The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Is Failing, Gold Is Winning | JPMorgan Sounds The Alarm

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

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JP Morgan says that Bitcoin has failed as a safe haven asset and that gold is winning. We had the mantra token collapsing this week. Trump going to war with China, but also, of course, with Jerome Powell. We have a lot to talk about here on the Friday. Five. NLW is not here, but I brought you a special guest, and it is the one and only Dave Weisberger. We're going to talk about all this and more right now. What is up everybody? I'm Scott Melkor, also known as the Wolf of all Streets.

Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. It's the Friday five. Usually I have NLW here to help me break down the top stories of the week. He is absent. I panicked when I found out I had to do it by myself about 30 minutes ago and I said, Dave, wake up. Wake up, Dave. You and my dog who wanted to go for her walk at the same time.

So the good news is that Dave's dog woke him up so that he could join us to talk about the Friday five because there's some fun topics here and it was not planned that we would have Bitcoin is failing gold is winning as the main topic. But listen, we need you and McGlone, you know, on a good on a Friday to discuss this one. But here's the article is JP Morgan says Bitcoin has failed to benefit from safe haven flows, backing gold, they're looking generally by the way, at ETF flows. When they're talking about this, they're saying, listen, major outflows from Bitcoin ETFs,

major inflows for the first time, and God knows how long into gold ETFs. This is a Mike McGlone talking point. Ergo, Bitcoin has failed. Okay, have at it. So, you know, the old story of the blind men and the elephant, where you got five blind guys, they touch one piece piece of the elephant and they all come up with different things Well when you have an analyst that the only thing they look at is one topic out of Bitcoin Yeah, they're going to make stupid statements and this is exactly that I mean ETF inflows and outflows are one small piece of the puzzle with Bitcoin

There's also what's going on on chain is what's going on in the network. There's flows from corporations. There's flows from sovereigns. There's flows from institutions who aren't forthright in the US. They don't have to buy ETFs if they want to participate. So what have we seen in Bitcoin over the last week? Absolutely nothing. The most lack of the the lowest volatility in a week in Bitcoin's history while markets are going freaking crazy and they're saying it's not safe. Boy, are they reading the wrong papers. But Scott, look, every single time JP Morgan says something bad about Bitcoin, it generally marks a low. They've been they've been wrong so often that, you know, it's they're not quite as good as Peter Schiff as an indicator. I mean, but, you know, and Peter

Schiff is the only reason to follow him. Whenever he takes victory laps, that's it. You know, you know, literally, it's about to go the opposite of what he says. I mean, it's not as good. Schiff may not be as- There's no Kramer. It's not Kramer. Because Kramer talks about everything, right? I mean, Kramer says, black Monday coming, incoming. What happens, market rallies? I mean, Kramer says, we all know about that. But look, JP Morgan doesn't want Bitcoin to succeed.

JP Morgan has met and fined billions of dollars because they've been able to manipulate gold. So they've been fined billions of dollars. You know they've made tens of billions of dollars trading gold, but using the paper gold kind of manipulation mechanism that they can do. And so look, why is that remotely surprising? The facts, what are the facts? Well, the facts are gold is still valued for its monetary value. It is triple, more than triple the price of platinum despite platinum being 30 times more of more air in the earth and just as prize for jewelry.

So we're probably up to 80-85% of gold's price now is relative to its monetary value because there's central banks buying it and that's what they can buy. This is changing. This will change. It will go in the direction of Bitcoin. At this point, Bitcoin has reached, I believe, escape velocity. It's just right now the price setting in Bitcoin is a war. It's a war between the crypto guys who, when they look at the rest of their crypto bags, are in panic mode. I mean, look at Ethereum, look at the rest of the crypto sphere. It's all, well, you talk to them every day. People are morose. I mean, this has been going on for a while. It's not pretty and it hasn't been pretty. So you get crypto guys selling and you have institutions buying Bitcoin. And so the bid is here and we're sitting at the same, you know, 84 and 85,000 that we have for the last three days. I mean, it's funny.

I look at the chart formations on my coin route screen. And, you know, I have to squint to see what the range is, because not $3,000 range is not $5,000 ranges. But today, the range, I mean, of course, it's a holiday, but now we're from 84, for $80,000 on on an $85,000 asset. I mean, it's it's 13. And so that's for 13 hours already. It's, you know, the day starts on crypto the night before.

So that's since last night. So, I mean, we're talking about ridiculously low volatility. It's not a stable coin, but we're seeing, you know, effectively a war and understand that the buyers are more patient and the sellers are learning that they can't push the buyers around. And so that's what's happening.

But look, Bitcoin versus gold is a story that's going to play out over a decade, not going to play out over a day or a week. And to make these kinds of statements is just funny. I mean, McGlone, and look, you know, he's been right about gold, but look, I own gold. I like gold. I think that gold is a great parameter. Every Bitcoiner I own gold. I like gold. I think that gold is a great problem. Every Bitcoiners should like gold In the fiat world, but you know

I've been been beating on him like a drum I thought one of my friends would say smoking them like a salmon because he keeps talking about beta and he keeps looking foolish I mean, you know, you've not seen bitcoins quote Volatility it ain't three X the stock market. I'll tell you that that's a lower over the last period. Then, you know, name that, that tech stock in the mag seven, it's lower than all of them and more to the point that has even been

correlated with them. Yeah. It's true that if a big piece of news comes out and the NASDAQ moves five, you know, half a percent Bitcoin moves a quarter of a percent notice, I didn percent. Bitcoin moves a quarter of a percent. Notice, I didn't say Bitcoin moves a percent and a half. I said, but that's on the move. And then when the move dissipates, then Bitcoin goes its own direction. That is true. But to make these comments about Bitcoin and gold, look, no one's selling Bitcoin to buy gold. That's not

happening. What you're happening is traders are using the ETF to position or shorting out their or whatever their positions, closing out their positions. I mean, I had an interview with a MarketWatch reporter and he quoted me earlier in the week about what happens before a long weekend. I said, listen, before a long weekend, traders that work nine to five jobs, or in their case, it's actually 7 a.m. to 4, 15, 4, 30, but whatever. You get guys on the trading desks, they're professional traders. They close out their positions before three-day weekends because they can't take the risk. Well, Bitcoin ETFs have low spreads. They're a great trading vehicle. If you're using Bitcoin as a hedge against anything, that's what you're

using because it's easier and cheaper for short term in and out hedges than Bitcoin spot. And that's just factual. So that's what they're doing, because they don't have to worry about counterparty risk. And so yes, there's going to be some amount of closing out of positions before a Friday. Yeah, as you're talking through this, I just for fun pulled up, you know, here's Bitcoin, peak to trough, 32% retracement from the top to the bottom.

Obviously we're not at 32% now, but that was from top to bottom. Nvidia last time I checked at the time of the high was the biggest company in the world, right? 43.43% retracement Tesla 56.1 4% from highs that were just three or four months ago so the Bitcoin is too volatile. It's going to go down three times as much as stocks is nonsense. It's just it's

That thing that Mike is continues to double down I don't understand because he has so much wise things that he says and so many things that are valuable. That one is just dumb. And when people in our comments on the chat on X like to dunk on him, I mean, I generally support him because he says so many things valuable, but that one is, I just don't understand.

I mean, that's like a blind spot that just, there's a brainworn there. It's a blind spot because you're looking at historical data, and it's a different asset than it was before. I mean, listen, before ETFs and institutional involvement and governors and governments talking about strategic Bitcoin reserves, I can see at three times volatility of Bitcoin would have been would have gone back down if there was no if the

reason to 100 was because of rumors or this is or that's the typical animal spirits that happened post having or whatever. And then things started going bad. Bitcoin would have been trading at 40,000 right now. Yeah. But that's not the case. That is not. Okay.

So we disagree with JP Morgan. I think it's nonsensical. It's a good talking point for them. And I'll say, just to conclude that topic, most likely when JP Morgan comes out and says something negative about Bitcoin in the background, they're doing something And I'll say just to conclude that topic, most likely when JP Morgan comes out and says something negative about Bitcoin in the background, they're doing something positive in the crypto industry that they don't want you to hear about, like building their own blockchain or tokenizing assets or you get it, right? Or you know what they're doing in the back.

Or setting up a Bitcoin trading desk. That's right. We're setting up a Bitcoin trading desk. The next natural topic here has to be Trump versus Powell because we've seen this show before. We've seen the Democrats do it as well. But right now, Trump's saying he has the power to oust Fed's Powell if he chooses. He also said, obviously, this guy can't get fired fast enough. We now have polymarket odds on will Trump remove Jerome Powell in 2025 up to 19% nothing crazy. But first, just the very quick TLDR in your mind, can Trump even get rid of Powell?

No, I mean, he can't get rid of him. He could convince him to resign perhaps, but he can't get rid of it. Look, the one thing that should happen here is, I actually generally support most of the things the administration are doing. I think it's been handled very poorly. I've been on record, I've talked about that at the other pieces, but on this one, there is an overwhelming requirement or need

for the Republicans to get their shit together and back the audit the Fed bill, not the audit the Fed bill not the end the Fed bill the audit the Fed bill the Fed is a private company that almost certainly Has lots of skeletons in his closet But because it's a private company and it was authorized in a weird way in 1913 to be this setup The there's no legal way for the executive or Congress even to audit them. They have to rely on their voluntarily giving them information. So we can't sick Doge on them or

anything else. If Congress on the other hand were to amend the Federal Reserve Rule to say we need to conduct an audit and we will authorize the Doge to do a forensic audit of the assets, liabilities, meeting minutes, processes, payments in and out of everything at the Fed. That makes sense. Now, if they did that, would Powell decide he want to stay through that? Maybe.

Maybe, because in all likelihood, the policy setting of the Fed is completely clean. But the Fed isn't just a policy setting. We already know, based on FOIA requests, that the Fed's hands are bloody when it comes to Operation Chokepoint. They violated the law. We know they did. We just have to prove it.

We have a pretty good idea that Federal Reserve assets are probably not what they say they are imperfectly, because they've never been willing to get that information. And people, you know, look, people who are have nothing to hide, tend to volunteer that information and Congress is repeatedly at check. And if you if you did a check, we should ask, you know, AI to go back and say how many times has Rand Paul and his father gone back and asked for audits of the Fed? The answer is quite a few. I don't know if it's a hundred times or whatever the number is,

but it's a lot and they've never gotten answered. So if you want to use your power rather than whining on truth social, whip your Republican friends into shape on the hill and do something as non-controversial as audit the Fed. Note, not in the Fed. Now, why do I say that? And I'm not a big fan of the Federal Reserve. Honestly, I think the world would be a better place if they didn't exist. But the first step is to audit them and understand what it is you're dealing with. Break the opacity of the institution. Make it clear how the decision-making happens. Making clear how much money they're spending, how many economists they have, because they have, I think, a thousand economists. This applies to every government agency, by the way,

and every non-government agency or in- Right, but they're a particularly important one because the Open Market Committee may be the single most important committee. They set the price of the most important good money in the world and the rest of the world looks at them. So auditing them is the right answer. And frankly, I'm actually surprised

that no one in his inner circle has said, rather than talking about untrue social get out, leave and cut interest rates, let's do an audit. And let's see what's going on. We don't audit the golden Fort Knox. We don't audit the military, which can only account for 30% of where the money is going on any given year and has never passed an audit.

We don't audit the Fed. And we certainly still haven't gotten clarity on how much Bitcoin the United States government is holding, which was supposed to be 30 or 45 days ago. Yeah. And we're never getting the Epstein list. Look, it's very simple. If you're a CEO and you take over a company

that is deemed to be failing and Trump has deemed the US to be failing, we can argue that obviously. But if you do that, the very first thing you do in every turnaround situation is a comprehensive audit of how everything works, where the balance sheets are, where the assets are, where the people are. You do a Talin audit, you do a process audit,

and you do an asset audit. That's what you do. Where do we stand? You need a starting line. I mean, you just need to know where you stand. To me, I just don't understand it. And if there's any listener here who could come up with a reason why auditing the Fed

isn't the first stop here, you know, and by the way, the audit will likely give him ammunition to, you know, why they don't want to do it. But I don't want to go. I don't want to go full Simon Dixon. But the reason that the Fed generally doesn't get audited is because it's a bunch of powerful banking families that have been around for hundreds of years. They control the individual banks and probably don't want that audit done. I'm not saying that's true or not,

but that's a prevailing theory is that that's just not a beehive they wanna poke. Look, Simon's gone full Bilderberg, right? Yeah. And I understand that. And directionally, I think that there's a lot that he says that is accurate. The fact that he ultimately ends up supporting racists

is something totally different. And the Jersey series get crazy. No, no, no, it's fine. I mean, Simon and I get along because we just agreed not to talk about one topic, but there is truth. The one thing he says always is accurate. Simon, whenever you say follow the money, I'm nodding.

And that's exactly right, which is why I think auditing the Fed is the next step. Yeah. So quickly on this PAL topic, we obviously, you mentioned it before, so I just brought this article up. Quickly, support for stablecoin legislation and loosening of crypto rules for banks. As you said, the Fed was complicit with the FDIC

and the OCC, the three banking regulators in operation choke point 2.0. Just worth noting that that's over to whatever degree and that you even have Fed Chairman Powell who doesn't need to comment on these things saying, you know, that there was something happening there. We need to figure this out. We're going to loosen the rules.

We're getting rid of reputational risk from the OTC. This alongside everything happening at the SEC, of course, we clearly are going to get or have gotten a major backup in regulatory pressure on the crypto industry. I mean, Powell is now answering about crypto in his press conferences. It's pretty crazy to zoom out and think about it. And by the way, really quickly, we also have just to show it, sweeping DOJ memo signals, turning point, impossible relief for embattled crypto firms. The DOJ coming out and saying, we're not a regulator.

Our job is not to regulate crypto or any other market. I mean, these are crazy things when you think about it. CFPB to cut financial firm supervision, curb fintech focus. So I do wanna go back to Powell and Trump because there's more to talk about, but this thawing is real. It's real, but I'll make two points.

One is skeptical and one is what the implications are. So skeptical. When Custodia Bank gets their Fed Master Account license, I'll believe it's fully real. Shout out to our mutual friend, Caitlin Long, who has been fighting like a warrior for two years against this absurdity. But when the Fed allows non-fractional reserve banks to get a Master license, that's when you'll know it's real. Until then, they can talk about it as much as they want, but I'll believe it when I see it. And so it is important because the entire world

has been gaslit by this notion that fractional reserve banking is necessary and it's why the world is a better place. It's because it facilitated bank lending, et cetera. And that was true in a world where the average entrepreneur had to talk human to human in order to get a loan. 100% certain that when, before we had this thing called the internet

and the ability to communicate with people in every corner of the earth, that if you wanted to get a loan to start a business, you needed to go to your local savings alone. If you were in a city and cities grew up as bastions of entrepreneurship, because you could go to big money center banks in that city and you could get loans. But that changed with the internet. That's actually changed before that with with venture capitalists, but even they were geographically concentrated and couldn't get to so many. But once you got to the point where you could access capital all over the world, there was no need to use fractional reserve banking. Now, banks of course are a great source of capital.

They have captive deposits, right? They've deposits people put in. The average rate on money, even money markets paid by bank is less than half a percent. So yeah, it's effectively free money that can be loaned out. But of course that loaning out creates risk, et cetera, et cetera.

Yet the Fed, and that's why the Fed denied custodian because if their model succeeded, it was going to challenge the assumption that fractional reserve banking was necessary. And so there's a lot that could get unpacked there, but I'll believe when I see it. Second point was the implication. The implication of this thawing though, very, very real. What is the implication? The implication is that builders in the crypto space who have the idea for a token or a network actually that can have a native token that has real utility that it can thrive. And you can offer real utility and real

economic benefits to your token holders without risk, without a virtual certainty that you are going to have to raise 10 or 15 million dollars in your legal defense fund, right? And that's a big deal. Now the reason, and it's been said many times, but I will continue to harp on this, the reason we have meme coin mania and we have governance tokens and other assorted things that are kind of bullshitty is because that is the only way to create a token that wouldn't fall under every one of these regulators purview and force yourself

to defend yourself. And so that's why the thawing is very, very real. But that has implications on meme coins and on governance tokens that people are going to take a look at their value and say, well, why the hell are we buying this thing? Yeah, I love the project. I love the network, but I don't get a piece of it. Not unless someone decides to grant it to me. But why is that? That's a big difference. I do think that that matters quite a bit. Okay, so just to wrap a bow on Trump versus Powell,

there's a video that I want you to watch and I don't want you to panic. I want you to watch that. Well, you're gonna see something that you might not like, but here it is. I wanna make a pitch here for a second about the importance of Powell staying in history. For some reason, it's not coming to this day.

And it's unusual coming from you. You're very critical of him. I have tangled with him on a regular basis about both regulations and interest rates. But understand this. If Chairman Powell can be fired by the President of the United States, it will crash the markets in the United States. The infrastructure that keeps this stock market strong and therefore a big part of our economy strong and therefore a big part of the world economy strong is the idea that the big pieces move independent of the politics, that somebody is making his, their, her best decisions economically and independently. We understand that if the New York Stock Exchange, if interest rates in the United States are subject to a president who just wants to wave his magic wand, this doesn't distinguish

us then from any other two-bit dictatorship around the world where everyone knows what you really, your big investment risk is, will that dictator wake up in the morning and have a tummy ache and decide to cause this problem or favor that friend? That's why we need to strengthen the infrastructure. God damn it, Dave, I think I agree with some of what she said. Yeah, me too.

Look, I think that, you know, hey, you know, blind squirrels, nuts, whatever. I mean, look, she's wrong about one thing. It wouldn't crash the markets. Markets would actually rally like absolute crazy because the markets are degen and Trump would be printing money and, you money and financialization would take off. So it would be awesome for Wall Street.

It will be horrible for Main Street because the ultimate, when you get blow off tops, which that would create a melt up boom, a crack up boom as Hayek would have said in, or is that Mises, as Mises would have said, you would get a crack-up boom like we haven't seen before and Trump would be feeling great for a few months while the market went crazy.

But then when the tide goes back out as inevitably would when people stop looking at what's going on, the carnage, the economy would be bad. Removing a Fed chairman and putting it under the guidance of a president dictates is a bad idea because the Fed as a whole is a bad idea. The fact that we have humans set a market rate for setting the rates for monetary policy I think is problematic. It's always been problematic. And you can look at every chart, you know, the chart of the dollar debasement since 1913.

You can look at what happened when you got rid of the gold standard. You can look at a lot of different things. I am not a fan of Federal Reserve, but it needs to be done in a method. It is so important to the economy right now that you need to do it in a methodical, intelligent fashion, which is why my screed earlier, I'm not going to repeat it, on auditing makes so much sense. Yeah, and I mean, you know, it's at least in theory, an independent agency There are ways that things need to proceed and it would shake the entire system if those rules were violated Obviously in a in a democracy or a Democratic Republic or however people want to define the United States

Which leads us right to the next topic more Trump. It's more Trump every day. It's exhausting It's exhausting but US recession in 2025 Obviously the next topic topic is tariffs Obviously we can dig into what Trump says but it might change by the end of the day interesting here Sheriff shock awaits China after trade surplus hits 103 billion You may have seen that China completely ended its reliance on I believe liquefied natural that China completely ended its reliance on, I believe, liquefied natural gas from the United States as of today,

finding other trading partners actually getting a bunch of it from Canada. Trump, obviously, back and forth, right? We're gonna crush China, we need a deal with China, we're gonna have a great deal, we're friends, guy won't call me back, I don't really know. Trump says he's reluctant to keep raising tariffs on China. And obviously, we have him saying maybe we'll get to deal

with the European Union, things looking good there. Maybe the bigger story is how the market reacts to every single one of these comments as if they're fact. We're just in this place where the market seemed to have no fundamentals. It's just a Trump tweet away from up or down, whether it's a meaningful tweet or not. Look, you know, I'm not a fan of tariffs.

I think, you know, you do a 10% tariff as a form of transaction tax, like, you know, a value added tax, but just only on imports and tax, and call it a day, and deregulate the hell out of US industry, you know, for for US industry because our regulations are insane. It doesn't matter what you are, but it was eye opening to me earlier this week, I watched a video of talking with someone

who runs a company that was trying to get the Pebble mine for rare earths in Alaska in the middle of nowhere. And I mean the middle of nowhere, with environmental protections. And effectively, they've been denied for decades, by the way, that's the point. There are certain industries that literally cannot happen in the United States because there's multi decades

of regulatory review and no human being with an ounce of common sense is gonna invest in a venture that you can't get approved within a year or two, much less decades. So we have a lot of industries that we cannot do here. Then there's manufacturing with permitting and the way things work. We put millions of pages, well not millions,

over a million pages of new regulations over the last decade, I think, in place. You can't get things done. I mean, even on the state level, California, there's been four permits applied, four for rebuilding after the Palisade fires, four. Here we are a couple of months later, four. And this is symptomatic. For us to go out and be belligerent in tariff wars when the issue is US's inability to produce and not them cheating is silly. That said, you want to put something that 10% tariff across the board and negotiate

new deals. You want to negotiate a new deal with Canada and Mexico after four years ago he said that was the best deal ever? You can't. I mean, it's just let's get some consistency here. And let's get people like Peter Navarro with what he's saying, who puts up that chart out of the White House, or at least defang, declawed, because that's what the markets want to see. The markets want to see more of firm hand on the tiller because deregulating an intelligent policy and changing

our outlook from we need a strong dollar at all costs and we're going to hollow out our industry to, okay, we're going to incentivize US production and we're going to react to obvious cheating from other countries. Let's face it, China has done things. There's a study that came out yesterday about since China entered the WTO, you know, things that they've done to enhance their own industry in terms of subsidizing exports and curtailing imports and stuff. Yeah, there are some things that need to be negotiated. But the truth is, we're not in a good spot for the negotiations because we can't produce stuff yet.

And that's what the market's reacting to. Yeah, you mentioned obviously Navarro potentially being defamed just as an aside that there was an article in the Post, I'm trying to find out here it is. Today saying Howard Lutnick is a Trump advisor Wall Street loves to hate it's almost like they've taken I don't know if it's intentional or not but that we have like WWE and there's heroes and heels. You know, and they're allowing Lutnick to go out there and you know, basically say hey, these tariffs are permanent, they're meant to external revenue service.

And then you have the cooler minds like Besant out there saying these are negotiations happening. Right, but let's give Howard some slack for one thing. I'm not saying it. I'm saying it is, yeah. He knows something. He knows something specific. He knows, it's DEOs will not invest

massive investments in productive capacity, massive investments in new not invest massive investments in productive capacity, massive investments in new technologies, massive, if they think we're gonna just capitulate back to the old system, why would you? Yeah, and then we just know that so he needs to be so he's trying to be firm hand on the tiller or whatever the message is. And so it's while you know, the memes, his name is perfect, Jerry, the Jerry Seinfeld meme, what Nick instead of Newman was funny. It's not fair, right? It's just not fair know, the memes, his name is perfect, the Jerry Seinfeld meme, Lutnick instead of Newman was funny.

It's not fair, right? It's just not fair. I mean, he knows that is absolutely true. That's why policy via trial balloon or straw man is probably not the best idea. But I don't think that's the point here. I think the point is let's kick the whore nest, let's kick it all, let's create chaos

and let's figure out what can we actually accomplish. The problem with that is I don't think that they looked at what the markets would do and what the political backlash would do. And now you have Republicans who are saying, in a very, very small minority, it doesn't take many to say, listen,

I don't wanna go and vote with the administration on massive waves of deregulation if I'm going to lose my job in two years for backing the administration. Yeah, and a perfect example, I mean, is all these companies that evacuated from China between 2018 and 20 when there were tariffs on China and went to Vietnam and Cambodia and other places are now getting hit even harder a few years later. You can't blame them for saying I don't want to make meaningful change here if we don't know

the firm direction, having already been through losing billions of dollars because we listened to the last time we went through. It's very clear the markets believe that at the end of all the bluster, we will end up with a sense of normalcy. Because markets are discounted in the future. It's very clear that all you have to do is look at things that have happened over the last few days in the markets. And it's more or less kind of queasing in that sense. Certainly, there hasn't been a crash. No one believes that it's going to crack the markets. But look, Scott, there's more to be played out here. We'll see how it goes. I'm tired of talking about it. But none of this impacts Bitcoin, really. What impacts Bitcoin is liquidity. And liquidity,

whether or not the Fed reduces rates, and they shouldn't cut rates, in my opinion, I don't think it makes sense to, because if they do, it's likely to make the long end go the wrong direction. And the major concern, and this is why it's amusing to me, not amusing, but it's amusing to me these screeds, let's say Powell decided to cut the short end of the curve 50 basis points. How many economists believe the long end of the curve would go down as opposed to probably pushing 5% again. Almost everyone I talked to says that it would go up. That is what's the basis for mortgages. That's what the basis is for not necessarily credit card debt, which is already ridiculously high, maybe not the prime rate, but the rate that is actually used by people to make economic decisions

that's more impacted by the tenure. And so it's important to understand that what really matters is the tenure. And I'm quite confident that behind closed doors, that's what the secretary of treasury is telling the president and saying, listen, you could try to get him out to have a different policy, but for all we know, he's badgering them on rates

because that's what people knows about, but what he really cares about are other policy levers. Yeah. We have to talk about Trump again. I'm sorry. Because the next topic is Trump and his family's involvement in the crypto industry. Of course, we have the Trump meme coin unlock being talked about this week, which raises risk of further slide by once hot token. Sure, we know that there's unlocks and tokens. Of course, recently the Trump family launching US Bitcoin mining venture. That's not this week, but this is Trump's latest crypto venture will be a real estate video game, kind of like Monopoly.

Trump's world Liberty signs crypto deal with DWF labs. None of this even mentions obviously the NFT projects or any of the other things they're doing. There's a lot, but all this to be wrapped in a bow. The reason we're talking about it this week is TD Cowan says that political risk for crypto is rising because Trump's crypto ventures could derail US legislative efforts.

Basically, if he does all of this and it becomes a political hot potato, crypto legislation could be at risk because nobody wants to basically capitulate to Trump and his personal interests. I personally think that the only way out of this is comprehensive government wide banning on insider trading of stocks and crypto. And if that happened, does that affect Donald Trump Jr? Well, if he's part of the administration, yes. If he's not part of the administration,

no. And so he gets to go full Pelosi's husband. Yeah, he gets to go full Pelosi's husband. Pelosi's husband's a different story. You know, anyone who's worked on Wall Street can tell you that a spouse is just as subject to insider trading rule as the as the person thousand percent But children are not that way. So if you have an adult child, they are not subject to it But then they can't be part of the administration Ultimately, that's the right move. The right move is a comprehensive suite so that Congress congressional staffers federal, you know federal employees can't trade without prior approval from their boss in a documented way and without restrictions about how long they have to hold and when they can sell.

And then you do that and you call it a day. That's the right answer. And it's almost impossible to believe this, but that's a second topic I agree with Elizabeth Warren on, which is blind squirrels have found two nuts today. But that one actually makes sense. And Ro Khanna talks about that. But of course, he doesn't mention Congress when he talks about it because he speaks with

forked tongue, unfortunately, as much as we like him on the crypto side. I mean, the dude doesn't want to get pinned down. A comprehensive federal employee ban on insider trade and a comprehensive employee ban on the same families and disclosures of being on the payroll of NGOs who get federal funds is the way out of this mess. And it's what should be negotiated. It should be bipartisan. But I basically just talked about something that will never happen.

Why? Because that's how the Beltway gets rich. And the beltway gets people like getting rich and they're not going to vote against it, which is unfortunate because if there was a true populist, that's what they would be pushing for. Yeah. And I agree with all that. We have one final story and I know this one gets you fired up and it should, which is mantra om token crash exposes critical liquidity issues in crypto. So obviously this happened earlier this week. You had a token that was previously trading above $9.

It was definitively the winner of this cycle. You know, talking about something that was trading 30, 40 cents and continued up even during all of these corrections, it was over six bucks when this happened, but dropped basically to 50 cents in a matter of minutes. When it happened, there was all kinds of false speculation that the project had deleted their telegram, that the CEO had disappeared.

He was pretty transparently on a plane and at conferences, going from one conference to another. Certainly not hiding. I've actually interviewed him multiple times. Very nice guy, but welcome to crypto, you never know. And they basically said, this wasn't insiders, it wasn't the team, now they're gonna burn all the team tokens to save this,

but that this was a result of poor liquidity on exchanges and that the exchanges were basically implicit in crashing this token. But either way, you had a Luna-esque collapse, although I think at this point in the market, it goes unnoticed by anyone outside of the market. It's not like Luna that triggered a full contagion. But you have one of the biggest tokens, multi-billion dollar market cap,

flash crashing 90 plus percent in a matter of minutes. And you look at this stuff all day and how this happens. I don't know why that didn't go on stage, but there it is. You can see it, and break it down for us here. So, Montreux is a poster child for trends in crypto that make no sense. It makes sense in the abstract.

Real world assets, RWA's, they call them in crypto, I call them the real world, are going to be a multi trillion dollar opportunity for the world of crypto. But it's not going to be because you can stake your own token to use the Sam Bankman free to Matt Levine in the box analogy. It's not going to be because you can buy a thing that let's govern the thing that's going to be making money But have no ability to give yours pay yourself that money It's gonna be because there will be innovations and there will become critical mass and people will figure out how to tokenize everything from bonds to stocks to real estate to whatever and That is a very big deal

It's gonna play out over the next couple of decades. And the blockchains that win with that will be worth a lot of money. But the blockchain being worth a lot of money and the token being worth a lot of money are not the same thing. It's sort of like if you have an equity of a company that persists in issuing enormous amounts of debt,

that the debt holders are the ones who are going to get the money because if they issue too much debt and they can't pay it back, the equity holders are the ones who are going to get the money because if they issue too much debt and they can't pay it back, the equity holders end up with zero. And we've seen this before with bankrupt companies. I'm not saying monstrous bankrupt. In this particular case, it's a governance token, them like Ando. And until such a time as the governance changes and they make the token pass through a percent of the network and the token holders are rewarded directly not by staking rewards Which is a I'm sorry, but staking rewards unless there's a fundamental way

You know a fundamental way. Oh, that's come from somewhere. It has to come from somewhere So, you know OM right now Montres token is worth just between six and seven hundred million dollars Is that a fair price? Is that cheap? I don't know. Maybe it's cheap Right now, Montres token is worth just between six and $700 million. Is that a fair price? Is that cheap? I don't know. Maybe it's cheap. Maybe the opportunity to stake and be part of that network is worth that.

Five or $6 billion. Was that intelligent? Probably not. That's a lot of money. That said, we have a lot of memes in crypto that are still worth billions or hundreds of millions with absolutely nothing. So I think JP is doing an admiral job in a difficult situation. The problem was people, and whoever it was, pumped the price of the token up. Now, why I got fired up on this is I was on

the spaces with our mutual friend, Kelly, Kelly Kellum. And, you know, and we were in, you know, one of the people in the spaces was saying you know because I made the point that regulators will absolutely if it is true and I'm not saying it's true I just want this to be clear I am not accusing anyone at mantra of doing anything wrong but if it is true as was alleged that they sold tokens to OTC desks or other people with a lockup and use the funds that they received to buy more tokens in the open market. That that is the kind of thing that you did that on an undisclosed basis in a security. I don't care or in any asset in any jurisdiction.

I don't care if it's the US, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, doesn't matter, the EU, you're going to go to jail, or if not jail, you're just gonna be out of line. To be clear, you're allowed to sell a token OTC, the buyer can buy anything they want at any price in a fair market for whatever deal, but if you utilize the actual funds that you earn to manipulate the price, that's where the exactly, exactly, exactly.

They utilize the funds to build the network better, to advertise, promote, whatever. Totally cool. If you use it to go into the market and on an undisclosed basis, stabilize it. That is bad. And the way you know this is that we have IPO laws. Now our IPO laws in America are complete crap. I mean, they have things like 30-day printing windows, which of course is absurd today and stuff like that.

But the thing you know is about stabilization. If a company comes to market, you know when there's a stabilization period. You know what price, you know what the investment banks are doing. When that ends, it's over. And if you're caught doing it, you're going to have a serious problem. But what got me fired up was, and it was a founder, I'm not going to say what token or who it was, tried an impassioned defense. Well, of course they were doing that. We all do it. All projects do this. And that just makes me mad because that is exactly the kind of thing that the DOJ will

prosecute. The EU will prosecute. It is exactly the kind of thing that eliminates trust in the market for retail because basically you're telling retail that you're screwing them without telling them you're screwing them. And look, I know this has gone on. When I was running CoinRoute two years ago, companies tried to get us to use our software to quote, make markets to push the price, to be able to tune it, to push the price of tokens up, right? And we said, no. We just said, no, we're not going to support that.

That's not a use case that makes sense for us. And so we've never done that. That's not what market makers do. That's correct. But it is amazing that here we are in 2025, that in the crypto industry that people will make statements such as that's what we all do. If you want to understand why I do agree with Michael, well, there are many, many projects that should be worth zero. Honestly, we need to clean this stuff up. Now, that said, JP, I've seen several interviews

with them. We follow each other on X. I agree with you. I don't think that he personally is doing anything wrong. And I think that he's just going to put his head down and keep building. And ultimately, if that's successful, it will be worth an enormous amount of money, but not right now. And that's kind of the point. So, you know, the crypto industry needs to get clean. And part of clean, part of clean is disclosing what you're doing with regard to any price influencing action. Yeah, but even like outside of that,

so that's conjecture clearly crime, as you said, and there's definitely accusations that happened. What actually shakes me to the core is your first point about all the things that are being built and are hyped and that a lot of us, myself included, over time have believed in deeply. But if tokenized assets are going to be the future of crypto, it probably won't be on some crypto native builder CEO's new blockchain that they did.

It'll probably be on BlackRock. Well, no, let's be careful. BlackRock's using ETH, so I'm just saying, it's very unlikely that it's gonna be some brand new chain built for purpose just to do this specific thing. I don't know. I actually would debate that.

I actually think that. Well, good, because I'm going based on what you said, and I would have debated it until today too, which kinda convinced me. Well, no, no, I look at there are many of them in crypto, and only a couple will win. But if you look, if you looked at what was the assets, and this is going to be, I'm going to use your use an example that it's a very important one. So in 1999, if you were going to ask who was going to win the search wars, Who was number one? But there was Lycos and Ask Jeeves. There were like eight of them.

And there were all these searches. Who won the search war? Company that was owned, it was a big company, but it was owned totally privately by VCs called Google. You may have heard of them. And they were not tradable by the public. Now, in crypto, that doesn't happen. In crypto, they would have been traded by the public because, you know, there's no credit investor rule in crypto, and the network would be there.

It is entirely possible that one of or two of or three, not 20, not 50, not 100, not 1,000, but a small number of protocols that are in the crypto sphere will ultimately be the winners. And that ultimately will get bought by a consortium or used by consortium of very big players to be part of this. I mean, the XRP army will tell you XRP is the one that that's going to be for, at least in payments and other things. Ripple Labs will tell you that they're using XRP as much as they can, as fast as they can, to build a vertically integrated company to compete with Coinbase. But that's a different story. The fact is there will be winners. Those winners will probably emerge from what exists today. They may not. And those winners will ultimately be worth many, many multiples of what they're worth now. But understanding what that is takes a ton of research and I for one do not want to make

speculation about what those are right now. Makes perfect makes perfect sense. Just cautionary tale that 99% of what you see even in the words of McClone, right is going to be fluff and probably go to zero at time. But I think we all know that and there's going to be huge winners like the internet bubble, everybody says crypto is like the tech bubble, it's going to pop. It's going to pop for 99% of this stuff. But the 1% that emerges will be the biggest companies in the world. I think we all agree with that. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better. Perfect. Well, that was I think that

was our longest Friday five. And I loved every second of it. It's great having you here your app replacement when NLW is not here. We're gonna be getting Dave on the channel a lot more. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. But Dave, man, thank you so much for waking up and making this happen for us. I really appreciate it would not have been the same if I had to rant by myself about these topics. Well enjoy the enjoy the rest of the long weekend. For those who are watching overseas in America, this is a holiday. No markets open, so Bitcoin shouldn't move at all.

And it happens. Stablecoin when Wall Street's off, it was a stablecoin anyways. And yeah, I've got 25 minute break until Crypto Town Hall, are you on today? I didn't even think they were gonna do it. I'll probably join why not. See you there.

All right guys, thank you everyone. Otherwise we'll be back with Dave on macro Monday, 9 a.m. on Monday. Thanks, yeah, and where Mike can defend himself. Yeah, that's right. Sorry, Mike. I'll see you then, bye. Now I'm at my street.

Let's go. I'm at my street