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- [00:00]
Austin
Most tokens, I would guess, are going to go to zero and things are going to die. But the winners will be very big.
- [00:06]
David
Even if we do see a market structure bill like realize in 2026, let's say I think the market hasn't priced it in yet.
- [00:15]
Rahm
The difference also between now and most of the last seven months or so is that investors are all in the market now. Investors are in.
- [00:24]
David
Right.
- [00:24]
Rahm
There's no one off the sidelines now.
- [00:25]
Chris Perkins
I've talked often about this massive risk gap between 24. 7 markets and non 247 markets. They just can't rebalance and it's going to lead to a massive crisis. So hat tip to our friends over at nyse. Welcome to Bits and bips, where we explore how crypto and macro combine one basis point at a time. I'm going to be your host today. I'm Chris Perkins, president of Coin Fund. Today I'm with, as usual, Ram Alawalia, Maester of Wealth, leader of Illumina.
- [01:00]
Rahm
It's gone.
- [01:00]
Chris Perkins
And today I am blessed to have my dear friend David Dong, global head of research at Coinbase. Gentlemen, we're here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro. And remember, nothing we say here is investment advice. And check out unchained crypto.com bitsandbits for more disclosures. All right, let's go to the break.
- [01:24]
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- [01:32]
David
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Chris Perkins
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David
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- [02:03]
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- [02:17]
Chris Perkins
All right, welcome back, everyone. There's a rumor running around that the mad professor is going to be joining us here in a second. But in the meantime, we wanted to jump right into the market structure.
- [02:27]
David
Bill.
- [02:28]
Chris Perkins
Now, this has been quite a drama and la. Last Thursday, David, your firm, Coinbase, publicly withdrew its support, calling the draft quote unworkable Now. Hey. Hello, Austin. Now, since that time, the Democrats, industry reps, and others have reopened their negotiations and they're underscoring just how fragile this coalition is. But this would have been the first real vote on the crypto framework. But it seems like we've talked about in this podcast, that the empire is striking back. It seems like the banks and Citadel are positioning themselves against crypto, and disputes are centered around things such as stablecoin yield, market structure, around equities, intermediary roles, and how much flexibility the regulators are going to have vis a vis crypto regulations. Over the weekend, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rejected reports that the Trump administration may pull support. And he's called that. He said that the White House has been super constructive. Now, look, separately, new resistance has emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee. We had Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin object to not being included in some of the discussions. And, and so let's just, let's just get into it, guys. And Austin, welcome back. You know, you've been all over market structure. You want to kick off with your take on where we are and where we're going?
- [03:57]
Austin
Yeah, sure. I think a lot of the complication of market structure is you're at the nexus of about six different groups, all of whom have overlapping and not identical continuous concerns. And the core problem for anybody who wants to oversimplify it is that it's hard to get to an over 50% majority to move anything in that situation because as Chris said, you have the big banks who are piling in. They're concerned about competition from stablecoins and Yield and looking to, quite frankly relitigate parts of genius that were already passed. You have the crypto industry itself looking at the stablecoin part, but also all of the rules around securities, who gets essentially control between sec, cftc, how powers are divided, and there's not even unanimity within crypto on that, much less outside of it. I think you have some traditional financial players like Citadel, who care deeply about those rules, who may not be aligned with the crypto industry. And then I think, helpfully piling in, you've got people on the, call it judicial and anti financial crime side who, I'm going to be honest, I'm not sure are completely up to speed and on how some of these issues work because they say they have certain goals and then propose things that directly contradict those goals. So I think we have something of an education problem. And then at the final leg now starting to get involved, you've got people like retailers who themselves have their own views on commerce related to this that the big banks have attracted who now are pushing for, like, the Credit Card Choice act and things of that sort as part of this. So that is a. I'll just say it this way. It's hard to predict exactly which rock the boat will crash into, but when you see that many rocks in front of a boat, you could pretty accurately predict it's going to hit one of them. And so when I look at Chris, to bring this back around to where we started, Armstrong's comments, a lot of what I am concerned about there is, I think he's probably right that the White House is constructive. I think once people heard out why Coinbase was pulling back and others opposed it, there's probably, like, some ground between all of them. But I don't know that that solves any of these other issues amidst the constituents in the bill. And that's before you get to the Republican, Democratic, like, political problem here.
- [06:19]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I agree, David. So I don't know what you're able to say or not say, so if not, we can just keep talking. But I did see Fariar, who is your global head of policy, just speaking at Davos with Brett Teshpal, and. And he highlighted three different things that were the reasons why they pulled back. It sounds like things are constructive. Is there anything that you can comment on around where Coinbase is in the situation?
- [06:42]
David
Yeah, I would say Farrier is definitely the authority here. And, you know, going to Brian's tweets is probably the. The best thing because I think that he laid out very clearly. But I can tell you that it wasn't just one issue that really kind of caused Coinbase to step back from this. And Faryar has kind of pointed out that there were, you know, six big, fundamental kind of concerns that we had, and that was why, you know, we were at the table at Good Faith. But, you know, we're not going to compromise on what we think isn't going to be good for our consumers, isn't going to be good for the industry. So this was part of the problem. And, you know, like, I think that coming back to it, what Austin said about stablecoins, that's absolutely a big part of this. It's not the only issue. I think that I can't speak to the fact that the Genius act wasn't a perfect bill, for example, but it was still a very good bill. And I think that even during the time since it was adopted, there's been something like 200 different commercial announcements that have been made with these companies. And this has been integrating stablecoins into these payment systems, into the infrastructure in a way that wouldn't have been commercially viable before that. So I think that this is kind of what we need to consider when we're trying to relitigate this whole issue.
- [07:56]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I don't get the relitigation. I get why it's happening, but I don't think it makes sense. There's no mulligans in crypto.
- [08:03]
Rahm
Willis Roth on this. Has everyone tracked up? Obviously he introduced the Clarity Act. He's now the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Is anyone tracking on where he's netting out on these issues between the large banks and.
- [08:16]
Chris Perkins
Sorry, who?
- [08:17]
Rahm
French Hill. Congressman French Hill.
- [08:21]
Austin
So I think part of the problem they have in the House and like I'll remind everybody that Congressman Hill himself is a former community banker here.
- [08:30]
Chris Perkins
Is.
- [08:31]
Austin
The small banks have convinced themselves that stablecoins are a significant threat to their deposit base. I'm going to be the first person to tell you that is factually false. Like, I've done a lot of research on this. The share of deposits is a percentage of the system held by small banks was close to cut in half from 2009 to 2023. Let me tell you, stablecoins, 100% had nothing to do with that because that is over a trillion dollars in deposits at a time when they were like a hundred billion ish to 200 billion ish of stablecoins, 95% of which are held by non US persons, right? Just mathematically you can't square that, right? That's like saying one Hyundai Tucson, right? Is a car is responsible for 500% of US auto accidents, right? Like this is an incoherent statement. And the problem it's created though is the small banks have convinced themselves that is the problem. I think in the vein of we'd rather point the finger and blame somebody else for our woes and not appealing to customers and not sort of like modernizing because like Rom, you and I have talked about this outside the show, but community banks in general are essentially zombies. Every year for many community banks, their average customer gets one year older, right? And that means you are on a path to obsolescence. And you know that because there are some outliers in that space who have very much gone the other way that show the other path, right? Like take Sofi as an example. That's a bank that's grown very quickly because it was digital first, a tech native, it appealed to young people. But like I live in Brooklyn. I could walk around and look at like 5 to 10 community banks, 20 minute radius around my house, and I have absolutely no reason to use any of them for anything. And so when stablecoins become the sacrificial lamb that the ICBA is pointing to and all of their claims are false, so there's functionally nothing you could do to appease them other than just like they need to educate themselves and stop being 80 years old. I don't know where French Hill goes.
- [10:32]
Rahm
On that 12 observation.
- [10:34]
Austin
I have one old.
- [10:35]
Rahm
I think it's a great point you made. That Congressman French Hill, who's extremely thoughtful individual by the way, he's a former community banker. This is going to come down, I believe, to the guy in the seat. He's the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. So he's going to want to make tiebreakers and he's going to lean towards the incumbency. And the banks is my read of the situation. I'm not saying that's what they should do, trying to handicap what's likely to play out. One other quick point is on Zell, so the small banks and the big banks had an interesting innovation opportunity around payments with Zelle. This was what, like seven years ago? This is a dry run for stablecoins, which is another modern payments innovation opportunity. The big banks were the first to adopt and they had an edge because of that. The small banks that adopted were able to acquire new accounts quicker, but on average they're slow adopters. So if you're a small bank, you're trying to slow the pace of change. So I think Austin's right in a larger sense of, hey, it's not really disruptive to community banks. But that's not their mindset. Their mindset is I'm already getting hosed by online digital banks. I mean hosed by the big banks are now stepping into Pennsylvania, taking share from these regional banks. I think they'll push back. I think Congressman French Hill will probably go in the direction of the banks. I guess the last real question here is this part of this is what is a bank? Is a rose, is a rose, is a rose. That's the issue. If you pay out interest, what is that? We are breaking definitions. Our modern banking regulatory system isn't set up for these kinds of concepts.
- [12:14]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I don't know if I agree with you on Congressman Hill because this is very much a Senate battle right now. We got to get through the Senate. That's where the problems have been. I was on the phone all weekend with a lot of folks at the table at some of the highest levels. And I'm going to tell you, Austin, this is going to shock you. Wait for it. I'm actually kind of bullish on getting something passed, at least getting something to the floor, because as I go with those folks line by line down the issues that matter, I think they're all solvable from a policy perspective. What I don't think is solvable, perhaps, is when you get to the floor, the Democrats that I talk to can't get over the fact that their constituents or their party align crypto with Trump in many facets. And so they can't get over that. So I think from a policy perspective, we can get there. I'm not sure we can get there from a political perspective. And let's just break down the issues. Right. Stablecoin interest. When you talk to the powers that be, they're like, listen, you were never able to pay interest on idle stablecoins. Like, how easy is it to not make it idle? It's not that hard to do. And so I think there are ways we can thread the needle. The other thing that I keep going back to because like we, why not? We like to talk about Gary Gensler on this show. Like, I blame a lot of this on him. It's a lot harder to make legislation these days because we're post Chevron deference. Regulators have limited ability. And what you're seeing in this bill as well is they're trying to restrict the ability of regulators even further. Gosh, in this case, we kind of want the regulators to do their work. We want them to be able to issue exemptions and it's called a section 505, where we want them to have the flexibility to say, well, wait a second, guys, these are tokens. We should provide limited exception relief because again, we can solve the same principles with this new technology that we solve in the old way. So again, my overarching thesis is that everyone's still at the table. This is very positive. We're going to go to the floor, people are going to vote, and then they're going to have to live in the bed that they make.
- [14:26]
David
Right.
- [14:28]
Chris Perkins
I don't know how it plays out. I'm still thinking it doesn't get done, but I'm feeling better about it. And then I guess the question that I'd like to ask David next, what happens if a bill gets passed and what happens if a bill doesn't get passed? Where does that leave markets?
- [14:45]
David
Good question. I think If a bill does get passed, markets still have an even reckoning with who does this actually benefit, which tokens does this benefit. I think that probably for most part bitcoins carved out its own niche. Obviously bitcoin isn't considered a security. It's well within the bounds of like being commodity. So I think that's fine. But people haven't really reckoned with how is this going to support DeFi. For example, we saw for example Uniswap actually do the fee switch vote on or Christmas. But you know, like as a community, I don't think anyone has really kind of figured out what do we want from the crypto space right now. Do we want to just kind of invest in tokens? Which once upon a time I would have said most definitely, that's kind of the path of least resistance. But AAVE is a good example of this. I think, you know, AAVE has kind of brought in this idea of like, could there also be the equitization of tokens and is that the right way to kind of accumulate value to these projects, for example? I don't think people are as opposed to equity as they once were. I think once upon a time people just kind of dismiss it as stocks and that they were only invest in crypto, only invest in tokens. That's not the case anymore. We open the door to that with ETFs and DATs and Circle's IPO and all these other myriad of things. And it's still ongoing right now with, you know, Bitgo and other things that have been in the news. So I think that this is kind of the challenge. So even if we do see a market structure bill like realized in 2026, let's say, I think the market hasn't priced it in yet. I mean, obviously not because of all the challenges we faced. But beyond that, I think people haven't figured out, well, which sectors does this benefit? Like, do I want to buy like, you know, dinosaur defi names or do I want to buy longer tier, long duration kind of names? I don't think anyone realizes that yet.
- [16:36]
Chris Perkins
So you don't think market structure is priced in either way?
- [16:40]
David
No, I do not. I think that very much. You know, it probably will overlook bitcoin. I think bitcoin will benefit to some small marginal kind of effect. But I think if we do see it get passed, and you know, I'm not going to throw out the timeline there, but let's say it gets passed in the near term, I think then people will kind of rush and say, like, okay, what should I be buying here? Like, where do I need to be long?
- [17:04]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I think you're right. And securities are no longer a death sentence. But, Rob, how do you think the market reacts to the ongoing.
- [17:11]
Rahm
Well, I guess I'm trying to reason through this in real time myself. I'd love to hear your perspective, Chris. Like, where's the causality? So, look, we get clarity on what's a commodity. How does this drive asset prices? Right. You get more investment, I suppose. Like, what's the. What's the bull case around how this act drives higher asset prices? I'll take the other side. After you.
- [17:36]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I think it, you know, prices go up when there are more buyers than sellers. And there's a lot of buyers that haven't been able to access these markets because they have risks that they're just not comfortable taking, let alone the. The volatility of the underlying asset. It's a frontier asset.
- [17:52]
David
But.
- [17:52]
Chris Perkins
But they don't want to take regulatory risk. And so again, but, but my thesis is a little bit different. I think on the base. If you have a market structure law that's passed, those institutions feel even more comfortable and it's easier for them to navigate their investment committees, to enter the space in a major way, whether that's, you know, whatever equity form or crypto form. But I think the truth is something a little bit different. I think the truth is that letting these regulators do their job and Chairman Atkins and Selig are world class, we're going to have pretty good certainty one way or the other. Why? Because we're going to know what a commodity is. We're going to know what a security is. Commodities are going to have futures, and we're going to have a whole bunch of them. And so the issue there is enshrinement. And the question is, well, if I build all this infrastructure and I'm operating, it takes me two years to build. Okay, I put it in place for six months, and there's a change in administration. Oh, no, now I'm stuck. I wasted all this money. So I do think market structure law helps accelerate those new buyers coming into the market. But at the end, I think we're going to have wonderful certainty either way for at least three years and press.
- [19:04]
Rahm
On a wall of capital waiting for clarity. I just don't see that 585 crypto VC funds have a mandate to invest in digital assets they were going to invest with and without the bill. From my vantage point, I see crypto along with other high Beta names like Robinhood and Palantir and Sofi. And it's like the old guard of this bull market. Now it's rotating to a new guard of high beta. That includes space stocks, that includes defense stocks. I think that's just where the money is. That's where the relative strength is. And I don't think this bill suddenly changes that.
- [19:43]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I think it's different than vc. Right. We're talking about pensions, endowments, investing in liquid assets. We're talking about those traditional large allocators moving into the space for the first time. You run around the world. There's a lot of pension funds, endowments, and other institutions that have been watching it. They're not yet comfortable dipping their toe in the pool. So I think it's much bigger than the VC community who's always going to be early.
- [20:07]
David
I agree with that. I think that access I, I think is probably underappreciated in terms of everyone in, in this space right now. Probably. Yeah. You know, we can easily go to like my company Coinbase or wherever kind of do it. But I think Chris to his point is large institutions still have a lot of constraints and the, you know, regulatory one is a big one. So I think we have started to see like RIAs kind of step in here. Like, but even that's more of a recent development. Right. Like we saw Morgan Stanley's headline that hey, now they can. Their RIAs are allowed to kind of recommend those ETFs to their clients and would still have to be within that vehicle. It still couldn't be Bitcoin natively into a portfolio. And that's fine. There's tons of reasons why that might not be the case. But I think that if you have the regulatory bounds in there, the framework in there, then a lot of those large institutions can kind of step into the space and there's trillions of dollars waiting there. I'm not saying that would happen immediately again. It probably wouldn't be a wall for per se. That would be like, boom, day one. Like all that money is kind of floating in again. If these things are slow, these guys are like, you know, very large conservative institutions. So it will take time for that money to kind of flow in. But I think when it does, I think it still will come into a crypto space and benefit us.
- [21:26]
Chris Perkins
Yep. So we're going to go to Greenland next, but before we do, wanted to hear Austin's final thoughts on how this thing plays out.
- [21:32]
Austin
Well, I think one thing that's happening here is it kind of begs the question to me of why do things have value? Right? Like, put differently, clarity showing up to me, I think is going to be a pivotal moment for a lot of crypto projects and a lot of tokens. Because under the Gensler regime, everything was hypothetical and you might have value, but, oh, I can't do things. We're all doing janky things. But the reality is when the gun goes off and the game starts, you either could do it or you can't. And so I think this is going to be like a sort of dividing function. Most tokens, I would guess, are going to go to zero and things are going to die. But the winners will be very big. You know, in many ways, a little bit like tech in the 90s, right? A lot of that stuff did not make it, but the stuff that made it is incredible. And so it's going to be a forcing function on that. I think the other part, back to our discussion here is now you will have equities, like things that are equities right now that build into this space, deriving a lot of value from it. They may never launch a token, right? That may just be like somebody who is a corporation starts using this stuff and generating revenue from it. And so it really scrambles the playing field in a way that was not possible previously. And for that, I don't think it matters whether we get clarity or not. Chris. I think if clarity passes, that's great for the long term. If they do a good job of it, it's actually probably bad if they do a bad job of it. But as I said, we've got like Atkins and ceiling in place. They're going to go through notice and comment rule making periods for these things. They're going to actually write things down. That means if a future like regulator wants to unwrite those things down, there's also a process for that. And you're not going to get in trouble for the time period in which you did things as they were written down. Right? It just creates a framework that allows people to operate in a way that is not total kabuki theater. And without, you know, something like the Gensler Sec acting truly in bad faith, where they prosecuted a bunch of people like Coinbase who were not deliberately engaging in criminal acts, but missed most of the people who were. And I think it's that playing field that really matters. Like, I'm still very skeptical on coins clarity, because like you said, where the Democratic votes ultimately come from is a hard line for me to get over. But I also think it matters less than it ever has.
- [23:54]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I agree. So real quick before we go on go around the horn, does, does clarity get done this year? Austin, you say no, right? No. Rob? No. David.
- [24:08]
David
This is just my own opinion, but I think yes.
- [24:10]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, David's, David's the optimist. I don't know, I've been no forever. I felt encouraged after the weekend chats. I'm going to stick with no for now, but maybe next week will be different. But I hope it gets done. I think it's generally bullish. Great, let's go to Greenland next. So lots going on here, guys. President Trump wants to buy Greenland. And it looks like, like from my perspective, the guy's a real estate guy. We had 1951. The US already has like pretty much free reign across Greenland. You know, when it comes to military installations, we've actually pulled back military installations. But he really, really wants Greenland. I think he wants to be part of his legacy. And now he's starting to ramp up tariffs, applying other tools, non kinetic tools to coerce know our allies to, to give him what he wants. Polymarket states it's only a 21% chance that he acquires it before 27. You see gold and silver moving higher. Obviously the markets have not. Markets just don't like tariffs. But I guess starting off, what does this mean? I mean, is this just another issue where he threatens the tariffs and then things settle and then markets rebound, Then we kind of get back to where we were. Want to hear your takes. Let's start with Rahm. So much going on in Greenland right now, you know, fresh off of Venezuela. What does this mean for the markets? What does it mean for crypto?
- [25:41]
Rahm
Well, first off, Trump is serious about it. He's very serious. This is an objective he wants to pursue. It'll get done. The question is, what's the method? Is it through a bargain or is it through something else? The second thing is, I don't know if you guys remember, after the Venezuela episode, there was this viral clip with Jack Ryan giving a lecture around how strategic Venezuela is. And now we saw that again with the Greenland this weekend. This, we're seeing this new kind of social media. Life imitates art, art imitates life. And it's just kind of fascinating to see. I mean we have the first television president, the first social media president. I think all future presidents will be social media influencers going forward. That's just fascinating to see in terms of how this is being processed, in terms of historical movies and art and all the Rest from a markets perspective, Markets don't like where we are now. Futures obviously down. That's a combination of both Greenland and also the EU threatening the us. This is like a man bites a dog now around scuttling a trade deal. Markets don't like any of that. The difference also between now and most of the last seven months or so is that investors are all in the market now. Investors are in. Right. There's no one off the sidelines now. So the positioning is long. So I'd expect that international stocks will continue to outperform. What you're seeing is the S and P is one of the worst stock markets in the world. Over the last 12 months, Mag 7 stocks are in correction. They've been lagging. That's in part due to the fact that there's more populist pressure on those names, including from the President and also pressure from money managers just rotating out of the us. So yeah, this is not a nothing burger. I think there are a lot of nothing burgers out there. I think this one actually is that so I think there's, there's more risk to, to process, you know, ahead.
- [27:49]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I think so. David. Bitcoin is not. Gold's up. Bitcoin is not acting like digital gold. Is this all correlated? Why aren't we seeing, you know, bitcoin assume its rightful place?
- [28:03]
David
Yeah, this is a continuation of the trend that we saw in 2025 where that digital gold narrative just didn't look very convincing to a lot of folks. And I think that you're seeing this in a weird way because right now the dollar is actually weaker against most other currencies, notably the Euro. Typically. The strange thing about market dynamics, you know, I used to work from Tradfi and I used to work emerging markets and usually like regardless of whether the issue was coming from within the U.S. oftentimes you saw investors actually buy the dollar, the dollar would still strengthen, but it's not happening. And again, this kind of harkens back to what we saw with Liberation Day. It was trend that kind of got broken from a 15 year cycle where oftentimes most of that, you know, trillions of dollars worth of capital, I think somewhere around $34 trillion worth of international money into like US assets often goes either unhedged or under hedged. Well, that all flipped in 2025. It's continuing now. Theoretically that should be helping bitcoin as much as it helps gold. But, but what we saw in 2025 was that there was a clear break and this really Kind of happened close to the events of 1010. So this is kind of why it's hard to disentangle what's going on here, because I think that was an idiosyncratic event that had to do with the actual market structure of crypto itself, and that had to do with market makers and liquidity and all those things. And we've corrected that, like, day by day. It's getting better since the events of 1010, but it still hasn't repaired itself. And so we're now here on whatever, January 19, and gold continues to kind of, like, swing better because of these geopolitical kind of developments. And Bitcoin just can't catch up. I think that we are at least kind of through the worst of it. This is why, like, we're at 93 and 99,293 rather than, like, back in the 80s. And I don't think we're going to get back there because so much of that selling pressure has already been alleviated. Anyone who really wanted to, like, sell in earnest probably already did so in Q4. So I do think that we're in a better place. But it's definitely hard to kind of see us kind of swinging back, recovering in a way that's a lot more convincing than what it was historically.
- [30:17]
Chris Perkins
Austin, what's your take on Greenland, man?
- [30:20]
Austin
So I think there's a couple of things going on here, and it's important to disentangle them from each other because it tells you where future things are going to head. One is that I agree with Rahm that Trump is serious about the Greenland thing. I think, as we've seen, the administration sort of adopt a very muscular version of the Monroe Doctrine. You would understand that a largely untouched but strategically important place in the Western Hemisphere that, quite frankly, is kind of undefended right now is the exact kind of thing that doctrine would lead you to want to grab and control. And I will remind everybody, as we're talking about Greenland, not all countries are created equal, which is to say there's like 50,000 people in Greenland. Right? This is not attempting to take over a country of, like, tens of millions of people or something like that. Like, there's probably more people in my neighborhood in Brooklyn than there are in all of Greenland. And it. The scale is part of what matters. Because, Chris, exactly as you said, like, we used to do a lot there. We can go back to do it a lot there. Two, and this is something I think markets have not fully priced is that this, to me, represents a re Underwriting by the United States of the following question, are we allies with Europe?
- [31:46]
David
Right.
- [31:46]
Austin
And I think that is a question that was taken for granted for a long time, but has really started to fray recently. I think there are major, major, major disagreements about NATO spending that have now been ongoing for about a decade. But I also think there are starting to be very major disagreements on tech. You have seen tech driving U.S. economic results and the Europeans doing everything they can define, impede, censor and essentially jerk around US Tech companies. Maybe the best and most egregious example of this is Ofcom in the UK sending extremely threatening, like large fines at jail time threats to 4chan for things Americans said to Americans in America. And their theory is because somebody anywhere sees this in the UK the whole, whole thing is under our jurisdiction. And I just don't think we're willing to play that game. And so it's starting to force these sort of discussions in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago of are we in Europe on the same team? Like if we're really going to behave this way, do we have the same goals? Are we on the same team?
- [32:57]
Rahm
Hit that nail on the head. You hit the nail on the head. I agree. Chris, would love to get your take on the side. One thing for the mix. You guys see that Carney and China and like Carney's, you know, embracing China now. Europe was sourcing China a few months ago also. So everyone's cutting deals without the United States. That's the trend. And I think you're, you're right. Like it is. Macron is criticizing the United States, saying there will, quote unquote, be unprecedented cascades should there be move on Grundland, including the status of the NATO coalition. So yeah, no, I think, I think you're right, Austin. That's the key question. And it's showing up in asset prices. Chris, what do you think?
- [33:38]
Chris Perkins
Did you see the Mercosur deal with Europe too? That was being negotiated for 27 years. 27 years. And they're like, oh, we got to get this done. So look, what we're seeing right now is a world that's dominated by real politic, right? Not idealism. It was more balanced in the past, particularly when we were dealing with the ideology of communism versus the west, the Soviets, whatever. And I think it was interesting when we had Peter Scheer on here a few weeks ago, he talked about pivoting from the post war world to a pre world. And that is what you're seeing on the chess table, right? This quest for securing natural resources at all costs and really redefining alliances. Now, what I'm watching for, and I think this is one of the, the tactics. I do think Trump is so maniacally focused. I do think he will have success. At some point, the Europeans are going to say, at what cost? At what cost? Do we really want to do this? Yes, there's some minerals there. There's 50, 000 people. We're gonna, it's gonna really hurt us. And I do think you'll start to see some, some fracturing on the continent. The European, like the German economy is a lot different than the French economy is a lot different than the others. Right. And so I do think that the US Will be able to, I don't want to say pick them off, but, but, but they'll be able to, to come with a different set of carrots and sticks to ensure that they build that consensus to make it move. I think they're going to lead with economics, you know, whether it's the cost of NATO. Sadly, like a lot of the Europeans don't have a lot of choice. They, they had, they, they put themselves in a very difficult spot vis a vis energy and the Russians and dependency on that, particularly in Germany. And they outsourced a lot of their defense. And so they're going to have to figure it out. If Greenland's the price for economic harmony and defense, at some point, it may be worth it. So, look, I think you're right, Rahm. I think the president is super focused, but I'm also curious about what does this mean for stablecoins?
- [35:48]
David
Right.
- [35:48]
Chris Perkins
Because we're seeing the dollarization and I think, Rob, you talk or David, you talked about the softness of the Dixie. Like, is this going to impede the globalization of the dollar via stable coins or is it going to accelerate it?
- [36:02]
David
All this going to accelerate it. So I mean, we've kind of talked around this and I hate to kind of bring it down to like, brass tax, but like, how is the, how's Europe going to finance a permanent military presence in Greenland to defer or DETER these like, U.S. annexation efforts? Because, you know, like, they are not, most of those countries in the EU are not in a good position, financially speaking right now. And I think that this only put even greater financial constraints on them because they need to up their defense spending. And ultimately, like, does this, like, you know, like, I think Ron brought up the idea of like, people don't want to invest in the US Right now, but equally, I'm kind of like is the US a bad place to invest in right now? Because I don't know if I necessarily want to pivot and put more of my money in European stocks or other things, for example. And you know, like just thinking more kind of like just you know, again, like bottom line, like most of the names that you would still want to invest in and most more innovative names are still inside of the us. So, so ultimately I think the way it's going to shake out, I think that there's going to be a blip here. I'm not saying that like the dollarization trend isn't going to, isn't intact. It definitely is, but I've always thought of that as a decade stone trend. Anyway, this will probably, you know, accelerate that. But short term I don't think that this is going to like deter people from like adopting dollars and adopting stable coins. But I mean there's more than just that, right? It's, it's other things too. It's like what's happening in Japan, what's happening in China with like other stablecoin efforts. So it's, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Right on.
- [37:41]
Austin
Well, I want to, I want to hop in on that one and say we also need to be careful what we mean by stablecoin adoption. Like it's fascinating as to how these things work. You could have a world where the governments of nations are trying to get away from the US dollar. At the same time their citizens are opting into the US dollar. So it's also a reshuffling of where control exists and who gets to say what. Because if you're a country that wants to have both the Internet and capital controls, I think you've got a problem on a forward basis because of stablecoins. And so the EU could very well have like their big banks and like their governments dumping US treasuries and trying not to use dollars. At the same time their citizens rapidly adopt dollars. And that paradigm has not been like well understood so far.
- [38:31]
Rahm
Once again hit the nail on the head. No, I agree. Look, it's in the US's interest to trade with merchants and small business in China in stablecoin to move them off the rim. Nibi and you could do it could take receipt of goods and then deliver payment in stablecoin. It could be bottoms up and that's, that's incredibly disruptive. So I agree, I think that's something to keep watching. I don't see why emerging markets dollarization wouldn't continue simply because millions of Individual decisions would prefer a dollar back stablecoin over their own currency.
- [39:03]
Chris Perkins
Yeah. So what's the trade here David and Rob?
- [39:08]
Rahm
International stocks still.
- [39:10]
Chris Perkins
Still here's what David's pushing back on that he used to buy America.
- [39:14]
Austin
Well hold on. International stocks where as well like almost South America versus Europe.
- [39:21]
Rahm
Let me tell you, the markets beating the United States, you can tell the wind to stop. Mexico 50% Brazil 50% Germany, France beating the market beating the S and P. Canada, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam up 70%. All of them. The whole thing. The whole thing. Now the last time we saw emerging market outperformance versus United States including United States tech stocks was in the aftermath of the dot com bust and when it leads US stocks by a year it continues. These trends aren't just one and done, they continue. And there's a real driver of this and the drivers of them are exactly what we're talking about now. It's the geopolitical issues. Right? You have money managers that are saying gee, what's going on over there in the United States? I'm just going to invest over here and oh, now I've got momentum. I mean you're right. Like the most innovative tech companies and management teams and capital markets and rule of law are in the United States. 100%. 100%. That doesn't mean that every single year The S&P 500 is coded to outperform the rest of the world. In fact the setup now is that the international markets will continue to outperform the United States.
- [40:40]
Chris Perkins
David's buying the dip. What do you think David?
- [40:46]
David
So I've read the same thing from, I think Bridgewater wrote a post on this as well and they also, you know, they supported the idea that international equities were going to outperform and I don't dispute that. If I was thinking I could actually, you know, convert my euro based or Mexican peso based rewards back into dollars for example. I'll be honest though as a US investor, I mean like I, I don't have the balance sheet necessary to make that worth my while in a way where like I, you know it, we're talking about outperformance, that's one thing. Like if we're talking about the US equities still doing well, I think they're going to be fine. I think that yes, like you know we still saw a double digit return in the US last year. It's just it was outperformed by em in a way that hadn't happened for a long time. I mean like I used to cover Vlad Tam. That was my beat. And like it was always one of those things where like I said for the better part of the last decade, you always wanted to hedges assets back into either you kept it unhedged, you just kept it in dollar exposure. That has changed. And I think that there, it does kind of speak to the idea that it's not just the fact that as kind of Ron was alluding to, hey, what the hell's going on in the US Maybe I want to like just buy back home. There's also probably a sentiment issue of like how do you justify to your if you're an asset manager, for example, and the US is putting on large tariffs on your country, like, and it seems like, you know, it's, it's combative, for example, how do you justify to your investors and your investor base when they ask you, hey, why are you still investing in U.S. assets? So I think that has kind of changed things and that's probably what has contributed to some of that move or in some of that outperformance. But yeah, I'll be honest with you as end of the day I'm like, I'm American spending dollars. I I'm still buying American, I'm still buying US Equities.
- [42:49]
Chris Perkins
Amen with that, gentlemen. We're going to go to an ad from the sponsors who make this show possible.
- [42:56]
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- [43:57]
Austin
All right everyone, welcome back. We just talked about Greenland and now we need to talk about another exciting development here. I would say perhaps even more important in the long run than Greenland, though. We'll see about that. Which is Wall street going on chain so the New York Stock Exchange is developing a platform for trading and on chain settlement of tokenized US equities and ETFs aiming to enable 24,7 trading fractional shares and near instant settlement. All of this of course is pending regulatory approval. But I can tell you the SEC is actually working in good faith to approve these kinds of things. This is part of a larger push for round the clock markets in general from Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of nyse. And they're working with many people in the greater financial industry including Boney and Citi on various capabilities around this. But I want to just like throw it to the group. What do we make of this coming out of nyse? What do we make of US capital markets finally potentially moving away from New York Only banking hours.
- [45:08]
Chris Perkins
I'll jump in. First off, a lot of people don't realize this and NYSE is actually owned by ice. Not the guys, you know, not.
- [45:18]
Austin
They're not reporting anybody.
- [45:19]
Chris Perkins
They're not reporting anybody. It's the Intercontinental Exchange. And the Intercontinental Exchange, what makes it interesting, it's actually a founder led company. It's a behemoth, it's a $90 billion market cap company last time I checked. I'm probably off a little bit but it's run by a guy named Jeff Sprecher. Now when you're an entrepreneur and you have that entrepreneurial mind, you're always thinking about how to innovate and adjust your company to win. And we saw what he did with, with the, the Polymarket deal. These guys have actually been in the space very, very, very long time. In fact, you know, some argue they were too early with their Bakkt initiative way back in the day, but they're real right now. Look, I was in the futures industry. I've known those guys for years. And another lesson that people need to watch really closely is guess what guys? ICE bought nyse. And NYSE didn't buy ICE because derivatives rule the world. And it's something to keep in mind. Now vis a vis this introduction, it's about time. Now that we aren't being put in a box by regulators and we're actually allowed to embrace technology. The market is taking control, the market is moving forward. Look, we're going to be in a bot driven economy, an AI driven economy, capital markets, before you know it, we have to be 24 7. I've talked often about this massive risk gap between 24.7markets and non 247 markets. They just can't rebalance and it's going to lead to a massive crisis. So hat tip to our friends over at nyse, hat tip. To our friends over at ice, this is the one, this is the way. Now I think we're a little bit light on details around, you know, which chains they're integrating and some of the specifics. And I know everyone's really interested to know how this integration is going to take place, but I think it's a great move forward.
- [47:07]
Rahm
I would prefer to see the headlines with digital asset brands like Superstate, like Coinbase, like Jito, whatever it might be. This, this goes back to the Empire Strikes Back theme. A digital asset has been running fast and hard and climbing up the hill and challenging Elizabeth Warren and getting fair shape pack involved and they're getting to the finish line and then ICE steps in and takes the cherry, NYSE steps in, takes the cake. And I don't think that's good for digital assets. It's, you know, the technology's being co opted and fintech is beating digital assets and even fintech's being co opted by the incumbents. I think a lot of digital assets was about how do you shake up legacy financial institutions? We're not seeing that. We're seeing legacy financial institutions adopt blockchain technology and I'm not personally excited about them. I'm glad to see digital technologies proliferating. I just, I have someone like, who's taking the reins and leading on this right now.
- [48:18]
Austin
I mean a lot of that comes down to one of the great failings of the crypto industry over the past decade. And actually Coinbase is one of the exceptions that proves the rule on this, which is probably the single most important thing in business, period, full stop, is who controls the customer relationship. And you have tons of people who spent a huge amount of time building more and more niche things for a small, smaller and smaller group of engineers and nobody stopped to ask, hey, can normal people use our stuff? And I feel like a lot of those chickens are coming home to roost where the reason that you could have a company like NYSE, right, which has a huge B2B customer base, obviously, or as you look around like a Robin Hood, step into this space and dominate, is that nobody like, I don't know, went out into the world and got people to use it because like if I just were to go outside right now in New York and start walking down the street asking every single person I ran into, hey, not a centralized exchange app, but have you ever used a self custodial crypto wallet? I'm just gonna get. No, no, no, no, no. One 20 year old guy is gonna be like, I've got bitcoin. No, no, no, no. Right. And so I think it's like the misunderstanding or unwillingness of the space to just like go, go face customers that's caused this dynamic.
- [49:39]
David
Yeah, I, I wouldn't necessarily phrase it as co opting. I mean like, to some extent you're right. I think that, you know, we should be have been pushing all along for, you know, how do we like use these rails better and, and kind of having crypto kind of increase its own. But I think what Austin said in terms of who owns relationships is a huge point. I mean I, I still think that this is a legitimizing moment for the sector. Not that it needs it. We had several of those now like I would say the most prominent one being like the 2024 like ETF kind of moment, which itself was a watershed moment. But I feel like now we're seeing that n's entry into tokenized trading. I mean this is another kind of watershed moment that I think, I mean, I don't see how this doesn't validate the vision that we've had in terms of saying all along that the future of finance will be on chain. I think that it's true. It's just that we were fighting that fight on our own for a very long time and now you're having a lot of traditional incumbents kind of coming to the space and say like, oh yeah, no you were right, like our bad. Let's kind of get into it. And they're seeing that blockchain technology isn't just to trade crypto, but it in fact is what we said it was all along, which is it is superior infrastructure for all assets. And I think that, you know, there's probably going to be a lot of people in the traditional finance space that are not going to be happy that they now have to trade 24 7, but they'll probably be happy that there's now on chain settlement. They're probably going to be happy that they can actually use stablecoins to actually fund themselves with. I think it's still a massive win for the ecosystem overall.
- [51:18]
Rahm
Doesn't this cut out a seat at the table for, for digital asset firms? Like how are they going to get involved? How do they get a seat at the table? How do they participate edgewise in any which way shape or form, in any economic way? NYSE and Nice are saying, hey guys, we're here. We're tokenized. BlackRock, we're tokenized. It done. Thank you for all the work. We're here. We got the marbles, we got the customers, we got the product, we got the data.
- [51:44]
Chris Perkins
Well, we don't know how the integration is going to work yet. Right. Is it going to be on public blockchains? Is this going to be on private blockchains? You know, I thought it was interesting, Austin, they talk about tokenizing bank deposits as collateral. Like interesting, not stable coins, not money market funds. So I think details will matter. Look, Solana has said from day one they're going to be the decentralized nasdaq. And so it's going to be really interesting to see how these types of solutions compete on chain. Look for a lot of people's experience. You start centralized, it's a gateway. You get comfortable, you get the wallet set up, blah, blah, blah. It's often a gateway and a lily pad into the world of decentralized finance. And so I'm maybe not as bearish as you Rom. Now, are they going to prevent, look, coinbase, they didn't put up, you know, massive gates to stop people from getting on chain. They've been encouraging it. So maybe that's going to be a good thing.
- [52:35]
Austin
I would also.
- [52:36]
Rahm
Go ahead. Go ahead, sir.
- [52:37]
Austin
I was going to say. I would also say there's a big difference between the blockchain infrastructure that exists right now will win and blockchain infrastructure in general in the future will win because. Right. Like if we're thinking about like Solana's whole pitch is, you know, we're going to be decentralized nasdaq. Well, guys, I have so many questions based on like your current security model about how you think that's going to work once you understand how NASDAQ really works. I'm not sure Solana is well equipped, but that's also not to say like a daisy. Private chain is the winner too. Right? To go back to our Internet analogy, please tell me who in like 1994 as the Internet was really starting to breach into the mainstream was like, Aha, TikTok, right? Like many of the things that are coming in the future, their shape is completely unknown to us right now. And I would say one thing that I would tell everybody to pump the brakes on is picking winners and losers purely from the set of people you're currently aware of. Because in some ways you should probably bet the fear yield against everything that currently exists.
- [53:42]
Chris Perkins
I'd say, are you a venture investor now?
- [53:47]
Rahm
It's like on the optimist side. Look, I think a lot of companies are set up for a Netscape Navigator moment or an AOL kind of moment right now. But here's the opportunity. The opportunity isn't to say, let me go do what BlackRock does better, let me go do a DTCC and just do it better. That's ego and you're underestimating the technology, customers, regulatory mode, all the rest, the opportunities around the underserved niche markets. And there are massive underserved niche markets and I don't see people focused on that customer segment. And Austin's right, you got to focus on who is the customer, what are you going after as opposed to what is this technology? And let me make it go 24 7, which sounds cool but doesn't solve a problem for someone that's willing to pay, which the business allows. So here are the two opportunities briefly. One is Internet capital markets. What segment of the market? Those that cannot access public capital markets. Who are those? Small businesses. Not just the ICOs and venture backs up, but small businesses. Someone's going to start up a dunkin donuts. The SVA 7A lending program will finance that business because they've got underwriting history going back to decades.
- [54:58]
Austin
They'll underwrite debt.
- [54:59]
Rahm
If you can underwrite debt, you can then definitely underwrite the equity because you know the debt's good. There's a whole class of companies, including like funeral homes or barbershops that fit under the Internet capital markets for debt. That's one bucket. Who's going after that? I don't see people doing that.
- [55:15]
Austin
And guess what?
- [55:15]
Rahm
You can team up with the community banks that are fighting for relevancy and survival against the big banks. They will say, thank you, you're going to help equitize my customer so I have more subordination. My loans come talk to my customers. The other side is the equity side of Internet capital markets. That's something akin to what's a modern version of the Angellist, where you've got people with skin in the game around what they're investing in. They invest alongside community, have a curation concept that's an opportunity. And the other big bucket is creator, economy and influencers. In the age of AI, people are going to have a lot more abundance, a lot more leisure time, entertainment matters, more trust matters, more personalities are going to pull proliferate. That content needs a monetization mechanism and it's a digital content, so it lends itself to digital assets. Who's going after that? These are the opportunities people need to go after as opposed to, I'm going to go take a blackrock in the dtcc.
- [56:10]
Austin
Well, let me throw another one in there. Right? You raise Internet capital markets. One of the big things you've got to think about with capital markets is how do you pay for things? Right back to what is a Main street opportunity that would matter for people to address. How many retailers are there currently in America with profit margins like net margins somewhere between like 1 to 5%. Right. Like very high turnover but very low margin businesses where if you put all of the payments into a single block and have that as an employee, far and away the highest paid employee beyond even the CEO would be interchange. Right. So again, if you can modernize the piece payment structure for these people, right. That is transformative prop. So now you're talking about decentralized. What you're. I guess the way I would say it is this what you're fundamentally talking about here is meta community banking. Right? Like rather than all these community banks existing is like localized things where like I only serve this one town in Idaho, it's saying sort of why don't we take something that exists between a credit union and a community bank, decentralize it, make it much broader across America and provide a way better value prop than the zero that you get paid on your Wells Fargo checking account.
- [57:23]
Rahm
Yeah, no, look, I think there are real prompts to be. So why did Solana have success in this cycle? Because they were application focused, they were end user market focused. Why did Kanter get some traction? Because their application and customer focus, it wasn't lost in the engineering and the theory. And there are major big problems to be solved still that involve, to your point, disintermediating interchange, raising capital for small businesses which need capital. So there's still a lot to do. But the crypto entrepreneur falls in love with the technology instead of falls in love with the technology instead of falling in love with the problem that the customer is facing.
- [58:03]
Austin
Yeah. If you learn nothing else ever from listening to this podcast, please learn this one thing which is in blockchain space right now, across the whole technological stack. None of this stuff is TEDx better to the point where people are picking based on technology. Right. If somebody is picking a blockchain to use for this stuff, they're going to pick on like features, ease of use, able to like implement effectively, etc. Etc. The tech is no longer the important part. I was going to say. I see I've killed our discussion with that one. All right, cool. So final one before we get moving here today, guys. This will be a quick one for us. But we've talked a decent about about the Fed. Sounds like Hassett is out. And I would put this as part of our ongoing story of like, Trump sparring with the Fed in the same way that he's currently sparring with Denmark over Greenland. But Ron, what are you taking from this? What do you think about, like, impact for the market? Is this a nothing burger?
- [59:16]
Rahm
I have mixed views. So on the one hand, if you're Trump, you're supposed to get Kevin Haslett.
- [59:20]
Austin
He's the Dove. He's going to do what you want and cut rates and send us a 2021 Valhalla.
- [59:26]
Rahm
That's what Kevin Haspert would do. He's extremely dovish. Now, I'm not a Kevin Hassett guy because I think you don't even need to cut rates. You got 5% nominal GDP growth. We got wartime deficits. You got fiscal spending and tax cuts coming. Why are you trying to cut rates? We don't need a sugar high that's going to then give back in a 23. We don't need that. So they're talking about Kevin Warsh. Kevin Warsh is a monetary hawk. He opposed qe. What Kevin Wash would do is inconsistent with Trump's call last week to buy $200 billion in MBS. So it's lack of consistency.
- [59:58]
Austin
So think about if you're markets, markets.
- [60:00]
Rahm
Are saying, hey, they're entrained on Kevin Hassett being the Fed chair. Now you rug pull me and tell.
- [60:06]
Austin
Me Kevin Warsh is going to be.
- [60:07]
Rahm
The new Fed chair. I mean, he's one of the folks being nominated. It doesn't make sense. I think over the last two weeks, a lot of the policy coming out of White House is not good for beta. And this is another example.
- [60:26]
David
So I think that there's something going on in our economy that makes the Fed's job distinctly difficult right now in this moment. And you said, why should the Fed be cutting rates? Because the economy is doing well. And you're right, except for that the Fed needs to respond to its actual mandate, which is to deal with inflation and full employment. And those two things actually are not diametrically opposed to what's going on in the economy right now. But certainly the companies in our economy are doing a lot better than most people in the labor market. Like I would say that the labor market is still weakening, jobs are being dismediated. And whether you want to dispute or not, I do think that, like, you are not seeing the participation of the labor market in the same vein as it was like a decade ago. In part because of AI, in part because of efficiency, productivity gains in a way that's not fully being captured by BLS data, et cetera. And equally, I think that's also contributing to a disinflationary trend that we haven't recognized. I think that like a lot of people were worried about one offs like tariffs, for example, despite the fact that the San Francisco Fed actually wrote a great paper about how tariffs actually are disinflationary, not inflationary. But at the same time you're seeing the economy actually doing fairly well. Like it's a weird state of affairs when you see a lot of companies kind of stepping in and letting go of people, mainly white collar workers and you know, like middle management, while the company is actually profitable. Generally those companies go of people because they're not doing well. It's completely different right now. And I feel like this is what's making the Fed's job much, much harder. So when you say why should the Fed be cutting rates? I'm like, well, because their mandate requires them to do so. Except that the underlying what they are supposed to be doing is actually responding to the economy. And yeah, you're right, the economy will probably return like 4 or 5% in Q4 in a way that we didn't necessarily expect. Now to your point about Kevin Warsh, that part I think is much harder to kind of reconcile because as you said, like, he doesn't necessarily like qe. He's been critical about balance sheet purchases in the past. And I think that's what kind of makes it hard for me to kind of say like if Warsh is now the front runner and not say Waller or someone else, then I feel like this could actually put complicate like the risk asset environment in 2026 just recently, I'm sure.
- [62:55]
Rahm
Can you guys see this chart here? The initial data?
- [62:58]
Austin
Yep.
- [62:58]
Rahm
Just briefly, all this is saying like initial claims, jobless claims are arena lows. We're below 23 and below 2025. Like labor market's strong, continuing claims are low. In our weekend newsletter this week we went through the bank earnings transcripts. Delinquencies are low. Consumer spending is high. Credit ability is high. This is Goldilocks. So overall things are fine. And the Fed's cutting rates into this. It's bizarre. I mean, I kind of ask myself, does Trump want to talk down market markets? Like isn't that a legitimate question to ask when you do a 180 on your bed yard?
- [63:34]
Chris Perkins
Right. And it's Max uncertainty right now we have no idea what's going to happen with tariffs in the Supreme Court. We got Greenland going on. We've got all types of craziness happening that, that you know, is that he has a lot to do with it. Maybe not the terrorist thing but you're right sometimes you wonder. But I also think that markets are starting to get used to Trump again. When he first came out and you know when say various things, I think they over responded but now it feels like things are, things are relatively stable despite the amount of craziness out there. I know tariffs are going to happen. We're going to get that Supreme Court ruling on tariffs pretty soon. Good or bad.
- [64:11]
Austin
Well, I'll, I'll pie over an additional point here is think about how all of this is going and the tariffs thing inter plays with this. I'm not so sure that people have a good handle on what is going on with interest rates and the Fed anymore. Which is to say if you pause and think about the mechanics of raising rates versus lowering rates, a variable that nobody currently discusses much is the outstanding amount of current government debt. And the fact that it being very short dated in many cases means rebasing that whole thing because the impact of rates going to 10% when your debt to GDP is also 10% is very different than the impact of rates going to 10% when your debt to GDP is 120%. And it's mostly short dated. Like there are frameworks in which it's very possible that rate cuts are disinflationary and rate increases are inflationary. If you look at the money flows that are going to be coming off of US treasury debt at back in an private sector. And it also interplays with are we increasing or decreasing spending from there, which is where tariffs come into this thing. But my point is what I'm really worried about is it's one of those things where like everybody Trump people in Congress, right. Like commentators think we're still driving a car but now we're like flying a plane or like sailing a boat and the controls work differently and they're trying to do the thing they're used to doing and not getting the result they expect because that's not how the system works. And as a result some very unexpected things are going to happen that are going to break stuff because to Rom's point with equity valuations where they are, if you wanted a really large down leg that'll happen when something like the Fed cuts rates and as a result of cutting rates inflation drops and unemployment spikes and the economy starts stalling out and then everybody will panic because that's not what they expected.
- [66:15]
David
Yeah, I think that you bring up a really good point about the debt burden that we're actually dealing with right now. And based on everything that I feel like we've been seeing coming out of the treasury, like they think long and hard about the term structure of the curve and certainly I think they come to the conclusion that the pivot point is the 10 year rate. It's not the 30 year, it's not something further out on the curve. And they've been trying to use like trying to move that into the T bills so they can actually manage this. And this is why we are keeping rates sub 5% in the 10 year. And that of course has been also been very supportive from a liquidity standpoint for equities, for the corporate names. And that kind of, I think has kind of created like a separate dynamic that I think the Fed has also been kind of been dealing with. Because you brought up like we don't know what's going on with interest rates right now or at least like the connection between interest rates, what's happening to the broader economy. And that's absolutely right. I mean we saw in Q4 that it was a background deal with like sofa rates and what the Fed had to do with Ioer but effectively they are trying to manage the volatility in those short term funding rates because they otherwise would have had a much bigger problem. So it was almost kind of like sleight of hand of like, hey, they're dealing with the interest rate here. But actually this is the big problem and we've kind of gone past it January where at least it feels like that issue has kind of moderated for now, but I don't think it's going away at all. And I think that's still going to be an outstanding problem probably later in the year.
- [67:43]
Rahm
You guys see pimco's buying non US debt now. Block Rock. These are big money managers, big institutions that are just rotating away and nothing. I seen the last two weeks going to change. It's just going to accelerate that.
- [68:01]
Austin
All right, you heard it from wrong before we close out long bitcoin. Now he's making fun of me. All right everybody. Well, I think we've been rolling for a while here, so this is where we will stop today. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bits and Bits. We'll be back in a week to discuss more about how the worlds of crypto and macro are colliding. Until then, everyone.