← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:01]
A
Bitcoin ETFs bleed $630 million in one single day. That is the worst day in three months. We love to track these inflows and outflows as if they're actually what's driving the market. Spoiler. They're not. But either way, what may be driving some of the market is sentiment around the Clarity act, which is getting marked up today at 10:30am Eastern stand standard Time. I'm going to talk about all this and more with the one, the only, the magnificent mark us. Let's go.
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B
Let's do.
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A
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Cloud City. Those are trees. Those are trees. Sorry. Mark, you are magnificent. As almost as magnificent as my landscape,
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B
almost as magnificent as the backdrop. I appreciate the, the magnificent level, although I am, I am no longer the one and only. Although it doesn't have the same last name, but there is another mark. My newest grandbaby, Mark Hennebry Madden. His last name is Madden.
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A
Congrats. When? Today? Yesterday? When?
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B
Oh, no, no, no. A few months ago. But I just had that on my desk and the one and only, I'm like, you know, now I'm. Now I'm not now I'm actually not even the most important mark in my family in Chapel Hill.
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A
So, yeah, I'm the only Scott. And I'm still not even remotely the most important somehow in my family. Today is my son's birthday, though. He's seven. So I was wondering if you had a baby birthday.
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B
My birthday was last Saturday, so Taureans rule.
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A
Happy birthday, Taureans.
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B
I have my platinum birthday, Scott. I turn 63. Born in 63. So, you know, you have the golden birthday where if you have your birthday on the day of your birthday, that's your golden birthday. Well, I made it platinum, so congratulations.
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A
Big day. Also a big day in the Senate. You know, we're getting the markup of the old Yield Clarity act here, 10:30am I don't know if you saw this, by the way. So they obviously, they announced, I GUESS it was 12:01am Tuesday. They came out with the language, 390 pages, the last nine of which were a housing bill. But we. 309 pages. The last nine were. But we won't talk about that. So then the senators get 24 hours to file amendments, you know, like what's going to be discussed.
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B
Generous of 24 to read, you know, so many pages.
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A
Elizabeth Warren hits on with 40 individual amendments. 24 hours. So either she's the fastest reader and thinker on the planet or I'm just going to throw it out there. My conspiracy is that the banks wrote these 40 in advance for her and she threw them out there. But shocking, they now have to sit there today and vote on every single one of those individually. Can you imagine how bad you want to fight her if you're sitting in that room and being tortured with the vote and discussion of 40amendments? There were a hundred total, 40 of them were hers.
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B
Yeah, no, look, the process has always been broken. It's, it's always, you know, the bills are written by the lobbyists that run the certain industries that they're trying to protect and like the name of the bill is antithetical to what the bill is. So you know, if you want to talk, if you call it the Patriot act, it has nothing to do with patriotism. If you call it the Inflation Reduction act, it has nothing to do with inflation producing inflation. Clarity. It's the most obtuse, obscure, obfuscated thing. And let's call it what it is, right? This is a bank protection bill and Ms. Warren is the pawn of the banks. So yeah, it's. And I guess the thing that bothers me most about it is its a tack on to the genius act which was not very genius but the genius act basically said all right if you don't back your stablecoin with dollars then we won't acknowledge you and you can't really do business. Well why would they do that? Well no one else is buying dollars. In fact, dollars have become the lowest weighting in central bank coffers in the last 50 years. And people aren't buying our debt because China's selling our debt to buy gold because they want the renminbi to be gold backed. And so oh, we have this new, new thing that we can use to buy our debt which is unsustainable and why money supply growth is 17% and why ultimately what we're going to end up talking about is why bitcoin is going to continue to rise in value. I won't say go up in price because the price of bitcoin never changes. Right? One bitcoin is one bitcoin. What changes is the number of dollars we need to buy it just like everything else we buy in our life. I'm sure you have gone out to eat lately and you get the bill and you're like I didn't eat that much food. In fact I saw a funny meme about that. The woman said man, I am getting strong in my old age. I can now lift $100 of groceries with one hand.
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A
I, I went on a rant yesterday about Wash being, you know, obviously named Fed chair to the governor and then chairman yesterday, and how I, in a million years and for all the Estee Lauder money he has behind him, would never want that job. Can you imagine right now what he's walking into? I mean, CPI is hot, PI is hot. That's 39 trillion. We got 1.27, I think now in debt service a year and he has one guy telling him to cut and make it worse, which they need to do to reduce the debt. And now you got a 30% chance they're going to hike. And he's, I mean, it's the worst job in the world. He's just going to get bullied and he can't be right. There's a, it's a.
- [06:08]
B
No, no, it is the worst job in the world. And it's kind of sad because he, as much as I think he'll probably end up going down as one of the worst Fed chairs just because of the situation he's in, he's actually maybe the most qualified Fed chair we've had in a while. Now, what's funny about that is none of the chairs of the Fed have really been qualified and earned the position. Right? They are political appointees and they serve a purpose of the independent, you know, administration at the time. But this one's different. Like he's coming from a different path of coordination and control and he's part of a larger group of people that really, you know, run the government while Trump is just, you know, a showman. But I, I do struggle with all of the challenge that he, to your point, is up against. If you look at the economic activity, right, Leading economic indicators and all of those things. Oh, shoot, I don't know how to stop.
- [07:21]
A
Little Mark is calling.
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B
Yeah, no, actually, you know what that is. I joke that usually when I start going down one of my rants, like someone calls the black hats to come get me. And I was actually on a show years ago with one of the other people, I can't remember who was, and I was talking really deeply about the things that led up to SPX happening. Like, you know, most people don't know that it was Robert Maxwell's money through Jeffrey Epstein that set up ftx and that there was this whole network of lies that was concocted to basically launder money. And literally my lights went out, went black and people were texting me, like, did they come get you? Like, so I won't go down that path quickly.
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A
We have the best comment here that I just happened to say it was, it was a margin call.
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B
Ah,
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A
you've been liquidated.
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B
I'll never get a margin. We are going to talk about margin calls I never get because I don't use debt. Because you've, you've ranted about this like, why would anyone buy an 80 Vol asset with leverage? It doesn't make sense. If you want to avoid getting margin calls, then don't do that. Now you want to borrow against STRC or something and lever it up one time, that's fine. There's basically no volume but borrowing against stocks. And so I saw in the comment when you announced that I was coming on this morning, some people said, hey, I'll be there. Another person said, no, I sold all my Bitcoin and I'm going to buy it back in the summer under 50. And I almost replied, well, no, no, you're not, because we're not. But here's the thing. I don't claim to have any particular knowledge, but here's the thing. We are in crypto winter, we're about halfway through. I think it ends in September, October. But I actually am willing to say that absent an unraveling of margin, which I'll come back to in a second, we have seen the bottom, that, that 63 print and the 59 touch intraday was the bottom. Now, why do I, why do I say it? Well, if you look at the Metcalfe Law value, Tim Peterson has this great model that kind of tells us the value of the Bitcoin blockchain network. And that was starting to dip sub 80,000 because of a bunch of factors. Part of it was the shutdown of the hash rate, part of it was the war and uncertainty. Long story short, it got there and we got pretty well below it at 60. And so if that kept going down, the impetus for investors. Remember, investors are my favorite one of the four participants in markets. There are investors, there are traders, there are speculators and hedgers and there are gamblers. The problem is the gamblers cause the pain because they lever up and then they get the margin calls. That's happening in the traditional markets right now. Right. We've got these parabolic moves like literally almost going back in time in semiconductors and chips. And we've got valuations that make no sense. And we've got the highest level of margin debt in history as a percentage. It's not the highest, but it is in terms of total dollars. So the only Thing to me that could take us to a new low so that this guy could actually buy under 50, which I feel bad for him. I don't think it's going to happen. I should have said flip it. I mean, I don't think it's going to happen is if we don't get a peace plan, which I think we're going to get one sometime. Not until, you know, Trump puts on some calls. If we don't get that and this skirmish takes a funky turn, whatever that turn is, and if the disruption in the oil markets and the fertilizer markets and the helium market suddenly gets so acute that the GDP numbers, remember in Q4 when they promised us we were going to have 5% GDP because we're going to have this productivity miracle because
- [11:57]
A
we're going to grow our way right out of that baby.
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B
We're going to grow it right. And the first estimate was 5%. And then. No, I'm sorry, not the first estimate. The GDP now was 5%. But then the first estimate came in at like 3.4. Like, oh, it's close. Yeah, 3.4 is close. And then the second estimate came in at like 1.7 and then the final estimate came in at like 1.4. So we were sub 2% again last year. Shocking, I know, but nominal GDP growth is working age population growth plus productivity. Working age population growth is sub 1% is going to be sub 1% for the next 20 years and there's nothing we can do about it. And productivity is sub 1%. And AI doesn't improve productivity. The way we measure productivity, it may make you faster cleaning up your inbox. Like that woman at Meta who said, hey, fix my email and said, I'm going to delete your inbox. No, don't do that. I'm going to do it anyway. So you could fix it that way. But all of this says we're not going to grow our way out. And so if, if GDP starts to tank because of the disruption in global oil and particularly helium, and we get like the lockdown, knock on supply chain effects that could trigger a market drop. And if we get a market drop and an unwinding of leverage in stocks, Bitcoin will fall. Not because bitcoin should fall, but because when you get a margin call, you don't get to sell what just fell. Like, you know, people who own the trade desk and I don't even know what the trade desk does actually, but the trade desk, right, it went down 40% yesterday. So if it's down 40%. And you owe somebody money. You can't sell that asset to pay you. So you have to sell what didn't go down. Gold, bonds, cash, bitcoin. And so that's what happens. Remember 2020, we had that big, you know, what was it? March 11th or March 12th, I think.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Black Thursday, March 12th drop. And, you know, Bitcoin went down 45% in 12 hours. Not because bitcoin was bad. And that was a great buying opportunity, by the way.
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A
Obviously my favorite story, but. Yeah, go ahead.
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B
No, go ahead.
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A
No, I was gonna say my. It was my favorite story because, like, days before that, I put stink bids at 4,000. You know, it was at 6,000.
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B
I remember this.
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A
And I woke up and it was 6,000. Because it happened in 12 hours and I hadn't checked price. It took me like four hours to realize I had bought Bitcoin at 50% discount to the current price or whatever. You know, I do remember 50%. Right. I bought it four and it had bounced back to six, and I didn't even know it for hours.
- [14:47]
B
I know that's the only thing I can see that would take BTC off of its track. Like, you know, I didn't wear my roller coaster socks today, but I, you know. You know, I wear bitcoin socks every day. I get them from my friends at Mount Socks. I love that name, by the way. It's like one of the greatest names in the company ever. But Mount Socks sends me this, you know, a bunch of socks on, and I have these roller coaster ones, and I wear them pretty frequently because, you know, we. And the. Exactly. It's. It's the. Yeah. And. But part of the roller coaster ride, remember, is when you lock in the track and you go up the hill. We're kind of in that right now. And I'm not saying we're going up forever and we will have more whoop dee doos. But I. I do think the relentless money printing, and it's not so much the US. The US money supply is growing 8ish percent. Great. That's an 8% tailwind to Bitcoin. Gold, platinum, whatever. But where the real growth has happened is China. China's growing their money supply at 17%. And, you know, people don't really appreciate the impact of global monetary surges. I mean, they do in the sense that they see things getting more expensive. We've all seen the pictures of. There was the 711 out in California with gas. 7 11, right. $7.11 for a gallon of gas. A buddy of mine is in Italy. I guess everyone's in Italy. In fact, I'm going to Italy for my 40th anniversary. But he's in Lake Como and he said he paid $10 equivalent for a gallon of gas the other day, so. Or petrol, I guess, but you do see it that way. But it's, it's that boiling a frog thing. It's slow and steady and you don't really feel it until you realize you really can't afford anything. The craziest part of it is what it does to income and wealth inequality. Which is partly why Ms. Warren is on the take of the banksters. Right? The Banksters really like $300 million a day of free money. Think about that. That's a lot of money to make for doing nothing. Like literally, people deposit their money. They, they give it to the bank. The bank says, okay, thank you, it's my money now and I'll give you a token of appreciation. 50 basis points, 75 basis points. And then I'm going to lend it out. I'm going to rehypothecate it at 5, 6, 7%. Those NIMs, those net interest margins are about as high as they've ever been. And that is a great business.
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A
And then loan it again, and then loan it again and then load it again.
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B
And load it again. Yeah, nine times. Yeah, exactly. And look, I'm actually not. I love fractional reserve banking. I know people hate it when I say that. I actually do. I think fractional reserve banking created the prosperity that we all love. I say, I say it all the time. Name a country with no fractional reserve banking system that you would live in. I'll wait. Right. Can't do it. So I, I think that the problem is the stablecoin companies are like, well, we could actually pay yield on depositors and we could still make a nice spread. We can make a maybe 2% spread or, and we'll pay people 4 or 5% and are held to the. No. So I get it now. I think the one thing that's disappointed me most, and this actually is pretty disappointing, you know, I used to think, and I shouldn't name names, but I will. I just think Brian Armstrong was, was a champion of us. Right. I thought he was fighting the good fight to try to get stablecoins to pay, to pay yield. And it turns out he's right there.
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A
He can hear you.
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B
I know, but he's, he's not. He, he likes being told that he has to have high net interest margins. So I don't have to pay my depositors anything. So I'm kind of saddened by that because I do like and admire, and we made a lot of money investing in Coinbase early on, and so I have a lot of respect for what he's built, but I don't like selling
- [19:34]
A
out, especially though he's the one who's fighting for yield in theory, but it's also fighting for Coinbase's ability to keep their customers getting their yield, which I get that. And it's also actually, I mean, if you look under the hood and listen, he has a fiduciary duty. He's a CEO of a publicly traded company. Right. He has to do what's best for his shareholders.
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B
Yes.
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A
Coinbase is in a very unique place, just looking at it from the outside in, where they're kind of the only ones who can do it right now.
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B
Right.
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A
Actually, you'd think that they wouldn't want this bill at all, because then the banks can't do anything. The banks can't do anything. The other companies aren't really doing it, and Coinbase can just keep, you know, kind of owning the, the yield thing. So it's interesting that.
- [20:12]
B
And it's possible, it's possible. Brian's playing 3D chess and he's, he's just looking nefarious to, to. To end up being the innocent one. Maybe, but I. Look, I. Regulation, regulatory capture has never been for us, for the people. It's just not right. It's for the few. And again, it is. Why? If you look at the number of regulations since 1900 and you look at the number of lobbyists, both are straight lines up. And the other thing that's straight line up is income inequality and wealth inequality. So we have the largest gap between the haves and the have nots in history. And look, 2020 was the largest transfer of wealth from the masses to the rich in history. Trillions and trillions of dollars engineered by a fake scamdemic. Right. But this new set of IPOs is going to be worse. Oh, my God, this. I'm so worried about this valuation of AI companies that aren't intelligent in any way, shape or form. I mean, they're good tools, but they're not intelligent. And we're not on the brink of AGI. And, and it's, it's very disconcerting to see how much money is going to be transferred from the poor to the rich. Scott. It's going to be, again, trillions of dollars.
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A
I think that. So that That's a huge part of it, poor to rich. But I also wonder the just effects on the market because where does that money come from to buy those IPOs? I feel like it's everybody's going to sell every other Mag 7 stock and everything else they have to FOMO into it. It's going to be the top.
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B
Oh yeah, I'm well full disclosure to that point. I don't manage this account, I have somebody manage it for me because I don't really have time and compliance doesn't like when I trade. So I have a financial advisor and literally we were talking yesterday, he is selling calls for me on Tesla because not because I am anti elon. I've been wrong on Tesla for a long time. But the point here is that you're going to have to sell something to buy SpaceX and how much elon risk do you want now maybe I'm wrong, maybe they'll sell some of the other mag7s or they'll merge or they'll merge one company. Well remember we're going to put know we're going to put a roadster on Mars. The problem is we don't have roadsters. That's a problem. How long have we been promised a roadster? 10 years, 11 years? I mean it's a long time. Semis, robo taxis. We've been promised a lot of stuff that we don't have and yet the stock just relentlessly climbs and look, it's a 400 times earnings stock. So people say oh this bubble's not as bad as 2000. Cisco was 286. You had to pay $286 for a dollar of earnings. Tesla 413. I'm gonna argue that's worse. I mean in my math class 413 is higher than 286.
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A
I mean every stat you see supports that the market should have topped long ago. But markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain.
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B
That's why you don't borrow and that's why you don't leverage and that's why I didn't get a margin call because I'm not crazy enough to even though I believe it strongly that we are on the verge. Look, I'm old enough to remember getting the letter at my desk in March of 20 of, of 2000 from Julian Robertson saying I'm shutting down the fund. I don't understand anymore this. I used to think I knew how to invest and so I'm just, I'm giving you all the money back and you Know the funny part of that story is it was at the time the largest position in UNC's portfolio. Mostly just because of appreciation. I mean he was an incredible manager, but he was having a bad year, right? US Airways was down and all the value stuff was down and, and he was short, you know, some of the Internet go go names. So he was down in the low 20s, right? With the market up, I remember was like maybe mid teens. And he's like, I'm done, I'm out. And we had the option because we were super tight with them to stay in the kind of stub. It was kind of, he kind of turned into a family office. He said if you guys want, you can stay in because I actually think this is going to be really good. And like Julian, I will follow you into battle every time. And by the end of the year, the S And P, because 2000 wasn't the worst year, we ended up down like 11% and then we were down like 14, 15 and 01 and the bad year was really 02 when the debt blew up, we were down 20 something. So it was a 50 plus percent peak to trough. But 2000 wasn't horrible. But we ended up in our stub of Tiger up 54% by the end of December in 2000. And you know, Tiger Global and a bunch of others were. I mean it was, it was glorious.
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A
The best thing, by the way of the guy who you said was going to buy below 50 is the part nobody talks about, which is that even if you're wrong and the bottom's not in and it goes there, he's not going to buy it because he's going to want to buy it at 30 when it hits 50.
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B
And that's true.
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A
I'm not buying this thing. It's dropping like a stone.
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B
Like a stone. It's just like people who say, oh, if I could have bought it at 3 cents, you know, like all the OG, I'd be so rich. I'm like, well no, because most people would have sold when it went to a dollar. I mean think about that, three cents to a dollar. You're like, oh my God, I'm a genius. And there's lots, I mean there's the post all the time of hey, I bought it a dollar and it's dollar eight and I'm out. Even that is an amazing return the idea mentally. And look, you and I, we were there not at the beginning, like not at 2009, but at a point where the idea of 80,100 because the Metcalf value now is 130,000. That was my point earlier. Tim's model has rebounded. And so now I feel comfortable that the gap between the Metcalf value and the current price is. Is wide enough that people like me who invest for a living, we like to buy things. Two things. Two things. Either as a value where the price is below the fair value or something that's close to fair value, but that's growing really fast. Like, I will do that. Like, I've done a bunch of AI investments, and I will do that if I think the growth is high enough and the price isn't too crazy. Like, we didn't do bad on me, didn't do OpenAI, didn't do anthropic, but have done a bunch of other things that have worked out. But I do believe that the gap right now is wide enough that you should be accumulating. So in our fund for the last, I don't know, eight or nine weeks, we've been buying every week, just routinely, to get to the position that we want. It's kind of smart enough to know when the bottom is.
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A
Yeah. Did you see by the way you were talking about AI, did you see the story? Now, people got this totally wrong. But I think this is so cool that this guy lost his Bitcoin for years.
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B
Yes.
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A
So people are like, it cracked Bitcoin. It cracked his wallet. No, I mean, he just gave it its computer and it found his keys on there, which he had lost. Or his password. I think it was actually what it was.
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B
Password. And awesome. Look, I said, these are amazing tools. I mean, again, the ability of a human to go in and try to comb through the computer, it just takes time because, you know, we got fingers. But a machine can go in and it understands the syntax of what's in the computer and the filing system. And so, yeah, it found an old note that had a link to the password, but no, it didn't crack Bitcoin. It didn't guess his password out of thin air. And actually, it's only the password to get into an account. It's not the seed phrase. That needs to be very clear, too, because the ability to guess a seed phrase. I think I have this right. 24 words to guess randomly. The odds are equal to the number of atoms in the universe.
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A
Totally doable. So it's like diamond democracy. You're saying there's a chance.
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B
There's a chance. There's a chance.
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A
I mean, I know you don't watch flows, inflows and outflows of the ETFs. I assume they do.
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B
I do, I do. But they're.
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A
This was a big one. They're not real because of the carry trade.
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B
Exactly. No, they're not real because everyone looks at these numbers like there's something. And the little flows are something, right? If there's lots of little flows from Morgan Stanley or, or some. That, that is real. But these, when, when someone takes 600 million or that's not real, what that is because. Oh, Look, Millennium bought 2 billion of Ibit. Yes, they did. And they shorted 2 billion of Bitcoin. That is an arbitrage trade. That is what they do. That is what Jane street does. It's what this new firm that I hadn't even heard of, that has 10%. They're the new Stevie Cohen. Stevie Cohen used to be 10% of daily volume. And there's this new firm, I can't remember the name of it. They're 10% of NASDAQ volume every day.
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A
That's insane.
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B
It certainly is insane. And those people buy and sell ETFs in size, but there's no information content in that. That is not if, if they sold their Bitcoin etf. It just means that. Well, it's what we are. We're coming up on options expiration date. And so the spread narrowed and they're out next month.
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A
There's much ado. I mean, even Jeff park, who I deeply respect, you know, Jane street slash its Bitcoin ETF exposure in Q1 2026, cutting IBIT by 71% and FBTC by 60 according to its latest 13 filing price discoveries. Back on the menu. I don't describe to the Jane street conspirator theory personally, but maybe that was a lot of selling. They could have been holding price down here if they were actually exiting these positions. But I think you're talking about 13 Fs.
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B
I'm sorry, but 13 Fs are dumb. They're old news. They're not. They're not real time. So it has nothing to do. So it's 45 days ago. Yes, somebody did something 45 days ago. But you have no idea what they did in this 45 days. The other problem with 13 Fs, they don't have to report shorts, they don't have to report options, they don't have to report futures. So yes, on the 13F, it could say this super investor owns a million shares of Intel. Oh, they're long semis. Awesome. No, they're short A million shares of AMD against it. Oh, they're market neutral. They're an arbitrage firm. Oh, yeah. But then they've got these options positions because it's really a Gamma or a Vega or some other Greek trade. And so it's one piece of the information. It's stale, it's not useful. And in fact, you know, we actually run a fund, and we've run it since 2013. So we have 13 years where we take the 10 best idea. I'm sorry, the 20. The 20 best ideas of the 10 underlying hedge funds that we invest with and we supersize their best ideas. And that portfolio has doubled the return of the market over the 13 years. Everybody says, no, you can't do that. Like, why? Because I could have done that. Could just got 13 Fs. Like, well, they tried that. There was an ETF that said, we're going to read the 13 Fs of the great investors and we're going to try this. It underperformed the market because again, you're buying old news. And by the time the 45 days elapses, that big investor is probably selling to you. And here's the other problem. Just because it's the biggest position doesn't mean it's their best idea. That could be an old idea that's gone up a lot and they are getting ready to sell. What we do is we just talk to the managers every month and they give us a couple ideas. It's really interesting. And we had. I pitched this to hundreds of people and most of them say, no, no, I could do it myself. Like, okay, go do it. But to your point, on, on the guy who won't buy under 50, no one ever does. But we've actually been doing it a long time. And so this one family called Bullshit, they're like, we don't believe you. And they called one of the managers behind our back and said, hey, Morgan Creek claims that you talk to them every month. No way. Like, well, yeah, we actually do. And come to think of it, you know, they're the only client we talk to every month. He says, well, why would you do that? He says, well, we get more from them than they get from us. What are you talking about? He says, well, I'll give you an example. So we were talking to him last month and they were asking us about this oil company and we said, what else are you seeing? He said, well, our guy had been to Hong Kong, this firm called Tyborn, and they were the guys that coined the term Amazon Roadkill where you went long Amazon and short, all the other retailers and one of the companies was Under Armour. And so we put it on in size short and we made a lot of money. So yeah, we'll talk to them a lot. And so again, it's not that we're so smart, it's we work with a lot of smart people and we were smart enough to say, you know, their best three ideas will outperform but no one will ever run a three stock portfolio. I mean Chris Hahn runs 8, 9, 10, but no one will run three because the volume is too high. So you can't raise money. But if you have 102 stock portfolios, the volume actually equals the market volume. But you get two times the the alpha.
- [35:31]
A
I mean, is there anything else on your radar at the moment that you think could be a catalyst in either direction? I mean obviously we know that the black swan is one. By the way, everybody hates us. I found this out today. I didn't know this, but they hate us again. They don't care. Poll shows Congress crypto push isn't catching on with voters people. I mean it's like the numbers are astounding. They don't care. Buy Bitcoin at lowest level in past 12 months. I mean I love this stuff.
- [35:54]
B
Yeah, I mean I think, I think there are, there are number casts. So, so the Clarity act being done good, bad or indifferent, I'm going to lean that it's going to end up bad but it'll be done. That'll be a positive catalyst. Anything of definitive end of Iran and the strait. Now the fact that times I've heard Strait of Hormuz in the last three weeks has gone down to almost zero. Awesome. So I do like that. But we need closure on that. That would be a positive. Look, if war comes in and tightens dramatically which again I don't think he's going to do but if he were to say you know what, inflation's out of control. But it's not, it's not inflation, it's devaluation. And there's a difference. There is a difference. Now you, you could argue, well, no oil, that's real inflation, it's temporal. Remember, oil is excluded from cpi. So the CPI part is really more about real estate and owner's equivalent rent and that's sticky down. But if you've seen it, have you seen the gap between home sellers and
- [37:21]
A
home largest it's been. I didn't see in how long thousands of largest ever.
- [37:29]
B
And I'll give you, I'LL tell you why.
- [37:31]
A
Right.
- [37:32]
B
So live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And, you know, I live on this. They call it a lake. It's a big retention pond. I mean, it's a nice thing. And I live across the street. I don't live on the lake. Right. And there's a house around the lake for sale. And I'm like, I'll look. I'm curious. And I looked at it, and they were asking $3.6 million. Wow. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Okay. And it's a decent sized house, but it's not worth 3.6 million. I said, all right, how much did it sell for last time? So five years ago, right after lockdown, it sold for 1.5. And the time before that, two years before that, it sold for 1. So in seven years, in theory, this house, which didn't grow, didn't get more efficient. It's the same bricks and mortar and stuff.
- [38:35]
A
Worse, actually.
- [38:38]
B
And it's actually, it's on a pretty steep cliff, and it's got this driveway that's starting to crack. You're right. It is worse. So you're gonna have to put some money into it. Long story short, it'll be interesting to see how far they have to reduce that price to get a bid. And, you know, people say, well, but in my neighborhood, houses are selling like that. Yeah. I'm sure there are certain places, like if you're in Nashville, Tennessee. Yeah. Houses are going like that because everybody wants to move to no tax states. Or if you're in parts of Florida, probably, but I don't know. We'll see. I could be wrong.
- [39:13]
A
We get ugly out there. Mark, I always appreciate you spending your time with me, man. Thank you very much.
- [39:20]
B
We haven't done this for a while, but, you know, I think it's time to howl. I think we're gonna. We're gonna say the bear market's over, and we're gonna celebrate it with. With a.
- [39:30]
A
How.
- [39:30]
B
We're not gonna say the bull market's here yet, but on three.
- [39:34]
A
The first time you made me. How, by the way, really quick before we do it, I still didn't have video. It was just audio.
- [39:40]
B
Oh, my gosh. That's right.
- [39:42]
A
All right, all right. In a while. Felt good. All right, man. That's all we got for you guys today. See you on the Daily World. Thank you, Mark. Have a good one, man. Bye.
- [39:57]
B
Let's do. That's dope.