The Wolf Of All Streets - Everyone Wants Bitcoin - So Why Isn’t It Moving? | Macro Monday

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Everyone’s buying Bitcoin – Metaplanet is raising $5.4B, Saylor just added $110M, and Circle’s IPO is on fire. So why is Bitcoin still stuck? Noelle Acheson, Dave Weisberger, Mike McGlone, and James Lavish dig into market sentiment, looming macro risks, and whether inflation data or the U.S. debt spiral will finally move the needle. Join Crypto Is Macro now: https://www.cryptoismacro.com/ Noelle Acheson: https://x.com/noelleinmadrid Dave Weisberger: https://x.com/daveweisberger1 James Lavish: https://x.com/jameslavish Mike McGlone: https://x.com/mikemcglone11 ►► 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.io/ 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.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Wolf of All Streets Macro Monday show. I'm Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, filling in for Scott today. Very big shoes to fill. But it is great to be here with the gang and with all of you. There is so much to talk about. But before we dive in, do please hit the subscribe button so it'll be easier for you to find new shows.

And if you've already done that, right next to it is the like button. If you like this show, do please give that a click as well. We'd really appreciate it. Hi, everyone. Good to be here. How are you all doing? Hello. Doing great. I wish there was something going on for us to talk about. Exactly. However, will we fill the next hour?

Mike, could you kick us off, please, with what Bloomberg Economics is thinking? Yeah, I was kind of surprised this morning. A theme from two of our strategists, most notably Anna Wong and our fixed income strategist, Audrey Chilfringham was deflation. Now Anna's pointed out she expects the CPI numbers to be, she's on the lower end estimates, expects them to be lower and expects the headline to be 0.1% and core to be 0.17, which is a little bit less than expectations. And she's pointed out a key theme that she's seen for softer CPI despite the pass through tariffs is increasing deflationary forces in China.

Between airfares and recreational prices dropping negative 4% in airfares, pretty significant drops in hotel bookings, a lot of that's related to Doge. And her model, the model they put together shows a downside risk for CPI. Now let's just skip over to FX. Audrey Chill Freeman pointed out she sees deflationary risks brewing in Switzerland. Again, these aren't my views, these are their views and I'm just piggybacking on them. Gina Martin Adams pointed out she expects the S&P 500 is still somewhat vulnerable.

52 stocks are vast majority of all the returns are most concentrated since the nifty 50s, so I really enjoy when she does that. And so still somewhat bearish, and most of the factor models are still quite negative, but that's very high risk for only 52 stocks mattering for the total S&P 500. Ira Jersey pointed out, we're still range-bound for interest rates in less inflation expectations,

the job market tilts lower. And key theme from him was that we have 30-year box auction this week. I know James is going to be all over that. I see you nodding, James. I bet you can't wait to bid on those, and so you can ride them back up to 6% rather than down to 4%, I'm kidding, to rope you in. But the key thing he pointed out is a thing that I've been enjoying is the sensationalism and headlines about how the long end is just going to go higher.

So I piggybacked on that and gave my view that these deflationary forces are certainly not the case in crude oil, which makes sense. Now, crude oil right now is bumping up at $65 a barrel. Last year's low. So it's a bear market bounce. How much higher can go? And I just published today, I just piggybacked and published the difference between that 5% level resistance in the 30-year yield, copper about five bucks, corn about five bucks. If we can stand you above those levels, that's not consistent with Fed easing, Fed tightening. So it's like the demarcation line has declined. And then I ended with what theme I started in January pointing out that I still view

this $100,000 threshold in Bitcoin as a key risk asset threshold that's favorable for gold. So I'll end with this. I pointed out the facts of since Bitcoin search first reached 100,000 and then December 6th, it's up 7% or so. I mean, by end of the day, by 4 PM close and gold's up almost 30%. To me, that was the trigger for gold and and I still stick with that bias. So many threads to pull on there, Mike, but before we do a question for you, are you or the team focusing on Japan at all? Are you worried about Japan? There was no mention this morning in the meeting. My colleague Damian Sassaris speaks a lot about the JGBs, but the key theme this morning was 1.69 percent on that Chinese tenure note

Which is quite low and that's showing the deflationary forces out of China much more significant than Japan So really no mention of Japan this morning. Oh, um, Daurian range for audrey is 145 to 140 is what she's expecting Cool. Anyone who would pull on any of those? There's so many. There's lots to talk about. But yeah, the 30-year bond auction, I mean, that's squarely in focus for most investors this week. People are trying to figure out just how much that long end of the curve is going to continue to decouple from Fed policy? And that's the big question mark.

So how much are investors really concerned about long-term fiscal issues? And is there gonna be a fire strike on these 30 years? I mean, look, I'm not expecting in any way, shape, or form for there to be like a failed auction or something like that. I just wanna make sure that people understand that we're just looking to see how bad the bid to cover is,

just how much foreign demand there is outside of just hedge funds who are trading around this stuff. And one of the questions is, are you going to see international investors back off of bond purchases because of the possible extra tariff that's on international investors who that are deemed to have tariffs that are too high for us. So if they are, then you could have some foreign investors who are backing off the purchases of these treasuries because they're worried about the taxes that are going to be on their

interest or the tariffs that will be on their interest. So it is a question and we're watching closely. We also have the 10 year treasury auction on Wednesday, which is a $39 billion auction. And we've seen term premiums creep up towards 80 or 90 basis points at some at one point right I might go it was like 80 90 92 just a couple just a few weeks ago and so they've come back down the term premiums on the 10-year which is just under 70 basis points now but

that's something else we're watching to see if the 10-year before the 30-year if there's any just you know kind of not disruption but jitters before the 30-year before the 30-year if there's any kind of not disruption but jitters before the 30-year bond auction. So that's a big deal. And then of course, you get the CPI this week too. So there's a lot going on. There's plenty to impact markets broadly. There is. And not just the US market. Dave, before I throw it over to you, I actually was writing about this in the newsletter this morning. The 30 third year auction is on Thursday. And I shared a chart, which I can't share my screen, unfortunately, but there's a chart, all 30 year yields in not just the US, but UK, France, Japan, they're all at close to not record highs, except for Japan, obviously, but multi year highs, which

is a sign of a withdrawal from that end of the market around the world And what does that do to government deficits everywhere going forward Dave? Well, I mean the Japan threat is is is one that's interesting on the the high end but look there's Inflation in my mind goes back to Milton Friedman. And anytime I hear the word deflation, I immediately start thinking Keynesian versus monetarist debating and you get into this, you know, the entire notion that in a world where every government is running deficits and they're constantly plowing money in, that there could be deflation is foolish.

Now, is there deflation in certain goods? Of course there is. We have massive deflationary consumer good in things going on, mostly from technology. If it's energy, it has to do with fracking. If it's production, these days it's now AI and AI may be one of the greatest deflationary consumer forces ever, but that doesn't

change the fact that there is massive monetary inflation. And so financial assets continue to go up and are the biggest beneficiaries of that. And when you analyze these markets and treat every commodity and every asset the same as if it is if their exposure to deflationary technological forces and productivity forces are the same, you're going to make mistakes. And so to me, that's the problem lens with with where Mike started. It's certain things, obviously energy, obviously things that we manufacture. Now, these days, things where you can replace people with AI are all going to go down in price because guess what?

There's less demand and there's higher supply because of those technological forces. But to use the word deflation in a world where you're flooding the market with liquidity, that liquidity is gonna go someplace and where it's going to go is into financial assets. Now, typically, we look at financial assets through valuation lens. So we look at stocks based on earnings and book value and stuff like that. We

look at gold is basically has been the major beneficiary of monetary premia throughout the world over the last, you know, over the last, you know, whatever, you know, 5,000 years. I mean, I don't know what the number is, but certainly it's a long time. And recently, gold has not just gotten the majority, but up until, but given where it is vis-a-vis silver, and silver is definitely worth talking about, it has definitely gotten the most of it. And in this vast history of gold monetary premia

introduces this new thing called Bitcoin. Now, Bitcoin, we those of us, you know, people like James, who run the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and myself believe will eat into and eventually replace gold and monetary premia. But this doesn't happen overnight. This happens as a process. And what we've been seeing play out in the markets is we're in one of those times when you actually are seeing it play out in the markets. Right? There have been every reason for Bitcoin as a risk asset to fail at the 100,000 level because it got ahead of itself, it did this, it did that.

We've heard all the arguments. Yet, it's been in the tightest trading range that it's had in percentage terms ever, literally ever. Now over the last month or so, we had we thought was the biggest tightest trading range last year we went eight months where it traded in a 30% range. We're in a month where it's traded in a three or 4% range. You know, it's been between 102 and 107. I mean, maybe is it breaking out now? I don't know. But I mean, you know, come on. I mean, you know, we're splitting hairs. And the truth is that there's a supply-demand dynamic that's going on with Bitcoin. It's not leverage per se, although a lot of people like to say that it is. I mean leverage rates inside the Bitcoin speculative market are still crazily low well below long term If there was such a thing as a bitcoin VIX, it would be at a low This is this is a very important point and and someone's going to come up with a that that metric and so that james

And I can you know parrot it every week? I mean hell if they don't i'll start calculating it because it is it's important to know if you're in a Bitcoin low vote and Bitcoin's volatility is a ratio of the Bitcoin VIX to the S&P VIX would show the S&P VIX much higher. And that's important because we're in this supply demand dynamic. So when I look at and I hear things like deflationary forces out of China, my brain, what is the first thing I hear?

I hear, oh, the Federal Reserve is gonna be able to inject more liquidity and push more into financial assets because consumer inflation is gonna go down. There's only one problem with that. Big story in the journal this morning is that imports from China are at an all time low. Well, if you factor out the first bit of the pandemic anyway, going back to the 1950s,

we haven't seen imports drop this much. And yet we're not seeing those stresses in the economy yet. So I'm wondering if the do-mers who think that the next shoe is gonna drop are looking at this. Now, could it be that our supply chains are being eroded behind the scenes and we haven't seen it show up in the real economy yet?

Maybe. That's the kind of thing I'd love Bloomberg's team to look at because frankly, I don't have the capacity to know what's going on in the supply chains. But if in fact, Chinese imports can drop by 34% and the economy doesn't really react to that, that's incredibly bullish news for those people who care about the economy. So it's not bullish news in my mind yet, because we don't know what the stresses underneath the covers are. But those sorts of things matter, right?

I don't wanna be a cheerleader for the administration by any stretch of the imagination on tariffs. We all know what I think there, but if in fact the economy is adapting quicker than we thought, that would be pretty important as well So one thing one thing to add quickly before we move on there. There is a Bitcoin VIX. It's the BV IV I followed it on trading view and you're right Dave. It's low it strangely It's the lowest since early 24, which you would expect would be high because of the ETF run-up

But it is not as historical those lows, but pretty darn close. BVIV, and there's also an Ethereum one if anyone's interested. I really appreciate the mention from you and Dave. The 60-day volatility on Bitcoin at 27% is the lowest ever versus S&P 500. The difference right now is 0.85 means Bitcoin volatility is actually 15% below beta or S&P 500. It's never been that way.

Our data goes back to 2010. That's insane, isn't it? When you think about it, it's insane. It's not insane and it's very important. One of the things when you're trading, and Mike, you say this all the time and it's one of the points that I agree with constantly. One of the things about trading is to understand what volatility, what the VIX is, what these things mean. And just to peel back the onion, what does it mean? We call it, the reporters like to call it the fear gauge. Now, the fear gauge is because of a simple relationship with risk assets. In the case of risk assets, generally speaking, options premium blowout when markets are dropping. When they rise, they tend to rise steady. In a bull market-

In simple terms, the reason for this is because investors are scrambling for insurance. Right. The thing that's important about options for anybody who doesn't understand it's that Options when you have options So if you have a put option the price goes higher that immediately translates to the call Even if there is no scramble to buy call options Why because you can combine options in and when you're trading them? So if let's say you you think that call options are cheap and put options are expensive, well, you can buy them,

but somebody else on the other side is gonna be able to buy a call from you if you're selling that call because you think it's expensive. They're gonna buy that call and sell the underlying and boom, they have a put. And so it's the way financial instruments get combined mean that you have this thing called put call parity. And yes, I'm over

simplifying it for the purposes of we don't have time for an options class in the middle of macro Monday. But the reason this matters is because Bitcoin has asymmetric volatility that's different than the S&P. In fact, in Bitcoin's case, its rallies can be just as explosive as its falls far more often than than stocks are. I mean, yes, some individual stocks can have that, that certainly biotech stocks when they get FDA approval, that kind of thing. But Bitcoin, its up candles can be as large as its down candles consistently. And so therefore, options markets don't necessarily tell you everything, but it does tell you something. When it's in a very tight trading range in the VIXIS like this, it's telling you the market is in more or closer to a short-term, I hate to geek out, but equilibrium. And so when the markets are in a short-term equilibrium, the longer that happens, the more a large move is capable and the less options traders will cushion that move because frankly,

they'll scramble and get the hell out of the way. Now, I can still remember, it's not that long ago, when the S&P volatility during one of these periods got in 2006 and 2007 down to, what did it get down to, single digits, Mike, or just very, very low double digits, depending on how you measure it, right before this thing that we call the great financial crisis. And it's important to understand why the two are related. Well, one of the reasons that the moves in the GFC were so big was because volatility was so low in the period that ran up to it. And so it creates that.

Now that volatility in Bitcoin is that it could be either-sided. I'm not calling for a crash by any stretch of the imagination, actually quite the opposite. But it is important to understand what happens when you get in these low-vol environments. I would structure it exactly. I look at it as a strategist trader. This is a signal to buy call spreads or calls on Bitcoin. I mean, calls or puts.

I mean, basically buying volatility on Bitcoin right now doesn't seem like a good trade, not a bad trade. For a trade, it looks like a positive delta, positive gamma trade on Bitcoin. Yeah, no, that is basically my conclusion as well, which is I think people are gonna All fall off their chairs that we're sort of agreeing on this but that that's the point and and the thing that's also really interesting Is risk assets in general have low volatility and why in an environment where if you objectively look at it, I mean we have Look at the news that's happened over the last week, right? You know, you got we have geopolitical news all over the place

I mean we had an attack from Ukraine a week and a half ago on Russia's nuclear arsenal markets yawned You know, we have riots going on in LA and National Guard going into people talking about California seceding Yawn, you know, you have I mean, you just go up and down the list. I mean, this is this is a really if you objectively looked at this, you would say, well, I don't understand why markets are so boring when the rest of the world is is so insane. Right points. And speaking of geopolitical risk, what's the general take on the bromance breakup from last week relevant or just to be honest?

Oh, did that happen? Oh, yeah. Oh, God. James, James, you're on this. Someone else should talk about this because I don't want to go off on us. I have no idea except it seems so rapid and escalate so quickly that it's almost as if it was staged. It was just insane. But who knows? I mean, we've got two very large personalities who have the biggest platforms in the world to talk about these things. So it's, everybody

grab your popcorn and watch. It's not over. Yeah. And this was a surprise to absolutely no one who's been following the internal politics in DC, but for the world, surely it must have been some kind of reminder that there is no way to bring the deficit down. It's just not going to happen. As I titled my restream of this, nothing stops this train, right? I'll steal from Lynn Alden, who did a brilliant speech on this. The interesting part about this, the most interesting to me,

and I was live with John Deaton and Tillman and Andrew from ArchPublic on when this was happening. And so it was playing out and we're watching the tweets go by and we're commenting on them live. It was rather amusing. But the thing that's important is Elon Musk has the patience, he makes me seem patient

and boy is that a very hard thing to do. I mean, really, really hard. The way the sausage is made in DC is depressing, to say the least. And so this whole nonsense of what they can put the sausages made in DC is depressing, to say the least. And so this whole nonsense of what they can put into a reconciliation because the Democrats vote as a block against everything

the Republicans do. And I say it that way. There's reasons to blame both parties in a lot of stuff, but the Republicans don't vote as a block, generally. They have to be beaten in the line. And the Democrats laugh at them. The Democrats vote as a block generally. They have to be beaten in the line. And, you know, the Democrats laugh at them. The Democrats vote as a block. So when you're voting for any Democrat these days, I mean, I'm sitting in New Jersey, although I vote in Florida, and Josh Cottheimer is arguing, and I've met Josh, and Josh is actually a good man. But Josh votes the same as Ilhan Omar in AOC. So you have to understand it's creating tribalism. And so the fact that you have to do put things in a reconciliation bill means there's certain things

you can put in and certain things you can't. And Elon wants all the stuff that he wants, most of it is in the can't part. And so this was a situation where I am generally on team Elon and pretty much everything he wants to accomplish, I believe he sacrificed for, to go in and try to help, but most of what he wants can't be put into this bill.

And so I think this is amounted to a temper tantrum because of that fact. And because Congress has been unbelievably slow to codify things that they should do, such as giving Doge the authority, such as chomping down on the NGOs. It's gonna bother people to hear this, but there are pallets of bricks that were left for the Los Angeles rioters funded by federal money

Through through NGOs, you know, we have enough that that's probably almost certainly true at this point The investigative reporting has kind of shown that so, you know, that's the kind of thing That's gonna be another big flashpoint that's going to trigger stuff But this whole bromance breakup is more about Elon wants to see the deficit cut and there's just limits to what they can do without changing the underlying appropriations laws. And that's a problem. Yeah. And not just that, but you know, you were talking about, you've got Trump out there hammering Congress saying, we just just we need to remove the debt limit altogether. Which is okay. Let's be real. Let's be honest here. There is no real debt limit. There's just like stop signs that we blow through. But it's still symbolic. And to have just remove it altogether is like then there's just absolutely no check and balance. There won't be any discussions about everything that Dave is talking about right now. And there won't be any negotiations. It'll just be spend ad

nauseum. And so that's why you're seeing, you know, why, that's exactly why you're seeing yields tick up, Noel, across the world is because people are realizing that these are just some kind of symbolic stop signs and everybody blows through them, meaning every country blows through them, every country that has debt that's issued in their own currency is just, they're just raising these limits, you know, endlessly. And the U.S. has kind of become the leader here of this. We're at $36 trillion now. It's going to be $41-$42 trillion in a blink of an eye here. As soon as we get this, this budget pass, it's going to be, that's what we're looking at. And, you know, that's, that's thinking positively. that we remove the limit altogether. I think it's a low probability, but just speaking about it, it's just like that gives investors no confidence in the long end of the curve. And that's the big deal here. And that's where Mike, I wouldn't want to be on that end of the curve and in that trade. So exactly. And that's a great segue though into the outlook for gold as well as Bitcoin. And Mike, I'd everyone get your take on this. We saw last week from the World Gold Council that central banks are still buying gold hand over fist, led by Poland for some reason in the first quarter,

but whatever, they're buying gold. And this blows my mind. We have the custodians of fiat currency diversifying into gold. I mean, that is quite the signal, but we've seen gold outperformed, as Mike mentioned since the beginning of the year, a lot like double the performance of Bitcoin,

but over the past week over The past month Bitcoin is notably outperforming like double the performance of gold Mike Do you think this is just a temporary catch up on Bitcoin? Do you think it's still gonna be gold going forward given what James has set out for us? I'm clearly gold going forward. I don't want some of the blame I mean, I still I just had a it'll be published in tomorrow I sent it to editors just rehashing something I wrote six months ago that that 100,000 threshold in Bitcoin was the key trigger, I think, to buy gold and not buy Bitcoin, yet the masses

are buying Bitcoin. That's just when as a strategy, you look at when everybody's doing one thing, you want to look at the other thing. And that's the key thing I want to point out is when we talk about deflation and Dave talks about deflation, there's one key force for the normal deflation of false inflation and that's the most expensive US stock market in about 100 years versus GDP and versus the rest of the world. There's only two examples in history, 1929 and 1989.

So I look at treasury bonds right now and even gold is a bit of a put on the stock market. The US stock market for everything you've said, for Bitcoin to go up, cryptos to go up, for more inflation, stock market has to go up. Yet, I look at the biggest theme here is potential 10% decline. It's just how expensive we are. There's only no parent in our lives. So I even pointed out recently how if you just look at stock market versus debt, it's just starting to roll over.

I mean, it's almost two times than 60, a little bit less, $62 trillion are your stock market cap in the US. There's a debt running 30 and change. That to me is the key theme. And it's also when you see everybody pricing and trading, and Bitcoin's already priced for this. I mean, I just point out it went from 10,000 in 19 and 20 to 100,000. That to me is a decent plateau.

You don't wanna be overweight long this asset now. It got too expensive versus the stock market. It's stuck versus gold for almost a year and four years now. And I'm still just pointed out this, if you're bullish Bitcoin or cryptos now, you better be bullish beta because if beta rolls over, the whole thing tumbles. And that's to me is part of what you're seeing in China

at 1.69% in 10 years. That that the 30 year bump went up against 5%. And that's why I published today that 5% threshold. If that 30 year stays above 5%, copper above 5%, that's a Fed tightening environment. That's demand pole, that's inflation. And that's not good for all risk assets. And we all know crypto is hardly ever do well when the feds tightening. We've only had one example, 2022, as when Bitcoin dropped like three, four times S&P 500. And to me, that's why I'm pointing out and just point out with what's happening. And now we're at that very low volatility time in Bitcoin where you should, people should be looking and I suspect traders are,

have been looking to buy gamma and Delta and Vega, and usually they get melted a little bit and finally goes the right way. So to me, that's the key theme. It's all the number one factor. There's a 10 and all this is US stock market. Everything else and the stuff you're hearing about the unstoppable US deficit, that's usually when it finds a problem and it stops. It's just so much in the headlines.

Every single screen I look at now, it's all we're talking about. And it's priced in and you're supposed to buy Bitcoin. I'm like, okay, good luck. I'll stick with gold. And it's absolutely astonishing that the s&p 500 is back where it was in February when we were still high on the excitement of the inauguration of trump 2.0 and the deregulation and the Investment in infrastructure etc to be at those levels. I mean arguably the economic outlook today is not what it was back in February There's only one thing that stops it You have to have people get out and get out that sentiment's never going to change

It's like it didn't change in 1999 until it went down It didn't change in in 1989 in japan until it went down and change in 1929 went down. It doesn't go stop Humans are being human as scott always says and that's where I don't know what's going to take it to stop but i'll stick with the value and I think the value is still in goal So all of this brings us no, no, I need to make I need to make I mean I figure that fire up j Dave a little well, no because there's two points look i'll i'll make it clear in 20 years We'll look back and we'll think 100 000 is no more important than 10 000 I think it's a bullshit. Uh kind of the notion that it's a plateau is insane because Bitcoin's steady state, it's the entropy

of Bitcoin, the gravity of where it goes to is where gold's market cap is. And frankly, I think that Bitcoin crosses gold's market cap at a much at gold where gold is probably 50% higher than it is today, maybe 100% higher than it is today. So I'm actually bullish gold for all this reason. And we won't be at one quadrillion assets, investable assets in the world will be at like 1.5 or 2. So it's important to understand that this is a fake. There's no magic behind 100,000. It's just it's a round number where we're finding the supply and demand have created equilibrium

over the last month because, look, there are a lot of people who bought Bitcoin below $100. I mean, $100 was a really big deal, then $1,000 was a really big deal, then $10,000 was a big deal, $100,000 is a big deal, and $1 million will be a big deal. Sure, all these round numbers always are big deals in the short term, but in historically, it's none. So I just want to make that very, very clear. And when you look at financial markets, when you're trying, when something gets revalued, I mean, all you have to do is look at the market cap. I still remember when becoming a trillion-dollar company was, people were like, Oh, no, no company's ever become a trillion-dollar company. Oh, my God, when's this going to happen? I mean, this is such a big deal. It'll never happen.

And now there are lots of them. And we don't care. Why? Because there's a lot more dollars. You know, it's simple. The denominator is dollars. So that is a critical point. Now to get back to what you're saying in the stock market, I want to be really clear, because I've made this parallel. This market feels a lot like 2000 in that regard. I'm not saying it's going to play out the same way, but in 2000, people forget there was this pricking of the internet bubble in the March, April timeframe where it collapsed. And then there was a slow steady rally back up to a new high, but it was a lower breadth high. And I haven't looked at the internals of the stock market, but everything that I have seen tells me that's probably sort of happening again.

The real trick for the stock market will be the fall to see what happens with the mega caps and whether or not we get through a policy outcome that is conducive or not. And that matters, but understand the stock market market when it drops, if it does, during that period of time that it's dropping, Bitcoin will languish, it will certainly go down. Now there's no in 2022, there were structural reasons, there was this enormous trade relative to the market cap of Bitcoin called the grayscale trade, which effectively bankrupted and caused for sellings of double digit percentages of holders. Right? One of the reasons Bitcoin is holding in at these levels is people are gab just gotten the first wave of distributions from FTX and a lot of that money is

getting cycled back into Bitcoin. That's just fact. And it's just when when you see waves of for selling starting with Luna, following through the summer with Voyager and, well, you know, Celsius, and then ultimately FTX, there was waves of force selling. So yes, rising rate environment is not good for Bitcoin, no question about that. But understand that the reason it was three times the S&P was because there were waves of force selling that were very unique and specific to it as an asset class. And so you have to contextualize these stories. But

that's true. One thing that Mike's saying is absolutely true. If we see a major stock market correction, yes, I think even gold will drop just like it did in the great financial crisis, although three months later, gold had rallied back and nothing else had and And I strongly suspect you'll see something similar in Bitcoin, but if that happens. I actually don't think it's going to happen, to be honest. I think that we are in this situation where the Fed and the central banks of the world have successfully navigated back to where they were pre-pandemic, of pushing inflation into assets as opposed to

or pre-pandemic of pushing inflation into assets as opposed to into consumer goods. But we'll see. I mean, look, the other thing that just like the S&P is the most expensive, housing affordability is the least, which is an expression in the same way. The housing markets globally and certainly in the United States are at all time highs also versus affordability. This is not a good thing for all sorts of reasons, but it speaks to this financialization that continues to accelerate. And I think Bitcoin is the off ramp from that, to be honest.

Speaking of financialization, though, Dave, what's your take on the wave of Bitcoin treasuries that we're seeing? Do you think they add strength or risk? I think it well, look, it's obviously, the answer to that is sadly obvious. Today, it adds strength. In the long run, there's some risk. Now, what are the risks and where are they coming from? The strength is obviously just supply and demand.

It just creates demand. Now note, Sailor's first conference, the very first one he held at 2,400 companies, and what are we at? Are we up to 200 yet? Have we even gotten to 10%? I think no. So we are, we're in the beginning of that thing. You don't short a train rolling down the tracks until the train at least stops or slows or has to go around a turn. We've gotten to none of that yet. So in the short run, it's clearly bullish because of the

very simple supply-demand dynamics, right? In the long run, someone said it, I don't remember who I'm paraphrasing, and whoever is someone the audience might point it out, but they made the point that this isn't about MicroStrategy or Sailor who has architected himself extremely carefully. so will get irresponsible. There will be companies that take cash that their CFO says, we're going to need it. But for now, let's park it in Bitcoin. It won't go down, will it? And at that point, you'll have leverage in the system. We don't have that leverage in the system. Not at all, no. But the point is... Yeah, there will be... ...on the way down to $1.03? Come on, Dave. You got to know there's tons of that in this market. There's...

Silly. Dave Korsunsky Yeah, but there's there's a difference between, hold on, there's a difference between having claims on a company because your debt is, and, you know, you have debt that you have to service, and you're not able to remain solvent. There's a difference between that. And, you know, shares going down because Bitcoin goes down and so your market cap gets reduced and the ownership of that MNAV goes down. People will lose money and they'll lose money on these companies that are way, way, way overvalued at some point. But it doesn't mean that the company becomes insolvent.

I mean, the company could borrow if you've got companies out there borrowing, you know, um, at zero interest rate, you know, 0%, um, uh, yields. That's a different, that's a, that's a completely different animal. But if you have a company out there that is issuing debt that has to service that debt and can't remain insolvent and has Bitcoin in their balance sheet and must and might need that to remain and remain solvent, that's a completely different equation. And, you know, I know we've talked about this before, Mike, but MicroStrategy is nowhere near that problem. I mean, it's got such, and they have created such an intelligent ladder of maturities and prices that it's just,

you've got years and years before anything could possibly crop up and you'd have to have Bitcoin down like 80, 90% over a very long prolonged period for it to even impact micro strategy. And that's like the poster child of of borrowing to add down to add add Bitcoin to your balance sheet. So it's a completely that argument. It just it doesn't hold water right now. Right. And the hyper liquid thing, I want

to make a point about that. Because the hyper liquid thing actually proves the point. It proves the opposite of what you think. So we got some lunatic on a dex that the entire world can see his positions and shoot against him. And he consistently gets shot against. Meanwhile, the vast majority of leverage in the system is on Binance and Bybit and OKX

and Deribit and the open-ended fund. Right now at this instant, the open interest weighted funding rate for Bitcoin is 0.0000. Think about what that means. It is dramatically easier and dramatically less leverage in Bitcoin throughout the system. You know, it's balanced when it buys and sells, obviously, but it is it is perfectly balanced right now and at a zero interest rate at the top. Just to put this in perspective at the top in in you mentioned 2022, the right when it was at the top, the interest, the open interest weighted funding rate annualized to over 100%. It was point one, you know, we haven't been we've been well, right now we're infinitely below that. But the point is, we've been

tracking somewhere in the neighborhood of 100% below that. I mean, you know, two orders of magnitude lower. And yes, there's the occasional hyper liquid idiotic trade that the entire world looks at and laughs and goes, hey, look at that idiot. But we don't do things here on anecdotes. We do things based on overall data. And the overall leverage in the system is really, really low.

And you'd expect it to be. It makes sense that it's low because we talked about the VIX, right? We talked about the volatility being low, but it is low. And yes, there's of course, morons that do weird things and people get to make stories about it. You know, it's, it is, it is what it is, right? That is the system. And, you know, we all get, get stories like, you know, Josh Mann's 84 and the 444 stuff and his calls on gold now, which are equally kind of out there.

And he may very well end up being right on some of these things. But the truth is, and look, Josh, I didn't know him when we were both at Solomon Brothers. But he's trading and I strongly suspect he's a fairly profitable trader long term, but he's fired people's imaginations. People like soundbites, but we can't look at sound bites. We've got to look at what's going on. What's going on is right now there's not that much leverage in the system. Yeah, for now and definitely according to all of the market data, but I'm going to throw

out a hypothetical out there. James is right, MicroStrategy is a public company and it's fairly highly scrutinized, but there are an increasing number of players that aren't and we are seeing institutional crypto lending come back into the market for the first time since 21 pretty much, well certainly since 22. And is there a danger of seeing a repeat of the GBTC trade where you go and take public debt to buy Bitcoin and then you use that Bitcoin as collateral for a loan to buy more Bitcoin and so on, rinse and repeat. That's a kind of fragility of leverage that we haven't seen for quite a while and would

be pretty opaque when it does come. Can I just make a point about the GBTC trade that people always ignore when they make this comparison? The GBTC trade happened because of a structural stupidity in the United States regulatory environment. For those who don't know this, and look, you'll hear me yelling about this in this administration, if Paul Atkins does one thing, the one thing I want to see him do is get rid of this structural stupidity.

It's called the accredited investor rule. I was introduced to this by a wealthy friend who was an attorney and he said, oh, you should do this GBTC. I never did it, by the way, probably to my chagrin. He said, listen, you can buy Bitcoin for spot, hand it to Grayscale and they'll give you GBTC shares. And six months later, they become freely floating because of the way it's something called seasoning in the rules. So what it meant is you could buy Bitcoin at whatever Bitcoin was trading at, say $5,000. It doesn't matter. GBTC at that time was trading at the moral equivalent of $6,000. And so you could buy Bitcoin, transfer it over to GBTC.

You could hedge yourself. So if Bitcoin went to whatever, went down to 4,000, you didn't care because GBTC was you could hedge yourself, right? So if Bitcoin went to, you know, whatever, went down to 4,000, you didn't care because GBTC was trading at five. And this thing went on for years where you could make this huge premium. Now, why did the premium exist? Premium existed because retail wasn't allowed to buy Bitcoin. They were only allowed to buy GBTC. It was the only thing they can buy. And so this huge premium came in because of a natural supply demand. Now, we've seen this before in financial markets. You see it generally in emerging markets when there are foreigners restrictions and you have this thing called

the quibs, you know, qualified investments, you know, investors in, I've seen it in Korea, I've seen it in China, I've seen it lots of places over my career. I hate to go back to bad examples, which will show how old I am, but it's whenever you have a constrained ability to buy an asset at the same time as a regulatory regime, which gives loopholes for others, you end up with these sorts of things. That's what happened in the GVDZ. That is not at play today. No individual has any problem buying it. And so there's no natural supply constrained premia in the market to come out when those natural supports has come out, which is exactly what happened. True. And that's part of what happened. Also what happened, you had a lot of people buying GDC in order to buy more GVDC. And so there was just a lot of layering going on there,

which rapidly unwound when it was discovered how shaky this collateral was. It comes down to collateral, but you're right, Dave. There's hopefully almost certainly going to be more oversight this time. My concern is, along with private credit, it's a fairly opaque corner of the market, but all of all of what we've been discussing here, we have, leads to the elephant in the room, which is the outlook for the dollar. You want to take that?

First of all, they go back to the opaqueness of these holdings. And one of the things that we're seeing now, and this is we've been talking about this, Dave and I talked about this, I think two years ago, we were talking about just the private equity markets and how opaque they are. And now you see endowments, universities trying to peel off some of their exposure there. So, and this goes, this goes all around all those, you know, credit investor rules, qualified purchaser rules. And so now you've got the opaque, the opaqueness of that market, which is really just a kind of a which is really just a kind of a sleepy, quiet credit market, you know? And so those are, those are forces that, that are, it's, it just produces that illiquidity and opaqueness produces opportunities for large investors. It's just, it's classic. It's been happening for, you know, centuries. And so it, that's, that's really the big problem we're talking about.

And I don't see that in Bitcoin. I just don't see it. There's just way too much. You could see through all the way through to every single trade. And so I think there's just way too much information around those. It's the truly opaque markets that are having a problem. And when you've got private equity that's marked at certain values, it's only because you've had add-on investments. You see it in venture capital all the time. You see smaller venture capital firms leading, you know, doing whatever they can to lead small rounds in order to push up values on a mark to market basis. And you know, it's happening in the university markets now because you've got private equity firms who have marked up their values of their holdings, which are just air. It's because you had a Series A, followed by a Series B, followed by a Series C that are marked at higher valuations, that who made the investments?

The same exact investors who are marking it up. So that's where these problems come in, in my experience in the opaque markets. And we're going to start seeing the chickens come home to roost on that. Totally agree. I've been following this also. And now we're seeing the retail market being used as exit liquidity via the ETFs packaging, private credit. And the regulators are okay with this and yet crypto is supposed to be an opaque market. But I do, before we wrap up, I do want to get to the dollar because that is arguably the underpinning of everything that we've been talking about. Mike, what's your take on where the dollar goes from here?

I really appreciate you calling it the elephant in the room, because if you compare the S&P 500 divided by the rest of the world's stock market, the MSCI XUS index, a lesson I learned from my colleague, Gina Martin Adams, it's the same trade as the dollar since the bottom in 2009. So the elephant room for the dollar is U.S. stock market. But the fact that U.S. stock market has been stabilized here is great. But you look at the MSCI-XUS indexes here, it's up almost 12 or 17%.

Yet the dollar trade-rated broad dollar is down about 7 or 8%. That's a wonderful environment for gold, less so for very highly volatile cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. And that's my key theme is if this continues, if we just get that out of consensus, maybe just oh my gosh, 10% decline in the S&P 500 this year, which is only giving back of the 100% gain since 2019. That's a massive, pretty deflationary force for the dollar. And I have to say deflation, because that's what we're going to get. All the lessons of history point to that when you get risk assets too high and they go down. It's just what happens in commodities, but it's what's happened historically. So to me, that's what the dollar is reflecting is the rest of the world's like, get me out of the US. And that's why I also have to tilt over to key thing. They're always remember about the dollar and some most significant technology in this space is crypto dollars. We saw Circle go public last week. I mean, there would see that USD coin is about $60 billion.

Next on the list of all the cryptos is Dogecoin, 27 billion, and then you go down, of course, so I'd say the key thing is, oh, you've kept me really bullish. This space is just technology and how it's really allowing the transacting of dollars instantly. But the key thing to remember, I like to point out is,

elephant in the room is US stock market. The dollar's related, it's already kind of leaning downward, like gold's leaning upward. It's telling you by the end of this year, S&P 500 is down 10%, that's all gonna make sense. But I'll end with this, the key theme I like to point out with all this talk of crypto is a new thing. On a one-year basis, the Bloomberg Galaxy crypto index

is down about 12%, I'm sorry, one-year basis is down about 3%, gold's up about 40%, one year basis. This year alone, Bloomberg Galaxy crypto index is down about 11%, gold's up about 30%. I stick with gold. Yeah. So look, the dollar is the best of a bunch of currencies that were unraveling. Going back to the beginning of the show, we talked about when James talked about the debt limit.

The truth is we have this theater that goes on, but they're saying the quiet part out loud now, Noel. Now, when we talk about the dollar in financial analysts, we are looking at all the stuff that is above the sea. So, you know, with an iceberg, you have the tip of the iceberg, you see it, but 90 plus percent of the weight of the iceberg is below and you can't see it, so it's going on.

What's going on in the Fiat system is, is we are now starting to reach the point of escalation in terms of deficits, but you won't see that in the FX markets because every other FX is also having the same issue. So it's not the same thing. So when we look at the DXY, it's like, well, what is the DXY? It's the dollar against, I mean, every currency other than the Swiss franc is in significant

fiscal deficit. Right? And that is important. So it is the elephant in the room in the sense of that's gonna matter, but to Bitcoin and to gold, both, it's really the stuff that's going underneath the surface. It's not the which currency is the one that's performing or underperforming, it's the entire notion of all of them.

And we are, look, I do not believe we are close to, although God knows it's certainly more possible today than it was at any other point in history, to some sort of massive revolution where the fiat system gets overthrown. I'm not like that, but that is a very big deal. So when you look at this, the question is, is there an opt-out?

Are there things which you do smart? I mean, the reason the stock markets are elevated are because, unless you're not paying attention, there's a simple point where all the authorities want financial assets to go higher relative to everything else. They literally, that's what they're engineering it for. Their nirvana is suppressed consumer inflation and heightened asset inflation. That's what they want. And so people invest because in a way, you know, you don't fight the Fed, don't fight the entirety of the monetary

system. And so that's what you see going on. And so you have to contextualize it all that way. You know, as far as cryptos are going, you know, Mike always makes the point and, you know, about the volatility and about, you know, memes and this, you know, I think that there, there's two stories that, that we talked about a little bit last week, but are worth repeating one that the market for gambling is beyond alive and well. The meme coin market is, is a completely anecdotal thing, right? But it's the same as what I saw out in Las Vegas at the World Series of Poker after I went went there for the Bitcoin

conference Everybody the first day I was there were saying our fields are gonna be down this year because Canadians aren't coming to the US and all this this stuff that you read about in the news Except for the news is completely wrong What a surprise the mainstream media lied. Okay, well, that's nothing new there. You know, it's like the old expression, how can you tell a politician is lying? Their lips are moving. Well, how can you tell the mainstream media is lying? Well, they're broadcasting. The fact is, is gambling and money that are being put out there by people,

the World Series of Poker is at an all time high. And that's not remotely surprising when you see what's going on in whether it's Dogecoin, Pepe or my personal and I call it favorite Fartcoin, which is back up over a dollar again. This is just an expression of gambling and what the rich have in disposable income. But there was a story we didn't talk about that's a big macro story that came out last week

that I did wanna get in here before we end, which is JP Morgan. So forget what Jamie Dimon says, and just look at what the bank is doing. The fact that JP Morgan was reported to be getting ready to offer Bitcoin, you know, services is a very big deal. Because think of what this will allow. I mean, Circle, Mike, glanced over. That's another huge story. Circle trading at 125 means that it's trading at a market cap of five times

where it was reported that someone in this case, Ripple Labs was looking to buy them before they IPO'd. So I'm going to repeat that number because that matters. So here we have the second largest crypto company on the planet that people could buy crypto equities and it's trading in a market cap of 25 billion when the thought was that 5 billion was a fair offer for them less than six months ago. Have they grown in the last six months? Nope, absolutely not. But exposure to an industry. So that story matters. I don't look at USDC, Mike, as a crypto. This is literally just a vehicle for dispensing treasuries across the world. That's all it is.

And that company makes money hand over fist and it is in line to benefit the most from a stablecoin bill because they're literally the gold standard for auditing what is actually the underlying ownership of that coin. And so, you know, they're the ones who are poised to benefit from that. And, you know, for people who are not paying attention, as Dave likes to say, the treasury needs stable coins.

And they know this because of everything we talked about the beginning of the show. There being no real debt limit, there being no checks and balances on spending and they're going to keep spending, they just need to they need to find where places to tuck all this debt into and the stable coins or how they're going to do it. And they know that. And so USDC is a massive beneficiary of this. I mean, I wish we had gotten some on the IPO. Of course, only the largest hedge funds in the world

and pension endowments got this thing, but the massive institutions got it. But you're seeing retail rush in behind it because of this. And it's not surprising. The valuation is surprising, Dave. It's rich right now. But the reality is it's not that it's the crypto that is growing in value and it's now above Dogecoin.

That's missing the point completely. The point is that these stablecoins are here to stay. The US Treasury understands that and they want to be leaders in building some structure around it because they want to benefit the most from it. That's the point. It's a corollary also on demand for the dollar which ties into what you were talking about before. Go ahead. It's accessibility via the technology. That's what I learned in trading futures and ETFs, just a better way to mitigate risk or get access to that asset. That's the question I want to ask you.

So what I see is happening with USDC going public and with Tether proliferating since 2018, is this process of tokenization is awesome awesome to be able to track assets next to treasuries, next equities on chain. And once you do that, why would you not look at things like these 17 million other cryptos? Most of them are just BS, things like Dogecoin and Fartcoin, as short bait. That's my point is this whole space is gonna get arbed out and maybe Bitcoin will survive a little bit, we all know. Everything else goes down, Bitcoin don't goes down with it.

That's my point is as we get more towards tokenization of real assets on chain, and you can buy, sell and short things equally like short some Dogecoin and use 100 leverage long to get long maybe some of these stay in crypto dollars that can give you some sort of interest. What stops that? It's just the way it usually works in futures and what happened in futures. Can I answer that? So look, you have two markets. The people who are playing in the gambling markets, the Dogecoins, the Pepe's, the Fartcoins,

etc., etc., etc., have more than an easy access. Outside the United States, it is trivial. I mean, really trivial in a far better way than any gambling futures markets that you ever grew up with. Futures are massively old, archaic, crunky, socialized losses, very expensive markets, crypto derivatives, and the way that

the perpetual swaps have grown up are an order of magnitude or two more efficient. And the reason why you don't have options markets in crypto anywhere near the size of the options market in the United States is because an option suck for getting leverage. They're very expensive. 80% of option premium is lost, right? You know, people, the options market makers make compared to the other ones. Yet the S&P single day options are the most powerful or the most profitable new product of last year. Well, in crypto,

you don't have that problem. So everything you're saying that could happen is already exists. What will happen though is JP Morgan, and why I mentioned that in at the same thing as Circle, think about what you're gonna happen at. Right now the ACH and SWIFT system is unbelievably slow. It takes three days to move money and so you have restrictions and counterparty risk and all sorts of things baked into the cake. If you combine tokenizations with stablecoin rails underneath the banking system, all of a sudden your bank can offer a product that says, you want to save in Bitcoin? Cool. We will convert it to dollars when you need it. We will move it via stablecoin to wherever you want to send it. And we can take

very little risk out of it. And all of a sudden, tokenization allows you to save in Bitcoin and spend in dollars. And that is gonna accelerate. And that's not just gonna be Bitcoin. That's gonna be stocks as well, by the way, at some point. So yes, you're right about that. Crypto is both a technology for monetizing an asset, as well as the assets themselves. And so you're right.

There are many of those 17,000 assets that are bullshit. And then there are others which are gambling vehicles and there's still others which are going to have real value. And so we could dive into that, but this is a macro show. But the understanding that the speeding up of the financial rails, Noel, is a very big deal. And there are many, many macro effects of that. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons given for Circles current valuation.

It's not just a bet on stable coins, it's a bet on tokenization. And with that, I mean, it's astonishing actually when you look back since the beginning of the year, just how far this industry has come, not just in terms of understanding the macro narratives, but in terms of the infrastructure, the institutional development that we've talked about today. With that, we do have to wrap up. I could have gone on

talking a lot longer, and I am going to spend the rest of the day enjoying an image Dave has planted in my head, which is that of pitchforks in front of central banks. Thanks, everyone for joining us. Thanks, guys, for being here. And don't forget to tune in next week.