okay, share screen. And the second one, is that working? Did that one work? No, that did not work. Why did that not work?

C (29:31)

This share screen, we're relying on Dave's technical ability.

D (29:35)

Starting to get. Why is that? Oh, do. Do you guys see that? Nope, I see it.

A (29:41)

Here, I got you. Yeah.

D (29:42)

Yep, there it is.

A (29:43)

There you go.

D (29:43)

Okay, so now we look at total US Debt. By the way, if you do this globally, it's actually worse. And you look at the trend here, there. Not just government, you know, we're talking about total indebtedness is now household debt included. Yeah, household, government, both types of corporations. You know, in this sort of a back when people talk about why is it pushing on a string, this is what's going on. And that's why the money, which is, by the way, a lot of it is coming from debt. So you talk about leverage in the system, it's there. These are the two things that you need to take into account. You need to understand that when you value an asset, so if you're selling anything, you're selling it with the expectation that if. And you're going to cash with the expectation that your money, you know, they're going to be printing 8 to 10% more of it. And so you know that even if you're getting 5% yield, you're actually probably going to be a negative yield vis a vis some rational financial benchmark. Weirdly, it's set up that if, in fact every financial asset performed just kind of bang on, and of course that would never happen. That's an average that that's sort of the same thing that the actuarial assumptions underneath pension funds are because that's how much money we're printing and what James is telling you and what this is telling you. Is they're going to likely need to print more. Right. So it is a. It is non trivial. Right. And so where everybody says yeah but.

C (31:06)

$38 trillion of US debt, who cares? I'm gonna pay it back anyways. Who cares. Well you gotta, you're still, you're still feeding the engine.

D (31:14)

You've. You're.

C (31:15)

It's not just the debt. It's the deficits that you're running and we're not solving that. We're not solving with tariffs, we're not solving with those. It's not solving it. You know, you're going to continue to run 2 trillion dollar plus deficits and.

D (31:28)

No, we'll see what this government shut down.

C (31:31)

What's that?

D (31:32)

I said we'll see what the government shutdown end is. My guess is you'll get some token increase in spending promised to be, you know, in terms of medical care. Look, our medical care system is a joke, right. I wouldn't even call medically our health care provide provision system is a joke in this country. Yeah. By far the worst in the world in the sense of we pay double per capita for similar care. Right. You know and, and there's all sorts of reasons for it, but it's mostly lobbyists have given the insurance companies everything they want and so we'll get there. I don't want to go into that in detail but what, what does matter is here we have something that's really crazy. Dave is more of a gold bull than Mike which now talk about the way but I am. But it, it's an intermediate term. I'm just saying the fair price.

C (32:19)

We're liquidity. We're liquidity bulls. I mean I'm, I'm a bull on liquidity. Like it is not stopping.

A (32:25)

But liquidity bull also implies stocks, Bitcoin, gold. Literally. It's another everything rally, right?

D (32:30)

Well yes, but, but stocks will be have to be tethered to earnings. So unless you believe that then don't go there. Now personally, the GDP stuff and what this administration is doing vis a vis regulation does seem to be working in the sense of. Yeah, your everything rally can happen. You know, Mike talked about seasonality. I mean you know this, this expiration, you know we're, we're done with it, right? You know we'll be done with it on Friday. If we don't, if we don't have a crash between now and next Monday, it ain't happening.

A (33:04)

James Wynn said that there would be a black Monday today. Dave.

D (33:09)

Well, I mean James win and we're.

A (33:11)

Here I, I never respond to basically anyone on Twitter who says stupid things, but that guy I had, I was like, do you know you're calling for the Dow to be down 25% on Monday? Like, do you even know what Black Monday is? It's.

D (33:25)

I'm literally in the process of writing my 1987 crash chapter in my book, which will, will, will be coming out at some point in the not so distant future, hopefully. We, we haven't, we've submitted the proposal to publishers, but what people need to understand is for a crash like that to happen in the U.S. the, the kindling of portfolio insurance isn't really there. It could happen, obviously, if in fact there was a major financial seizure. But that was a unique set of circumstances. And the day that there were no.

C (33:59)

Breakers either, it was just like I.

D (34:01)

I go through all of that. That's right. And trust me, I helped design the circuit breakers. So, you know, I, I understand what's going on. Look, if you call for more black swans every year, it's gonna be like the boy who cried wolf. The next black swan will happen when nobody's calling for it. It's not that it won't happen, because it will. As sure as day follows night, there will be financial crises. Right? We kind of know that. And in this world it will be magnified. But yeah, the people who call for it that way, it's just, they're just engagement farming and they're hoping to be right so they can then be famous for the rest of their lives. Right. It's, it's, it's, it makes me crazy. But the reason that, that I'm more bullish on gold and don't think we've gotten to is that hot ball of money doesn't generally stop until it literally stops. I mean, you go two or three weeks at least of gold not moving, that's when that, that money will dissipate and that'll be a short term top. Now, am I saying that it will necessarily carry through to over 5,000? I don't know. I thought eth would get to 5,000 in the last bull run. The tom Lee engineered one. It didn't quite get there. I got the 4900. Okay. So I don't know where gold's gonna go. I just know that we haven't seen the scenario when you can get a 3% rally on a Monday. It's not there yet. Doesn't mean this isn't the blow off top. It just means we're not there yet. That's really the point. And as far as as bitcoin needs the stock market, I'd say in some respects the stock market needs bitcoin. Bitcoin's been leading, but bitcoin has something the stock market doesn't have. Bitcoin still has a lot of people who've made a lot of fiat money that can change their lives from, you know, 2010, 15 years ago. Yeah, there's some people holding Nvidia who might be able to say that, but not many people had the balls to buy Nvidia when it was that much lower and not have sold along the way. Because most people in the stock market take profits along the way. Most bitcoiners didn't. So if you don't understand that dynamic and why bitcoin can be range bound for longer than you expect. And by the way, it's been range bound really all year in a sense, but certainly in this really tight range. Now we're going on three and a half months. Right. So you need to look at the human nature going on here. At some point we're done. And when this fiscal year is over from people, I think that it sets the stage for something very interesting. But what Mike's saying I don't disagree with is the notion that the everything rally or the everything boom. Right. Because it really is about the denominator. It really is about liquidity. Bitcoin, even though its hash rate, its network looks like adoption has gotten to a critical escape velocity. Bitcoin's price does not indicate that yet. It will at some point, but it hasn't yet. That's the next step function. So we call that a face melting rally. Call it whatever the hell you want, but bitcoin at critical massive adoption as a store of value is at a much higher price than here. Bitcoin's network looks like it's already getting there. And so as to use Mike's commentary, when the, when the price shows us, that's when we'll know it's there. Right? It's, it's show us the beef. Will it be there? Look, I think it's going to get there. That's the difference between he and I. But it hasn't yet. Anyone who looks at the bitcoin rally relative to, you know, to, you know, the denominator, it really hasn't done a whole lot, you know, and, and that's actually very bullish if you think about it. Unless you think it's going to fail, which I don't. I see James is nodding. Come On Mike, I was gonna say I gotta teed you up there. Come on. You did.

B (37:35)

And we tee each other up. So I think the key thing to point out is gold is among four precious metals and they're all.

D (37:46)

Yeah, so.

B (37:47)

But I don't, I don't want to be a nauseam repeat that. We get it. And they're all only going up because gold's gone up. And gold, as we pointed out, is just at levels as I as a disciplined money Andrew says no, if you've been overweight long, you're supposed to.

D (37:58)

But Mike, could you do us all a favor and because I dispute your premise here, show us a chart of gold, silver, platinum, and you can put in palladium. It makes you happy. Gold has massively outperformed platinum because platinum is not viewed as, as money. So please don't say they're all going up together. Gold is way outperformed platinum. It's crazy. I mean, when we were younger, when I bought my wife her platinum diamond ring, the diamond is worth less because of lad diamonds. Platinum was double the price of gold.

B (38:29)

So gold's the best performing commodity this year, is platinum. And in May or June it reached the lowest price versus gold ever. And our data is only like 40 years. So my point is all the precious metals are going up on the back of gold and gold's leading everything. So maybe you misunderstood what I said and they're catching up. But the bottom line is they're all going up a lot more than your average cryptocurrencies. Again, there's unlimited supply of those and we know there's millions of them in bitcoin. Was one in 2009. There's 25 million people are remembering that. And also you have to understand it's. You're missing the correlations. Gold historically has zero correlation to the stock market. Obviously everything's correlated now. But we have to reiterate. The point is we have a year right now with the S&P 500. Total return is 15%. Amen. But Bitcoin's up about the same. And Bloomberg Galaxy crypto index is up less than that. Look, to think of the year, if we end up only 5% in the air, everything's ready to trickle down. I mean, crude oil is ready to get hammered. Copper is just waiting, I think, to get hit if the sovereign goes down. We're so dependent on the stock market. I completely agree with you. Maybe the stock market's dependent on bitcoin now. It's just that's. I've Written about that for months and seeing in Norton Burn might have shifted to bitcoin. And bitcoin is starting to fail. So sure it bumped. It's now what if the S&P 500 drops to its 200 day moving average that bitcoin just did. Can't do it now. It's too late in the year. But that's about 6,000, maybe a little above it, maybe 6,100. There's the problem. And so yeah, I'm not predicting crashes, but I just, when I see stuff like this, there's some things that just say if you've made money this year, you're supposed to just get out and look at treasuries and that, look at that long bond. It's just starting to take off. It's up like on the year now. It's up almost 8%. Yeah, I've been wrong in that one forever. But just a little tick down and a little more volatility pick up in the stock market, a little tick down in prices and that's where everything is going to go. I think that's what golds tell me again. It's also the key point is there's always reasons, there's always nuances. Dave, you dig into the weeds. I just pick back and say when I see markets is stretched, do the right thing and don't get overweight. Gold at these levels. I'm not supposed to give investment advice, but I also can say you can always buy treasuries.

A (40:35)

Dave, the conversation, the point that you just made about gold versus all the other metals is exactly the point that anyone who understands the crypto market would make about bitcoin and everything else. One of them is money and it's wildly outperformed the rest of them.

D (40:50)

Here's the chart. You want to, you want to allow it. Scott? Yep. Okay, so platinum purple line, way over gold. You know, there's that one little, little blip down in, you know, in the financial crisis. Look what's happened since. If you correlate this to money supply, you can see it. I mean this is gold monetary value. The monetary premium of gold in one chart for, you know, for, you know, this is if you did monetary premium for dummies, if you had one of those yellow and black books, it would be this, this is the monetary premium of gold. And by the way, it has more room to run. So if you want to understand why, when we us bitcoiners talk about bitcoin eating into the monetary premium of gold, what the percentage of price Is just look at this chart. This isn't platinum keeping up with with gold. This is gold's monetary premium showing out. And by the way, I think it's rational that this is, that this is case. I mean this is not an irrational chart. But I mean gold is now triple virtually platinum's price. It platinum, it used to be half, that's 6x move in my lifetime. Six times. It hasn't changed in the earth's crust. I promise you, if anything asteroid mining of gold is more likely than platinum.

A (42:04)

How much gold did they just find in China? Was I. There was a story over the weekend that the they found a humongous.

C (42:10)

Was it really confirmed or was it China just trying to get the money?

A (42:13)

There was a theoretical story from.

D (42:15)

Yeah, we don't know. But the point is this chart. That is the monetary premium of gold in one chart. And Mike, you know, I don't want to argue, you know, about facts. We want to argue about reasons. And if you ask yourself why is that happening? It's because gold is seen by many people throughout the world as an alternative to fiat money, full stop. It used to be, but you know, they trusted it. But the stresses that have been happening in the system, starting with the GFC and continuing through to today that James keeps talking about, everyone keeps talking about is why it is rational. But you can't look at that chart and say that gold isn't separate from other precious metals. Now I will make the argument. You will see a very similar chart from bitcoin versus crypto. As a crypto aggregate, you will see a very similar chart to a lot of them over the next 10 years. Now does that make me a bitcoin maxi? No. I think there is a lot of value in certain crypto assets, but I think most of them are worthless, worthless, literally worthless. And we all know that. I love the bitcoin fartcoin ratio and I love the fact that Fartcoin is below $0.40 when it was last time bitcoin was at. It was over a dollar when bitcoin first got to these levels. So the market is gently, slowly healing here. Does that mean that if we get a face melting rally in bitcoin that fart coin and all this other crap won't go up? Of course it will. People will do what they do. But you know, it's at a certain point you hope that the mouse who's in the maze, you know, will eventually learn that, that if you want to pick an asset, make sure you have some understanding of the value of that asset. Right. And, and so we, we all are in agreement. So I'm, I can't get, I can't tee you up on that. You know, you like to mention there's 21 million competitors, whatever there, there are arguably there are 15 to 20 assets that likely and, and are likely will be demonstrated value out of 200 or so.

A (44:16)

But none of them are competitors.

D (44:18)

No, they're not competitors.

A (44:19)

What you made about gold and all other metals, Bitcoin is money and the rest are some kind of tech stock sort of.

D (44:25)

So as long as we continue to print fiat bitcoin ceiling goes higher, the global GDP and what you can get on chain or move on chain is there and, and is, is, is where you're looking now. My big problem with a lot of crypto is that many of them are self defeating. I mean XRP being the most obvious self defeating one because if you have an asset which you claim people are going to need to own the asset to use a network and they're going to want to use that network and your basis for them using the network is that it's cheap, then obviously if the token goes much hot too high, the network won't become usable and people will stop using it. It's exactly the same reason that Mike talks about with oil and copper, right? It's, it's different in terms of mining and the type of elasticity, but the price elasticity of a lot of these things are very, very strong. If in fact that's the reason you want to use it. That's not true with all, but it's certainly true with xrp, it's certainly true with others. And so you have to ask yourself the question, well, why do I own this asset? Who's going to want to buy it? I mean you look at bnb, it's the exact opposite bnb. The stronger binance gets, the more in utility and the more they burn, the higher the price goes of owning that asset. Now does that necessarily mean it's going to massively outperform again? Well, I don't know. It's had a pretty strong run. Trees don't grow to the sky, but you have to look at the use cases.

A (45:49)

But we are seeing a period here in the altcoin market where liquidity does generally seem to be flowing with the few things that can argue some sort of utility or actual value. I can't say it will last. But clearly the meme craze has died and things like BNB and Solana and such have had large moves because they're actually being used or actually have a purpose. Well, I mean, that's a generally good trend.

C (46:14)

Utility.

D (46:15)

Sure, utility is a good trend. Look, I, I don't own very many crypto assets. I, I own basically, you know.

A (46:22)

Did you sell all your xrp?

D (46:24)

No, I have, I still have a tail in position. I'm waiting for the trade because I think it, it. I think there's a trading rally here to play. So, you know, people will think I'm.

A (46:32)

Making fun of xrp. Dave and I had a conversation on crypto and crypto Town hall last, last week where he was upset about the news that they were buying the token back and intended.

D (46:42)

Yeah, I basically want to sell my position when they do buy the token back because that'll be the next. That's the trade. Right? You know, but whatever, it's a small trade, it's not that big of a deal. But it is important. Mike is right on one thing. Not on necessarily the numbers and not necessarily Doge, because there's arguments on Doge that it actually has a real blockchain, etc, but until as long as people are willing to put money into memes that don't even have, have any path to the coin ever denoting value to the holder, the market's not healthy. And it is some it. And when I say healthy, I mean, if you look, where did Amazon's real gains happen? Amazon's real gains happened after all the pretenders got washed out. I think the same thing is going to be true in crypto. And so it is when you get, when it's part of the broader financial system that will naturally happen. We're living it. It's a slow, slow thing. This is not a trading advice. I'm not giving trading advice now. But if I'm an investor and I want to hack, I'll have a portfolio that I can effectively ignore for the next five to 10 years. I don't want to own anything that has what I call the musical chairs. Right when the music stops, it goes kerflunk. And we know that it could and so understand what that means. And so that's where we agree. And look, you have to look at the denominator. That's the other big thing here. So whether it's gold or bitcoin or silver, I mean, look, I personally think silver will probably go to the low of the range versus gold. And the gold silver ratio that you're seeing 60 is perfectly reasonable and gold higher. That means that gold creates a much higher silver price. But does anyone really expect silver to catch up to gold in terms of where it is in the earth. In the earth, it's 15 to 1. We haven't been there until there was no monetary premium in gold. I just got through telling you that gold is, is rallying because of its monetary premium. Don't expect that to collapse. So there are. So all these people talk about silver shortages and cornering the market and all of that. I mean, anything is possible, but if you invest based off of that, specifically on leverage, you're likely to get your head handed to you. All you have to do is look at this morning. I mean, hell, you know, it's, it's. Right now gold is up 2.96 and silver is up 2.29%. If you believe beta was stable, silver should be up 6% when gold is up 3%. But it isn't.

C (49:08)

And there's another good reason for that. I just shared this screen here, Scott. I mean, let's, let's face it. The, you know, we have, this has been delayed. The CPI has been delayed. What you're looking at here is the CPI and you've got the core services and you've got the core goods, you know, inflation. But what we're looking at here is the, this is the white line. This is the core CPI reading. This is expected to just continue higher here at 3.1%. Okay, so inflation's not stopping and the world is figuring this out in real time, that this is not stopping and we're going to continue to stoke the flames of inflation. That's just reality. This is not so, this is what people need to understand. Even though we're not getting this, we were supposed to get this, what, 10 days ago, Mike, something like that. We're now getting it this week. Even though there's a government shutdown, it's delayed. How, how strong this number is, I don't know. But this is, this is a really important factor into everything we're talking about. Along with, yeah, the denominator just continues to go higher. This is what's driving the denominator. Inflation is, is kind of a. Reflecting the expansion of liquidity and money supply. This is like an indication of what's going on. And this is, it's important, important to realize that this is continuing, it's not going to stop. And gold has figured this out and meaning central banks don't want the, the. I, I don't know. I, I think, Dave, you said this at the beginning of the show, is that central banks don't want to hold dollars. Well, they really don't want to hold Treasuries because you know, they need dollars eventually to, to do trade, most of them and because the dollar is the global reserve currency. But they're using gold in lieu of Treasuries because of this. Because they don't want to be holding something that's, that's a negative real yield and that's, that's the real crux of all of it. And this goes back to Mike's, Mike's assertion that he thinks rates on the 10 year and the 20 year and 30 year coming down. And I, you know, yeah, they could short term, but long term, I, I think we, you know, the, the, the you have, you have what we've been talking about, the vigilante, the bond vigilantes have. They're, they're standing there and they're refusing to, to accept lower rates from. Because they want rate premiums to pay for the likely expansion of liquidity, money supply and continued relentless perpetual structural inflation.

A (51:53)

I asked Mike really quickly, I asked Mike on Friday when we did our live show. I said how can we be getting deflation, which is his base case if we obviously see inflation ticking up? James, sort of the chart that you showed. But Mike made an interesting point. He said we just saw the inflation.

D (52:09)

So I'm curious what you guys think of this. If you look at that chart and you see the effect of technology creating, you know, which is suppressing goods inflation, obviously tariffs will increase goods inflation. And we understand that. The thesis that I have heard from people, they believe from a consumer inflation point of view, and this is unbelievably bad socially. I just, I'm not going to argue this, I'm not saying this is a good thing. But what if AI does to services inflation, you know, to what, what it did, what technology with goods inflation. Now obviously it can't do it for a lot. I mean you're not going to get AI really helping, you know, making, bringing the cost of plumbing or painting down. But you are for in terms of consulting and tax advice and legal advice and you know, medical advice creates a.

C (52:58)

Major problem for the Treasury.

D (53:00)

So then you have the situation where all inflation is continuing to be channeled into assets as opposed to, which is creating a far larger wealth effect. You know, wealth, you know, stock market.

C (53:13)

Goes higher, housing market goes higher.

B (53:16)

Exactly.

D (53:16)

Yeah, right. And you get more people in. It will be self correcting, but it's self correcting the way we don't want. You get things like the next mayor of New York Likely to be somebody who, if he had as much power as people think he does, or would, I mean, if he had the power to do and actually implement the policies that he wants to do. You know, we need to call in Snake Plissken because you're going to put a wall around New York because that could be that bad. But the truth is you won't have that much power. So it won't be nearly as bad as people are saying, not saying that it's a good thing, not, not at all. But that's the kind of thing that happens in a world where you keep pumping up asset prices and making it hard for wage earners to get out of the cycle.

C (53:57)

Separation of emerging markets and we are becoming one.

D (54:01)

It create, it creates a economic feudal system. And I'm not a fan of it. I mean, obviously, you know, if you're holding these assets, you're going to do well, but if you're investing, you need to understand that that is, that's the current course. And so there's a lot going on here. But it, it's once again the only way out is through. And they need to pump up GDP and do this. And we've said this a million times. I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're certainly going to try. I mean, all the protesters this past weekend, none of them understand this. And if you're out there yelling about it, you know, you know, they're yelling about the personality of the person at the top. And frankly I, I'm sympathetic to that. But I'm not sympathetic to arguing that we want to go the other way and get an equally absurd personality who wants to turn us into a socialist nirvana. You know, because it isn't nirvana. I mean, Mike, your whole thesis is that we're a self correcting system and we're not going to go that way. Right.

B (54:56)

Well, I appreciate you mentioning the protest because it's a virtual guarantee. We all know at midterms you always shift back from the party in power. It's a virtual guarantee. If things don't change exponentially, there'll be a major shift away from the Republicans majority in the House. So that's just a matter of time. It's just going to be a year away. It's almost guaranteed. But I want to tilt over to and show a few charts and point out we've had the biggest pump in history. We've had the biggest liquidity pump in history. The average home residential real estate in this country is running around $60 trillion, that's up 57% since 2020. Never been that much. Stock market cap, the GDP got as high as 72 trillion right around there. It's up about the same amount since 2020. It's never been at that level. But when you talk about money, supply, liquidity, anything, there's only one thing that matters. Let's talk about the 10. Everything is a past, present measure of this is it. This is the Warren Buffett model. You take this, take the S&P 500, divide by GDP, add a couple zeros, it's the highest ever. That's great. Okay, good luck. What do you want to do at that level? Okay, I look for gold and I overlay that with just the minor period in history we've had the bitcoin to gold ratio. We've never had bitcoin go down like this with just a little bit of backup in the stock market versus gdp. Okay, wonderful, great. Maybe we'll get through that period then. I point out the volatility thing, but I also want to point out thing you mentioned the Gold Silver Cross. I wrote about it last year. Last week. If you want to buy a dip, Gold Silver Cross is a place you should buy. It just drop below 80 and it's been supported there for over a year. So it got a little bit below one thing that always happens with Gold Silver Cross. It almost always peaks when volatility peaks. This is the Vix. This is just a 200 day moving average of the Vix. And the key thing is right now the Vix is a bull flag. It's a bull flag bull market at the moment. And right now we're above the Vix 200 day moving average. 19.4 red 20. Gotta can't hope that goes low. And I just want to tilt over to one key thing that was prevalent, I think when we had this correction. This was a story from Coin Grape just pointing out how we we've had this discussion a little bit. The tide went out a little bit in crypto markets. Yeah, we missed stops and everything. But overall the market just declined a little bit based on the stock market going down 3% one day. And we found out what who's wearing clothes. So here's the narrative I want to change. You can see the headline. Trump emerges as $870 million Bitcoin whale amid historic Crypto market meltdown. Key thing, there's a bunch of headlines. But here's the thing that's changed in the past. Some of us who got really bullish bitcoin when it was five thousand and ten thousand and twenty thousand and it was widely hated and I got was the questions Mike, tell me about this space and people make Mr. Trump hated it was you were pushing against the system. You had something different. It wasn't anybody else's liability and traded completely outside the system. Now if you're buying any cryptos or bitcoin, not only you dependent on the Trump administration, you're supporting the Trump administration. It's completely shifted and I think if we just get a little more ticks down, if we get that microstrategy stay below the 200 day movement average which it already has, Bitcoin needs to tick near that 200 day moving averages. The dominoes can tumble.

D (58:07)

I think that people who invest because they're, they're against Trump are going to be the same ones who are saying five years from now why am I so much poorer and why did I do that? Why did I do this? Why was I such a. To you know, use it when whenever you let emotion and things that are non investment related get into your, into your investment strategy, it does not go well and I don't care. There are multiple examples of this throughout time. ESG being probably the most obvious one. When's the last time you heard those words? There's a reason for it, right?

A (58:37)

Pivoted to btc.

D (58:38)

Yeah. Well, not just that because, because people were getting smoked. I mean, you know, social and justice and all these sorts of comments. Basically all you're doing is just take is you're paying money for it and if it makes you feel good to lose money by being on the other side of it, it's fine.

B (58:56)

I mean losing money this year when gold's up this much and Treasuries. And Treasuries are outperforming a lot of things certainly risk adjusted. You're missing the point. You're jumping on the lamb's case. Look at me, I made money doing this. Be careful with that. You remember that in 1999. You remember that in 2007. And that's my point about cryptos is this is a place when gold's telling you be careful, just stick with your.

D (59:20)

Treasuries and don't lose money telling you the denominator. That's what gold is telling.

B (59:24)

Gold is the denominator for everything. Yes.

D (59:26)

And in that world. We'll see. We will see. I mean, you know we've talked about this ad nauseam but I do think it's, it is important to look at the. What's Going on fiscally and monetarily. And I don't see any way out that gets us back to dances toward a balanced budget beyond hyper economic growth.

A (59:47)

Listen, we're going to grow our way out of this. The biggest pivot from Doge is saying we're going to print our way out of this. And you don't have to believe Trump or Besant or any of these people. You can think that politically they're lying to you. The one thing I definitely believe them on is that they care deeply about the stock market going up. And we'll push every button and pull every lever possible to make that happen. And we watched the last administration do the same. All the times that we were supposed to get this guaranteed recession. All we got was slight pullbacks, recessions being illegal and prices going up. I don't know if they can keep that going forever. But I definitely find it very dangerous to try to call an immediate top every single time markets look peaked because we know exactly what they're going to try. So you're literally betting against the United States government failing at the thing that they view as their number one mandate in my opinion to think that we're going to go right now into a bear market. But Mike, as I've said to you many times, when it comes, I don't know when it's going to be just the most horrendous drawdown we've ever seen.

D (60:53)

Well, it'll be, it'll be a crack up boom.

B (60:55)

You know, there's different ways to look at it. My key point is I had many as I love this quote from you, Spidey senses last year this was getting way extreme and pointed out that the relative value of gold and treasuries and that whole portfolio, that outlook has done nothing but do well. Why should I push back on it so far except that gold just got too expensive. That's a good problem. Let's get through this next three months, two and a half months would be wonderful if that stock market can stay strong. But if it doesn't, gold's telling you the domos are ready to tumble. Crude oil is telling you there's a problem and crypto is a problem.

A (61:26)

I mean Mike, the best bet is that one day after midterms we go into a deep depression. I don't have to ever worry about re election again. Right. Give it, give it one more year of crack up boom and then we can start, start to really talk about it. We've talked about it endlessly though. The amount of ways they can find to keep things propped up has just blown my mind over the past few years and I'm not ready to bet against their success, even if I think.

C (61:53)

It'S I just can't wait to to learn what the new acronym is. I'm excited to see it.

A (62:01)

Any guesses? No. The new acronym is tds. Sorry, that's. That's all we got for you guys. Macro Monday. Literally my favorite of the hour of the week every week. James, I don't know if you're going to be in Vegas next week, but I'm going to be there interviewing Sailor on Monday at.

C (62:19)

Yeah, let's hook up.

A (62:20)

Let's hook up for sure. But I will be here at this show 6am right alongside you. I'm going to be on the 6am train for macro Monday next week. Mike, Dave, thank you guys so much. We'll see you all next week again for another Macro Monday. Thanks. Gentlemen. Are you looking to earn up to 9% APY on your cash backed by real cash flow assets or want to secure a crypto backed loan at 8.91 interest rate with the Figure Markets app you can do both all in one mobile app. They've released the first ever real world asset borrow lend pool called Democratized Prime. It allows you to earn up to 9% by lending your money against real world assets like home equity lines of credit known as HELOCs which only banks were able to do prior. Lend like a bank and get more than what others are offering to you on your stables. Big Year is also the largest non bank mortgage lender in the the US with over $17 billion unlocked on their lending platform. Access loans starting at 8.91% interest rate, the lowest fixed interest rate in the industry at 50% LTV all with decentralized custody which allows you to see a segregated personal bitcoin wallet with your bitcoin in it on chain. Download the Figure markets app today with my personal link figuremarkets co scottmelker and start earning 9% on your idle cash or take out a bitcoin backed loan at industry low rate.