On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/31/25 (DATs selling coins, prediction market problems, Bessent's pesos) (EP.681)

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for more news and deals. In this episode:  Mastercard buys Zerohash for around $2b Fiserv has a catastrophic day Bitwise launches a Solana staking ETF Is there another regional banking crisis? EthZilla sold some ETH to buy back shares Will there be activists with the DATs? Are prediction markets structurally doomed? Sen Tillis introduces the Ensuring Fair Access to Banking act Could you go back and time and trade effectively? Bessent's great peso trade What's going to happen with Venezuela? We review the Iran-Contra scandal Content mentioned in this episode: Sen Tillis, Fair Access to Banking press release  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, IG $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

And I'm Nick Carter. According to this one a little bit late, I had a, I was physically on a, able to perform earlier today due to a dental situation. Yeah, that was kind of a doozy. Yeah, lost a tooth last night having a steak. That's, you hate to see it. I don't get you. And then the Novocaine was just, they say Novakain's supposed to wear off after an hour.

That was with me for like four hours. I couldn't speak. It's hard to do this job without talking. That's the entire job. Yeah, but I'm back. So, Patriots are doing good this season. Oh, my gosh. Oh my gosh.

What's going on? Turns out we have the Tom Brady of the future in the form of Drake May. It's just unbelievable. Commanders are awful. Now they're terrible. Huge regression. What was that? A fluke last year with them?

Yeah, I mean, we won a lot of really close Toyncos, Toyn toss games. Like, we had a Hail Mary against the Bears from like 70 yards. Shouldn't have won that game. And we just had a ton of like super close. moments and I think in a normal year you just lose half those games. Yeah. So it's just, I guess that's right.

Statistics. It's nice to be back on the top of the AFC East. Have you looked at UNC? Belchak's not doing a very good job down there. There's a lot of controversy going on. A lot of off-the-field distractions for him. Yeah. He did a good job up here, but not doing a good job this year.

Well, there's plenty of talk about this week. some things finally happened. Thank goodness for that. Yeah, it was a busy week. I mean, we'll hop into the deals. Actually, the first deal is actually the Castle Island content of the week as well. So Sean sat down with Gita from Tesser, CEO and founder of Tesser, which is the first deal the week. So Tessor is an institutional stable coin payments platform. They raised $4.5 million in a round led by Castle Island along with Strobe and Anthemis. Really excited about Tessor. Yeah, so both the content of the week and the deal of the week. Congrats to the tester team.

Next up, we've zero hash is a huge deal. Stable Quaid infrastructure company. They're required for $2 billion by MasterCard. Wow. Yeah, it's rumored at 1.5 to 2. We'll use the high end of the two. But congratulations to Edward. What a journey with zero hash.

It was CX. I know it was zero hash, but they built an amazing business. So really happy for them. Yeah, next up we have standard economics. There is stable coin-based remittance app. There is 9 million from Paradigm and Lightspeed. Then it's Zarr, which is a stable coin on-ramp network. There is $13 million from Andresen, Dragonfly, and Vanek.

Congrats to Brandon and the team over there. Next up we have Braun Labs. They are a digital asset custody business. There is 15 million from GSR, Fassanara, and Local Globe. Then it's accountable, which is a data verification network. They raise $7.5 million from Pantera and OkX Ventures. Next up we have stable finance, their consumer app for accessing defy yields. They're required by Avey.

And then last one is Herkel, which is a cross-border payments company. They raised $10 million from F prime capital, Fulger, and others. So if you look at it, almost every single deal this week was stable coin. It's a killer use case. That's one of the first time. it's almost complete saturation stablecoin deals I mean to see MasterCard come into the space

that's a pretty big move huh I mean you gotta be making moves if your MasterCard they've been building stablecoin infrastructure for years but yeah this is their first real show of intent yeah they bought that that crypto forensics company back in the day I'm totally blanking on the name of it

but they've made some M&A moves in the past over there cypher trace You know, what I was thinking about today was FISA. Did you see what happened to the? Yeah. So what was it the, it's down like 50% since Bizzignano left? And this is a real big, serious company, right? Like serious business company.

And they're down like 70% on the year and like 40% in one day. And do you think that's stablecoin related? No, because they're doing stable coins, right? It's reported they're doing stable. They just missed earnings horribly, and the growth was just way less than what the street expected. And they were this kind of high growth, really popular name and kind of fintech and banking, I guess. And that story just came to a halt today. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that that category is probably less impacted by stablecoins if they can just get their act together and add stable coins as an account type. but I guess there's fewer banks that are rolling out just hardcore core banking infrastructure. There's just letterweight options these days. Yeah, that could be it. It could be a function of the fact that there's a bit of a regional banking crisis going on. I don't know if you've been, have you been following this? I have been going on for a while. No one's been talking about this.

Secretly, there's like a huge problem with the banks again. It's happening again. Well, we'll come up with an acronym and throw some cash at them if it gets really bad. Yeah, the Fed will invent some new alphabet suit facilities. But maybe that's it too. If I serve the client base, they just need a lot of these smaller banks to sell them. Maybe there's just less of them. But he had a great trade.

Did you see that he was able to, he works, he's the CEO of the IRS, which I wasn't aware that that was the title. But he left and he was able to get one of those Hank Paulson deals, it looks like, where he was able to sell his stock. without capital gains. Really? Yeah. And the title is CEO of IRS? Yeah, which I wasn't aware of until I read the Blumer article yesterday. No way.

No way. A government agency and if you run it, you're called the CEO. I think that's in the IRS, I think reports up through Treasury. I think it's best in its idea. Wow. Maybe we should have like equity and investing and, you know, boards for. I don't think you want to incentivize all things. No, you don't want to give a take rate.

to the IRS. To the IRS or, you don't want to do that. It could get a little perverse like the head of ice or something. No, yeah, you just want people to do their jobs. But he's getting paid like $200,000 a year to be the head of the IRS. But he was able to sell $450 million worth of Pfizer's dollars. I was going to say that's the real con package right there, the tax free. Yeah.

So it was a busy week for BitWise. So BitWise was first out of the gate here with the Salana staking ETFs. They saw over $50 million in first day trading volume into the product. They're partnered with Helius and they also run their own staking operation. I guess Helius is a service provider into Bitwise's staking operation. Over 300 million in assets in a couple days, which is unbelievably impressive. And of course, disclosure were investors in BitWise. Yeah, one of the hottest ETF launches the year, right?

Yeah, it's actually like one of the hottest of all time. Wow. So there are already salon ATFs, but this one has staking. First staking one out of the gate. Yeah. They were ringing the bell at NYSC today. I saw that. Teddy wearing the mustache.

I noticed that. Yeah, I like it. I do like it. Hard to, well, you would like it since you have a mustache, but hadn't seen them in a mustache before. It works. Yeah, 100%. There's a lot happening. the Dats this week. Can we say it's the beginning of the end for the Dats? I mean, I think we called

the end. We were at the very early part of just saying that these things were not going to work. And I think the market has come to that view. Maybe it's the end of the beginning. It is. Or the beginning of the end. Either way, it's over for the Dats. Maybe it's not, you know, things can change. This was a tough one. ETHZILA, they sold some ETH to buy back their stock. that makes total sense by the way that's exactly what they should be doing the only problem is if you bought eith thinking the dats would never sell the eth yes so that's going to happen to the bitcoin dats by the way may already be happening in fact i think it's happening secretly behind the scenes so if you're a dat what you should really be telling people is you're going to be buying

the asset when you're trading the premium and when you're trading a discount you're going to sell the asset and you buy back your shares. It's kind of what you have to do. You probably get sued if you don't do that. There's nothing forcing you to do that, but you probably should do that. But what the DAT said instead was, we're just always going to buy the asset. Always. We're never going to sell. That's the problem. They're setting expectations wrong. People got totally miscalibrated. I thought the Dats would never sell. Here we are. The Dats are almost net sellers. Now, how would you feel if you were a retail investor and your investors in a debt say that maybe hypothetically sold 40 million of

this week and they not only traded a discount to NAV but they had an asset management agreement where it was even worse than a discount to NAV. Yeah there's a discount there's leakage. Yeah you got to that's a leaky bucket over there. So yesterday was a particularly ignominious day for the DATs. It was the first time that collectively, if you look at all them together, the BTC, Seoul and ETH DATs all traded below even Bitcoin. And micro strategy, of course, the biggest one, but they're all the way down to 1.1 on an MNAV basis.

Now, do you think that activist investors are already in these data sending letters to management? Is that something that's already happening or is that something that's going to happen in two weeks? I mean, I haven't seen any yet, but some of them are trading at 50 bucks on the dollar, like 50 cents on the dollar. NACA?

Yeah. That one's trading at a massive discount. Now because of like 60 to 70 cents on the dollar. What about cracking it open getting the gold out? You know? I think you had a bunch of these activists that were active in the grayscale products when those were trading at discounts. And I don't see any reason why activists wouldn't be all over these.

I think things have to get way worse before we see intervention. I think the management teams are going to put on a brave face and try and claw their way out of this, get creative with the financing. So I think you're going to have to see these stats trading at 30 cents on the dollar before anything happens. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Maybe they will get that low. Who knows?

But it doesn't seem like as fun of a category as it was for some people like two months ago. No. So the ETH dots did flip in the Bitcoin dots as a percentage of supply held in the dots. Yeah. So that did happen. wondering now if they're going to unflippin because they're going to disgorge all the eth that they have to get back to par. I haven't seen much from Michael Saylor lately. He hasn't been too active. There have been virtually no Bitcoin purchases since August and the last

meaningful one was in July. It's actually been really all-Eath in a small amount of soul in the last couple of months. So last week, this was an interesting story. New York State Gaming Commission issued a cease-in-diss letter to Calci. I think that happened on Friday night last week, claiming that the sports prediction markets constitute illegal gambling. In response, Calci filed a federal lawsuit against New York regulators to block any potential action from the state. The legal strategy here, I don't know. I mean, it seems like their strategy is to get out in federal court and kind of get in front of the states as opposed to having this hodgepodge where all the states come after them at once was sort of my interpretation there yeah i haven't been following this closely at all um i thought it was kind of

kalsh's fate had already been settled at the federal level well i i don't think that it's that clear because i think it sort of depends on the market and these uh gambling related industries are tough i mean they're obviously highly regulated it's just all Also, there's a lot of political dollars on that side of the market. And so they're up against some pretty formidable opponents, I think. I've begun to formulate a view that the prediction markets are actually not good, aside from sports. Why is that?

They're bad markets. And I'm going to sound like a hater, of course, because we're not in either one of the big ones. But I think they're not going to work, actually. So for electoral markets, they're great. Obviously, have consistently delivered. Not always. Sometimes they've actually been wrong. And then for sports, you know, there's a tax reason that maybe they're better than the bookies.

But for your run-of-the-mill sort of event markets, here's the problem. There's like a finite amount of, you know, people and capital that's willing to bet on these things, like Taylor Swift's next album or who's going to be nominated for Supreme. court, you know, whatever. There's two main problems I identify. One is they're not liquid enough to be useful for people that need to use the markets to hedge. And I don't know if you're going to get there spontaneously. Because the only reason that people will be buying the markets is just pure speculation. So I don't know if that organically gets up to the hedging size.

The other bigger problem, I think, is it's kind of like early days of online poker where you had a lot of fish it's like ordinary players like me and then there are a lot of pros and the pros would farm the fish and eventually the fish ran out of money they gave it up

and then the pros were just playing against the pros and then it got too competitive and it sucked we're at that stage right now there's a lot of fish in the prediction markets who are they trading against they're actually trading against informed flow people that are insiders you know they know who the next supreme court justice is because they're a clerk

or they know what the next taylor swift album is going to be because they work for the record label so you have a lot of informed flow that's farming the uninformed flow and then eventually uninformfoam phil gives up and they realize they're not profitably trading on the p.m. and they give up and then volume kind of dries up so i think we're in sort of like the the like really soft period when there's still tons of volume because a lot of people are trying it out for the first time, but I think it's going to dry up as a lot of these retail bankrolls get exhausted. That's my analysis.

That's interesting. I mean, I think both things can be true, though, to some degree, that these things could be massively successful, but only on the large liquid markets, right? The sports markets are very large, very liquid. There's a ton of informed and uninformed flow, and I think prediction markets are better than the standard sports books

because they're actually just easier to understand for a retail person. it's like will this happen yes or no here's the percentage and you're not trying to deal with this line and trying to dissect that the other reason this is very outpropos of current events sports markets are quote unquote better is because the there's no like insiders per se no yeah exactly or like insiders are prohibited except for like obviously there are inside but inside of trading is like really prohibited in sports yeah exactly so I think like a Taylor Swift market these idiosyncratic ones they'll never be big enough. There is no natural hedging.

In sports, there is natural hedging, actually. You'd have, like, the Vegas sports books would be the natural. They'd be looking to hedge at some point in the future. They probably already do this, just, like, over-voice-brokered ways to layoff risk and things like that. So I have been looking at it recently, and I think what's going on is the big prop funds that, like, do sports betting, I guess. market make sports betting? That's the thing apparently. Yeah, it is the thing. Yeah,

sports market makers, they are providing a lot of the volume on the sports prediction markets and they're trading wider spreads. So you're actually getting slightly, so I think what's happening is you're getting slightly worse execution on the PM, but you have, don't have a volume cap. Whereas if you go to a bookie, you get a better kind of mark, but you are very much capped with your volume. Yeah. Like if you want to go to, I don't know,

what do people use for gambling? What sports app do they use? Like draft kings or fan duel or something like that? I don't do it, so I couldn't tell you. But apparently if you, to avoid the slippage problem, you just can't do a certain amount of volume

if you're even wanting to. Yeah, well, plus they cut you off if you're successful. So like a guy like Haralabob, like can't trade on those things. So I think the difference is, is you have kind of like certainty. There's no slippage when you're trading on the sportsbook

versus on a PM. Maybe there will be some slippage. Might be a little chaotic. But you can do more size. So I think that's what's happening. Yeah. I think that's probably right. I mean, the other market that's interesting

for prediction markets is just what will the price of X asset be in Y timeframe? Like you could see those getting very large and liquid and you could lay off risk in a market like that. So, yeah, I've actually soured on prediction markets. a little. And I think one of the really big issues is market fragmentation. Like there's just so many things. Like what makes a really good market is fungibility, generalization, the same instrument being the same worldwide. And with PMs, you just have so much fragmentation, like an explosion.

Well, it'll be interesting to see how Cal She Fair is here. I'd imagine this will be an issue for anyone in the category. Speaking of legislation and regulatory things, so Senator Tom Tillis out of North Carolina drafted a bill. It's called Ensuring Fair Access to Banking Act. It looks like you were actually in the press release here. Yeah, I was I am officially endorsing this legislation. Tell me more about it. This is the first time to my endorsement has been sought and it has been granted in fact. So there have been many attempts to legislatively codify fair access rules. There's something called

the Firm Act back of the day. This one from Tom Tillis, I think is great. I actually worked with the Tillis team before on some proof of reserve legislation. And so I know them pretty well. And this one is, it's pretty solid. It basically says the banks can't debank you for arbitrary reasons,

unless they themselves have a good reason. It's a pretty common sense thing. They eliminate reputation risk in bank supervision legislatively. That's already been done administratively, but we care about the legislative. And they also do a really good thing, which is they revise up the thresholds for cash transaction, suspicious activity reports. Oh, they do that. Wow. Because that's how they got us. Yeah.

$10,000 30 years ago is a lot different from 10,000 now. This is the dirtiest trick in government, which is setting these non-inflation index thresholds. And they did it to us in 1970. $10,000 in 1970, $70,000 today. So they finally fix that. And so it has the effect of creating this creeping financial drag net that only grows with inflation, right? So that was a really nice thing that it was in this. So where does this stand right now in terms of a bill?

I mean, it was just introduced literally today. And so who knows, maybe it'll get tacked on or something. I actually have no idea how Bill becomes law. I mean, I guess... Oh, you should know that. Didn't you have to become a U.S. citizen? I know kind of like in a technical sense, but I don't know in a practical way how it happens.

I mean, what percent of introduced legislation becomes law? Like, less 1%. That's very little. I mean, you have senators like the one up here in Massachusetts who is just literally never passed a lot. It's mind-boggling. You can be a senator for a decade. Some are just not a bill like that.

Yeah. You know. But we at Castle Island officially endorsed this legislation. Do we? Okay. Good to know. Good to know. Yeah, I'm co-opting you as well.

All right. All right. I'm in. Yeah. I think people should have fair access to banking. It seems like a no-brainer. Yeah. I mean, it's time we put an end to the cycles of debanking. Like, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen.

Trump is going to start debanking the left, probably. Do you think so? Yeah, I think nothing's off the table. Like, they want to go after Antifa or. universities maybe or abortion clinics, they're probably just going to do the same thing that the Biden admin did to the right. He better not.

I mean, this is my prediction, unfortunately. I think it's going to happen. And to be clear, I'm against it. When I'm against it, it's them, against it when it's us. I'm against it. Yeah, I mean, that would not be good. That would definitely not be good.

So how do we put a stop to the cycles of endless recrimination? We pass law. this is the law I like that speaking of laws have you read the book 1929 yet

no I have so many books to read I'm drowning I thought it was good kind of talks about obviously the Great Depression talks about the stock market crash

of 29 and then some of the legislation that came out of that Glass-Steagall kind of behind the scenes on how that happened very good book does he

analyze the root causes of the Great Depression not to the a level where you'd come away feeling like you actually had a good handle on it. But I mean, part of it was like bank branches were not really a thing back then. That's very true. And so there was a lot of localized. And as like the agricultural economy was waning, a lot of the banks in the heartland were impacted by that.

You also had just a lack of disclosure. So you had like CEOs shorting their own companies and things like, just crazy stuff that you would never believe. It's like crypto. Wild West stuff. So George Saldjan has a, I want to say, you know, I'm going to say revisionist history, but a revisionist history of the New Deal as well. A book that's called False Dawn.

And he's arguing actually that FDR extended the Great Depression and made it worse. Everyone says, now we're taught in schools is the New Deal is great. Saved everyone. But actually, it was maybe it was bad. So. The whole time I was reading this book, I was thinking to myself, if I was just transported back in time and I landed in 1929, would I have been able to navigate that?

Well, let's say you're in charge of, I guess they had the Fed at that point, right? So they did make some elementary mistakes, right? Didn't they, like, tighten the money supply into a contraction leading to massive, like, deflation? Yeah, they didn't intervene enough. That was for sure. But I'm even just saying, like, let's just say you were back in the day and you were a junior your person had an investment bank, but you knew everything that was going to happen,

it would have been still hard to navigate that. I mean, it was a massive depression. Like, there were times when after the crash in 29, stock market came back up 20%, only go back down 50% after that. Like, there was no timing that thing. Even if you went back with today's knowledge, I think you still would have ended up getting wiped out. Yeah, I mean, before the 70s hit, like, we had multiple 20-year periods where the stock market

was flat, basically. Yeah, I actually think about that literally all the time. If I went back in history with the knowledge I have, how would I be able to like thrive? Yeah. In various time periods. Yeah. And in 1929, all you could do is just buy stocks that we've heard of today and hope they made it. But they'd still probably draw down 80%.

Yeah. That was my conclusion is you'd only be buying things that exist today. And then you just hope that it wasn't like some reverse merger that actually made that company. exist today. And I can't, I don't know if I could name a stock, like Ford, maybe, where they publicly traded? I don't know. They probably were back then. Like AT&T or something. You had, you had a few banks that made it through, obviously, JPMorgan, but I believe they were private at that point. It's honestly probably more challenging, even with the full benefit of hindsight, probably quite challenging. I think very, very, very challenging. And then it's just like,

where do you live? Yeah. Tough. I was thinking about this, but with the 1500s. Like, what would you do to gather resources and power in 1500 Britain, for instance? I mean, I think you have to become a cult leader. So I was thinking about it. What could we do? And I was like, okay, well, I guess I could invent the steam engine.

Well, actually, I don't know how to do that. No. So that's all the day. Well, okay, gunpowder. Don't know how. Don't even know what it's made of. The printing press. It kind of already exists.

I guess I could maybe make some refinements to it or something. It was probably my best hope, actually. It's sort of like the written words and innovations with words. But everything I could think of, like modern, like germ theory, you wouldn't be able to convince anyone of it. No. There's no like proving it. No, you get hung for being a wizard.

Yeah, like electricity. Okay, well, I don't know how to make it. So it was like our knowledge is completely abstract and worthless. It really is. I mean, I feel like you'd have to go back to like the 1960s or 70s. Here's a great idea. Why don't we take mortgage-backed securities and we'll just bundle them up and financialize it? This is the only thing we know is financial innovation.

Yeah. We're completely disconnected from the soil. It's very sobering. Very sad. Very sober. Yeah. And then after that, actually looked up how to make a steam engine just in case. well I have this great book which is just the I forget what it's called Seth from Groma gave it to me

but it's the book on how to rebuild civilization and so it has a page on how to build penicillin has a page on how to build fire and it's kind of like everything you would need to try to get society to a basic level so that's what you need that's what you need but if you actually had to use that book that would mean that there was like nuclear holocaust and the book would probably be burned so I don't know when I would actually put this book into practice well all of society's knowledge is condensed into a few gigabytes on chat gpt that's true but you need to power it like you need like a hand crank powered laptop or something yeah that's true as i asked my girlfriend this question and she was like well i just asked chat like you can't there's no Wi-Fi your phone battery is gonna die

instantly just got to yeah you get to go to the library yeah all right that was good detour from tom tillis uh next one up consensus which is is Joe Lupin's company, the creator of MetaMask wallet, and a bunch of stuff in the Ethereum ecosystem. They announced that they will be going public. Looks like they have Goldman and JPM running that book. The Walser Journal reported that Zell, the payments up, is introducing international payments powered by Staboquins. Really cool, actually. Zell, do you ever use Zell? I have to because I live in Miami and everyone's on Zell. Yeah, I've used it a couple times. I despise Zell. I hate it. It's not the most intuitive thing in the world.

It's a bank consortium. I mean, actually the parent company is called Early Warning Systems, which I always found weird. Oh, really? I just thought Zell was like owned by Bank of America or something. Yeah, basically. It's like owned by like 16 banks. But yeah, I think we're going to see this from all of these. I mean, you saw like a Western Union one as well.

Yeah, let's talk about that. They're doing their own stable coin next year apparently, running on Solana and issued by Anchorage Digital. Yeah, I think every single legacy and newer fintech remittance app is just going to do this, some of them with varying degrees of effectiveness, but they just have to. Coinbase was on the board with two partnerships this week. The first one was with Citigroup to try to build out some institutional payments infrastructure for City, which makes sense. It's kind of in the same vein of what we were just talking about.

And then a partnership with Apollo to offer stable coin credit and lending opportunities to the exchanges users. Apollo is definitely leaning in here quite aggressively. Also in the, I guess, private equity news, J.P. Morgan has tokenized private equity fund on the Kinexas. Private blockchain.

Kinexis. Didn't know that was going on. Yeah, this is the old like onyx platform or whatever. It used to be called something different, right? It did. What was it? Quorum? Quorum?

What was it, Kormon? J.P. Morgan. Quorum, that rings a bell. Connectus, not an easy one to spell either. Now, but some of the things that they were talking about in this press release around just making subscription docs and onboarding to private funds easier, that's all great ideas. I don't strictly know if you need a blockchain for any of those things, but it's a noble thing to work on because that is a broken process.

Yeah, no, it is actually quite challenging. And you know why Jamie Diamond is just so good? Because the whole time he was siding with Elizabeth Warren and just taking pot shots at crypto, he just still had like 150 people working on his blockchain stuff over there. Yeah, it was actually kind of pretty sneaky. Yeah. Talking to someone this week who made a passing comment that they think Jamie Diamond's going to be retiring in a couple of years. And I totally agree with that.

I mean, look at how much stock that guy is selling in JP Morgan. He cannot be staying around that much longer. Maybe it's a sign that it's not a good time to be a bank. Yeah, or maybe it's just a, what he probably should do is try to get one of these Frank Bizzignano rolls where he gets a job in the administration and he can sell it all at once for no taxes. So did you follow this kind of Scott Besson-Argentine peso misadventure? Oh, he did the swap lines.

Yeah. We're profitable now on that swap deal. Yeah, the joke, I don't actually know how swap line works. So in my kind of like P-sized brain, I'm just assuming that he just bought a fistful of pesos with dollars. I know that's not how it actually works, but I don't know how it works in real life. But my understanding is we bought $20 billion of pesos, something like that. Yeah. I mean, correct me if there's some more complexity to it. I mean, I think it's basically what happened, right?

Like, it's fixed rate swap. So we bought some pesos. Millay won the election. Surprisingly, everyone thought he was going to lose. The peso went up. And so Scott Bessent is the only trader in history to make money buying the peso in conclusion. That's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, is there any better person in the world other than, I don't know, maybe Druck and Miller

or Soros above him, but he's in sort of the pantheon of great currency traders? And it's like, well, so why weren't we doing this the whole time? Why didn't we just put the literal best trader as the Treasury Secretary? He's also got a pretty interesting Twitter game. Do you see his tweet against Elizabeth Warren this week? That might be my favorite tweet of all time. It just combines so many things that I love. Scott Besson, Javier Millay, hating on Elizabeth Warren.

It's great. Unbelievable. I read that as like, I cannot believe that this is actually happening. Yeah, I like that he, I like blind specifically, while profit is a, private sector that you may be unfamiliar with. Just a great tweet. And, you know, Malay did win resoundingly. Actually, he's more control over Argentina than before.

So the radical libertarian experiment continues. Argentina's got some problems down there. Not as much as Venezuela. I mean, I keep thinking that we're going to extraordinary rendition Maduro out of Venezuela like any day now. it seems like it's going that way there's some crazy stat that what is it like 30% of the population

has left over the last four or five years and they're right here the city of Miami by the way yeah that's what it seems like yeah it's a real tragedy I mean Venezuela was I think one of the richest if not the richest country in Latin America before

so yeah we we do have a track record of literally just sending in the seals or Delta Force or whatever and just actually just kidnapping some of these presidents, like Noriega, Panama. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was what, like, early 90s.

Yeah. People forget about this. We just sent in the Army and depose the guy. It wasn't like even covert or Grenada. Grenada? Yeah. That one was more of kind of a catastrophe. We, I just learned about this.

We finance an entire, insurgency in Nicaragua. Contras. Oh, you just learned about that. That was a huge scandal. That was like, that almost brought down the Reagan administration. I mean,

frankly, it should have actually. But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I knew about, you know,

kind of like generically what Iran Contra was. And then I actually, like, I read a book by CIA guy. And it's like, this is actually the craziest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

Yeah. You read like Legacy of Ashes? I am reading it right now. Yeah. That's a great book. So we sold guns to Iran mere years after they had kidnapped hundreds of Americans, by the way, through Israel or maybe it was really weapons or something. And because we were on some sort of like weird closed loop profit system at the CIA, we did do this gun running exercise to Iran so we could finance the Contras because we didn't like the Socialists. They were running Nicaragua.

And the Contras, meaning while we were like doing atrocities. in the rainforest. I mean, if you like that story, the other good one is the book, The Fish That Eat the Whale. It's about the Banana King. I forget what his name was, but basically all about the agricultural interests

in the U.S. and how they influenced politicians in the U.S. to overthrow Latin American dictators, basically. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people still don't like dull bananas because of that, right? Yeah, yeah. It might have been dull. or Chiquita, I don't know

Chiquita, yeah. Sam Zamori, I think. I mean, if you had told me this or if you made a movie about the Iran-Contra thing, I'd be like, well, that's completely unrealistic. It doesn't make any sense. Like, who could possibly dream that up?

That's a real thing that happened. Yeah. It just makes you wonder what completely zany schemes will be running right now. It does make you wonder to that. Yeah. Well, once you wake up and realize that,

that everyone's just a human being and people are nuts. Yeah. All right, well, we'll keep an eye on Maduro. I feel like it's going to be a busy couple weeks on the M&A front. I mean, I think we're, I guess one of the good things about this job is you see things a little bit early before they hit the press, but a lot of big deals going on in the industry right now. So I think we'll leave it there for the week.

Hopefully next week I can speak a little bit better. My jaw is killing me right now. Yeah, it's been a tough performance, but it's like your flu game. Yeah, Jordan Fluke. Over here. All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.