Founder's Story - The Shocking Future: How Markets Are Changing with Larry McDonald—Crypto, AI, BRICS, and the New Administration’s Impact | S2 Ep. 161

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Welcome back to Founder's Story! In this episode, Daniel Robbins sits down with Larry McDonald, founder of The Bear Traps Report and author of the newly released book, How to Listen When Markets Speak. Larry brings decades of investment expertise and invaluable insights on navigating today’s volatile markets and preparing for the future.Episode Highlights:The Journey to Bear Traps:Larry shares how he became a leading voice in financial analysis, writing A Colossal Failure of Common Sense during the 2008 financial crisis and connecting its lessons to today’s economic landscape.Market Insights for 2025 and Beyond:The shift from austerity post-2008 to massive fiscal and monetary responses totaling $16 trillion since COVID.Why today’s inflation pressures demand a new investment philosophy for the next decade.Predictions for 2025, including major restructuring in the U.S. debt market and its potential impacts.Investing in a Multipolar World:The rise of emerging markets and their increasing energy consumption.Why global energy infrastructure—including natural gas, uranium, and copper—may become the biggest beneficiaries of the AI and crypto boom.Lessons from Legends:Larry reflects on mentorship from investing greats like Charlie Munger, highlighting the importance of patience, discipline, and resisting the hype.The Reality of Crypto Investing:Why Bitcoin’s extreme volatility requires careful timing and discipline.The dangers of "testosterone-driven" investing and how liquidity drives crypto markets.BRICS and Global Shifts:The BRICS nations’ push away from the U.S. dollar and toward hard assets like gold.How overuse of sanctions by the U.S. has accelerated this trend.AI's Transformational Role:Why the true winners in AI will be those investing in the energy infrastructure to support it.Why NVIDIA’s valuation is a cautionary tale and where to look for real opportunities.Key Takeaways:Patience and timing are critical for successful investing—“All the great profits are in the waiting.”The next wave of investment opportunities lies in energy infrastructure, not just AI companies.Bitcoin and crypto are highly volatile and require a disciplined, long-term perspective.The global financial system is evolving into a multipolar world, requiring new strategies and insights.Connect with Larry McDonald:Follow him on Twitter: @ConvertBondEmail for a free trial of The Bear Traps Report:[e-mail]@thebeartrapsreport.comLarry’s newsletter and book democratize market intelligence, providing everyday investors access to the insights of top hedge funds, mutual funds, and pension funds.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com* Check out Vanta and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://www.vanta.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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mean it's huge right now right like this is everywhere everything everyone's talking about it so many changes happening so I love to understand from your perspective before we even dive into everything about the future predictions what you're seeing how did you even get started, and why did you write this book? Okay, well thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you guys. I really appreciate the platform and all that you've accomplished to get here and build

this outstanding audience that you have. Essentially we wrote kind of the, probably the number one book during the financial crisis of 2008 to 2010. It was a colossal failure of common sense was the name. It's been published in 12 languages. It was featured in the Academy Award winning movie Inside Job. So it was a very big book. And we wanted to connect that book to what's happening now. So the fiscal and monetary response to the financial crisis was about $4 trillion

from say 2008, 2011, 12 and there, $4 trillion. Now the fiscal and monetary response to COVID, the regional bank crisis of 2023, and the spending going into the election of 2024 has been $16 trillion, fiscal and monetary. And so what happens is when you inject that much kind of, I guess, steroids into the economy, into the market, you create much more dislocations in terms of sustained inflation pressure. And so most people watching us right now lived through an austerity period from 2008 to 2020. Europe was in austerity with Greece. We had the Brexit, we had Lehman, we had the Tea Party of the United States.

So we were in this like a post-financial crisis austerity period where they were keeping the fiscal and monetary levers down somewhat. And now we've gone into this overdose of fiscal and monetary, which is going to basically translate into much more sustained inflation. And so we need to understand we need a whole different investment philosophy for the next decade. So the portfolio of the 2010 to the 2020 portfolio is really in the the rearview mirror and we need a whole new Investment philosophy looking forward. I really appreciate you sharing that and I remember the 2008 I can remember

What happened I lost the house. I mean my whole life collapsed in 2008 I was ever Never forget that time, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot. I was only in my 20s, so it's okay. I'm curious then, as you are looking into 2025, I bet everyone comes to you and says, what are your predictions? How are you feeling about, with all the changes politically, how are you seeing 2025 playing out?

Well, first thing I wanna say is there's no I&T. And so we've done 140 speeches in 16 countries over the last 14 years. And we've met, I've met some incredible people. And so we host a conversation with hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, some of the most impressive investors on planet Earth, you know, many billionaires, many people that are worth a lot of money, but they're, you know, at the end of the day you need good mentors. And so the content of our Beartrap support of our book in this conversation today comes out of working with great mentors. And so what I'm really hearing is that as we go into the new year, the U.S. Treasury has been borrowing money to support the deficits on the front end of the yield curve in what

we call T-bills. And a lot of this money is about $15 trillion of debt that matures between 2024, 2025, and 26, which is about half the United States debt. And so as that rolls over, it's been pushing bond yields higher. And right now, the baby boomers are turning, the oldest boomers are turning 79. So the whole world's structured a little different. So as we look toward 2025 and 26, the new administration in Washington, and they want to restructure, but it's like a 750 pound, say woman or man that needs

restructuring or needs to go for some liposuction and it's going to create some short-term pain in early 25, but by the midterms and by the selection, the administration, the Trump administration is hopeful that we'll be in a much better spot, but there's a real significant restructuring that's about to happen for the United States of America. Wow. So when you're interviewing these people, these obviously very smart people alongside yourself, how are they feeling about things?

Well, the amount of risk taking the market, like the bullishness right now, the level of people in say the University of Michigan studies or positioning in the market, you can measure this through the amount of people that are actually long market, has essentially never been higher since 2000. I mean, it's really no human beings ever really made money investing at this level. In other words, at this level of hubris of kind of like massive, massive bullishness. So you're much better off over the last 20, 30 years sitting in the boat and waiting for those great moments that come a lot of time.

I sat down with Charlie Munger in my book, When Markets Speak. He said the hardest thing, Larry, I was in Omaha with him. We sat down for 40 minutes and he said the hardest thing Larry is to stare at a screen all day and do nothing. He said all of the great prophets, all the great prophets are in the waiting. And he said testosterone is the greatest enemy of an investor, especially a young age, testosterone. It's, you know, J.P. Morgan said in 1907, there's nothing in this world which will so violently distort a man's judgment more than the sight of his neighbor getting rich.

And that's where we are today. I mean, he would have a difficult time with social media then right because all we do is see what we think is our neighbors getting rich everywhere right? Buying Lamborghinis, flying private jets. Well we don't know right? That's reality. I'm curious then what do you think makes a person become a billionaire? Like these people that are super duper successful, uber successful like Charlie and others who are, you know, worth tens of billions of dollars.

Elon Musk just surpassed $400 billion net worth. What do you think separates those people from the ones that never make it? Well, one thing with Elon in the last like 20 years Elon's a brilliant guy, but remember Central banks really and go we're not allowing the business cycle to function right so we had a Lehman crisis that lasted a very short period of time we had a Colby crisis that lasted a short period of time and so if you look at say someone like Musk the SpaceX and Tesla

vision would never have been successful without a huge injection of fiscal and monetary response. Right? And so he's a brilliant guy, but there's different types of investors, right? Like Warren and Charlie have been successful through and made, you know, right now the market cap of investors, right? Like Ward and Charlie have been successful through and made, you know, right now the market cap of say Warren Buffett's Berkshire is about a trillion dollars. And the market cap of say Nvidia is 3.6 trillion or so. And so Buffett and Munger over, you know, 60, 70 years turned this company into a trillion dollar company through many, many, many business cycles. Whereas the new wealth of the last several years or last decade has really been supported by this $16 trillion fiscal and monetary response. Like we should have gone into recession in like 2022.

You had Jamie Dimon, you had Elon Musk, you had all these people claiming that the recession was just offshore. And the Biden team basically ramped up spending. We went from $1.4 trillion deficits in recent years to now close to $2 trillion. So they juice the fiscal into the election because they didn't want to lose. Don't get me wrong, both sides do this. The team Bush in 2008 created tons of excesses to try to help McCain. And this is what happened in big election years. So at the end of the day, we just have to understand like, what's really happening.

There's a lot of billionaires and millionaires have been created by this $16 trillion of fiscal and monetary largesse, which is going to create a whole new inflation machine. I was reading something around since like 2020 during the pandemic, the last few years, like more billionaires were made than ever before when I think we would normally think the opposite, but we're not really so in tune with what's really happening. So I'm glad you shared these because this is really opening on my eyes. I didn't even know about a lot of these things when it comes to crypto. Blackrock now, you know, they have the Bitcoin ETFs and Blackrock is talking a lot about

Bitcoin. How are you feeling about crypto and what the markets are reacting to, maybe even having more ETFs in the future? You know, I don't know, but how are you overall looking at crypto? Well, crypto is, it's been an extremely deadly investment for young people. Once again, the testosterone, the lies on Twitter, everybody pretends they've owned crypto or Bitcoin for all these years. Most people haven't. I mean, let's come on. I mean, you've had four drawdowns, two of 80%. Since 2017, you've had two 80% drawdowns and then you've had

two more of 55 and 62. So at the end of the day, I'm a huge Bitcoin bull, but you want to buy it when you don't see the strippers. You know, when you see the strippers taking off their clothes and trying to get you to buy a different coin, look out. When Michael Saylor is tweeting X every single day about his returns and about his new strategies, look out and put your money in cash and wait for the next 50 to 80 percent drawdown. There's no asset class in the world of any quality that's had four drawdowns since 2017 of this kind. Now, you can say that Bitcoin's destroyed gold over the long haul. Every imbecile knows that, right? But gold's largest drawdown over the last 10 years has been 22%, right?

And so the Nasdaq's biggest drawdown over the last 10 years has been like 34%. But Bitcoin's had four drawdowns of 80, 80, 64, and 52. So it's just as sure as God and little green apples. You're going to get another chance. But once again, testosterone is your greatest enemy as a young person. And you want to sit in the boat, you know, and really wait for that great buying opportunity and don't buy Bitcoin when you see the strippers. That's what you want to do. They're very convincing. They're very convincing. So I could see, you know,

if I was in my twenties, I would be totally out of control trying to buy just because they're everywhere. And it seems like reality, But you said it best. Most likely these people have already sold, you know, they're touting whatever they're touting and it's probably not the truth. There's a lot of people and we've talked to a few guests before about bricks. So with Bitcoin, if you do the math, there's about 40 or so families that control 60% of the flow.

What happens is when you're long Bitcoin, you're actually just long liquidity. This is very important. Think of August. On August 5th, there was stress in the financial markets. The VIX had a big move. In six days, six days, six days, Bitcoin dropped 31%. Think about that. What asset class does that? Essentially what I'm saying is you're essentially, you're not long the fiat currency BS, all

this stuff, all this sales pitch. You're just long ultra liquidity. Now, over time, you are long the fiat alternative. But in the near term, short term, you're just long excess liquidity. If liquidity starts to dry up, which had happened on August 5th, because of a situation with the Bank of Japan and the carry track, you will be obliterated in Bitcoin. And so everybody has this long, has this long-term give, just watch out for, you're essentially long, and you're essentially short the VIX. So you,

when you're long Bitcoin, you short equity volatility. So every time the VIX has made a move up about say 30, 30 got 40, Bitcoin's been in a, been in a 30 to 50 to 80% drawdown every single time. Thank you for clarifying that. It seems like many people when they look at crypto, it's like the lottery. The hope is I'm going to get a 10,000 percent return. I invest a penny and maybe it goes to $100,000, which we know is pretty rare. But it's those people that you mentioned before that they get me too excited about it. So they're going back to BRICS.

People are all over the place. We've talked to many people and they're all over the place about this. And I am very confused as to what's really happening. So is it really challenging Western financial system? Is it not? What is your perspective on bricks? Okay, so in our book, what we talk about is, over the last 15, 20 years,

Republicans and Democrats have used a sledgehammer and they've hit country after country after country over the head with sanctions, with property confiscation. And these are weapons that should be used like once every 10 years. Like when Russia invades Ukraine, that's when you want to use your sanctions, right? That's when you want to use maybe some aggressive tools. But unfortunately over the last 20 years, both Republicans and Democrats have overused

these weapons. And it's really hubris, like in terms of Washington policy and people in Washington, you know, where the United States of America would push people around. Yeah, but over time, that's pushing the bricks away from the dollar. And so if you look at central bank ownership of gold, it's exploded over the last 10-15 years because of the threats from Washington around sanctions, around property confiscation, you know, billions and billions of dollars have been confiscated from Russian assets and they're being dispersed throughout Europe right now.

So at the end of the day, the BRICs are investing in hard assets, rare earth metals, all kinds of alternatives to the dollar. And whether or not that's going to be successful, nobody really knows. But there is a trend shift away from the dollar over the last three to five years and looking forward to the next 18 years. So with all of the changes, you had just brought up a geopolitical or an international change with war and a lot of politics changing recently from presidents to prime ministers to, you know, lots of different things happening globally. I feel like we've never been so global in the sense of how we are connected with one

another. What are you seeing when it comes to investments or what are you looking at with all of these global changes? Yeah. So what we talk about in our book, when market speakers around were much more a multipolar world now. So we the globalist in Davos spent the last 15, 20 years. We took five million jobs out of the United States, five million.

We decimated families in the rust belt. And just, you know, you look at JD Vance and his life story in that movie, in the book, and the whole thing. We decimated. I mean, opioid deaths and life expectancy in the American Rust Belt are pathetic. They're disgusting. We're the strongest country in the world in terms of healthcare spending, but we have a life expectancy in the Rust Belt and in Sealeast states that's crashing lower. It's disgusting. The good news is we've raised the standard of living in Bangladesh, India, China, all throughout the emerging world. If you work in a call center in India, you're making 10 to 50 times more than your great-great grandparents. But the dark side of this is that we've created all these new emerging energy consumers globally,

and they're consuming a lot more carbon. And so the carbon neutral goals of the globalists, they really shot themselves in the foot because by really moving jobs out of the United States, we've created more energy demand. Just think of young people in India. There's a billion people in India that don't have air conditioning. A billion people. Imagine, you're a young person, you're making more money. You get a moped, you get air conditioning.

You're consuming energy at a much greater pace. So the energy consumption globally is spectacular. Then you throw in onto that artificial intelligence, right? Bitcoin. Bitcoin right now, at a hundred thousand dollars, the annual energy consumption for the love of God is South Africa. And like two years ago, it might have been Finland or even much smaller country. But if Bitcoin doubles again, because of the calculation of the equation in the formation of Bitcoin, it's going to basically require the annual electricity demand or energy demand of say France or Germany.

And then if you add in artificial intelligence, the data centers globally and all the power that's needed to fund, everybody's heard the stats, a Google search versus a chat GBT search, it's like chat GBT is 10 to 15 times more energy because of the processing. And so we are going to cusp one of the greatest potential bull markets in natural gas equities, uranium type nuclear power plays. There's essentially this hole toward the green meadow. In other words, carbon neutral 2050 is impossible, and it's really going to be carbon neutral 2100, the solar and wind solutions are a complete and other joke relative to these emerging demands from AI, crypto and the emerging markets.

And so you want to get on that grid to the green meadow and that's in some of these other areas where you want to position yourself meadow and that's in some of these other areas where you want to position yourself for this incredible bull market in energy and electricity production. I can't help myself but ask Chasubit really stupid questions but I'm going to commit to stop doing that because it's using up energy and I can't help myself. This Christmas why not give the gift that truly lasts a lifetime. Imagine helping your loved ones connect with the world, explore cultures, and grow personally. All with the gift of language.

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about? Obviously, you know, you had mentioned Nvidia, you know, three trillion plus insanity, a bunch of these AI companies are, you know, meta all these companies adding AI and now, you know, stock markets through the roof, stocks through the roof, a lot of excitement. Then you have on the flip side, people talking about so many jobs, you know, thousands, maybe millions of jobs being decimated all around the world. How are we going to deal with that? What are your thoughts on the future of the impacts of society with AI? Well, first of all, in years where there are big gains in the market, like this year, and especially essentially two years ago today, Nvidia was

worth about $850 billion and today it's worth $3.6 trillion. So $850 billion to $3.6 trillion. So there's a lot of gains in the stock. And what happens is when you go into the new year, there's a lot of investors that when you see stocks with big gains, it typically will sell. Anybody that has it mentioned, say you have like a $200,000 gain in Nvidia, if you sell it now, you pay the tax on April 15th. If you sell the stock January 5th, you pay the stock April 15th, 2026. So near term, all these high flyers are going to get probably hammered in January.

On the other side of the coin, stocks like Intel, Intel right now is worth about $80 billion. You've got to think about when you look at a stock, don't look at a stock price. So Nvidia might be whatever, it's $130. That's idiotic. You need to look at the value of the company because to get Nvidia to double from here, it has to basically go to almost a $7 trillion company and USGDT's $29 trillion. You know, it's just a complete lunacy and idiocy. Whenever you see the morons on Wall Street, all upgrading stock and buying, buying, buying,

buying, buying, buying, buying, it's like these people were so bearish on Nvidia two years ago. I mean, Nvidia had literally the highest sell ratings, the lowest price targets a year and a half ago, not even two years ago. So now everybody's coming in. It reminds me of 2000 where in 2000 everybody wanted to belong, Cisco, KDS, Uniface, global crossing, kind of the infrastructure for the internet. They weren't looking at things like the formation of Google or match.com or all these

things that would actually benefit from the new revolution. And so it's the same thing today. Everybody's in the wrong trades. Everybody's in kind of the infrastructure of the AI world, and they're not really investing in the energy infrastructure. I mean, just think of copper. These copper names are cheap. The amount of copper that it's going to take to get Nvidia to that valuation, you need an entirely new – the US power grid is 50 years old in some spots, 30 years old in others. So you need a whole – you need like a trillion and a half dollar remade of a fat and disgusting US power grid.

Like it's outdated. They can't support all these data centers. So the great investments for artificial intelligence are going to be in the support system, the energy system to get us there. Wow. I learned a lot today, Larry. I mean, I'm very, very appreciative. And something I'm just reading between the lines. People that are very wealthy are looking at these things. They're looking at the long game, like you said, Charlie. And then they're looking they're seeing this, because they've been in it for so long, but they're really looking at this from a different perspective. Which is why I'm glad you have your book. book it's amazing it opened up my eyes for a lot of things if you if people want to get in touch with you they want to buy your book they want to

find out more information I know you have your newsletter you have a lot of content that you create as well for people how can they get in touch well on Twitter we're at convert bond if you want to get our letter we'll give you a free couple of months, tatiana at thebeartrapsreport.com where we are all about crowd sourcing information, democratizing information. In other words, working with the billionaires, working with the big funds, and kind of sharing that gathering intelligence with a wider audience.

So tatiana at thebeartrapsreport.com or Valentina at TheBearTrapsReport.com, we can help you out there. But thanks, it's been great to catch up and have a blessed new year and Christmas. Amazing. Thank you for joining us today on Founder's Story. Thanks, Larry. All the best. Tis the season for shopping and with Rakuten, it's also the season for stacking up the savings. Use Rakuten to stack cash back at hundreds of stores on top of holiday sales. That's like savings on savings.

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