What Bitcoin Did - THE FED CAN’T SAVE THE ECONOMY w/ Jeff Snider

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Jeff Snider is a macro analyst and the host of Eurodollar University. In this episode, we discuss why Jeff believes the Federal Reserve has far less control over the economy than people assume, the true nature of money creation, and whether inflation was ever really about money printing. We also get into his perspective on the global economic landscape, the long-term effects of the pandemic’s economic policies, why he thinks central banks are more about signalling than substance, and Bitcoin Bonds MASSIVE THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/ CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

It's done. What's done is done. We've made the entire world poor and now we have to pay the cost of doing that. And unfortunately, we don't really have a good idea of what that means or what those costs actually will end up being. People are pissed off. They know things aren't going in the right direction, but nobody will give them answers for it. Sadly, I think because everything's been done, we're kind of just along for the ride from here on out. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor, a massive legend, Iron. the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They also provide cutting edge computing resources for AI all backed by renewable energy.

So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit iron.com to learn more, which is iraeren.com. How's life in Miami? Oh, I'm good. I'm everything with you guys. I mean, it's been a couple of years. I know it's been a long time.

Some changes here. Now you're in front of the camera. Yeah, so Pete has moved on. He's now doing his own podcast. He kind of broke away and it's focused on like UK issues mainly. Oh, really? Yeah. So he's doing a lot of stuff with like UK politicians and that kind of stuff. Like with the football club and everything he's doing in Bedford, it just got too much to keep traveling. And with them like most of the Bitcoin audience and the people we speak to are all in the US. So it was just getting too much. So yeah, I've taken over. How's that going so far?

You enjoying it? It's going good. Yeah, I'm loving it. So I've, I mean, the travel is only just started again for me, really. I've done everything remotely so far, but I'm in DC now and starting doing in person again. So it's only been a few months, but it's gone great. Yeah, I've been really enjoying it. Yeah, it's difficult, isn't it?

It seems like it should be something that's easy, but interviewing people. Yeah. It makes me really tough. And it's like the travel always sounds amazing. You sound like you're so spoiled to complain about it. But when you're leaving the family and stuff, it's not easy. Yeah, and to go work at something, right? It's not like you're going on vacation everywhere.

Totally. And I live in Australia as well. So like getting here was like 20 hour flight. Yeah, it's not like it's short trips. Yeah. But good to see you again, Jeff. The last time you were on the show was nearly two years ago. It was when we did a live show in Miami with Lynn Alden.

You were debating money printing. And I always think it's really. I love Lynn. I think she's amazing. But it's really interesting to hear from you because you have such different perspectives to the normal people in like the macro people in Bitcoin. So I want to get into all of that. But maybe that's a good place to start. Why is it that you see the world so differently to the people that I normally speak to? I'm not sure. Maybe you need to talk to other people. No, look, the monetary issues are really difficult to begin with simply because of the fact that central banks controlled the narrative and they have for a very long period of time. And by the way, that's a new, that's relatively new phenomenon. There was a time period when, you know, the central banks, any central banks, the Federal Reserve in particular was treated as it should as a joke. People didn't care what the, nobody knew who the Fed, even who is at the Fed, the Fed chief.

Nobody really knew who was there because the Federal Reserve didn't matter. So there was this narrative that was crafted really in the 80s and 90s to try to explain the great moderation. And central bankers said, we did this. This is us. And what they didn't tell you was, and they actually lied to Congress about this, what they didn't tell you was they were pushed out of the monetary business entirely by the way that the banking system and the monetary system evolved in the 60s, and into the 80s and beyond. end. So central banks simply shifted to the only thing they had left to do. And there's all sorts of quotes and comments and discussions about this to inside the Federal Reserve that they never, they don't make this public. In fact, they conspired to keep all of this private for 17 years. But essentially,

they got thrown out of the monetary business and crafted this idea that they could control an economy by moving the federal funds rate around. And the only reason they move the federal funds rate around is because that's the last thing that they had available to them. So it was either closed the doors because they had nothing else to do or move the federal funds rate around and see if that somehow works and has some kind of effect on the economy. But because they transitioned to this during the period of this great moderation, they've been claiming correlation as causation ever since. So nobody knew where the great moderation came from. Economists were stumped about it. So in comes Alan Greenspan's Fed and they said, that's us. We did this. In fact, Ben Bernanke was the biggest

proponent of selling this idea, that interest rate targeting is somehow this powerful economic signal. So ever since then, because nobody could explain the great moderation, the Federal Reserve has taken on more and more, become more and more central to the narrative behind the economy. And because the central banks also employ a ton of economists themselves, the entire financial media has no idea what it's talking about, so it gets all of its talking points from the central bank, too. Politicians have no idea what's going on in the economy. Where did they get their advice and information from central banks. So there's this entire, basically the entire financial services industry, economics, all of it is set up to put the central bank in the middle of

everything. And so because we're taught to believe in the message is reinforced over and over, central bank, central bank, central bank, everything that happens in the world, it's almost, it's almost like everybody wants to attribute everything to the Fed and central banks. And so there's an entire narratives and ideology that has been constructed. around this idea that central banks are at the center of everything. It doesn't matter the fact that, you know, 2008 happened. If you had an all-powerful Fed, how do you have something like 2008? Or March of 2020, or the banking crisis in 2020.

There are a number of other things that happened along the way. So it's really just most people, it's understandable why they focus on central bank policies and therefore try to attribute these meaningful impacts from central bank policies because we're led to believe in this modern era that the central banks are all important for basically everything. When we really need to go back to where we were before, which is ignoring the Fed entirely because it's just a bunch of wacky superstitions. So you don't think the Fed has any impact on the market, or do you think the only impact that it does have is the signal that it provides? And that's what to tell you, too. If you actually listen to what the central bankers say, they're very careful to never use the term money.

And that's on purpose. It's a dirty little secret. Why is that? Because they don't do money. They have no idea what the monetary system is. And so they keep talking about other things other than money because they don't actually do monetary policies. Their interest rate policies, which is an entirely different animal. So do this, does the central bank have an impact on the economy in the marketplace?

And there is some impact. But as you said, Danny, it's all about signal and sentiment. It's not about money. It's not about money into the economy. It's about getting people to believe the Fed is doing something that's helpful. and if you believe the Fed is doing something that's helpful, I don't need to know what it is. I just know that the Fed's all powerful because that's what CNBC tells me, and that's what economists tell me, that's what every politician says.

So if the Fed gets on TV and says, we're stimulating the economy by doing X, I'm going to just believe that they're stimulating, I'm going to act as if they are. At least that's the theory, right? It doesn't actually work in practice. It works better in some places like the stock market than it does and others. But essentially, the Fed is its entire policy, is set up to signal. It's all about sentiment and psychology,

not actual money in financial markets and intervening. So if you believe the Fed is powerful, then you can follow along with what they want you to do and the signals that they're sending through these interest rate targets. But is the money and markets not downstream of interest rates? They are impacted by interest rates, but not nearly as much as everybody believes.

Again, this goes back to the transformation. The transformation was the fact that central banks, because all they had left was targeting the federal funds rate. Part of selling that narrative was getting people to believe that interest rates, first of all, are the opposite of what they really are and what they really represent, number one. I mean, that's a big thing right there. But number two, making interest rates also the center of the universe. If you're the Fed and all you have is an interest rate and your job is to try to make yourself

the center of the universe, then you have to make interest rates into the center of the universe. And it's it's an easier job to do that when, I mean, it sounds intuitive, right? If interest rates go down, how is that not stimulus, right? Because it's cheaper for people to borrow. But what you never consider and what they never ever talk about, again, this is the thing that people should be thinking about in their minds. Why don't they talk about this other half? Is it better for banks to lend when interest rates are lower? No, it's not. So even if it's cheaper for people to borrow and maybe people want to borrow, at the very least, that's not the decisive factor. It's not the entire story.

There's another story to tell. And honestly, when we get to interest rates, from the bank's perspective, interest rates is one of the least important inputs into banking anyway. It's all about balance sheet constraints and risk aversion. But from the Federal Reserve's perspective, you've got to make interest rates into everything. And most people don't really have a good sense of the economy and how it operates anyway, so it sounds intuitive. even though the fact that interest rates behave opposite of how they're telling you

it's supposed to work, right? We're supposed to associate lower interest rates with more accommodative policies and more accommodative conditions in the marketplace, and higher interest rates are associated with more restrictive policies. I mean, that's what we've been hearing for the last, what, three, four years now. But historically speaking, it's the opposite. You know, it's Milton Friedman's interest rate fallacy. You go back to inflationary periods, genuinely inflationary periods, interest rates are rising.

They're rising because of growth and inflation expectations with an emphasis on inflation expectation. You go to deflationary periods like Japan in the 1990s, one of the most obvious deflationary periods in recent memory. Japanese interest rates were going down. They weren't going down because the central bank was pushing them down. They were going down because the market said zero growth, zero inflation expectations. The U.S. in the 1930s, the Great Depression, where did interest rates go? They went down and they stayed there.

So in order to get this thing to work in terms of psychology, not only is the Fed have to make interest rates the center of everything, they've got to tell you it's the exact opposite of the way it actually is historically in reality. And they have to do so by leaving a whole lot of it out just to get that signal down to the most basic levels so that people can understand it. Because if they started talking about, well, if we lower interest rates and banks are going to want to lend, you complicate everything, which again goes back to the point that this is all about signaling, not actual money. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero-fee recurring buys, making stacking sats effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outperforms most high-yield savings accounts. What really sets River apart is their unmatched dedication to security. You have peace of mind knowing that River has monthly proof of reserves and holds all Bitcoin in multi-sid-sid-cold storage. and with US-based phone support, you'll always have someone ready to help.

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Okay, so I'm not done with the Fed. I want to get back to the Fed and drone pile. But before we do, can we just take a bit of a step back and get a bit of a perspective of how you're viewing the economy right now? What kind of state do you think we're in? Like, give us the broad overview. Yeah, there's two different things that are going on right now. And they both relate to the term recession and one people hate and the other people are just starting to get a sense of. Okay.

The question is, and I think a lot of people have been asking, at least people outside of the economics profession and politicians. and although politicians recently have been reminded they have, but they should have been having this discussion all along. The question is, do we ever recover from the pandemic, the lockdowns and everything else, the supply shock? And you look at statistics around the world, in nominal terms, it looks pretty good because you had a nominal increase in a whole bunch of stuff.

And it said, okay, economies appear to be red hot. Everybody said they were red hot. So how could we not have recovered? But then you start looking at economic data in real terms, adjusting for prices. And immediately you see the economy did not recover. and it stopped recovering three years ago at the end of 2022. So as soon as prices soared ahead, and by the way, it wasn't right hikes that did this. The cure for high prices is always high prices.

The high prices themselves lead to economic circumstances like that we're exactly what we've been experiencing over the last three years. So prices went ahead. Businesses couldn't afford it because they couldn't pass on all those costs to their customers. He had margin compression, you have activity that never recovered. And so there's a very good argument. In fact, I think it's pretty conclusive when you actually examine the data that we never actually recovered from the pandemic before we even get to the cyclical questions about the last couple years.

And you see this, by the way, in the United States, because there's a belief, especially within the United States that, okay, maybe that's a problem for Europe because Europe's a basket case and their economy is always performing poorly to begin with. But you look at something like U.S. economic data and U.S. labor market data in particular, what you see is, you know, the main payroll reports, which, We just got a Friday payroll report last month or last week from February. And the main payroll reports, the establishment survey, is something like five and a half million jobs short of recovery. That's in here in 2025, which means if had we actually recovered, had the supply shock and the price illusion been an actual recovery where all the nominal stuff zoomed ahead, we would have had 5.5 million more jobs in February than we do today than we actually do. because it was all an illusion. It was a nominal illusion, a price illusion, and it was reinforced, again, by these narratives

that consumer prices that went way ahead somehow represented a red-hot economy that was recovering, not just recovering, but recovering too quickly. So how do you have a recovery that's recovering too quickly and too much when we're still 5 million jobs short of what recovery looks like? So even before we get to today,

we have way too few jobs, and this is the United States, which is the best possible view, So you have too few jobs in the U.S., which means too little income. And this is one reason why when you add the price changes to the last couple of years, the price shock, why people don't think the economy has done really well. They can call it a recovery, but most people don't feel like it's been a recovery because it actually hasn't been one.

So people's sense of how things have gone are more accurate, are more accurate representation of how the economy is than the statistics look when you just examine them on a short run basis. Yeah, I think that's one of the most interesting thing that's happening at the moment is that while economists are saying that the economy is quite healthy, like people on the street are struggling. And why do you think there's that discrepancy now? Again, I think it's the focus on short-term changes in statistics. So if you look at the statistics like GDP in the United States, it looks fine. You know, last quarter was 2.3%, which isn't great, but it isn't all that bad. And the couple quarters before that were 3%. There's been no negative GDP numbers. So how can

the economy be poorly. So if you look at the quarterly changes in GDP or the monthly changes in the payroll reports, they look relatively decent. They look like they might have, you know, five years ago. What you're missing is the context behind that. And the context is what we just said, what I just went through. GDP might be growing at 3%, but we needed to grow at 8%. Payrolls are growing at 140,000, but we need them to grow at 540,000. That's the context that's missing. People have in their mind a binary binary outcome. It's either if the numbers aren't negative, then the economy's fine. And the only time we really worry about the economy is when the numbers are negative. And that's just not the case. You need the wider context, which shows that the economy never recovered. However much of

nominal GDP there was, it wasn't enough to generate actual employment growth, employment recovery, let alone employment growth. So that's part of the disconnect there is when you look at the GDP numbers from quarter to quarter, they don't look bad. You don't realize what's really missing from them. And so, you know, politicians and macro tourists in every industry simply look at those GDP figures and say, okay, everything must be fine. And then Jay Powell comes on TV. What does he say? This economy is really good. It's robust. It's strong and resilient. And Jay Powell has been deputy. I mean, how great is this from the Federal Reserve perspective? On top of everything we just talked about, Congress and the entire government and the entire public have deferred to the Federal Reserve to tell us how the Federal Reserve is doing. You imagine that. boss comes to you and says, I want you to tell me how you're doing it your job. And so that's what happens every quarter, twice a year. Jay Powell goes to Congress and tells them how we've been doing it to Federal Reserve. Is he ever going to say the economy didn't recover from four years ago? He's not going to say that. He's going to tell you that the economy is fine and resilient.

Plus, he also will lie to your face because he believes that if he tells you the economy's poor, he can actually make it worse. So you have all of this information that seems to be coming from everywhere that reinforces the narrative that everything's just fine and dandy. But then you look at, okay, we had the U.S. election, people were pissed off. You had the elections in Germany and France. People are pissed off. You have the election in the U.K. You've got Australia now that's looking weaker. New Zealand. I mean, New Zealand went from one administration to the other, and it looks like they're going back again because they're still pissed off. The economy has never recovered. So while we have economists that are arguing like we're heading for recession and people have been saying that for years

and is like technically not happened. Do you think that's all a misnomer and we've always been in recession since the pandemic? Yeah, see, that's the point. So we get into what the definition of what actually a recession is. And so most people, a recession is when the payroll number gets negative and GDP gets negative. I know there's a technical definition of two-quarters of two straight quarters of negative GDP. That's not really the definition, but it's a shorthand. So people have in their mind a recession must look like this. And if it doesn't exactly look like that, then it can't be recession. Again, we're trained to believe there's only two states of the world. Recession where GDP's negative and payrolls are negative or everything else. And everything else falls into the category of the

economy is just fine. That's just not the case. There's an entire spectrum of possible outcomes here. And we've been living in one of the worst of those, which is a prolonged period of at best stagnation. And when you have a massive contraction that just happened, you know, four or five years ago back in the pandemic and you don't recover from it five, half a decade later? That's an enormous economic problem. By the way, we went through this last decade. We went through the 2008 crisis, the Great Not Recession, which was not a recession, though most people looked thought of it as one. We had no recovery after that. And so half a decade later on, we had fewer jobs, fewer people working, fewer incomes, all the same stuff. The only thing that was missing was the consumer

price component. And people were pissed off and people acted that way. People felt that the economy wasn't performing. It wasn't as good as people said. And it was economists and policymakers said the same exact GDP looks okay. Payrolls are growing. How can we complain about the economy here? So what people are missing is the context. And in many cases, politicians and central bankers are omitting the context on purpose because it makes them look poorly. It makes their policies, it shows that their policies didn't work. And they're not going to, they're not going to tell you that. They're not going to get on TV and say, you know what, We did a bunch of QEs and they didn't actually work.

They're not going to say that. So there's this massive disconnect and we've had it for a long period, a long time. We're talking about going back to 2007, where politicians, central bankers, the entire establishment says, everything's just fine, maintain the status quo, just keep doing what you're doing, don't ask too many questions.

So in your career, has this been the most confusing time to try and analyze what's actually happening? You had a lot of ways because we have that added consumer price component, right? So we've got the same basic economy and economic setup that we had in the 2010s with the big difference being the supply shock from 2021 and 2022, which everybody said, that's inflation. It's 1970s all over again. So you've got the poor economy that has people looking in the wrong direction because they think this is going to turn out like the 1970s. And they can't figure out why consumer prices are slowing down, or at least consumer price increases are

slowing down when 1970s, it would be accelerating and interest rates would be going up. So you've got, you've got an economy that hasn't performed that has never recovered from 2020s, didn't recover from 2008, and everybody's talking about inflation. And when you get into the topic of inflation, look at the language that we're supposed to use, right? If consumer price rates are relatively higher, at least higher than our experience from the 2010s, so you've got a 3% CPI, what does everybody say? Oh, that's a hot CPI.

It's red hot. It's scorching. It's a scorching CPI, which then means where you're led to believe is that means the economy. economy must be hot, right? Because that's where consumer prices come from. So how can we have a recession or economy that never recovered from 2020? We've got red-hot inflation. So yeah, it's very difficult for people who can't compartmentalize and put all these pieces together to come to a coherent narrative. All they know is the economy sucks and it doesn't seem to be getting any better and nobody has any answers for why it sucks and why it isn't getting better. So you can understand

why people are lashing out in a political, in the political way. But it really comes down to so many misconceptions about economics, and I mean small e-e economics, thanks in large part to the horrible job that economics, capital E-e economics, has done in educating the public about how things actually work. So you said no one knows the way out of this. What do you think the way out of this will be? Yeah, and I don't think there is any other way out of this. And what I mean by that is, look, What happened in 2020 was the opposite, like I said, opposite of recovery, but it's even worse than that. I mean, just from a big picture standpoint, we don't even getting into any details. Do people, do anybody really believe, does anybody really believe that we can just shut everything down and then open it back up and we'll be just fine?

Did anybody really buy that? Seems crazy. I know. I mean, that's the narrative. Like, the governments are going to come in. They're just going to lock things down. And then when they let everything come back up, it's just going to go back to the way it was before. But that's where the price illusion and CPIs all come into because it made it seem like that was the case.

So first of all, when you locked everything down, all across the world, he had especially small businesses that were just destroyed. They never come back. They never did come back. And small businesses are a huge part of the growth engine and the economy. So you can't just destroy a bunch of future capacity and potential and expect the economy to be just fine. So a lot of that was a lot of that was covered up under the price illusion. Then you had the price illusion itself. And the price illusion, I keep referring to it as illusion because of the language that we use and the interpretation that we use. It's not a red hot economy. It was essentially a supply shock or phase shift, which meant that demand came back from the pandemic much faster than supply was able to meet it. And when you have those basic differences in supply demand, you know, the supply demand curves.

You know, when they shift them around, the only way to adjust where demand is coming back faster than supply is with prices going up. That's not inflation. That's a supply shock. And it's insidious because what it means is that unless, incomes rise at the same rate and the same time, you're essentially becoming impoverished because prices go up, but your incomes don't go up nearly as much. And so you're falling further and further behind, the longer your incomes don't go up to match prices. We've seen that all throughout the world. So what happened just in big picture terms was that we destroyed a bunch of small

businesses in particular, a bunch of capacity, that's harming future growth. At the same time, they impoverished the entire goddamn world. Right. So how are we going to to have an economy that's growing at a relatively decent rate that's growing it enough that it can create conditions that are beneficial to everybody if you destroyed a bunch of long run potential and then made everybody on the planet poorer for it. So I don't understand why people think that things are going to go just fine from here. The reason people think that is because Jay Powell and Christine Lagarde and I forget Bullock in Australia, they're all going to tell you that everything's fine because it's their job to tell you everything is fine. And every politician

going to say, don't worry about our policies work tremendously. Meanwhile, everybody can feel the difference. They number one, they can feel the fact they've been impoverished because you see it every time you go to the grocery store. Anytime you want to buy a car, if you haven't bought a car in the 2020s, you know, let's say you haven't bought a car since 2019. You go to the dealer and you're like, holy crap, what the hell happened to prices of automobiles? My income didn't go up for me to afford that. So you feel the impoverishment, which is why people are pissed off because the economy is not fine. And worse than that, the recession question that we're getting into today, the cyclical stuff is that as bad off as we were there, it's actually getting worse because some of the, some of the

positives that were part of that lack of recovery economy, I call it, I call it the forgot how to grow economy because people hate it when to use the recession terms. So fine. We'll call it forgot how to grow. The economy forgot how to grow. It didn't really forget, but it forgot how to grow. And now it's starting to remember how to traditional recession, which means we have all a bunch of cyclical. negatives on top. So while everybody has ignored that previous stuff, it's becoming more and more difficult to ignore the recession, the more familiar types of recession that we're getting in the more recent signals that suggest, okay, whatever happened over the last couple of years, this year we might actually see the negative numbers in GDP. We might actually see some negative

payrolls. And when you put those two things together, you've got an economy that never recovered from the last several years, plus the prospect of a traditional type recession in 2025, it makes a bad situation even worse. So what you there blame on supply shocks, I think Bitcoiners would blame on the money printing. Now, I know you have a different definition of money printing. And in this, maybe you should explain that. But what role do you think the money printing has played in this? Well, there wasn't much money printing to begin with. But it was really, if there was, then we would have seen positive consumer prices right away in 2020. It didn't really start until 2021 when in the United States, which really, really kicked

off the supply shock, which was the third of the government interventions where they just sent out funds to everybody. So I think the biggest component that a lot of people miss is that it was more about the supply restrictions than it was actually demand. Had supply been able to respond to demand, he wouldn't have seen very much price changes at all. There probably would have been some acceleration in prices, but it wouldn't have been as far, it wouldn't have gone as far, nor would have been as far reaching. So it was really the restriction of supply. And the restriction is supply hit everything. It wasn't just, you know, the difficulties in shipping goods from China or getting components to Japan or the railroad crap that went on in the United States. It wasn't that.

I mean, that was part of it. A lot of it was lockdowns. Lockdowns and people who were sick, who actually had the disease, the COVID-19 disease, and weren't able to go back to work. And so you had a bunch of businesses that were responding to an increase in demand thinking, holy crap, what do we do? We need to get people in here so that we can meet this rise in demand. And so wage rates went up. So it looked like money printing. It looked like a red hot economy. It looked like things were really going well.

But then very quickly, it went in the other direction. We're talking about less than a year later, things already, I mean, it took the Russian invasion of Ukraine to spike oil prices that finally broke the real economy. That was, you know, March of 2022. And then everything followed thereafter. It wasn't inflationary. It wasn't money printing. It was the fact that the impoverishment got to be too much that the economy could no longer

bear it. The supply shock, it was really, that's why we call it a supply shock because it was really about supply. And in every single way, most ways, we won't say every single way, but in most ways it has followed the historical pattern of previous supply shock. Now, most people are aware of them because we haven't had one since the 1940s and 50s, but you go back to the 1940s and 50s, you know, there was one in 1940s, seven, and eight, another one in the early 1950s. It looked a lot like what we went through here today. And again, the most important component and factor of it was the restriction in supply more than anything else. So it wasn't the money printing.

It wasn't that kind. It wasn't actually inflation. So I think anyone who's not familiar with your work will be confused with you saying there wasn't really money printing. If they want like an in-depth explanation of that, we've done other shows in the past. They can go back and list them. But just briefly, do you want to explain why that wasn't money printing? Well, money printing everybody has associated with the Federal Reserve, right? I mean, that's every time the Fed does QE, everybody talks about how that's money printing and pouring dollars into the real economy. It's not. money printing, that's just the Fed creating bank reserves, which have no point, they don't get to

the real economy. It's just an interbank token with a very limited use case. And so the Fed creates bank reserves that go nowhere if the banking system doesn't do something in response to the bank reserve. You talk about sentiment and signaling. That's what bank reserves are. The Fed does QE and its entire purpose is to signal to the real economy that you think the Fed printed money, you act as if you're going to act as if you think inflation's coming. You become the inflation that the Fed wants from you, which is one of the biggest ironies out there. People who hate the Fed and talk about it printing money, they actually become the inflation that the Fed doesn't have the ability to create, assuming enough people actually believe it, but it doesn't work that way.

So it only works in certain financial markets, but the Fed creates bank reserves. And bank reserves don't go anywhere and don't do anything if the banking system is itself impaired. So if the banking sector doesn't care about the level of bank reserves the Fed creates, it doesn't matter what the Fed's doing because banks create the money that goes into the real economy. It's all bank money. We've been on a bank money system for a couple of centuries, really, but almost exclusively a virtual ledger money system since the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, an international ledger money system. So money printing and money creation comes from the banking sector. And the Federal Reserve, if you want to be charitable, has the only has the ability to influence.

the behavior of the banking sector when there's not really much evidence they can. But that's, that's the only way which the Federal Reserve can create money or print money is to get banks to do it for them. And if the banking sector doesn't want to do it, the banking sector won't do it. Now, there's another part of this, which goes along into the 2020s, early 2020s, where the federal government came along and said, screw banks, screw the Federal Reserve. I'm going to borrow a bunch of money in the Treasury market. I'm just going to shovel it out there to businesses and individuals. This is a stimulus check. Exactly.

I didn't really stimulate much outside the short run too. But either way, that's not money printing either because that money, where does it come from? It comes from the banking sector. The banking sector creates additional deposits that the federal government then uses to disperse those funds into the real economy. So in that case, the federal government becomes an engine of redistribution and reallocation of money that might be created or money that might just be transferred from within the the commercial banking system.

So we talk about money printing, it's all about commercial banks, not central banks nor the federal government. So what is money printing? Money printing is when commercial banks expand their balance sheets to undertake a whole bunch of riskier activities. Whether they expand their balance sheets to buy junk bonds,

they expand their balance sheets to lend to other commercial banks who buy junk bonds, they expand their balance sheets to lend in the real economy or to create loans that then become packaged to securitization structures and then get traded and transacted through wholesale marketplaces. It's when they expand their balance sheets. And we've got to be careful here, too, Danny. It's not just about money creation.

It's also more important in many cases circulation. So you can create all the money in the world. Let's say the Fed did print money through its QEs. If that money, if they created base money, like a lot of people say, for bank reserves, but then it just sits in a vault somewhere. If the Fed prints a bunch of physical Federal Reserve notes and physical dollar bills and they just sit in the vault, what happens? Nothing. So you have to be as attuned and careful about circulation as you do potential money supply. So in the act of creating and expanding

balance sheets from the commercial banking system, dealer banks in particular, when they're expanding their balance sheets, they're also expanding dealer activities, which recirculate, redistribute money and credit, they get it flowing throughout their entire global economy. So even if money supply and some balance sheets are expanding and money, money availability is increasing, if dealers take a step back and say, I don't want to take risks and redistribute money, the money just goes to the sidelines and becomes idle. And that's, that's, you know, that's the same as if there was money being pulled out of the economy. So it's much about circulation as it is supply. So we need balance sheet activities and balance sheet expansion and expanding activities among money dealers in particular, but also the commercial banking system. So it's about creating additional balance sheet capacity and then using it, using it so that money flows. And it's really money credit collateral that flows throughout the entire global system.

Okay. Can we talk a little bit about the incoming administration, well, not the incoming administration, the new administration. And they've obviously got a few things that are going to have some impact on the economy, like Doge being one of them, tariffs being the other. I don't know where the best place to start is. Maybe tariffs. What impact do you think tariffs will have?

I think they'll have a pretty negative impact. at least in the short run, because there's always a redistribution. And we've already seen it. One of the reasons why people are talking about recession is because we had an artificial high at the end of last year where you had a bunch of artificial activity, you know, tariff beating, front loading of demand, which created what looked like an accelerating economy, which really wasn't. It was artificially based.

So you had a bunch of businesses all over the world that were building stuff and, you know, trading back and forth, trying to get stuff into the United States. or near the United States before the increased prices went into effect. So you had that front loading of activity, which means there's already going to be a payback to it, which we're starting to see around the world. I think the markets are getting a sense of that too. But tariffs as a policy, I'm not a big fan of tariffs because it's just another form of central planning. So even if there are long run benefits, assuming that there are long run benefits,

you're going to pay a short term price for it anyway, because not only do you have the artificial distortion in the short-run economy. You also have the, I mean, let's face it, you raise the prices on certain goods, the demand and the ability of the customers to buy those goods is going to go down. You're going to see some demand destruction at the very least in the short run. So the idea behind the policy is that the long-run potential outweighs the short-run cost when what we're seeing right now is a whole bunch of short-run costs for it. And will tariffs be inflationary, do you think?

No, God, no. Were they in 2018 and 2019? Why do people not? I mean, we went through this already. And you can look at any number of studies for this. You can just look at what happened in 2019. Did consumer prices soar in 2019 like central bankers thought? No, they didn't.

They went the other direction because the global economy was going in the other direction. Tariffs are like the supply shock, which means when prices go up for non-economic reasons, it destroys demand. What that means is if you raise prices for necessities, as consumers, I have to pay the higher price for necessity. but my income didn't go up. So I have to take spending away from something else. You're distorting the economy in another harmful way,

just like the supply shock in 21, 22. So while there is a temporary impact on consumer price measures, so the CPI goes up and adjusts to those prices, it's not actual inflation. It's another distortion, which leads to disinflation down the road because of all the economic activity that gets destroyed from it. Again, we have experience with this. We saw this in 2018 and 2019.

And that's exactly what happened. So if we saw this in 2018, 2019, why do you think there's so many economists out there that are saying they think tariffs will lead to inflation? Is it just a misunderstanding? Because economics is all about ideology. It's not about actual science and observing what happens. It's about econometric models. And so the econometric models make certain assumptions about the way the world works. And they're never falsified, no matter how many times they don't work.

So an economist, what they do is they plug in a bunch of assumptions into their subjective, regression models, the DSG models when they're Neokinesians, and it spits out the answers that they were looking forward to begin with. So if an economist believes that higher prices are equivalent to inflation, then you put something in that's at least a higher prices and you say it's inflation. And the reason why they do that is because their understanding of inflation is not inflation. Central banks and economists believe inflation is a combination of Phillips curve, which means tight labor markets plus expectations, which is one of the most horseshit aspects of economic

It's out there. There's absolutely no evidence that expectations play any role in inflation, because, of course, it does. And inflation is a monetary phenomenon. But if you're a central bank and you have no idea what's going on in the monetary system, you've got to find some other way to explain something that happens in the real economy. So what economists believe is that if prices go up and then you and I believe that prices going up will be inflationary, like I said before, we become the inflation. So that's why economists look at tariffs and say, oh, prices are going to go up, there'll be an expectations component to that, which can then become inflationary, when that's not actually how inflation works. So that's why in 2018, you saw Wall Street in

particular, but Wall Street economists most of all go apeshit crazy about inflation expectations that never happened in 2019 because their understanding of inflation is completely flawed. And so maybe it's worth you giving your definition of inflation. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It's the old adage of too much money chasing too few goods. And money comes from the commercial banking system. So if the commercial banking system is creating money, then you'll have inflation. And we'll know there'll be inflation because there'll be all sorts of corroboration and, you know, evidence for it in financial markets before it even shows up. I mean, like I said before, interest rates don't go down.

They go up. So if there's an inflationary period coming, then interest rates would be rising. In fact, again, you look at what the markets have been telling us for the last several years. Going back to 2021, the bond market said this was not. inflation, that over the long run, you're not going to see something like the 1970s. That's what the inverted yield curve was back in 2022. The recession question. The inverted yield curve, most people say, okay, the yield curve inverts, that leads to,

that means recession, therefore this time the yield curve must have been wrong because we didn't have the recession. Again, that's not what the yield curve was saying, and again, they're missing the context. What the yield curve says when it's inverted is simply that interest rates are likely to go lower over the longer term. That's all it says. That's all the market ever really says.

Typically in those cases, when interest rates go low over the long run, come from where they are, those associate with recessions because when you get into a recessionary period, lower growth and inflation expectations, rates go down. So that's all the market was saying. The market was saying in 22 when the yield curve inverted, and it wasn't just the U.S., yield curve inverted a lot of places around the world, including Germany for the first time ever. So you have yield curve inversion, which is the market saying rates are going to go lower over the longer term. That's not consistent with an inflationary period.

That's consistent with a period that either didn't recover from the 2020 pandemic or is going to encounter more economic difficulties down the road, or in this case, both of those things. You had other financial markets that reinforce that message, a big one that people never, nobody ever pays attention to the interest rate swap market. When the interest rate swap market is probably the most important market that exist out there, there's basically no area of the financial system that interest rates, swaps don't touch, and interest rate swaps are all traded through dealer banks. So they have

incited to basically the entire global financial system through their, because they're on the side of every interstate swap trade. And interest rate swaps have been compressing. The spreads to U.S. Treasury have been compressing for the last couple of years, which is the only, when you see that, what that says is that rates are going to go down and stay down. Rates going down and staying down is not inflation is, again, reinforcing the message you got from the yield curve. So the bond market and the swap market and a whole bunch of other markets beside have been saying this entire time that it was a supply shock. And over time, what we're going to experience is a period of prolonged low interest rates, which is exactly what central banks are now getting into, right?

Since last March, when the Swiss National Bank kicked off the rate-cutting cycle, what have we seen? More and more central banks are cutting. Even the Federal Reserve panic for a little while, and they're likely to panic again up ahead. So you even have central bank policies following the market over the long run. So the yield curve didn't miss on recession. That was the wrong criteria to assign to an inverted yield curve. What the financial markets have been saying, going back to our original, what you just asked here, there wasn't money printing.

This wasn't inflationary. This was a temporary phase shift in the price structure induced by the pandemic and the overreactions to it from coming from governments and officials around the world. This episode is brought to you by CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. I've been using CASA since 2019 and I can't recommend them enough. CASA have options for all Bitcoiners from a 2 of 3 multisig to a 3 of 5 and a private client option for absolute best in class security. CASA also do inheritance which I very recently set up and it really couldn't be easier.

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Is that the case? No. That's, again, another misconception, especially hear it from the stock market people, where it's say, oh, lower interest rates means a lower discounting rate, which means future value, the future value of cash flow is much higher. That's another rationalization about stocks. Think to, I mean, you're not old enough, but if you remember periods where interest rates are going down

systemically, and you think back, okay, how did stock markets perform, how did risk assets perform, how did the economy perform when interest rates are going down? Last time we saw that was March of 2020. That's not really good. Before that, we saw it in 2007 and 2008. That wasn't good for risk assets or the real economy. Before that, it was 2000, 2001, the dot-com bust, really bad for stocks,

not really great for the economy. you go back before that 1990, 1991, you get the point here. Is that because rates going down is in response to something, but when they stay down, it is good for risk assets? No. Okay. That was true. I mean, you could make that argument, Danny, post-QE because the economy never recovered from 2008, but stock sure as hell did. So you had the real acceleration in the stock market in 2013, 2012 into 2013 with those final rounds of QEs from the Fed.

the economy never changed. It continued to perform the same ways it had after 2008. But the stock market's interpretation of that afterwards, the rationalization, the beauty contest came back into effect. That wasn't really about low interest rates so much as it was the rationalizing the lack of traditional recession signals in the 2010s, against it making the same mistake. But risk assets, when we talk about the real economy, rates going down and staying down, that's the worst sign. That's a bad. because that means the economy gets, whatever happens to get the economy into that state, whether it be a recession or whether it just be growth that just disappears. Doesn't have to be a contraction, doesn't have to be a crash.

It could be any number of possibilities. But whatever gets the economy into that state, what it really means is, and this is the most important part, is there's no recovery. That's what the 2010s were. That's why interest rates went down and stay there. What they were saying is there's no recovery from 2008. But everybody looks at the stock market, said, well, the stock market is so it must be everything's fine.

or the unemployment rate's not, is the unemployment rate low, so everything must be fine, when the unemployment rate doesn't take into account the tens of millions that fell out of the labor force because there were no jobs. So rates going down and staying there is the worst case. I would much rather have a crash, because in a crash, a legitimate crash, everything goes down and it goes down a lot. It's really painful. But then it comes back and you actually have a recovery. And over any length of time, that's far more important than it is the short run crash. When you get into a prolonged period where there's just no economic, growth, that leads to all the worst cases. That's what the Great Depression really was. It wasn't

the contraction so much as it was the aftermath from it. That's why it lasted the entire decade of the 1930s, and that's why interest rates went down and stayed there. So that's what the markets are saying. Rates are going to go down, and they're likely to stay down for a long period of time. So first of all, that's not the 1970s, that's not out of control inflation. That is recognizing the fact that we were impoverished by the pandemic, and we have to pay the full price for it. and get back to the question that you were asked a little bit earlier, what do we do about it? And the answer is we can't. It's done.

What's done is done. We made the entire world poor, and now we have to pay the cost of doing that. And unfortunately, we don't really have a good idea of what that means or what those costs actually will end up being. Like I said, I would prefer things crash today so that we can get it done with and get on to the other side, move along into a recovery. This slow transition period that last year after year after year, you look at places, like Europe that have been no real GDP growth for two and a half years, I mean, that's just, that's just disaster waiting to happen. Again, we're seeing that in the political arena, right, people are pissed off.

They know things aren't going in the right direction, but nobody will give them answers for it. Sadly, I think because everything's been done, we're kind of just along for the ride from here on out. I mean, there's a lot of people talking about Europe recovering at the moment, but maybe we can get to that, maybe not. I don't know if that's worth it. But when you say rates are going down and going to stay down, do you think we'll see a period of like zero interest rate policy again. That depends upon how central banks react

to the transition period because that's really what we've been in. The entire period since 2021 and 2022 has been this transition phase because the economy is searching for a long run stable potential or stable equilibrium. I hate to use the term equilibrium, but that's what economists use. We were unstable in the supply shock prices were soaring, people are being impoverished, and then you had to transition. That's another misconception. People have, you know, transition has to be short run, right? It can only last a couple of quarters. It can't go long for a year after year after year, can it. The answer, of course, is that it can. So we've been in this transition period, which we have no idea what the full transition will look like. If it becomes one of the

more traditional types of recessions where we do see negative GDP show up again in a bunch of different places, not just the United States, then central banks will react in the predictable fashion to it by lowering interest rates as quickly as they possibly can. If you get really negative of GDPs like we saw maybe in 2007, 2008, and obviously they're going to go down to zero, and they're going to stay at zero, and they're going to introduce more QEs, which by the way, I don't see a lot of people talking about this,

but the Fed has already said in the ECB2, they're not going to wait for zero to launch QE. So we could get a QE before they even get to zero policies, depending upon what the short run outlook looks like as this transition period continues to progress. And what do you think would trigger that QE? Is that the bond market? No, it's,

the Fed is aware, the central banks are aware of the bond market. And they also are very much aware that the bond market signals are contrary to what their, what their forecast and their policies are. But there's nothing they can do about it. So what the Fed does, the markets are saying rates are going to go down and they've been saying it for the last couple of years. And then you'll notice the central banks a couple of years later, a year or so later, react to the same conditions that the bond market was pricing ahead of time.

So if the bond market is pricing bad conditions ahead, then eventually the Fed will not react to the bond market, which they should, but instead they're going to react to the economic data that eventually comes out that reflects the conditions that were forecast in the marketplace. So if those conditions turn out to be, you know, too negative for a central bank to stand put and do nothing, then central banks will be more aggressive with their rate policies, which is, again, that's what we've seen since last summer. You know, the ECB, perfect example. The ECB started out in June, June of 2024, saying, we're not going to do all that much. We're going to cut here in June, and then maybe we'll skip a couple meetings,

and then maybe we'll cut by 25 basis points, and then we'll skip a couple more meetings, and maybe we'll, they wanted to go very carefully. But that's not what happened. They skipped, they went June, skipped the next meeting in September. They cut again. Then the next meeting, I think it was November.

They cut again. The next meeting was November. And then we get to December, they're talking about maybe we need to a 50. And that's not, they're not the only one. The Swiss National Bank, like I said, they kicked off the rec cutting cycle last March. They're doing 50s.

The Canadian National, the Bank of Canada, they're doing 50s. They plan starting out very slowly because we don't need to do anything. But then they see that the economy is performing poorer than they expected. And so they chase that underperformance by more aggressively cutting their interest rates, expecting that lower interest rates are at least telling people that lower interest rates are stimulus. But the reason why once they start cutting rates, it doesn't actually stop until they go down a lot

is because rate cuts don't work. They don't actually stimulate the economy. They are nothing more than a reaction to the weakness that the market have already been warning is coming. Again, there's so many misconceptions about economics and central banks. I mean, I think I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I know you don't like the central banks, but you do pay a lot of attention to them. Do you think Jerome Powell has been doing a good job? No, I think the central banks should be shut down. Actually, no, let me be clear here. Their policy, I don't think they should, I don't

think central banks should be doing anything to begin with, because again, assuming that it did what it said it was going to do, it's still a form of central planning, which is going to lead to the harmful outcomes to begin with. So I don't think we should be doing that. Central banks did have a legitimate and genuine and useful task when they were actual central banks, which was to maintain an elastic money supply. I know people, especially Bitcoin people, they hear that term elasticity and they go crazy about it.

But elastic money supply is actually a beneficial thing. The question is whether or not central banks can maintain an elastic money supply and whether or not we want them to. But either way, that's not what central banks are these days. They're just simply central planners who try to signal to the economy using interest rate targets. To me, there's no benefit to it. We've just been sitting here talking about how much, not only does it distort people's perspective of the economy, it actually does create distortions in financial markets,

especially risk markets like stocks that want to go up and they want to believe that lower interest rates are a form of the punch bowl. So you actually make the case that central banks make things worse, not better. If that's really the case, then we don't need them. Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a legitimate role for central banks. It just has nothing to do with markets in the economy. What central banks do well, one of the few things they do well, is they offer insight and information and data collection on some of the stuff that really does matter. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York does a primary dealer survey that tells us something about primary dealers,

important stuff about collateral flow and conditions, that primary dealers will not tell us on their own. So there is a, there is a role for central banks. It's just not as a central bank, nor in the form that they've taken right now. Has Jerome Powell done a good job? My answer to that is it doesn't, he doesn't matter. That's one of the biggest issues that we have here. What I would like people to realize is stop looking at the government and central banks for everything. They're, they're not helping. They're actually, you know, they're making people believe that every answer to every economic question comes from either D.C. or New York City or someplace, you know, the capital, the central bank or the government fiscal policies or monetary policies, they don't matter. Fiscal policies don't work

either. It's, we're conditioned to believe that everything is, you know, again, from the center out when it's really a private economy matter that we need to really be focused on and stop looking at, you know, economies aren't, it's not a president's economy. It's not like it's, it wasn't Biden's economy, it's not Trump's economy, it's the economy, and whoever's in the White House just happens to be in the White House. It doesn't matter if it's Republican or Democrat, but what side of the aisle, it's not really a partisan issue to begin with. They have very limited ability to affect the course of the economy, and if they had a real ability to affect the course of economy, it wouldn't have been as bad as we've been over the last, you know,

couple decades. So we've got to stop thinking about in terms of, you know, always believing that politicians, it's their economy. They have a very bad as we've been. the ability to influence it, they have the ability to tell us what's going on in it. We need to get away from all of that and start thinking, first of all, thinking for ourselves, but more importantly, thinking of exclusively in private terms, not public terms. I wholeheartedly agree with that. I wish you're a Bitcoiner, Jeff. I know you.

I love the idea of Bitcoin. We can get into the Bitcoin discussion. The problem with Bitcoin is that it's become about price, not being a useful form of currency. I love blockchain. I think I will reiterate here that I believe that at some point, I don't know how long it'll take, but we will be on a Bitcoin, not a Bitcoin,

but a digital currency standard. Whether it's Bitcoin or not, it remains to be seen. I'm quite skeptical about that. But we will be on a digital currency. And I don't mean a central bank digital currencies, because those are all just scare tactics. Central banks aren't actually working on them seriously to begin with. Their private digital money is the wave of the future.

There's no question about it. It's just the question is now, about how long it takes to get there and how much damage we incur waiting and what form it ultimately takes. And I really think that when we get to that point, there'll be several different competing private currents, private digital currencies that operate the same time, which is sort of how humans have been operating with money since, you know, from the beginning. This idea that there's a one single global currency is a relatively modern invention to begin with. So going back to, you know, a couple different competing standards, hopefully,

I mean, there's too much capacity, resources, and potential for it to not, and to not actually happen whether or not governments want it to. That's, I think, the other point here is that governments don't have the ability to, I mean, yeah, they can try to outlaw it, but if, if digital currencies prove to be useful, then digital currencies will be adopted regardless of what governments want. And eventually what happens is a currency becomes more and more useful and more people use it, whether it's approved of or not, political power follows the commercial power. So if money gets adopted, whether it's approved of or not, and it's adopted on a wide enough scale, politicians will come along and flow with it. I think, again, that's another thing I think people get backwards, that everything flows

from the top down. It really does come from the bottom up. Well, I obviously think that the only cryptocurrency that's got only real value is Bitcoin. I know your problem with it is the inelastic supply. But I think to have an elastic supply, you then need some form of central planning. So that completely breaks the idea of Bitcoin. But we've had this discussion before in other shows. I mean, people can go back and listen to them.

It's just somewhere where we probably disagree. But one of the, I know you've got a really tight stop in a few minutes, but just I want to touch on the treasury market briefly. Yellen obviously was issuing tons of these bonds on the very short end, whereas Bessent, who's coming in, wants to start issuing on the long end again. Yeah, but he did. Well, do you think that's possible? And what do you think is going to kind of play out over the next few months and years?

Well, this idea that was a Rubini put forward about an activist treasury issuance, that's just horseshit to begin with. And that's just him trying to explain why consumer price rates haven't worked out the way he thought. I mean, this is a guy who said when the CPI was at 5%, we'd never see anything less than that. So he's trying to come from an explanation of why that's the case. the fact that the Treasury Department continues to issue bills, including percent,

is because that's what the market wants. And the market wants bills because bills are the best form of collateral, and we do have a collateral shortage and collateral scarcity problem, which tends to rear its head at the worst possible times to begin with. So all the Treasury Department is doing is saying,

what do you guys want us to sell you? And the marketplace says, bills, bills, bills, bills, give us more freaking bills. We went through a period, and again, a dollar shortage period, a very serious dollar shortage period in November, December, in the middle part of January, this year, last year and this year, where money was exceptionally tight, including collateral.

We had auctions for treasury bills that were just absolutely off the charts. So the marketplace says give us bills, and the Treasury Department is actually stupid if it doesn't give them bills. And that's what Besant has basically said, is he came into it saying, oh, yelling, that was a bunch of crap, you know, why are they issued so many bills? They're trying to keep interest rates low. And then he talked to primary dealers as Treasury Secretary,

and they said, give us bills, and he's now, he said, oh, yeah, I'm going to give you bills because that's what you want. The marketplace wants bills because they tend to be, they can get to a period where we have such scarcity that becomes a real financial issue. One of the things that's becoming a bigger talking point in Bitcoin is the idea of Bitcoin-backed bonds, where you issue, say, 10, 30-year bond with a Bitcoin kicker as a way of incentivizing that. What do you think of that as an idea? I think that's one way to create elasticity. because that's ultimately where it's going.

That when you financialize a money like Bitcoin, it becomes a little bit more useful, a little bit more elastic, a little bit more, you know, basically usable, which is what I've been trying to say. Again, the issue to me isn't necessarily the fixed supply of Bitcoin is that that's part of it. I think that's going to be a constraint that becomes a real big problem. It's mostly that's just not useful.

It's the price volatility is a huge impediment to that, to being adopted, and the higher the price goes, the more difficult it becomes to adopt. So it's really the usability issue with Bitcoin. And financializing Bitcoin, which I think a lot of people, a lot of people from the Bitcoin community would have a problem with, financializing Bitcoin is one of the only ways to make it more useful, to make it more adoptable and more elastic.

So yeah, I think there should be more of that. There should be more experimentation with making Bitcoin more useful in a more commercial sense rather than just as a strictly financial sense. All right, Jeff, there's so much we could say there, but I know you've got to stop basically right now. But I really appreciate this. We'll do it again and maybe we can get more into the Bitcoin side of things. Yeah, absolutely. Good to see you again, Danny.

Yeah, great to see you. Thanks, Jeff.