The Wolf Of All Streets - The Most Bullish News For Crypto

Starting point is 00:00:00 This week, the crypto industry in the United States has been under attack by three letter agencies. We've seen action from the FBI, the SEC, the IRS, waiting for the DEA, the CIA, maybe the LOL, the BRB. They're all seemingly coming for crypto at the same time. But amidst all this FUD and negativity, there's actually some exceptionally bullish news that people don't seem to be talking about. It's the Friday Five with NLW, where we unpack the biggest five stories of the week. And this has been an action-packed week in the news. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel. Hit that like button. NLW, man, it has been a wild week. We kind of had some quiet times there for a while. Definitely not now. Yeah. It was a real when it rains, it pours kind of a week here. Yeah, for sure. I mean, first, as I've committed to just taking a look at the market, Bitcoin's just sideways, right? Amidst all of this nonsense, we've just been kind of trading in the middle of the 60,000s. We haven't even talked about the halving, but I think it came and went as we would have anticipated with a whole lot of much ado about nothing, sideways price action, which is sort of my expectation for quite a while here.

Starting point is 00:01:36 Did you expect more from Bitcoin around the halving? No, no. I mean, anyone who's watched it, it's almost always, it's never a dramatic sell the news event, but nor is it a dramatic, you know, things happen right after an event. So it was almost invariably going to be a bunch of other stuff that was causing whatever Bitcoin price action was happening. I think the most interesting thing around the halving was the sort of fee price spikes leading up to it with Ordinals.

Starting point is 00:02:01 I think that represented a kind of a new moment for Bitcoin. But yeah, price is never sort of the first and primary thing that happens around the having. Yeah, high transaction fees, volatility become the calling card for Bitcoin, which kind of leads to the next story. And the first one of the day, which I think is exceptionally bullish and is one of those I just don't see that many people talking about. Stripe brings back crypto payments via USDC stablecoin. The payments firm stopped taking crypto payments in 2018 due to Bitcoin's high volatility. So people may remember that Stripe had attempted to adopt Bitcoin because of those transaction fees, which were unpredictable. They could be high, they could be low, they could be in the middle, the network being slow and the high volatility of the actual asset, they eventually got rid of it,

Starting point is 00:02:47 but now adopting USDC exclusively for crypto payments. So how big do you think this is? What do you make of the decision to go solely with USDC? I think it's a much bigger deal than people would think if you're not paying close attention to... Or if you're not building a business that, you know, if you're not building a business that uses Stripe, if you don't notice how much Stripe is sort of, you know, everywhere. When this happened in 2018, I remember there being broadly a perception that it was both motivated by exactly what they said it was motivated by, the actual sort of volatility and challenges of Bitcoin, but also it representing a sort of mark as we peeled off of the 2017 bull market,

Starting point is 00:03:27 an indication that it wasn't worth the trouble, right? Even if it wasn't some big negative stamp on Bitcoin or anything like that, it was an indication that the sort of emerging class of technology financial firms weren't that interested in doing what it took to actually engage with this. So I think in similar ways, this represents a return of financial services firms saying that crypto is worth dealing with, that it's become a going concern enough to actually deal with whatever is going to come. You know, Stripe is a very large, I mean, they're the largest private startup, I think, at this point. They're not going to wade into the morass of legal and regulatory issues with crypto without being pretty convinced that it's an important thing and being pretty convinced of the trajectory, I think. So I think

Starting point is 00:04:16 that from a purely symbolic standpoint, it's actually fairly meaningful and certainly represents yet another sign in sort of shifting of phases and cycles. I think in terms of USDC specifically, it just makes a lot of sense that they would come back in the... This is what stable coins are for, right? I think it just is a very logical first place to be. Now, I have no idea if they plan to add other assets, they might never add them, but it still gives this incredibly significant payment rail access to or an on-road into the crypto space. Reinforces the idea that stable coins have undoubtedly been the killer app for crypto outside of Bitcoin itself and that attempting to fit Bitcoin into every one of these use cases just has not been,

Starting point is 00:05:06 A, popular, and B, to your point, technologically possible. We obviously saw Tesla start to sell Teslas and Bitcoin. Nobody even did it. As big of news as it was, there was no real interest in doing that. And I would have to imagine there's no real interest in using Bitcoin, at least on layer one, as a payment system. And to your point, Collison, the CEO of president of Stripe said, crypto is finding real utility with transaction speeds increasing and costs coming down. We're seeing crypto finally making sense as a means of exchange. He's talking about stable coins being a means of exchange, but this is just saying that this is the way that this works for crypto. And anecdotally, we've seen this with USDT on Tron everywhere else in the world.

Starting point is 00:05:51 This is the thing that people are adopting in crypto when they actually need to move money around. Yep. No, absolutely. I guess the one other thing just to really put a fine point on how big Stripe is, Stripe is at this point, the absolute default option for if you're setting up a new business and trying to accept payments. I mean, it's not even close at this point. It's just that you're going to use Stripe. So much so that I actually saw a tweet a couple of days ago from a guy named Ben Tossall, who was a multi-time founder. He runs an AI newsletter called Ben's Bytes Now. And he said something to the effect of, turns out we were all just building stripe wrappers as startup. And I think that that's

Starting point is 00:06:30 kind of a fairly accurate representation of the world of technology startups right now. I don't think it's particularly shocking, but it is worth noting that they're not going to be working with Tether, right? That this is USDC exclusive. And I think it lends more credence to the idea that USDC is going to be the anointed regulatory approved stable coin in the United States. And that's worth watching, which leads perfectly into the second story we're covering today, which obviously has to be the stable coin bill. vaccine waters now, citing conversations with Patrick Mahenry, Schumer and Brown saying that they're getting very close on stablecoin bill. We know that Lummis and Gillibrand after coming out heavily a couple of years ago in the summer, now reproposing some stablecoin action, some legislation surrounding stablecoins. But interestingly, it bans unbacked algorithmic stablecoins, not a surprise after the Luna collapse, but it also is going to, if you dig in, it is going to effectively ban Tether in the United

Starting point is 00:07:33 States. So this is a really big deal. This is, as you read through all of these articles, how it can be a huge disaster. Here's the thread. I'm just kind of cooking through all these things. You start to realize that this once again is backing the banks. It's allowing stable coins, but only from banks in the United States. It's going to eliminate Tether completely and is going to let the biggest players on Wall Street likely into this space. Yeah, although it's interesting. So that is the substance of the Lummis-Gillibrand version of this for sure um which is interesting because they they're uh this bill from them is a lot is being a lot less uh positively uh you know accepted than than the last time they were here i think to your point there are some obvious differences you know the

Starting point is 00:08:17 fact that luna has happened since then that was probably always going to happen even if it you know the dragnet caught die as it were um you You know, the Tether thing also, I think, Tether has given some indications over the past year or so that they are trying to be more US compliant, US facing, but they certainly haven't gone all the way to, you know, throwing themselves headlong to try to compete for that anointed US, you know, stablecoin slot. I think that they, you know, want to be in a position to potentially take advantage of changes, but still are kind of thinking of themselves as the world's US stablecoin, right? I think that the biggest challenge here, if we adopted something like the Lummis-Gillibrand version of this, would be for Circle. There are serious questions around whether Circle would be

Starting point is 00:09:03 able to operate, whether they would be able to even get the type of licenses that they needed. So there's big questions there. However, as Waters and McHenry are talking about their version being closer, that is a totally separate process from whatever Lummis and Gillibrand introduced. And that bill, from what we know, doesn't seem to have the same sort of challenges potentially for Circle, at least not a priority in the same way. It has seemed like the biggest hangup for that bill has been questions about state authority versus federal authority when it comes to who has oversight of these things. And it seemed like there has been an obvious compromise sort of

Starting point is 00:09:45 sitting there, which is let states do it, but give the Fed ultimate authority. And it may be that just the last mile has actually been more hung up on the horse trading for the legislation that Senator Sherrod Brown wants in order to move things forward. Which by the way, he's not necessarily a friend of crypto, but I think his marijuana bill is one that most libertarian leaning crypto people would be very happy to pass as well. It's pretty coherent, let's say, with the rest of this. Yeah. And it makes sense now when you describe it in that manner, why this would be touted collectively with marijuana legislation, because many people have pointed to crypto legislation as somewhat following the same path, where it could be legal in a state, but not federally. And how do you then bank your profits? And what do you do with all the cash? They really are following a similar

Starting point is 00:10:36 trajectory. So it would be interesting to see two of these things get some clarity at the same time. And this is coming from committee in Congress rather than two senators proposing it to the Senate. So it's a different path potentially to the same place. But your point is really, really necessary that these are not the same bill. And we actually may want to cheer for the one coming out of Congress and not the one coming out of the Senate at this point. Yep. I think in a lot of ways, Senators Lummis and Gillibrand have viewed their role as not to force their particular legislation down the throats of their fellow senators and their fellow representatives, but instead to make sure there is always some coherent version, some approach that looks like it would pass muster with a sensible person who's a representative who doesn't care that much about crypto. And it could be that the timing of introducing this bill was actually a catalyst or an attempt to catalyze the finishing of that other process

Starting point is 00:11:37 more than them wanting to just have their names on stuff. They're really very unlike the type of senators who just want their name on everything. They're almost the opposite so far from what I've seen. And they're diametrically opposed on most policy. Yep. They're talking about a Wyoming Republican senator and a New York state Democrat. Yep. So unlikely bedfellows for sure. I just wanted to bring up the one last article, Tether St stablecoin dominance,

Starting point is 00:12:05 Maywein following proposed US rule, basically saying that any issuer that doesn't have a banking license would be capped at $10 billion, which we know just effectively kneecaps Tether entirely. The irony that Tether has effectively helped hyper-dollarization by buying treasuries should not be lost if they get kicked out of the United States and their business model remains buying US treasuries. Yeah. I mean, Tether is a really confounding force for the US government. I mean, it is the inheritor of the entire euro dollar system, which is a thing that has been both good for the US in many ways in terms of keeping the dollar the dominant currency

Starting point is 00:12:45 in the world, but also completely outside of our control in ways that are very uncomfortable. You know, the euro dollar system makes monetary policy less effective, because we can't really control the supply of dollars in the world. And now, you know, over the next call it decade, we're going to face these other interesting choices of how much to let Tether be versus try to not let them be versus try to actually institutionalize them in some way. And I think that your point that they are, at this point, one of the biggest buyers of US treasuries in the world is not going to be lost on people either. So it's pretty fascinating to watch from a geopolitical standpoint. Yeah, especially when the foreign banks that used to stack treasuries are now stacking gold,

Starting point is 00:13:29 sending the prices of that flying. There's just so much nuance and really interesting stories. I also don't know if you saw that Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, who effectively now has said, we custody Tether's assets, they're good to go. We saw that in the past, who over the weeks has said that Tether is essential for United States dominance and dollar dominance. He said, I believe yesterday, that Americans don't need Tether. He's a huge Tether cheerleader, but said, hey, you got cash in your pocket. Why would you need a stable coin in the United States? And in the same article, I believe it said that Tether, still the bulk of Tether is on shore in the United States.

Starting point is 00:14:00 So just a hell of a lot coming on here with stable coins. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. The next story has to be the ETFs because US Bitcoin ETFs suffer one of their worst outflows as digital token waivers. Of course, we know that the 71-day inflow boom ended for BlackRock's iBit. Totally normal, guys. We're talking about a historic run, one of the largest of any ETF with inflows in history. And then we obviously also have to talk about the Hong Kong ETFs that are launching for both Bitcoin and Ethereum, which seemingly when you dig in will be a drop in the bucket of flows versus United States ETFs. Yep. I think that the Hong Kong ETFs are clearly more relevant as a story in terms of

Starting point is 00:14:45 the continued softening of China's stance towards crypto, I think more than anything else. If you view Hong Kong as sort of a proxy for the farthest edge of finance that China is willing to countenance in its sort of orbit, it is notable that these things have been approved and they're trading, but they're not going to make a big difference when it comes to actual volume or anything like that. When it comes to the ETF flows, I think one of the interesting parts of the story is that the outflows have had seemingly no impact really on price. And the question is, does that mean that the relationship between the ETF and price for the moment is, is a little less close than it than it perhaps was in the past. I think that there's some interesting things to look at there. But,

Starting point is 00:15:31 you know, to your point, there was always going to be some amount of a peeling off period. And, you know, the question, I think, of course, for for the ETFs is just where the next new source of demand comes from? Is it, you Is it going to be when advisors get on board and start recommending it for people's portfolios? Is it going to be, is there another wave of institutions that's waiting for it to drop down to 50 to buy because they've gotten their mandates approved,

Starting point is 00:15:55 but they don't want to get in at these levels? There's all these sort of questions, but the thing exists now. It's going to continue to exist. And as much as we would like it to, it can't go up only forever. Yeah. Just to put some numbers behind this, the 11 Bitcoin spot ETFs have seen 12.4 billion of positive net flow so far. Of course, that's kind of hard to calculate when you have a lot coming

Starting point is 00:16:17 out of GBTC. But they expect that in a year, the Hong Kong products in total, Bitcoin and Ethereum, will do about 1 billion. And that 1 billion is 2% of the total addressable Hong Kong market, which is only $50 billion in ETFs in total. And the total market cap of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States is higher than that $50 billion. So our Bitcoin ETFs is larger than their entire ETF market. Yeah, it's wild. Hong Kong is not considered a small market. When we think of Hong Kong, we think about financial centers. It's right after London and New York, but it's just another reminder of how massive US markets are compared to just everything else in the world. Yeah, the next story here is pretty pretty astounding is that CZ and Doquan under heavy, heavy attack with very, very large fines

Starting point is 00:17:09 and jail sentences on the horizon, potentially that I don't think people expected. United States SEC looking for $5.3 billion fine to Doquan, $4 billion of which they're claiming are ill-gotten gains. Really interesting to dig into because I'm still confused as to whether what he did was just hubris or an outright fraud and crime. And of course, CZ now, they're looking for three years in prison. He's getting support, friends, family, royalty, seeking mercy for crypto's richest man. A lot of support for CZ. Interesting to see how bipolar that is or how different from obviously what happened with SBF. Obviously, the crimes are different, but I can't find a single person really that thinks what CZ did was terrible. But clearly, the United States government is not playing around here. They want huge fines and huge sentences for these guys.

Starting point is 00:17:59 Yeah. I mean, I think that the fines are hard for me to get all fluffed up about because it's like the numbers that they throw out at this stage in the process are, are so arbitrary and they never reflect what actually happens. You know, like the, one of the big questions with the FTX estate is that the IRS is seeking like $25 billion. It's like a ridiculous number. And it's like, you might as well call it a million bajillion gazillion dollars. Like, you know, it's not even like you want so much that we can't possibly do it. All right. That's where we're starting from the negotiations. Let's figure it out. I do think that to the extent that we view these things in total as the U.S. trying to send a strong signal, that is definitely true. You know, when it comes to CZ's sentence, it seems like he had prepared or has prepared for the reality of serving some amount

Starting point is 00:18:46 of time uh it feels like you know whatever his lawyers advised that i mean the deal that he cut basically said that if if his sentence was in the sentencing guidelines he would not appeal that was part of the agreement and um and you have to think that that came with a presumption that there was going to be some time served i think the fact that there was a presumption that there was going to be some time served. I think the fact that there was a presumption that there was going to be some time served has to do with a move that's broader than crypto, but certainly we are at the epicenter of right now of trying to actually hold white collar crime to more account than we have in the past, to not let people just get off with fines and slaps on the wrist, but to actually see some amount of, you know, punishment in this way. The prosecutor recommending three years,

Starting point is 00:19:29 not super surprising given that they had previously, you know, as they were talking about whether CZ should be allowed to leave or not, said that they might recommend even more than that, you know, up to the absolute maximum. Ultimately, it's going to be the judge in the case that decides. I would be surprised if he went with that three-year recommendation. I think that he's going to feel, I think that he's going to respect sort of the spirit, let's call it, of the plea agreement. And I think he's going to get 18 months. Yeah, I think so too.

Starting point is 00:19:58 I wouldn't even be surprised if it was less. Obviously, CZ's lawyers themselves pushing for probation. Interestingly, there's another fine here. I don't now remember the number of 40, 60 more million dollars is already paid over three billion, I think. Just seems like they're fishing for more at the moment. And CZ has done everything he can to possibly get ahead of this. Frankly, I hope he gets less than three years. I think it would be pretty sad if he did three years. And he, by the way, did the exact opposite of what SBF did at his own sentencing hearing. SBF obviously tried to cope his way through it, admitting really no fault,

Starting point is 00:20:31 acting like he didn't know what was going on. CZ wrote a very heartfelt letter apologizing for all of this, saying, I would never do anything like this. This is the only time I'm ever going to be on the other side of a criminal investigation. And this was never my intention. So they're just very vastly different characters. Yeah, 100%. I also think that there's a big space, I think, in the crypto industry for people who think the laws are stupid but still comply. And then there's people who think the laws are stupid and try to get away with sort of skirting around them. And then there's people who think the laws literally don't apply to them and are just going to ignore the existence of law as a principle for

Starting point is 00:21:16 human society. And it turns out that last one ends up in jail for a lot longer. Yeah, I thought he'd be there a lot longer. But speaking of crime, whether it is or not, founders and CEO of cryptocurrency mixing service arrested and charged with money laundering and unlicensed money transmitting offenses. This is Samurai Wallet, and they're saying $2 billion in unlawful transactions and laundering over $100 million. This, of course, coming from one of our main enemies at this point, Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And as I kind of alluded to at the beginning, we're getting the Southern District of New York. We're getting some wild,

Starting point is 00:21:55 wild FBI letters going out here for anybody who didn't see this, warning Americans against using cryptocurrency money transmitting services. Basically, don't use a private wallet. Don't self-custody is what this looks like if you read in. And the IRS set to kill pseudonymity in crypto tax form proposal raises alarms. I mean, this is all happening effectively in a week and we haven't even gotten to the SEC, which will go next with consensus and Ethereum. But what do you make? Do you think this is coordinated, coincidental? Do you think self-custody is going to exist in the United States? What's happening here? Man, there's a lot. I feel like this is... The Samurai Wallet guys are like the Tom Hardy meme where he says that's bait. These guys are like plants to attract regulators and authorities with how they behave. I mean, this is a great example of

Starting point is 00:22:48 a situation where you kind of have to unpack the issues underlying it from the particular culprits or defendants in this case. Samurai did a lot of things from a... I mean, they literally taunted the US authorities in numerous ways and numerous public statements. They talked about inviting Russian oligarchs onto the system, which whether tongue in cheek or not, like, come on guys, right? And so they are very, let's call them unsympathetic actors in a lot of ways. And I think that many in the crypto industry have pointed out that it would be better for us if we didn't have so many unsympathetic actors that make for great targets. However, at the end of the day, that's not actually the big part of this.

Starting point is 00:23:31 The big part is the underlying questions of privacy technology, of whether you're on the hook for code. And specifically, I think in this case, it's a little bit nuanced, but what really constitutes a money transmitting business, right? There was 2019 FinCEN guidance that basically made it seem, or at least the way that the crypto industry took that guidance, was that if you were not custodying assets, if you were not custodying your customers' assets, you were not a money transmitting business. That's been the basis for how a lot of companies have run themselves since that happened. It seems that the arguments that we're seeing now

Starting point is 00:24:12 do not require, or at least the government is trying to argue that it doesn't require actual custody of those assets for there to be a centralized money transmitting entity. And that's sort of the big change that I think people need to keep an eye on because there's much bigger implications, which of course gets us to the broader story even than that, which is the push against self-hosted anything. I think that it is really clear that, I don't know, I'm not quite ready to call it this, but it sort of feels like part 2.0 of Operation Chokepoint 2.0, where the big battle in general to debank crypto hasn't worked. The hope that it just goes away because it dies didn't work. And so instead, we've gone back to this

Starting point is 00:24:57 one very specific thing, which is endemic and very essential to what makes crypto crypto, which is self-custody. And there seems to be a broad scale attempt to just outlaw and ban that. Basically, it seems like the US wants the reality to be that you can never interact with money without a third party intermediary being there to tell the government who you are and what you're doing. And there are, of course, bigger implications than just crypto, but it is very central to the crypto industry for that to be happening. Yeah. Well, if you take a look at what's happening with the IRS here, I don't think crypto will be pseudo-anonymous or privacy-preserving anymore, at least in the US.

Starting point is 00:25:38 Yesterday, the IRS issued the long-awaited draft form 1099-DA, the first tax form specifically designed to collect your ID and detailed transaction data at scale from brokers. Brokers, CeFi exchanges, certain DeFi exchanges, and wallets will be required to generate this form for each sale transaction and submit that info to the IRS and you, similar to stockbrokers, starting 1-1-2025. This is literally impossible. Yeah. I don't know, man. Obviously, there's a lot of legal battles ahead. It seems very unlikely to me that these are particularly winnable. I think that obviously there's some amount of fight to be had here and there's broader privacy issues, but I don't know, I'm not particularly bullish on our chances when it comes to this stuff. I think the US does not

Starting point is 00:26:32 want people to interact with any... Cash is already a grind on them when it comes to invisibility. I don't think that they're going to allow anything to be even remotely invisible. And I think that by trying to sort of make things that obviously can't be KYC, like these sort of self-hosted wallets, they're positioning themselves for a compromise peelback that effectively gets everything else and changes fundamentally the way that people interact with crypto here. If you want to own Bitcoin in the United States, you will own a BlackRock ETF and you will like it, sir. Basically. And maybe the one exception that we can hope for is there's a special privilege to put your own Bitcoin or crypto on your ledger, but that's it. You can't interact with it from there. You can't do anything with it. And there's probably some gateway through which you have to do that. So the US government has a record of when it went into your... You

Starting point is 00:27:28 know what I mean? That's the direction that things are headed. Yeah. Good old capitalism and freedom in it. We should have saved Stripe for after this. Seriously. Well, final story, which is the biggest. Consensus files lawsuit against SEC and commissioners over Ether regulation. The industry once again going on the offensive against the SEC. But interestingly, at the same time as they're receiving a Wells notice from the SEC saying that the SEC is coming for them. But maybe the Ethereum Foundation consensus trying to get ahead of this and looking to force clarity on whether Ethereum is in fact a security or a commodity. This is wild. Yeah, listen, so I don't think that it particularly matters that it's sort of prompted or at least initially, you know, finally catalyzed by that Wells notice.

Starting point is 00:28:21 I think that was coming down the pipe. I think that they thought it was coming down the pipe. That was just sort of the next step in the process. You don't file a lawsuit like this days after getting something like that. This has been in the works for a while, obviously. I'm actually much more bullish on the crypto industry's ability to fight the SEC and these types of battles than I am on sort of the very core money transmitting business sort of national security type arguments where, uh, you know, you're not even battling with someone you're battling with the entire establishment all at once.

Starting point is 00:28:51 You know, listen, the, the sec has picked a lot of fights on a lot of fronts. I continue to think that a big part of their objective is just tying, gumming up the works by having us all, all in, uh, all in fights, uh fights to try to delegitimate it in the eyes of Wall Street, who are now coming there. I mean, there's been a clear shift in regulatory policy towards this, if you're not losing cases, you're not fighting hard enough cases kind of thinking. And Gensler brags always about how many enforcement actions the SEC has brought as his record of being good. Right. It is very clear that for the powers that be that surround Gensler, enforcement actions is his metric. That's what he's being graded upon.

Starting point is 00:29:38 And so, you know, if that's the case, if it's not winning, you know, necessarily enforcement actions, it's taking on tough ones. Just, you know, sue everyone and let it let it all sort out later. Yeah, he won't be there when any of these are resolved anyways. Yep. Regardless, regardless of what happens. No SEC chairman lasts that long. Yep. The good news is, though, I think that, you know, these I think are much they're a pain

Starting point is 00:30:00 in the ass in the short and medium term, but they're much more likely to result in definitive answers that can allow us to move forward in positive ways. As we've seen with sort of the ripple decision to ETF pipeline, I think that we're likely to see other things like that. I think that it is very likely to me that this sort of Ethereum case goes more in our favor than in their favor when it comes to this. But we'll see. It's still going to be a multi-year process for that to happen. That was our last story. We had honorable mentions, which we won't dig deeply into, but I know we have PC data coming today and inflation has been a hot story this week and

Starting point is 00:30:39 what's going to likely happen with the Fed. And of course, the other, I think, is the Biden proposal to raise cap gains to 44.6% and potentially 25% on unrealized capital gains. These things will never pass. But in my mind, the very fact that we have to spend our breath on them is just astounding. Yeah. My favorite meme that I saw was the one of sort of like the spirit rising up above the body. And the quote or the caption is, Wall Streeters, feeling the Democrat leave their body as they read about 25% unrealized gains tax. I mean, for people who don't understand what that means, I mean, imagine a founder's stock value goes up $100 million in a year. They have to literally pay $25 million in taxes that year. And the day later, it could go back down to its previous value. Oh, and the other irony is that the

Starting point is 00:31:34 unrealized gain would have to come from them realizing a gain selling $25 million worth of the stock just to be able to make the payment. I mean, the whole thing is so absurd and insane. And the 44.6%, all that's going to do is make the billionaires who can never sell anything. So there'll be no taxable income. They'll take larger loans. And by the way, the interest on those loans, tax-free. Yeah. I mean, listen, this is an election year policy. You want to be able to say, you're going after the billionaires, the rich billionaires who can afford to pay more. It's just positioning.

Starting point is 00:32:12 It'll go away after November. Like I said, it's not going to happen. It's just populism. It is wild, though. It's just wild. I didn't even intend to talk about it. That's all we got, guys. You should be obviously listening to The Breakdown every single day. NLW checking out all of his channels

Starting point is 00:32:27 and following him on X, formerly known as Twitter. I still just can't say X. I just can't get there. I do a lot of Twitter, Twitter slash X. Yeah, and hopefully we'll be on a better run of you and I not being out of town for a while here. We can make this more consistent again. I know a lot of people love it.

Starting point is 00:32:44 I actually ran into someone in Dubai who tracked me down just to compliment you he was like i love your friday show that guy's so smart but oh yeah it really happened so there are people who specifically watch only for this show which was interesting to find i think uh from someone randomly in Dubai who wasn't an American. Guys, that's all we got for you today. We will see you next week. Peace.

The Wolf Of All Streets - The Most Bullish News For Crypto

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