The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Just Did The Opposite Of What Everyone Expected After The Fed Hike

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Crypto rallied after the Fed delivered its first 25bps hike since 2023, with Bitcoin holding near $76K, Treasury yields easing and Zcash surging to new highs. Tristan Thompson joins the show as we break down the market reaction, the Fed’s path from here, and how the SEC and CFTC are moving ahead with crypto rules after the Clarity Act stalled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin just did the opposite of everyone expected after the Fed hike. If Kevin Warsh was going to raise rates, that was supposed to put pressure on risk assets, and Bitcoin was supposed to go down. But instead, it went up. What the hell is happening here? Going to dive into that and more right now. Let's go. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the show.

It is 9, 10 a.m. and I'm not on time. And if you have a problem with it, bye. Actually, you probably already left. So I can't even say goodbye because you're not here in the first place to say goodbye to. It's an unfortunate situation for me. So if you're wondering why we were late, it's because we were trying to get in touch with LaCroix corporate for them to send us our sponsorship check. But they didn't.

Actually, the reason is because Tristan Thompson, our guest, NBA superstar legend, turned crypto legend, has food poisoning. So we were trying to get him up on stage. and it didn't go too good. So that leaves me exceptionally prepared to talk about everything that's happening in crypto today. So first of all, I want to just highlight something that is just so amazing that it was the first thing I saw today and it made me so happy.

And it was this announcement right here. USDC rewards just got even better. Coinbase 1 members now earned 3.75% percent APY on USTC. So you may remember this little thing called the Clarity Act. And the Clarity Act that we all hoped so deeply would pass, it failed before even getting to a vote on Tuesday. And what the Clarity Act actually would have done is prevented Coinbase from doing something like this. As I continue to say, the banks rallied against the Clarity Act, which means that the law of the land is genius, and genius allows platforms to offer rewards or yield on your passive

holdings. So as the ultimate FU to the United States government, Coinbase, just two days after the failure, comes in swinging and raises the APY on USC. I mean, seriously, man, can you write this better? I wish I had somebody get me the, you know, the video of Josh Hawley. I've got it somewhere. One of the Republicans who voted for it. Team, if you're listening, it's on my ex. Get it?

I would like to show it, if possible. it a little while, because it's so bananas why some of these people said they voted against it. So obviously now, we're going to talk about the Clarity Act later. I don't want to dive too deeply into it, and I can show you exactly why. And the reason is because I just recorded an exclusive interview with the bald, beautiful, badass Brian, alliterative, Forbe's Better Business Bureau. Brian Armstrong in his only comments since the Clarity Act failed. Now, you'll remember that many look back to January and said when Brian said,

we would prefer no bill to a bad bill, that it killed Clarity, which is complete nonsense, by the way, because they hadn't even talked about the ethics clause yet. But I have an exclusive with him. I think it's 35, 40 minutes on The Daily Wolf, which is normally a 15-minute show at noon on Yahoo. You know what? I'm going to just show you the trailer for it right now before we dig in. into more news because I feel like it. We're going to do it.

Let's watch it. Could have had the ability to affect America for generations to come, but unfortunately it didn't happen due to politics. What do you think ultimately actually killed clarity? I think the ethics deal is what killed it. But somehow the bank lobby got really spun up on this issue of stable coin rewards. I think because some of the big banks just didn't want the competition. So didn't the banks effectively just shoot themselves in the foot by blocking clarity,

could have actually put more restrictions on Coinbase and others on rewards? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself. Do you view this as entirely dead? I would just at this point assume it's dead unless I hear otherwise and then I'm pleasantly surprised. Would you launch a meaningful, sizable product while there's litigation over the rule that's allowing you to launch that product? We're not afraid of litigation. In the prior administration, we actually sued the SEC in one, which is a pretty atypical thing to do as a public company. Yeah, we're going to keep this idea of tokenization just growing and growing because it creates better

products for our customers. You know, we started with stable coins. That's a version of tokenization, a one-to-one-backed digital token for a dollar. Now we're doing it with stocks. The fact that we even talking about tokenized stocks probably shows how early we are because this probably becomes mainstream when they're just stocks. What we realized is that the existing payment rails are sometimes not sufficient for AI. We're going to keep investing in that because I think we're going to be here in the future and not too far where there's actually more agents transacting in the economy than humans, which is a pretty wild thing you think about. Yeah, I mean, if we posit, China's just going to build it.

It's ironic, but it would not surprise me within a handful of years if it's actually the banks coming and lobbying for Clarity Version 2 or something like that. Did that turn you guys on a little bit? Thank you. Half Shubb. Excited to watch the interview. I'm so woefully underprepared today.

I'm probably going to get fired. But other things that are happening since the Clarity Act failed to pass. Yeah, great edit. Looking forward to this. You should be. You should be. So since Clarity Act also failed, oh, you guys are going to love this, those haters who voted against it. We've got, once again, the wrong screen.

The SEC releases long-weighted innovation exemption to bring America's capital markets into the digital age. It took all of 48 hours for Coinbase to raise rates on USC and for Paul Atkins to come over the top and say, yeah, we're going to go ahead and write the rules with or, without you, which we knew that they were going to do. So now you have the SEC putting basically into motion the idea that you can fundraise in crypto in the United States, that you will have a five-year safe harbor period to become sufficiently decentralized. You can do it on a white paper. There's a path to not being a security.

All the things that we were looking for for all of that time. Absolutely amazing. Now, it's not all unicorns and puppies and sunshine. John Reed Stark, a bit of a crypto fundster. I've talked to him a lot on spaces. He's a nice guy, but he used to be ahead of enforcement at the SEC. He's saying there's no chance that this makes it past the courts, basically. So he gives a lot of reasons as to why not.

He says he concedes the SEC's exemptive authority under Securities Act Section 28. It rests on findings. A record cannot support. support, disregards the reliance interests that record create, cannot be sustained by any honest economic analysis. Errogates, he made that word up. Aggregates. I'm not smart.

Arrogates. Do you think that you roll the ours? Aggregates to the SECA decision of vast economic and political significance that belongs to Congress, which considered the Clarity Act for over a year and declined to enact precisely the regime. The Ackon's proposal would decree. So there are some major challenges here to theoretical rulemaking by the SEC. Because the SEC can go ahead and make all the rules they want in this case.

But that doesn't mean that it's legal and it won't be challenged in the courts. And we have to assume that it will, in fact, be challenged in the courts. And we cheered last year when Loper Bright passed, which was removing the Chevron doctrine, but the problem with that is it removes a lot of authority from regulators. That's generally a good thing, right? We could not have had the Gensler enforcement by regulation if Loper Bright had been the law of the land at the time, and if the Chevron doctrine had been reversed. The problem is now agencies aren't allowed to just write rules without the courts coming over the top and giving them approval. So you have to assume basically with 100% certainty,

that this is going to be challenged. That was that question that I asked Brian Armstrong there in that trailer where I said, you know, if there's litigation, would you launch projects? He was like, we sue the SEC, bro. We don't care. Right? But there's a chance that we get this rulemaking from the SEC, and it's supposed to bring companies back,

but we get a lawsuit, and then those companies don't want to do anything until they see the results of that lawsuit. I think it's fair to say that it's messy. So here's the video we got it of Holly, a Republican who voted against the Clarity Act. Let's hear what he had to say. Against the Clarity Act yesterday. Can you tell us?

Who is the fourth? Tom Tillis. No, he did? I don't think so. Yeah, Tom Tillis changed his mind at the 11th hour. Oh, okay. He's a sponsor. Okay, okay.

What are your concerns with it? My concern is all to do with farmers in my state. Ag is our number one industry of Missouri. and farmers in my state are so, so concerned that they won't be able to get loans for their farms from small town banks because they're concerned that investors will leave those banks and pursue the yields that are available under the bill. I think this is something that can be fixed. Senator Moran, I think who also voted no, PES language that would fix this. So this seems like something that's pretty doable to me.

But you are in favor of it otherwise, other than that? My big issue is just with that. It's with the small town banks, it particularly as it affects farmers. As ag is our number one industry and they don't get our farmers, they don't get loans from Wells Fargo or, you know, Chase or whatever. They're getting loans from our local bank that has one little branch. And I just, we've got to make sure, from my state, got to make sure that those banks stay in operations, stay competitive. And with enough capital to make loans or else our Missouri, like our economy will collapse. That's my biggest show.

Economy would collapse. Do you guys remember a little show that used to be on TV? TV when our president of the United States was a social media star, like a reality TV star, it's called The Apprentice. Well, Josh, Holly, you're fired. You're an idiot. Nobody's buying that. You're stupid.

Actually, you're probably smart. And that's the most ridiculous one minute of television that I've ever seen. So first of all, who's the fourth guy? Tillis? Tillis? He was a sponsor. Okay. Yeah, I roll the tape.

Okay, so first of all, he didn't even know what happened in the vote. You know, one of four Republicans. His reason for not voting for the Clarity Act is eggs. Not the baby kind. Well, the baby chicken kind. I thought he's going to be like female reproductive rights. Clarity Act violates them. I've actually heard that there's a 37% chance that the Clarity Act kills all of us in the next three years.

I mean, guys. It's the eggs. It's the farmers. It's the farm. Okay. So here's the reality, right? As I told you at the beginning of the show, if clarity does not become law,

exchanges like Coinbase can offer the yield that he's afraid will be offered and will hurt somehow the chickens. It's for the chickens. Not the chicken heads. Josh Holly is here. His new campaign is here for the chicken heads. His name's Josh, right? It could be Bob Holly.

Guys, he believes somehow, and by believes, I mean, has cashed a check from the small bank lobby in his state. But his argument is that if the Clarity Act, which gives broad protection, and rules of the road for clarity would prevent fraud like FTX and Celsius and Voyager and Terra Luna and would actually stop Coinbase from offering this yield. His belief is that the Clarity Act somehow is going to kill small banks, specifically in Missouri who are giving loans to eggs. We just spent 12 months, 16 months, 18 months, hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm sure, from the crypto lobby, taxpayer money, time, effort, emotion on this bill passing. And a guy like this has the audacity to walk out of the room so uninformed with the most ridiculous

narrative about his egg farmers being killed by the Clarity Act. You know who was killed by the Clarity Act? Mitch McConnell. He's dead. It literally killed him. Now, not a chicken head. Don't know about the other people in his family. But what are we doing here?

Is this not the most broken political system you've ever seen? Does this not just make you want to just go ahead and opt out and buy Bitcoin and say, I'm going to be an unaffiliated voter and I'm no longer going to participate in this system? I mean, it's absolutely insane. There was one congressperson that just ran away from the reporter because she didn't have a pretend reason to vote. I believe that. I believe that. Tillis changed his vote to be part of the opposition,

being part of the opposition, enables him to bring clarity to a vote again. Yes, that Tillis had a very good reason, but by the way, that doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. But yes, he did it, whatever. Like, guys, I mean, I... Can we meme this guy out of existence, like out of office? Like, make a, like, little song that's like,

for the eggs. For the eggs. Voted no? For the eggs. Something like that? I mean, I rest Tristan was here. Miss him. Yeah. I even wore a basketball shirt. That's the dream team.

That's the dream team. I thought maybe he would think I was cool and want to go grab a drink or something. So, yeah, let's talk about whatever this title's about. I'm really good at this. Crypto rallies through the Fed's first rate increase since 2020. Bitcoin rose 0.8%. 0.88% over 24 hours to $76,621 as the central bank's projections implied only one further hike. Zcash jumped 23% to a record after paradigm disclosed a stake.

So there's a few things I need to tell you. One is that watch time on this channel is very important, so I'm going to probably sing for 30 minutes to get this up to an hour. But also Zcash apparently is a hedge against Fed interest rate policy. Yeah, so crypto went up. And I think that the reason that crypto went up is because nobody believes the government and nobody cares anymore and we're all fed up and who cares. This was the most important FOMC meeting until the next FOMC meeting and probably since the last FOMC meeting. But it is important, I think, that this was a unanimous vote to hike rates in a time when people like me said there was a 0% percent. I'd say I would hike rates. I was wrong. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Hope you guys enjoyed it. Me, Dave Weisberger, other people who had bad takes, we didn't believe that Warsh, who was there to cut rates politically, would ever hike them. Didn't think it would happen. I don't think most people thought it would happen, but that should show you actually just how bad things are that it did happen. And the problem is, like most of the reasons that we actually have inflation right now, now are somewhat own goals, right? I mean, a lot of this is geopolitics. It's the price of gas and oil and all these things that have made inflation sticky. I mean, we actually had this beautiful moment. Trump came into the presidency and inflation, whether you like it or I mean, it was dropping,

right? I had just paid almost 140 bucks for a tank of gas the other day. It's a lot of money for a tank of gas, right? And then we went and we did this war thing, you know, because we were going to change regimes and the danger of nuclear weapons and we needed to, you know, get the Straits of America for whatever reason we went to war. And now we have bigger problems. And we have a Fed that unanimously had to hike rates. I mean, this article, Trump's comments are so good. I still, I hit the wrong button every time. Trump says he told Warsh to vote for hike with the rest of Fed board. It's not going to matter. So that's probably true. So he said, you know, President Donald Trump said he still has confidence in Federal Reserve Chair, Kevin Worsh, whom he nominated,

but Trump demanded the Federal Reserve slash its chase to 1% or less. Hours after the Central Bank announced his first rate hike since 2023, he's rekindled his pressure campaign against the Fed, which had temporarily subsided after Warch succeeded Jerome Powell as chairman. So first of all, is there a happier person on planet Earth than Jerome Powell right now? Jerome Powell is at a club right now. He's at 11 in Miami. It's 9.30 a.m. And he's getting bottle service.

Because he just watched Kevin Warsh hike rates, right in the face of political pressure from Trump. But these quotes are so good. I'm relying on Kevin, but he's got, you know, a very tough board. He's got a board that was put there by other people. And I told, I talked to Kevin, fed independence. And I said, you might as well vote with the board. it's not going to matter. The board is very hostile, they're very political,

they're doing the wrong thing. They're raising rates to make Trump do as bad as they possibly can do. Can possibly can do. They're raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly can do. I don't really know if he said that or if they typed that wrong. But wow. And then, if he believe Warsh made a decision based on what Trump told him, the president replied, no, I don't think so.

I want him to be independent. Scrolling back. You know, Kevin and I talked, and I told him it was cool to vote with the board. I want him to be independent, he said. Oh, man. The jokes about this government right themselves. It's unbelievable.

So, yeah, I think that, once again, market probably went up because there was no major indication that we're going to see a massive rate hiking cycle. So markets were already pricing one more rate hike in 2026. That's effectively what we were still seeing. Nobody really was expecting, at least the market, rate cuts. So there was no real new news there. And I think it just becomes a situation that the market shrugged off.

Now, like you can actually, potentially maybe kind of sort of. Blame Jerome Powell, right? Maybe it was true that Jerome Powell should not have cut rates when he did because he was under political pressure pre-election not saying from Trump necessarily. I think he didn't necessarily do what Trump wanted him to do. And that we never should have cut rates in the first place and that this is placing a band-aid over that previous wound. But either way, it's not going great. Not going great.

unless, of course, you are Zcash. Cache jumps 23% as Bitcoin and major tokens rise despite Ferdt's first hike. I think I pretty much already told you about that. But the article's here, so brought it up. Bitcoin traded above $76,000 as the Fed projected, limited further tightening. While Paradigms Matt Wing discussed Zcash's role as privacy complement to Bitcoin. I like when they say privacy complement to Bitcoin instead of saying stupid things like better Bitcoin.

Right? So some other things happen in government that are important. House Committee moves to codify Trump's strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

So this got out of House Committee, I'm just a bill, yes, I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill. Well, it's a long,

long, during the capital city. It's a long, long wait when you're sitting in committee. I didn't know it would take me that long to get the

committee part. So, yeah, so it got out of the committee and it's going to actually, hopefully, maybe sort of head to the House floor that we could get the strategic Bitcoin Reserve out of just being an executive order and onto becoming a law that the House actually votes on on the floor. Right. And they also passed out of committee a tax bill committee. Just out of committee. Should I say it again? try not. Also got that out of committee, which would have a de minimis tax exemption so that you could buy coffee or whatever with your Bitcoin and not pay taxes on it.

So that's good. So the bottom line is there's actually a lot of positive things happening right here in the world. And I guess most notably, like check it out, man. Let's see what treasury yields did. Here's the tenure. By the way, if you're a chart nerd, that is an absolutely crazy.

crazy place for yields to reverse. That's the 10 year. It had gotten up to 5.02 in 2023, and now we have this little tiny wick playing just the tip with that resistance right there, and reversing. So maybe, maybe they're going to get the job done and yields will actually reverse here. I have my doubts, but it is possible. And this obviously is what they are going for. It's what they want. It's what they need. Like smiggle with the ring. He wants it. We need it. That was Ghalem.

You guys remember that I used to do that. Let's take a look at the Bitcoin chart. We need things to do. Hey, do you think Tristan's going to show up? Call me. Bitcoin. This is the weekly Bitcoin chart. This is resistance.

This is the line. 82,0814, that Bitcoin needs to get above to make a higher high in this market. This is the 50 MA on the weekly. It is for many people the bull bear break line and we are struggling with it now for the one, two, three, fourth week in a row. Very predictable that this is exactly the area that Bitcoin might struggle. Take a look at what prediction markets are thinking. Will Bitcoin hit 50,000 before 100,000? 18% chance. The bearish sentiment is way down here. By the way, if you use my link down below on Cali, $25 for trading $25.

So that's pretty sweet. But I'm using Cali markets for a lot of things here. And as you know, I like to take a look at what markets are saying to get a view on sentiment. And this is way down. So look, I mean, if you go back to just June, markets were pricing an 84% chance that Bitcoin would hit $50,000 before $100,000. This is when we were at peak fear, stupidity, strategy, insults. solvent, Bitcoin to zero, we were probably boiling the oceans again, and data centers, I don't know, man, down to 17.9% chance now.

So it seems that at least prediction markets are pricing out the idea of a massively lower low. Because even if we went to 55, this market would, and then to 100, you know, those people would lose. But the bears are not really believing it anymore, which I find extremely interesting here. Hey, is there anything you guys on your minds, the comments, in the chat? This person says, abolish the federal government and central banking. I think I might be here for the back end of that, but the front end might get messy.

I don't know how we abolish the government, but that would be cool. Democrats apparently serve shadowy European superbankers. Can you have those guys call me? I need a loan. We need the sailor clip. If I play that clip, I get like a copyright issue. Oh my God. Do you guys want to see something amazing?

I'm going to look it up. Apparently, this is real. This is happening in real time, guys. Real news. Apparently a guy, did you see this? Went to jury duty? Here he is. I'm going to show you to you.

He went to jury duty, and it had been widely reported that Bezos had to report for jury duty. Sailor was in jury. jury duty too. Look at them. Apparently this is not AI. A guy literally went to jury duty. He interviewed Bezos on camera, so you have that.

He was in jury duty with Michael Saylor and Jeff Bezos. Which part of the simulation are we in right now? Do you believe it? I can't believe it. Sailor clip is even better when Mike is here required by Bloomberg to act offended. Yeah, he was very unfortunately. He thought that I was being like derogatory towards women, I think. That was bad.

All right, guys, you know what? We covered everything we want to cover. I'm sorry that the show was shorter and that the guest didn't show up and that left me wildly unprepared. But the good news is, I'm going to play it for you one more time that you can go watch my much better show at noon. It's the Daily Wolf. Let's roll it back.

Wait, roll it back. Ready for it? Here it comes. I think, maybe. Could have had the ability to affect America for generations to come, but unfortunately it didn't happen due to politics. What do you think ultimately actually killed Clarity? I think the ethics deal is what killed it.

But somehow the bank lobby got really spun up on this issue of stable coin rewards, I think because some of the big banks just didn't want the competition. So didn't the banks effectively just shoot themselves in the foot by blocking clarity, which could have actually put more restrictions on Coinbase and others on rewards? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself. Do you view this as entirely dead? I would just at this point assume it's dead unless I hear otherwise and then I'm pleasantly surprised. Would you launch a meaningful, sizable product while there's litigation over the rule that's allowing you to launch that product?

We're not afraid of litigation. In the prior administration, we actually sued the SEC in one, which is a pretty atypical thing to do as a public company. Yeah, we're going to keep this idea of tokenization just growing and growing because it creates better products for our customers. You know, we started with stable coins. That's a version of tokenization, a one-to-one backed digital token for a dollar. Now we're doing it with stocks. The fact that we're even talking about tokenized stocks probably shows how we're early we are because this probably becomes mainstream when they're just stocks. What we realized is that the existing payment rails are sometimes not sufficient for AI. We're going to keep investing in that

because I think we're going to be here in the future not too far where there's actually more agents transacting in the economy than humans, which is a pretty wild thing to think about. Yeah, I mean, if we posit, China's just going to build it. It's ironic, but it would not surprise me within a handful of years if it's actually the banks coming in lobbying for Clarity Version 2 or something like that. And you guys can watch that in noon. I see a lot of you left because you thought that was the outro. I did tell you I was done. But I tell you that I'm not done.

Because I don't have the story. Let me see it. The Arc blockchain launched yesterday, as I told you. I wish I had unpacked, like actually looked into this. But I made a joke when Laura Shin was here yesterday. And I was like, the funniest thing that could happen here, you know, in this simulation that we call crypto and the world. would be that Circle would launch this, like, build for purpose, BlackRock blockchain,

and the Dgens would show up. Apparently, like, 80% or something of the traffic on Arc yesterday was meme coins. Apparently, there was some situation. I don't know the exact details, but like the head of product at Circle or somebody tweeted a meme coin, but someone had already made a meme coin in the same name, and people got confused and bought the wrong one. and the circle people themselves are actually tweeting about meme coins.

What a time to be alive. Crypto. Got to love it, guys. I hope you check out the video. We have no outro video here. Why would we want that? Why do we want that? I also realize my logo is missing.

And my name's not there. We did a really good job producing this show, guys. Like you know, we're very proud of our work. See you tomorrow.