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The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin Skyrockets, Trump Makes Billions Of $$$ Overnight Selling Memecoins | Macro Monday
01:05:37
Bitcoin Skyrockets, Trump Makes Billions Of $$$ Overnight Selling Memecoins | Macro Monday
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- [00:01]
Scott Melker
Bitcoin made a fresh all time high today. After dumping below 100,000, Trump launched not one but two meme coins. World Liberty Financial, his company is buying up every ethereum token they can find on the market. We have an inauguration, a bunch of pardons from Biden and everybody is losing their damn minds. What better crew to unpack everything that happened this weekend then James Lavish, Mike McGlone and Dave Weisberger. We've got macro Monday and it may be the most explosive yet. Let's go, let's do.
- [00:48]
Mike McGlone
Let'S do.
- [00:51]
Scott Melker
What is up everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of all. Before we get started, please subscribe the channel and hit that like button. I know that many people listen to this on audio, but for those who are on video, you can tell that I was so flummoxed by what happened this weekend that I decided to go to a bar at 9 o'clock in the morning, Eastern standard time and just start drinking on Trump date. No, I'm just kidding. I'm in a, I'm at a friend's house upstairs in his bar. But wow, what a weekend. Absolutely unbelievable what happened. I'm just going to bring the team on right now so that we can start to unpack this. Mike. I don't even think we have to have a morning meeting, Mike. I mean, is even Bloomberg just talking about Trump on coins today?
- [01:32]
Dave Weisberger
Yeah, well, I think it's a good start. It's the, his speech yesterday. It's everything that some of the people who did not agree with him or didn't like him or the media doesn't like him starting to happen. He is not going to go down in history as president Blowhard weenie. He's going to start out right away hitting hard and everything he said and he said he's going to set it. So why disagree with it? So that's finally showing up in Bloomberg headlines. The headline is Emboldened Trump returns to with new allies Claire goals. And you see he also mentioned things like national emergency, energy emergency. So crude oil is getting hammered. We obviously see what's happened in bitcoin. So I think he's going to do what he said he's going to do as soon as possible, as soon as he possibly can. Things like regulation and tax cuts will take acts of Congress. But it's going to be a flurry of activity today and tomorrow. And it's obviously good for crypto. But I think there's, for me, for me it's the macro that's Kind of confusing is I. I trust you, Dave and James now to tell me what's going to happen with crypto now, because we're completely in the hands of a new administration, a president who switched over to zealot from convert. But the macro to me is still the problem it. And that is, I still see, at least from our chief equity strategist, Gina Martin Adams, a stretched equity market. I see potentially that bond yield, that 1030 year that peaked up. I think it potentially peaked around 5%. It might be heading towards the rest of the worlds that are maybe more in three handles. With crude oil peaking around $80 a barrel. Right now, it's 79.54. And the key thing I'll end with is in terms of commodities, it's the beginning of the year and you see nothing but enthusiasm for prices to go higher, but very poor fundamental backdrop with China in decline and Trump saying he's going to pressure energy prices, drill at will. I mean, it's not good for commodity prices. And so I look at it as maybe we can keep lifting this great American wealth machine and keep inflation elevated and keep risk assets elevated, which also may tilt the Fed towards tightening, which has been showing up on the screens lately.
- [03:40]
James Lavish
God, there's so much unpacked there.
- [03:43]
Mike McGlone
So you go first, Jason, because I'm.
- [03:46]
James Lavish
Gonna go 100,000ft here. Okay. So economically, we've gotten some, you know, positive indicators economically over the last week. And so that has emboldened the. The bond traders to. To step in a little bit on the longer end of the curve and not be so worried about inflation. Okay. However, here's a. Here's an incredible thing, Mike, is that we are currently above our debt limit. And our debt limit is like $36 trillion. We're currently above it. And we're. And, and Janet Yellen came out last week and said, hey, just FYI, y'all better be all over this because we're gonna have to start doing extraordinary measures, which is not paying intergovernment obligations. And so they're just piling up more debt as we're sitting here. And so that debt number is growing, those obligations are growing. They're just using extraordinary measures and kind of what I call this accounting voodoo until they can figure it out. But nobody's even talking about it. Like, nobody's even worried about it. Nobody's even thinking about the fact that we are bumped up against. We're all over the debt limit again. Here we go. We're in a crisis. We've got a new Administration coming in, we're gonna have to fight about it and nobody cares. Just more debt. Let's just keep piling on more debt.
- [05:11]
Scott Melker
Don't worry, we're gonna pay it with meme coins. James, you obviously were not paying attention this weekend to anything that happened because if you are a deep Trump believer, apparently I once again am suffering from horrible TBs because I was willing to call a grift a grift. My point about the Trump coin, and I'm not gonna obviously hold anything back and believing it. Listen, you can love the guy. They piss me off literally all the time. You can love the guy and still say that this was wrong. Right. And that doing this days before the inauguration was wrong. But there's literally people telling me, guys, just wait for the master plan because this is how they're going to pay off the debt. You guys don't know he's playing 4D chess.
- [05:49]
James Lavish
There's a cash. That's not going to happen. So. But I did see some of that, Scott, and I thought that you were right on, on everything you're talking about this weekend. So. But look, you know, there are, there are like global macro headwinds, sure. But the United States is clearly in the position to continue to take on debt, continue to expand the money supply, continue to fuel inflation. You've got a president who's coming in now that all he cares about clearly is money and asset inflation. He wants the stock to go up. He wants, he wants his me. He wants his meme coins to go up. He, you know, I'm, I would be surprised if we get. Didn't. Well, anyway, so the, the, the bottom line is we have a president who's very keyed on, keyed in on these things. And bitcoin initially reacted negatively this weekend to all of this news. And the, the meme coin, after Meme coin, it was like, well, initially the, the Trump meme coin was like, eh, who cares? And then the Melania coin came.
- [06:54]
Scott Melker
It was like Melania.
- [06:55]
James Lavish
That's when it became this is, this is kind of, this is a bad signal. And then overnight it kind of digested it and said, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Bitcoin is going to be Bitcoin. It does not matter. And it's going to benefit from the asset inflation we expect to have here. And, and they're gonna, they're gonna devalue this dollar. That's just, that's the only path we have now. And it's very clear that the, you know, the broader markets the, the analysts, nobody's even talking about the debt. This is just insane. And so it's clear that we're just gonna keep it, keep it on going, you know, keep tapping it and, you know, life is good.
- [07:37]
Scott Melker
They both basically ignored it during the election cycle as well, just for the record. So that was, you know, purposeful, I think, for both parties because nobody's going to win on austerity.
- [07:46]
James Lavish
But now we are in the crisis. We're literally in it right now. We are, we're, we're executing extraordinary measures to avoid defaulting on the debt. Just for everybody listening to understand what this means. The government is not paying intergovernment obligations in order to pile up this, this, you know, all these obligations that they're gonna have to pay later, right? These are liabilities that they're gonna have to pay later. They're just piling up. It's a tab that they're keeping and they can't issue more debt. They can draw down the tga, the Treasury General account, which is their cash account, and do these extraordinary measures for the next few months. We are literally in crisis right now and nobody cares. So it's clear that we're just going to keep piling on debt. We're going to figure out how to do it, we're going to expand the money supply, we're going to allow for inflation to deal with it and we're just going to keep going. That's obvious.
- [08:37]
Scott Melker
Have you ever seen the movie Dumb and Dumber, James?
- [08:39]
James Lavish
Yes, I have.
- [08:40]
Scott Melker
The guy opens, opens the briefcase and he says, what are these? And he said, oh yeah, that's as good as money, sir. Those are iou. Every cent is accounted for. He's like, you're gonna want to keep that one. It's like Lamborghini, $2 million. Welcome to the US government IOU's. That's how we're gonna find it. Whatever.
- [08:58]
James Lavish
Go for it. Dave.
- [08:59]
Scott Melker
Dave.
- [08:59]
Mike McGlone
Have fun. So. Well, no, look, there's a few things here, you know, if we just talk. You macro. Let's talk about the COM stuff first. So Lyn Alden posted a few days ago something that I thought made sense in terms of why the treasury bond rallied off of, bounced hard off of the 4.8 level and is now at 4.6. And her point is that when dollar surges versus other currencies, foreign countries have to trim their treasury holdings to support their currencies. And so we're seeing lots of cross currents going on here.
- [09:31]
James Lavish
So that means that we've kind of Topped out at a level like just under 5%, which is. That was just enough for them. They've got to start.
- [09:38]
Mike McGlone
Yeah, that's right. So we know. We know there's a lot. We know there's stuff going on. Okay, so let's take a deep breath and look at what's actually happening here. You know, we have a one asset that is different than everybody else, all the rest of crypto, which is bitcoin. And we talk about this for a very, you know, for lots of reasons. I actually am going to break crypto into three pieces, you know, for this, for this rant. Bitcoin is more than anything else, is looking to replace the role that gold used to have and is now kind of hanging onto by its fingertips. Gold used to be 100% of monetary aggregates. It's now around 7% of monetary aggregates or wherever it is. Bitcoin will demonetize gold and go past it. That is in a day like today when we have one leader making his friends and family billions of dollars by shilling off his name and his wife's name and the other leader preemptively pardoning what could be one of the. What people accuse of being one of the great mass murderers in history and Anthony Fauci and, you know, senators and others who are accused of lying under oath in Congress, preemptively pardoning of them of all their lies without an investigation into that, that has everyone on the right enraged, including me. I mean, I cannot believe he pardoned people like Adam Schiff, who consistently.
- [10:59]
Scott Melker
At least SBF is still in jail.
- [11:02]
Mike McGlone
I actually was going.
- [11:03]
Scott Melker
People were starting to worry about that last night.
- [11:06]
Mike McGlone
I'm telling you, Scott, my tweet this morning was going to be at least he didn't pardon sbf. So we. I guess you're right. There's a silver lining here. But, you know, look, all that stuff is noise. The fact of what happened this weekend is the most bullish possible thing that could happen for bitcoin. Bitcoin is an asset that cannot be screwed with like this. And if you have a president who sees that billions of dollars get created for individuals by playing around with this stuff, and he knows that he could potentially create, whether it's a bitcoin strategic reserve, whether they want to buy it. We've talked about the trade. This to him is very promising. And this to him is a very good reason why bitcoin very well may break the four year cycle and not top out in the 250 range or 290 range. Or whatever we're talking about and actually get to gold this cycle. It is, it is now on the table. And that is a very bullish reason. Now, why do I say that? I said, look, if something like a meme coin about fight, you know, about him fighting that has absolutely no economic value can get to those levels that quickly and attract that much capital, what are the marginal players and speculators in bitcoin who are not involved in bitcoin or. I haven't looked through all the data this morning because, like Scott, I'm skiing and it's hard to go through my, you know, my laptop. I'll go through all the stuff I normally look at. But, you know, we have an asset here that when it went down, you know, last night I was thinking, oh, God, I wish I was my computer. I would love to play this inevitable bounce because to me you have the, you have a bitcoin friendly administration after an administration that quite literally tried to crush it out of existence. And we do have to remember that they tried to crush bitcoin out of existence and they caused, they laid the groundwork for Trump, Coin and Fart Coin and others by effectively telling all founders that they couldn't create utility. They had to just stick to memes and we'll let you play with memes because there's not much we can do as long as you don't say it's based on our efforts. And I guess they went after Kim Kardashian and a couple of the others that were sort of meme like, but they, in their tries, they tried to tell people they were going to build a community and pass on economic value. Nobody's trying with any of these things. And I've ranted about Gensler picking on the wrong people and being completely counterproductive and the exact opposite of what he should have been. But that's literally over now. And if you take a deep breath and you look and you say, okay, assuming the inauguration goes forward, assuming the nominations come in as we expect them to be, we are in a new world. And what's that new world look like? That new world looks like bitcoin really taking its place and as the base layer of Internet of value. And so that's why I am so. I'm so bullish. It's really crazy. I mean, yes, if you're a meme coin and Trump and Melania come in, I mean, the whole saga where Trump is in at 70, then they announce Melania and Trump does the nosedive down to 30 something and now it's back. Where is it? Back to 60 or something.
- [14:07]
Scott Melker
Mid 40s, last I checked. Yeah, mid-40s, last I checked. We can check it.
- [14:11]
Mike McGlone
Yeah, I'm looking now. Where are we? Official Trump 4936. Okay, whatever. You know, it's like a ping pong ball. And, you know, the volatility is crazy. It's not beta, it's volatility. And that is something that's different. I mean, look, some of the things that are ripping today are things that should have. I mean, Solana should have. You know, that rally made sense. I mean, we literally have the Solana cheerleader in chief as the cryptos are in America. It's just a fact. Right. I don't know the guy things about him. I've invested a lot of investors.
- [14:52]
Scott Melker
Chamath. There's that all in podcast. They all talked about basically dumping their salon on retail. That infuriated everyone.
- [14:59]
Mike McGlone
Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff going on there. Right. Chain link is one that went down at first. And I'm like, how the hell is chainlink going down of all this stuff is, you know, if the entire. If the administration.
- [15:10]
Scott Melker
That was just a liquidity. Trump was a black hole. Trump was a black hole. Everybody sold everything to get into Trump, who was a speculator in crypto holding any altcoin. That's what happened there. I mean, people were down 20%.
- [15:22]
James Lavish
So you guys talk through the reaction of Trump Coin and Bitcoin when Melania Coin came out, like, what do you think?
- [15:30]
Mike McGlone
I was. I was not at a computer, dude. I don't know what you tell me, Scott.
- [15:34]
Scott Melker
I can. I mean, I can't do, like, what I think happened. So there's. There's some pretty good take. So obviously they launched Trump in the middle of crypto ball at, you know, 9pm on a Friday night.
- [15:45]
James Lavish
And everybody's at the crypto ball. They don't even have. They don't even know what's happening.
- [15:49]
Scott Melker
No idea. No idea. And then it was a fair launch because it was unannounced. But anyone who looked knows that, like the insiders sniped all of the initial supply, basically, you know, tails. All this time they get about 80% of what's existing and floating and hold 80% on investing schedule. So obviously, Trump went absolutely nuts. If you want to talk about why chainlink or anything else went down, it's because you've never seen a liquidity stuff like this. The President of the United States tweets a meme coin and says, buy this, all of a sudden, you're talking about 60, 70, $80 billion in market cap for this asset. And then, as if that wasn't enough, the problem was there was kind of a rumor that the insiders didn't. Didn't expect it to go as big as it did and didn't play it the way they wanted to and sort of like, willy nilly, fired off Melania. But obviously, I think what you saw was that there was not much new money in these things. This was the same hot potato in crypto. The money came from somewhere else and went to somewhere else and then came out of that with people trying to jump into Melania. And I think when bitcoin went down, this moment I've just discussed, I'm telling you, like, I know people are thinking, that's what me. But I asked people, friends, they were like, crypto's a joke. This is stupid. I'm selling it. Even bitcoin at that moment, right? And then I think they woke up to their senses two hours later and said, we're probably getting executive orders tomorrow. All sins will be forgotten and forgiven. Right? But this is. You have to think about this. Gary Gensler's out. There's no SEC chairman right now, right? He launches not one, but two meme coins the day before inauguration, when the president, by the Constitution, is not allowed to enrich himself financially based on the abuse of. There's a lot of terms about it, but very clearly in the Constitution, he couldn't have launched a meme coin today, probably. Although I think they will launch 10 more of them and not really care. But I think it was this perfect window of opportunity to just make a ton of money. And listen, like I said, I think that the Trump presidency is going to be absolutely incredible for this industry. This is probably the biggest signal that this will be incredible for this industry. Because the governor is off. You can go. Every person I've talked to who's in America and in crypto, not even specifically bitcoin, is like, fuck it, I'm going to launch a meme coin. Literally, they're like, it doesn't matter. The president's doing it. Nothing. There's no more illegal, right? You can do whatever you want. So for better or for worse, my first reaction was, this is great for crypto, kind of bad for humanity. It's a terrible signal. Like, it's wrong. You know, it's a grift, it's a cash grab. It's never going to have utility. But, hey, here we are. The industry should Go, absolutely.
- [18:20]
James Lavish
I think it's exceptionally macro Monday. I mean, macro Monday mean coin.
- [18:28]
Scott Melker
Coin Monday.
- [18:29]
Mike McGlone
You know, it is, it is funny because, you know, Lynn Alden had another, another really interesting tweet. This one I actually disagree with, but I agree with most of it, but I disagree with some of the conclusion. She made the point that all the tradfi people pointing to us boomers, people who look like James and I and Mike and say, oh yeah, you know, they sold it. The reason bitcoin topped in 17 was because of the ICOs. And they sold bitcoin because of that. And then the reason it topped, you know, was Luna collapsed. And we all know that. And you know, and they're looking at the meme stuff and saying, ah, this is going to cause the same thing. It's going to cause all the serious money to fly out of it. I think that's just wrong. I think what will happen is people on the margin will say, you know, this whole thing, the whole crypto thing is crazy. What are you, Luna doing? It's a holiday. We have. It's Martin Luther King Day today. The markets are closed. So we have, while this is going on, we now have three uninterrupted days where the only markets that are trading worldwide are crypto markets. And so they look and say you're crazy. And that's all probably true. And so there is some people who will be disgusted. That said, none of this is going to have any impact on BlackRock and their investors, Fidelity in their investors, Morgan Stanley's E Trade launch and their investors, all of the financial consultants that are now going to be free to be able to offer crypto trading services over this year, it's going to have absolutely nothing to do with that. If you've seen this movie like we have, we know the Internet bubble wasn't a one or two month thing. It went on for a long time, right. It was sort of mildly interrupted by Y2K, but it went on. It was going crazy for the entirety of 1999 with stories like I always talk about Net Taxi. I mean, Net Taxi seems cute now. You know, Swan Valley Snowmobile gets renamed to net taxi in 1998 and it's worth a few hundred thousand dollars. It zooms to a billion dollars. Oh my God, how huge could that be? Actually it's like 800 million and then falls back within a year or two, back down to being worth nothing again. That seems cute. Now things zoom to $100 billion. But I mean, with the world financialization that we've had and the amount of monetary printing that we've had, the amount of assets and everything that James rails about every time he gets to old man yell at cloud at the debt. And by the way, I agree with you, James. I'm not memeing you. I'm just saying that sometimes you feel like, how come people can't see this financialization is very real. But my point is that didn't take down the nasdaq and it was happening constantly. It was years. It took two or three years and it took, you know, it really took the valuations to get ridiculously extended on individual companies. Now, Mike has made the point, he's been very patient here, that there are a lot of assets around the world, not just crypto, whose evaluations are very, very extended now. And maybe in the macro, it's as extended as it was back then. I don't know. I'd have to look through those metrics, but I'm not sure that that's true. Curious what your take on that is, Mike, but the point is that it doesn't necessarily derail you. What I do think is going to happen, and this is the amusing part of it, is this administration is going to be net worse for meme coins in the sense of that it's going to have real competition. If you're a founder in America and you're building a token that can have value behind it or build a community behind it that you can actually pass on something, well, you're going to have an actual Runway where today that Runway has barbed wire across it. That barbed wire is about to get. The guy is about to get sworn in and take the big bolt cutters and get rid of the barbed wire. That's locking in the real crypto industry. And so this is a really interesting backdrop. It could go. The volatility and the bumpiness is going to be all over the place. But understand real value expressed through crypto is now open for business or is about to be. And that's a very big deal.
- [22:35]
Scott Melker
Mike, stepping out of like the macro picture that we've discussed so many times. I really just want to know, like, your gut reaction when you saw what was happening this weekend in a vacuum.
- [22:46]
Dave Weisberger
Oh, massive speculation. Never ends well. If you're smart enough to get out and make some money, great. Remember, I'm born and raised in highly speculative leveraged markets and futures typically is 20 to 1. Remind me of everything I see is very. Is it 19, 27, 28 or 29 ish? We have a complete dependency now for bitcoin has to go up in the next year. I've just never seen something like this. I'm trying to, you know, it has to go up now because if it.
- [23:17]
Scott Melker
Goes down, you know, you've been on. I think you've been on a very active like, you talk very often about meme coins and the amount of extra kind of market cap that's in this market that needs to be flushed out. I mean, you couldn't get a more gratuitous example of that. Obviously this, this weekend, if you believe that. Right. I mean, we just got the president launching a meme coin on a Friday night.
- [23:39]
Dave Weisberger
Just there used to be sayings like buy the rumor. I don't have to say the rest of it. We're definitely getting pretty good rumors. We're going to get facts soon. It's going to be the greatest thing ever. And I'm loving, enjoying hearing the same things I've heard every time bitcoin gets expensive. Oh, it's different this time. We're not going to have the drawdowns like we used to. You and I just still have to point out the 2.5 million wannabes. And then I was getting pushed back a little bit this week on an x about bitcoin. I said, you know, it does have a much higher correlation to dogecoin than it does to the S P 500 or gold.
- [24:10]
Mike McGlone
Thank you. Go ahead, keep going, Mike. Mikey, put a pin in that one.
- [24:17]
Dave Weisberger
But a few things I want to macro bring over to the macro and that is we. We have. I know that you will. I mean, I'm intentionally firing you up because that's what we have to disagree on some things. Just from a macro standpoint, we do have a new present coming and it's typically the optimism of how much better he's going to make it. Yet we have the highest, most expensive u S stock market in history by many measures. Great. It's got to go higher, get better yet last year, the stupid rock beat the stock market. This is things I hate to see. I don't want to see gold beating the stock market yet the gold has all this competition from bitcoin and still beat the S&P 500. We probably can look back from the history from history and say that was a bit of a warning. And I have to. I look at the iterations of next year. This is not hypothetical. The bitcoin will be up or down 40% based on its first standard deviation move of its annual volatility. It's about 40% so no one can conceive of being going back to around 60, which would be a shocker but it's got to go to 140 just on a normal correlation move and based on its history yet it's already gone up a lot. And I just look at the whole space is now we have a new government. You know, in some ways we have to thank Gary Gensler for this. I mean nothing like anybody showing especially in life. I always taught my kids you want to see the dark side sometimes to really appreciate the, the good side in life. And he showed us the dark side. Thank you sir. But now we've completely swung over and we have an administration completely embracing massive speculation and in an industry that has unlimited supply and ease of entry. I just kind of look at some of the histories of what came after the stock market crash of 1929 that set up to try to prevent excesses like this. So I'm, I'm looking at this as good luck. Like Soros says, when you see a bubble, join it. But we've had had a serious bubble. Now there's a risk that bitcoin is going to be stuck within you know, 10% of a hundred thousand for quite a while. It's got to go higher. So that's why I look at, I'll tilt over to the macro. The macro globally is very bad and I'll end with this. A question is, you know when you have a pretty extensive excessive importing in the US by corporations for clients, there's one main reason for that is for profits. Why do you offshore if you're Walmart and Amazon or anything else? Because you can get better profits doing it overseas. We're shifting that which means tariffs are going to push back on profits. We already see profit expectations, I'm sorry earnings way too high. Which means we're going to have a normal correction. So here's what I'm still waiting for. Just the normal 10 correction. S P500. Now let's see how the dust settles and see where we should reallocate capital.
- [26:48]
James Lavish
What if we have a sudden 10 expansion of the money supply instead?
- [26:51]
Dave Weisberger
So let me finish with that. That James, I'll end with that too is I do love when people point out the the Debt is on a 1 to 10 basis. US debt historically is basically about a 1 when it comes to affecting long term interest rates. The 10 is inflation, inflation expectations. And this is one of the things that got me out of trading pits almost 40 years ago when I pointed out what's happening in the Rest of the world, the rest of the world's pretty seen risking pretty severe deflation, most notably China. The interest rate in China for that 10 year notes like 1.7 yet they have debt to GDP much higher than US. The interest rate for the the 10 year note in Japan is 1 and change yet their debt to GDP is much higher than ours. You yes, I agree it's a bad trend but we do have, I do think see people addressing it. And to me the bond vigilantes have been in place by us Rates are so high now versus the rest of the world it's potentially something breaking. And that's what I see with gold outperforming the stock market despite the fact it's got major competition from bitcoin.
- [27:51]
Mike McGlone
So there's two massive whopper wrong assumptions in what you're saying where we actually disagree too. What assumption number one is, is that you treat an asset that is aspirationally you treat an option like an asset. You know I've said this many times but, but it comes across. Bitcoin at this point will either reach escape velocity in this cycle or the next cycle after this. But in this, in the not so distant future to where it is parry pursuit with gold and beyond or it won't. That is not an asset that you look at and say oh, it's annual volatility is X and therefore it's no, sorry, if you tried doing that. If you traded options that way, looking at the volatility of the option itself, you go broke very very fast. And that's what shorts are happening. That's what happened to shorts at bitcoin. That's what you saw this morning. People were piling into the short saying okay, the cycle's over, then it's getting their faces ripped off and we'll see what actually happens later. So that's assumption number one. And I say it and you know we joke about it because I talk about it a lot but you can't look at it that way. It's very, very important. Okay, what's the second assumption? The assumption that you make and you, you actually understand that what I'm about to say is correct. So this is a little bit harsh for me to say it that way, but so be it. It makes it good. It makes for good tv. The inflation is not created equal. There's consumer inflation and asset inflation inflation and we're in a world where the all the powers that be want asset inflation and are trying to engineer as much consumer inflation disinflation as they can and how do you do that? Well, you prioritize capital over labor. You make it cheaper. This is pre Trump. You make it cheaper to outsource. You make it cheaper to automate by making capital effectively free so that you can do that. And now we have administration that says, I want to reverse that policy. Well, that is enormously dangerous. And you and I sort of agree about that. But the bond market saying inflation, consumer inflation expectations. Is the bond market going to get hammered because people see us re on shoring where we are going to do something simultaneously which is going to make the US as cheap or in the same ballpark as the rest of the world? Keep in mind the reason the rest of the world is so much cheaper, there are two reasons. One is what everybody talks about, but it's only 20%, which is the cost of labor. US cost of labor is more expensive than the rest of the world. And 20% of the reason it's cheaper to outsource is because of US labor. 80% is because of our regulatory structure and what it costs to actually build a business and build something. China, you've talked about this many times, Mike. How much does China cost to build the cities and all the infrastructures, the nuclear reactors they're building, everything they're building, it costs so much less to build it there than it does here. And that is exactly what this administration is trying to tackle. Will they be successful? I have no idea. I certainly hope they're successful. But if they are, then the amount of inflation we'd be importing, because if we can't fix that, then tariffs and trying to build everything in America, if it costs 5x to build things here, well, inflation is going to be in the double digits very, very quickly. And I think that's what you and a lot of economists are looking at. And it may very well be true if you can't slash the red tape. Because it's not just red tape, it's everything. I mean, it really, it permeates every single thing you tried to do. Think of it this way. In California, we have this great example, Gavin Newsom, that I'll try to leave the expletives off of it, but probably the least likely person I would ever want to run anything, including a lemonade stand, actually said a week ago that, well, one of the things we're going to do to help homeowners is we're going to make it easier for them to rebuild because we know it's too expensive to build in California. Think about what that, what the, the gravity of that admission. But it goes way beyond just state rules. It goes way it goes. It's the entire rulemaking structure. It's the environmental difference. Those of us who are environmentalists believe you shouldn't be able to spew toxic waste everywhere. Well, China, when they dig up rare earth minerals which we use for all our windmills that we think are so green and our solar panels cause toxic waste pits in the middle of their country, and they just say, yeah, no one's living here, we don't care. You can't do that in America. You literally can't. Even if we did find all the, all the rare earths that we wanted, we couldn't get them out of the ground as expeditiously as they do. You know, there's so much of this I could rant forever on this topic. But the point is those two assumptions. So if you bring that back to what James said, though, we have to look at asset prices and asset prices. If you were put in a time capsule, if you were Rip van Winkled, I. E. You fell asleep for 20 some odd years at the end of the Internet, you woke up in 2000 and you went to sleep in 2003 as Internet bubble is pretty much winding itself down and we're about to embark on the huge bear market, the huge bull market that got interrupted by the G. GFC but more or less has continued. And you see that this, this bull market of financial products, you would say, oh my God, how could the price of this be that? But people ignore that money, that the dollar is the denominator. And if you make more of it, what do you think is going to happen to prices? And we keep doing that. Right, James? Isn't that kind of the point?
- [33:19]
James Lavish
Well, I mean, any indication is Hindenburg closed their, their short selling fund for a reason. You know, like this is a guy who, who famously kicked off Enron too much stress. I mean, like, can you imagine being a short seller in this environment? I mean, I can't even fathom what, how painful that would be.
- [33:42]
Mike McGlone
It's money sloshing around, having to find a home. I mean, if you're, if you're, you, you're a person, someone, you know, drops you whatever, you know, a million dollars, where are you going to put it? You're going to put it in a bank account. We know that it's, to use Michael Saylor's analogy, it's a melting ice cube. You know it. So where are you going to put it? You know, you can put it in two years okay, well fine, you know, maybe for two years, that's okay. You get 5% interest or wherever you're at, 4.6 or 3, buy some real.
- [34:12]
James Lavish
Estate, maybe buy some stocks. Yeah, right.
- [34:16]
Mike McGlone
And what do you do? You take a piece of it, you put it out on the speculative curve. You buy lottery tickets. And what are lottery tickets? Well, lottery tickets are OTC equities, really small cap equities and meme coins and other sort of crap.
- [34:28]
James Lavish
Trump and Melania.
- [34:30]
Mike McGlone
And so when Mike talks about 2.5 million Bitcoin wannabes, they're not 2.5 million Bitcoin wannabreS, they're 2.5 million lottery tickets. They're beanie babies. Bitcoin is sitting there and bitcoin like gold. Bitcoin outperforming. Crypto at some point in their lifetime is gonna look as bad for the crypto industry in terms of what's actually happening. Because crypto is going to be assets at some point. All equities are all going to be crypto in the next 10 years because it is way cheaper. No, it's true. You know, you could have an equity, a actual claim on the assets of a company, but it's all going to be tokenized because tokenization, the way crypto trades, is so dramatically more efficient. Lower cost, less friction. So 24, 7 global full multi currency, everything is going to trade that way. Soon you will not be able to distinguish an asset will either be a claim on the equity, the value, the ownership of a company, the future earning streams of a company, if it's utility, or it could be a dow, could be whatever, a debt obligation, or it could just be something that we think is worth value because hey, we like it. And it's kind of funny, which is a pure meme coin. And that's what we're seeing. Eventually we're going to grow up and everything is going to be crypto. So the only issue is going to be, well, what's its value based on? Well, its value is based on people thinking it has value. Okay, cool, right? You know that, that is what it is. And I keep making the point that we're all going there. So it's, you know, here we are. Today, crypto markets are open. They're going to trade a lot. I haven't looked, but yesterday, just yesterday, Sunday, a Sunday in the middle of a three day weekend, Coin Routes had one of its top ten most busy days. Facilitating trading and helping our clients save money. I mean, billions of dollars.
- [36:12]
James Lavish
And you know, to this point, Dave, you remember Back in the. And both. Well, both you and Mike, remember, I don't know, Scott, if you traded these or not, but in 99, 98, 99, when the Internet bubble was, was just getting, you know, really big and you had all these companies that were, all they did is they said they're, they're www something and you, they. Every single IPO was hot. I mean, every single IPO was gangbusters, out of control. If you could get 100 shares or a thousand shares as a, as a huge hedge fund of an allocation of one of these, you made massive money because they were so hot. And they went into the market and they traded straight up. It feels a little bit like that with the meme coin points because people aren't really thinking about utility or value. They're just like, I got to get in the next one. I got to get us another lottery ticket. Just got to get in the next one. Got to get in the next one. And then there's so much money sloshing around in there. It didn't disappear, the money. It just, you know, it went other places and, and some of the stuff was way overvalued. Obviously, it, that, that stuff just went to zero. You know, but it feels like that in this moment. But then the markets did, you know, they, they continue to mature and grow up. And, and I think that, Dave, you're right that it's obvious that this is where it's all going. It's just a question of how much, how much pain do we have to. How many growing pains you have to go through to get there. Right?
- [37:35]
Mike McGlone
Yeah. I mean, I, I think that's kind of the point. The point is the more money we continue to spin and create, the more money they're sloshing around. You're going to get ups and you're going to get downs, but in that, in that environment, it. Downs are harder now. We haven't gotten rid of downs. And at some point people are going to wake up and say, wait a minute, this stuff is all crazy. The emperor has no clothes and there will be a bust. And what will the bust be in and how will that affect other assets? How correlated are all these things to each other? And, and in all of that, the ghost correlations, you, you, once you get past the first day, like this weekend, this weekend proved correlation goes to 1. As Scott said, the black hole of Trump coin, all of a sudden money gets sucked out and everything goes down and then you wake up to.
- [38:15]
Scott Melker
But that to me indicates that there was not much new Money that to me indicates that it was yet the same speculators that have been here the whole time.
- [38:22]
Mike McGlone
It was the middle day. We're talking about the middle day of a three day weekend.
- [38:29]
Scott Melker
No, I agree, but I'm saying to me, like there was a, there was a sentiment and my first, my first thing was like, yeah, this is awful, but man, he's going to bring in a lot of new people. I think that might be happening now. That's on exchanges. But yeah, but listen, it's, you know, if a lot of people come to buy Trump coin, it wouldn't have been here. That might. Will find a home now.
- [38:48]
Mike McGlone
Okay, and now let's bring this back to Mike's other statement that I want to talk about. And I got the two people in the world that are the best to talk about. Mike says bitcoin is correlated to dogecoin. Well, and Scott has always said, how did you get into crypto, Scott?
- [39:04]
Scott Melker
By trading dogecoin. I mean by trade, by trading all coins. But Doge was my first love.
- [39:10]
Mike McGlone
Damn right. So now you have an entire generation of craziest who, who are going to get into crypto because they have a new thing to have as a first love. Is that bullish or bearish?
- [39:22]
Scott Melker
Massively bullish, obviously.
- [39:24]
Mike McGlone
And if this were the court of law, I would say the defense rests. But I will point out that, but that really is important because if you want, if all we care about in macro more than anything else is watch the liquidity. And if you were saying that this idiocy, and it is idiocy, I mean you could say whatever it is, I mean Trump himself probably thinks it's kind of funny and I think it's funny. But if it brings in more money into the, into the sector to get more people to actually start looking at the real stuff that is massively bullish in addition to all the other massively bullish things that we talk about every week. And that's an interesting comment, Chris.
- [40:05]
Scott Melker
Just quickly, Chris, Chris here said Moonshot, where he can basically just buy like crypto with a credit card, you know, head over to 200,000 new users in 24 hours. I saw that, but I also saw an analysis that the bulk of those were crypto natives just looking for the fastest way to get in. So I'm not saying it's not true, but I don't know if that was 200,000 brand new entrants into the market. We know that wallets, one person can own 200 wallets. And it's very Hard to tell how many new people. Listen, it's going to bring a lot of new people. Literally the most powerful and influential person on the planet is firing off meme coins willy nilly. That's going to bring a hell of a lot of new people. The same ones who buy Trump steaks and Trump shoes and Trump, you know, water and all these things, coins forever. He just found a more effective way to do it.
- [40:50]
James Lavish
So one of the things that we're Macro Monday, we're supposed to talk about macro topics and one of the things we haven't even touched on is that Davos, the world economic. The, the forum starts today in Davos. And you know, normally you'd be like, oh, here we go again. You get all these, you know, executives up there. You got JP Moore, you got Jamie diamond. And by the way, I was in New York this last weekend seeing that building, the new J.P. morgan building. Have you guys seen this thing? This monstrosity? It's got a, well, Mike has, it's got a, it has a black diamond on this. Every side of the building. It's got this big diamond on it. So kind of feels like a mark of a top. But anyways, so he, so that's his legacy. He's got this big JP Morgan building with a diamond on it. But you normally think, oh, here we go, Davos. We've got the, you know, the World Economic Forum going on and we're going to, we're going to hear about, you know, the negativity around bitcoin, how it's just used for drugs and sex trafficking and because, you know, it's money laundering, because you've got all these executives up there just, they're just talking bad about it. But this year you got Larry Fink going to Davos. A year after the greatest launch of any ETF in history. It's a completely different feeling for bitcoin this year in particular at that forum, which is just interesting that again, there's just nothing like. It's just yet another, it's just another, you know, check mark. It's another, you know, I don't know, a checkpoint from bitcoin. Here we go. It's just now it's becoming mainstream and adopted now. I'm interested, interested to hear how it's talked about in Davos this week, especially just really quickly.
- [42:33]
Scott Melker
If we get a strategic bitcoin reserve executive order today or tomorrow, how much would that. Oh, my God.
- [42:40]
James Lavish
And that's another, I mean, that's yet another thing. I mean, I'm just Thinking. I'm just thinking macro. Typical mainstream investing, Davos is this week. Last year was super negative. This year. It could be a different. It could just be a different tone about bitcoin because Fink is speaking there and because of the greatest launch in ETF history, the Bitcoin, the, the BlackRock Bitcoin Spot ETF for everybody's listening, right?
- [43:08]
Mike McGlone
And, and that is a very, you know, it's a telling sign. I mean, it. People, for very good reasons, in some cases, in some cases, overboard loan have a tendency to be very negative when they're in Main street about Wall Street. You tell someone you work for Wall street, they say, oh, yeah, you guys are just money grubbing, blah, blah, blah. Okay, there's truth there. The. And the reason why that truth matters is because all of the firms on Wall street have been prohibited from making money on Bitcoin or anything in crypto. And that it's about to change. And every single time, in every asset class, in every situation, when Wall street has had the ability to make money on an asset class for the first time, that asset class has done, let's make it multiple choice. Has it done A, has it gone up? Naturally. B, has it kind of stayed where it was? C, has it gone down? Or D, has it fucking exploded? The answer is D. We all know that. And that's literally what's happening here. That's why the President of the United States family is like gleefully jumping on. They're trying to say to the Biden crime family, hold my beer. You know, and they're doing it legally, right? You know, Biden, you know, took money from, you know, his, his family, James, his brother and his now pardoned son took money from China and Ukraine and this, that and the other thing. Trump is basically doing it. His family's doing it out in the open and legally. And they're, and they're, they're crushing them in terms of value. It's billions instead of millions. You know, say what you want to say about this. I'm not going to put a value on it. But, you know, if you do things legally, Wall street has literally exists to financialize this country by legally making money in ways that if you took a step back and you said, do we really think that we should have, you know, billion more people making money from mortgages than the banks, than the old savings and loan that allow people to buy houses? Well, here we are. We've accepted that for years. The housing crypto allowed.
- [45:07]
Scott Melker
I mean, I mean, Mike, doesn't crypto just open the door to all of the best and worst behaviors that sort of Dave is alluding to here. I mean Trump just printed like $70 billion worth of money. Like if you were looking at all his he probably made five, ten times more than he made in his entire career in 24 hours by simply tweeting something and allowing someone to like pump a meme coin. Doesn't this just unlock the insanity times 10 if all of this becomes legal because the President is doing it. And I'm not saying right or wrong. I'm just saying the strategies that Wall street has used to make money over the years have now been supercharged with whatever Dave drinks every single morning.
- [45:52]
Dave Weisberger
That's a good lead up. Well, I just, I love always like for years, every time I present publicly the most first thing I'd ever say about cryptos is go to coinmarket.com and and sort on volume. This was six years ago when Trump still hated him. And tether's number one. But you know what number four is right now? Official Trump. So there's, you know, there's no lessons in history about risk of massive excessive speculation and inflation. And remember a guy from the training pits who've seen the Ds, the deaths and divorces who, guys who made a lot of money lose it. They get divorced and a lot of them end up committing suicide. I'm just. This is the way markets are now. We're in the mass respect of the frenzy. It's awesome, it's great. But when you get the, the average person getting involved and think it only goes up. It just. I had to go back to Irving Fisher's quote, quote from 1929. A permanently high plateau. Dave, you have to be careful saying things like that because you're saying things in a way that it's different this time. Yes, we have a President. This is unique. This is unique. But this kind of.
- [46:49]
Mike McGlone
But I want to be.
- [46:50]
Dave Weisberger
But no wealth creation number one. Let's look in the macro the Fed to ease. I thought last year was a bit of a mistake. We all saw what happened. It just increased inflation, increased bond yields. They were wrong. So far the market's telling them they were wrong by easing and to ease in this environment means this is an environment they should be taking away the punch bowl. Stock market going up at 2 times GDP means only inflation means massive wealth creation which is wonderful but it means excesses which humans are human nature is.
- [47:16]
James Lavish
Famous for massive, massive, massive divergence in wealth creation. Like continued divergence in wealth creation where the it's the separation of wealth is only going to get worse. It is true. That's why we talk about it. That's why we talk about. And that's why we talk about Bitcoin. Because we want people to protect themselves.
- [47:34]
Dave Weisberger
So let's point about one thing about that. You want them to protect themselves with a highly speculative digital asset. And virtually everybody ever speak to about bitcoin. Who's more normie which I would consider myself many times. My history I was a normie before I got into markets of course was 40 years ago. They all have these and almost always they ask me not about bitcoin but oh, which coin should I buy? And they're all speculating which great. It's fine. Right.
- [47:57]
James Lavish
Because they're, because they're trying to keep.
- [48:02]
Dave Weisberger
Let's point out the major reason why there's massive wealth distribution and difference in this country is because the wealthy are making so much money. But you go around anywhere now your minimal working class person has one of these now they're on their phones. They have the basics of life. They have food, they have water. Yes, they have to work. But remember I got a lot of family members who are wage earners. It's just, it's the wealth creations because that's what America does. Great. It ain't happening in China right now because Mr. Z put on the screws. And this is one thing I love about the big picture. Macro is the world's most powerful demand pool economy is tilted over to cryptos partly because we can't, it doesn't really matter. And the second largest country that's led by the most autocratic communist leader since before Mao is pushed away. Why? Because they can't accept this. It's pushing the whole world. I think what crypto said it initially is two free decentralized markets. The point is prices are just so expensive now when your average person jumps on at these levels and expects to make 10x it's really scary. The time to make 10x is when you typically hear oh it's, it's crushed, it's, it's beat up and now it's just too much enthusiasm to be aggressively long.
- [49:09]
Mike McGlone
And I agree 100 with that last statement. But what James and I are both telling you is the denominator matters. When you have a 36, you know when your debt to GDP in the G7 if you take unfunded liabilities into account, right. It's over 120%.
- [49:26]
James Lavish
Forget it. With add unfunded liabilities. It's absurd.
- [49:30]
Mike McGlone
Then we're at 2.
- [49:30]
Dave Weisberger
So what does that have to do with speculation? With all coins? I agree with you.
- [49:34]
Mike McGlone
Everything.
- [49:35]
Scott Melker
Everything.
- [49:35]
Mike McGlone
It has to do with it. Because the difference is we don't have a docile, aging population like Japan. No, no, Mike, it does. And, and there's two messages here. One message is very important that you're making, which I agree with a hundred percent, which is people who are trying to make 10x their money instead of intelligently investing and looking at this are going to get hurt. You are right. I do not believe this time is different. I think to even insinuate that is. It's annoying because, you know, I agree with you on that point. I call them lottery tickets for a reason. You know what I also they say about lotteries. The lottery is the, is a tax on the poor. The lottery tickets that our government sell, that all governments sell, are a tax on poor people. They are the most regressive tax on the planet. And I do believe that the entirety of speculation is bad. I mean, look, I ran business, you know, I ran Two Sigma securities, right? What did we do? We took the other side of all retail trades. We saw what happened. I mean, retail doesn't always lose money by any means, but there are a lot of people who get crazy. And it's always at the end, at the end of every bull market, you see people pyramid up and speculate up and start taking more and more leverage right at the worst possible time. And I rail about that constantly. And so yes, I agree with you on that. The but is if you're an institution and you're intelligent and you're looking at what's an intelligent bet. Intelligent bets are things like we are devaluing our currency. We have to. And that does something. When you have market interest rates below actual where a free market would set interest rates, you end up getting malinvestment. It is as simple as supply and demand. Parts of economics. And what I have been saying is that's been happening for years. If you set out with a blank sheet of paper and said, I want to create wealth inequality, what would you do? Well, the first thing you would do is you would have fiat money and you would be printing it relentlessly because people who have money now can make money because assets appreciate. So if you're trying to do the bad thing that we're saying is bad, then you wouldn't be doing what we're doing now. Of course, what's the one asset that doesn't print relentlessly? Bitcoin. And. And there are People who understand that there's a reason why the demographics are the way they are. And so please criticize me if you will, and I deserve lots of criticism, but I absolutely agree with you on who could get hurt and what they and what could happen.
- [51:56]
James Lavish
But the one part and yeah, exactly, and 100%, Mike, all of that, let me just say, and then you can then please answer all this. But the one phrase that you said that kind of bugs me is a highly speculative asset. Now this, it's a, it's a new asset and it's only been around for 15, 16 years. But highly speculative is not really fair anymore because it's got over $2 trillion in it. It has, it has handled transactions relentlessly without a, without a hiccup for over a decade now. It is backed by a massive amount of energy, massive 175 terawatt hours. There's 20 nuclear reactors running continuously all year. And so you know, the, the quote I use is that it is, it is just a fortress of digital power and it's nation state level resistant and it's growing every day. And so that's the difference is that I don't believe it's speculative anymore. Is it new? Is it volatile? Is it growing? Yes, it is. Will it remain volatile in the short term? Yes, it will. But I don't think it's speculative anymore.
- [53:03]
Dave Weisberger
You know, let me rephrase that a little bit. Bitcoin is digital gold. That's what got me into the space a long time ago reading Seifudine Amos book. I completely agree with that. We all know who goes back in his program a long time. It is digital gold. But there's times when gold gets too expensive, stock markets get too expensive and markets get too expensive. You have to be very careful. That's why I think we're on else. The key thing I want to reiterate is 2.5 million digital cryptocurrencies are highly speculative digital assets. Let's define what they are. Nothing wrong. Most of them are Bitcoin. Was the bot, the father or mother, whatever you say for all those. The key thing I want to reiterate is, Dave, is what you said is professional investors absolutely know and get. If they're adding bitcoin to an existing portfolio, they're adding massive. They're adding to the risk of their correlation with the stock market right now. Now you tell me that's different. I want to see the proof. I have not seen the proof yet. Everything's making record highs. Bitcoin's Leading the way, it trades it three times the volatility. Great. But most of them get that. Now your typical investor doesn't get that. I get getting off of zero makes sense. But if you're 100% allocated equities and you take 3% of that and add it to crypto, you have much more high exposure to risk assets, as led by the stock market. Historically, there's only been two down years for the stock market since 2011, both times Bitcoin on average dropped around 70%. Yes, it's outperformed. That's the facts of professional investors. And let's look at ETFs. ETFs have already on a risk adjusted basis of reach parity with gold, around 220 billion. Yes, it's risk adjusted. I guess that doesn't matter until you're less wealthy like some of us and you lose money. So to me that's the macro. Whereas I, I'm not. I just pointed out is we've had this most wonderful event. The world changed in November. November 11th. President Trump is the president as of today. Is this the time to be getting over long bitcoin? If you were smart enough like you were James and, and, and Scott and even Dave when it dropped down around 50 in August, this is just not a level to be okay.
- [55:01]
James Lavish
Yeah, but you've gotta, you've got to define your timeline. You gotta define your investing timeline. My investing timeline is very long. And so I don't care, I'm leaving, I'm not selling it. I don't know, it depends on what happens with the dollar, you know, but it's long. It's longer than four years. Warren Buffett, I'm sorry, forever. Well. Oh yeah, you're quoting where. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, but that's the point is my timeline is very long. If you're just trying to make a buck and you, and you may need liquidity. Yeah. It may not be the right time to jump in, but if this is going to be a long term investment for you, four years or longer, then I think you're fine and you just wait it out. And that's the point.
- [55:43]
Scott Melker
I had a long conversation this weekend with Bill Barheit, the CEO of Abra, because obviously they're still doing bitcoin lending at. I just wanted to understand structurally how it was, even though I'd done a podcast with him. I think everything's going to change for bitcoin, whether it's microstrategy or the banks having SAB121 overturned. But I think it can be a forever thing, Mike, for people who are willing to take a 30% loan to value ratio on a loan against their bitcoin if bitcoin continues to rise, literally. I know this sounds crazy, but you literally never have to pay. If you took a loan at $100,000 bitcoin and only took 30% out and bitcoin goes to 1 5th, literally never pay that loan or its interest and you never have to sell your bitcoin. It's the billionaire playbook that's never been available on bitcoin but is available on Tesla stock for Elon Musk and such. Right. So I do think that as bitcoin becomes more financialized, people are going. The big holders are going to have to sell less to fund their lifestyles because they'll be able to do all the other things.
- [56:43]
James Lavish
Exactly what I wrote about this weekend in my newsletter. Exactly.
- [56:46]
Dave Weisberger
I don't disagree. But it predicates. It's an if statement based on one simple fact of it has to go up in price. Okay, no problem. No problem. It's going to have to go up.
- [56:55]
Scott Melker
Right? Right. On a 35% loan is Bitcoin cutting in half and you can add more. I'm just saying if you're very safe about it and you do it in the right way, one bull market sets you up for life and you never have to sell.
- [57:10]
James Lavish
Let me rephrase that, Mike. Let me rephrase that, Mike. The it's not that bitcoin is going up in price, that the US Dollar is continued going down in value. That's the point.
- [57:18]
Scott Melker
You're borrowing. You're borrowing an inflationary asset against a deflationary asset.
- [57:23]
Mike McGlone
Thank you.
- [57:23]
James Lavish
Yes.
- [57:24]
Dave Weisberger
So let me. I don't disagree with that. But that's what gold has done historically over time. And when you actually measure the court, what really pushes Bitcoin up or down over time? Even our Bloomberg economist team did it. Dollar doesn't even fit in there. It's one tenth of what really matters. Macro, big picture over 10 years. Yes, but look at the dollar versus all the other currencies on the planet. Let's think of fiat currencies. I get it. It's still the best horse in the race. There's nothing even close.
- [57:48]
James Lavish
I don't disagree with that. That's why I don't.
- [57:51]
Dave Weisberger
What currency is better? I mean, fiat currency is better than.
- [57:53]
James Lavish
The dollar, but dollars still will buy you fewer things today than they did 10 years ago, period.
- [57:59]
Dave Weisberger
Every current, every fiat currency history and planning except for maybe a Spanish piece of eight. Right.
- [58:09]
Scott Melker
By the way, I don't know if you guys saw. Go ahead, Dave. Yeah, please.
- [58:13]
Mike McGlone
No, you go ahead, Scott.
- [58:15]
Scott Melker
I'm just gonna say I can't literally get Twitter up on my computer if you guys are wondering. But World Liberty Financial, obviously Trump's company just announced that they're unlocking more token supply to sell on the back of their demand. In case you're wondering, this was the one that was World Liberty Financial was raised by accredited investors in the United States. And now that he'd be inaugurated and can't launch a meme coin, they're going to sell more of those tokens than we're on the fixed schedule that people are raving about for all of the other launches.
- [58:46]
Dave Weisberger
So let me ask one thing in history. What happened with Gary Gensler became fcc? He showed us the dark side, thank you very much. We're going to look at him for history. Like Aaron Burke, he did us a favor. Now we have this situation, the complete opposite. We have this crypto present and there's nothing, anything that can go bad. I just look at it. All right, good luck with that one. Just be careful.
- [59:07]
Mike McGlone
Well, all I'll say is, I'll say, all I'll say is this. If you understand that Hester and Paul Atkins are both disclosure based regulators, that things like what Scott just said is if you raise an asset and you say this is the schedule that's going to happen and then it isn't that you're going to get prosecuted. Having an SEC that ignored bad guys, ignored ftx, ignored Voyager, ignored Celsius, ignored all the bad guys and focused only on stopping innovation and allowed meme coins, allowed all, basically they allowed all the bad behaviors. And Mark Cuban in his rant today, and I'm going to respond to his rant on Twitter to Jeff Dorman, who, Jeff is brilliant and Mark basically just took a absolutely ridiculous potshot at him, is if you do those things that we think are bad behaviors and you have reasonable regulation, you will get done. And that's what we want regulators to do. We want regulators to say if you say, if you tell people the token economics are X, Y and Z with the supply schedule of Q and it isn't, and you deviate from that, then you broke the law and bad things happen. And that's what we want. We want that. We've literally had the polar opposite of that. So when you say these things, just understand what you're saying. The Biden administration, the Democrats in charge, put Gensler in that seat to destroy an industry and to hold back innovation and not to protect investors. Protecting investors means if I buy something, I buy it on the basis of information and that information turns out to be a lie. The person who lied to me goes, pays fines or goes to jail. That's what needs to happen. And I don't believe James or I even remotely disagree with you on that. My problem is, let's not be disingenuous. Let's understand that that is exactly what's going to happen. Yes. Is there going to be grifting? Yes. Is there going to be stuff at scale? Yes. The same people brought to you, you know who. There's so many different things that have happened. Same people brought you Enron, you're going to bring you new crypto scams and hopefully they will also go bring Enron back. You go to jail. Yeah, I know, I saw that. You know, the nuclear, the household nuclear reactors. Okay, great. If that were true, it would be fucking awesome. But, you know, I, let's just say I'm going to stay skeptical until proven otherwise. But my point is we want regulation to make these disclosures be real, be forced material. And if you deviate from them, you go to jail and you have to give people money back. And ultimately this weekend is going to shine a huge light on that and eventually we'll end up in a better place. Now, is there going to be a lot of volatility to get there? Absolutely. Is there a lot of crap that happens? Yes. Is bitcoin through all of this? Just building block by block every 10 minutes also? Yes.
- [62:04]
Scott Melker
Yeah. I think it's very clear the winner here should be bitcoin. And all of the insanity which you, I think eloquently sort of described at the be at the beginning. I mean, James, did you buy Melania.
- [62:17]
James Lavish
Just in case I, I, I leveraged it.
- [62:20]
Scott Melker
I don't know. Got a little bag.
- [62:22]
James Lavish
Melania, perp future.
- [62:25]
Scott Melker
Do you think we're gonna see, do we, you think we're gonna see Baron and John Jr. And Eric coins, or do you think that they got, they got there?
- [62:32]
James Lavish
I think it's past the deadline.
- [62:34]
Mike McGlone
Yeah, yeah, he put it, I mean, it's starting now, right? Isn't it? Isn't, you know, isn't the.
- [62:39]
Scott Melker
I'm not watching on tv noon est, I think.
- [62:44]
Mike McGlone
Oh, it's noon est. Oh, okay. Okay.
- [62:47]
James Lavish
Well, it could be wrong. Could drop any minute.
- [62:49]
Scott Melker
We could do this, we could do this show for 15 hours. I wish that this show was, like, going to be later. This afternoon too, because. Because we're going to see the executive orders. So we're going to have a lot more, I think, to talk about as those come out because people are really waiting for executive orders.
- [63:04]
Mike McGlone
Quick prediction. I do not believe there will be a bitcoin strategic reserve by executive order buying. I do think you probably will have an executive order saying don't sell the stuff that they own and having a study and kind of to allow what's going on. I think that there will be actually significant action happening that we aren't going to see because it doesn't make any sense for the US to say we're going to buy and let everybody buy ahead of us.
- [63:30]
James Lavish
Exactly.
- [63:30]
Mike McGlone
So I want to be really clear about that. You know, in terms of that. Now, could that cause a sell off in bitcoin today? Yes, it absolutely could. If people are stupid and if they're smart. Yeah, it will, it will go up from here, but we'll see what happens. People do a lot of crazy things and remember, none of the other markets are open to trade this stuff. So people are going to trade it.
- [63:48]
Scott Melker
I think it's very important to understand. Go ahead, Mike. Yeah, I think it's very important.
- [63:55]
Dave Weisberger
All futures markets are open. You can trade gold, you can say crude oil, you can trade S P500. They're all, they're all open in futures, right?
- [64:02]
Mike McGlone
Yeah, but I mean you can't trade individual stocks.
- [64:04]
Scott Melker
Yeah.
- [64:08]
Dave Weisberger
Hopefully.
- [64:09]
Scott Melker
Yeah.
- [64:10]
Mike McGlone
Yep. I agree.
- [64:11]
Dave Weisberger
The technology is amazing that I think.
- [64:15]
Scott Melker
It'S pretty clear that a lot of people believe that Trump would be the first bitcoin president. Have said so. I think it's very clear that we have our first crypto president and there's some important nuance there and that things are going to get absolutely wild over the coming weeks and the next four years. Hard to protect what's even going to come. Listen, as I said, if this all brings a ton of liquidity into the market and 5 or 10% of those people find their way to bitcoin, which is what happened with doge and, and NFTs and metaverse and Defi Summer and all those things in the past, it'll be a massive net positive for the space. I think it's all systems go for crypto in the United States. So for better or for worse, if Trump meme coin gave us that, I think it will shake out as a net positive for the industry. Right. And so we'll take what we can get. Guys. It's 10:07 707 for the skiers and the Vegas guys out there. I don't even know what we'll be talking about next week, but I can just promise it's going to be epic. There's a great conversation. Thank you guys, as always, for helping me unpack it. Heading over to Twitter spaces in about 10 minutes. See everybody else here tomorrow, 9:00am thanks, Mike. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, James. Later.