Unchained - Why Bitcoin Isn't Acting as Digital Gold & International Stocks Are Winning - Bits + Bips

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Uniswap! Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product? The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-and-play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto It’s on-chain execution at an enterprise level. More liquidity. Less complexity. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more. Is Bitcoin losing its “digital gold” narrative just as geopolitics heat up? The Bits + Bips crew debates what markets still aren’t pricing in. In this episode of Bits + Bips, hosts Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins are joined by David Duong, Global Head of Research at Coinbase, to unpack a volatile mix of crypto regulation, geopolitics, and shifting market structure. The group digs into why the latest market structure bill is starting to crack, why investors may be underpricing regulatory clarity, and what it means that Bitcoin is failing to behave like digital gold just as global risk rises. They also explore whether the U.S. and Europe are still true allies, why Wall Street’s move toward 24/7 onchain markets matters more than most realize, and how internet capital markets could reshape who gets access to capital in the next decade. Hosts: Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida Austin Campbell, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting Christopher Perkins, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund Guests: David Duong, Global Head of Research at Coinbase Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most tokens, I would guess, are going to go to zero and things are going to die. But the winners will be very big. Even if we do see a market structure bill realize in 2026, let's say, I think that market hasn't priced it in yet. The difference also between now and most of the last seven months or so is that investors are all in the market, man. Investors are in, right? There's no one off the sidelines now.

I've talked often about this massive risk gap between 24-7 markets and non-term. 24-7 markets. They just can't rebalance and it's going to lead to a massive crisis. So hat tip to our friends over at Nizzi. Welcome to bits and bibs

where we explore how crypto and macro combine one basis point at a time. I'm going to be your host today. I'm Chris Perkins, president of coin funds.

Today I'm with, as usual, Ram Alawalia, master of wealth, leader of Illumina. It's gone. And today I am blessed to have my dear friend,

David Dong, Global Head of Research at Coinbase. Gentlemen, we're here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro. And remember, nothing we say here is investment advice and check out UnchainedCripto.com backslash bips and bits for more disclosures. All right, let's go to the break. Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product? The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-in-play access to some of Bet mode activated.

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It's on-chain execution at an enterprise level. More liquidity, less complexity. Visit hub.uniswop.org to learn more. All right. Welcome back, everyone. There's a rumor running around that the mad professor is going to be joining us here in a second. But in the meantime, we wanted to jump right into the market structure build. Now, this has been quite a drama.

And last Thursday, David, your firm Coinbase publicly withdrew its support calling the draft, quote, unworkable. Now, hey, hello, Austin. Since that time, the Democrats, industry reps, and others have reopened their negotiations and they're underscoring just how fragile this coalition is. But this would have been the first real vote on the crypto framework. But it seems like, you know, we've talked about in this podcast, the Empire striking back, It seems like the banks and Citadel are positioning themselves against crypto, and disputes are centered around things such as stable coin yield.

Market structure around equities, intermediary roles, and how much flexibility the regulators are going to have vis-a-vis crypto regulations. Over the weekend, Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong's rejected reports that the Trump administration may pull support, and he's called that he said that the White House has been super constructive. Now, look, separately, new resistance has emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee. We had Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin object to not being included in some of the discussions. And so let's just let's just get into it, guys. And Austin, welcome back. You know, you've been all over market structure. You want to kick off with your take on where we are and where we're going?

Yeah, sure. I think a lot of the complication of market structure is your app. the nexus of about six different groups, all of whom have overlapping and not identical concerns. And the core problem for anybody who wants to oversimplify it is that it's hard to get to an over 50% majority to move anything in that situation. Because as Chris said, you have the big banks who are piling in. They're concerned about competition from stable coins and yield and looking to, quite frankly, relitigate parts of genius that were already passed. You have the crypto industry itself, looking at the stable coin part, but also all of the rules around

securities, who gets essentially control between SEC, CFTC, how powers are divided. And there's not even unanimity within crypto on that, much less outside of it. I think you have some traditional financial players like Citadel who care deeply about those rules who may not be aligned with the crypto industry. And then I think helpfully piling in, you've got people on the, call it, judicial and anti-financial crime side who I'm going to be honest, I'm not sure, completely up to speed on how some of these issues work because they say they have certain goals and then propose things that directly contradict those goals. So I think we have something of an education problem. And then at the final leg now starting to get involved, you've got people like retailers

who themselves have their own views on commerce related to this that the big banks have attracted who now are pushing for like the Credit Card Choice Act. And then that they're things of that sort as part of this. So that is a, I'll just say it this way. It's hard to predict exactly which rock the boat will crash into, but when you see that many rocks in front of a boat, you can pretty accurately predict it's going to hit one of them. And so when I look at Chris, to bring this back around to where we started Armstrong's comments, a lot of what I am concerned about there is, I think he's probably right that the White House is constructive. I think once people heard out why Coinbase was pulling back and others opposed it, there's probably

like some ground between all of them. But I don't know that that solves any of these other issues amidst the constituents in the bill. And that's before you get to the Republican Democratic like political problem here. Yeah. I agree. David. So I don't know what you're able to say or not say. So if not, we can just keep talking. But I did see Fariar, who is your global head of policy, just speaking at Davos with Brett Teshawal. And he hired. highlighted three different things that were the reasons why they pulled back. It sounds like things are constructive. Is there anything that you can comment on around where Coinbase is in the situation?

Yeah, I would say Faryer is definitely the authority here. And, you know, going to Brian's tweets is probably the best thing because I think that he laid out very clearly. But I can tell you that it wasn't just one issue that really kind of caused Coinbase's step back from this. And Fariar has kind of pointed out that they were, you know, six big fundamental kind of concerns that we had. And that was why, you know, we were at the table at good faith, but, you know, we're not going to compromise and what we think isn't going to be

good for our consumers, isn't going to be good for the industry. So this was part of the problem. And, you know, like, I think that coming back to it, what Austin said about stable coins, that's absolutely a big part of this. It's not the only issue. I think that I kind of speak to the fact that the Genius Act wasn't a perfect bill, for example, but it was still a very good bill. And I think that even during the time since it was adopted, there's been something like 200 different commercial announcements that have been made with these companies. And this has been integrating stable coins into these payment systems, into the infrastructure in a way that wouldn't have been commercially viable before that. So I think that this is kind of what we need to consider

when we're trying to relitigate this whole issue. Yeah, I don't get the relitigation. I get why it's happening, but I don't think it makes sense. There's no mulligans. in crypto. What is Rob? Phil and on this. Has anyone tracked out? Obviously, he introduced the Clarity Act. He's not the chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Is anyone tracking it where he's netting out on these issues between the large banks and kind of the- Sorry, who? French Hill, Congressman French Hill. So I think part of the problem they have in the House and like I'll remind everybody to Congressman Hill himself as a former community banker here. is the small banks have convinced themselves that stable coins are a significant threat to their deposit base. I'm going to be the first person to tell you that is factually false. Like, I've done a lot of research on this. The share of deposits as a percentage of the system held by small banks was close to cut in half from 2009 to 2023.

It let me tell you stable coins 100% had nothing to do with that because that is over a trillion dollars in. deposits at a time when they were like 100 billion-ish to 200-billion-ish of stable coins, 95% of which are held by non-U.S. persons, right? Just mathematically, you can't swear that, right? That's like saying one Hyundai Tucson, right, is a car responsible for 500% of U.S. auto accidents, right? This is an incoherent statement. And the problem it's created, though, is the small banks have convinced themselves that is the problem. I think in the vein of we'd rather point the finger and blame somebody else for our woes and not appealing to customers and not sort of like modernizing because like, Rom, you and I have talked about this outside the show,

but community banks in general are essentially zombies. Every year for many community banks, their average customer gets one year older, right? And that means you are on a path to obsolescence. And you know that because there are some outliers in that space who have very much gone the other way that show the other path, right? Like take SOFI. as an example. That's a bank that's grown very quickly because it was digital first, a tech native, it appealed to young people. But like, I live in Brooklyn. I can walk around and look at like five to ten community banks in a 20-minute radius around my house. And I have absolutely no reason to use any of them for anything. And so when stable coins become the sacrificial lamb that the

ICBA is pointing to, and all of their claims are false, so there's functionally nothing you can do to appease them other than just like they need to educate themselves and stop being 80 years old. I don't know where French Hill goes on that one. Too observations. I think it's a great point you made that Congressman French Hill, who's extremely thoughtful individual, by the way, he's a former community banker. This is going to come down, I believe, to the guy in the seat. He's the chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

So he's going to want to make tiebreakers, and he's going to lean towards the incumbency and the banks is my read of the situation. I'm not saying that's what they should do. I'm trying to handicap what's likely to play out. One other quick point is on Zell. So the small banks and the big banks had an interesting innovation opportunity around payments with Zell. This was what, like seven years ago?

This is a dry run for stable coins, which is another modern payments innovation opportunity. The big banks were the first to adopt and they had an edge because of that. The small banks that adopted were able to acquire new counts quicker, but on average, they're slow adopters. So if you're a small bank, you're trying to slow the pace of change. So I think Austin's right in a larger sense of, hey, it's not really disruptive to community banks. But that's not their mindset. Their mindset is I'm already getting

hosed by online digital banks. I mean, hosed by the big banks are now stepping into Pennsylvania, taking share from these regional banks. I think they'll push back. I think Congressman French Hill will probably go in the direction of the banks. I guess the last real point here is this. Part of this is what is a bank, is a rose, is a rose. That's the issue. If you pay out interest,

what is that? We are breaking definitions. Our modern banking regulatory system isn't set up for these kinds of concepts. Yeah, I don't know if I agree with you on Congressman Hill because this is very much a Senate battle right now. We got to get through the Senate. That's where the problems have been.

I was on the phone all weekend with a lot of folks at the table at some of the highest levels. And I'm going to tell you, Austin, this is going to shock you, wait for it. I'm actually kind of bullish on getting something passed, at least getting something to the floor. Because as I go with those folks line by line down the issues that matter, I think they're all solvable from a policy perspective. What I don't think is solvable, perhaps, is when you get to the floor, the Democrats that I talk to can't get over the fact that their constituents or their party

align crypto with Trump in many in many facets. And so they can't get over that. So I think from a policy perspective we can get there. I'm not sure we can get there from a political perspective. And let's us break down the issues, right? Stablecoin interest.

When you talk to the powers that be, they're like, listen, you were never able to pay interest on idle stable coins? Like, how easy is it to not make it idle? It's not that hard to do. And so I think there are ways we can thread the needle. The other thing that I keep going back to, because like, why not? We like to talk about Gary Gensler on this show. Like, I've laid a lot of this on him. It's a lot harder to make legislation these days because we're post-chevron deference. Regulators have limited ability.

And what you're seeing in this bill as well is they're trying to restrict the ability of regulators even further. Gosh, in this case, we kind of want the regulators to do their work. We want them to be able to issue exemptions. And it's called a section 505, where we want them to have the flexibility to say, well, wait a second, guys. These are tokens. We should provide limited exception relief because, again, we can solve the same principles with this new technology that we solve in the old way. So again, my overarching thesis is that everyone's still at the table. This is very positive. we're going to go to the floor, people are going to vote, and then they're going to have to live in the bed that they make, right?

I don't know how it plays out. I'm still thinking it doesn't get done, but I'm feeling better about it. And then I guess the question that I'd like to ask, you know, David, next, what happens if a bill gets passed and what happens if a bill doesn't get past? Where does that leave markets? Good question. I think if a bill does get passed, markets still have an even reckoning with who does this actually benefit.

which tokens does its benefit. I think that probably for most part, Bitcoin's carved out its own niche. Obviously, Bitcoin isn't considered a security. It's well within the bounds of like being commodity. So I think that's fine. But people haven't really reckoned with how is this going to support D5. For example, we saw for example,

Uniswap actually do the fee switch vote on over Christmas. But, you know, like as a community, I don't think anyone has really kind of figured out. what do we want from the crypto space right now? Do we want to just kind of invest in tokens? Which once upon a time, I would have said most definitely that's kind of the path of these resistance. But Avey is a good example of this. I think, you know, Avey has kind of brought in this idea of like, could there also be the characterization of tokens? And is that the right way to kind of accumulate value to these projects? For example, I don't think people are as opposed to equity as they once were.

I think once upon time people just kind of dismissed it as stocks and that they were only invest in crypto, only invest in tokens. That's not the case anymore. We open the door to that with ETFs and Dats and Circles IPO and all these other myriad of things. And it's still ongoing right now with, you know, FitGo and other things that have been in the news. So I think that this is kind of the challenge. So even if we do see a market structure bill, like realize in 2026, let's say, I think the market hasn't priced it in yet. I mean, obviously not because of all the challenges we face. But beyond that, I think people haven't figured out, well, which sectors does this benefit?

Like, do I want to buy, like, you know, dinosaur, defy names? Or do I want to buy longer tier, long duration kind of names? I don't think anyone realizes that yet. So you don't think market structure is priced in either way? No, I do not. I think that very much, you know, it probably will overlook Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin will benefit to some small. marginal kind of effect.

But I think if we do see it get passed, and, you know, I'm not going to throw out the timeline there, but let's say it gets passed in the near term, I think then people will kind of rush and say like, okay, what should I be buying here? Like, where do I need to be long? Yeah, I think you're right. And securities are no longer a death sentence. But, Ron, how do you think the market reacts to the ongoing? Well, I guess I'm trying to reason through this in real time myself.

I'd love to hear your perspective, Chris. It's like what, where's the causality? So look, we get clarity and what's a commodity. How does this drive asset prices, right? You get more investment, I suppose. Like, what's the bull case around how this act drives higher asset prices? I'll take the other side after you. Yeah, I think, you know, prices go up when there are more buyers than sellers.

And there's a lot of buyers that haven't been able to access these markets because they have risks that they're just not comfortable taking. let alone the volatility of the underlying asset. It's a frontier asset, but they don't want to take regulatory risk. And so again, but my thesis is a little bit different. I think on the base, if you have a market structure law that's passed, those institutions feel even more comfortable, and it's easier for them to navigate their investment committees to enter the space in a major way, whether that's, you know,

whatever equity form or crypto form. But I think the truth is something a little bit different. I think the truth is that letting these regulators do their job, and Chairman Atkins and Seelig are world class, we're going to have pretty good certainty one way or the other. Why? Because we're going to know what a commodity is. We're going to know what a security is. Commodities are going to have futures and we're going to have a whole bunch of them, right? And so the issue there is enshrinement. And the question is, well, if I build all this infrastructure and I'm operating, you know, it takes me two years to build. Okay. I put it in place for six months. and there's a change in administration. Oh, no, now I'm stuck. I wasted all this money.

So I do think market structure law helps accelerate those new buyers coming into the market. But at the end, I think we're going to have wonderful certainty either way for at least three years. A wall of capital waiting for clarity. I just don't see that. I think it was 585 crypto VC funds have a mandate to invest in digital assets. they were going to invest with and without the bill. From my vantage point, you know, I see crypto along with other, you know, high beta names like Robin Hood and Palantir and SoFi. And it's like the old guard of this bull market now.

It's rotating to a new guard of high beta that includes space stocks, that includes defense stocks. I think that's just where the money is. That's what the relative strength is. And I don't think this bill suddenly changes that. Yeah, I think it's different than VC, right? We're talking about pensions, endowments, investing in liquid assets. We're talking about those traditional large allocators moving into the space for the first time. You know, you run around the world. There's a lot of pension funds, endowments and other institutions that have been watching it. They're not yet comfortable dipping their toe in the pool. So I think it's much bigger than the VC community, who's always going to be early. I agree with that. I think that access, I think, is probably underappreciated in terms of it. I think it's probably underappreciated in terms of, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I of everyone in this space right now, probably, yeah, you know, we can easily go to, like, my company, Coinbase or wherever you can do it. But I think Chris, to his point, is large institutions still have a lot of constraints. And the, you know, regulatory one is a big one.

So I think we have started to see, like, RIAs kind of step in here. Like, but even that's more recent development, right? Like, we saw Morgan Stanley's headline that, hey, now they can, their RIAs are allowed to kind of recommend those ETS to their clients. and it would still have to be within that vehicle. It still couldn't be Bitcoin natively into a portfolio, and that's fine. There's tons of reasons why that might not be the case. But I think that if you have the regulatory bounds in there, that framework in there, then a lot of those institutions can kind of step into the space,

and there's trillions of dollars waiting there. I'm not saying that would happen immediately. Again, it probably wouldn't be a wall per se. It would be like, boom, day one, like all that money is kind of floating. Again, if these things are slow, these guys are like, you know, very large conservative institutions, so we'll take time for that money to kind of flow in. But I think when it does, I think it still will come into a crippling space and benefit us. Yep.

So we're going to go to Greenland next. But before we do, wanted to hear Austin's final thoughts on how this thing plays out. Well, I think one thing that's happening here is it kind of begs the question to be of why do things have value, right? put differently. Clarity showing up, to me, I think, is going to be a pivotal moment for a lot of crypto projects and a lot of tokens. Because under the Gensler regime, everything was hypothetical and you might have value, but oh, I can't do things.

We're all doing janky things. But the reality is when the gun goes off and the game starts, you either can do it or you can't. And so I think this is going to be like a sort of dividing function. Most tokens, I would guess, are going to go to zero at the, are going to die. But the winners will be very big, you know, in many ways a little bit like tech in the 90s, right? A lot of that stuff did not make it, but the stuff that made it is incredible. And so it's going to be a forcing function on that. I think the other part back to our discussion

here is now you will have equities, like things that are equities right now that build into this space deriving a lot of value from it. They may never launch a token, right? That may just be like somebody who is a corporation starts using this stuff and generating revenue from it. And so it really scrambles the playing field in a way that was not possible previously. And for that, I don't think it matters whether we get clarity or not, Chris.

I think if clarity passes, that's great for the long term if they do a good job of it. It's actually probably bad if they do a bad job of it. But as I said, we've got like actions and sealing in place. They're going to go through notice and comment. We'll make it periods for these things. They're going to actually write things down. That means if a future, like, regulator wants to unwrite those things down, there's also a process for that.

And you're not going to get in trouble for the time period at which you did think as they were written down. Right. It just creates a framework that allows people to operate in a way that is not total kabuki theater and without, you know, something like the Gensler, SEC acting truly in bad faith, where they prosecuted a bunch of people like Coinbase who were not deliberately engaged. aging in criminal acts but missed most of the people who were. And I think it's that playing field that really matters. Like I'm still very skeptical on clarity because like you said, where do the Democratic votes ultimately come from is a hard line for me to get over. But I also think it matters less than it ever has. Yeah, I agree. So real quick, before we go on, go around the horn. Does clarity get done this year, Austin? You say no, right? No. Rob? No. David.

This is just my own opinion, but I think yes. Yeah, David's the optimist. I don't know. I've been no forever. I felt encouraged after the weekend chats. I'm going to stick with no for now, but maybe next week will be different. But I hope it gets done. I think it's generally bullish.

Great. Let's go to Greenland next. So lots going on here, guys. President Trump wants to buy Greenland. and it looks like, like, for my perspective, the guy's a real estate guy. We had 1951, the U.S. already has, like, pretty much free reign across Greenland, you know, when it comes to military installations. We've actually pulled back military installations.

But he really, really wants Greenland. I think he wants to be part of his legacy. And now he's starting to ramp up tariffs, applying other tools, non-kinetic tools, to curse, you know, our allies to. to give him what he wants. Polymarket states it's only a 21% chance that he acquires it before 27. You see gold and silver moving higher. Obviously, the markets have not, markets just don't like tariffs.

But I guess starting off, what does this mean? I mean, is this just another issue where he threatens the tariffs and then things settle and then markets rebound and then we kind of get back to where we were? Want to hear your takes. Let's start with ROM. So much going on in Greenland right now, you know, fresh off of Venezuela. What does this mean for the markets? What does it mean for crypto?

Well, first off, Trump is serious about it. He's very serious. This is an objective. You want to pursue. It'll get done. The only question is, what's the method? Is it through a bargain or is it through something else? The second thing is, I wonder, if you guys remember, after the Venezuela episode,

there was this viral clip with Jack Ryan giving a lecture. around how strategic Venezuela is. And now we saw that again with the Greenland this weekend. We're seeing this new kind of social media life imitates art, art imitates life. And it's just kind of fascinating to see. We have the first television president, the first social media president. I think all future presidents will be social media influences going forward. It's just fascinating to see in terms of how this is being processed in terms of historical

movies and art and all the rest. You know, from a markets perspective, markets don't like, you know, where we are now. Futures obviously down. That's a combination of both Greenland and also the EU threatening the U.S. This is like a man bites a dog now around scuttling a trade deal. Markets don't like any of that. The difference also between now and most of the last seven months or so is that

investors are all in the market now. Investors are in, right? There's no one off the sidelines now. So, you know, the positioning is long. So, you know, I'd expect that international stocks will continue to outperform. You know, what you're seeing is the SMP is one of the worst stock markets in the world over the last 12 months. Mag 7 stocks are in correction. They've been lagging. That's in part due to the fact that there's more populist pressure on those names, including from the president, and also pressure from money managers just rotating out of the U.S. So, yeah, you know, this is not a nothing burger. I think there are a lot of nothing burgers out there.

I think this one actually is that something better. So I think there's more risk to process, you know, ahead. Yeah, I think so. David, Bitcoin is not gold's up. Bitcoin is not acting like digital gold. Is this all correlated? Why aren't we seeing, you know, Bitcoin, assume it's rightful place.

Yeah, this is a continuation of the trend that we saw in 2025, where that digital gold narrative just didn't look very convincing to a lot of folks. And I think that you're seeing this in a weird way, because right now the dollar is actually weaker against most other currencies, notably the euro. Typically, the strange thing about market dynamics, you know, I used to work in Tradify, you used to emerging markets. And usually, like, regardless of whether the issue was coming from. within the U.S., oftentimes you saw investors actually buy the dollar.

The dollar would still strengthen, but it's not happening. And again, this kind of harkens back to what we saw with Liberation Day. It was a trend that kind of got broken from a 15-year cycle where oftentimes most of that, you know, trillions of dollars worth of capital, I think somewhere around $34 trillion worth of international money into like U.S. assets often goes either unhedge or underhedge. Well, that all flipped in 2025. It's continuing now. theoretically, that should be helping Bitcoin as much as the whole helps gold.

But what we saw in 2025 was that there was a clear break. And this really kind of happened close to the events of 1010. So this is kind of why it's hard to disentangle what's going on here. Because I think that was an idiosyncratic event that had to do with the actual market structure of crypto itself. And that had to do with market makers and liquidity and all those things. And we've corrected that like day by day, it's getting better. since the events of 1010, but it still hasn't repaired itself. And so we're now here on, whatever, January 19, and gold continues to kind of like swing

better because of these geopolitical kind of developments. And Bitcoin just can't catch up. I think that we're at least kind of through the worst of it. This is why, like, we're at 93 and 992, 93 rather than like back in the 80s. And I don't think we're going to get back there because so much of that. selling pressure has already been alleviated. Anyone who really wanted to like sell an earnest probably already did so in Q4. So I do think that we're in a better place, but it's definitely hard to kind of see us kind of swinging back, recovering in a way that's a lot more convincing than what it was historically.

Awesome. What's your take on Greenland, man? So I think there's a couple of things going on here. And it's important to disentangle them from each other because it tells you where. future things are going ahead. One is that I agree with Rom that Trump is serious about the Greenland thing. I think as we've seen the administration sort of adopt a very muscular version of the Monroe doctrine, you would understand that a largely untouched but strategically important place in the Western hemisphere that quite frankly is kind of undefended right now is the exact kind of thing that doctrine would lead you to want to grab and control.

And I will remind everybody, as we're talking about Greenland, not all countries are created equal, which is to say there's like 50,000 people at Greenland, right? This is not attempting to take over a country of like tens of millions of people or something like that. Like, there's probably more people in my neighborhood in Brooklyn than there are in all of Greenland. And the scale is part of what matters because Chris, exactly as you said, like we used to do a lot there. we can go back to do it a lot there.

Two, and this is something I think markets have not fully priced, is that this to me represents a free underwriting by the United States of the following question. Are we allies with Europe? Right. And I think that is a question that was taken for granted for a long time, but has really started to fray recently. I think there are major, major, major disagreements about, NATO spending that have now been ongoing for about a decade. But I also think there are starting

to be very major disagreements on tech. You have seen tech driving U.S. economic results and the Europeans doing everything they can to fine, impede, censor, and essentially jerk around U.S. tech companies. Maybe the best and most egregious example of this is Offcom in the U.K. sending extremely threatening like large fines at jail time threats to 4chan for things Americans said to Americans in America. And their theory is because somebody anywhere

sees this in the UK, the whole thing is under our jurisdiction. And I just don't think we're willing to play that game. And so it's starting to force these sort of discussions in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago of are we in Europe on the same team? like if we're really going to behave this way, do we have the same goals? Are we on the same team?

You hit the nail on the head. I agree. Chris would love to get your take on the side. One thing to the mix. You guys see that Carney and China and like Carney is, you know, embracing China now. Europe was surfing China a few months ago. Also, so everyone's cutting deals without the United States. That's the trend.

And I think you're right. Like, is Macron is criticizing the United States and there are quote unquote be unprecedented cascades, should there be move on Groodland, including the status of the NATO coalition. So, yeah, no, I think you're right. Awesome. That's the key question. And it's showing up in asset prices. Chris, what do you think? Do you see the Mercosaur deal with Europe, too? You know, that was being negotiated for 27 years.

27 years. And they're like, uh-oh, we got to get this done. So look, what we're seeing right now is a world that's dominant. by real politic, right? Not idealism. It was more balanced in the past, particularly when we were dealing with the ideology of communism versus the West, the Soviets, whatever.

And I think it was interesting when we had Peter Shear on here a few weeks ago. He talked about pivoting from the post-war world to a pre-war world. And that is what you're seeing on the chess table, right? this quest for securing natural resources at all costs and like really redefining alliances. Now, what I'm watching for, and I think this is one of the tactics, I do think Trump is so maniacally focused. I do think he will have success. At some point, the Europeans are going to say, at what cost? At what cost, do we really want to do this? Yes, there's some minerals there. There's 50,000 people. It's going to really hurt us. And I do think,

think you'll start to see some fracturing on the continent. The European, like, the German economy is a lot different than the French economy, is a lot different than the others, right? And so I do think that the U.S. will be able to, I don't want to say pick them off, but, but they'll be able to come with a different set of carrots and sticks to ensure that they build that consensus to make it move. I think they're going to lead with economics, you know, whether it's the cost of NATO. Sadly, like, A lot of the Europeans don't have a lot of choice. They put themselves in a very difficult spot vis-a-vis energy and the Russians

and dependency on that, particularly in Germany. And they outsourced a lot of their defense. And so they're going to have to figure it out if Greenland's the price for economic harmony and defense at some point. It may be worth it. So look, I think you're right, Rahm. I think the president is super focused. But I'm also curious about what does this mean for stable coins? right? Because we're seeing the dollarization and I think, David, you talked about the softness

of the Dixie. Like, is this going to impede the globalization of the dollar via stable coins or is it going to accelerate it? All this movement. I think we're going to accelerate it. So, I mean, we've kind of talked around this. And I hate to kind of bring it down to like brass tax. But like, how is the, how is Europe going to finance a permanent military presence in Greenland to defer or deter these like U.S. annexation efforts because, you know, like they are not, most of those countries in the EU are not in a good position financially speaking right now. And I think that this only put even greater financial constraints on them because they need to up their defense spending. And ultimately, like, does this, like, you know, like, I think Ron brought up the idea of, like,

people don't want to invest in the U.S. right now, but equally I'm kind of like, is the U.S. a bad place to invest in right now? Because I don't know if I necessarily. necessarily want to pivot and put more of my money in European stocks or other things, for example. And, you know, like, just thinking more kind of like just, you know, again, like, bottom line, like most of the names that you would still want to invest in, the most and more innovative names are still inside of the U.S. So ultimately, I think the way it's going to shake out, I think that there's going to be a blip here.

I'm not saying that, like, the de-dollarization trend isn't going to, isn't intact. It definitely is. but I've always thought of that as a decade's long trend anyway. This would probably accelerate that but short term, I don't think that this is going to deter people from adopting dollars and adopting stable

coins. But I mean, there's more than just that, right? It's other things too. It's like what's happening in Japan, what's happening in China with like other stable coin efforts. So it doesn't exist in a vacuum. But on. I want to hop in on that one and say

we also need to be careful what we mean by stable coin adoption? Like, it's fascinating as to how these things work. You can have a world where the governments of nations are trying to get away from the U.S. dollar. At the same time, their citizens are opting into the U.S. dollar. So it's also a reshuffling of where control exists and who gets to say what, because if you're a country that wants to have both the internet and capital controls, I think you've got a problem on a forward basis because of stablecoins. And so the EU could very well have like their big banks and like their governments dumping U.S. treasuries and trying not to use dollars at the same time their citizens rapidly adopt

for dollars. And that paradigm has not been like well understood so far. Once again hit the nail on the head. No, I agree. It's in the U.S. interest to trade with merchants and small business in China in stable coin to move them off the rimiby. And you could do it. You could take receipt of goods and then deliver payment in stable coin. It could be bottoms up. And that's incredibly disruptive. So I agree. I think that's something to keep watching.

I don't see why emerging markets, dollarization wouldn't continue simply because millions of individual decisions would prefer a dollar-backed stable coin over their own currency. Yeah. So what's the trade here, David and Rob? International stock still.

Still. David's pushing back on that. He used to buy America. Well, hold on. National stocks wear as well, like Latin America versus Europe. Let me tell you the markets are beating the United States. You can tell the one to stop.

Mexico, 50%. Brazil, 50%. Germany. France, beating the market, beating the S&P. Canada, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, up 70%. All of them, the whole thing.

The whole thing. Now, the last time we saw emerging market our performance versus United States, including United States tech stocks, was in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. And when it leads U.S. stocks by year, it continues. These trends aren't just one and done. They continue. And there's a real driver of this. And the drivers of them are exactly what we're talking about now.

It's the geopolitical issues. Right? You have money managers that are saying, gee, what's going over there in the United States? I'm just going to invest over here. And oh, now I've got momentum. I mean, you're right. Like the most innovative tech companies and management teams and capital markets and rule of law are in the United States.

100%. 100%. That doesn't mean that every single year, the SMP 500 is coded to outperform the rest of the world. In fact, the setup now is that the international markets will continue to upperform the United States. David's buying the dip. What do you think, David? So I've read the same thing from, I think, Bridgewater wrote a post on this as well.

And they also, you know, they supported the idea that international equities were going to outperform. And I don't dispute that if I was thinking I could actually, you know, convert my Euro-based or Mexican-Peso-based rewards back into dollars, for example. I'll be honest, though, as a U.S. investor, I mean, like, I don't have the balance sheet necessary to make that work my while in a way where, like, I, you know, if we're talking about outperformance, that's one thing. Like, if we're talking about the U.S. equities still doing well, I think they're going to be fine. I think that, yes, like, you know, we still stole a double-ditcher return in the U.S. last year. it was outperformed by EM in a way that it hadn't happened for a long time. I mean, like, I used to cover Vlad's hand. That was my beat.

And like, it was always one of those things. Like I said, for the better part of the last decade, you always wanted to hedge your assets back into, you kept it unhaged. You just kept it in dollar exposure. That has changed. And I think that it does kind of speak to the idea that it's not just the fact that, as kind of Ron was alluding to, hey, what the hell's going on in the U.S.?

Maybe I want to, like, just buy back home. There's also probably a sentiment issue of like, how do you justify to your, if you're an asset manager, for example, and the U.S. is putting on large tariffs on your country, like, and it seems like, you know, it's combative, for example. How do you justify to your investors and your investor base when they ask you, hey, why are you still investing in U.S. assets? So I think that has kind of changed things, and that's probably what's contributed to some of that move or some of that outperformance. But yeah, I'll be honest with you. At the end of the day,

I'm saying like, I'm American, I'm spending dollars. I'm still buying American. I'm still buying US equities. Amen. With that, gentlemen, we're going to go to an ad from the sponsors and make this show possible. Hey, founders and developers. If you're looking to bring on-chain trading to your product, wallet, or platform, check out the new Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs. It's your plug-and-play gateway to global on-chain liquidity, no deep crypto experience required, and no need to manage complex integrations or ongoing maintenance. With the Uniswop trading API, you'll get enterprise-grade on-chain execution, combining both on-chain and off-chain sources for the most competitive prices. Simply put, more liquidity, less complexity. And this isn't

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settlement of tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs, aiming to enable 24-7 trading, fractional shares, and near instant settlement. All of this, of course, is pending regulatory approval, but I can tell you the SEC is actually working in good faith to approve these kinds of things. this is part of a larger push for round-the-clock markets in general from Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of Nisi, and they're working with many people in the greater financial industry, including Bonian City, on various capabilities around this. But I want to just, like, throw it to the group.

What do we make of this coming out of Nizzi? What do we make of U.S. capital markets finally, potentially moving away from New York oldly banking hours. I'll jump in. First off, a lot of people don't realize this. And Nisi is actually owned by ICE. Not the guys, you know, they're not reporting anybody.

They're not reporting anybody. It's the intercontinental exchange. And the intercontinental exchange, what makes it interesting, it's actually a founder-led company. It's a behemoth. It's a $90 billion market cap company last time I checked on probably off a little bit.

But it's run by, I'm Jeff Brecker. Now, when you're an entrepreneur and you have that entrepreneurial mind, you're always thinking about how to innovate and adjust your company to win. And we saw what he did with the polymarket deal. These guys have actually been in the space very, very long time. In fact, you know, some argue they were too early with their backed initiative way back in the day. But they're real right now. Look, I was in the futures industry. I've known those guys for years. And another lesson that people need to watch really closely is guess what, guys, ice bought NISI and NISI didn't buy ice because derivatives rule the world. And it's something to keep in mind.

Now, vis-a-vis this introduction, it's about time. Like, now that we aren't being put in a box by regulators and we're actually allowed to embrace technology, the market is taking control. The market is moving forward. Look, we're going to be in a bot-driven economy in AI. driven capital markets before you know it. We have to be 24-7. I've talked often about this massive risk gap between 24-7 markets and non-24-7 markets. They just can't rebalance and it's going to lead to a massive crisis. So hat-tip to our friends over at Nizzi, hat-tip to our friends over at ICE. This is the way. Now, I think we're a little bit light on details around, you know,

which chains are integrating and some of the specifics. And I know everyone's really interested to know how this integration is going to take place. But I think it's a great move forward. I would prefer to see the headlines with digital asset brands like Superstate, like Coinbase, like Gito, whatever it might be. This goes back to the Empire Strikes Back theme. DigitalOass has been running fast and hard and climbing up the hill and challenging Elizabeth Warren and getting fair shake pack involved.

And they're getting to the finish line. and then ice steps in and takes the cherry, nizy steps in, takes the cake. And I don't think that's good for digital assets. It's, you know, the technology is being co-opted and fintech is beating digital assets. And even fintech is being co-opted by the incumbents. It's, I think a lot of digital assets was about how do you shake up legacy financial institutions? We're not seeing that. we're seeing legacy financial institutions adopt blockchain technology.

And I'm not personally excited about them. I'm glad to see digital technology is proliferating. I just, I have so like who's taking the reins and leading on this right now. I mean, a lot of that comes down to one of the great failings of the crypto industry over the past decade. And actually, Coinbase is one of the exceptions that proves the rule on this,

which is probably the single most important thing in business period, full stop, is who controls the customer relationship. And you have tons of people who spend a huge amount of time building more and more niche things for a smaller and smaller group of engineers. And nobody stopped to ask, hey, can normal people use our stuff? And I feel like a lot of those chickens are coming home to roost, where the reason that you can have a company like Nizzi, right, which has a huge B2P customer base, obviously,

or as you look around like a Robin Hood, step into this space and dominate, is that nobody like, I don't know, went out into the world and got people to use it. Because like if I just were to go outside right now in New York and start walking down the street asking every single person I ran into, hey, not a centralized exchange app. But have you ever used a self-custodial crypto wallet? I'm just going to get, no, no, no, no, no. One 20-year-old guy is going to be like, I've got Bitcoin. No, no, no, no, right? And so I think it's like the misunderstanding or unwillingness of the space to just like go face customers that's caused this dynamic. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily phrase it as co-opting.

I mean, like to some extent, you're right. I think that, you know, we should be, I've been pushing all along for, you know, how do we like use these rails better and kind of having crypto kind of increase on some. but I think what Alston said in terms of who owns relationships is a huge point. I mean, I still think that this is a legitimizing moment for the sector, not that it needs it. We've had several of those now. Like I would say the most prominent one being like the 2024 like ETF kind of moment, which itself was a watershed moment. But I feel like now we're seeing that 90s entry tokinage trading. I mean, this is another kind of watershed moment that I think.

I mean, I don't see how this doesn't validate the vision that we've had in terms of saying all along that the future finance will be on chain. I think that it's true. It's just that we were fighting that fight on our own for a very long time. And now you're having a lot of traditional incumbents kind of coming to the space and say, like, oh, yeah, no, you were right. Like our bad. Let's kind of get into it. And they're seeing that blockchain technology isn't just to trade crypto, but in fact is what we said it was all along, which is, is to pure infrastructure for all assets.

And I think that, you know, there's probably going to be a lot of people in the traditional finance space that are not going to be happy that they now have to trade 24-7. But you'll probably be happy that there's now on-chain settlement. They're probably going to be happy that they can actually use stable coins to actually fund themselves with. I think it's still a massive win for the ecosystem overall. It doesn't this cut out a seat at the table for digital asset firms? Like, how are they going to get involved?

How do they get a seat at the table? How do they participate edgewise in any which way shape or form in any economic way? Nisey and nice. We're saying, hey, guys, we're here. We're talking a block rock. We're tokenized it. Done. Thank you for all the work.

We're here. We got the marbles. We got the customers. We got the product. We got the data. Well, we don't know how the integration is going to work yet, right? Is it going to be on public blockchains? It's going to be on private blockchains.

You know, I thought it was interesting. Austin, they talk about tokenizing bank deposits as collateral. Like, interesting. Not stable coins, not money market. So I think details will matter. Look, Salada has said from day one, they're going to be the decentralized NASDAQ. And so it's going to be really interested to see how these types of solutions compete on chain. Look, for a lot of people's experience, you start centralized.

It's a gateway. You get comfortable. You get the wallet set up, blah, blah, blah. It's often a gateway and a lily pad into the world of decentralized finance. So I'm maybe not as bearish as you, Rahm. Now, are they going to prevent? Look, Coinbase, they didn't put up, you know, massive gates to stop people from getting on chain. They've been encouraging it.

So maybe that's going to be a good thing. I would also. Go ahead, sir. I was going to say, I would also say there's a big difference between the blockchain infrastructure that exists right now will win and blockchain infrastructure in general and the future will win. Because, right, like, if we're thinking about like Solana's whole pitch is, you know, we're going to be decentralized NASDAQ, guys, I have so many questions based on, like, your current security model about how you think that's going to work once you understand how NASDAQ really works. I'm not sure Solana is well equipped, but that's also not to say like a nisy private chain is the winner too, right? To go back to our

internet analogy, please tell me who in like 1994 as the internet was really starting to breach into the mainstream was like, aha, TikTok, right? Like many of the things that are coming in the future, their shape is completely unknown to us right now. And I would say one thing that I would tell everybody to pump the brakes on is picking winners and losers purely from the set of people you're currently aware of. Because in some ways, you should probably bet the field against everything that currently exists. I'd say, do you venture investor now? It's like in the optimist.

I think a lot of companies are set up for a Netscape Navigator moment or an AOL kind of moment right now. here's the opportunity. The opportunity isn't to say, let me go do a block rock does better. Let me go do it DTCC and just do it better. That's ego and you're underestimating the technology customers, regulatory and all the rest. The opportunities are on the underserved niche markets. And there are massive underserved niche markets. And I don't see people focus on that customer segment. And Austin is right. You got to focus on who is the customer. What are you going after? as opposed to what is this technology and let me make it go 24-7, which sounds cool but doesn't solve a problem for someone that's willing to pay,

which is business about. So here are the two opportunities, briefly. One is internet capital markets. What segment of the market? Those that cannot access public capital markets. Who are those? Small businesses, not just the ICOs and venture backs up, but small businesses.

Someone's going to start up a Dunkin' Donuts. the SVA 7A lending program will finance that business because they've got underwriting history going back to decades. They'll underwrite debt. If you can underwrite debt, you can then definitely underwrite the equity. Because, you know, the debt's good. There's a whole class of companies, including like funeral homes or barbershops that fit under the internet capital markets for debt. That's one bucket. Who's going after that?

I don't see people doing that. And guess what? You can team up with the community banks that are fighting for relevancy and survival against the big banks. they will say thank you. You're going to help equitize my customer. So I have more subordination of my loans. Come talk to my customers. The other side is the equity side of internet capital markets.

That's something akin to what's a modern version of the Angel List, where you've got people with skin in the game around what they're investing in, invest alongside community, have a curation concept. That's an opportunity. And the other big bucket is creator economy and influences. In the age of AI, people got to have a lot more abundance, a lot more leisure time. Entertainment matters more. Trust matters more. Personality is going to proliferate. That content needs a monetization mechanism. And it's a digital content. So it lends itself

to digital assets. Who's going after that? These are the opportunities people need to go after as opposed to I'm going to go take a BlackRock in the DTCC. Well, let me throw another one in there, right? You raise internet capital markets. One of the big things you've got to think about with capital markets is how do you pay for things, right? Back to what is a name? Main Street opportunity that would matter for people to address. How many retailers are there currently in America with profit margins, like net margins somewhere between like one to five percent, right? Like very high turnover, but very low margin businesses, where if you put all of the payments into a single block and have that as an employee, far and away the highest paid employee beyond even

the CEO would be interchange. Right. So again, if you can modernize the payment structure, for these people, right? That is transformative prop. So now you're talking about decentralized, what you're, I guess the way I would say it is this. What you're fundamentally talking about here is meta community banking, right? Like rather than all these community banks existing is like localized things where like I only serve this one town in Idaho, it's saying sort of why don't we take something that exists between a credit union and a community bank, decentralize it, make it much broader across America and provide a way better value prop, but the zero that you get paid on your Wells Fargo checking account.

Yeah, no, look, I think there are real problems to be solved. Why did Solana have success in this cycle? Because they were application focused. They were end-user market focused. Why did Cantor get some traction? Because their application and customer focus. It wasn't lost in the engineering of theory. And there are major big problems to be solved still that involve, to your point,

disintermediating interchange, raising capital for small businesses. which need capital. So there's still a lot to do, but the crypto entrepreneur falls in love of the technology instead of falls in love with the technology, instead of falling in love with the problem that the customer is facing.

Yeah. Like, if you learn nothing else ever from listening to this podcast, please learn this one thing, which is in blockchain space right now across the whole technological stack. None of this stuff is TEDx better to the point where people are picking based

on technology, right? If somebody is picking a blockchain to use for this stuff, they're going to pick on, like, features, ease of use, able to, like, implement effectively, et cetera, et cetera. The tech is no longer the important part. I'm going to say, I see I've killed our discussion with that one. All right, cool. So final one before we get moving here today, guys, this will be a quick one for us. But we've talked a decent about the Fed. Sounds like HACID is out. and I would put this as part of our ongoing story of like Trump sparring with the Fed in the same way that he's currently sparring with Denmark over Greenland. But, Ron, what are you taking from this?

What do you think about like impact for the market? Is this a duffig burger? I've mixed view. So on the one hand, if you're Trump, you're supposed to get Kevin Hassett. He's the dove. He's going to do what you want and cut rates and send us to 2021 Valhalla. That's what Kevin Hesper would do. he's extremely dubbish.

Now, I'm not a Kevin Hasseg guy because I think you don't even need to cut rates. You got 5% nominal GDP growth. We got wartime deficits. You got fiscal spending and tax cuts coming. Why are you trying to cut rates? We don't need a sugar high. That's going to them give back like in a 23. We don't need that.

So they're talking about Kevin Warsh. Kevin Warsh is a monetary hawk. He opposed QE. What Kevin Warsh would do is inconsistent with Trump's call last week to buy $200 billion in MBS. So there's lack of consistency. So think about if you're markets. Markets are saying, hey, they're entrained on Kevin Hassett being the Fed chair. Now you rug pull me and tell me Kevin Warsh, is he me the new Fed sure?

I mean, he's one of the folks being nominated. It doesn't make sense. I think over the last two weeks, a lot of the policy coming out of White House is not good for beta. And this is another example. So I think. think that there's something going on in our economy that makes the Fed's job distinctly difficult right now in this moment. And you said, why should the Fed be cutting rates? Because the economy is doing well. And you're right, except for that the Fed needs to respond to its actual mandate, which is to

deal with inflation and full employment. And those two things actually are not diametrically opposed to what's going on in the economy right now, but certainly the companies in our economy are doing a lot better than most people in the labor market. Like, I would say that the labor market is still weakening. Jobs are being disemediated. And whether you want to dispute or not, I do think that, like, you are not seeing the participation in the labor market in the same vein as it was, like a decade ago, in part because of AI, in part because of efficiency, productivity gains, in a way that's not fully being captured by BLS data, et cetera. And equally, I think that's also contributing to a disinflationary trend that we haven't recognized. I think that,

like a lot of people were worried about one-off, like tariffs, for example, despite the fact that the San Francisco Fed actually wrote a great paper about how tariffs actually are disinflationary, not inflationary. But at the same time, you're seeing the economy actually doing fairly well. Like, it's a weird state of affairs when you see a lot of companies kind of stepping in and letting go of people, mainly white collar workers and, you know, like middle management, while the company is actually profitable. Generally, those companies go with people because they're not doing well. It's completely different right now, and I feel like this is what's making the Fed's job much, much harder. So when you say, why should the Fed be cutting rates? I'm like, well, because their mandate requires them to do so, except that the underlying, what they are supposed to be doing is actually responding to the economy.

And yeah, you're right. The economy will probably return like four or five percent in Q4 in a way that we didn't necessarily expect. Now, to your point about Cameron Warsh, like that part, I think, is much harder to kind of reconcile because, as you said, like, he doesn't necessarily like QE. He's been critical about balance sheet purchases in the past. And I think that's what kind of makes me hard for me to kind of say, like, if Warsh is now the frontrunner and not say Waller or someone else, then I feel like this could actually put, complicate like the, the risk asset environment in 20206. Just recently, I'm sure. Can you guys see this chart here, the initial claims later? Yep.

Just briefly, all this is saying, like, initial claims, jobless claims are arena lows. We're below 23 and below 2025. Like, labor market's strong. Continuing claims are low. In our weekend newsletter this week, we went through the bank earnings transcripts. Delinquencies are low. Consumer spending is high. Credit bill.

This is Goldilocks. So overall things are fine. And the feds of cutting rates in the, this. It's bizarre. I mean, I kind of ask myself, does Trump want to talk down markets? Like, isn't that a legitimate question to ask when you do a 180 on your headguard? Right. And it's max uncertainty right now. We have no idea what's going to happen with tariffs in the Supreme Court. We got Greenland going on. We've got all types of craziness happening. That, you know, he has a lot to do with it. Maybe not the terrorist thing. But you're right.

Sometimes you wonder. But I also think that markets are starting to get used to Trump again. when he first came out and, you know, would say various things. I think they were responded. But now it feels like things are relatively stable despite the amount of craziness out there. I know tariffs are going to happen. We're going to get that Supreme Court ruling on tariffs pretty soon. Good or bad? Well, I'll, I'll pie over this, but an additional point here as I think about how all of this is going and the tariffs thing it plays with this.

I'm not so sure that people have a good handle on what is going on with interest rates of the Fed anymore, which is to say if you pause and think about the mechanics of raising rates versus lowering rates, a variable that nobody currently discuss as much as the outstanding amount of current government debt and the fact that it being very short-dated in many cases means rebasing that whole thing. because the impact of rates going to 10% when your debt to GDP is also 10% is very different than the impact of rates going to 10% when your debt to GDP is 120% and it's mostly short-dating. Like there are frameworks in which it's very possible that rate cuts are disinflationary and rate increases are inflationary if you look at the money flows that are going to be coming

off of U.S. Treasury debt that back into the private sector, And it also interplays with are we increasing or decreasing spending from there, which is where tariffs come into this thing. But my point is what I'm really worried about is it's one of those things where like everybody, Trump, people in Congress, right? Like commentators think we're still driving a car. But now we're like flying a plane or like sailing a boat and the controls work differently. And they're trying to do the thing they're used to doing and not getting the result. they expect because that's not how the system works. And as a result, some very unexpected things are going to happen that are going to break stuff. Because to Rob's point, with equity valuations where they are,

if you wanted a really large downleg, that'll happen when something like the Fed cuts rates. And as a result of cutting rates, inflation drops and unemployment spikes and the economy starts stalling out. And then everybody will panic because that's not what they expected. Yeah, I think that you bring up a really good point about the debt burden that we're actually dealing with right now. And based on everything that I feel like we've been seeing coming out of the Treasury, like they think long and hard about the term structure of the curve. And certainly I think they come to conclusion that the pivot point is the 10-year rate. It's not the 30-year, it's not something further out on the curve.

And they've been trying to use, like trying to move that into the T-bills so they can actually manage this. And this is why we are keeping rates sub-5% in the T-Burts. 10 year. And that, of course, has been also been very supportive from a liquidity standpoint for equities, for the corporate names. And that kind of, I think, has kind of created, like, a separate dynamic that I think the Fed has also been kind of been dealing with because you're part of like, we don't know what's going on with interest rates right now, at least like the connection between interest rates, what's happening with the broader economy. And that's absolutely right. I mean, we saw in Q4 that it was a background deal with like sulfur rates and what the Fed had to do with

I-O-E-R, but effectively, they are trying to manage the volatility in those short-term funding rates because they otherwise would have had a much bigger problem. So it was almost kind of like slight of hand of like, hey, they're dealing with the interest rate here, but actually this is the big problem. And we've kind of gone past it in January where at least it feels like that issue has kind of moderated for now, but I don't think it's gone away at all. And I think that's still going to be an outstanding problem probably later in the year. Do you got to see PIMCO's buying non-US debt now. Block rock. These are big

money marriages, big institutions that are just rotating away and nothing I've seen the last week's going to change. It's just going to accelerate that. All right. You heard it from wrong before we close out. Long Bitcoin. Now he's making fun of me.

All right, everybody. Well, I think we've been rolling for a while here. So this is where we will stop today. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bits and Bips. We'll be back at a week. to discuss more about how the worlds of crypto and macro are colliding. Until that, everyone.