The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Bulls Are Giving Up, Is Bitcoin In Danger? | Macro Monday

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Join Noelle Acheson, Lawrence Lepard, Dave Weisberger and Mike McGlone, and James Lavish as we break down what's happening in macro and crypto! Lawrence Lepard:  Noelle Acheson: https://x.com/NoelleInMadrid Dave Weisberger: https://twitter.com/daveweisberger1  Mike McGlone: https://twitter.com/mikemcglone11  🔥 𝗟𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗞 𝗘𝗫𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘 - 𝗡𝗢 𝗞𝗬𝗖 𝗥𝗘𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗗! 𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗠 𝗨𝗣 𝗧𝗢 𝟱𝟬% 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗕𝗢𝗡𝗨𝗦! Join today & get rewarded! Start trading to claim up to 50% in trading bonuses!! 👉https://www.lbank.com/activity/ScottMelker-Cashback?icode=4M3HD  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://archpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #MacroMonday The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

let's go hello everyone if you're here for the really sharp macro monday insights normally hosted by scott melker you're in the right place. I am not Scott. My name is Noelle Atchison, friend of the show, and I'm filling in for Scott today, and we have a lot to talk about. But before we dive in, do please hit the subscribe button. And if you've already done that, right next to it is the like button. Please hit that too. Now today, obviously, top of mind is going to be some of the macro data we've seen over the past week, which is showing that maybe there is some weakness seeping into the economy. This is on top of the talk of tariffs and the talk of layoffs and the talk of general uncertainty.

I'm sure we'll get into that. Also, we do need to talk about meme coin fury, which seems to have reached a peak after the antics over the weekend from Argentina's President Millet and the Libra token. I'm sure we'll get into that as well. And all of this is feeding into the overall malaise in crypto at the moment. I know you've all talked about this often before, but it seems to be getting even bleaker if that was possible. Is that a bullish sign or does that mean we're gearing up to head lower? With that, I am joined by the usual gang, Mike McClone, Dave Weisberger, but we're missing James Lavish today.

Instead, we are joined by Lawrence Leopard. Thank you all so much for joining us and welcome, Lawrence. Anyways, I hope you all had a good long weekend and I also want to thank everyone for being here on what is a US holiday, but as Mike was saying earlier, this doesn't't work this is breakfast and this is fun so thank you all for being here now I want to um Mike I want to head to you first and get your take on the macro situation

I'm imagining you didn't have your normal Monday meeting that the Bloomberg team today but I do want to get your take but before that Lawrence I want to give you a chance to tell us about your book. Oh, yeah. So I'll hold it up here. So I published a book called The Big Print, and it's just out. It came out about a week ago now. It's on Amazon in hard copy, paperback, and digital format. The audio will be out. Audible will be out in a couple weeks.

Central thesis of the book is the monetary system is broken and we need to fix it. It talks about the history of the monetary system, talks about how to fix it, and then suggests ways that investors can protect themselves from the inflation, which I think is obviously has been bad, but I think it's actually going to get worse. I know a lot of people don't believe that, but I do. So that's the point of the book and hope people like it. Often things do need to get worse before they can get better, right? That's sort of one of my theses as well. And the topics that you mentioned are topics that we often discuss deeply on this show. So thank you for that. And I'm sure you're going to have many

insights to share with us today as we get deeper into the crypto weeds. But first, let's do the macro look. I mean, Mike, we saw some pretty alarming figures last week. Retail sales came in way under expected. CPI was way above expected. Are you worried? Oh, yeah. Well, you know my bias. We can make a good market, Lawrence, and I'm the opposite. I think a major risk is towards normal deflation historically that's followed the inflation. And retail sales last week has showed what I've been pointed out for almost two years now. Aflation-adjusted retail sales are about the same as they were right before the financial crisis. They're hovering near zero, inflation-adjusted. And if you overlay that with

what's happening with the wealth competition, I'm sorry, the wealth effect. We've created $12 billion of equity wealth last year and retail sales are still not good. It's a bad tilt. And I want to share my screen to just show you the tilt in commodities. I can't see it. Just show me when you tell me when you got it up. And I'll start with the doctor of copper. Dr. Copper last week put in a pretty good peak. And that's just based on the shenanigans with risks in the U.S. potential tariffs. And we got data going back almost 30 years on the CME trade of copper versus LME. CME is U.S.-based, dollar-based copper peak last week at $8.48. We have your screen up now if you want to go to the copper chart. For what it's worth, we can't see a copper chart.

520 last year. And what I show you in this chart is the equivalent in an LME copper. Okay. Your screen's up. We just, um, still no chart. Your screen's not showing copper. You've got, we've got your appointments. I can pull it up.

Let me see if I can. I don't have a Bloomberg terminal. Not like some of us. All right. So we'll just forget the share screen. I'll just focus on what matters. Copper on the CME last week had a major spike, the biggest spike ever versus LME. Now that's going back 20 years.

Every time that the last time was similar was last year at peak. It's a sign of what's happening globally. The doctor is not doing well because you see what's happening in China. China's imploding. Just look at their bond yields, about 165 in the 10-year notes. 300 basis points or so below the rest of the U.S. You have England, the U.K. tilting towards recession, the latest GDP data. Germany tilting towards recession, the latest GDP data.

And what are they facing? Severe tariffs from the U.S. And I would not underestimate it in a bold and president. This is his second chance, his last chance. So I think that's the key focus we have to look at. You can see that in commodities. Like I said, coffers tilting lower. The U.S. 30-year bond yield maybe peaked around 5% this year at the same time that crude oil peaked around 80. Crude oil is tilting lower. And what's the stated goals of our new president? Lower yields, not really rates, lower Crude oil is tilting lower. And what's the stated goals of our new president? Lower yields, not really rates, lower yields, which is tilting that way. Lower energy prices,

which is tilting that way. So from my standpoint, from a commodity standpoint, I see one commodity making record highs that matters, and that's gold. Lawrence is all over that. I expect that to continue. The key thing I think from the macro that's significant is this Bitcoin, the gold ratio is tilting downward. The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, which is I helped created with Galaxy and our index team, it's tilting downward. And I wanted to end with the key macro thing. I think that a lot of Bitcoin people are missing. That's the macro. The macro globally is tilting towards deflation worthy of the inflation. That's always happened in history. Long time no see. Look up on that unless you really print money.

But the key thing I think that Bitcoin people are missing is what we just did with this reelection. The world changed on November 5th. I think people are missing that there's a big difference than innovation, creating companies that can create money and profits out of the innovation from tokenization and from cryptos and everything. And then there's a speculative excesses in prices. I think they're missing. This could be bad for prices as evidenced by 11.2 million cryptos lifted on coinmarketcap.com. There's just too much supply in the space. Now, yes, I get Bitcoin is definable diminishing supply,

but in terms of its competition, all the new ETFs now you're seeing or anything to do are obvious, all the other crypto. So that's why I look at it in the macro for commodities. Crude oil may be peaked. Copper may be peaked. Gold's the only one going higher. What stops that trajectory? Much like the commodities, there are many different narratives to all of crypto as well. Lawrence, dive in.

Well, no, I don't disagree with anything Mike has said. You know, I don't follow crypto very much. I'm kind of Bitcoin only. And I think there's a lot of noise in crypto. And I think all crypto is, you know, destined to trend lower versus Bitcoin over longer periods of time. Clearly, you know, copper is getting soft and oil is getting soft and the economy does appear to be going down a bit. I mean, we had some light retail sales numbers.

I think you're starting to see airline traffic or gate passages at the TSA are trending slightly lower. It appears though the economy might be rolling over. I've got friends who are fund managers who watch the earnings reports and projections very carefully, and they say lots of companies are missing and guiding lower. So, you know, it feels to me like the economy might be truly rolling into, you know, the recession that we thought was going to happen last year and didn't. But we'll just have to see. You know, certainly the gold price uh doesn't reflect that and i think what gold is telling us is that you know um the the market for sound assets i mean people think we're in a sovereign debt crisis and in my opinion we are and uh so you know sound assets are well bid and you know

bitcoin's just been kind of chopping around between 96 or 95 and 105 and I think it'll ultimately break out and squirt up to 140. I think gold's on its way to 3,500 4,000 and and this is really because the government spending situation is just completely out of control and in spite of what Doge is saying they can do um the markets know they can't really do it I mean they can certainly at the margin reduce some of the expenditures and some of the stupid stuff but you know when elon came out and said he was going to take two trillion dollars out of the deficit or out of spending i mean there's just there's no way it's just impossible so um and and the you know the sound money alternatives gold and bitcoin smell that and so if you assuming

you're right and it sounds plausible for sure, then that does mean markets, probably stock markets are going to be heading lower. And this could be part of the short term pain that Trump is starting to hint at, prepare us for. Does Bitcoin decouple entirely? That's a great question. Yeah, I do believe stock markets will head lower. I mean, the stock markets in terms of valuations are just an unbelievable nosebleed record levels. If you look at any of John Hussman's data, I mean, this is we haven't seen this since 29.

It's even worse than that. Yeah. Bitcoin decoupling. It's unclear. I mean, it's it's got a risk on component to it. Always has. It's been heavily correlated with the Nasdaq, although I've recently seen that correlation start to weaken.

And I think ultimately it will decouple um because you know it benefits from gresham's law as does gold and uh you know it's when when you know a lot of it depends uh well on the policy response and what you know what the government decides to do i mean the point of my book is that they're going to be forced into printing money and when they are forced into printing money then you know we're going to see what we saw in in 2020 or what we saw in 2008 which is sound money assets are going to take off and uh you know but but when that when that print occurs who knows and they're trying to figure out all kinds of stealth ways to print money but not say they're printing it i mean

you know they're talking about they're going to take the supplementary leverage ratio down to zero so the banks can buy more bonds. There's a big Zero Hedge article this morning, a premium that talks about how they're talking about possibly revaluing the gold that they hold. They have 261.5 million ounces of gold, theoretically, in Fort Knox and Denver and West Point. Whether it's really there or not, a lot of us are somewhat skeptical. Right, Dave? Not to mention what's under Wall Street. Yeah, but the theory is that if they marked it up,

that that would be an immediate credit to the... Similar... I'm over in Europe, and already we're starting to freak out about the defense spending that's going to be needed given the new stance of the... well, expected stance of the United States, and what's that going to do to money printing over here which is a reminder that this is not just a U.S. phenomenon and crypto are not just U.S. assets and Dave what's your take on that well I mean it's funny listening to Mike you know the first three quarters everything you said I agree with completely I definitely am on board with what Lawrence is just saying. But honestly,

if you think about what are the macro things that have to happen for Bitcoin to have an explosive second half of the year, they're all happening. So think about what it is that we care about. What is Bitcoin? Verifiability. What have we seen over the last week in terms of massive news stories that are just getting started that even if they don't turn out to be true, still they're going to scare people. And if they do turn out to be true, are massive. Number one, massive stories about the gold of the Bank of England might not be there and calls for Doge to audit Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve Banks, et cetera, and a story out of Australia saying the Bank of England, based on serial numbers, almost certainly has counterfeit gold

bars. Well, when you compare Bitcoin to gold, what is one of its largest advantages? Bitcoin is 100% verifiable and easily verifiable cheaply, and gold is not. And that is a very big story. And yet nothing in the markets yet. Okay, that's cool. We're used to things happening and it taking months for it to get digested. What's the second story? Elon is making claims that the social security database is completely foobarred. And there is an enormous amount of fraud going on, just absolutely enormous. What has he said we should be doing with all of these spending programs? Putting them on the blockchain. Whether that's good for Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever blockchain, it doesn't matter. But in terms of public trust,

in terms of becoming a risk-off versus a risk-on asset, the notion that using blockchain for something so important and finding a fraud on the scale of 100 Enrons within Social Security and how no one is talking about what the long term implication of that is, is mind boggling to me. I'm here out in Mammoth Mountain. You know, we're skiing and I'm enjoying myself. I'm reading these stories and I'm thinking, why is no one talking about this? This is a big, big deal. The third story that is huge for Bitcoin and will ultimately be good for crypto is we're finally seeing the meme coin implosion. The thing that we have wanted for a long time. So when Mike says there's two or 11.1 million cryptos, it's like, yeah, that's

right. Because we haven't punished anybody for doing shit that if they were doing it in a security, they would get punished for in any major jurisdiction. And that's going to happen. What happened in Argentina and your newsletter lays it out really well for those who don't know. Crypto is macro now is Noelle's newsletter. She did a phenomenal, she will not promote herself, but I will promote her. I was one of the first subscribers, I think. Love you, Dave. I read it religiously, and she did a good job of pointing this out. Basically, what goes on with sniping in meme coins is no different.

It is literally the same with modern technology as the shit that happened in boiler rooms back, and they still happen in boiler rooms, but happened in boiler rooms in securities back in the early 2000s. We all saw The Wolf of Wall Street because it was a cool movie and people liked Margot Robbie, et cetera. But the fact is, is this stuff happens. And there are people who would do this for a living. Now, the internet and the global scale of it has made this much larger between the Trump and Melania sniping and now the Libra sniping. What is sniping? Sniping are insiders front running the rest of the world and then dumping on them. There is no person who is serious, who believes that shouldn't be considered fraud and punishable by law in every jurisdiction that it happens. I don't know of one who thinks that.

And the scale at which it's happening, as you pointed out, is different. Yeah, the scale is huge, but let me finish and then you can go off. What is one of the big things that changed on November 5th? Instead of having an administration that basically said, sure, do memes, we don't care. Just don't do anything serious and we'll let you go. We now have an actual crypto czar. We have an actual infrastructure. We now have Paul Atkins and Brian Kintenz getting ready to take the reins at the SEC and CFTC who all agree with the words I just said. The people who are running crypto policy in the United States all agree that this shit should stop and we should have a reasonable principles-based

way of regulating this stuff. Now, it's going to take time, but these examples are going to be incredibly helpful to make it obvious. Okay, now you should talk about the scale. Why is it so obvious? You hit the nail on the head there when you say this should be regulated, but just last week, Hester Pierce, the head of the crypto committee on the SEC, said that, no, meme coins are not part of our purview. They're not part of our box. And yes, obviously they're not. And I myself have said in the past, no, meme coins should not be regulated. They're like gambling. But I think this weekend, even those of us who thought meme coins alone have said enough. This is enough. This is fraud. This has to stop. Can I just interrupt you really quickly? It is gambling, and gambling is fine. Can you go to Las Vegas? Can you go to Atlantic City? Can you go to a casino where the casino is legally allowed

to wait the dice, have mechanics operating at the blackjack table, for those who don't know, a mechanic is someone who can deal bottoms or seconds and cause winners and losers, or fix the roulette wheel so as to make people lose more than they win. In every jurisdiction, gambling is regulated. And so it may not be the SEC. I don't think it should be the SEC, but it doesn't mean it should be nobody. And that's the point. And what I'm excited about is the possibility, which is higher now than it has ever been in the past, that now we actually do get comprehensive crypto rules, not bucking

them, not bucketing the assets into pre-established buckets, which were set up 100 years ago, creating entirely new definitions and hopefully maybe creating entirely new division, entirely new team to give this asset class its due, not trying to convince us that tokenized securities are the same as traditional securities and not trying to convince us that mean coins don't need some rules around them. Insider trading is fraud and sniping is a type of fraud as well. So and crypto and casinos do have rules. So I think this weekend did change the narrative a lot.

Once we do start getting regulation, then to Mike's point, we will see most of those crypto tokens disappear. We will continue to see fraud. We will continue to see innovation. That's just simply human spirit. But they will be cleaner and it will be better trusted and institutions will be more comfortable,

especially if we do start to get deeper institutional grade services. As we saw last week as well, reports that City and State Street are now working on crypto custody. BNY are already doing that. They're probably going to ramp up the marketing of that. And that is one of the catalysts, I think, that will bring the big institutions into the crypto market. And to Lawrence's point, they're probably going to start at Bitcoin because it's the deepest, it's the one with the most off-ramps, and it is the only one that is clearly not a security. Lawrence, do you want to take it? Yeah, no, I just agree.

I mean, I think it's sad, and my book talks about this, I think it's sad how much crypto and you know the sam bankman freed actors and and others like him i mean now we know that president malay is one of them have have distorted what dave and i understand to be you know an incredible technological innovation which is what bitcoin is bitcoin they solved the you know the byzantine generals problem it was a math problem that couldn't be solved for years. They solved it. And so they created legitimate digital scarcity.

So it's kind of, you know, there's money pre-Bitcoin and money post-Bitcoin. I mean, until the Wright-Belozers flu, humans didn't fly. Now we fly. And that's really the kind of level of development this is. And sadly, you know, there's nothing else like Bitcoin. All these other coins are, you know,'s nothing else like bitcoin all these other coins are you know proof of uh proof of state not proof of work and so you know they're just they're just gambling tokens and and you know they confuse people and it it really they hurt bitcoin a lot

in my opinion um and they should be heavily right in my opinion they should be heavily regulated or shut down i mean i i suppose it is legal in this country to gamble and we do have a lottery and all that i i don't think those are particularly great activities but but dave's point is fair that if you're going to do that at least make the rules fair so that you know they can't you can't just obviously you know fraud people and you know to that point um you know you know look at look at our new president, who kind of immediately pre-being inaugurated, launched his own coin and then had his wife launch a coin. I mean, it was just so sad. I was just so disappointed in that behavior.

It's important to understand what people are... Look, I've been listening, and it's funny. I saw, i think the interesting about the most interesting thing about the meme economy when i said we may finally be seeing what we've seen is arguably the human being who expressed the the bull case for meme coins better than anyone was ran munir and i don't know i'm not sure i know ran i don't know how he pronounces his name i'm sorry if i'm butchering it but you know he know, he talked about for years, you know, you build a community and then you can eventually monetize the community and you get all the eyeballs together and, you

know, et cetera, et cetera. That's fine. You know, whatever. I mean, I've always kind of shrugged my shoulders at this. And, you know, I think the things that are interesting and bright and shiny and new, hell, I'm not going to lie. I got involved in one meme coin. I think it's kind of cool.

But it's, you, but it depends on what kind of community you're in. It's called Sparky Token because it's about an AI roboticized dog as opposed to all these, whatever dogs. Did I put anything serious in it? Not investment advice, right? No. And did I put any serious money into it? No, of course not. You're killing me, man. You're killing me. But my point is, it's something to, you want to build, if you want to build a community, you want to get eyeballs. We have an attention economy.

We have people who have the attention span of hummingbirds out there. You know, it's like the things that are actually going on, fundamental things that are happening are really important, right? You know, I talked about two of the three of them. The third one is what's going on vis-a-vis freedom of speech, which is if anyone's been following my ex-account, I've always been. It's been in my profile since I started it. I'm a free speech maximalist. I think it's really important.

We literally had an anchor at 60 Minutes say the single dumbest thing that any news person has ever said in the history of television broadcast journalism. And people are shrugging their shoulders at it. I mean, we had a woman who said that Germany used, and this is relevant to this for a lot, and I'll get to it, but she literally said that Germany, you know, committed genocide because of freedom of speech. Weaponization of free speech. Literally ignoring the fact that the very first thing that Hitler did in 33 was ban free speech and made it illegal to criticize his government

because Joseph Goebbels, which was the propaganda minister, said, if we can't get public opinion behind us, people are not going to be willing to do the things that we're going to ask them to do. Literally the opposite. Free speech is the one thing that stops genocides like this from happening. In every single case of genocide, in everyone throughout human history, it's always been based upon scapegoating and blaming and getting the population behind the genocide. And yet we have this. Now, why does this matter? Because freedom and freedom of speech is literally one of the core tenants in Bitcoin. How many times have you heard Bitcoin as speech from people saying why it needs to be protected, why you shouldn't be able to ban it, etc.? And so you're seeing the last gasps of the old institutions who are trying to stop a freedom economy from taking root.

And I think this time with the vice president, the United States gave one of the great expositions of the importance of freedom of speech that I've seen. I mean, yeah, you know, the Germans are not very happy about it because within days they were invading people and literally putting them in jail for posting memes or criticisms of the German government. You know, what does that sound like? You know, I'm going to be you will see me be, you know, and I will engage with anybody who wants to discuss this, but it matters for crypto. You mentioned the lottery, Larry. You like Lawrence better than Larry, right? Lawrence, you mentioned the lotteries. Lotteries are state-used. Governments use lotteries as a tax on the poor to raise money because the payouts are so bad.

I mean, come on, at least when a charity does a 50-50 drawing, you know half the profits are going to the state. People use lotteries to do that. What are meme coins at its core? What are people investing in meme coins for? They're trying to buy lottery tickets. They're trying to buy the next Shiba Inu. And to that degree, the entire category of that, which is what I was asking for the show, matters. So when you look at 11 million cryptos, okay, how many of them are real companies? Probably less than a thousand. The rest of them are, quote, projects. And what are those projects? They're lottery tickets. And should people be allowed to try to make them? Sure. But understand what they are. Anyway, so there's a rambling answer there,

because there's a lot of stuff in the middle of all of this. I want to get Mike's take on something, on a narrative that's related. I mean, we've lived through the mean stock craze, and the mean token, the mean coin craze is not totally dissimilar and indicative of a certain amount of froth. And let's face it, financial conditions have been loose. We then, that got wiped out while it did attract basically all of the attention. But then did we get back to fundamentals in the stock market when that changed? Will we see something similar in crypto? Well, that's the problem I like and Dave, appreciate him pushing back.

I mean, this is so important. We have this discourse. Is crypto on a broad basis, we all can agree is a leveraged version of beta. And the question is Bitcoin. It still trades three times the volatility of gold and three times the volatility of S&P 500. And we haven't seen the S&P 500 print its 200-day moving average since October of 2023. It's going to do that this year. Blame me if I'm wrong. And when it does that, I fully expect the whole crypto It's going to do that this year. Blame me if I'm wrong. And when it does that, I fully expect the whole crypto market's going to get clobbered. Bitcoin might not get down as much,

but we have not even started the purge. Shiba Inu and Doge and most of those 11 million cryptos have to lop off zeros. We've seen this happen before. Those of us who traded things back in 1999, it's happened. It's just way overdue. This is just silly, massive speculation. And it's pumped up. And it's melting every day now. That's my point is this is a process that's happening despite the S&P 500 making new highs.

And Larry pointed out how we know what's happening in earnings. They're tilting lower for equities. We know it's borrowed time. Everybody gets it. Even President Trump. And he gets it. He's got great advice from Mr. Besson. He's a trader. Traders get this. You don't want to buy when everybody's saying buy. That's what's happening when it's super expensive. And this is what got me out of the trading pits 30 years ago is when I pointed out just the streams. And this is where we are right now. So I think based on that too is

I think Bitcoin meets the major threshold at $100,000. And now that all the mainstream saying to buy it and all the insiders who did buy it when they figured it out 10 years ago are saying, thank you very much. But now the mainstream is buying. You got to be very careful. And it's just human nature to try to jump on board and buy things like Shibu Inu that have, you know, point zero zero zero. And it goes to one cent, you make a killing. This is extreme stuff. This is as bad as the dot-com bubble. And that's why I'm tilting over to gold.

But even gold's getting expensive near $3,000. So the macro and you see in commodities is everything's tilting that way. And that's why I think that you see it from Brest and Trump. I think they're going to have a great trade in getting that 10-year yield to go lower. And part of the key thing will make that go lower. So I'm going to piggyback on this. Larry, you mentioned 140 Bitcoin. 140 Bitcoin this year implies that we might add another $10 trillion in U.S. stock market market capitalization, unless you're expecting complete divergence, meaning that correlation

we've had forever to go reverse. I mean, that might work. Well, good luck with that one. That also means more Fed tightening, more inflation, more wealth effect. That's why the Fed stopped. One of the reasons they stopped easing. Or we'd say we get a normal correction. Bitcoin, let's say, drops the same amount, drops to $60,000.

Not a big deal. We're just there a few months ago. A month ago, that brings the Fed back in. That probably means a little bit correction in the stock market, which we're way overdue for. It brings Fed easing back on. You see the bent here? Higher Bitcoin is the problem. It means more speculative excesses, more inflation. Fed's got to tighten. There's no doubt there's correlation there, Mike. I don't disagree with you at all. And I think both of those prices are very much in the realm of possibility. The thing you said that really resonated with me, because we've all been through these markets and I was very active in the 2000s.

This feels very much like March of 2000 to me. I mean, I think we are really, I don't know if it does see you, I see you nodding. I mean, it just feels to me like we're building a top here. And it was interesting when that bubble burst, you know, it took a little while for it to get momentum. I mean, kind of all of 2000, the market chopped around, up, down, up, down, up, down. I mean, the real speculative stuff started blowing up. But it wasn't until, you know, I was short things. It wasn't until late 2000 and then 2001.

Look out. I mean, the bottom just fell out. And that's kind of how I feel about these markets right here. But to be fair and to criticize myself, I felt that way probably for a year or so so i might be too early yeah i i think i'm sorry well look you know there's there's two points there first one 2000 was the the march 2000 you know mass nasdaq sell-off that got triggered from tax you know people who had all those taxable gains had to sell and there wasn't a buyer because there was a liquidity. And then by August, it had rallied back to recover all those.

And then the slide started, and it was more gentle. Yeah, there were some ducks down. And then we all know what happened in 2001. And we all know that the proximate cause for the real depth of that market was the Twin Towers, et cetera, et cetera. We know what happened, the idiocy of going to Iraq. We could go down that rabbit hole. But the most important thing you just said, Lawrence, which is really, really important, is that the market bifurcated. And yes, Amazon and Cisco and other high flyers got absolutely annihilated down, Amazon down 90%,

and people remember this stuff, right? Yet at the same time, thousands, and I mean, literally thousands of OTC stocks and smaller cap, small cap NASDAQ stocks got wiped out to zero. Meanwhile, within 10 years, Amazon was worth 10 to actually 100x of where it was at the bottom. And the entirety of the internet sector was up a lot. People tend to remember these things. So Bitcoin, I will tell you, I believe is 90 plus percent undervalued right now with exact monetary conditions relative to gold and everything else. And you don't have to see that. If it were to drop 90 it would be a hundred times undervalued there are is a lot of money a lot more money than is necessary to keep bitcoin at these prices look who agree with

me that it's 90 undervalued right now in the world and in a world where markets do implode like that liquidity is going to be injected in like a friggin fire hose mike always talks about that's the point where's that money coming from that's my point is we're so addicted to this u.s stock market going up and i point out last year that 12 trillion dollars is the most in the history of mankind of wealth creation why is retail sales dipping that environment and cpi high we've reached an apex yeah market bubbles can get big and but you got to be careful. And just these coins and Milana coins and just what happened, copper last week, the bell rang in copper that you should sell. That's from a commodity guy. Yeah, I've been stopped out before,

but that's what I'm seeing. So let's try to keep things on a very simple playing field here, right? If the argument is that the stock market is going to implode and it doesn't do that. I mean, it's not, you know, we've outlawed crashes, right? You know, the markets will close. Well, you know, there'll be a plateau. No, we haven't outlawed falling. But, you know, it's not going to go drop 90 percent a day. You know, we saw anyone who lived through 2008 knows exactly what

will happen you will have massive bazookas of liquidity being talked about the plunge protection team will get together there will be all sorts of things will happen ultimately will they succeed no if markets are going to find a new level yeah we could see a major correction in the market absolutely but along the way certain things are going to go they're going to change i always point out mike and you always have to admit that there was a delay in the lag but in the great depression or the in the mid 30s home stake mining which was the proxy for gold and the only proxy for gold that you could possibly have went up dramatically when the stock market was getting crushed that big well and i've said this before bitcoin's going to be let's look at the 2000 example so if bitcoin is digital gold in 2000

the stock market basically in the next two years it lost 55 of its value that kicked off the bull market in gold gold was at 250 at the time and in the next two years it went to five or six hundred on its way to nineteen hundred so you know gold gold and stocks are counter cyclical and there's a lot of data to prove that they they move inversely you know and and so you know when the stock market is healthy and credit's expanding healthy and there's no monetary debasement stocks win gold loses when the stock market's blown apart and there's a lot of monetary debasement witness what you just alluded to dave you know they're going to come in and do a big print gold takes off like a scalded dog and so so i think mike one of the things you've got to factor in is if

bitcoin is now digital gold and we have a stock downturn with a lot of printing dave's going to be right here's the key thing lawrence it's not digital gold yet but there are a ton of people that we've been seeing for eight months and and we're seeing it accelerate now a rotation from people who buy bitcoin and sell bitcoin on massive leverage i mean you know 100x leverage whatever nonsense uh Two people who are accumulating it and holding it because they think it's 90% undervalued relative to gold. And those same people generally are more likely to be investing in gold alongside it than saying, no, no, no, no, no.

I mean, you find me a Bitcoiner who is at our age that doesn't own gold also. And I would say that'd be the first one I've ever found. Yeah, there aren't many of them. That's our age and the big wave of investors coming in are younger. I got to pick them back up. Our discussion's missing. I'm not pointing out stock market crashes.

I'm just pointing out relative valuations historically. We all know it's worked that way. The difference with the last corrections, we've learned the lesson of too much liquidity and inflation it created, and that's part of what helped Mr. Trump get elected because inflation helps people like us, anybody who owns assets and has a home and stocks, it hurts your average person, 55% of the wage earners in this country. And that we've learned that. Also what tilted him also was figuring out Bitcoin. The key thing that's pointed out here is Lawrence Pardell us gold oh we all know this has zero correlation in the stock market historically yes if it crashes it'll go down initially but we know

cryptos have a very high correlation to equities that's my point is let's get past that hump absolutely right now as far as a relative value risk gases on a global basis u.s is the most expensive ever u.s stocks bitcoin is the most expensive ever relative to many other things. It's 100,000 threshold. I agree with that. And then we have that massive amount of competition and supply. Remember, you don't have that in precious metals. There's only three other ones, silver, platinum, and platinum.

In cryptos, there's gazillions. And then there's this massive issue of what's happening in the rest of the world. Just look at their sovereign bond yields. The average of the five top countries in the world by GDP, their 10-year note yields, starting with China, are about 130 basis points less than the U.S. That's signs of a problem. That includes India.

Before the financial crisis, they were about 100 basis points above the U.S. So what's the tilt here? When we have a little bit of normalization, the next big trade, I think, will be those treasury bonds. And the key thing you're missing about pumping and dumping, we've learned that lesson. When it comes time to do that, everybody can say, well, you did that last time and you ruined my life. The total CPI is up maybe 30% since the end of 2019. Your average wage earner is not making 30%

more. Yeah, there's no doubt. Absolutely. I want to pull on the thread of, will the Fed come in and just print money should we get that correction we're waiting for? Oh, yeah. Will it? I mean, that's the easy thing to do. But then again, most of the current narrative, especially from the current administration, is that that is precisely what led to part of the problem, certainly in the heartland. It boosted assets. It boosted stock markets.

It didn't actually help people. And this comes down, Joe Creston, I want to throw back at you, Mike. We've been taught, I certainly was taught in school, that the stock market is not the economy. Has that changed? That's the key thing I enjoy about this, the lessons of Einstein, the questions that are the same, the answers have changed. Particularly crude, I really enjoyed pointing that out when it pumped above 100 last couple of years ago. This is the seed starting to go back to 50. Now it's still heading that way because the answers have changed.

And that's the big difference now is we've learned the lesson of too much liquidity and inflation. We've got that. Checkmark is the biggest inflation since most of us since the 70s, which I was most of us were really young. It's just the macro now. It's at that point now. And we all know it's just the complete every time we have a human nature, a complete optimism for this new president. Just get a little bit of tilt back to normalization. The Europeans are pointing that out. But the rest of the world facing these. Now, these are terrible things that I remember speaking with clients 30 years ago.

And here was a quote I used to use. This is the macro opening in where we used to say, yeah, everybody in the world says they want free trade as long as they can run a surplus with the U.S. It's impossible to have free trade with the rest of the world because we're the demand pool economy. We can't have a currency adjustment and we provide security. There has to be higher tariffs than anybody else coming to the U.S. It's just to even it out. And that's happening. And my point is the tilt is already that way. As I point out in Bonniel's, the rest of the world heading towards a deflationary recession. Will they print? They have to, but they also have to pay for their own security now. The U.S. has been, and I have a lot of skin in the game in the military,

and I don't want my kids, the people I know, dying overseas. And most Americans get that now, the rest of the world. So this is my point is it's not Smoot-Hawley. It's worse. And it's completely defendable, and it's complete. The world has become accustomed to exporting to u.s that trade's over and yet at the same time number one smooth holly with the u.s at the time of smooth holly was the net exporter the massive

net exporter and so the effects of tariffs would be different. Number two, and we could go down that rabbit hole. Number two, Trump's tariff policy that is starting to emerge looks a hell of a lot more rational than certain people who on this thing have said. What is the emerging tariff policy? Use tariffs as a threat for geopolitical things, which has been successful, things like curbing fentanyl, and go to reciprocal tariffs, pointing out where people are going back to fundamental fairness. Now, what will that do? That will tilt and cause certain, there will be lots of issues to that, but it won't be Smoot-Hawley. It's not going to be global depression, you know, sort of things. But the most important point when we talk about inflation is we have a, you said it, Scott Bessette is a trader. Inflation, people in

all the economists, and I love making fun of stupid economists, make this argument that we managed to have monetary printing, you know, huge monetary printing without inflation. They're absolutely wrong. We had huge monetary printing and we channeled inflation toward assets as opposed to toward consumer goods by prioritizing capital over labor. I'll get all Thomas Piketty on them because he's right in what he's saying. And by doing things such as making it more, you, effectively, to invest in technology and automation, overly cheap to make the investments to do outsourcing. Outsourcing is not cheap. It's not free. It costs money for companies to set up outsourcing to do that. And so what we did

is we prioritized something that was guaranteed to increase the wealth gap. And so that massive 30% print, what was that because that was because both Trump and then Biden on steroids decided to put money in the hands of the average person. Right. So, you know, the actual stimulus checks and all that other stuff, they broke the taboo. They broke, they literally changed the flow of money from assets to consumers and that triggered 30% inflation. And they realize that mistake. People have figured it out, and they're not doing it again. And now we're in a situation where they're trying to get the genie back in the bottle. Will they succeed? Well, if you believe

true inflation, they're starting to succeed, right? So if that's true and monetary printing is going to continue to happen, then shorting asset price based on the denominator of the money probably isn't a smart move. One quote, and we'll piggyback, is from Robert Lighthizer's book, No Trade is Free. The U.S. has been exporting wealth to the rest of the world for decades. That's stopping. That's my point. It's shifting that backwards. And this is not my view.

This is Robert Lighthizer. The largest military in the world was built in U.S. dollars, and it's not in the U.S. This is what's focusing. I would behoove people not to underestimate the motivation of President Trump right now. By the way, he's got less than four years left,

and he's done. He's going to make sure it happens soon. And depending on what happens in the midterms, maybe even less, just, you know, who knows. But, you know, Dave, coming back to something you said, and this was something I was going to throw your way. We do have, going back to U.S. Main Street, inflation expectations are blowing out, not only on the surveys, but also in the tips yield. Inflation expectations are blowing out. Is that tariff expectations or is that money printing expectations or is that just people are scared well it's people are scared but i mean at the you have a vice president has said it very

eloquently that we need to bring things back to united states well what does that mean well right now building the united states is dramatically more expensive than in a lot of these other countries because it's not just wages. It's environmental laws. It's oceans of red tape. We could go chapter and verse and look at what's happening in California. I mean, people aren't going to get back into those houses for a year. And that's with Newsom claiming he's going to cut red tape. I mean, we've made it almost impossible to build factories at anything close to the cost that it's done in Mexico or China. And the wages are only 20% of that. And everyone always looks at the wages. You're looking at the 20% unless that changes.

Now, will it change? Well, that's the promise. We'll see. But if I'm an American, average American, I'm taking a survey. Do I believe that they're actually going to fix something that's so structural? Look at the screaming that's going on from, you know, from almost half of the politicians in Washington about doing things to actually stop fraud, waste and abuse. Look at the screaming. I mean, you know, it's we knew this was going to happen. But this this this is actually the debate, the fight, because if we are capable of reforming our system to the point where we're going into politics isn't a way to get rich, which, by the way, has been the truth in every single command and control economy ever. But when we look down at our own, you know, look at how look at the average wealth in the Senate and the House. It's not pretty, right? You know, it really isn't

beautiful. And you see why we're now hearing the stories, we're seeing the truth, that money is getting sent around to their families, right? You know, it's the stuff that we're seeing. No, let me take this inflation thing a little bit. You know, Mike earlier mentioned that there might be a trade in some of these bonds, because we've got a little bit of a deflationary impulse here. And I don't disagree with that. But I think that, you know, we had 40 years of deflation based on the china price and a lot of other things that happened from you know volcker to the present and when when covet happened that that trend got snapped and it's very hard to turn it around and we now in my view we

now live in a secularly inflationary world and i'll just cite a few examples you know the long shorman went out last fall and struck on their wages. They got a six year deal for 10 percent a year, up 60 percent over over six years. 10 percent is a long ways away from the Fed's 2 percent target. You know, the DBA agricultural ETF last year was up 28 percent for the year. By the the way that's why your grocery bill hurts so much i mean you know and and as we all know you know they have hedonics and a lot of other things they do to cook the inflation numbers you know i personally had a house where the the insurance went up 100 year over a year the homeowner's insurance my automobile insurance went up 33 last year i mean

the notion that inflation is kind of really running at what they tell us, this 2% or 3%, that's just a fantasy. I mean, we live in an inflationary world now. Oh, and by the way, nobody's talking about it, but tariffs are inflationary, right? So in an inflationary world, what do you not want to own? I mean, with all due respect to Mike, you might want to own bonds for a trade, but you sure don't want to own them long term, right? And you probably don't want to own stocks because in the 70s, stocks did pretty poorly because, you know, you're not able to necessarily have the pricing power to maintain your margins. And what you want to own are things that can't be debased. And, you know, so there we go, gold and Bitcoin, right? So gold can, I mean, Bitcoin is, the competition is massive so

we'll give you the deflationary tilt um first of all profits let's look at um the number one thing that the reason that u.s corporations which are profit maximalists have done why they reshored and why did we created all this import markets for profits what's going to get hit hard what are expectations for way high profits so let's give an example of that. Right now, our trade deficit, which you said is going to be tariffs are inflationary short term. So maybe it's about a trillion dollars. Let's say you add 20% on that. That's $200 billion. Big deal. If the stock market drops 10%, which used to be normal, that's $6 trillion. That's what, 20% of GDP? be normal, that's $6 trillion. That's, what, 20% of GDP?

I mean, that's massive deflation. Look at the price of unleaded gas. The number one measure of two measures of consumer sentiment over time is gas prices going up or down and stock market prices going up or down. Gas prices right now, $3.16 on a national basis with first trade in 2007. So, yes, you're seeing some pockets of inflation on the back of the number one factor, the big pump from COVID. But I'll mention two books, The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth, a big Bitcoiner, massive deflationary forces from these little things called technology. I see it every day.

The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor, pointing out deflation always comes in back of massive pumps and liquidity. What's happening in China right now, the property crisis, severe deflation. So I think the key thing you're pointing out is anecdotal things. It's the max. You've also, it's all dependent on the stock market going up. We have to see that tide going up. So that's my point is the next big trade is the US catching up to China's bond yields. We've seen it happen in Japan. It's just happening globally. And the tariffs are part of that tilt. That's my point is I think Besson and Trump get it. You can't just have a stock market go straight up over time. If you get that correction over with early, to me, I'm talking about a trade. But also there's one other thing I want to mention is we have the world's

largest employer. The U.S. government is cutting workforce like we've never seen before. Now, we knew what Trump and Elon were going to do, go fast, move fast, and break things. I love the criticizing, like criticizing the president for trying to end killing in the war. I mean, at least he's trying. We haven't come to the grief. He's trying to stop the death. And I love the criticizing, but it's great. I completely defend what he's doing, But we are purging this massive employer.

It's just getting started in this deflation. And it always comes at peaks when people are worried about inflations, when you get the opposite. I hear you, Mike. And I don't disagree. And Jeff's booth is great. And I read Chancellor's book as well. And we live in a deflationary world, but we've got a monetary system that actually requires inflation or else it blows up. It has to expand. And we learn that. Yeah, it's like a shark. It has to swim and expand. And so. And it's a tool to bring down the debt relative to GDP. Right. Fine. So what you you know, what you're talking about occurs, the natural deflation takes place.

And then guess what? You know, the base level of money can't support the debt structure. And guess what? Here comes another big print. You know, I mean, right. I mean, we know that the third Fed mandate is financial stability. And so we know and we know there's a Fed put underneath the stock market. So the stock market falls 30 percent. Unemployment starts to spike. I mean, we're going to be back to QE and ZERP, you know, so fast your head will spin. Right. So if the stock market falls 30 percent, what happens to Bitcoin? My point is you're missing. We're not missing, but I don't disagree. It goes down in that instance. I don't disagree with that briefly. I look at it as a trader. There's going to be a great trade here. That might be the time to buy risk assets. But right now, isn't it? I want to I want to start, I want to start because we haven't got much time left.

I want to start wrapping this up by bringing this to the uncertainty that is, of course, underlying all of these conversations. We have no idea how successful Trump and Doge team are going to be in getting down the deficit. We have no idea what's going to be happening on the military spending front. And we don't even know if we're going to have a functioning government after March the 14th, which is when the debt conversations, I think that's the next deadline for them to reach an agreement on. What do you guys think is going to happen there? Because that depends, that affects a lot, not just the regulation that

we know we need for crypto, but it also affects the spending. It's such political theater. I mean, come on. I mean, Lawrence and I are both going to shake our heads and say there is only one direction the debt goes. That's up. Now, the only thing that can change that is two things. And they both have to happen. One, what they're doing with Doge and everything else, you know, finding all this stuff, downsizing government and decreasing, you know, what we're actively spending on to buy us a little bit of time and to cutting the bureaucracy to encourage hyper growth, which would be may show up in the current stock market. It may be new companies. You know, you can talk about where it is. It's literally the only way out

long term. As far as March is concerned, it's really a question of can the Republicans hold their shit together to get some of this stuff passed? Or are we going to blow up in a paroxysm of screaming matches again? I mean, you know, the amount, I don't think I've ever seen more absolute lies being screamed at by people ever. I've never seen this. I mean, things that are factually untrue, like, you know, dumb shit, like getting rid of the Department of Education to lend the Pell Grants. No, that's not the proposal to move the Pell Grants under the Treasury. I mean, you can go through a whole litany of these things. So many things from literally this, the presumptive ranking member, the Speaker of the House of the Democrats win the Congress, Hakeem Jeffries, literally lying to people.

I mean, and not in a subtle way. We're seeing, you know, all of them do this. So and yet now we have this big theater that will come up in March. The question is, will the Republicans be able to pass something before that? Because what do they want to do? They want to make it a $4 trillion increase so that they don't have to fucking worry about this for the next two years and can get on with business. What does all this mean? It means more liquidity being pumped into the economy. I see Mike smiling. I mean, we, this is, we've seen this movie. We know what's going to happen. They're going to pass a debt increase. This is, that've seen this movie. We know what's going to happen.

They're going to pass a debt increase. That's all a rounding error and it's all very predictable. What will be interesting to see is if percent goes for a gold reset, which is kind of being kicked around and very much possible in my view, and something they probably need to do. They've got to figure out ways to get more liquidity into the system. And he's as much as said that, you know, he wants to, you know, liquefy the asset side of the balance sheet. The only thing that's really liquid there is the gold and silver that they hold. So, you know, I think that's going to be the story of the next six months. Can I make one other point, Lawrence? I'm curious what you think about that.

So we all know that as far as the U.S. government balance sheet, the single largest landholder in the United States is the U.S. government. And I started to see it getting floated. Talk about the ultimate rug pull on land. Yeah, if they start selling land, it's possible. I don't know. My gut is the Defense Department is not going to let them. I think they think a lot of that's strategic stuff.

But who knows? So to wrap it all up, there's a lot of tension. There's a lot of that strategic stuff. But who knows? So to wrap it all up, there's a lot of tension. There's a lot of people screaming. Bitcoin could shoot up to 150 or it could come crashing down to 60. It very much depends what the stock market is going to do. We don't really know.

In terms of that, let's a quick fire round here. Seconds each because we've got three minutes left. Catalysts. Mike, what catalyst do you think will start the move going that you're waiting for? What's always happened in history is risk assets just get too expensive and they mean revert. And it's a question of timing. I feel like I have to

point out from my colleague, Gina Martin-Adams, she's pointing one thing about the U.S. stock market rally. It has earnings. We remember in the bubble in 2000 they didn't have earnings but cryptos don't have earnings so to me this is very much a dot-com bubble levels in cryptos we need to lop off zeros the catalyst i don't think i don't know what it'll be next but i like to did point out we are the world's largest employers purging his biggest purge probably in history um and this everything cutting out that waste means all that excess spending is being pulled from the economy remember what we have like six to seven percent of GDP needs to be contracted at least a little bit. And that's my point. As I look at it, I'm just gold. A bullish copper, a bullish crude oil. Typically, you need a lower price cure. And I think we're still at the risk of Bitcoin's just too expensive. Risk assets are just too expensive. And as far as the catalyst, I'm waiting. But right now,

I think Bitcoin might be the leading indicator for everything. It needs to stay above 100 grand. If it doesn't, everything trickles down. It's definitely a liquidity widget. I think Mike makes a very good point that a lot of people have not focused on, which is if Doge is successful, that's very recessionary. You know what I mean? You cut expenses and it shows up somewhere else, right? We've seen that. I mean, I read an article this morning about house prices in the Washington, D.C. area. It's just frightening. And the house price, the mortgages are held on bank balance sheets. Again, frightening.

Lawrence, Catalyst, seconds. I think it's going to be very interesting to watch what the Treasury does with both the term maturities on the debt they have to roll over. I mean, very few people have focused on it. We haven't talked about it. They've got to roll over between $7 and $10 trillion of the debt this year. And so Mike is all over this because he's a bond guy. I mean, oh, my God. I mean, this is going to how the hell are they going to do that? I mean, I think the SLR change is one thing they'll do. I think they're probably using

the tariffs as a club to try and get foreigners to buy the bonds. And then they'll say, hey, we'll give you a swap line if you need it. I mean, it've got to me, the treasury market and what Besant decides to do, revaluing the gold, et cetera. I mean, it's just, it's fascinating. And to me, I think it's going to be the biggest catalyst to what's going to happen. Watch the auctions then, right? What's your favorite catalyst? My favorite catalyst is the absolute certainty that all of Wall Street is going to be unleashed to offer crypto and most importantly, Bitcoin and potentially Ethereum and other trading services, allowing the unlock to finally happen where it gets its share of all wealth. And then the stories start about what does it actually mean? And so all this de-linking stuff, trading at a 90% discount, these are very powerful narratives. At the same time, money printing, I believe that's why the back half of this year, and I think it'll probably

happen further, but sooner. I think that's why you'll see that rally. I think the trade is if you figure out which are the companies that can't take advantage of this or cannot, as Mike puts it, you know, keep their margins because they don't have the ability to do so. The trade is going to be long. Bitcoin is short that and a bunch of other crap within the crypto sphere. I think there are some winners in the crypto sphere that will take place. But I do think that Bitcoin being able to be offered by the entire brokerage community in the United States, that all of these things is a very, very big deal. Because still, when you ask people, you mentioned Bitcoin to people, what do you hear? The first question, how do you invest in it? Name one other asset where the first question that you're asked is, how do you invest in it?

So up, down, sideways, we don't know. What we do know is things have never been this interesting. Thank you all so much for watching. Thank you so much, Dave, Mike, Lawrence, for being here. Tune in again next week. Let's go.