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The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin Has Never Been This Bullish – How Long Will It Last? | Macro Monday
01:03:18
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- [00:01]
Scott
The setup for bitcoin has arguably never been this bullish with bitcoin. Treasury companies buying bitcoin at astounding rate following the lead of Mr. Michael Saylor, who now owns over 600,000 Bitcoin for MicroStrategy. We also have DJT, Donald Trump's company, amassing $2 billion in Bitcoin out of their 3 billion in available cash. I think it's clear to say that we have a marriage here between what's happening with institutions and the United States and bitcoin. How long can this last? Are these actually top signals? We're going to break that down and of course everything happening in the macro. It's macro Monday after all. Let's go.
- [00:39]
Dave
Let's dope.
- [00:55]
Scott
Without further ado, going to bring on Mike, Dave and James to get the show started. Mike, we're going to start with the morning meeting but man, it's hard to talk about much other than bitcoin crypto right now. But we should still frame it with what's happening with the macro.
- [01:10]
Mike
Yes, that's good because it is a summer market. Not a lot going on. In terms of Stuart Paul, our senior economist who works around a long point out the obviously the the inflation number is a little bit better expected last week but monthly core is running 2.3%. It's too hot for the Fed. He pointed out retail sales surprised the upside but there's been downward revisions and tariff price increases were a big part of the recent uptick. Personal spending growth is running below 1% which is quite weak. Doesn't really see that improving. That's big of a problem. Inventories of new homes is very high and he suspects that the Fed meeting this week Fed Waller is going to dissent. Nikita's will see if any of the other members dissent with him. Gina Martin Adams pointed out S&P 500 earnings have been good but not the price results. The Ford forecast is only being revised upward for tech. Most are vulnerable. She pointed out that U.S. i think I mentioned this last week U.S. is valued at 55% other global equities almost the highest ever. Still quite high. And his point she point out a lot of risks in US stocks. Ira Jersey, our chief interest rate strategist pointed out that curve steepening is likely to continue Fed versus Trump that's a good sign for or Trump versus Fed for a curve to continue steepening. Our FX strategist Surly Vol pointed out that the ECB meeting this week might be a dovish hold. Expects two to three more cuts are in Store which is going to be a problem for the the euro. It may be good for the dollar as we get those yield differentiations, differentials and widening. I pointed out, I dug into crude oil a little bit just pointing out the season of the crude oil market. It's a bear market. I don't see what gets above 80 and it's probably heading below 50. Most notably crude oil if the stock market drops. I was in the grain, in the grain belt, corn belt last week. This massive supply, it's a wonderful thing. Weather's good, should see more pressure there. Copper has been the outlier, it's pushed up on tariffs. Question how long that's going to last. It's only US copper around 460, I'm sorry, 560 in Europe it's trading a buck below that. It's the risk. And gold is still mains, the main commodity. That's going up 3400. I'm pushing 3400 announced this morning. It to me it's a bit of an indicator that gold is not really buying into this US stock market or bitcoin rally. It's still outperforming certainly this year and to make gold go lower got to have that stock market to keep going up. And then there's a risk that as we get towards the more volatile part of the year that we get a little correction. And I just point out some of the ratios. The gold crude oil ratio at 50, if we end the year there, that's 50 barrels of crude for one ounce of gold. That would be the highest year end ever. The highest two records in the past was around 39 and that was in 2020 and 1934. So pretty unusual. And then I just point out that bitcoin, the gold ratio hovering around 35, you know Dave loves this one but it was still, it's still below that peak from 2021 and that used to lead beta and it's been lagging for a while. So I'm sticking with gold. And I pointed out that, you know, it's not a good indicate indication that the rock this year, the first year of Donald Trump's administration is actually beating well ahead of stocks and still beating bitcoin. Back to you.
- [04:44]
Dave
So I just have to jump on that one thing because it's, I keep making the point. The reason that I've been calling for 300,000 Bitcoin is because that would match the euphoria from 2021. Okay. Honestly that feels very conservative right now. And why do I say that? I Say that because in 2021 we hit much higher levels of Bitcoin versus gold and the adoption of Bitcoin is at least five to six times higher. And that's really it because if you look at it, the people who are adopting bitcoin, the people who are buying bitcoin, not the ones who are selling it, the ones who are buying it for the most part think bitcoin will get to somewhere within it. Depends on the range 75% to, to 90% of gold's price of gold's market cap, which would make the ratio a hell a lot higher. So the fact that since 2021 we're sitting here in the same range tells you we haven't even gotten close to euphoria part of this market given where adoption is. And we could debate whether or not adoption is real. I mean, okay, we have the Secretary treasury of the United States effectively declaring himself a bitcoiner without using the word bitcoin in the Walter Bloomberg point about the Fed argument this morning. And that's definitely something we have to talk about. We have the President and his family of the United States basically saying they're bitcoiners. You know, we have the head of the largest asset manager in the world saying he's a bitcoiner. So yeah, you know, but none of that was true in 2021. And yet here we are now. So that is a really important simple ratio to look at. And that's the, that's, that's the core of an investment thesis. Is that a trading thesis? No. Bitcoin is stuck in a range. It's still stuck in a range burbling where it is. And we're clearly. It's almost a classic alt season and we'll see how long it lasts.
- [06:35]
Scott
Yeah, I was just going to say. I don't want to interrupt. I just want to show the chart because it's stuck in a range. But this is bitcoin dominance, right? And in past bullish cycles for crypto, not just bitcoin, this is what happened. Bitcoin hits a new all time high. Bitcoin goes sideways a few percent off the all time high and all coins go nuts. And this is the largest drop in bitcoin dominance I've seen. We, I think we've seen in a week, in literally years. So.
- [06:59]
Dave
Well, but, but let's put a bow on this one for Mike because. And every time Mike uses the word beta, I cringe. But this is beta, there's no question about it. The beta of the S and P of the bitcoin vis a vis the S and P and bitcoin versus that stuff that thesis is, is deader than, well, it's better than what you find inside sarcophagi. You know, it's just there is no frigging beta from bitcoin to the S and P. If anything, it's been less volatile than most of the Mag 7. But the real beta in our market that we cover here is crypto versus bitcoin and crypto versus tech stocks. And that's very, very real. And so, and you're seeing that now and that's the cycle. And as I said before, it's notoriously unstable. It changes, but it's undeniably. Now this isn't. This basically shows something. Another thing that Mike says that has the kernel of truth to it, which is it's not that there's 2 million competitors to bitcoin, but there's no question that within the crypto ecosystem that altcoins. I don't like the word compete, but at the end of the day it's still money. People are taking some money off the table in bitcoin and putting some into alts looking for higher beta and it's. Is that a long term competition? I don't know. But what do you think, James?
- [08:21]
James
The reality is, I think what one of the really good point here and to kind of turn it on its head a little bit is we have not seen retail euphoria in bitcoin yet. We haven't. And you know that because Google searches the headlines, people talking about. I haven't heard people talking about it in grocery stores or at the gym or just you're just not hearing about it. And so, and anybody in the comments, please let me know if you think you, you've heard euphoria because I have not. I don't see it. And one of the important things about this and what you're talking about with the beta to bitcoin with the all coins is that, you know, you would think that, well, bitcoin is a gateway drug to the altcoins, but that's not really the case. The case is, is like Mike points out one, one thing you do point out astutely, Mike, is that bitcoin has tens of thousands of competitors as an entry point for retail investors because they don't know the difference. They really do not know the difference between bitcoin and all the other garbage. And so they're going in and saying, well, Bitcoin's $110,000 $120,000. I'm not buying that it's over. I need to buy something that's $0.50 or $0.12 or, or $3 because that's going to get me juiced because maybe that'll become a hundred thousand dollars and then I'll become rich. And that's literally the mentality of it. I mean, I've been speaking with friends and family for years about this stuff and they still, it's difficult to understand unless you really dig in and go down the rabbit hole. And you know, if you've done a good job of the people around you, they do understand it. But you can see how difficult that hurdle is if they're not doing the work themselves. And that's just real. The, what we have seen is we've seen OGs selling and getting, you know, monetizing their, their HODL strategy, which they've been doing for many of them for, for over a decade. And so here you are, you've got how many coins came this weekend? 80,000 from one seller. Was that, was that the, the number, Scott?
- [10:23]
Scott
Yeah, it was 80,000 tokens. He sent them to Galaxy. There was two weeks of conjecture as to who it was. A lot of people thought it was actually Adam back sending from for this spac. It wasn't a lot of people still saying Roger Veer. But yes, somebody literally unlocked 10 wallets, eight wallets with 10,000 coins each, sent them to Galaxy without any test transactions and sold them. And there we are still at 118,000.
- [10:47]
James
And, and, and monetize being a billionaire, you know, overnight. And that's, it's not, it is understandable, you know, we, that person may have other wallets that we don't know about, you know, you know, and it is understandable that somebody wants to take it and go buy houses or cars or whatever they want to do with it and say I'm done, I'm going to redistribute this wealth in another way. So that's not really surprising. And, and, but the, the reality is we haven't seen that retail craziness yet. And that's why we're, we're what we're seeing in the activity in, in altcoins, in my mind, it's, it's kind of an indication of that.
- [11:28]
Scott
I think you make a great point. And having been here for roughly 10 years, nine years, my first cycle when I came in, the only way to access altcoins was to buy Bitcoin. So you bought bitcoin on Gemini or Coinbase Then you sent your bitcoin to Bittrex because you were in the United States, Binance didn't exist yet and you swapped your bitcoin for Ethereum or XRP or whatever the new hot thing was. Nobody knew what those were. You had to be very crypto native or at least getting the rumor. But everybody's gateway back then was Bitcoin 100% because there was no way to access the rest of the market. There were no stablecoin pairs. You couldn't buy them. That changed entirely in the 2021 cycle when people started trading altcoins in USDT. And you'll remember almost everybody who came into crypto came through either buying DOGE or an nft, not through bitcoin. And that has remained the case. James, to your point, I think now. So I think there's been a wild bifurcation of the market that didn't exist in the first eight or nine years that bitcoin existed. That now is there. But a lot of people are still stuck in the bitcoin gateway mentality. I think there's more of a chance that people find bitcoin through buying other things and realizing how dumb they are than they find dumb things by buying bitcoin at this point.
- [12:46]
James
I agree. And you know, and that's, and that's clearly what we're looking for here. And that's where the, you know, Mike, I think you, the only point that I, when you point this stuff out, the what I differ on you on is clearly is that that bitcoin does not react to the all coins. It's the other way around. You know. And so I would say at this.
- [13:12]
Scott
Point, yeah, I would almost make the argument as I think through it, that the ETH altcoin comparison now is probably more accurate than Mike's bitcoin to all other altcoin strategy. I think if you're trading altcoins right now, you're trying to beat ETH because it's going up. So you have to be concerned with whether eth, because they are. A lot of them are competitors directly to Ethereum. I just think there's bitcoin and everything else. But I mean, Mike, I don't know your thoughts, but that's how I view it now.
- [13:42]
Mike
Well, to me it was focused on the big picture macro. I stick with the premise I had at the beginning of the year that the best for bitcoin cryptos have been priced in. You typically don't want to buy an asset when the masses love it, which is what Dave points out. I get it, it's great. You want to buy asset. When Michael Saylor discovered 2020, Bitcoin was at 10 grand. Now it's above 100. President loves it. I get it. They jumped on board to help them get elected. But you look at the actual performance this year, it sucks. I'm sorry. Risk adjusted this year. Get it? It's a point in time. But it is the first year of a significant new administration. Bitcoin's up 26%, gold's up 29%. Sticking with the rock. And unfortunately, I hate to say it but it's keep beating. But that's an environment with the S P500 up about 8% which is the historically annual gain. You got to have that. That to me it's the key thing for the whole crypto space. Bitcoin is just a little bit different. Obviously it's the first, but then we do point out There is about 19 million now. Call them what you want want. But there is that many. Unlimited supply. Just look at as a commodity guy. Sure there's competition, but the point is this year if you've been allocating the bitcoin, you have to realize the past performance is not indicative of future volatility. And bitcoin's reached near the lowest ever versus the gold and versus S P500. Why? Because it's in the main space. Once it got into ETFs.
- [14:57]
James
Yeah.
- [14:58]
Mike
So just. I'll finish with this. I think as long as you can assume the stock market's going to go up, the end of this. Let's look at the rest of this year. Let's say we're in descent, we're in December. End of the year we're doing macro Mondays. If the stock market's up, say 10, 20.
- [15:10]
Dave
Yeah.
- [15:11]
Mike
Bitcoin and alts should be up. What if it's up only 2 to 3%? To me, that's what you're doing here. If you're buying bitcoin now, you're buying leverage stocks and its performance is showing just that. I don't see a big difference so far. Yes, the difference is people are looking at what it used to do in the past. And you can get Dogecoin, it's worth 40 billion. But you can buy that at fractions on the dollar.
- [15:30]
James
Which is why I would say that the, the four year cycle is kind of dead. I don't, I think that, you know, the, the significance here, Mike, is. Yeah, you can't. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially with Something like Bitcoin, which has only had a few of these cycles. You know, it's a very small data set. And the difference here is that you now have institutions and sovereigns who are waiting into this market and that changes it entirely. So it's very difficult to know exactly how this is going to play out. One thing we do know is that bitcoin has been very closely correlated to the expansion of the money supply and liquidity in particular. And so, and we know that it lags it a little bit. And the reality of the fiat world is we have these vicious expansion and contraction cycles in, in liquidity and, and debt. And so, well, debt just keeps expanding ad nauseam, but the liquidity around it is, can be violent in some of these contractions. And so we will still get volatility in bitcoin and I still, I think we will get up and down cycles. It's just, I don't think they're going to be correlated directly with havings and probably not directly correlated to elections unless we start getting socialists elected around the world, which is possible as we, as we were kind of joking about before the started in, in Manhattan or in New York City. But you know, I mean the, there will be cycles, there will be expansions and contractions of, of liquidity and credit. And, and I do believe that bitcoin will follow that. And why is that? Because it's the, it is literally the opposite of, of fiat. And so if you want to protect your money, you buy gold or bitcoin. I mean there's just really, you know, you can, you can buy real estate, but there's a, there's a whole lot more. You know, there's, there's a handful of headaches that go along with real estate and, and they're extraordinarily interest rate sensitive. So you know, I do believe that we. You're right, there's. That there, the future, you can't be predicted by the past. I agree with that. And especially because of big bitcoin's nascent nature and it's changing dynamics and it's going to be very different this next four years, I believe.
- [18:08]
Scott
I just want to talk about really briefly before you jump in, Mike, the setup. Because bitcoin has never been this bullish. Right. And we've had it repeated here and Matt Hogan said it, you know, on a risk adjusted basis, this is probably the safest time to buy bitcoin. Doesn't mean there's necessarily the most upside. But just digging into why price is going up, I Mean, it's pretty simple. A I'm just going to cook through a few stories so we get them.
- [18:30]
James
Out of the way.
- [18:30]
Scott
We got the stablecoin legislation. We know that market clarity is on its way. Charles Schwab plans to launch bitcoin Ether spot trading. CEO says and said very vocally they're going to directly attempt to compete with Coinbase. Trump Media. 2 billion of their 3 billion in liquid holdings is now in bitcoin. Michael Saylor buys 6,220 more Bitcoin crypto investment products see record 4.4 billion in weekly inflows. Jack Dorsey's block, which owns bitcoin, set to enter the s and P500. Peter that we will save that one. And then of course the title somewhat coming from Brandon Lutnick, Howard Lutnick's son, pushing Cantor to go all in on crypto. Spac says, I want to be sitting at the heart of crypto. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be pro digital assets than right now. I know that's a lot. And I know that when Mike, I know that when you're in markets, those can be glaring Spidey Sense top signals happening. But to me, the fact is right now, there's just a hell of a lot more buyers than sellers.
- [19:33]
Dave
Well, before Mike jumps in, I want to repeat something from the, from the, the 1998 through 2100%. When those IPOs, when you've had a, when the cycle is there and the investment banks are using IPOs as currency allocations of those stocks, that's the Spidey Sense top. The Spidey sense top isn't people filing for the beginning. And one IPO. I mean, this feels much more like 1996. You know, circle feels more like the Netscape moment from 96 than it does the pets.com moment from 2000. And I want, and I, I, this is the hill I will die on rhetorically, because I've seen this before. So, you know, it's funny with bitcoin treasury companies, people are so scarred in the crypto world that they're looking for the top signal to be terrified to get the hell out.
- [20:27]
Scott
I'm coming around, by the way.
- [20:29]
Dave
What'd you say?
- [20:30]
Scott
I'm coming around even.
- [20:31]
Dave
But no, I'm just saying that's what happens. And markets are funny that way. Everybody is terrified in the beginning. You have to climb a wall of worry. We haven't had it. But yeah, bitgo bullish gonna, you know, you know, all the Things you're talking about. Hell, I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I mean I, I'm the large, the second largest shareholder in a, a crypto company that would be in the Russell 2000 were we a public company. So clearly. And, and I'm looking at this saying, this is good. Someone should figure this out and figure out how to monetize it. That's, that's true. That's what every single person in the crypto sphere is going to look at. But why does this matter? I'm sorry, Mikey, you'll get to talk. But this is not a, this is an important point because so many crypto tokens that people are used to trading are complete vapor. When you're in equity with real earnings, it's different. I mean, I had an argument on crypto town hall last week. You might remember it. Someone talked about pump fun. They're all jazz saying how great it was. It's real earnings. And I asked this bull, I said, listen, dude, what percentage of those earnings do you get by owning the token? What's the economics? I don't know. I'm like, what the, what do you mean you don't know? You're buying a, a financial asset without any clue what your economic rights are. That's, and frankly, people are going to say the same thing. Now, Michael, say the entire crypto sphere is that way. I do not. I think quite a few crypto assets are going to have economic models that will create supply and demand. Bitcoin being the most obvious. But why the equities matter is because the equities are going to massively outperform. And the people in crypto aren't stupid. And so those governance tokens are going to quickly turn into economic tokens. And what does all this mean? Well, this means you have to start hiring armies of lawyers to figure out securities versus not. So what's the other thing that happened last week? Well, gee, we had a much larger Democrat join over in the Clarity act because what is going to happen, and this is with 100 certainty now, you're going to get a market structure, Bill, Paul Atkins and the SEC and Jamie, you know, sell away who runs trading. And markets are going to be full on writing rules for digital asset securities that allow Coinbase, Kraken, bitstamp, etc to compete in that market without, without getting rid of them. That is going to happen. You're going to see the ability for us customers to be able to buy these things to eliminate the risk to people. That is now it might not be until 2027. But it's going to happen. And so investors are smart and they're going to start looking at this stuff. So what you will start to see is this trend. I know this is a big rant for a Monday morning, but we saw this all last week. And to, you know, when Mike starts Talking about 2 million competitors, my thought is maybe there's 50 that have real value and what's that? 1 million 900. You know, you get that, you get the, get the joke that are complete fluff that are going to fall away to nothing or be, you know, memes trading around and who knows what they'll be. But I think it's really important to make, to distinguish. I'm sorry, Mike, for jumping in front of you, but you can frame it with a.
- [23:44]
Mike
Your rants are priceless. And not only do I learn from them, we all learn, but our audience does. So thank you. And also it's a thing I learned day one, starting in the business in late 80s. If I just, I always have. I got to be contrary. I got to be against consensus and point out different things. All right? So I know add no value to clients to my trading, to invest in particular to this environment. So first I want to touch base a little bit. What James said about liquidity, don't underestimate what's happening to liquidity. The number one source for liquidity on a global basis, bar none, the biggest in Almost history is US stock market going up. If we just drop that 10, 11, maybe 12% or so. That's the liquidity thing. You might see massive pumping of liquidity from a prime pumper like the government, like what's happening in China right now. But that's the only thing that matters to liquidity. When they get to these levels, we're at that unique stage in history. So I like to point out, as far as money supply in China right now, current money supply is around $46 trillion. That's double the U.S. they have to do that. They have to pump the system liquidity just to support, to lift out the massive deflation from the stock market we saw obviously bounced a little bit this year, but 20 years unchanged certainly from housing to what we've seen in Japan a while ago. So that's what's happening. The key lessons I like to point is you always get pretty significant deflation from inflation. Now it's just a question of when China, it's happening, the rest of the world's happening. And then I like to point out what Scott said. Everything Scott Said is classic selling when they're yelling kind of stuff. I mean I love Matt Hogan. Matt Hogan and our friends, but he's selling a product, used to sell products too. I get it. He's, you know, and obviously he's making money if that product people are buying and it goes up. So just remember what's happening here, what people are doing. And then I just take out performance. This is what I've done with the stock market for a while. When you see the rock beating stocks and all you see on CNBC is nothing about AI driven stock market, that's a problem. It still is a problem and it's still beating stocks. It's happening with bitcoin now for a while. I'm just pointing out facts of performance. You get a much better performance this year with a much lower volatility asset if you had stayed with it. And still I think it's going to be kick in by the rest, the rest of the year now if I'm wrong come December, yeah, I got to stop out, move on. But that's still the case this year. Bitcoin's so great. I get it. Why is it not beating gold? I'll stick with gold. And that's the point is when you, you hear people doing the lamps, you know, look at me. I made money doing this. And you can too. It's just a classic case. I remember one key example was in commodities when the whole world says, oh, you got to buy commodities, they diversify your portfolio. This was 20 years ago. Rowan GERT it was the facts and fantasies and that put in a bit of a peak for decades. It's just the way things work. Remember the housing market? It wasn't supposed to go down after 2006. It did. It's the widely red near. I hear from everybody now how you have to buy bitcoin. That's great. I love it. That's when my, my spidey contrarian sense comes out and says, yeah, when people, when Trump administration hated the first, first administration, that was the time to buy. And now that they love it. Well, good news is as long as Trump administration is successful and there's no bumps in the road, cryptos will be.
- [26:46]
James
Okay as long as stock market's going up again though. Mike we haven't seen retail euphoria in, in bitcoin. We're picking out headlines because we're, we're paying attention to them. You know, we are really paying attention to the, to the game theory that's going on in at the corporate and now Sovereign level. So I just shared a chart here, Scott, and this is, this is bitcoin, you know, over gold. So what time period you want to pick out here, Mike? Just pick out the time period. You can see clearly that that bitcoin is, is just eating gold alive. And so if we just look at. Yeah, if we just look at 2025, sure. It, you know, but bitcoin, look at where bitcoin ran before 2025 against gold, you know, from the, from the election forward. And then it had.
- [27:39]
Dave
Just draw a line from the middle. What's the tr. What. What would a chartist call the trend line?
- [27:44]
James
Yeah, the trend line.
- [27:46]
Mike
That is a bull market. Now I, I agree with.
- [27:49]
James
It's been a bull market for, for a very long time. Do you want me to go all the way back? Because if I go all the way back to 2009, it gets ridiculous. But let. Just look at where it is, you know, so I know it's.
- [27:59]
Mike
It's a classic, the best techno signal ever. It's. You have to buy it. It went up. So you have to buy it because it's going to go up. Just point out that high we made in 2021 was on the back of a 100 year event. The biggest money pump in history in Covid.
- [28:12]
Dave
Yes, we should have pumped right here.
- [28:15]
James
Right? Okay.
- [28:16]
Mike
We're still at that same level. My point is. But beta has gone up to record highs and continues to record highs. That's weakness. That shows the virgin weakness. My point is as long as this talk where now we switch. The point is that chart used to lead beta. Now it's lagging. Okay, yes, that's a point. But the point is beta. I just keep, keep thinking you have to point this out. The stock market's up 7% this year. Bitcoin's up. The. The risk adjusted amount goes up a lot more. As long as the stock market keep going up, that chart will go up. That's the point.
- [28:44]
James
Okay.
- [28:45]
Mike
Reach that inflection. That's.
- [28:46]
James
I disagree on that and here's why I disagree. Do you believe that. That the money supply is going to expand or contract. Contract between now and 10 years from now? As long.
- [28:57]
Mike
Of course. Well, we know the answer to that. But remember I just point out what's happening.
- [29:01]
James
That's why we have to keep double.
- [29:02]
Mike
The U.S. but the stock market's gone down. That's the point is we've potentially. Do you believe that history is. It's different this time. That you'll get to 2.2 times GDP in the stock market, it's not going to matter from the future and say, well gosh, that was just on the way to three times.
- [29:16]
James
No, but I think that, I think the difference between you and me is that I don't think we've learned our lesson. I think that we are on. We are a terminal patient that is, that is hooked up to, you know, a series of drugs and those drugs are, have to do with liquidity, expansion, supply of money supply, and we cannot stop it. So my answer is I believe that GDP is going to catch up to the stock market before the stock market falls apart to collapse, to mean revert, as you say, back to GDP levels. I believe that we're going to continue to expand the money supply and continue to expand liquidity to have those metrics come more into line. And it may be both. Maybe we'll have a little bit of a pullback, but it's not going to be a 20, 30% pullback in the stock market in my mind. And you know, and if it is, it's going to be momentary because they will flood the market with, with a print. And that's just reality. I don't think. It's not about, about whether or not we've learned the lesson. It's, it's about the fact that we have no incentives to do the right thing. From the, from the White House all the way through every single chamber of commerce, Congress, every, every single committee and every single individual legislator only cares about one thing. And we've said this before, they care about getting elected. They don't care about their people. We see that because of what the things they do and say. You know, you think that Elizabeth Warren cares about the people? No, she cares about getting reelected, you know, and so, and she's obviously owned by big banks or else she wouldn't do the things she's doing. And so, you know, the, it's, it's not about them learning the lesson. It's about them not being able to take away those drugs because the patient will die. And that patient is the U. S. Treasury and the US treasury can't die or the whole world collapses financially. The entire world. And the whole point of stablecoins is not to get banking access to individuals, you know, or it's not to get, get the, it's not to allow the people to have, to have access to more yield, you know, it's to, it's to enable the banks to offer a way for the treasury to get more treasuries out to, to any. Nook and cranny they can stuff them into across the entire world. That's all they care about.
- [31:47]
Dave
Can I riff off of two things here? So one, I want to take us in a new direction and talk about what Besent and the administration of been saying. But the point that you keep making Mike, about it's not different this time. Etc. Bitcoin is. You guys are tired of me talking about an option. But the fact is bitcoin is evolving. It is still a baby. It is still worth a fraction of what it would be if it. If it grows up. When it grows up, it is parry pursuit with gold.
- [32:17]
James
Gold going the size of gold in a. In 15 years versus gold being used as money for thousands of years.
- [32:24]
Dave
That's right. But the point being that as gold rises, that's bullish for bitcoin, full stop. You just have to ask yourself the question if you're a bitcoin bull, do you want to see gold go up or down? The answer is up. Now, do we think that over time, just like the chart James put up, that bitcoin will eat more and more of it eventually? Yes, I do think that is true. But it is a long time thing. There are people out there. Until the boomers in every country are all de. Until I am literally not able to talk anymore. There are people who will hold onto their gold as yellow rocks as their store of value forever. That is not something that happens immediately. So people in the bitcoin world, oh, bitcoin's gonna leave gold in the dust in the next two years. They're out of their fucking minds. We're talking generations, we're talking generations of generations of people who believe gold is a store of value for holding onto and maintaining purchasing power, parity. And it's done a great job with that. It's done a horrible job of being the value standard for the entire financial economy.
- [33:27]
James
Don't forget Dave, it's us centric mentality. You know, gold is store value across these, these regions that are. That are oppressive.
- [33:37]
Dave
How about India? Or it's the largest store of value in India, which is the world's largest growing economy. I mean it's not just there, but. But the point here is, is the bitcoin gold ratio is really a question of. And I keep saying it, does bitcoin live or die? Does it succeed or fail? We're not at that point yet. But it certainly feels like there's more likelihood of success. And that's why we talk about that. But every argument you use for the Shiny rock is applicable to people who are younger than the four of us as they look at storing value and understanding. So that's thing number one. But thing two, it is so important to look at what's happening with the Fed right now. You know, you have the Secretary of Treasury who is, was an avowed bitcoiner before he took the job. He gets the joke. This is the most powerful man in the economy, and he gets the joke. He knows that the only way out is to grow and pump nominal GDP as fast as humanly possible. At the same time, you push as much inflation into financial assets, including Treasuries, as you can vis a vis consumer assets and consumers. This is not great. This will create more wealth inequality, but it may very well be the only way out. And that is why they're pairing this with populist policies. You know, the Democrats and the media that support them are so disingenuous, it's beyond belief. I mean, I'm not fully, you know, Republican pilled here, but let's face it, what are you seeing? The tax bill that just passed, the only differences were for no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, up to, you know, 12,000 525,000 on tips. Things that are to try to improve the standard of living for Trump voters. All the, quote, you know, giving stuff to billionaires bullshit, that's just continuing what we already had, lest they derail nominal gdp. And so, you know, this administration is trying to walk a dance, and it's really important that they've been doing it to try to pump nominal GDP without costing them votes by increasing wealth inequality. Understand, that's what has to happen. So if you think that's what they're going to do. And by the way, the Democrats, if they manage to win, are going to realize that they need to do the same thing because they have. This has been bipartisan. Right now, they're doing it for political points. But as James puts it, if you want to get elected, you don't cause a recession or a depression. You just don't do it. And so we have a world where for at least the next three and a three years and a half, we have an administration that wants to pump gdp, pump financial assets, notably Treasuries among them, and in doing so, try to unleash productivity so that consumer inflation won't be as bad. That's what they want to do. Now, whether they'll succeed or not, I don't know. But if you want to ask yourself what's the official policy, that's what we saw. So that's what the budget bill was. Rescissions will go after some small pieces, but they're not going to be able to really cut spending. They have to grow their way out. So where does this leave us with the Federal Reserve? Well, the Fed is an independent agency. That's what they say. What it really is is a group of private bankers who have control of the economy. That lean Democrat. And it's a war. And it's a war where they just gave ammo to the opposition by spending, you know, trying to spend two and a half billion dollars on an office building. I don't care if it has passes. You could literally bomb it and build a new one for half that price. You could build. We build football stadiums for a billion and a half. Right. You know, it's, it's, it's unconscionable. And they are gonna eat. That is going to be the thing they're going to use and they're going to use it relentlessly until they can get the political acumen to start auditing the Fed. And when they audit the Fed and you start finding out how much private bankers make money because of their coziness with the Fed, when you start looking at all the receipts Caitlin Long has had, a lot's going to happen. If you don't realize that a fundamental reshaping of our economic policy is underway, you're not paying attention. Now, I think that to me is unbelievably bullish for Bitcoin. I'm not saying it's necessarily all going to be good. It won't be. There's going to be lots of bumps along the way. But we are going to have a fundamentally reshaped economic policy. Here, you take this one to the bank. If there's any alpha in what I'm saying this morning, if I'm right, invest accordingly.
- [38:07]
Scott
I want to show you guys something while we're discussing this because in the midst of this, obviously our favorite topic of conversation is treasury companies. We had the announcement this morning, Pantera Capital backed ether machine to go public via merger with 400,000 ETH on its balance sheet for treasury strategy bang launch today. Just like that. Look at that chart. Now the question is, when you look at these, how could a company that's dead Dynamics have this many people to sell on this much volume on the day it launches? It's curious. Curious. Don't know how we can figure that out. But if anybody's wondering how people are making a lot of money, this is alt. Season, this is alt season.
- [38:48]
Dave
Right. But, but understand the backdrop here. But Mike, I'd really like to hear your comments on this because I know, you know, you think we have an independent Fed, which I think is complete nonsense. I mean, the rate cut last year was about, it was the smoking gun as far as I'm concerned in terms of politics. But it's private. The Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve chairman is nominally, and not by the chair, the chairman, but the board of governors. It's a private organization. And you know, the markets like the fact that it's independent. Sure, they do. And so that's why I think the other stories this morning out are Trump isn't going to fire him because he's listening to aides, namely Scott Bessant, telling him, don't do anything precipitous. Let this all play out.
- [39:29]
Mike
So I think it's very important. Dave, what you said is putting Trump and Powell and the Fed in the same statement as gold. My first thought is bitcoin. I start with gold. Anytime I see Trump push back on this traditional form of separation of the executive branch and the Fed, at least in theory, I think. All right, well, if you're going to push back on what's really got the US Exceptionalism, the US Premium and asset price is the highest in history. Good luck. Say good luck with. I'll stick with gold. And so remember what's happening. And let's remember the facts of performance. Cryptos and bitcoin are risk on asset, gold is a risk off asset. And the fact that gold is beating cryptos, certainly Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto X index only up about the same as S&P 500 this year. That's, that's bad performance. Let me, I gotta finish this. Yeah, but you, you, you keep we me making how great it is. Everybody's buying. We pointed out last year was a lizard, a watershed year in cryptos. We got that. Now it's just kind of, I think potentially, yeah, we're making record highs. But all that other stuff is kicking in. Remember, it's July. So to me, it's very important to look at what's happening and what markets might be telling us, not what the sell side people is going to tell. People are going to be buying more of this asset. Just be very careful. It's telling us gold is telling us there's something wrong with all this bullishness. And the key thing is one thing we also have to remember is the last president who got elected with the stock market this expensive was Herbert Hoover. It just let's remember the facts of what I understand everybody knows what the Trump administration wants, but how much can they do to make things more expensive when they're already doing it, doing a major cutoff? And what's really got the US Stock market expensive and that was earnings, partly because they could offshore and buy and bring in stuff cheap and adding tax to that via tariffs, that might be a hurtful for earnings. Now it's obviously not happening yet. But the bottom line, you have to I think in this sustained points. I can't even have a view on cryptos or gold or crude oil or copper anymore without having to view in the stock market first.
- [41:32]
Scott
It's got to go up first, Mike. I guess so. I have two questions. Two questions historically. So how many times have we seen gold perform exceptionally well when stocks are actually still up? Wouldn't we anticipate, pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't we anticipate if gold is on a historic run, that stocks should actually be suffering? Also in the Herbert Hoover days, I guess is my next question, how much QE and money printing did we have?
- [42:00]
Mike
Well, so that's the key point is, and I want to mention that to James, we will get money printing when risk assets go down. And that's my point. When risk assets go down, which so far it's been wonderful, the risk.
- [42:12]
James
What you're seeing, what you're seeing Mike, is that the, you're seeing a collective around the White House trying to push for liquidity before we have that drawdown because of midterm elections coming up. Right, got it.
- [42:28]
Mike
Yeah. In the meantime, why is gold beating the whole crypto market and certainly beating, beating bitcoin. That's my point. Yes, they're trying to do it. We all get that. Everybody in the market. It's a known, known. We can talk about it. I mean it's just, it's, it's a known, known in markets. How much can they do it? That's my point. If you look at the actual performance of markets, the fact that gold is doing this and even bond 10 year note yields are down 30 basis points on the year, there's something ticking in. Like my economist pointed out that you know, actual consumer spending is just very recessionary 1%. It's nothing. How are you going to fix that? Right now it's transition. So yeah, I get it. The midterms of course. But key thing for midterms is you want low energy prices. That's happening. Low bond yields. And by the way, if the stock market corrects 10%, it's much more likely going to get that. And we know 80% of stocks are owned by the top percent of the population who do not vote for Mr. Trump. It says 55% of the population which are wage earners and just got a cut on the taxes on, on tips and Social Security and overtime. Yeah, those people more concerned. I think if you get those yields lower where they can refinance mortgages and you get the price of gasoline lower, sure, I'll vote for Trump. But the stock market for them doesn't matter as much.
- [43:43]
James
All right, but if you take out the MAG7 from that stock market calculation, it's a completely different world, you know, so. And that is an important thing. Yeah, I know most people own those things because Most people own ETFs through, through their retirement funds, 401ks, IRAs and all that stuff. But the reality is the vast majority of companies are not overpriced, you know, not to that level. It's, it's the mag sevens that are driving all of it. And that's reality. And the second thing is that, I mean we can pick and choose the. Again, what, what time frame you want to compare gold and bitcoin. But the reality is bitcoin made a, a massive run prior to gold even taking off. And so I've been waiting for gold, I've been advising people, gold, I own gold and waiting for, waiting for, waiting for it. And finally, you know, it finally got, it got, got a lift this year. And so, but I've, I've owned gold long before I ever owned bitcoin. And now my preference is clearly bitcoin. It's not even close. But that's just, and that's me. But because I believe that what you're saying. I agree. Here's the problem, Mike, and this is why we have a hard time arguing with. You said I agree with 98 of what you're saying. I just disagree with a few key points that are critical and that's where we differ. And, and, but there's no learning from this. And I just believe that we're not going to wait for, we're not going to wait for the stock market to crash. It could, on an event, you could have a black swan. And that's always, you know, a risk. I mean like we've talked about before, we've had, we had 1987, we had 1990, 98, 2000, you know, tech bubble, you had the 2001, you know, 9, 11, you had 2008 and 20, 20, 20. I mean you have 100 year event every few years. So to not expect there to be a black swan is ignorant. You know, we should, we, we should expect something. But on the backside of that I think it's going to be a V recovery and ridiculous amount of printing. Like Larry the Pard likes to say, the big print. And he wrote all about it because there is no way to stop this. There's this.
- [46:05]
Scott
Okay, so last week's obviously big story was will Fed, will Trump fire Powell or not? Right. Or can Trump fire Powell? Did he write a letter? Did he not write a letter? Okay, we, I don't think we need to unpack that, but I think it's fair to say that even if he doesn't fire Powell, which I don't believe for one second that he's going to, Powell is going to be gone next year and whoever Trump does put in is going to print the hell out of money. Right. So you, and they're going to definitely throw gasoline on this fire whether it's today or next year. Mike, I assume we all agree with that in theory, or at least that's what they want to do, correct?
- [46:40]
Mike
Yeah, exactly.
- [46:43]
Dave
Scott, can I push back a little bit about that, the fire part? You know, it's a. People keep making the mistake of assuming that consumer inflation, while correlated, is causally related to asset inflation. It is not. It is absolutely not. We've seen this for 40 years. CPI is very sensitive to two things that have absolutely nothing to do with money printing. It is sensitive to energy cost, which Mike points out all the time. And Mike could easily end up being right. Ish. I think 50 may be tough with the amount of, with the denominator of dollars going up, but energy prices, technology has improved, it is way cheaper to extract it and regulations are coming down at the same time. So energy is not going to be feeding into consumer prices as long as we don't get more war in the Middle East. So that is very important. Second, productivity with AI and everything that is going on in the world, to assume that we are not going to get another burst of, in, of another, you know, hold back on consumer inflation at the same time we're inflating the money supply is also delusional. So yeah, you may see, you know, consumer inflation hanging around 3% and asset inflation going back way above trend again. There is nothing in the world stopping it. When you cut interest rates, this notion that you allow people to refinance their homes and all of a sudden that's going to stimulate aggregate demand and that there's no slack in the productive side of our economy is just, I mean, it's been demonstrably wrong for 40 years, yet people keep assuming it. And the Fed's models and the fact that they have 20,000 employees and maybe 10 of them have common sense is insane. I mean, honestly, I could hire, I could probably have taught a college level economics class, taken the graduates after a couple of years, and staff the economics departments of the Fed and come out with economic models that were at least as accurate. Frankly, I'm not sure monkeys throwing darts at dart boards aren't as accurate as the Fed has been, but for them to have missed for 40 years that aggregate demand is only one input into inflation is beyond insane. And so, yeah, I'm pretty pissed off at the Fed. I think the Fed should be gone. I think an audit, a real audit by a real organization would basically say these guys are all basically digging holes and filling.
- [49:20]
Scott
Dave, Inflating two things. I just want to say, like the President firing the Fed chair because he doesn't like his policy is very different than the old, good old Bitcoin. Like abolished the Fed because.
- [49:33]
Dave
No, no, no.
- [49:34]
Scott
Hundreds of years.
- [49:35]
Dave
But, but you would, but that's my point, Scott, you know, the Treasury Secretary also Scott told him, don't do it. Let's get political wins to audit these guys and let the Congress go to work and let Democrats die on the Hill of defending it. They're not going to, by the way, Elizabeth Warren might, she won't die because she just got reelected. But you know, they're not, the Democrats are not going to die on that, that Hill. They are doing this smart for a change. Right? They're letting the papers go at it, they're letting the talk shows go at it. They're letting it build, build, build. But the momentum to starting to understand what the Federal Reserve does and, and, and invalidating it is what's happening. These things don't play out over days, they don't even play over weeks. We're talking months here. Mark my words. By the midterms, there will be momentum to, at a bare minimum, audit or investigate what the hell's going on in that building, in that organization. And people will start to learn that it's a private company. Now, why this matters is it means that the people at the Fed who want to keep their jobs are going to start realizing they're going to need to play ball sooner rather than later. But I do think that it's entirely arguable that it's not throwing gas On a fire. That it's a fire of financialization. Yeah, that I think we all agree.
- [50:53]
James
The fire is already raging. People are starting to realize that the whole, you know, all the information coming out about this 2.5 billion dollar renovation of a building is just the tip of the spear. You know, I wrote about this a few weeks ago. The, the operating budget for the Fed last year was $10 billion. $10 billion. Just think through that for a second. You've got 12 regional, 12 regions with what, 24 branches of, of, of banks. You have 21,000 people that work for the Fed.
- [51:31]
Dave
What?
- [51:32]
James
21,000 people? What on earth. And those banks do we need 21,000 people for? To manipulate money and how much money.
- [51:43]
Scott
Those banks make by getting a favorable interest rate free of risk from the United States government simply to hold the money.
- [51:51]
James
Right. And at the same time, the Fed has run up a, a 240 billion dollar bill, a quarter of a trillion dollar bill, that it's got to pay back the treasury before it starts, you know, giving its profits to them. I mean, so we're. The Fed is creating a larger deficit. It used to help the deficit, now it's creating a larger deficit. This is a major, major problem. And people are waking up to it. And you know, the White House is waking up and they're putting pressure on them about it. And so that's what Vicente is doing because he wants, he wants to be able to, you know, have his yield curve control in order to, and like Dave said, deflate away this bond problem before it gets, gets completely out of control. It is already raging. This fire is raging. The spending at the Fed is raging. The ridiculous number of employees they have, it's raging and they're, they're starting to figure it out. And so in the Fed, yeah, it's big. Bitcoiners love that, but I think it's, it extends far beyond bitcoiners and it's going to go mainstream this year, in my opinion.
- [53:05]
Dave
Gold, by the way, loves it too. Let's be really clear. That's, that's the thing. I mean, it's, it's, it's literally the same trade. It's just that one has, has an order of magnitude more upside than the other. But it's the same trade.
- [53:19]
James
Yeah.
- [53:20]
Dave
Whether we're right or wrong or not, time will tell, but we are, but our belief is it's the same trade. And the, the point here, and this is why from a macro point of view, this is macro Monday. The macro situation in a world without A central bank cabal, controlling the money, you know, controlling everything is very different. It's not necessarily better. I think it is better, but there's going to be bumps and bruises along the way. So this is not going to be smooth, this is going to be bumpy, rough, political. There's a lot that's going to happen.
- [53:51]
James
Yeah, it's going to be vicious. It's going to. You're going to have a lot of volatility. And Mike, I appreciate that you, you're sitting at Bloomberg and there's. If I were you, there's very little you could really say about this subject because it is a touchy subject with mainstream media and I get it. But the reality is the Fed is a problem. It is a massive problem. It's only getting worse and people are waking up to it. Hopefully they wake up to it fully this year.
- [54:18]
Mike
Well, one thing we, I think we can appreciate from the Trump administration, they're at least attempting to purge a lot of those bureaucratic excesses. I mean, we needed that and hopefully will improve. The best thing, I think. Well, it's the best thing. I think sometimes you just cut off a lot of stuff and if it's that important yet replenishes it later. But I want to point out, one thing you pointed out earlier is I've always viewed owning gold without bitcoin in that space would be inconsistent in ignoring what's happening in the world going digital. But there's time to overweight the rock. The low volatility risk off asset and there's times to overweight the crypto. The high volatility risk on asset and the fact that this year in a risk on year that bitcoin's still underperforming going to me, those are the signals I've been looking for. I'm worried about that. We've reached near the end game of this high volatile speculative digital asset. Now I have to point out my outlook. My outlook initially was years ago once we had launch of widely disseminated ETFs in the US that would be a bit of a peak in cryptos. I still stick with that. Ben early can say wrong, but I look at this space needs excess. So for me for now, the way I'm looking for a bit of a bottom is when we have a bit of a purge of the excesses. Now we're seeing massive speculative excesses right now. You can disagree with it all you want in Bitcoin, but looking at 40,000, 40 billion dollar valuation at Dogecoin, we will look back from that, from history and blame me if I'm wrong is that was about $40 billion too high. We need purge. A purge in this space. We need to find out that you can't just put bitcoin on your balance sheet and then your stock goes up two or three times. Like it's, it's at that stage. I think now again, everything's fine. It's July. Stock market's doing fine. Let's think of how things are going to be towards the end of the year. To me, the indications are you should stick with the risk off assets.
- [56:09]
James
Here's, here's, here's my mentality around it. We believe as bitcoiners that, that bitcoin is not a risk on assets. And we believe that eventually the world figures that out and eventually that it overtakes gold as the premier store of value asset of the entire world, the entire global financial system. That's the bet. And we're willing to ride out the volatility between now and then because we believe that that is the end game. And what may happen before that, and I hope it doesn't happen, is that we have a violent collapse of the entire system because of the stupidity that we have from the people who are manipulating the fiat currencies. And if that happens, good luck to everybody. Gold will go to 70,000, you know, but bitcoin will eat up most of the financial markets because you're going to find people are going to need somewhere to go with their capital in order to preserve it without hyperinflation across the entire world. I hope it does not. We do not get to hyper bitcoinization in, in a violent move. That would be terrible. I think that would be catastrophic for the whole world and it would make a lot of people poor and it would be an ugly world to live in for a while. I don't want that, but I would like to.
- [57:30]
Mike
Where are they going in China?
- [57:32]
James
What's that?
- [57:34]
Mike
So where are they going in China? What you described, what we're having in China is a severe deflationary normal reaction from emerging market that grew too fast. We've had one of the biggest bull markets in history has been in the CGBS Chinese government bond markets 1.68. That's where they're going in China. In the US well, we're still buying bitcoin. I just say good luck. Hopefully we'll be okay with that.
- [57:57]
James
Yeah, it's interesting. We're buying bitcoin and gold, you know, and so what's no I pointed out, but China is.
- [58:04]
Dave
Is a but. But you have to understand something about.
- [58:09]
Mike
I mean, that's macro. People are going in.
- [58:13]
Dave
So, Mike, you talk about China a lot and, and for very good reason. And there's a lot of important information in what you're saying. But the United States, you know, is different than China in multiple respects. You know, we always talk about, you know, creative destruction, but we kind of don't allow it anymore. We allow zombie companies, but it's on a really small scale. China has zombie cities. They literally built enormous amounts of infrastructure with no utility simply because there was so much money that people built and employed it. We've never done that. I mean, yeah, we get the occasional bid bridge to nowhere. We get empty shopping malls. You know, we get stuff that we could use.
- [58:56]
James
More housing, let's face it.
- [58:58]
Dave
Yeah, we actually are short of housing. China went and just built and built and built. The answer is it's sort of like, why'd the chicken cross the road? Why'd China build excess cities? It's because they could. Now they have all this, this, this mal. We call this mal investment in economics, where you, you invest your productive capacity in things that are not necessary because you could. Because rates are artificially too low. So of course, what's their cure? Their cure is to cut their rates even lower and inject even more liquidity into the economy. But it's exactly what. What James, I was talking about, the general economist tone for this is pushing on a string. You know, the other analogy is it needs more and more drugs to keep things going. They have no choice but to either keep pushing or just say, okay, we don't care, and just allow it to collapse and then just dust themselves off and get back up again as they build their capacity with more stem, you know, engineers and more stuff and more stuff. But the reason why we're not hearing about Chinese tariffs and people are realizing is they're realizing that China put themselves on the wrong foot. And, you know, it's like if you're a negotiation is like jiu jitsu, right? You know, what's the. What's. What is the first statement of jiu jitsu? Use your opponent's momentum and power against them. Well, that's what's going on here. China built too much productive capacity. And as you adroitly have noted many times, and it's very important, you know, they, they now have deflation in the consumer side and inflation on the monetary side because they have no choice. And that's what's going on and, and this too shall pass. But right now that's what you see. That's one thing we don't generally have in the U.S. we don't, I, I don't think there's a whole lot of, you know, condo buildings sitting empty. Right. You know, we don't have that problem. Maybe Miami is going to have.
- [60:44]
Scott
We did that in Miami. Yeah, we did it 15 years ago.
- [60:47]
Dave
Yeah, but it just, but, but it's nothing. It's, the scale is different, Scott. It's, it's orders of magnitude more in what they did in China. And so yes, everything Mike is saying is true. And the question is, is, and you also. Well, they haven't said it in this show. You also extol the virtues of our system versus a one man system in China, which is also a big deal. So you're right about that. And so all of that, what does all that mean? Not sure, but it seems likely that it means more liquidity coming out of China and more productive capacity coming out of China at the same time, which, oh by the way, is disinflationary for the rest of the world.
- [61:24]
Scott
Yeah, I know that we're over time. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
- [61:30]
Mike
Go ahead. I mean, it's just the key thing is we're going to see major technological competition out of China, as Jeff Booth pointed out, which means earnings. I mean you have to have tariffs to protect yourself from China. It's not just us. The whole world now has to protect themselves from massive deflationary forces come out of China and them being able to do some of what our tech companies do, but maybe cheaper.
- [61:50]
Scott
Yeah, I mean, just circling back on Bitcoin as we conclude. I just still see right now more demand than supply. I don't know if that's indefinitely, but I find it hard to see announcements like this. I brought this up. Charles Schwan plants lots bitcoin ether spot trading and saying, you know, aiming to attract clients who want to consolidate crypto holdings with their traditional assets. I mean this is really the holy grail of any asset class is that you can go buy your Bitcoin and Ethereum on Charles Schwab and then use it as a part of your entire portfolio to take loans against. I mean it's just very hard for me not to think that at least we go a bit more higher, a bit higher at some point in this cycle with all this because these people haven't even been able to buy it. I don't know, we'll debate it for another time. But that story just kind of got washed, you know, because I think it happened on Saturday. But just absolutely incredible what's happening in this market. Guys, I love the debate, as always. Really appreciate all of you, Mike. Looking forward to seeing people walking back and forth behind you in the Bloomberg offices soon. But enjoy the rest of your vacation, other guys, see you on Monday. Thanks, guys.
- [63:00]
Dave
Let's dope.