The Wolf Of All Streets - Biggest ETF Launch Ever, But Bitcoin Crashes | Friday Five

Starting point is 00:00:00 Last week saw the launch of the Bitcoin spot ETFs by many metrics, arguably the most successful launch of any ETF or group of ETFs ever, but price is down and everybody wants to understand why. I'm going to dig into this, of course, today with NLW, Nathaniel Whittemore, who is my co-host for the Friday Five, every Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. We're also going to review the other four most impactful stories of the week. And man, a lot happened this week. Let's go. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:01:05 What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe. Let's go. and the pundits and the conversation and the analysis around the Bitcoin spot ETF, which we will get to in a bit. Man, what a week, huh? Yeah, it's a good one. This was a totally reasonable kind of post-ETF week. There was stuff that started to happen that wasn't about the ETF, new narratives around the ETF, kind of what you might expect if you were looking at it. Well, let's talk about some of that stuff that happened after the ETF that we should be talking about before we get to the ETF. And one of my favorites here, Tether's reserves do exist. Cantor Fitzgerald, CEO, says this is Howard Lutnick. Is it Harold or Howard? Now I blew it. Howard Lutnick. I did get that right.

Starting point is 00:01:42 Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. And he just absolutely finally put a death blow, murder, finish him from mortal combat to all the tether truthers of all time. While naysayers have had their go at tether over the years, it's heartening to hear Cantor Fitzgerald, CEO Howard Lutnick, affirming the robustness of our reserves. That was Palo Arduino. And of course, this from Lutnick himself, they have the money. They say they have. I've seen a whole lot. And the firm has seen a whole lot and they have the money. And so there has always been a lot of talk. Do they have it or not? And I'm here with you guys. I'm telling you, we've seen it and they have it. Can we finally be done with Tether Fund?

Starting point is 00:02:26 I've been done with Tether Fund for years, to be honest. No, so I mean, listen, a couple things that are interesting about this. First of all, second time that he's made statements like this. The first time was in a CNBC interview last month. And a couple things that are interesting about that. So this is the first time at the end of last year that we actually started to get visibility into where Tether was holding some of these assets. So that was a big shift all in and of itself. So you kind of had that change. And this set of statements was extremely more definitive and declarative than even those statements in December.

Starting point is 00:03:08 They were also almost completely unprompted. He ripped the conversation over to Tether. They were talking about Bitcoin, so they weren't totally out of the realm. But he basically had some very loose segue, something like, I want to tell you about another company that I like, it's Tether. And then he went in on this whole thing. I think that it shows that Tether is not interested in seeding the legitimate above board sort of mantle to USDC. It had seemed for some time, like Tether was pretty comfortable letting USDC and Jeremy Allaire play the sort of

Starting point is 00:03:44 were institutional and, you know, connected to the US establishment kind of game all on its own, while Tether was just for the rest of the world. I mean, it worked for them financially, right? You saw outflows from USDC following the banking crisis when Circle's money got locked up in SVB last year and into Tether. But it seems like they're not content to even let Circle and USDC have that area of narrative. Now, the Tether truthers, of course, are saying that this just means that let Nick's on the dole. But I think that that's going to be a little bit hard for the rest of Wall Street who already finds this guy sort of relevant and uh and influential to swallow so a meaningful moment for sure i don't think there's any reason for a guy like this to put his neck out and be on the take on behalf of like uh industry that's already viewed as shady

Starting point is 00:04:36 and questionable it's just not the case i continue to believe that the tether truthers probably are right seven years ago yeah and are wrong now yeah i mean it's there it's not even that's not even a conspiracy there was there's literally at least one moment that we know for sure that there was an imbalance now you can have a lot of debates around whose fault that was but that was sort of the subject of the ny dfs suit and why there was that resolution you know like it's it's not even a conspiracy, right? There was some amount of that sort of mismatch between assets and liabilities. But I think that you're right. And I think that to some extent, a lot of people assume that, you know, this would sort

Starting point is 00:05:20 of be the normal progression for crypto companies that were playing a little loose at the beginning of their life is they'd eventually resolve to the better um you know that probably would be the case in a lot of cases if they weren't perpetrating massive fraud as uh as is in the case of some companies but you know here we are it's amazing we have the full spectrum of massive fraud to light and questionable maybe fraud and all the way to yeah we were just kind of driving with no road times and uh waiting for to catch up. But we do have that full spectrum. But Tether, not the only reason that they should be in the news. a value of $2.8 billion at current market price. Everybody should love this. This makes them one of the largest holders of Bitcoin. And just to be clear, once again, this is not from the money that they're using to back Tether. This is from

Starting point is 00:06:20 the money that they have made and they're putting it on their balance sheet as a company, your tether is not packed by Bitcoin. Yeah. So one, I think that it feels like Paulo Arduino and Michael Saylor got drunk in a bar at some point and started betting sometime like six or 12 months ago. But I do think it's interesting to see that Tether has made this decision very clearly to pretty much pump all of their USD profits from their treasury holdings back into the ecosystem in the form of Bitcoin holdings that sit on their balance sheet. Travis Kling tweeted the other day about this, and he basically said it sort of further reinforces that Tether is the most significant institution at this point in crypto, which I think a lot

Starting point is 00:07:04 of people have come around to being in alignment or agreement with that statement. And largely, that's a result of the hiking cycle and high interest rates and the just insane amount of money that they've been able to make by just simply holding short-term duration treasury bills and cashing in. It's really an incredible sort of bipolarity of the reason people buy Bitcoin and the reason Tether is doing so well. Well, that's sort of the interesting story about stablecoins in general is they really are this interesting and fascinating matched pair with Bitcoin in the sense that if you look globally, the role of stablecoins is about dollar access. And it was interesting,

Starting point is 00:07:46 I think Morgan Stanley wrote a report this week where they talked about stable coins, and they basically talked about how US policy was going to have a pretty dramatic impact on whether or not stable coins were enabled to create another generation of dollar dominance. And this is something that people inside crypto have been talking about for years. Nick Carter started talking about this back in 2020 2020. I remember when it was a very unpopular opinion among Bitcoiners. Nick basically said back then, and this is the point that Morgan Stanley is making now four years later, that if the US were to allow this and not get in the way of it, the access that Tether and other things like it are creating to synthetic US digital dollars is the most powerful force for extending the hegemony of the American

Starting point is 00:08:32 dollar for an entire another generation, right? The dollar is still at this point, despite sanctions against Russia and all these things, the dominant currency in the world. There's no denying it. The question is whether that will be for long. If you have an extremely accessible, easy to use version of it that continues to hold that promise, all of a sudden the mechanicals of a stable coin like Tether existing could actually combat some of the political machinations that surround it. So this is why people have always thought that it was insane for the US to be sort of opposed to things like stablecoins.

Starting point is 00:09:07 But, you know, there are some counter arguments as well, but probably out of the scope of this conversation. I seriously doubt that we're going to get any form of meaningful legislation towards crypto this year in an election year. But if we do, I would not be surprised to see the focus be stablecoins. I think that's the lowest hanging fruit and the area that I'm most interested in. And maybe because of the reasons that you just said. Our second story of the day, a clash of the titans. Jamie Dimon says he doesn't care about Larry Fink changing his view on Bitcoin. Larry Fink is apparently just one of us. He's a crypto degen out on the news saying all the quiet parts out loud that nobody would ever expect from one of the most powerful men in the world. And Jamie Dimon is just absolutely triggered.

Starting point is 00:09:51 He can't take it anymore. Says he'll never talk about Bitcoin on CNBC ever again. Even use the word shit in his interview on national TV. I can show it if you'd like. I have the think one as well. It's seven minutes. It might be worth watching Jamie Dimon. It's about three minutes long. Should we do it? It'll give us some great fodder. Let's do Jamie Dimon at least. Yeah. Well, we're not doing Fink. Here you go. Here's

Starting point is 00:10:12 Jamie Dimon. I know you find sort of laborious at this point. That's a good word. Which is Bitcoin. This ETF was approved just about a week ago now. And I think a lot of people are trying to understand what it ultimately means. JP Morgan, i imagine uh if you're a client of jp morgan you could call your broker and say uh get get me some of this etf what are you telling what are you telling your brokers to tell them back when they make that call yeah so this is an important thing i really this is the last time i've ever talked about this in cnbc okay so help me god blockchain is real it's a technology we use it it's going to move money it's going to move data it's efficient we've been talking about that for 12 years too and it's very small okay so i think we've wasted too many words in

Starting point is 00:10:54 that cryptocurrencies there are two types there's a cryptocurrency which might actually do something think of a cryptocurrency as an embedded smart contract in it and that we can use it buy and sell real estate and move data. That may have value. The idea of tokenizing. Tokenizing things that you do something with. And then there's one which does nothing. I call it the pet rock, the Bitcoin or something like that.

Starting point is 00:11:14 And so on the Bitcoin, there's, first of all, and I'm not trying to make a joke here. There are use cases, AML, fraud, anti-money laundering tax avoidance sex trafficking those are real use cases and you see it being used for hundreds maybe 50 100 billion dollars a year for that that is the end use case everything else is people train among themselves so speculate yeah now okay now my last statement the last time i ever talked about Bitcoin is I defend your right to do Bitcoin do it yeah it's okay I don't want to tell you what to do so my personal advice is you don't get involved but I don't want to tell anyone of you what to do it's a free country what do you think so what do you make of that what do you make of the other firms the Black Rocks of the world that that obviously

Starting point is 00:12:01 and Larry Fink changed his view of this obviously and maybe he changed his view because you think he genuinely believes in bitcoin or gen or believed it because he thinks that there's a marketplace for it and he wants to be part of that market but what do you think of the and there's a about a dozen big financial companies fidelity included number one i don't care so just please stop talking about this and and I don't know what he would say about blockchain versus currencies that do something versus Bitcoin that does nothing. And maybe that's not-

Starting point is 00:12:30 Okay, I've had enough. I think we get the gist. Joe Squawk, Joe does go on to question him. And Jamie Dimon goes on to say that we could, Satoshi, he says, Satoshi could come back and make more than 21 million Bitcoin and goes on some nonsensical rant. But clearly, this guy is sick of having to hear about Bitcoin. I find it

Starting point is 00:12:55 hilarious that he says the only point of this is money laundering and sex trafficking when he was Epstein's banker. And JP Morgan literally pays fines for money laundering every single year. But hey, maybe the irony is missed on most people. You know, it's funny about this is he's created this situation for himself by being such an outspoken hater. Like, look, you know, I think that the most relevant part in some ways of that outside of the enjoyable media cycle, which we are now contributing to, is where he said, I defend your right to do Bitcoin. At the end of the day, this guy's an arch capitalist. He may have his thoughts, but whatever, he's going to do what makes money. So who cares? We've always talked about, watch what they do, not what they say. Now, at the same time, if you listen to Fink's latest

Starting point is 00:13:41 interviews and Diamond's latest interviews. It is entirely possible that Fink's entire motivation for getting interested in this was the capital opportunity. In fact, it's highly likely. However, when you listen to the interviews, he sounds like a guy who did what almost all of the rest of us did, which is got interested because of the money. And then we're like, oh shit, this is actually a little bit more than just the number go up project. He really, I mean, listen, he's either a great actor or at somewhere along the way, he really bought in. Now it's interesting that Diamond clearly hasn't been listening to anything that Fink said, because one of the things that happened last May when BlackRock announced their ETF is that Larry destroyed the blockchain versus Bitcoin dichotomy.

Starting point is 00:14:26 I mean, he has just spent the last eight months eating that alive, right? I mean, every interview where they try to pull that stunt again, or that sort of divide, he will talk eloquently about Bitcoin and then rip right over to real world asset tokenization and make a point that they are not mutually exclusive or discontiguous. So it just reads like someone who just got stuck in 2017 or 2018 and their arguments then, and a guy who's actually spent the time maybe provoked by the money motivation, but ultimately did the work to start digging in and found there was something there to be interested in. I did find it interesting that Jamie Dimon openly admitted finally in this interview

Starting point is 00:15:07 that there is the power of the blockchain and the importance of it, which we all know since they have JP Morgan Coin and have JP Morgan Onyx and are actively tokenizing these assets and moving them around the world, even if it's just an experiment, JP Morgan is openly expending money and resources and staff to explore this technology. So maybe he is part of the way. It just needs to take the next step. But here's a few quotes from Fink, since we're not going to play his interview. We have the technology tokenized today.

Starting point is 00:15:35 If you had a tokenized security, the moment you buy or sell an instrument, it's known it's on the general ledger that is all created together. This eliminates all corruption. Having a tokenized system. One of my favorites. I see value in having an ETH ETF, he said. As I said, these are just stepping stones toward tokenization. He said that the day after the Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved, already beating the drum on the ETH ETFs. Bitcoin is no different than what gold represented for thousands of years. It is an asset class that protects you. I believe it goes up if the world

Starting point is 00:16:04 is frightened. If the people have fearful geopolitical risks, they're fearful of their own risks that think it's no different than what gold represented over thousands of years. It's an asset class that protects you. And finally, unlike gold, where we manufacture new gold, we're almost at the ceiling of the amount of Bitcoin that can be created. What we're trying to do is offer an instrument that can store wealth. This could literally be Satoshi Nakamoto giving a lecture out of the grave. It's unbelievable to me. Yeah. No, I mean, like I said, it just really reads like someone who, you know, wherever he started,

Starting point is 00:16:35 he got there. Yeah. That is story number two. Story number three from the headline, biggest ETF launch ever, but Bitcoin crashes Friday five. We have this article, Bitcoin retreats to one month low as ETF-led enthusiasm wanes. Seems to be a lot of misunderstanding as to what is happening here. Why the hell is price dropping if these ETFs are

Starting point is 00:16:56 seeing such massive historic inflows? What's going on here? It's a GBTC question, right? So the countervailing force with this ETF approval was always going to be that GBTC for the first time was unlocked and people could move out of it, right? That was going to create potential selling pressure. Now, why right now you have iBit with 1.2 billion in assets under management, Fidelity with a little over a billion, Bitwise with nearing 400 million, right? You have all these things that have big top line numbers of assets, but the total inflows have only been 1.2 billion is that there have been significant outflows out of GBTC. The question that we don't have an answer to that's the most interesting one to me, hold aside price. I don't know. I remember on this show when we were at around 41,000 before, we were talking about how

Starting point is 00:17:51 it felt like this was sort of the level where we had priced in the ETF, but then we ran up from there. We ran up to 47, 49. Now we're kind of back at that same level where we said we had priced in the ETF. So I think, we get very bad at recent historical context very quickly. But the question that I have when it comes to the outflows from GBTC is how much is crypto rotation out of GBTC into lower priced options, which has to be some part of it, versus a natural sort of move out from people who perhaps have gotten less interested in the space or wanted to move out. Because what we don't know without an answer to that is how much of these inflows really

Starting point is 00:18:33 represent first-time buyers and new market participants because there's a BlackRock ETF on the market. I think that would be the most interesting piece of data because, you know, listen, to the extent that someone had their assets locked up in GBTC for a long time, and now finally had a chance to get out and left the entire field, that's sort of less relevant in some ways than the new people who are deciding to come in. I also think there's an option number three, which is sort of a corollary to number two, which is the people who literally on Wall Street or otherwise literally just took this as a trade

Starting point is 00:19:03 to exploit the discount. And the minute the discount closed, they closed their trade and went to dollars. Having nothing to do with boredom or disinterest in the space, they were literally just traders who said, I have the opportunity to arbitrage something that's 30, 40, 50% below the underlying asset value. And now it's back to zero. I'm out of here. That's what JP Morgan was saying when they say Bitcoin exposed to possible $1.5 billion in future GBT sales. This is based on the idea that $1.5 have actually flowed out already. And they went ahead at the time, previously estimating $3 billion, here you go, had been invested in GBTC in the secondary market to exploit the trust discount to NAV.

Starting point is 00:19:40 So they're saying that maybe $3 billion in total is what I'm talking about here. Half of that is already gone. Maybe we have another $1.5 billion to go. I don't know if you've seen this. There's a cool dashboard on the tie actually tracking everything with the ETF, but it shows these outflows daily of GBTC. We've already got $1.64 million worth today. Yesterday, $375 million. The day before, before, 791. And you have to remember that there was a holiday on Monday and there's T plus one or T plus two settlement. So people who are aggressively selling GBTC the first day that they could, we didn't really see those numbers until Tuesday because of the way that the market dynamic happened. So I think

Starting point is 00:20:21 personally, this is a massively successful launch. We will see a slowing in this GBT selling. Most people who wanted to do it will do it in the first week or two. And then we're going to go back to talking about how insanely successful these were. Yep, I agree. I don't even have much to add. I think it's, you know, we have to tell a different story than we did last week. It's the natural thing that was going to happen. Now we just kind of have to let it play out and get to the other side of it. Yeah, just a few quick tweets to

Starting point is 00:20:48 follow up on that because obviously we all follow Eric Balchunas like he is ETF Jesus. Day five is in the books. Total rolling net flows at $1.2 billion down a bit after GBTC's Whopper $582 million edged out the nine's $44 right and then we have him saying the newborn nine saw a 34 jump in volume today versus yesterday so this was him yesterday talking about uh the 17th and the 18th normally with a hyped up launch you see volume steadily decrease each day post launch rare to see it reverse back up all but one saw jump two but gbtc changed flat so it wasn't a volatility thing good sign in my opinion i spoke to him about this privately. He said he's never seen volume jump that large a few days into it, especially after you had such a hyped launch. And just to give context, another

Starting point is 00:21:35 way to put the Bitcoin ETF flows in ETF context is how they stack up to all ETFs in past one-week flows. Even after four days, two of them are in the top five and three in the top 10, up there with the studs, VOO, QQQ at all. So these are trading as much as the largest ETFs on the NASDAQ, right? Like QQQ, an index of the NASDAQ. I mean, just massively successful. I don't really see how you can take the other side right now, but there are still people out there beating the drum that this was a majorly failed launch. The question is how many of them would have even considered the possibility of saying it was a successful launch? My guess is basically none. Yes, emotionally already on one side and not willing to change. Also, you just have to consider the fact that, I mean, this BlackRock was, I think,

Starting point is 00:22:19 the third most successful launch in history to a billion right after biddo and gld and it had nine nine or ten competitors yeah right imagine if all of those were one i i love grouping them together and doing the doing the math there so the biggest story maybe this week that seemingly was underreported because everybody was still talking about etfs judge grills the sec with pointed questions as Coinbase hearing begins. This was on Wednesday. I had John Deaton on who was headed to the trial right before. He gave us a whole lot of perspective on what was likely to happen there. The crypto echo chamber thought that the SEC got massively slaughtered. But after I spoke to the

Starting point is 00:23:02 lawyers when they left, they thought it was actually pretty even that the judge was very measured and balanced and consensus is that this will probably continue on at least partially into discovery, much like the Ripple one did. What are your takes on Coinbase attempting to get this entire thing thrown out on Wednesday? Well, so a couple of things. We won, but not for the reasons that the echo chamber said. We won because this, I think, definitively destroyed the idea that the law is clear, right? I mean, it just obliterated. And that's what the SEC has been trying to say more than anything else from the beginning. So there were a bunch of different pieces of what was being argued. The context for this, for those who haven't been paying close attention, is that Coinbase is trying to get the lawsuit thrown out before it even starts,

Starting point is 00:23:50 basically, which is an incredibly high threshold to achieve. So the chances that they actually get that decision that they wanted are quite difficult. There were a bunch of reasons that they put forward why it should be thrown out. Let's talk about their least successful argument first. Their least successful argument had to do with the major questions doctrine. Major questions doctrine is a fairly new idea that is literally being litigated in the Supreme Court as we speak that says that it's effectively a sort of argument that when it comes to major areas of the US economy, agencies can't just sort of assume power, they have to be explicitly granted power.

Starting point is 00:24:34 They can't just sort of make decisions on their own. So this has come up in recent trials around things like student loans. And the Supreme Court has been sort of more and more focused on this MQD, this major questions doctrine. Coinbase was trying to argue that this was a major questions doctrine issue where Congress, not the SEC, needed to determine that the SEC was in charge of dealing with this or figure out who was in charge of dealing with it. Judge Faglia, who was incredibly considered, had clearly gone deep on all of the issues, had listed, had read every and digested every amicus brief that had come in, was very clearly the most uncomfortable the whole day around MQT, in part because she basically just felt like this was a thing that the, you know, is still so evolutionary in the Supreme

Starting point is 00:25:26 Court right now that it felt very nervous for her to be sort of litigating around that when it's such a new area of precedent. She said in her 10 years at the bench, an MQD argument had literally never come up. And to sort of put a fine point on this, the day before there was a Supreme Court case being heard around, I think, commercial fishermen, where crypto was given as an example of why MQD is an example. So it's like, this is a very evolving area of legal study. So Coinbase didn't really hit on that one, right? Where they did hit is that it was very clear that the judge agreed with both Coinbase and the amicus briefs that the biggest issue with

Starting point is 00:26:08 the SEC in general is that the way that they're interpreting things, there is no meaningful way to draw a distinction around where their power ends. So there was a ton of discussion around collectibles. And the judge said explicitly, she was like, I haven't thought about Beanie Babies in decades. And now I'm actively seeing Beanie Babies in multiple briefs. And I'm worried that they're going to have a class action lawsuit, you know, around this. And the SEC just had no answer. It was it was very clear. I think Bill Hughes from Consensus tweeted something to the effect of it was very clear that the SEC lawyers did not have the authority to draw any lines on where the SEC's power was. They would rather look stupid in this argument than draw any lines and commit themselves to any lines. And that just really wasn't

Starting point is 00:26:56 resonating with the judge. Now, ultimately, the question that the judge is answering is just whether this trial is allowed to proceed to discovery and then to the actual sort of trial portion. And she said that everyone has made every argument. I haven't decided yet. I just have to go sit and do it. So we're not expecting a decision for weeks or maybe even months. But I think that what it has showed us about where sort of the judges, the state of the intellectual arguments are certainly pointed more overall in the directions of Coinbase and the crypto industry's interpretation of the law than in the SEC's. Most of the lawyers that I spoke to said extremely low chance. There's no precedent even for this to be completely thrown out right here from day one without proceeding.

Starting point is 00:27:46 Most likely we'll have something in the middle. Maybe they throw out the staking argument, but continue with the securities, throw out the securities, continue with the staking argument. It could be either of those. But to your point, it just seems like the judge really gets it, had 14 pages of questions prepared, and was extremely complimentary of the crypto industry from the first moment that it began and seemed like she was leaning in that direction. I think this is going to go badly for the SEC, but I do think it will probably go to trial for that to happen. Important for people to remember, if it does, we're talking about a year and a half, two years, even three years down the road, very unlikely that we have this SEC in power if this actually comes to trial.

Starting point is 00:28:26 And more importantly, if it does take a year and a half or two years, right now, Ripple is the precedent for what can happen with altcoins and whether they're considered securities or not. So it remains sort of altcoin palooza until there's actually a judgment in this Coinbase case. So we don't really need them to say anything right now when everyone's interpretation of Ripple is that we can do whatever we want. Yeah. I mean, listen, so the staking thing is actually worth pointing out as well. The part where it actually looked the closest to her deciding against the SEC was when it came to staking. Because at this stage, what they are litigating is not the facts of the case,

Starting point is 00:29:08 it's the interpretations of the law. So basically the judge would have to decide that the SEC's interpretation of the law is fundamentally wrong, not the facts of the case are in favor of Coinbase, right? So she's not trying to figure out at this stage if these tokens are securities and if Coinbase is an unregistered securities exchange, she's trying to figure out if the SEC's legal interpretation of securities law is fundamentally wrong, right? Basically, if their interpretation undermines the basis for the case, that's what Coinbase is arguing. That's why it's such a high threshold.

Starting point is 00:29:42 It's not about facts. It's about interpretation man when it came to how she described staking versus they described staking she explicitly said she called them the defy people referring to the defy guys yeah she she basically said that their explanation of what staking was made a hell of a lot more sense than the sec's explanation which you which has been clear to everyone. So the problem with picking this particular fight for the SEC is that Coinbase actually doesn't, it's a full pass through you. They never take possession of the assets that are being staked. The SEC just made a mistake in coming after them for that particular case.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Now, because there's so much else, I think even with that, it seems unlikely that they throw out the whole thing. But again, it was a very clear and dramatic area of the judge being sort of in that crypto camp, or at least being more compelled by the crypto industry's arguments. Yeah. And I don't have the quote in front of me, but she made an incredible statement about the Howey test, basically to the effect of it was cool in the 1930s. This is something new, right? And so she was very clear that she doesn't think that the Howey test, even if that is the law is sufficient to regulate or go after these assets. Yeah, this personally was my favorite section. So it was it was during the discussion of Cynthia Lummis's amicus brief. And the SEC lawyer said, respectfully, Senator Lummis is wrong. And they were arguing that she just wanted to throw out 90 years of securities law. They said

Starting point is 00:31:14 something to that exact effect. And the judge did not like this one bit. She basically said, Lummis isn't saying that we need to throw out 90 years of securities law. She's saying that there is a new type of thing that may not be a security or a commodity, and that even with 90 years of a good run, we may have to reinterpret things. She was like, I have to take that seriously. It's not some sort of fly-by-night senator. It's someone who's deeply involved in this. And then she also said, and this is my favorite line, just in a personal kind of Sean Freuda version. She said, stop saying respectfully when you actually mean to malign someone, which is just so wonderful because

Starting point is 00:31:54 the SEC lawyers kept saying things like, respectfully, we disagree. And with all due respect to the crypto industry. And she just called that out viciously at one point. Hey, do you think anybody has ever respected anyone that they said with all due respect to at the beginning of a sentence no it's it's like i i don't you know like no respect me none yeah no no offense but it's like no offense right before the most like offensive racist uh yeah you could possibly say yeah perfect so listen we're done but there's one thing i've been doing since we last saw each other. I'm giving away $100 at the end of every single stream

Starting point is 00:32:29 just for some good karma. And so I'm going to have you pick the winner. I'm going to ask them a question. The question today, we got a couple of them over here. I like this one. Who should be the next SEC chairman? Wrong answers only.

Starting point is 00:32:44 So now we're going to, so who should be the SEC chairman? Next SEC chairman, wrong answers only. So now we're going to, so who should be the SEC chairman, next SEC chairman, wrong answers only. We're going to pick our favorite comment in the next minute or so. And if yours gets chosen, you email Mike at thewolfofallstreets.io. Yesterday, one of our most loyal long-term followers here, Des won, which is awesome. Bart Simpson, Hunter Biden, Diamond. I'm just hitting Bill. loyal long-term followers here des one which is awesome bart simpson hunter biden diamond i'm just hitting bill

Starting point is 00:33:08 uh skirmishy that's just a good answer v-back that's just a good guys wrong answers only you guys are going with the ones you actually want to see davy day trader dave portnoy animal muppets taylor swift uh god brett barb uh you can just choose one that you like here as they're Portnoy, Animal from the Muppets, Taylor Swift, Brett Favre. You can just choose one that you like here as they're going by, you know, but there's a lot. Ben Armstrong. Yeah, BitBoy for SEC chairman.

Starting point is 00:33:34 Didn't he stand outside and protest? Jamie, Jamie, Damion. You know that guy. Weird Al. That's a good one. I'm going Animal from the Muppets for sheer absurdity. All right, I'm going to go back. Whoever said Animal from the muppets for sheer absurdity all right i'm gonna go back whoever said animal from the muppets i gotta go back and find it i don't see

Starting point is 00:33:49 the name but that wins because uh man i love the muppets for my generation we will find it if you said animal from the muppets misha you're gonna have to go back there and find it i'm scrolling back we'll get there guys animal from the muppets you are the winner i don't have the name damn it i got it we do that Kermit the Frog there. All right. We'll find it. Email Mike at thewolfofallstreets.io. NLW.

Starting point is 00:34:11 There it is. Marco Trevino. This is what you need a producer for in the background because my scroll is out of control. All right, guys. That's it. We will be back, of course, next Friday with the Friday Five. Follow NLW. Listen to the breakdown.

Starting point is 00:34:25 Do all the things. That's all we got for you today. Thank you. See you guys next week. Peace. Let's go.

The Wolf Of All Streets - Biggest ETF Launch Ever, But Bitcoin Crashes | Friday Five

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