The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin EXPLODES To $82K As BlackRock And Apollo Go All-In

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Bitcoin is testing its 200-day SMA near $82K as $858M floods into crypto funds and Wall Street's biggest names — BlackRock, Apollo, and a16z — pour hundreds of millions into Circle's Arc and Canto...n Network. Add Saylor's $2.2B tax-loss play, a Coinbase earnings miss, and record stock highs colliding with Iran-driven oil spikes, and the macro setup is as pivotal as it gets. Is the next leg up finally here? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Bitcoin exploded up to $82,000. Don't look now, but holding above that key 80,000 level while we're seeing massive inflows, a six-week streak into crypto products and some eye-opening numbers on the Circle token presale and their investors, not crypto-KOLs, but BlackRock and Apollo. Of course, we're also going to talk about everything happening in the macro today with Dave, Mike, and Peter Chear. Let's go. Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome to Macro Monday. James is on his last week off. He will be back next week, but we have the very capable Peter Shear here to replace him.
Starting point is 00:00:56 And Mike and Dave, of course, gentlemen, it's a weird week. I took a look and I was kind of thinking, hey, what are we going to talk about? It's sort of more of the same. But Mike, we'll start at the morning meeting and see what we can find there. Yeah, I like what we said pre-show. It's nothing really going on. And Dave reiterated, well, there is a war going on. So it's just not much different from there. So appreciate that. So our economist Troy Dury came on and pointed out CPI is expected probably 3.7% year over year. The annual, I'm sorry, the monthly would be 0.58, I guess, 0.6, mostly because of gasoline. Core expects 0.36 or actually 2.7 year over year because of year because a quirk in the government shutdown in housing, new price quotes from the properties were skipped.
Starting point is 00:01:41 airfare is a big part of it, jump 5%. Offsetting deflationary forces in We're seeing hotels and rental cars and things having issues. Also pullback in discretionary services, as you'd expect, one thing he pointed out was emissions to gyms have been declining. Ira Jersey, our interest rates strategies point out, expected still 3.7, 3.8 for CPI should keep the interest rate market stuck in its range, even though volatility is picking up, doesn't see what's going to take out.
Starting point is 00:02:11 its range. Next Fed movie still thinks going to be a cut. It just doesn't know when, delayed for quite a while. Tips, he pointed out as 1.9 percent, 10, you know, real yields. He doesn't expect increase in coupons for quite a while. We have an auction this week. Chris Crane's stocks point out, yep, they're very overbought. He just made that point that stocks often get overbought, but that doesn't mean it's bearish, which is the bull market. Pointed out the University Michigan sentiment was the lowest ever, despite the record high in stocks. He said he hasn't figured that one out yet. I'm sure we can comment on that.
Starting point is 00:02:47 I bet Dave's got some thought, or Peter, probably some thoughts, both of you on that one. Earnings are a blowout. They just pointed out, double the earning per share expectations, 27% EPS growth. We still haven't had Navidia yet, so it's just, you know, blast off market in stocks for now. Dollars consolidating, according to all Gute Tril Friedman, doesn't see anything big change there. Net flows out of the U.S. are still beating things. And then I just focused on the elasticity and dependency and commodities. All about crude oil pushing there 100.
Starting point is 00:03:23 What's the motivation of our government and our president is for prices to be lower? Natural gas has already done that. And then I point out dependency. That's crude oil and grains. They're very much elastic for prices to go up, then go down after they go up. And then dependency, metals and cryptos, to me, I view are the two main sectors completely dependent on that stock market going higher for resiliency. Back to you. Mike, what was that about the gym? Yeah, he's pointed out that this was that as an example of
Starting point is 00:03:53 discretionary spending getting affected, and that is pullback in discretionary services. Emissions to gyms have been declining. That's just one example. I'm calling that one, Ozempic and read a true tide. Here go. And not discretionary spending. I don't know if there was some stat that was like a million or 800,000 less truckloads of food delivered this year because of a Zepic or something. I mean, absolutely just an astounding stat. I'm not denying by any stretch that people are reducing their discretionary spending. I just thought that that one was kind of funny because it seems like there's an obvious catalyst for it. I don't even know what directions to run in there. I mean, I think that it's worth having a conversation right now about what we were talking about
Starting point is 00:04:37 before. I mean, we can go kind of straight into crypto if we want. Yeah, go Peter, please. So, you know, I think if we weren't at the all-time highs, we would be talking about what CEO of Whirlpool said, right? Recession level demand slump in North America. McDonald's last week, consumer sentiment is certainly not improving it, maybe getting a little bit worse. Then you had crapped highs. Consumers are literally running out of the money towards the end of each month. That's not that, yeah. You have Home Depot and lows, kind of both near the lows. Like this economy feels to me like there's this water's rising and it's sucking more and more people into kind of this, I don't want to say maybe abyss, but that affordability crisis
Starting point is 00:05:16 is hurting more and more people. It's kind of consistent. And yet we don't want to talk about it because stocks are at all time high. So it kind of seems crazy. Why worry about the consumer for stocks at all time highs? I think there's a problem brewing. And even I'm not particularly concerned about today, but I feel this is the sort of thing if it continues, it's going to go worse. And the one thing I looked at in the University of Michigan consumer confidence. I generally hate the consumer confidence numbers. I think it's fun of it a lot here, Peter. Yeah, it's like James's most hated thing. He's like there's 12 people out there and they're reporting on there. I used to work with Bob Janjua and he always made me write consumer confidence with C-O-N and capital letters. So it's like
Starting point is 00:05:51 con-con. But the thing that struck me is I looked at it. So the Republicans were down to 85. 85 is still very high, certainly much higher than they were under Biden. But it's the lowest Republicans have been in consumer sentiment since Trump took office back in 2016. So that to me, like you're seeing even the Republicans that die are, you know, kind of breaking down a little bit. And that catches my eye a little bit more than the broad numbers because I think there's such a political influence. But when I start seeing the Republicans being at their lowest sentiment under Trump, they were way lower under Biden. Again, the consumer confidence, that's why you pay no attention to it. It's very biased by political view. But that got my eye. So there's something below
Starting point is 00:06:32 the surface that I think is really kind of ugly and getting worse and no one wants to address it. Yeah, the schism in the narrative is accelerating. So, you know, you, we could go there because I think it makes sense. This is the week that everything that Peter said is absolutely true. At the same time, everything Mike said is absolutely true. You have blowout earnings on one hand, and you have humans, Main Street economy going, what the F? And into that, void, you get chuckleheads like AOC making statements about billionaires that caused this huge thing. But what's actually happening is the innumeracy and the lack of economic literacy in America is being exposed. And the fact that we have abdicated responsible education to America's youth
Starting point is 00:07:24 over the last 20 to 30 years is a big effing deal. And nobody wants to address the fact that 57% of American college students think socialism is a better system, despite through 5,000 years of recorded human history, it has never done anything other than create misery. Every single example, including, by the way, Bernie Sanders' favorite examples, which are the Scandinavian countries, they had to reverse their socialist policies. And people don't understand this. They don't get it. They don't understand incentives and it's a big deal. And this is a political disaster waiting to happen because you're going to get schisms, right? When I say schisms, I mean things like when you look at underneath the economy, you see very different things. Like, for example, you walk into the Aventura Mall down in
Starting point is 00:08:18 South Florida and it is busier than any other, any mall in the Northeast. It is always humming. People are buying shit and going out for food. Yeah, there are a lot of people who are in the food court as opposed to in the restaurants, but everything is humming. You do the same thing. You go to a northeastern mall, and it's like you see tumbleweeds blowing across the floor. So don't make the mistake of when you talk about these things. There are very big regional trends going on as well, and it's causing all sorts of stuff. But at the core of it, the most important point is an AI is going to turbocharge the trend, is corporate profits are going higher because, we have prioritized by policy, both parties,
Starting point is 00:09:04 prioritize capital over labor for 30 to 40 years, and it's coming home to Roos with companies that are worth more, but humans getting less and less wages. And that is not a sustainable path. And I think I saw a stat today or something. I don't, this will be the idea of it, but it was like that, you know, stocks have risen 16 times more than wages.
Starting point is 00:09:26 Well, it's, 10 years or 20 years. Every chart you look at, Those charts at all as shows stocks, corporate profits, towards the highs versus GDP. And every time you look at it, wages, they're not toward the lows, but they're certainly moving towards there, you know, in it depends how far back you go. It is a unsustainable situation. And it creates all sorts of interesting crosscurrent. So do I think that we're going to have a crash this fall when we get into that rebalancing season? I mean, honestly, it's setting up that way.
Starting point is 00:10:00 very rarely do you get that this year, but you could. This is, this is, you know, it is definitely a possibility or it's a midterm year, right? You know, if it starts looking like we're going to get this ridiculous hung thing, well, markets like hung markets. I mean, but the truth is, is Mike's not wrong. Valuations are stretched by every measure, but people don't have any other place to put it. So you do have, you should be careful when looking at the macro here. There's no way around it. You have to be. But at the same time, there are investable trends and things that are changing our world in very, very fundamental ways. I mean, AI is making some very fundamental changes. That doesn't mean that they're all valued correctly.
Starting point is 00:10:42 Yeah, I mean, Dave, I guess then the question becomes, and it's sort of to Peter's point that started this, is investable by who? You know, like there are investable trends, but it will remain investable by the wealthy who will increasingly get wealthy from it. And, you know, I don't think your average person who the Heinz CEO is saying can't make, make it by the end of the month is going to be, you know, buying the open AI IPO. Right. And so, you know, to land the plane, Mike always talks about, well, you know, inflation is, you know, it looks at one, inflation is what that, what that's going to do to the midterms. That's going to do to economics. I mean, there's truth there. But what's, but it's not just inflation. It's inflation relative to people's earnings. right you know i got into a conversation i recounted had to recount a story about you know vulgar someone said well vulgar didn't really do anything he just crushed the economy and that it's like no vulgar did a lot and people don't understand what actually was happening back then but you can't do what vulgar did now you can't GDP was like third right i mean it was like 30 percent or so there was no
Starting point is 00:11:46 yeah there was no impact on the finances of the united states government materially by what Volker did. What he did was immediately take away the punchbowl that that was fueling the inflation and crushed inflationary expectations causing a short-lived recession. People forget that the leading macro textbook of the day, and it was the leading textbook, and I went, I had the professor, it was Robert Gordon's macroeconomics. I took macroeconomics with Robert Gordon, and he's book predicted seven years of recession to squeeze out the, you know, to squeeze out the, the inflationary expectations in the economy because it was pure Keynesian thinking, completely ignoring the fact that if you change the monetary situation, it will, in fact, change
Starting point is 00:12:33 inflation. And, and he just missed it completely. I, of course, had the ability to point this out to him afterwards. And I'll never forgive him for the B plus he gave me for articulating that in my last in my last Well, I mean, you know, he admitted that my reasoning was right. He just said that he didn't agree with me. It is whatever. Anyway, it's funny, but that was in 1983 guys.
Starting point is 00:12:58 So understand I'm old. So, you know, go around a lot. But so when people talk about that era, I mean, I was literally studying economics in the aftermath of that era and during that era. And so that was very important. But, okay, Mike, I have to have teed you up with two or three things. You teed me up.
Starting point is 00:13:15 I'm going to disagree with you adamantly. You ain't old. You just loaded with wisdom. And that's what's so important. And oftentimes when we agree that, I disagree, that's so important. But there's a lot of things I agree with you. What you said right off just nailed it is look at how cycles work. Right now we have the most extreme Republican right-winging president ever who's, you know,
Starting point is 00:13:34 getting crushed in the polls as bad as Nixon was during right before he's impeached. The whole world, the whole country and the world's shifting the other way, partly because of his extremism and hedonism and a bunch of, you know, wealth New Yorkers helping each other. And then we have, I just saw this morning and CNN people like, what's the opposite? Typically happens in cycles. The next president might be AOC. You get the opposite.
Starting point is 00:13:56 Female extreme left weak in focus. I saw around CNBC this morning, make the country different or better. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's how cycles work. And then I looked at the macro, what this means for markets. And part of the reason I completely understand why she's coming up right now on CNN right now, 2008 contender. I think she's going to be a primary one because. people are getting pissed off with the current government.
Starting point is 00:14:17 But the key theme is, this, why would Mr. Trump be? Oh. Yeah, we had a frozen mic. He froze in mind about the Federal Reserve. Yeah, I think we lost him completely there. I mean, the one thing he said that I don't agree with is Trump is not the most extreme right wing. He's the most extreme right-wing rhetoric. But he, his policies are anything but right-wing.
Starting point is 00:14:48 I mean, that's why the Republican Party is schisming. That's why the, you know, you get the, the Tucker's, you get Nick Fuentes calling himself a Democrat now. I mean, you know, you get all sorts of shit going on here. But that is, Nick Fuentes called himself a Democrat. Yeah, yeah, well, he, he, he is, yeah, the populists are starting to, you know, fracture. And so there's all sorts of fracturing. Mike, we lost you. You back?
Starting point is 00:15:14 Yeah, sorry, I took off some, I don't know what it's up with Riverside. I mean, in my office. So I kicked off some other things that are taking bandwidth. But I wanted to get to my key point is the part of the reason I would defend Mr. Trump from pushing back on the Fed to ease is because he knows that if the stock market is down from whatever level, by the time we get to that 28 election, certainly before we get the midterms, there's absolutely no chance that the Republicans are going to get elected because when you get the 2.4 times GDP, it is the economy. Stock market is the economy. And I can show you that in one chart to show why, yeah, okay, I get it. Everything is going up. But I just saw, yeah, 2.4 times market cap the GDP. We understand that doesn't matter anymore, I get it. But one thing that does matter is when you get gold volatility to double the S&P 500, which is the last time that happened was 2006-7, I mean, some of us got our cell signals way too early.
Starting point is 00:16:01 Just I have them on the same scale. So I look at this macro cycle here is this current administration knows, okay, if we want any type of positive view in the polls, first of all, we've got to get obviously inflation, energy prices, and interest rates, lower. One way to do that is make crude oil collapse. Now, they can do that, get it back to 50. They could do that. Just cut off exports. We're becoming the export exporter to the world. But another thing is they absolutely have to have, is the stock market to go up because it is the economy. It goes down, and that might mean we're going to have another potential couple terms of the opposite of what we have now in the presidency.
Starting point is 00:16:39 It's just the way cycles work. And I remember writing about this one, or even before the last election, the next president might have the bad timing of Herbert Hoover was elected in 28 just because the stock market is so expensive and how it has to go up now or stay up or it crushes everybody. So I guess one stupid question that's related to everything there. You mentioned the Fed.
Starting point is 00:17:01 Is Powell by term, his term expires on Friday? But there's no sign that Warsh is going to get a vote today, right? Package vote or something. Is it? I mean, is it a committee vote? is that the floor vote? Not sure. That's that that that is the story actually. Yeah, I mean,
Starting point is 00:17:24 Guardian US Senate expected to confirm Warsh's next federal chair. I'm not sure if that's specific to today. So I'll take a little deeper because that's a very big deal, right? I mean, you know, if if, if, if Warsh is if we end up with a new Fed and a new Fed chair, he is going to do some very interesting things. I mean, he's been very outspoken on changing Fed decision-making policies. I mean, forget the fact that he's been hawkish or this and and the, I mean, it's just understand that there's a lot going on here. And people need to understand that is a very, very big change. Having the president and the Fed and the Treasury Secretary and the Fed at odds basically means
Starting point is 00:18:08 that the administration doesn't have a whole lot they can do. There have been multiple cases in U.S. history where the Fed, and the Treasury worked together, most notably in the aftermath of World War II when was the last time we had budget deficits that even look like today. Now, of course, that was a much better scenario because in World War II there was huge amounts of pent-up demand and a baby boom underway that really did fuel the economic growth that came out of it. But people are going to ignore that. They're going to try to casually, it's going to be like a Bugs Bunny skit where they sweep all the get the skeletons under the rug and you get the, you know, whatever to try to look at it,
Starting point is 00:18:47 to try to justify what they're going to do next, but don't underestimate what they're going to do next. I think that's why silver is up today. Bitcoin is up today and gold is still hanging in there and hasn't done anything bad on the back of oil prices going up. The only thing I would say, Dave, is even more recently, right? At COVID, they worked very closely together, right? So you had a lot of fiscal policy coming out of D.C., but the Treasury and Federal Reserve worked together to buy the ETFs, to buy credit stuff, right? So if you, remember you had this huge massive problems in all these fixed income ETFs they were kind of trading at massive discounts to par you had huge problems in
Starting point is 00:19:20 the front end so you were trading seven eight nine percent yields at the front end for corporations which is problematic and then the Fed over the weekend said we're going to buy these things they had no idea how to buy them and what happened is the Treasury put up basically the equity capital the Fed could then leverage the Treasury's equity capital to buy those things so they were incredibly closely together on the ETF side it took them over a month before they could actually buy it because they didn't have the plumbing to buy equities. They were buying bonds fairly quickly. So we've seen this kind of combination work fairly well even more recently. And
Starting point is 00:19:51 that's the sort of thing I think we will see is kind of policies being put together that are aligned and work together. And I think we underestimate how much can be done with that. And I do not think Warsh is going to come out hockey at all. I think he's got one job to do and that is to try and drive rates lower. And they are going to pull out all the tools, including some form of reverse twist where they sell the front end to buy long end bonds. I think there's going to be much more coordination. I do think it's powerful. And I agree with you.
Starting point is 00:20:17 I just think it's been done even more recently than what you were saying. Yeah, I think Warsh's hawkishness was a great selling point to push him through relatively easily. Let's get a guy who's going to do exactly what we want, but point to all his hawkish comments so that it's misdirection. You know, that's what I think. I think he's, Trump's not putting in someone who's not going to do what Trump wants. And listen, maybe that's what needs to be done. I'm not making a judgment on that. I mean, all I could say is if you asked me, you know, and you focused on the need for monetary and sound money, et cetera, et cetera, I would sound hawkish.
Starting point is 00:20:53 But I would tell you that right now at this particular point, there is no way out of the debt crisis without hypergrowth. Literally no way out. So you need to have rates lower. And by the way, they need to get moving on deregulation because, you know, it's like, I don't know if you noticed Elon Musk had. some really good tweets in the last week that were absolutely spot on. What he basically said was, you know, we can't build a factory. It takes what China can get done from, I want to build this factory to we now are producing widgets could be seven to ten months.
Starting point is 00:21:26 We take five years from the time I want to produce this factory to actually get clearance to be able to put our first shovel in the ground. And that is just an untenable situation, right? That is literally. Didn't we have like, by Q1, you're talking about, have to grow out of it. I can't find the numbers in front of me at the moment, but wildly underwhelming GDP. Well, I didn't say they're succeeding. I said that's what they need to try to do. But the fact is, is it's very hard to run a race when you're wearing a strait jacket.
Starting point is 00:21:55 Right. So on top of that, so we're guiding a couple of companies through like DOD process in terms of, you know, rarest critical minerals processing, refining. And I think what you're seeing is there are states that are willing to roll out the red carpet. I think you're seeing the Mississippies, the Alabama, the Louisiana's of the world saying, bring it on. We want the businesses. We want the jobs. And we're seeing that. And I think I mentioned last week, but I think the heartland of America, so between the Appalachians and the Rockies, last year, 2025 was the first time it outperformed the rest of the nation in like 40 years in terms of GDP growth, in terms of population growth, and in terms of lower electricity costs. So I think you're going to see a little bit of a shift
Starting point is 00:22:33 to, okay, who's got electricity, who's got fresh water, and who's willing to deregulate. And those are going to be the hotbed. So when we're looking even for commercial real estate investments and that's kind of where we're gravitating to. I think some of the trend of where everyone was moving has been changing and you're looking for states that are willing to kind of, you know, push through regulations very quickly as the big hope and access to fresh water and relatively cheap electricity or sustainable and sustainable, not like in a, you know, whatever hypothetical contest, but like truly sustainable, resilient, you know, electricity, whether it's coming from coal, natural gas, wherever it's coming, nuclear. Those are the states, I think, that are going to do really.
Starting point is 00:23:09 really well because that's the only hope we have to address this. This, you know, not in my backyard is still kind of continuing to kill us. We had 20 years of building up regulations when we are the sole superpower. And now that we're having this friction with China and we need more and more to compete, we call it pro sec at Academy or production for security. We need deregulation. And I, it's probably the one thing I've been a bit disappointed with this administration is I think they put some really smart people in various jobs.
Starting point is 00:23:32 They gave them some amount of, you know, flexibility to do their jobs. But I think Trump was kind of supposed to. to be the champion of deregulation. And for the last two months, he's been sucked into this war. And I'm not seeing kind of this champion of deregulation, which I think it's the only way we can properly compete. Mike, I see you bringing up some charts in the back. Was there something you wanted to go? Well, I want to, on the backup on that is we're pointing out China and U.S., the two beamoths in the world battling out. Think of the rest of the world like Europe. It's just toast. And what's, I think, it's significant is China, since their export path to the U.S. has basically been minimized, they're exporting everything they can, most notably renewables, technology replacing fossil fuels, EVs, batteries, everything, to the rest of the world.
Starting point is 00:24:24 And they're loving it. I just talked to my friends in Singapore and Mexico City and like, yeah, we're loving these BY days. What does that mean? Less demand for energy, a little more dependence on China. don't care. They just want the cheaper sources of energy and they're getting it rapidly from China. And that's the key theme is there's only that it's like Scott Besson described it is, you know, it's like the sorcerer's apprentice, Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. This can't stop creating more. And so to me that's part of that deflationary force. Here's one key thing I find
Starting point is 00:24:57 quite disconcerting. If you're an American auto manufacturer and you're sitting here, you're doing well because you have 100% tariffs on the cheapest best vehicles on the planet. And who cares if they're dumped them? They're just good and cheap. And they don't burn, all EVs from China, you got to know there's a problem. And to me, as an American who drives an EV, I'd like to take in one of those and pay half the price and get double the range and good efficiency. And that's, I can show it on a chart where I see what's happening is, you know,
Starting point is 00:25:29 if you can just feature this one chart, is this is what's happening with Crudeau. I mean, I do love the bullishness in the space, but I just saw a monthly chart of crude oil. And what's happening is this is a surplus of supply from the U.S. and Canada. It's running 8 million barrels a day. Now, there's only one thing that stopped this from going down in the last three years. And I'm using a 12-month average. There's when prices collapse. Every time prices collapse, that surplus stop growing.
Starting point is 00:25:54 Now, we just have pumped up prices. What does that mean? Within a few years, we're going to have 10 million barrels a day of U.S. and Canada's surplus supply. And by the way, EVs are getting cheaper. Electricity, obviously, isn't so expensive. To me, that's a trend from commodities. That's just unstoppable. But I look at it is also in the macro.
Starting point is 00:26:13 Here's one thing I'll end with. And I like to have Dave's and Peter's view on this is copper. Because copper is, you know, the market, the metal known they have a PhD in economics. It's highly sensitive to economies and stock markets. I just overlay the price of copper, per pound price of copper, you take overlay with S&B 500, divide by three zeros. It's been the same price forever until recently. Copper is making new highs, but performance actually sucks versus S&B 500.
Starting point is 00:26:42 This is like to show I'm indiscriminate. I show the same kind of patterns in Bitcoin. The difference is that's a bear market. Copper is still a blue market, but it's completely lagging. Here's one reason why I'll end on this. Severe deflationary forces in China. That 10-year-old yield of 1.77 shows that deflation is going to probably go to the rest of the world. And when people talk about our deficit and how big of a problem it is, I get it. But if you look at the
Starting point is 00:27:04 next two countries and the next three, they're all completely dependent exporting to U.S. U.S., that's China, Japan, and Europe, they all have interest rates much lower than us. And with the exception of, I'm sorry, of Germany, they have much higher debt to GDP. So to me, that's an indication where we're going. So there's a couple of things in the middle of that that I find fascinating. One, you know, copper is a direct and I mean direct beneficiary of electronification. And electronification is two main drivers, EVs, and more importantly, data centers, right? So, you know, that's one of the reasons why copper has done well is because there's just more demand for data centers and they're using a lot of copper. But that also doesn't change the fact, as you say, that it's slowing down in China.
Starting point is 00:27:54 And the two things are, you know, irresistible force and immovable object. one one understands that that's not going to continue. The real question in terms of copper, in terms of electronification is, are we going to be able to deregulate on the sense of nuclear power? Now, it looks like that's becoming more and more bipartisan. And that's a very big deal for, you know, for what's going on. And just so watch that space. I mean, the price of uranium and the price and the ability to start using newer technologies and nuclear is the literal necessary. It's literally necessary because you can't use renewables as baseload power. I mean, I know people like to say you can, but the math just doesn't math, right?
Starting point is 00:28:37 You know, Scott likes to say humans are going to human. The math doesn't math when it comes to renewables for data centers and many of baseload power. It's great for discretionary power, and that's cool. And so you'll see the mix changing over time. But the one thing that comes back to every single time you say it when you talk about deflationary forces in a world with excessive monetary printing, this is the really interesting thing. As you like to point out, Jeff Booth, he's been out doing the conference circuit again. And he says one statement that should be tattooed to the inside of everybody's eyeballs, which is, absent the monetary situation, we are living in a technologically driven deflationary world. prices should go down because our productivity has gone up on many things.
Starting point is 00:29:25 Now, that does not account for things that are humans, right? You know, doctors, education, you know, plumbers, electricians. Yeah, maybe it does because we could produce some of their widgets and things they use easier. But the truth is that a huge amount of what we do, what we eat, what we produce, what we use, are natural deflation. The reason that every time I grimace that you say China is going to have, have deflationary forces is they are printing money like freaking crazy, right? You know, yeah, their bond yields are that low.
Starting point is 00:29:57 Why are their bond yields? Well, because they're printing money like freaking crazy. And, you know, to me, it's the whole Milton Friedman inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. I'll say asset inflation, not necessarily consumer inflation, but we see that. It's hard to be deflationary in a world where you're printing more money and therefore measuring that those prices based on that money. that that's the point that I will always make that that being said on a relative basis I agree with
Starting point is 00:30:25 what you were saying right you know because Dave I I obviously I tend to agree uh but the if you carry that forward the implication is that there can never be deflation again because governments are always going to print and that's true until it isn't right no no it's not that never be on the back of massive hyperinflation well but the question is what is deflation we always ignore you know, consumer prices, asset prices, et cetera. Asset prices, once they start falling when they're high, can create the opposite of a virtuous circle, could create a, you know, that serious, a very serious drawdown, right?
Starting point is 00:31:02 Because as Mike puts it, so let's look at Mike's, you know, his base logic on the stock market. Stock market has to be up because that's what people are spending on. The wealth effect is what's supporting the economy. It reverses. People spend less. People spend less. That means corporate profits go down.
Starting point is 00:31:17 corporate profits to go down, the market goes down. And eventually you find equilibrium. And if you believe equilibrium from debt to GDP, we're talking a 60, 70% correction like we saw in the 70s, right? Mike, am I getting any of that wrong? Basically, right, just the key theme is we've had 250% corrections since this started this 2000. Right.
Starting point is 00:31:39 So you look at that and you say, okay, well, what happens now if that happens? Well, what happens now if that happens is a major problem. political re-alignment and all sorts of extremism, right? You know, that's the issue. And so is the, is, are they going to allow it? Well, I mean, allow is an interesting term. I mean, you know, you saw, I mean, the difference was in the 70s, Carter literally did the opposite of what one might have wanted to do.
Starting point is 00:32:09 But even then, you know, it was a very different situation. So it is, it is fascinating. I personally think that money printing is, going to continue. And contrary to popular belief, if you want to know how Bitcoin gets to a million, President AOC is how Bitcoin gets to a million. Wow. Ouch. But just, let's follow up. Go ahead, Peter. You go. Yeah, I would just say, I like your copper chart. And I do think that picks up a little bit that
Starting point is 00:32:37 we have this data center slash AI part of the economy that's driving everything. And that's enough to pull copper up at the other part of it, housing, all the things that would normally push copper up as well if everything was humming along just isn't there. Like people are losing confidence about am I going to make a big investment in my home that's going to cost a bunch of money if I'm not sure where my job is three to five years from now, right? And you look at the layoffs that have been happening, whether it's meta in some of these places, right?
Starting point is 00:33:03 It's not, you know, low income earners. It's like people making $150,000, $200,000 who are very unsure where their next $150,000 to $200,000 per year job comes from. So this weighing down on the economy is there. And what I don't understand fully, but I think it will play out is, I think our market structure has been so messed up with leveraged ETFs, so many ETFs. Everyone treats it as passive, but it's really not, right? Almost every single trade now is a momentum straight. You put it into QQQ, and you're buying whatever's gone most up on QQQQ.
Starting point is 00:33:35 You buy socks or you buy socks L, you're buying the same things. People are pounding in on those with the zero date expiration option. And I feel every move gets exaggerated both directions. So we have these massive moves quicker and higher. I think hedge funds, you know, there's a time, you know, probably going to sound really stupid to say this, but, you know, stop loss trading made a lot of sense, right? You had your stop losses. And now Algos do nothing but search out stops.
Starting point is 00:34:01 And I would say half the hedge funds I talk to, they do better in their personal account than they do in their portfolio because they don't have to, they can actually make decisions they can stand by and stick to it. And so I feel like we get these moves. And I don't know when we're going to get a parabolic move down from what's gone on in semis. I'm not going to touch that. We still have a lot more higher. But everything about market structure right now scares me because it's all algal-driven.
Starting point is 00:34:26 There's this full liquidity. It looks like things are liquid, but it's not. And passive just runs through the system, and it either elevates momentum or crushes momentum. And that's a problem. We haven't had a big crusher momentum lately. But I think that is the sort of thing you're talking about, Dave. If you get that and people start pulling out, they're just going to pull out of the index funds which sells everything even the things that probably shouldn't be i think one thing to remember
Starting point is 00:34:50 here a key theme is something that most of us only remember from the 70s the number one a top issue in all elections now is affordability that's what's changed since we've had the biggest money print in history for in respect for larry lepard the the we've had it oh you got mike we have than planet. Go ahead, Mike. Don't just keep a... And it's the perception that people who follow AOC that's getting more follows every day, it's rich people are getting richer.
Starting point is 00:35:23 And by the way, they're not the majority. And they're all, they don't, you know, they need that stock market go up. So we're going to vote against that. But it's the point is affordability is the number one issue. And running it hot is complete expectation by consensus everywhere. And that's what gets you out of office, quickly. So it's kind of a unique oxymorne, and I just give the best examples of, like you mentioned, Dave, massive running it hot in Japan, a little less than Japan now, but in China, yet interest rates are low, and their stock market sucks, at least until the government started buying it. So to me, this is there's only, and the key thing I want to point out what you said earlier is there's only one game left in town. Before we had cryptos forever, they were great, to me, that game's over. And then we had gold and precious medals for certainly last year. That game. That game. was awesome and that's over there's only one game now left in the whole basic world for
Starting point is 00:36:16 for alpha and that's just you got to be on the trend until it oh it's ends and that's why i look over it yeah the year's still early i still think treasury is going to be waiting to go they haven't lost anything um but just wait till the end towards the end of the year there's absolutely no tolerance for stocks to go down by then near because it'll just balloon i think right now it just has to keep going up i've just never seen so that's why i'm one reason i'll end with that's one of reason i had I had to mention copper. I can't be bullish copper unless the stock market goes up. I can't be bullish metals unless the stock market goes up. I can't be bullish cryptos unless the stock market goes up. That's the stage we are now because it's all so correlated. Everything's so linked.
Starting point is 00:36:50 I can definitely be bullish Bitcoin if stocks don't go up personally, but I do understand your point. Yeah, I think that D-link will happen, you know, when I think that I made the quip about President AOC is where you get to a million dollar Bitcoin. And I actually mean that. I think that, you know, the, what will happen in terms of deficits, what will happen in terms of monetary accommodation, that is a big print waiting to happen because, you know, it's, we'll see what happens. But I do think that there's a couple of other stories that are worth talking about. We had consensus last week. And, and. And this is the headline in Bloomberg about consensus?
Starting point is 00:37:26 Sure. This has got to be the greatest headline I've ever seen in mainstream media, sadly. Crypto industry throws lap dance party in middle of bear market. Okay, we can move out. It's not even what the article's really about, but I was just literally dying when I read that. I wasn't there. They had answers and stuff with it.
Starting point is 00:37:43 I was, uh, witnessed no lap dances, but you know, whatever. Yeah, I didn't think that's what was going on. But what's interesting is,
Starting point is 00:37:51 you know, there were a lot of very, very serious conversations and people gave you shit because of the lap day and because of 11. Now, of course, we all know I'm an old funny duddy and I went to dinner all three nights, but I did not go to,
Starting point is 00:38:03 uh, to the end of the, any of the after parties because, well, you know, I'm an old boring married guy who's been married for 36 plus years. So, you know, whatever. I was there with my wife and it was fine. Well, I understand that. I know it wasn't as crazy people were saying, and I wanted you to say that. So that's cool.
Starting point is 00:38:18 But what was talked about extensively is, are two trends. Trend number one, the institutions aren't coming. They're building. Trend number two, it doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing for the existing token markets. Right. You know, it's like the fact that that crypto and tokenization is going to make finance more efficient means it will get adopted is a big deal. It is good for Bitcoin. It's good for tokenized assets and it has all sorts of implications for the modern financial system. But what is also clear is that the SEC and CFDC are moving together to right rules.
Starting point is 00:39:01 and whether or not you get clarity is really morphed about the banks and is anything else. Now, why am I saying this? Because we have a story you brought it up this morning, which was Circle is, I find this amazing. Now, I don't know. I haven't dug in. It would be interesting. A lot of people who watch this, you can dig in. If there is no clear token economics from the arc token to where that that arc token is going to be worth
Starting point is 00:39:31 10% of the value of Circle, i.e. revenues from Circle, you know, paths into the Arc token, then this makes absolutely zero sense. But on the other hand, if in fact, there is a clear indication that the network of the infrastructure underlying the financial, you know, ability of Circle to be worth money based on people's expectations of their future earnings, then it does make sense. Now, why am I focusing on this? And why, where are those numbers coming from? Well, a $3 billion market cap for the token when Circle is trading at, you know, we looked it up before, is trading at what, 30 billion. Is that right?
Starting point is 00:40:12 Market cap, yeah, around $30 billion. That's where I come up with the 10% number. Does that percentage make sense? You're talking about the 220 minutes, like 1%. But yeah. Right, $3 billion valuation. Yeah, 10%. I got you.
Starting point is 00:40:26 I thought you meant to raise. Yeah. No, no, no, no. The valuation. So basically, if you're saying the token is, going to capture 10% of the value of the entity that is using the token, that number seems high to me, but it's entirely possible. But that's actually really good news, if that's the case for some of the- Jeremy Allaire, just so you know, like how he's kind of presenting it,
Starting point is 00:40:48 he said, we're entering the operating system business and we're doing it by building this multi-stakeholder distributed model with a token, with a distributed network, and we're also getting into the apps business. And this goes back to Dave, doesn't it? The conversation, about public versus private blockchains and where people are going to build. I mean, I think Circle has to do this, by the way. I think they have an existential problem, which is that their stock is effectively interest rate exposure. And if interest rates come down, then stable coins don't make as much money.
Starting point is 00:41:15 And they're going to need a way to make as much money as they're making now by simply holding treasuries, right? So, I mean, they need to do something. But like, this is a direct competitor to the stable coins on Ethereum and Salonan narrative. This is a perfectly built layer one that now has BlackRock and Apollo, behind it. And I'm at my assumption, and I could be wrong, to your point, is that it behaves like an Ethereum or something, which is that you burn the token for gas fees or you spend it for gas fees,
Starting point is 00:41:41 but that's a race to the bottom. Like, that's a race to zero fees when you're competing. No, it's a race to commoditization. That's, I mean, that fees are only going to go down with time. They're competing in a market that's going to, you know, only become less profitable. Well, I mean, yes and no. That's, that's, that's bit hyperbolic even for me. There is switching involved for sure. I mean, it's one of the reasons that I love to tweak the XRP army for their lunacy, right? It doesn't mean that I think that I laughed. I'm in trouble. If I laugh at those, they clip me laughing at XRP jokes and tell me I'm anti-XRP. I'm not a joke. I'm not anti-XRP. What I'm saying is if you listen to what
Starting point is 00:42:22 Brad Garlinghouse would do, Ripple Labs could be worth, could end up being one of the more valuable companies on Earth. But XRP could never be one of the most valuable assets on Earth. It could be valuable asset. But it won't be the most valuable. And all you have to do is look at the valuation of DTC, which processes quadrillions in volume and is worth way less than the companies that use DTC. Things that are infrastructure could have value. Absolutely true. And an XRP's value could go higher than this, but it's not going to go 10,000 times higher than this. It's not going to go a thousand times higher than this, not relative to everything else. The same thing is true with that. That's why I pointed out that the arc token, if you believe that circles most value is going to be in infrastructure,
Starting point is 00:43:05 they are not going to set it up so that the equity gets less than 90% of that value. It's just, that's not the way companies operate, right? You know, and so understand these sorts of percentages are relevant. This is the first line in the sand where you can actually make a really clear delineation. And so look at the total adjustable market. I mean, people in the world of crypto are looking for where's value. And we keep saying that 90% of the assets are value less, but their 10% could be very valuable into the future.
Starting point is 00:43:36 The way it gets valuable is if actual revenue, actual value accrues to the holders of those tokens. And what all of these investors that you name, it's a who's who, or they're saying, well, yeah, there will be some. And this is where we think. And I don't know if that's true, but I think it's very interesting. It's Andresen, 75 million, BlackRock,
Starting point is 00:43:57 follow New York Stock Exchange, Parent Ice, SBI, Janice Henderson, Standard Chartered, General Catalyst, Marshall Waste, Ark Invest, I mean, to everybody, Han Ventures, and even bullish. It's telling you that the notion of crypto infrastructure tokens, there is a value. Now, that said, $3 billion, and you look through crypto coin market cap, and you say, okay, cool. Well, you know, Solana, which is now at $55 billion. Okay, so should Salana be 10 times this? Well, maybe that doesn't sound crazy. Ethereum at basically, well, it's 280 million.
Starting point is 00:44:38 So, you know, almost 100 times that. Does that make sense? Now those numbers start getting interesting and people start thinking about, you know, what will that mean? And the answer is that's why a lot of people will buy this. They'll say, well, they'll see it to make inroads. I mean, you can go down to Canton, and I don't know where Canton is these days. Canton is at. I have a huge announcement today too.
Starting point is 00:44:57 Right. So Canton is double this, and they have dramatically more uptake already with DTCC and whatnot. So, but that's double. That's not 10x or whatever. So, you know, you have all of these things going on. And we don't know. We're going to be living it. We'll look back in 20 years, and there will be a set of winners and a set of market cap and
Starting point is 00:45:21 crypto for infrastructure that will be worth X. I believe X is going to be higher than today, but I believe the number of actual tokens that have real value will be way lower than we have today, meaning that the winners are going to do very well. And the loser is going to go. You know, we always get the criticism for crypto that it looks like the internet bubble of the late 90s,
Starting point is 00:45:43 you know, early 2000s. But to me, it's a great comparison for the winners, not the losers. That's right. Of course, we're going to have thousands and thousands of losers, but you also had, you know, six to seven of the world's largest companies rise from that. You know, the Amazon's are the alphabets of the world. So on that topic, Dave, and everyone on this, and even our listeners, I have a question
Starting point is 00:46:05 for you. Why would you take the risk 10, 20 years from all that Bitcoin's going to be the best? Why not buy an index that kind of maybe caps 35% or so, which is the way we created Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto index. So at least 10 years from now, you can say, oh, yeah, that was the best one back there. Remember how great ass Jeeves was? Things like that. That's my saying.
Starting point is 00:46:25 Long term is why we launched that and the All Metals Index? Almost 10 years ago. I understand. So that's the key question there. Here's my answer. Because it's a very specific question and I'd like to answer it. It's bifurcated. Bitcoin is not the same as infrastructure being used to power the financial economy.
Starting point is 00:46:46 Bitcoin is going to succeed or fail on whether or not it is a financial asset that has provable scarcity and a network backing it up. It is a totally different use case than everything else. So understand that's why I would make that distinction. That said, the only way that rational people will ultimately invest in crypto will be an X Bitcoin index or an index where Bitcoin is part of it, I agree. I am a huge supporter of what, and Scott had Hunter, Horsley from Bitwise on his show, you know, from the, from consensus floor, I'm a huge fan of what Hunter and Matt Hogan are doing a bitwise in terms of presenting investable index products. I think that is the way. And so in general, indexes are going to make a lot of sense. Why? Because for the average person, they're not going to
Starting point is 00:47:38 know who the winners are and the indexes will continually rebalance toward the winners. And so eventually you end up with that survive, you take advantage of survivor bias when you're in an index product. And that is hugely important. So I'm a, big fan of indexes, but I do think you need to make a distinction between Bitcoin and the rest of crypto. That's my answer. I would I'm on this for Peter, you always have like the kind of a 30,000-foot view of Bitcoin and crypto and they're not arguing in the echo chamber. So I'd love your take on that. Yeah, I could see spreading it out a little bit. But again, I think 35% might be too much, you know, too low of a cap. I, you know, I kind of think Bitcoin 60, 70% and maybe a little bit in Ethereum,
Starting point is 00:48:20 maybe a little bit in some of the other things that have that potential. I am curious about the token. Like this is kind of, you know, there's not many things that you see a headline that makes you rethink things. Those people involved in this. Like, why? Why? Like, it strikes me as odd.
Starting point is 00:48:35 And when something strikes me as odd and something like this when very smart people, like, okay, I'm probably missing something. So I want to go back and rethink like that headline today about the, you know, arc token really caught me by surprise. And I got to go back and rethink this a little bit. I give me a couple takes. I mean, if they've simply, I guess the cynical take is there's a hell of a lot of money to be made in it. Because if you look at ICOs of the past, which they're calling this an ICO, on-chain capital raise just from a different sort of actor, I mean, this thing could a thousand X on launch.
Starting point is 00:49:07 And they can be vested in a month for all I know. I don't know what the vesting schedule is. But, you know, if you look at pre-sales of the past, you know, these entities would get 25% at the token generation event and then vest over the next year. I have a feeling this will have like a two-year cliff and multi-year vesting because this is circle. But this is the first time a publicly traded company has done this. It gives the cover, I think, for something that could just be a massive windfall for anybody who invest it. That's a cynical view, but I think it's a profit thing. Or maybe it's just, you know, like a BlackRock obviously was one of the first to tokenize
Starting point is 00:49:43 treasuries with B-UIDL, right? And maybe this, they just view this as their next experiment. I mean, BlackRock had an announcement, too. I don't know if you guys saw this, but this is also today. I mean, BlackRock has announced their own. That's the wrong window somehow. Sorry, I'll find it. But BlackRock had an announcement that they're deepening their tokenization with two new on-chain fund offerings,
Starting point is 00:50:03 one that will be effectively treasury management for Stable Coins, which Morgan Stanley also announced a couple weeks ago. So if you want to launch a stable coin, you just come to BlackRock, they manage the treasury, they, you know, in and out of the treasuries. You don't have to do that yourself. And the second was, I think. expanding like six was tokenizing like six trillion dollars in i don't want to private it wasn't private credit i'm going to look but uh massive two massive announcements here uh that came from from black rock so i mean i i do have it here i found it but i mean you know i
Starting point is 00:50:35 think they're just trying stuff maybe i'm wrong there it is uh asset manager also proposed to create on-chain shares for a seven billion money market fund not true billion yeah there go. But yeah, I think they're just trying things. That's my answer. Yeah, and if they're trying things, though, that tells me I should be looking more like, what are they trying, why are they trying in and figuring out? Because I'll take the opposite that maybe this isn't the cynical play, and they're seeing something that I've yet to see, but they have the ecosystem to create something massive. So I think they're seeing that they can, that they don't need to buy Ethereum in Solana to capture stable coin upside. They can capture it both in circle stock.
Starting point is 00:51:20 and then in the more kind of volatile upside, as Mike would say, beta play, you know, of the token from the same company. I just think there's like, you know, this will probably, you know, circle will go up about 5, 10%, and this token will swing 50 to 100 at the same time. And maybe that's what it is. Yeah, I mean, I'm less cynical than you in terms of the amount that these things could go up. I think that it's, but I do think it's extremely an important, it's an extremely important story. It's telling you that there are very smart financial people who say, okay, economic value can derive to token holders, full stop, boom, here we are. Right.
Starting point is 00:52:01 And that's a big deal. I mean, we haven't had that before. And establishing some notion of percentage of what the network would be worth versus the equity to be worth is very important. Do not ever underestimate Wall Street's ability to piggyback and try to look for percent and try to figure out what's investable and what is. I mean, Peter and Mike, you both live this, right? Analysts love having other analysts agree with them, and they hate sticking their necks out. Yeah, and I would say, you know, the one thing I do like about this is I've liked Tether or sorry, I've liked U.S.D for a while. I've liked their transparency.
Starting point is 00:52:36 Like what they were trying to do, I think has made a lot of sense. And if you're looking for institutional kind of buy-in, this is probably yet another step, right? Everything they've done has been relatively transparent, certainly compared to Tether or something like that. you know, this should help them grow their business again. You want to be associated with this. And I think if you're a U.S. large corporation, someone looking to make investments, the more tied you are to that ecosystem of U.S. treasuries that you can see and, you know, that you can see the BlackRock ETF portfolio or the BlackRock portfolio that holds circles,
Starting point is 00:53:08 you know, treasury holdings, all these things kind of tie in and create an ecosystem that I think makes it easier for, you know, traditional asset managers or institutions to put some money toward it. I still think it's not tomorrow's trade right now because I think a lot of enthusiasm for the whole space has been lost, but maybe this recreate some of it. Dave, there's a couple of quotes here actually from a layer that sort of, they don't answer your question, but they tell you directionally here to, it is a major shift in how stakeholders can participate in the growth of networks. Every company in the world over time will be tokenized,
Starting point is 00:53:39 meaning your shares will be tokens, and you will use digital tokens as mechanisms of engagement with your customers and stakeholders. It doesn't answer the question on where the value will come from, for the network, but they're definitely saying that this will, you know, be equivalent to shares or that will be investable by everyone. Interesting. I have been saying on this show for, for two plus years, that the capital stack will eventually normalize. I had this conversation with Taylor, you know, the head of the GC for the crypto task force. And everyone at the SEC that is now working on this stuff does not understand, well, they do understand it.
Starting point is 00:54:19 They do not believe that it makes any sense for being called a security to be a death sentence for crypto. They think there should be securities that are equities and securities that are secured revenue streams. And there is absolutely no reason why those two things can't exist as securities. And they further believe that if those revenue streams and if that utility becomes commodities that are public and not associated with a particular company anymore because the bird has flew the nest like Ethereum has, right? Ethereum isn't just the Ethereum Foundation. Solana is not just a Salana Foundation.
Starting point is 00:54:54 A lot of other people are using it. It's open source as communities. They see that the need for the financial markets to become seamless between those regulatory regimes needs to be true, that that needs to be the case, that people should not be having these arguments, that the entire notion that we're arguing about what a thing is, to determine how we regulate it from a market's point of view is insane. I've been saying that for a long time, but I know that the chief regulators agree with my sentiment.
Starting point is 00:55:22 Now, that matters. What it also means, however, is if you're an issuer, you're going to have issuer regulations. Issue regulation is really the SEC. If you're a commodity, by that point, the issuer is no longer meaningful. Yes, you can't lie about things and manipulate things, but it's important.
Starting point is 00:55:38 And people in crypto, that makes their brains explode. I mean, just think about it. Two years ago, if you had said to anyone that you would be indifferent between which organization regulates which, people would have said, oh, you're out of your frickin mind, Weisberger. I mean, just go, you know, just. And four years trying to push to the CFDC, right? Yeah, I mean, but it's not about that.
Starting point is 00:55:57 It's about a rational framework that doesn't include all these 80-year-old laws that don't work. Or, you know, at best, I mean, the last major overhaul of most rules outside of the actual trading rules which reg MMS. Reg MMS is over 20 years old. But the biggest amount of regulation was in the 70s and before that the 40s. I mean, are you kidding me? You know, you can't regulate based on an AI didn't even exist five years ago, much less 20 years ago. And so much of this has changed. So that's the deal here. But that's the capital stack. Now that has nothing to do with valuation. But I like Jeremy Aller's quotes and I think we should continue to talk about that and to focus sent on it because valuation methods are do matter.
Starting point is 00:56:43 I mean, this isn't about eyeballs or the bullshit in the internet error and this isn't about clicks or any of that. This is about how much money is something going to be worth. And, you know, I'm sorry, but an ether rock, a JPEG of a rock should never have value. I'm sorry. It should never should have. Orn-A-Rup huge in the last few weeks. We made a joke about them at six years.
Starting point is 00:57:02 The other day I looked at their 10 and a half. Well, that's art. You know, if you, art couldn't have all sorts of value. You can get bubbles in the art market. when monetary inflation runs away. I mean, it could go absolutely nuts, right? You know, there's nothing wrong with that, but that's why I pick on ether rock.
Starting point is 00:57:20 I don't know, I pick on rocks. I don't pick on board apes because bored apes are, well, it's art and beauty's in the eye of the beholder. Those rocks apparently were art too. I know they only got a couple minutes left. Peter, just give us the quick and dirty Iran update. You know, I think what are we doing to do right now? I think I like adding some private credit.
Starting point is 00:57:43 Actually, I think the whole thing's been a little bit overdone with business development corps. I think some of these asset managers that have relied on private credit, their stocks have been beat down. I think they finally have been starting to mark down their portfolios, which will reduce that kind of outflow there. So again, and I think even on the software, yes, we're going to have problems from AI, but you're starting to see that sector bound. So I kind of like that to put some risk.
Starting point is 00:58:06 And again, I'm going to go and I don't know whether agree or disagree with Mike, but I'm going to be adding more to BP, Shell, and some of these companies, because I think Europe is getting closer and closer understanding. They need to do stuff on their own. They have some resources, not as much as Canada, the U.S., not as much as other countries, that they have completely ignored, right? They have, you know, put a hand to like, no, we're not going to drill, we're not going to do that. I think in the coming year, like, everyone's heading towards vertically integrated nations. Everyone is going to do more on their own, and you have to have electricity as paramount because nothing works without electricity now, energy, chips, all these
Starting point is 00:58:40 things. The U.S. has been driving it. U.S. capitalism is pulling it through. I have some degree of confidence that this survives the midterms. It doesn't matter which way we go. This kind of independence and need to provide your own stuff is going to be there. What flavor you get, whether it's an AOC or Trump or something might change. So I like owning anything that's this kind of production for security. Things that countries need to be resilient, we should be investing more on our own. And I do think the U.S. is going to turn its attention to helping, you know, exploit, use, build out, central and South America. I think when you talk to people in the admin, we're actually having some degree of success working with Venezuela already. I think that will continue
Starting point is 00:59:18 to grow. I think you will see rarest critical minerals produced out of there, refined there. Because again, there you don't have the regulatory problems. So that's where I kind of want to focus is this kind of production for security. And it's not just defense spending. That's a part of it, but it is what do you need to be resilient so that China can't screw with you? And all those things are true in the U.S. We're further along. I think you can still invest here. But I do think Europe's finally going to get the joke because they have to. Otherwise, they're going to be dead. Yeah, I agree with all that.
Starting point is 00:59:47 And we somehow got, go ahead, Mike. Because they have to, I think, Peter, you nailed it. Price is the main motivational force. And the key thing you remember in commodities is what Trump really nailed is harnessing energy is the essence of improving the human condition. Now, we all get a little lesson. Certainly Germany taught a little lesson by eliminating nuclear. And they've been, what, stagnant GDP-wise for five years now.
Starting point is 01:00:08 Now they're facing all these massive EV deflation from China, taking their export markets. But the key thing to remember is the underlying producers, like the XLEs of World, that ETP, that will do well. But the actual price of the commodity typically doesn't because you can create more or less every day. You want to own the producers to create more or less in earnings. And that's one big problem in the most tokens in crypto. There's no earnings. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:33 And I like this, you know, service providers like the oil field service providers. I agree with you. I'm not bullish on the commodity because I think as we put more online, the commodity price has to come down, but those companies can make a lot more. Yeah, I'm reading, as you guys are talking about this, I guess I'll dive into it later, but a lot more uncircle is really interesting.
Starting point is 01:00:54 So it will give us a topic for another day, gentlemen. Thank you so much. I just realized it's 1002. Mike, Dave, Peter. We will have James back, but Peter, we'll keep rotating you in, man. We really appreciate you being here. Thanks a lot, for everyone.
Starting point is 01:01:07 having me. All right, everybody. Well, Dave, I guess we'll be on Cryptotown Hall in about 13 minutes so we can unpack this more deeply. All right, everybody, see you on Cryptotown Hall, Daily Wolf, and of course, here tomorrow.

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