BTC Sessions - If You Don't Get Global Liquidity, You Don't Get The Everything Bubble | Michael Howell
Episode Date: October 13, 2026Mentor Sessions EP 103: Michael Howell on Global Liquidity, the Everything Bubble & When Bitcoin RalliesGlobal liquidity is still rising in absolute terms, but the momentum is cracking fast, and t...hat shift is already bending bond markets, credit spreads, and Bitcoin. Michael Howell breaks down exactly what's moving underneath the surface.In this episode you'll see why Howell calls Bitcoin a "liquidity sponge," how the debt maturity wall forces old debt back into the system, and why roughly 80% of all financial market transactions are really just debt refinancing. You'll learn how to read the four indicators Howell watches before every crisis, why the euro system has no safe asset, how Japan quietly devalued its debt through a weaker yen, and why China is "basically Japan ten years later" buying gold for 23 straight months. You'll also hear his specific call: Bitcoin may struggle for three months, then do quite well into 2027 as Treasury QE monetizes government spending.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro1:06 - Is Global Liquidity Expanding Or Contracting?2:33 - Momentum Indicator Signals Liquidity Rollover3:25 - Why This Is a 5-6 Year Debt Refinancing Cycle4:28 - The Debt Maturity Wall Explained5:59 - Debt-To-Liquidity Ratio And Crisis Thresholds7:20 - Where Liquidity Shifted: CapEx And AI Data Centers8:54 - Treasury QE: The New Hidden Liquidity Conduit12:54 - Fed September Hike And Liquidity Management13:17 - Why 80% Of Lending Is Collateral Backed14:12 - MOVE Index And Rising Bond Volatility Risk15:42 - Bessent Buybacks Targeting Off-The-Run Treasuries16:26 - Fed Managing Repo Spreads And Bank Reserves17:30 - What The Repo Market Actually Is20:05 - SOFR Spreads And The Danger Line24:20 - What Really Drives The MOVE Index Higher25:49 - Are We Heading Into A Financial Crisis?26:53 - Two-Year Yields vs SOFR: Rates Rising29:24 - Where Interest Rates Could Peak33:25 - Bitcoin As A Liquidity Sponge: The Framework34:17 - Howell's Medium-Term Bitcoin Bull Case35:43 - Yield Curve Signals And Bitcoin Bull Market Timing40:38 - The Eurodollar Market And Gilts42:36 - France, Germany And The Oat-Bund Spread43:29 - No Safe Asset In The Euro System45:26 - Why The Eurozone May Not Hold Together47:18 - Japan, The Yen Carry Trade And Weaker Yen49:30 - How Japan Devalued Its Debt Successfully51:39 - China Is Japan Ten Years Later53:07 - China Printing Money And Buying Gold To Devalue56:16 - Could The US Engineer A Domestic Devaluation?58:25 - How Bitcoin Reacts To Chinese And Treasury Liquidity1:02:04 - Final Thoughts On AI, Private Credit And RiskMichael Howell runs Global Liquidity Indexes and publishes the Capital Wars Substack, where he tracks global liquidity data and the indicators referenced throughout this conversation.🔗 Links & Resources:→ Michael Howell on X: https://x.com/crossbordercap→ Michael Howell on Substack: https://capitalwars.substack.com/→ GL Indexes: https://www.glindexes.com/⚡Previous Episode:Rational Root: https://youtu.be/ZkpoEFOQ_cM🔔 Subscribe for weekly Bitcoin Podcasts🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/BTCSessions🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/theBTCmentor⚡Casa MultiSig & Inheritance: https://casa.io/sessions10% Off First Year Promo Code SESSIONS⚡ Sponsored by Trezor - Get Your Safe 7 Today: https://affil.trezor.io/aff_c?offer_id=352&aff_id=1088⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB⚡ Sponsored by BITCOIN WELL: Best Place to BUY & SELL BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Ben and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io #Bitcoin #GlobalLiquidity #EverythingBubble #MichaelHowell #BTCSessions #MentorSessions #FinancialCrisis #BitcoinMacro #TreasuryQE #DebtCycle #CapitalWars #BondMarket #YieldCurve #LiquiditySponge #Liquidity
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're going to get a financial crisis.
Over the last five to eight years is something called the everything bubble.
And what are the major contributing factors that are moving in that direction?
Policymakers throw liquidity at every problem.
Do you think they're trying to fight this liquidity cycle?
And is it even possible for them to do so?
Warren Buffett always says the liquidity tight goes out.
You see he's been swimming naked.
The way that we had this tension between the financial markets and the real economy,
because I would think that that would be kind of the sweet spot for Bitcoin.
I'm going to show you two charts and give you some senses that when Bitcoin will
Raleigh.
All right, good morning, Michael.
Thank you so much for joining me.
It's a genuinely very excited to have this conversation because in preparation, I started
digging into everything that I thought could contribute to global liquidity one way or
another and very quickly realized I have no idea what's pulling us in which direction.
So just to rattle off a few, we had the Fed just confirmed that it stepped into the yen market
on behalf of the Treasury.
France and Germany have crisis-era-wide bond spreads.
We've got private credit cracking with multi-year highs.
We've got China on its 23rd month of straight gold buys, but it's only sit around 41.
And Bitcoin, our little liquidity sponges, quietly floated its way back up to the 80s.
So honestly, I have no idea how to sort through all this.
Right now, in your view, is global liquidity expanding or contracting?
And what are the major contributing factors that are moving in that direction?
Well, I mean, the fact is that a lot of things are pointing in different directions,
but I mean, that's not surprising given we're late in the cycle.
The fact is that global liquidity in absolute terms is probably still rising.
Okay, it's inching higher.
But the fact is that in terms of momentum and underlying growth is clearly slowing down quite rapidly.
And at the margin, markets tend to price growth or the growth rate of declining growth.
And so you're starting to see these tensions emerging.
I mean, the fact that the bond markets have been terrible in the last few weeks is a clear sign that liquidity is coming under pressure.
The fact to look at the Russell 2000 is pretty much in a bare market.
I mean, that's more or less telling you as well that liquidity conditions are crows.
I mean, Bitcoin's clearly selling us something else, but I think it's kind of difficult to take too much from Bitcoin because there's a powerful trend there, which is kind of, you know, laying on top of what is probably a cycle as well. So Bitcoin may be a little bit different. It may not be the true barometer for the cycle that we maybe expect. But, you know, basically a lot of other indicators are telling us very clearly that liquidity is rolling over. It's late cycle. The credit markets.
as you point out, are a further indicator. So there we go. And if you look at the chart I've just put
up of global liquidity, this is for the advanced economies. Well, pretty much the world, more or less.
And what this is telling us is that the black line is looking at the growth rate, the underlying
growth rate of liquidity. It's a momentum indicator. And what that shows is the cycle peaked in late
2025. And we've been moving down through this year. As I emphasize, it doesn't mean that liquidity
in absolute terms is falling, but the growth rate clearly is slowing, and the growth rate matters.
And that's why you're seeing these emerging tensions. And the cycle as such is more or less
fulfilling the pattern of recent years, which is a 65-month or five-to-six-year cycle.
My Lord, okay. So taking a look at this cycle here, when would you expect it then the kind of
bottom if it continues the trend? And also, what's driving this continuous pattern? Is it just
a credit expansion until basically is unsustainable and then kind of pulling itself back? Or what's
What's going on here? Well, I think that's a great question. My answer would be is that if you look at the
frequency of the cycle, which is basically, as we say here, between five and six years, why five to six
years? Well, the one factor that is of that sort of length is the average maturity of global debt.
So what this is really telling us is that this is a debt refinancing cycle. And I think you've got to
step back and say, what are financial markets really doing right now? And the fact is the textbooks
tell us that financial markets are there to raise money for new CAPEX. But actually, most of the
time these days, they're rolling over existing debt. And we've got a lot of debt. So something like
80% of all primary transactions in financial markets are basically debt refinancing transactions.
And that's what this cycle is really representing. Interesting. Yeah. I believe I saw a post
from you not too long ago on Twitter that was highlighting the maturity wall that we have
coming up here, that would be another factor than contributing.
Can you tell me maybe about that and what's going on, what you kind of perceive in the future?
So what you can see on this chart is the debt maturity wall.
Now let me just explain what the debt maturity wall is.
It basically refers to debt, existing debt that needs to be rolled over.
Now, this is not new debt.
New debt comes on top of this.
This is the old debt that basically is matured and needs to be rolled.
Now, the reason that you've got this increase shown by the darker red bars is that during COVID, you'll see there's a big bite out of the chart when you get negative readings, and that's showing the negative increment in debt rollovers.
The reason that occurred is that when we got COVID, policymakers came up with a brilliant idea of slashing interest rates to near zero, encouraging people to take on even more debt and further encouraging existing debtors to term out their debt.
into the late 2020s. And that debt clearly has a fixed maturity date, and that fixed majority
date is coming due, which is why you've got this extra debt coming back into the system.
And that's going to put an even bigger load onto financial markets.
Now, that is important because we've got to put this into context.
And I'm going to go back to another slide, which is basically showing the issue, which is this one,
of looking at the debt liquidity ratio, which is the key metric for understanding the stability
of the financial system.
Now, what this ratio is basically telling us is that in periods where there's lots of debt
relative to liquidity, you get financial crises.
Why is that?
Because debt has to be rolled over, and you need balance sheet capacity to do the role.
And if the balance sheet capacity is not there, that's broadly the cost.
liquidity, you're going to get a financial crisis. There'll be refinancing tensions. And the
threshold that we show on the chart where you've got some sort of stability is around two times,
200% on the chart. Now, anywhere below that line, ContraWise is saying there's excessive liquidity.
Excessive liquidity finds its vent in asset price bubbles. And you can see what I've annotated
on the chart over the last five to eight years.
is something called the everything bubble, where we've basically enjoyed bumper liquidity
because policymakers throw liquidity at every problem, and debt has been turned out.
So there's been basically a very favorable debt liquidity ratio.
That's changing, partly because the liquidity cycle itself is falling down, is slowing down,
and partly because you've got this debt maturity wall coming back into the system.
And that would suggest that the next few years are going to be a lot more difficult in terms of financial market.
investing. When it's, when you're having difficulty refinancing or difficulties in financial
markets, is that money flowing somewhere else. And kind of what I'm thinking about, you made a comment
earlier about CAPEX. And I would think that with everything going on with AI data center building,
all that sort of, all that hype right now, that we'd actually see expanding liquidity from
CAPEX pouring into those ventures. Am I missing something or making a mistake somewhere along the way?
You're not missing anything. The fact is that all money that's anywhere must be somewhere. That's
really the point. And you've got to think about there being two pools of money, one for financial
assets and a separate one for real economy activity. And if money is in the financial sector,
it's not in the real economy. And if it's in the real economy, it's not in the financial sector.
So what you've got now is you've got a transition where money is shifted from financial markets
into new CAPEX spending for AI data centers or whatever it may be. That's using money that was
previously sitting in treasury, I mean, just think of a lot of these companies, you know, Google or
whatever, used to sit on large, large treasury holdings, in other words, money in their treasuries.
And that money has been pared down now to basically, to wheel out for this KAPEx spend.
So you can say that money is shifted out of the financial sector, very clearly into the real
economy. The other thing that's going on is that we've ended FedQE.
In other words, the straight expansion of the Fed balance sheet, where it was pouring money into the financial sector.
And what it's been replaced with is something that I call Treasury QE, which is a subtle but important different conduit,
which is basically saying the Treasury is now spending money through procurement, whether it's, you know, defense procurement, whether it's purchases strategic stakes, critical minerals, these sorts of things.
And what is happening is that is spending in the real economy, but it's being funded by bill issuance.
So you'll notice that one of the things that Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary has done has shifted the maturity profile of US debt issuance away from the long end towards the short end, the bill market.
There's been a big increase in bill issuance.
And the fact is that although this is a wonkish point is that the people who tend to buy those bills are,
banks or credit providers. If banks and credit providers are buying the bills, they're expanding
their balance sheets, they're effectively monetizing the deficit. And that's the key point to make
here is that that's another source of liquidity, but it's primarily going into the real economy.
So if I shift on through these slides, and I show you another chart a little bit later on,
you'll see maybe this in action. Now, this particular diagram is looking at the global liquidity cycle.
And what this is showing is the liquidity cycle as such, the one that we measure in red, global
liquidity we saw the data earlier on. And the yellow one is what is notionally happening to the real
economy. Now you notice those cycles are out of step. The liquidity cycle precedes the real economy cycle.
So if you get an abundance of liquidity in the financial sector, it will ultimately spill over
and drive growth, and then the momentum of growth will start to pull liquidity out of finance
and more into the real economy. But you'll also notice that if you look at the period where the
liquidity cycle is falling, like now, that coincides with periods of economic strength.
So you've almost got anticyclical movements between the financial sector and the real economy,
which is why many people find it baffling to understand the simple fact that strong economies
don't always have strong financial markets and similarly vice versa. You know, the best time for the
stock market or the bond market is when the economy is near recession. And the worst time is when you're
in a boom. And that seems difficult to understand, but this is the reason why you're getting that
movement. If you look at the hard data, this is the hard data that is behind that. And this is
showing in black the world business cycle. This is just an index of all major business surveys worldwide,
the US ISM, the TANcan in Japan, the EFO in Germany, etc.
And aggregated together to show the black line,
showing recovery in the world economy at last.
And the orange line is basically showing what the liquidity cycle is doing.
And you can see it's almost exactly out of step.
So the reason that liquidity is going down,
and the reason that a lot of financial assets are finding you difficult right now,
from bond markets through small cap to whatever,
is the fact that the real economy is taking that.
cash that they've that's really been driving them over the last two to three years.
Now, I was going to ask that, because it seemed like almost counterintuitive. I think ISM has been
above 50 for the last nine months. And my initial kind of interpretation or thought would have
been that I thought that would have maybe increased liquidity as these businesses are then
going out there and creating new loans. But I guess it's their, they're drawing it away from the
financial sector. Yeah, it's being spent in the real economy. I mean, there will be some, you know,
feedback. So in other words, if profits are high and those profits are not,
spent or if household savings are high, money will flow back into finance. But at the margin,
the key change is that the cash that was formerly in the financial sector is now being spent
in the real economy. Interesting. I'm curious how you view basically the recent actions with
worst raising 25 bips in September, which just came out in the meeting. This was a 12 to zero
decision. But it looks like October, there's not going to be one if I'm checking out the CME
futures. And then we've got Bessent repeatedly coming in with these Treasury buy bribes.
Max, I'm almost interpreting it now as like, do you think they're trying to fight this liquidity
cycle? And is it even possible for them to do so? Well, the short answer is yes. I think you've
nailed it. I mean, the liquidity is so important in the system that they basically need to
manage it. And we live in a world that has changed radically from pre-2008, the GFC to now.
And broadly speaking collateral is critical in terms of backing any form of credit.
Something like 80% of all lending worldwide, and this is a world bank figure, so you can take it as almost an official statement, is now 80% collateral backed, which is a huge, huge number.
And that collateral tends to be not just home mortgages, things like US treasuries, German boons, maybe to some extent stocks.
And these things, you know, are important.
Now, therefore, what policymakers have got to do is to make sure that collateral is stable.
And therefore, looking at something like the so-called move index, which is an index of bond volatility across the U.S. curve, is really critical to understand.
Because if you start to get heightened volatility in collateral, that collateral is obviously going to be less effective.
and dealer banks who will lend against collateral
will basically give a bigger haircut to it.
So if you see a big jump in,
let me give you an example.
If you see volatility in the treasury bond jump,
which clearly has done recently,
the move index has gone from in the 60s,
around the 60s to recently as high
as sort of 110, 115 on the index,
which is almost a doubling of volatility.
That particular process would have meant
that haircuts on collateral
would have increased significantly.
Now, that in practice would mean that if you take a treasury bond to a dealer bank and try and borrow against it,
the dealer bank may well have said, okay, previously, and just giving you rough figures,
will then 98% against that bond.
So we'll take 2% haircut.
If you get heightened volatility, they might stretch that out to, you know, 4% or even 5%.
And what that means is, therefore, the collateral multiplier, the ability to lever up collateral, it diminishes hugely.
So one of the things that Scott Besson is doing, in my view, I mean, I don't know for sure,
but my feeling is that what they're doing is trying to reduce volatility in the treasury
market to maintain some stability. And therefore, what he's doing is doing buybacks.
Now buybacks, and this is getting into the weeds of the bond market,
but buybacks basically take out what are called off-the-run treasuries.
So if you have a 30-year bond issued today, in a year's time, it's a 29-year bond,
which is not very liquid.
Nobody really likes 29-year bonds or a 28-year bond.
So they basically tend to fall in price
relative to the shiny new issued 30-year treasury
when it's issued.
So what Besson is doing is basically buying these off-the-run treasuries.
I mean, he's often doing it at 60 cents in the dollar.
So he's great for the US taxpayer.
But the media have completely muddled this up
and think he's trying to sort of king-kernute-like,
you know, push yields down.
That's not what he's trying to do.
He's trying to control volatility.
And that's the key thing.
The other thing that's going on is that if you look at what the Federal Reserve is up to,
the Federal Reserve is very keenly managing repo spreads.
I said earlier on that we live in a collateral-based world.
The repo collateral markets are absolutely key to understand here.
This is the dominant feature of the financial system is stability in the repo collateral markets.
These repo markets are huge.
They're the marginal source of financing for, you know, of whole,
money or wholesale entities, and then they need liquidity. And what the Federal Reserve is doing,
you know, outside of the Fed funds rate, which is not, I mean, I don't really understand
Fed funds anymore to be truthful, what it really does. But in terms of what they're seeking to do,
is they're basically controlling the volume of liquidity. They're giving the banks. So they're
targeting a level of bank reserves and making sure they didn't fall too low. In other words,
if they did, there would be a problem in the financial system.
So taking a look, I want to, if you can, I'll get you to expand a little bit on what the repo markets are just for anyone who might not be in even I struggle with all these things at times. And I remember back we had like the 2019, I think, repo spiking kind of crisis there. Are we seeing any signs of stress in the repo markets, in the repurchase markets? And then additionally, I was looking earlier, I think at the spread between Sofer and the interest on bank reserves. And I think that's slightly negative at the moment. I was going to see if there was any sort of volatility. But as far as I can tell, surface level, I didn't see any.
Yeah, I mean, they're good questions. I mean, I'll attack them. If you look at this chart that I've put up here, this is looking at the debt liquidity cycle. And what it basically says is that at the heart of the financial system now, the modern financial system, you've got debt and you've got liquidity. And the point is that debt needs to be refinanced. So this is a refinancing model. In other words, the system is all about refinancing. And if you don't get the refinancing, you get a financial crisis. And every financial crisis is.
in my estimation in the last 20 years,
has basically been a debt refinancing crisis.
Now, if you look at that diagram,
what it's saying is that debt needs liquidity
for refinancing, in other words, balance sheet capacity,
but then equally, liquidity needs debt
because liquidity, in other words, credit,
is collateral-based.
And so you need good-quality debt to use,
to post at your bank or dealer bank
to actually get liquidity and get the borrow.
So there's a sort of vicious,
or virtuous cycle, depending
in which way it moves, between these two
elements. There's a nexus.
And what you can see on the diagram
is if you start to see problems
in turning debt
into liquidity, what you'll see
is problems in the repo collateral
side. In other words, the move index
could spike higher,
or sofa spreads, what you've
just mentioned, spread between
sofa rates and interest and overnight
reserve balances will tend to spike.
Equally on the other side, if you get
problems in turning liquidity into debt, you're going to start to see problems in terms of
bond term premium. So government bond term premium will start to compress or credit spreads will
blow out. Now, if you start to look at these indicators, what you're starting to see is some
signs of tension emerging in certain areas. The move is spiked. Sofa spreads are still compressed.
Term premium are starting to inch lower. Credit spreads are finally beginning to blow out a bit.
So you're starting to see some tensions emerging, and the Federal Reserve has got to be pretty alert to what's going on to make sure that there's not a crisis.
Now, if we go on to what's happening in the repo markets, the slide I've just put up is looking at the sofa spread against interest on overnight reserve balances.
And that is always, as you point out, slightly negative.
I mean, that's just a feature of the trade because of the different nature of these securities.
So for normally trades at a slight discount to interest and overnight reserve balances.
But what you can see is a normal zone on the chart and a danger point, danger line,
when that threshold is broken, you get big attentions.
That threshold was broken last at the end of 2025 when the Federal Reserve made a
wrong decision, wrong step, and they were talking boldly, as you probably recall, about
shrinking the size of Fed balance sheet significantly. That was a foolish move because they clearly
can't do this in this kind of world. They tried to do it, but repo rates blew out, and what they
had to do was to correct it quite quickly. And if you look at this chart, which is maybe, again,
getting in the weeds a bit, but this is looking at excess reserves of banks, which is shown
as the orange line, and that same sofa spread is shown in black inverted. And basically what
it's saying is that there was the decision they took last year to reduce bank reserves significantly
to shrink the balance sheet. And what that caused directly, as you can see from the data,
is this big spike in repo. And now what they've done is they've changed the policy.
They've introduced a new acronym called reserve management purchases. And those extra
is another form of QE, but that's another injection of liquidity back into the system to make
sure the bank would sort of stay flat. So behind, you know, the scenes of Fed funds going up 25 basis
points, what you're actually looking at here is a very managed environment in the repo collateral
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Very interesting.
There's a number of threads I want to pull on, but one of them I actually want to jump
back to you for a second, talking about lending against the collateral and then like the
move index has moved up since about like mid-September, I think here.
In terms of those sort of changes in what they'll maybe give them, what kind of deal they'll
give them on the collateral for those loans, is it a problem with collateral quality or is
there something else that's arriving the change in kind of market conditions?
Is it greater perceived risk?
Is it an issue with the just treasury market overall?
What causes the change in how they're valuing the collateral?
Well, it tends to be pure.
I mean, it could be, as you rightly say, it could be concerns over credit quality.
But for the most part, the bulk of collateral that is posted tends to be what's called pristine collateral.
So it tends to be U.S. treasuries.
It can be bills.
It can be notes or bonds.
And it can be German boons as well.
Those tend to be post.
popular areas. And it's much more about the volatility of those instruments. I mean, that's a key
factor. And so if you get a very volatile bond, you don't know what the price is going to be,
you know, in three months time or whatever it may be. And therefore, you've got to give a bigger
haircut as a cushion against that uncertain price. And that's really what's going on.
The reserve management purchases remind me, like when you said a new acronym, it seems like every
time there's a problem, like we have, we have the tools, we have it all under control,
and then something will pop up and we need a new tool. There's something else that we have
to add there and talked about this financial crisis always being kind of a debt refinancing crisis.
I'm curious with everything that you're looking at, expecting the liquidity cycle to kind of
shift here. Are you anticipating that we're going to see some sort of a crisis somewhere pop
up in the financial markets? Well, you can never say never. Warren Buffett always says that when
the liquidity tie goes out, you see who's been swimming naked. And that's always a good analogy to
think of. I'd have to say that compared with 2008, there's not the same leverage in the system.
And what's more policy makers are much more alert to what the issues are.
So I don't, I mean, I think what they're doing now is they're deliberately managing liquidity and collateral in the system.
And therefore, they're trying to maintain, you know, integrity in the markets.
So I don't think there'll be an accident per se or a deliberate, you know, a forced accident of whatever you like to call it.
But what you may, what you're still seeing is tightening, you know, by the Walsh Fed.
And I think that, you know, that's an important point to make.
And what I'm going to do is just shift on to another chart, which hopefully explains what's going on in this regard.
So if you can see this chart, this is looking at two-year yields and sofa rates.
So sofa rates are the overnight rate in the repo market, which is really the sort of the central rate, which more or less everything, really prices off.
And the orange line is the two-year U.S. Treasury note yield.
Now, as long as I've been in this business, which has been a long time,
the two-year note has been a very, very good predictor of short-term money rates.
It tends to lead both on the upside and on the downside, as you can see here.
Sofa didn't exist in the history that I've shown, so I've spliced it with Euro dollars,
but you get the same message.
and SOFA, of course, was a replacement for the euro-dollar market, so it's quite a legitimate thing to do.
What you can see recently is that two-year Treasury note yields have jumped relative to sofa rates.
That would suggest the rates are going to rise. The market is expecting that, and that's what the market is really pushing the Fed to do.
In many cases, the Federal Reserve is following the markets here. It's not leading.
and there's a sort of great misunderstanding that the Federal Reserve, you know, the Federal Reserve
sneezes and everyone else sort of catches a cold. It's much more the other way around. The Federal Reserve
is reactive really to the markets in many cases. Now, if you look at this follow-up chart,
what it's showing is the spread between sofa and two-year yields. So in other words, it's just
taking two-year yields away from that sofa rate. And the black line on the chart is looking at the
previous tightening under Chair Powell. And this is really the, it starts to gather momentum around
the end of 2021 and reaches sort of peak tightening or the trough on this chart, peak tightening,
sometime around about the first quarter of 2022. And between that period that I've indicated
there, Wall Street saw a very significant sell-off, a 25% sell-off. And then you started to see
liquidity conditions improve indicated by that.
black line improving gaining height around the back of, back end of 2022 when the bull market
restarted.
So that V shape is pronounced.
And where are we in comparison to that?
The orange line is basically saying, as far as I can see, we're proceeding at half pace.
So chairwash is tightening.
There's no question.
But he's not doing anything like as aggressively as Powell did.
Would you anticipate then that interest rates are going to continue to rise from here?
And does that cause, does it cause major problems at some point?
I'm wondering if the two years suggesting that the Fed is going to follow it upwards,
and we have the 30-year hit like over 5.7.
I think the 10-year was at like 5.3.
I think even about, but maybe it goes back to that real economy versus the financial
economy.
Like if mortgage rates on a 30-year mortgage are hitting like 8%,
I feel like that's going to be a wrecking ball at some point in time.
But perhaps the like the broader credit markets and the euro-dala market are so large
that the American consumer doesn't really matter as much.
Yeah, I think that, look, I've just changed the chart.
up a chart of U.S. rates. I mean, this is a long-term history going back to the 50s. What it shows
is nominal GDP growth, so NGDP, a four-year rolling average of that. So it's giving you
the underlying trend in the momentum of the economy, obviously including inflation and real growth.
And the orange line on that chart is basically, it says risk-adjusted treasury yields. That's a bit
of a wonkish statement, but what that really means is that that's the underlying average
of policy rates over the term of the bond over the 10 years. So it takes out any term premium
compensation for uncertainty. And it's just saying this is what the market is assuming
average interest rates, policy rates are going to be over that term. Now, you can see that
there's a pretty tight correlation there between those two series. There wasn't in the very early
50s, but that was when the Federal Reserve had its hands tied by the Treasury, and it was not
independent. And then I've just marked where the Treasury Fed accordion 51 came out when the Federal
Reserve was able to run an independent policy. But you can see through that period, basically
Fed policy has largely matched the underlying tempo of the economy. Now, it looks to me that what
you've got is, I mean, this is, we're always outdated by events, but, you know, risk-adjusted
yields have jumped up again, you know, in the last couple of weeks. So we're getting pretty close to that
black line now at that sort of 6% threshold. Baring in mind that term premier or my estimate
is slightly negative. So yeah, that's more or less saying that yields, the dotted line there is
saying that yields will probably get up to about, you know, five and a half, five and three-quarter
percent or thereabouts effectively. So that's really the backdrop. So we're getting very close
to the top. And as you rightly say, you know, this environment is one where high mortgage rates,
high treasury yields, heightened bond volatility are not great for the economy, factoring that oil prices
or more particularly diesel prices are sky high. Diesel are at the equivalent oil price of about
$165 a barrel. So, you know, you've got a lot of pressures. So it would be crazy to assume that
the economy continues at this pace. It's got to attenuate. And in my estimation, you're going to
see slower growth in 27. It won't be a recession, but it will be an inflection downwards in the
economy. And that has got to be good news for the bond markets. Very interesting. Actually,
I want to just double tap on oil for a second there, because I'm curious. So I don't know how much
it necessarily contributes to actual liquidity and, again, more kind of credit creation in the
system. But if I understand correctly, things like commodities and oils on tankers can be used
as collateral for loans. And so when we have events like the Strait of Hormuz, where there's just
less of it flowing, I imagine that has a negative impact on liquidity as well.
Correct. Correct. And particularly if you get high oil prices and this inability to
collateralize some cargoes, that's a big negative, yeah. Interesting. Is it significant enough to
really kind of show up in your broader global liquidity measurements? Or is it more just like an
I mean, I mean, oil is a very, very big user of liquidity. For sure, there's no question. I mean,
think of the inventory that's held, et cetera.
The size of the trade worldwide is huge.
Unquestionably important.
Beautiful.
I want to drill down a little bit more on what's going on kind of in Europe and in private
credit, but even kind of before getting there, we have the six to five year kind of run.
What is it that you would be looking for to note when we're maybe at the bottom of the
liquidity cycle and kind of expected to start to pick up again?
What are those signals or indicators?
What are we looking for things to change?
The reason I'm thinking about even just in the Bitcoin perspective is my understanding is a lot of people kind of view Bitcoin as a liquidity sponge.
If there's excess liquidity, it tends to go on a little bit of a run.
So if I'm interested in holding Bitcoin, that'd be something I'd want to pay attention to.
But maybe you even disagree with that framework of how Bitcoin behaves.
No, I think Bitcoin is a liquidity sponge.
I think that that's for sure.
And I think that, you know, one of the interesting questions is basically where are we in the fixed income cycle?
I'm going to show you, you know, two charts, which may well relate to that and
give you some senses to when Bitcoin will rally. I'm a bull of Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin will
do extremely well over the medium term. I'm not so convinced it's going to do well over the
next three months. I may be wrong on that, but I just think I can see further tightening,
and I think that's going to be a way, that's going to weigh heavily on the price.
Now, the chart that I put up in front of you is looking at the cycle of World Central Bank
liquidity, which is the orange lines and index showing the underlying growth rate of what
central banks are doing. And the black line is the world business cycle inverted upside down,
but advance forward by 12 months. So what that more or less is telling us is that policy makers
react to the tempo of the economy with a lag. Now, if they start to see strong economies,
as that chart is inferring, because the black line is falling down, the inverted black
is falling, that would say that there's going to be more tightening coming through. And that's
more or less what we're suggesting. And that's clearly an environment where it's not great for,
ultimately for economies, because that will be the seeds of ultimately a decline. It won't be
great for equities. And as I said, I think if you look at the credit markets and maybe the
small cap markets, they're already beginning to feel this pressure. The other thing, which is
to note is looking at the other side of this, is look at what's happening to the yield curve.
And this is focusing on the US Treasury curve.
And the black line here is the average slope of the treasury curve estimated by looking at the average or the area rather under the term structure.
And the orange line is our index of US liquidity momentum advanced by nine months.
Now, this chart starts in 1990.
It actually, there's a much longer history, which goes right back to the 70s.
this was one of the first examples I used of how important liquidity is when I was at Salmon Brothers
and it was used to understand the fixed income markets and trade the fixed income markets.
And what this is basically saying is that as the liquidity cycle expands, the yield curve steepens,
and as the liquidity cycle contracts, the yield curve tends to flatten.
Now, what you're likely to see is a continual yield curve flattened.
despite the sort of the pickup in the last week or so,
but you'll see a further yield curve flattening,
and that flattening will turn from a bearish flattening
with long yields going up to a bullish flattening
with longer yields coming down.
And then the curve will then start to steepen again,
which will be very clearly a risk-on move.
Now, what I would say is that I would like to see,
or to be 100% convinced of another big bull market in,
Bitcoin is to see that black line start to pick up definitively. In other words, it needs to form a
bottom and then start rising again. I think you might be able to get in earlier because I think
the phase of the market where you start to see a bullish flattening of the curve, in other words,
the later stages of this run could still be very profitable. And I think the thing to start thinking
about is what is the sensitivity of Bitcoin to the bond market, which is something that people
haven't really looked at in detail. But I think it's a key question to answer.
answer. In my view, Bitcoin is a very long duration investment, which means that if you start
to see yields coming down, it could move significantly.
Okay, I want to parse out a few things there to make sure I got my head around it correctly.
When we say the bullish steepening, that's because it's bullish for bonds, right?
Not necessarily bullish for equities.
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And then is that basically reflecting lower growth expectations?
Is that why we're getting that shift?
Well, it's much more.
You could argue that.
That could be an argument.
but it's basically because liquidity is coming down.
And the technical reason why that's happening is that term premier are basically compressing.
Now, I'm going to get into the weeds here.
But broadly speaking, if you look at a bond, a bond has two components, two moving parts.
One is rate expectations, in other words, what the Federal Reserve is going to do over the
term of the bond.
And the other is an uncertainty element, which is the term premier.
And the term premier is a compensation that investors get for holding a,
holding a bond through that uncertain period.
Now, essentially, that term premium reflects supply and demand factors,
and it's much more important at the longer end of the market than the front end.
The front end of the curve tends to be all rate expectations.
The back end is dominated by term premium.
Now, if I show you this chart, which is looking at world term premium and world policy rates,
What you can see from that is that the driver of bond markets over the last, this is daily data since 2025, but the main driver of yields going up has been that policy rates, the black line, have been basically moving higher.
So that's explained something like, well, a well over 100 basis points of the increase in world interest rates, world bond yields over the last 18 months.
the orange line is looking at term premier and throughout the turmoil of the last few weeks or months or
whatever with turmoil in the oats market in France, in the British guilt market,
you know, concerns over the treasury market, what the JGB market's done, actually term premier globally
being remarkably stable. And that would suggest if we go into the colour of that, which you can see in the
following chart, and you start to pick out the various bond markets. The US Treasury,
market, which is the bright red line at the bottom, has been remarkably stable. So all these people
that pour scorn on the treasury saying it's, you know, lost its safe haven status or the dollar
is toast, they're completely offside here. They've got no idea what they're talking about.
Basically, the US treasury market is rock solid. It's the, you know, the main safe asset in the system.
It hasn't seen a deterioration in its quality. And if anything, if you look at that chart,
you'll see term premier are beginning to fall, which is a very bullish side.
for the bond market over the next six to 12 months.
Yeah, I wanted to expand upon that one, kind of going into the Eurodollar market a little bit,
because then things just get, like, beyond my scope in the sense that.
So what I'm thinking about, you mentioned the GILTS.
And I remember we had the Liz Trust moment back in 20, geez, was it 2022?
I completely lost the timeline.
Yeah, the Liz Trust moment where the UK GILTS were at 5%.
They're now up at 6% and things are still kind of chugging along.
Now, like I highlighted in the intro, I'm looking at it right now, at least this,
this figure I have in front of me, the difference between the 10-year German and 10-year France
spread is 139 bips. So, oats, buns, gilts. I'm wondering if we can have, and what the
implications would be, it seems like Europe is not in the position that America is, the economy
is not doing as well as America. You've got the added stress of the Russia-Ukraine more and
what's going on in the Middle East and problems with energy getting in there. And I'm almost
wondering if you would expect to see flight from Europe and foreign buyers, foreign holders, foreign
holders into the treasury market, kind of having Europe yields go up and treasury yields come down.
Well, I mean, okay, let me unpack that. If you look at this chart, it's showing bond term
premium across the world, okay? You've got a core group of markets, which is shown at the bottom
of that, which is the Chinese market, the U.S. Treasury market and the German Bunn market,
which have the lowest term premium world wide. And you could say those are sort of core
collateral because basically government debt seems to be of high integrity there.
Then you've got a spread above that where you've got the British guilt market, which is the
black line.
You've got the Japanese JGB market, which is the broken black line.
And then you've got two other markets, the Swedish government bond market, red, and you've
got in orange, the oat market in France.
Those other markets are premiums, term premiums.
to the other three, basically because of their fiscal risks.
And you rightly noted that the Oat Bund spread is widening,
and you can pretty much see the reason for that on the chart
because you've seen this secular increase in French term premium
relative to German term premium, which, of anything, are falling, not rising.
Now, what does that tell us about the world?
It tells us that you don't want to be taking a lot of fiscal risk
in these economies, in the upper,
and the upper four, they've got funding problems, clearly.
They're, you know, with the exception of maybe France, they're not really, you know,
they're not really reserved currencies anymore.
The dollar has clearly got that status.
But the key thing when you start to unpack the Eurozone is that it's an unstable system.
And, you know, the more that people or the quicker people realize this, the better.
There's no safe asset in the Euro system, okay?
this is the problem they've got.
So when the sort of proverbial shit hits the fan, what happens?
Everyone goes into the German Bund, right?
Which is not a euro asset per se.
It's a national German asset.
And so what happens is that Bund yields go down and all the other peripheral yields go up.
Now, what Draghi, the former ECB chair, concluded or announced some years ago,
was a statement called whatever it takes.
And Draghi said, we are going to do whatever it takes
to basically make sure these spreads don't widen.
And whatever it takes means is printing money.
So that's the solution.
So every time there's a crisis in the Eurozone,
the Bund will benefit, people will go into Buns,
and there'll be money printing.
So the Euro will devalue.
And look, what's happening right now?
It's an unstable system.
You can I say, Dixie, I think I last looked this up at like 101 right now.
How much does the...
Because it's...
Again, so much of this is hard for me to try it unpack to follow at times.
But the added complexity of their issuing debt between different countries in a currency that they don't control as compared to the Treasury.
Yeah.
It's madness.
I agree.
Yeah.
I agree.
But you're not going to get...
There's no political consensus, but basically having European wide debt.
And the reason is that A doesn't trust B and B doesn't trust C.
And you've got the point of tension is that if you look at public debt,
France's public debt to GDP ratio is way, way above Germany's.
So, you know, that's just an inconsistency that just can't go on.
The Germans are ultimately going to have to pay for it,
but they're going to realize at some stage that this is not a great deal.
I don't think the Eurozone is long for this world.
I don't think the EU can hold together, particularly with,
immigration problems, if I look at the Eastern European countries, and then Germany getting pissed
off and constantly flipping the bill. I don't know why it would. Yeah, well, I think that's right.
I mean, I think, I mean, in many ways, my view, NATO is the glue that holds the EU together.
And if there is questions over the integrity of NATO going forward, you've got big problems for the
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slash sessions. I'm jumping a little bit further east. If we go and look at Japan, I always see
lots of people commenting on like the, what's it called, the yen carry trade.
focusing on the Japanese and U.S. Treasury markets. And again, we did see that the Fed just
had in the meeting minutes there confirmed that they did intervene. I think I saw the JPI. Y was at like
158 or so, so still pretty high, but a little bit down. What are your thoughts on what's going on
specifically with the Japanese yen in that market? Well, I think there are a number of things
to say. I mean, one is that you've got to understand maybe where, I mean, maybe I can shift to
another slide to try and show what's what's going on in Japan. There's a couple of things.
Whoops. First slide is this one, which is what we've got to try and understand in terms of the
Japanese economy. The orange line is that same metric that we looked at before, which is the
risk-adjusted 10-year bond yields. In other words, it's policy rates in Japan over 10 years without
the term premiering. And the black line is four-year rolling average of nominal GDP growth.
Now, this is the astonishing and stark fact, okay, is that Japanese nominal GDP growth is testing
5%, whereas if you go back through the decade of the 2000s, it was negative, okay?
That's a big, big change for a big economy.
And consequently, asset prices have to reprice.
The bond yields have to go up.
Now, that should mean that Japanese policymakers force interest rates up.
and that's pretty much what's going on,
but they're doing it at a really slow pace.
So they're behind the curve, deliberately,
I would argue, they're deliberately behind the curve,
they're behind the curve.
And so where is that tension expressed?
It's expressed in a week again.
And that's simply what's going on.
So you've got that process.
Now, is the Japanese economy in a good or a bad state?
I think that's another question, a separate question.
And in my view, it's in a fairly good place.
Because I think if you start to move on to, I'm going to show you this chart, if I can get it there.
So, okay.
So what I've put up here is a chart that looks at the debt liquidity ratios between China and Japan.
The debt liquidity ratio is the key ratio for every economy to manage because if you don't have the liquidity, you can't refinance your debt.
and most of these economies have taken on huge amounts of debt, not least Japan,
and actually the other country on that chart is China, so we've got to think about China.
Japan had a rising debt liquidity ratio, and that has really saddled the economy,
and it basically caused Japan to have this lost decade.
What you can see on the chart is that around 2012, that debt liquidity ratio started to collapse,
and it's fallen back to levels which are well below,
historic levels. So in all the words, Japan has got good liquidity and it's got through most
of its debt problem. It's devalued its debt effectively. Okay. So there's no big debt problem
in Japan anymore. How did they do that? They did that with abenomics restructuring of the economy,
and they did it through the Bank of Japan, buying Japanese government bonds aggressively,
expanding its balance sheet, printing money, and by that route, devaluing the yen. And so what you can see
there is the process of devaluation of debt through a much weaker yen. And that is a solution that
has been applied through history to debt crises. Think of the US in the 1930s. It did exactly the
same thing. Look at what the Scandinavians did in the 1990s. Exactly the same thing. Every debt crisis
is ended by devaluation of paper money because you cannot default debt in a credit money world.
So you have to devalue it. And that's what Japan has done very successfully. Now, that would
mean that Japan's economy is actually quite a good place. In my view, as Long Bean, don't think so
much about MAGA, make America great again, because Japan is going to be made great again first,
because it's really the bulwark against China. So I think there's going to, the Japanese economy
is not a bad place to think about structurally investing in. The interesting corollary to that is
then what about China? Because if you look at that orange line, China is basically Japan 10 years later.
And we know that China is struggling under a huge debt burden.
It displays all the characteristics of an economy that's suffering debt deflation.
I'm going to show you a chart here, which is emphasizing that.
This is the 10-year U.S. government yield in black.
We know what that's done.
It's basically broken five, and he's testing five and a half as we speak.
And if you look at the orange line, that is the Chinese equivalent 10-year government bond.
Now, that is a huge gap, which I depict on the next slide to show the gap between US and Chinese 10-year treasury yields.
That is reflecting the fact that the US economy is growing significantly faster than the Chinese economy,
because we know 10-year bond yields from earlier charts match the underlying level of nominal GDP.
So if this is correct, the Chinese economy ain't growing at the figure they say,
which is 4 to 5% real,
it's more likely growing at something like about 1% real.
So the Chinese economy is really suffering,
and it's suffering under that debt burden.
So they are facing a lost decade like Japan did.
I would imagine, given China's geopolitical aspirations,
they can't afford to do that,
so they're going to have to get rid of that debt burden.
And why not go the same route as Japan,
as this slide shows, and devalue your debt?
If you devalue debt, how do you do it?
You've got to print money.
So we've got to watch for the Chinese printing money.
And this chart is showing you in the black line,
the People's Bank of China's balance sheet, what it's done.
And you can see between 2022 and now it's virtually doubled.
That's a huge monetary stimulus.
There's obviously cost to that.
and what is the cost? Look at the other line on the chart, which is the price of gold. The Chinese
are buying gold with alacrity, retail investors in particular. The Chinese government is buying gold
every single month. This is the process that is being triggered by monetary inflation in China.
It is not affecting the cross rate between the dollar yet, for the simple reason they've got
this barrier, which is capital controls, huge foreign exchange reserves, and compliance state
banks, which is really allowing them to have a dual circulation system. But the fact is that if
China prints more money, what you're going to see is increasing price, the increasing price of
gold over the medium term. Interesting. So basically, if I understand correctly, China's
accumulating a whole bunch of gold and then they're going to devalue their currency against
in order to deal with the giant amount of debt that they have there on hand.
Well, I think what you can say to be accurate, as best I can be accurate on this,
is they're trying to engineer an internal devaluation of the yuan, trying to get domestic
prices and wages up.
So the real value of debt diminishes significantly.
That's the policy.
Will that affect the exchange rate?
Well, we would have said in normal circumstances, yes, the exchange rate should tumble under
that policy, because capital flows would basically shift accordingly. But you've got capital
controls in China. So China is basically cut off from the rest of the world in that regard.
And they've got cushions through forex reserves and what the state banks do. So it's quite
possible they can have their cake and eat it, at least for a long time, and they can maintain
the dollar yuan cross for geopolitical reasons, because clearly that's a very, very sensitive
cross rate. And at the same time, have a...
domestic inflation.
And I believe they've defended that the USD yuan rate for quite a while here as well, too.
At least I remember maybe months ago looking at it, it looked like the PBOC was actively defending
the yuan price.
Yeah, I mean, they are, I mean, they're clearly manipulating, and that's for sure.
But in my view, I mean, it's not a consensus view by any stretch of the imagination.
But I think that if you took off capital controls, the yuan would devalue significantly.
And that's really all you need to know.
It's a currency that should fall, not rise in value.
They're engineering it to stay up.
Very interesting.
I want to take us in a bit of a weird direction,
because it kind of reminded me something as well, too.
Do you ever think that you would see something similar in the U.S. markets
where you'd almost have like a domestic dollar versus an international or offshore dollar as well?
And what I'm thinking about is like how stable coins come into play with all this, right?
This friend of the show, Dr. Jeff, I was talking to,
And you mentioned even the idea of stable coin buyers having a different interest rate, a lower interest rate,
than say normal treasury buyers in order to help deal with the debt situation.
But I wonder if you could see almost like an American stable coin and then an international one and having kind of different prices for each.
Well, I mean, in the sense, you know, maybe that is the way that the world is evolving.
because under
the genius act
as I recall
the original legislation
that
Stable Coin cannot pay interest
in the US
but they can pay interest offshore
and
I mean I suppose one can dance on the head of a pin
and say there are various ways around that
through rebates or whatever it may be
but ultimately the legislation is saying
that there is an ability to pay interest
offshore and not onshore. So maybe de facto you have what you already have this situation.
You already kind of have it laid out. Jeez, it's just incredible. So then I'm curious as we're
kind of going forward here. One of the other things that was pointed out to me, again, from
wonderful Dr. Jeff Ross, was this idea. He's got this kind of framework in terms of three
burners. That's how he sets it up in terms of Bitcoin's kind of price action. He's looking at global
liquidity and your name directly came up as where he's getting his read on global liquidity. He's
looking at manufacturing and he's looking at speculation in kind of the space. And what I'm wondering
from this cycle perspective, the way that we have this tension between the financial markets and
the real economy, is there a position on the cycle where you have basically manufacturing would
still be high, but liquidity is again starting to rise again off the bottom? Because I would
think that that would be kind of the sweet spot for Bitcoin. Yeah, I think there are, well,
let me sort of try and explain how I see it. Okay.
And I think what, you know, I mean, hands up here, we're sort of treading new grounds.
So it's very difficult to be definitive because Bitcoin clearly is a new asset.
And it hasn't had, it hasn't really been stress tested through many episodes.
Now, what we tend to look at is to go back to the liquidity cycle.
The liquidity cycle isn't a down swing.
And that should, by definition, be damaging the value of monetary inflation hedges.
And I would class, you know, Bitcoin and gold among those.
among those assets. So a downswing of the liquidity cycle should not be particularly helpful,
although I recognize quite fully that there is a strong trend here, if you like, an S-shaped growth
curve where people are actually putting more Bitcoin and more crypto into their portfolios,
and that will mean and rising trends. So that may dampen the downward swing of the cycle.
Now, one of the or the two other points that are worth mentioning in this is, number one,
If you look at what happens in China, the PBOC is expanding liquidity,
and most of that liquidity, as I indicated, is going into gold.
Now, Chinese investors are forbidden or legally banned from crypto,
and therefore you'd expect that the PBOC liquidity expansion has very limited effect
or no effect on Bitcoin prices.
But I did do a test, having made the statement that there was little effect,
I thought, well, I better cross-check this.
And actually, what you do find is that Bitcoin benefits, I don't know how, but it benefits from expanding Chinese liquidity.
Now, whether that tells you there's a capital outflow, which is not recorded, or whether the Chinese managed to sneak money into Bitcoin or whatever, I don't know.
But the fact is, if the PBOC eases, it does have a positive effect on Bitcoin.
The other factor, which I've also debated with investors in crypto, is that the move.
from Fed QE to Treasury QE, in theory, should be a negative factor for Bitcoin because money is
coming directly out of the financial sector and going into the real economy. Now, I tested that
data as well. And actually, what you do find is this move to Treasury QE, in other words,
the monetisation of government spending, seems to have a positive effect on the Bitcoin
price. Now, whether that's because Bitcoin investors are benefiting directly from that government
procurement, I don't know, whether it's because they're factoring in a faster inflation rate
longer term, I don't know. But there is a positive effect. So I think what you've got here is a number
of different seeds or acorns of expanding liquidity that could actually mean that Bitcoin does
quite well in 2027. Very cool. Very interesting. It's funny. The first thing that came to mind,
and I have no data on what's still going on there, is if you remember back in 2021 or 2020, we had the
the China mining ban, where they're banning Bitcoin mining. Now, I imagine that some is still
going on there. But my interpretation of that is that was basically a roundabout way of getting
capital around the capital controls now the country. I can't buy Bitcoin, but I can take my yuan,
buy a bunch of electricity, throw it through the miners, and now I can support that wherever
I need in the world. And I wonder if it's still being used some roundabout way, maybe in the same
sort of people are kind of mining under the radar as a way of funneling capital out of China.
It could well be. The private sector, as we know, is innovative. So I'm questioning
that I'll try something. Beautiful. Michael, was there anything else that we need to hit on or that we
didn't cover today that it's really important for the audience to be aware of? We didn't really get to
it, but any thoughts maybe even on AI or private credit, or is there something else that's worth
flagging? Well, I think on the, you know, on the, on the, on the, both of those things,
I think on the AI question, I mean, there's, there's no, you know, there's absolutely no, no issue about
whether AI is going to be important in the future economy. Clearly it is. I think the question
or the uncertainty is what is the probability of the companies that are delivering it? And that matters
more for the investor, more than from the user and the real economy. So there'll be huge economic
benefits, but will you be able to make money out of the investments? And I'm always reminded
of the fibre optic story of 20 years ago on Global Crossing, where Global Crossing was sort of the
darling of the market, it was a new issue that came a big new issue at the time. And within five
years, global crossing was in chapter 11. Margins collapsed by 80%. Fibre optic is still there and
still doing a great, great job. Everyone's benefiting, but the company doesn't exist. And I think
that's a sort of salutary lesson to think about in AI because you may well get price deflation,
but the price deflation really hits the supplier. That's the main question. On private, on
private credit, there's a lot of, I mean, by definition, we don't really know. I sense that there's
not a great deal of leverage in that space, but I don't know for certain. I don't think it's
not going to be as catastrophic as what happened in 2008. And as I said before, I think the
difference between now and 2008 is the Fed is basically, you know, over, looking over the financial
system with a lot, lot more detail and clarity than they had then. And so there's not going to be,
let's say, an unforeseen accident in the way there was in 2008. Final thought is, you know,
what do you've got to do in terms of investing? My view is you've got to start pairing down
risk. You've got to start thinking about maybe more fixed income in portfolios. You've got to be
positioning as well looking into the future for the next upturn in the cycle. But what I would be
looking at pretty closely, some of the indicators I've looked at here, even if you can't get
liquidity data, you know, as we do, or you don't want to buy it from us, what you can do is
look at things like the Soap of the yield curve. That may be a training indicator, but it's a decent
indicator. Look at sofa spreads. Look at the move index. Look at credit spreads and look at term
premier. Those are all warning signs of what could be going wrong or ultimately what could be going
right. Beautiful. I absolutely love it, Michael. Thank you so much. Tell me where can everybody go to
follow you, your work, find all that good stuff, find these charts. Best way to get to us is
substack, Capital Wars, it's called, and that is named after a book I wrote about five years ago
about Capital Wars. Or if you want the institutional service, go to our website, which is glindexes.com
where we supply data. If you enjoy this episode with Michael Howe, please do hit that like
button and check out last week's episode with Rational Rood on Bitcoin on-chain data.
I know you're going to love it.
