Bitcoin, Gold & the Coming Liquidity Pivot | Lyn Alden - What Bitcoin Did

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
People kind of get in their mindset where they're owed a bull market, which no one's owed a bull

(00:06):
market. Some percentage of people bought Bitcoin for maybe the wrong reason. They bought it because
they think Uncle Sam's going to buy it, rather than buying it for its own qualities and kind
of the longer term story of what it is and what it changes. A lot of people are either too heavily
in treasury companies, too heavily in altcoins, or they are too heavily in Bitcoin in the sense

(00:30):
that their expectations don't match reality. I do expect that, you know, in 2026, we'll be back
into the six figures. And whether it's 2026 or 2027, I think we'll be seeing new all-time highs,
most likely. There's no particular reason to believe that there's a four-year cycle intact.
We haven't hit euphoric levels this cycle. Therefore, there's less of a reason to expect

(00:50):
kind of a major capitulation. The cycle could go on for longer than people expect because it's not
driven by the having. It's driven by broader macro and interest in the asset itself.
Lynn Olden, great to see you. Always one of my favorite people to have on the show. How are you?
Good. Happy to chat. How have you been?

(01:12):
Yeah, really good. It's been quite a while since we've done a show talking about macro stuff. We
We obviously did the one with Andy Constant about three months ago, but that was all about
micro strategy, which we might talk a little bit about today.
But there's so much happening that I almost don't know where to start.
We've got Bitcoin at just under 92K.

(01:33):
Gold's had an insane year, just a 12-month bull run.
We've got repo market crisis.
There's liquidity drying up potentially, maybe a liquidity injection coming.
I don't know if this is like recency bias or just the stuff you see on Twitter, but does it feel like the macro world is at a really pivotal point right now?

(01:53):
So good question. I do think it's at a pivotal point.
I think the magnitude is probably less than you'll see in a lot of sensationalist tweets or podcasts and things like that.
But I do think that it's at a pretty pivotal point and kind of to the literal extent, which is that we're getting to the end of a multi-year reduction in the Fed's balance sheet.

(02:14):
We're pivoting toward a more flat balance sheet and then probably eventually and not that long, eventually a more upward tilting balance sheet.
And that does mark a multi-year change, even though it's not always what the sensationalist headlines will say about it.
So this is quantitative tightening coming to an end.
I do want to get into that, but I want to start on Bitcoin because we're down quite a lot just under 92K.

(02:39):
Lou Groman talks about Bitcoin as sort of the last functioning smoke alarm of liquidity.
Do you view it the same way?
I do.
I think it's one of the many hats that it wears.
Right.
So I still think it's a small enough and volatile enough asset that that's not the only thing

(03:00):
it is.
That basically that's and I've seen him describe that before, that that's because it's still
a rather free market compared to other markets that are somewhat more controlled, that that
one is able to kind of show things before they happen.
And then Sam Callahan and I did research to kind of correlate Bitcoin to liquidity and
show that while you can't do the thing you'll see on Twitter where you overlay the global

(03:23):
liquidity chart, the Bitcoin chart, and try to make like three-month projections about
Bitcoin, that there still is a general causal and interesting correlation there over a longer
timeframe. And it generally gives you a pretty good insight into direction. Of course, the other
variables is that because Bitcoin is this new and emerging asset, and compared to other assets,

(03:45):
even though it's been around for a while, it's still new and small, that it's subject to
idiosyncratic things. And so, for example, the election in November of last year, almost exactly
a year ago, that gave a really big boost because it kind of changes the forward estimates, what's
going to happen with regulation, what's going to happen with different things like that.

(04:06):
And that has nothing to do with liquidity when something like that happens.
And same thing with the ETF launch, same thing with some of the accounting changes for Bitcoin
treasury companies.
These are things that have nothing to do with macro liquidity that can really shift the
asset around.
But then, of course, I think liquidity is a really big variable.
And I think that Bitcoin is more correlated with liquidity than most other assets.

(04:28):
and and how much of a part do you think that's playing in this drawdown now because i would say
2025 is probably in the time i've been in bitcoin the year that almost no one's been right on on
bitcoin like i don't think it's gone up nearly as much as people thought there was a lot of calls
for this being like the cycles being over potentially they still are but um how do you

(04:51):
like take this in like why do you think bitcoin's crashing now uh so i think it's actually the more
interesting factor is why it's been flat for so long because the crash itself like even in the
2017 bull run that was a fairly smooth and and kind of parabolic bull run but it still had
multiple sharp 30 corrections along the way like several yeah uh and it would just have these v

(05:12):
corrections and shoot back up so it's not necessarily that this one's had really big
magnitude i mean we were but we touched like 75k back in april uh for example um it's not the it's
not really the size of the corrections. It's more of the length of time of lasting in the state. So
the fact that we were 100K in November of last year, and after a year, we're basically flat,

(05:35):
and now we're down to some extent. That's, I think, the more noteworthy item. So I don't really view
Bitcoin as crashing. I view it as basically stagnating at this time. I think that's the
more noteworthy event. There's a lot of factors that can go into that. I think that
liquidity is a factor. So we do have tighter liquidity now. But when you look at kind of

(05:58):
broader measures of liquidity, they're really not that bad. And I don't expect them to get that bad.
I think we're kind of in the bottoming phase for domestic-based liquidity at the current time.
And broader liquidity is mostly fine. So I think that liquidity is doing it no favors this
particular month, I think there's a broader issue. It's AI potentially sucking some kind of capital

(06:20):
enthusiasm away from Bitcoin as kind of the fastest horse narrative. Obviously, gold has had
a really good year. And then there's also, to some extent, the disillusionment with the other
catalysts for Bitcoin. And so, for example, one of the most popular questions I got on Bitcoin
podcasts in early this year was, what do you think about a sovereign Bitcoin reserve?

(06:44):
And I found that the most boring question.
I mean, people had to ask it, but I found it, and I even said it a couple of times,
that it was like the most boring question.
Because one, as far as kind of the ethos of Bitcoin, I find the decentralized aspects
way more interesting than what is the nation state going to do with it?
And two, I'd said I'd rather kind of have a price estimate that doesn't include, you

(07:07):
know, Uncle Sam buying a half a million coins, I'd rather be surprised at the upside if that
does happen than to factor that all in and then be surprised when it doesn't.
Because my view at the time was that, sure, they're going to ring fence the coins they
already have, that they don't owe back to someone else.
But that any accumulation from there, I think, would probably be marginal at best.

(07:28):
And I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but that was kind of my base case, and I would just
plan for that.
I think a decent chunk of Bitcoiners were kind of really bullish on that outcome, really bullish on a lot of things.
And then when those expectations don't really align, even though it's otherwise a pretty good environment for Bitcoin, especially looking over two, three years rather than just the 12-month period, you start to get deflated expectations.

(07:52):
And then lastly, because it's had this pretty small sample size of this four-year cycle behavior, so it peaked in quarter four of 2021, it peaked in quarter four of 2017, there are a lot of people saying, well, it's probably going to peak here in quarter four of 2025, and therefore they sell it preemptively and kind of create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(08:15):
I think that the halving cycles no longer are particularly relevant.
I don't think even last cycle they were particularly relevant.
I think they happen to correlate with the liquidity cycle.
I think they certainly were relevant the first, say, three halvings periods, I think, were pretty relevant.
I think they've diminished to the point where it's no longer a factor I particularly concern myself with at all.

(08:36):
It's more about those other factors.
And so I think there's a bunch of disillusionment that's being kind of washed out.
And you can have an asset that is a good asset that's sometimes held for the wrong reasons.
And so I think the coins are kind of rotating away from people that held for the wrong reasons or the wrong expectations and back toward the hands of those that, you know, have, I think, you know, more conservative expectations while still, of course, being bullish, which is why they hold it in the first place.

(09:03):
So this has been like a bit of a growing narrative in Bitcoin that it's the long term holder selling Bitcoin here.
Checkmates talks a lot about this.
Jordy Visser wrote that piece about Bitcoin's IPO moment.
Do you think that that is what's happening and that's what's causing this drop in price?
Well, I think yes, but not uniquely.
So, so far in every major bull cycle, there has been distribution from longer term holders.

(09:27):
That's true for kind of any emerging asset.
So if you have a startup company that at first starts with like three co-founders, and then
it's got a few dozen early employees, and then it's got hundreds, and then it goes public,
and then it trades public for a long time.
And you get that distribution by people that either want to rebalance or want to upgrade their lifestyles that have been holding for five, 10 plus years into the newer buyers.

(09:51):
So that part, Bitcoin is going through a similar distribution cycle.
It happened in 2013.
And it happened over the past two years, really, of this kind of like OGs selling into the strength.
um what's a little different is of course now that it's more integrated with the financial system
it's a little more complex because you have some saying okay i can actually own bitcoin

(10:13):
in and some of them want a more regulated regulated environment to own it in they'd
rather not have a billion dollars on a on a wallet somewhere they you know they of course
they're more sophisticated as a whole with multi-sig and stuff but there's something to say
i'd rather bring some of it back into the system um even though it might not be the kind of the
Bitcoin ethos. You're some of them that funded treasury companies to some extent, some of them

(10:36):
converting into ETFs. And so that is generally happening. But that's actually pretty overall,
aside from those specific reasons, the overall distribution of older coins is pretty much in
line with other bull markets. That's not particularly new. What is new, there's been
obviously more selling pressure from five to seven year plus holders. But one thing I pointed

(10:59):
out on Noster with a post is that there's a higher ratio of people that have held for five to seven
years in the cycle. The older Bitcoin gets, the more of these kind of older cohorts unlock,
because five to seven years isn't even that old in Bitcoin terms anymore. So you get people from
two cycles ago, of course, selling into some of this. So I generally discount that it's uniquely

(11:21):
associated with this cycle, even though that is the number one selling pressure. So it's not about
new coins and the halving. It's about what price will unlock existing tightly held coins into the
market. I think another factor is that while most of the demand has been treasury companies and ETFs
and by extension, all of their investors, there's been pretty weak, kind of just broad retail

(11:44):
demand. The narrative has been elsewhere. And so the combination of pretty concentrated demand side
stuff, kind of moderate liquidity situation.
And then the ongoing pressure of OGs or semi-OGs selling into the strength is giving some weakness.

(12:04):
The bullish part, I would say, is that there's no particular reason to believe that there's
0a four-year cycle intact.
We haven't hit euphoric levels this cycle compared to prior cycles.
Therefore, there's less of a reason to expect kind of a major capitulation of sorts.
I mean, that's, I guess, famous last words, but basically you hit less euphoric highs.

(12:26):
There's kind of less to potentially wash out.
And I think as we return to a more pro-liquidity environment and as some of the coins that were maybe held for the wrong reasons are already kind of evacuated,
I think the cycle could go on for longer than people expect because it's not driven by the having.
It's driven by broader macro and interest in the asset itself.

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purchased. So do you think a lot of people are going to be caught offside by this sort of self
fulfilling prophecy narrative like i've seen again huge amounts of respect for luke groman i i really

(15:15):
enjoy talking to him i love having on the show but he in his recent newsletter said that he was
recommending people sort of trim bitcoin positions um do you think there's people that think the
four-year cycle is still alive and well and might get caught really offside with this uh i mean i
think to some extent it's already happened i think i mean a lot of people are either too heavily in
treasury companies too heavily in altcoins or um they are too heavily in bitcoin in the sense that

(15:43):
their expectations don't match reality so what too heavy in bitcoin means can of course vary
depending on the person but it's either having too much exposure compared to your like your
volatility tolerance yeah or x or holding it because you expect a 10x gain in a very short
period of time, even though it's a $2 trillion asset, as though it's a prior cycle. And they're

(16:07):
rather than holding it as something that maybe you expect to outperform significantly, but not
in that explosive time. I think that people kind of get into a mindset where they're owed a bull
market, which no one's owed a bull market. But then, I mean, the emotional kind of rollercoaster
is pretty palpable if you watch twitter back back when you know whenever like micrategies at three

(16:30):
times mnav the whole twitter feed turns into like well i could actually go to five times mnav it could
go to 10 times mnav we're going to the moon now guys and then as soon as everything rolls over it's
like oh the cycle's dead uh that's a ponzi this whole thing it's just like the the roller coaster
is pretty palpable if you have your if you're just like watching it regularly it's kind of like
like a cartoon almost how these kind of roller coasters come and go it's usually not as good as

(16:56):
people expect and it's usually not as bad as people expect as often how these things play out
so you can basically just counter trade twitter and we should talk about the treasury companies
a bit though because the last show we did was with andy constant and this was pretty much solely
focused on micro strategy strategy of like the share prices drops a lot i think they're at 1.2

(17:18):
MNAV or something like that at the moment, a lot of these other sort of pure play treasury
companies are now below 1XMNAV. Do you see that as a buying opportunity, maybe specifically to
strategy? Or do you think part of that trade is kind of unwinding? Well, I'd round back in 2022
and then restart again. So I think the question is having unwound, will it have another positive

(17:41):
cycle? My base case is yes. I mean, so far, like for example, in that discussion, one thing that
Andy and I agreed on is that you don't want a particularly high MNAV. That's where you run into
pretty significant risks. I think the number I gave in that one was, obviously, there's a lot
of flexibility. I think something like a 1.5 is reasonable. And I put the 1.2 to 1.8 band around it

(18:02):
for something like them. So now we're on the lower end, but still within, roughly speaking,
that band. I'm not that interested in the long tail of these pure play treasury companies,
because there's a self-reinforcing liquidity network effect.
And so basically, if you're the fifth biggest one

(18:23):
and you're not differentiated in any meaningful way,
there's not a lot of demand for that.
Now, obviously, if you're the biggest in your own capital market,
if you're the biggest in country XYZ,
that's interesting because that's a differentiated separate thing.
So I think the handful of ones that are leaders in their market,
I still think the structure can make sense.

(18:43):
Um, I'm more interested in the rise of ones that are cashflow positive personally.
Um, that's actually where I think my, I think that'll be kind of a next interesting, uh,
narrative, but in terms of the pure play ones, uh, my only focus is on the highest quality
ones, kind of the leading one in a given jurisdiction.
Um, whereas the other ones are more, could be anyone's guess.

(19:05):
Um, and, uh, so we're kind of in that scenario where it's obviously it's, it's de-risiton
the whole like treasury thing got really overstretched this summer.
I think what surprised a lot of people, including myself, is how quickly these things turn.
So for example, I'm on a record in the tweet saying, I like MetaPlanet.
It was back in June.
I was like, I like MetaPlanet, but I don't like it at a 6MNAV.

(19:29):
And so I was like, I viewed it as overvalued.
But if you were to ask me at that time, do you think it'll be at a 1MNAV in a handful
of months?
I'd say, well, probably not.
Something big would have to happen.
But the fact that it go from six to like sub one that quickly you know these things can kind of move around so fast So the direction of a lot of this cooling off was not surprising but that it just kind of happens all at once is pretty surprising

(19:53):
And we'll see, I think that it'll be a test to the biggest, most reliable one to see how they
handle it from here. I think if you do get another bull cycle in Bitcoin,
the ones that survive the bearishness with their leverage intact, you know, there'll be demand for
Because once kind of momentum shifts back again, there will be people saying, well, if I'm bullish on Bitcoin, why am I not bullish on Bitcoin with a little bit of kind of intelligent leverage attached to it?

(20:21):
So the question is, how can they manage their downside to get through these types of environments?
And we did see like almost all the treasury companies try and sort of de-lever over the last 12 months, I guess, for a situation exactly like this.
So you would look at something like MetaPlanet and strategy as being good value right now?
Overall, yes.
I think, I mean, obviously, you potentially face regulatory challenges.

(20:43):
That's been some of the news out of Japan a little bit, a little bit of regulatory and kind of exchange pushback, potentially.
With strategy, I think the big question is obviously the ongoing interest expense that they now deal with.
So I think you still have to approach even the best ones with caution.
but I think that once Bitcoin action itself kind of settles,

(21:07):
I still, at pretty low MNAV multiples,
find the top names interesting.
And I think it's a matter of position sizing.
I think when someone over-allocates a portfolio
to levered Bitcoin, that's going to be a challenge.
At the end of the day, you want to own the core thing
and the extent that you use the others,
That's kind of the accelerator rather than a core position.

(21:31):
Yeah, it'll be interesting if Bitcoin price remains, you know, flat going down.
It'll be interesting to see who does survive and who keeps going for, you know, who's still here in four years time.
That's the big question, especially when it gets to that long tail.
But a little bit earlier, you talked about global liquidity and you're saying it's not actually that bad.
You see the chart of almost like the sine wave of liquidity.

(21:53):
And where on that sine wave do you think we are at the moment?
So I think it's messier than normal. So global liquidity is still pretty good. I mean, basically, there's been liquidity out of China, especially the first half of the year when the dollar was weakening. That was pretty good for global liquidity. Now that we've had the dollar kind of firming up a little bit, and as you have kind of some of the stock stuff rolling over a little bit, it's more middling now.

(22:18):
The part where the pressure has been has been onshore U.S. kind of base liquidity.
That's where there's tightness.
It's pretty similar to the September 2019 repo spike environment, which is to say it's one of those things that takes over macro Twitter for a few weeks, but then never reaches the scale where the average person knows about it because it's not that big of a macro fire.

(22:47):
And so far, it's actually in line roughly with what the Fed expected.
They thought that by around, and they've been publishing reports in the New York Fed, like these annual reports they do on their balance sheet.
They've been kind of anticipating that sometime in 2025, 2026, they're going to reach a level of QT where they kind of run into liquidity constraints.

(23:10):
And that their plan after that was to go back toward expanding the balance sheet in line with nominal GDP.
And so I think that we're kind of in that inflection point where we're not at the expansion phase yet, but we're at the point where they've already signaled that they're going to end quantitative tightening.
And then some of the members are talking about potential expansion.

(23:30):
So you talked about something there that was going to be one of my questions, which is like, why does macro Twitter care so much about the repo market?
Because obviously in 2019, this was a big story.
A couple, I don't know, about a month ago, there was an issue in the repo market.
Again, it became big news on Twitter.
Why is the watch so closely?
So I would separate it into two buckets.
I do think it's worth watching.

(23:51):
For example, in my research reports, it's often something I touch on.
We've been kind of anticipating something like this happening for a while.
Because when it does happen, it marks a pretty big shift.
It goes from kind of structural multi-year balance sheet decreases to increases.
It's also the first time potentially you're going to have an expanding balance sheet in

(24:11):
this era without zero interest rates.
A lot of people have it in their mind that the balance sheet won't expand until they
cut rates all the way to zero.
But if it's expanding for a different reason, not for the purpose of economic stimulus,
but the purpose of facilitating liquidity, it absolutely can expand without zero interest
rates.
And that's what happened before 2008.
That was kind of a general tendency.

(24:32):
Now it'll be happening at a much higher reserve level.
So one is it just kind of represents a structural shift.
The part that I would generally disagree with is where the sensationalism comes into play.
So when you have something that's happening, you have people coming out of the woodwork to say, oh, like there's a major crash going to happen or the Fed's going to have to print a trillion dollars or a major bank is failing or, you know, like a liquidity tsunami is coming.

(24:58):
You get that kind of excitement.
Sometimes it's genuine in the sense that people want a reason to be bullish or bearish.
And so they do that.
If you're bearish, you say, look, it's all going to be a problem.
if you're if you're so that's if you're bearish if you're bullish you say look it's a problem now
but they're going to come with all this liquidity so the assets i'd like you're going to do great
so you get that kind of like genuine emotionalism but then you also sometimes of course you know

(25:21):
there are people that want clicks uh and will lean into uh these sensationalism because i know
there are other people that want to know what's going on and they'll watch that episode or read
that tweet or read that sub stack uh that kind of leans into sensationalism so i think that again
And the underlying pivot is real and substantial, but it's like less emphatic, I would say.

(25:44):
And it's the numbers, I think, are almost certainly going to be more mild than a lot of people think.
So when this happened, obviously, the people calling this like the repo crisis, comparing it to 2019, you think it's more mild than that?
And it's not like a huge systemic issue.
Even the 2019 repo crisis was basically a Twitter crisis.

(26:04):
like it wasn't so it happened then the fed came in and did repo then there are people like myself
and luke groman that were saying okay it's actually not really a repo problem it's a t-bill
oversupply problem they're going to go back to structurally buying t-bills they did a few weeks
later uh then you had kind of a mildly positive liquidity environment they still weren't trying

(26:25):
to stimulate with their balance sheet they were just trying to put out the liquidity fire and they
did. And that was kind of, it was good for asset prices until COVID hit a few months later. And
then of course, everyone forgot about the repo spike and that became the multi-year thing.
This is very similar to that, which is you have problems in repo. The difference is that now the

(26:45):
Fed has a standing facility, so they're already ready for it. So it's even a more mild issue back
then, which wasn't even a giant issue. It's one of those things that's like, it freaks people out
because if unresolved, it is a massive issue.
If overnight lending rates spike like that,
it's a disaster.
But basically anyone that's in the markets
knows that the Fed's going to put out that fire.

(27:06):
They have the facility specifically to put out that fire.
And it doesn't take big numbers to put out that fire.
So that's where you get that kind of disconnect
where you can theorycraft why it's a catastrophe.
In practice, it's this little thing
that gets talked about on Twitter and Substack and YouTube.
and you'll see Bloomberg headlines around it,
but it's not like the regional bank crisis of 2023.

(27:28):
It's not these kind of the bigger things.
And instead it's more of a pivot
where they have the tools to fix the problem
that all involve money printing
because that's how these things go.
And then the question is,
how judicious are they going to be with their tools?
How are they going to frame the use of their tools?
And basically,

(27:48):
we're gradually going to go back toward a structural environment of rising base liquidity
rather than we've been in an environment of kind of flat base liquidity in the US.
So we've had a falling Fed balance sheet, which has been offset by money coming out of the
reverse repo facility. This is like all this plumbing stuff that I think we've talked about

(28:09):
before. But the point is that the outcome is that it's been almost perfectly flat base liquidity,
but we've had rising broad liquidity.
So broad money supply,
all the IOUs that are built
on top of that base liquidity,
that's been in a pretty good shape
ever since 2023.
And now we're kind of entering a period

(28:30):
where base liquidity is going to start
kind of rising as well.
Maybe early next year, for example,
maybe mid next year,
I would say probably the latest,
but we'll see.
And that does mark a transition.
It just, I think the numbers
are going to be mild. I'm interested to know what that means, because you say like quantitative
tightening coming to an end, it'll go back to some form of QE and that might be in line with GDP

(28:55):
growth. But that's the first time that's happened with higher interest rates or first time in recent
history, at least. What does that actually mean for the market? Like what does that, what will
be different? At first, not a ton. It basically, it means banks kind of have less anxiety on their
liquidity. It potentially frees up lending. It's more about managing what won't happen.

(29:18):
So for example, if the regulators say, okay, there's this much, you have to have these liquidity
requirements. And then they don't expand the base layer, the balance sheet. What happens is you kind
of reach like a limit of how much lending you can do as a banking system. And then you got to stop
making loans. Kind of like how if you had a gold or a Bitcoin based system, if you're over your

(29:39):
skis in terms of fractional reserve banking, there's no bailout on the way. You have to actually
manage risk and liquidity. And so you would have basically banks saying, hey, we're at our
liquidity constraints. We can't make loans. Or we can only make loans as you replace other loans.
But instead, because they're going to go back to increasing the balance sheet,

(30:02):
it allows that type of lending to continue. So it's more about being anti-deflationary
than it is like some sort of inflationary stimulatory jolt.
On average, the expanding balance sheet
does have positive correlations with asset prices.
Doesn't mean it's always like that.
I mean, if you have an AI CapEx-fueled market,

(30:23):
that's disconnected from the balance sheet.
But it is one variable that has historically been pretty positive
for asset prices broadly, including Bitcoin.
and basically it just goes back to that kind of rising structural period
it also is generally good for banks because then they'll have
more reserves that are also paying them interest

(30:44):
and it's just generally kind of pro-liquidity
slightly anti-dollar and a slight upward tilt on other assets
but then it's just a question of magnitude it's not the same thing as the fed
coming in in like 2020 and printing trillions of dollars,

(31:05):
their estimates for how much they're likely going to increase the balance sheet
when they get to that point are pretty mild in line with nominal GDP.
In addition, they are specifically trying to only buy treasuries.
So they're still going to continue letting mortgage-backed securities
mature off their balance sheet,
which means they're not really coming to help with the housing market.

(31:26):
and part of a really dovish cycle is they they cut rates and they also buy mortgage-backed
securities in an effort to try to lower mortgage rates and if you get really low mortgage rates
you can have a big refinancing cycle people can take their money out of their home equity especially
in the u.s because we have all these like long fixed rate mortgages that are not super common

(31:46):
in other parts of the world and it's kind of a free lunch for consumer spending when that happens
Of course, it shows up elsewhere, but from the refinance consumer's perspective, it's all upside.
And basically, because I don't think we're going to get to a lower low in mortgage rates, partially because of the Fed, partially because of other factors, that whole thing's off the table.

(32:07):
So I think that the stimulus is just generally going to be weaker going forward, but instead what will be notable about it is the persistence of it.
So it goes back to the nothing stops his train thesis, which is more about duration than magnitude.
So I think that basically we're going to get to appear with some more grinding higher Fed balance sheet, but not really in that explosive sense, most likely.

(32:32):
Of course, certain wars or certain totally unpredictable outcomes could always trigger an extra liquidity boost.
But the structural backdrop is toward a more kind of gradually inclining Fed balance sheet rather than these kind of multi-trillion short-term injections.
So when I talk to people about this, one of the common things is that once the Fed start doing QE again, it's going to have to be a scale much bigger than we've ever seen before.

(33:00):
It sounds like you're kind of fading that narrative and saying they're going to be able to do this at 3%, 4% a year or whatever it is.
Will they be able to keep that going at a low rate for a long time, do you think?
Potentially, yeah.
So my base case is that it will be generally slower.
where you're starting from a higher...
When they started QE back in the 2008-2009 period,

(33:20):
bank cash was something like 3% of total bank assets in the US.
It was the most highly levered the system was since literally 1929 in the US.
We're starting this period, much like September 2019,
we're starting this period from a higher liquidity threshold.

(33:41):
um now in 2019 of course what was coming was covid right so you lock down the economy and
then giga stimulus everything uh assuming we don't have a crazy war a crazy like economic
so taking those just things off the table because that's you know out of the scope
just normal macro stuff there's no particular reason to expect that this next one's going to

(34:05):
be bigger than the one we had in the prior kind of extreme cycle.
2019 and this time are more liquidity-driven reasons for the balance sheet to go up rather
than intentional stimulus.
And sometimes 2019 gets lost in the noise of COVID because it was so kind of close to
that.
But this, I mean, assuming again, something like a COVID-level thing doesn't happen, which

(34:28):
is external, it's likely to be far more gradual this time.
And it's different than QE1, QE2, QE3, or kind of COVID QE.
It's more like what was happening in late 2019 alone before these other big variables hit.
Okay.
And so what does this mean for things like inflation and markets?

(34:50):
Because you've been talking for a long, long time now about the fact that we're in like
a fiscal dominance era and monetary policy has less of an impact on the economy during
that.
So what does this mean for maybe particularly inflation?
The short answer is not a ton because the fiscal side is way more impactful. What this mainly does is it keeps enabling the fiscal, which was always part of the nothing stops is train thesis is that, for example, when the fiscal authorities keep running these deficits, when eventually banks get kind of tight on how much treasuries they can hold.

(35:25):
And as you start getting strains in either the treasury market or the repo market, that's when the Fed comes in and they keep the party going.
So back in the global financial crisis, a lot of people thought that the balance sheet expansion they were going to do would be inflationary, or some even said hyperinflationary.
And for the most part, it wasn't.
And the reason was that money didn't really get out to the public.

(35:46):
It wasn't helicopter money.
It was recapitalizing the banking system, which is why I've described it as anti-deflationary rather than outright inflationary.
and during 2020 when they were doing this like latest round of like the massive balance sheet
increases some of the people were saying look all people said it'd be inflationary last time
it's not going to be inflationary this time either uh whereas like one thing i was focusing on is

(36:11):
this isn't like last time this was literally helicopter money this was massive fiscal spending
that was then supported by all this qe and that's why we had that really big inflationary impulse
It was a huge increase in the broad money supply, all this.
The type of QE that we're likely to see going forward is more like older QE, which is that

(36:31):
it's not combined with necessarily any new fiscal stimulus.
Now, those could be separate decisions by the administration.
They could send out a check that they call, say, a tariff dividend, or they could do another
tax cut.
They could separately decide to do something fiscally.
but they already have this kind of structural large fiscal deficit and mostly what this change

(36:55):
with the fed does is it just keeps that train going that that part's already there so i do think that
part of the reason we have above target inflation right now based on most ways that they measure it
is is large because of the fiscal side and it just keeps that going so is this really entering
a period of much healthier economic and balance sheet growth i would say no not particularly

(37:19):
because but it's not emanating from the fed the fiscal side is is sickly in the sense that
we have basically a two-speed economy right now in the u.s and certain other parts of the world
which is the deficits are largely like if you're on the right side of fiscal deficits or ai capex
you're doing great. If you're not on the right side of those two things,

(37:43):
you're pretty much in a world of hurt. And so there's very, like right now,
consumer sentiment in the U S is near record lows,
even as the stock market is near record highs,
which is a pretty unusual environment.
It's something you tend to see in like fiscal dominance.
And, and so basically what this means is that state continues,
which is right now the fiscal deficits are flowing towards social security,

(38:08):
Medicare, defense, and interest expense primarily. Those are the four biggest buckets.
And then to some extent, it then trickles out from there. All the DOD and defense contract
employees, of course, they spend their income into the broader economy. And healthcare workers spend
them into the broader economy. And social security recipients spend that into the broader economy.
So that's who gets it kind of first. And then the Cantillon effect, it kind of gets out there.

(38:32):
That's a stimulus for certain parts that are either directly or indirectly in the line of
sight of it. But if someone is, say, a young family, not really on the right side of deficits,
homes are expensive right now because mortgage rates are pretty high while also home prices are
elevated. They're getting all the inflationary effects from the fiscal stimulus and in some

(38:53):
limited pockets tariffs. They're doing pretty bad right now on average, unless they just happen to
get a great new job or something. So the average there is pretty weak. So instead of being like a
big macro crash or anything like that, it tends to manifest in just growing dissatisfaction
where people are like, well, I see the stock market's all the time high, but I'm struggling.

(39:15):
And you get more of that is, in my opinion, set to continue. Now, the extent that AI CapEx
eventually runs into kind of constraint, that could be a rollover period for the market.
But the actual fiscal and monetary situation is mostly maintaining the status quo with the exception that the Fed balance sheet has to kind of gradually pivot in order to keep that fiscal train doing what it doing

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this fiscal dominance era sort of drives greater and greater wealth inequality um i know you say
nothing stops this train but does something have to stop it eventually like do they have to move

(42:45):
from a fiscal dominance era into, I guess, the opposite as a monetary dominant era?
So the short answer is that if they eventually stop it, it's because they accelerate it so much
that it gets the next 10 years done in one year. It's death by fire rather than death by ice,

(43:07):
which is that they can't really stop it until there's a pretty big reset in terms of the debt
values and in terms of global trade flows. And as things get worse, that actually tends to
accelerate the train. And when I use the nothing stops this train kind of approach, it's basically
the time horizon from an investment standpoint is like 10 years, right? So it's not talking

(43:33):
about what's going to happen in 2070. It's talking from now to like the mid 2030s where you have some
degree of visibility. Beyond things like that, or just total political nonlinear moments,
that type of thing is a separate matter. But basically, it's that because of demographics,
because of voting patterns, because of polarized Congress, because of the nature of the fiat

(43:58):
system that has to grow or die, and then now it's more funded by the fiscal side rather than the
bank lending side, you get into this pretty persistent state of running it hot, but only
for part of the economy.
And the other part kind of gets dragged along with the inflation and kind of some of the
fiscal boost.
And people keep wondering, well, manufacturing activity is flat.

(44:21):
Inflation is hot.
Obviously, both commercial and residential real estate are struggling.
And it's like, well, who's winning?
because they see hot GDP numbers,
but they're like, well, it's not here, here, here, here.
And the answer is it's primarily
those on the right side of fiscal deficits and AI.

(44:41):
So I guess that kind of brings it back
to the balance sheet expansion.
You said that it's going to be all treasuries,
not these mortgage-backed securities.
And Trump's recently come out
talking about like a 50-year mortgage.
Do you think that is all part of the same picture there?
And it's really like a way of attempting
to help the housing market
without directly cutting rates and buying these mortgage-backed securities?

(45:06):
I do, because I think left to its own devices, the housing market has ended like a generational
cycle, which is to say you've had lower and lower interest rates, both in the short term
and the long term for 40-ish years.
And I think that's structurally behind us.
We kind of bounced off zero.
Now we're, let's call it sideways interest rates, let alone up.

(45:27):
but let's just say we're in a sideways band now,
you don't get lower lows,
which means that any sort of refinancing cycle,
like anytime we get moderately lower mortgage rates,
the only people that are going to refinance
are like those who took out a mortgage fairly recently
and volumes have been low there.
So any sort of refinancing cycle is very weak.

(45:48):
So normally when the Fed cuts rates
and when the market pushes down longer term rates,
and sometimes the Fed helps with that
by buying longer term, longer duration securities,
when you get that lower rate cycle it does a couple things obviously um you know businesses
can take out kind of cheaper loans now and invest in things they might not have done to higher rates
um but the biggest one of the biggest things is the consumer kind of homeowner market can refinance

(46:10):
their homes and spend more without really sacrificing anywhere else uh and that's done
uh that to the extent that that happens it's only that kind of smaller tiny like refinancing cycle
rather than a big one, which means when they cut and as things stagnate, it doesn't fix the problem
like it did in prior cycles. You kind of have a longer term stagnation. We've already seen,

(46:34):
for example, like usually manufacturing PI, it looks like a sine wave where activity is soaring
for maybe 18 months, and then it's kind of contracting for 18 months, and then it's soaring
for 18 months, and it's kind of, it keeps going through the cycles. It kind of mirrors the liquidity
cycle. And this has been like the longest stretch. We had the longest inverted yield curve
in US history, combined with like manufacturing kind of like stagnated and just stayed down.

(47:00):
It didn't collapse, but it just stayed weak for like three years. And obviously, housing has kind
of been in a similar boat, commercial real estate, a lot of private equity ran into headwinds in this
environment. And on one hand, it's held up by the fiscal spending. It's stimulatory. It's run it
hot. It's like pre-stimulus before recession. So it kind of prevents the bottom from falling out,

(47:26):
at least for the economy as a whole. But there's also this tight lid on the top too.
So you get that more stagflationary feeling where you have F-tier consumer sentiment,
But you still have inflation above target, even though a lot of areas are kind of grinding to a halt. And you have a few pillars holding up the whole thing. And that's the fiscally dominant era. And so it feels sickly to a lot of people because it is sickly.

(47:56):
and you're more likely to obviously get rising social discontent
in those types of environments, not just in the US but globally.
And I think that's probably the biggest story we'll be facing
over the next several years,
how both policymakers and the public deal with this situation
that is kind of structurally different than prior cycles.

(48:18):
Could you actually argue that the 50-year mortgages
are another driver of wealth inequality
in the sense that if you own scarce assets, gold, Bitcoin, equities, whatever,
and you're essentially shorting the dollar over a longer time period with a 50-year mortgage,
you'll potentially do quite well.
On the other side, if you are low income and you would take out a 50-year mortgage,

(48:39):
you just have longer paying off interest and all that part of it.
To some extent, I think that on average, I mean, the whole modern system,
It's really rewarded those who have taken out, like have good access to long-term debt and use it to buy scarcer assets.
And the 50-year mortgage in some sense is no different.
I generally, like the 50-year mortgage concept is making a lot of headlines.

(49:03):
I generally view it as less impactful than what other people seem to think.
If you kind of do the calculations for how much it can lower a monthly payment on the same house, it's not, I mean, it's not immaterial, but it's not like a game changer.
Um, and it's kind of like an artificial extension of what I just talked about, which is they,
they basically run, ran out of runway with the 30 year mortgage.

(49:27):
Uh, it's like, we're not getting almost certainly not getting lower lows, uh, in that doesn't
mean we, doesn't mean we'll get lower, you know, we could get lower than we are now,
but it's like not like the series of ever lower lows for 40 years, which is, you know,
lower highs and lower lows.
And because of that, it really kind of puts a cap on real estate appreciation also puts
a cap on housing affordability and all this. And so this is like a way of saying, well, we can't

(49:53):
fix that. So let's try this like Band-Aid. We don't even know if that's going to fully get into
effect. But even assuming it does, I think that at most that gives you like another half cycle.
And maybe not even that. It's just like it's not as big of a factor as a structurally falling
interest rates and that kind of perpetual refinancing cycle. And so it benefits those

(50:18):
who take out as long and low of a mortgage as they can buy a property in a place that ends up
being better than average. Like it's a rising environment, for example, like a city that's
going from a tertiary city to a secondary city, for example, kind of a booming area.
But I don't think outside of kind of more limited contexts that it'll have kind of macro scale

(50:40):
significance. The other part I wanted to touch on was the Fed. So they've obviously were tipped to
be doing rate cuts going into the end of the year. I know that the next one in December is sort of
called into question now. What do you think will happen with interest rates? So first answer is,
I think that that's one of the kind of the minor catalysts for why Bitcoin might have sold off

(51:01):
recently, is that the market had to kind of readjust to slightly less dovish Fed, potentially,
for the remainder of this year.
Now, one rate cut is not like a giant story,
but when the market was expecting A
and then they get B,
even if B is not that different,
it does have to kind of reprice things.
And when you already have a spooked market
for other reasons
and you get these repo issues and stuff like that,

(51:23):
it's not that surprising to see frictions
in especially the most volatile parts of the market.
So there's that.
You know, I generally don't have great insight
in what they're going to do
in a given FOMC meeting.
mostly whatever the market says is almost always what happens. And then the problem is it's
recursive. Like the Fed governors do look at what the market is expecting. And if the market is way

(51:46):
off course of what they're intending to say, that's when Fed speakers usually come out.
And if the market's too hawkish, then they'll come and say some dovish things. If the market's
too dovish, they'll come in and say some hawkish things. And they try to get it a little bit closer
to what they kind of are already anticipating what they're going to do. So rather than try to play
that game, I kind of focus on the longer term. I do think that within 2026, we will see a handful

(52:10):
of rate cuts. Whether or not we have one in December or not, for me, is like a coin flip
right now. And it's more about what happens next year. And so, yeah, I think we'll see mildly lower
interest rates while we're also going back toward balance sheet increases. But I think that they're
largely separate variables. You don't have to have one to have the other.
I think you're right in that whatever happens next year is going to be the most interesting

(52:32):
thing with the Fed. Jerome Powell's going to be done. I don't think we know who's going to step in
yet. I know there's people sort of guessing who that's going to be. But if it does become someone
who is essentially like a Trump stooge and is just going to do whatever he wants, what does that mean
both in terms of like fiscal dominance and just Fed independence? So obviously be a reduction in

(52:54):
Fed independence if that were to happen. Fiscal dominance in general chips away at Fed independence.
like the fact that the Fed is going to go back to increasing their balance sheet in line with
nominal GDP one of the challenges there is that the fiscal deficits the size of them contribute to
nominal GDP it's one of the inputs into that so basically the Fed is kind of indirectly saying

(53:17):
our rate of balance sheet increases will be partially dependent on how big the fiscal deficit
is and so you're that's already at least a minor reduction and a kind of a persistent reduction in
Fed independence, I would argue. Now, what they mean generally by Fed independence at the root
layer is that there's at least some separation between near-term rate decisions and the election

(53:40):
cycle. So it'd be very bad if an incumbent administration could say, okay, cut interest
rates right now a ton because they've got an election coming up, and then go back and maybe
raise them. That's kind of the cycle they try to avoid. There's no such thing as pure Fed
independence. More like how acutely can the Fed kind of operate on their own terms. Now that,

(54:02):
again, you can call on the question the entire purpose of the Fed. Should a central board of
12 people be setting interest rates? I would argue no, but it's still the case that you have
a somewhat independent board doing it. Even if they replace a couple of governors at a time,
you still generally are likely to have some degree of independence where they don't want to look like
a total sham, especially because it can backfire.

(54:24):
If they look super dovish, the bond market could freak out and say, well, I don't want
to own any duration yet.
So if they perceive the Fed as acting too political, they could sell off mortgages, the
market, and you could get higher mortgage rates even if you have short-term rates, which
is not what even, let's say, a hypothetical like Trump, Stooge, Fed, they wouldn't want

(54:48):
that.
So they always have to project some degree of kind of pseudo credibility to say, here's what we're doing now.
So I wouldn't expect like just a 180 degree change in what they're doing.
But that's separate from the fact that because they're in fiscal dominance, like they're going to go back to increasing their balance sheet, even if inflation is above target, because it's just it's keeping the treasury market kind of liquid.

(55:12):
And I mean, they can also they have other variables they could tweak.
I mean, they can tweak the supplemental leverage ratio, which sounds really wonkish, but it's almost like a shadow QE for banks.
It just kind of frees up some of their liquidity constraints that they have and allows them, it kind of, for them, acts like QE.
And so there's various levers they can pull, but all those levers have in common is that they allow kind of the existing thing to keep going without causing acute liquidity constraints.

(55:40):
So the trains keeps going, the fiscal deficits stay high, the Fed doesn't go out of their way to stimulate, but they do keep a lid on little fires that pop up.
And it just keeps running at this kind of stagflationary pace.
And Lynn, is there anything else on the macro side that you want to touch on?
I just have a few questions on goal before we close out.

(56:02):
Right. The other one would, I guess the final touch would be AI in the sense that if you get like a rollover in really big asset prices, whether it's NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, things like that, I'm not predicting it.
But that's where you can get kind of a disconnect where the Fed could be stimulating, the fiscal could be stimulating.

(56:24):
But if you've got a multi-trillion dollar destruction in just kind of capital, that wealth effect can reduce then consumer spending.
You can have things like Bitcoin get caught up in it, which is why when I say nothing stops his train, I'm talking about the fiscal deficits and the liquidity to keep fueling the fiscal deficits.

(56:47):
which over the long run does have an implication for asset prices,
but it doesn't have implications for asset prices on a year-by-year basis
or a quarter-by-quarter basis.
You can get all these crazy fluctuations.
Valuations do matter in the longer run.
And instead, it's more of like that macro backdrop
that gives you a foundation that other analysis can then be done on top of.

(57:10):
On the AI side, there's a lot of talk of like AI bubbles.
There's these sort of circular deals between NVIDIA and Oracle
and all these major companies.
Do you think we are potentially in a bubble in the AI side?
I think we're kind of in this like euphoric
kind of local bubble phase most likely,
but that I think the underlying trend
for the most part is real,

(57:30):
which is that this is a pretty big transformation
and especially white collar types of work.
Kind of like how if someone asks,
was Bitcoin in a bubble in 2017?
It's yes and no.
It's like a local bubble built on a structural thing.
that's kind of how I view AI right now, maybe less extreme, but it's kind of saying,
sure, I think certain things are overdone. Sure, I think euphoria is high, it's crowded.

(57:56):
Some of the deals have become somewhat incestuous in that sense. And you get that kind of circular
aspect, which can be frightening. But then I do think that when that kind of washes out,
I think that still sets the stage for growth. So I do think that when we look back 10 years from now,
you know will there be quite a lot of data center activity running ai that's that's doing all sorts

(58:18):
of stuff for us yes uh and i mean bigger numbers than they are now uh but that occasionally you
front run and kind of pull too much forward and have to cool off for a period yeah that makes sense
and when i had luke groman on the show a couple months ago we talked a lot about ai and the
impacts that that might have on the economy um and i don't actually know what the term is for this
It's almost like a black swan that you can see coming at some point.

(58:40):
Like if AI does start replacing a meaningful number of jobs, how does the economy sort of cope with that?
Well, on one hand, it's just like prior kind of productivity cycles, which is like when hydrocarbons started to become used at scale and we made like the tractor, like one farmer could do the work of like 10 farmers.

(59:04):
Right. So what that does that freed up the other nine farmers to go work in other areas.
Right So instead of like you know 80 percent of the society running our agriculture and 20 percent doing other things over time we would have it so that like 2 percent of people can feed everyone The other 98 percent of people can do other stuff like build technology or take care of things or do healthcare And what this does is it kind of is like another version of that

(59:27):
It's saying some percentage of human labor
can be replaced by basically pure energy
combined with hardware.
So you say, okay, well, we can take electricity and GPUs
and that can replace some percentage of,
especially our white collar labor force,
which is disruptive when it happens.
but then it frees up people to do other things in general we want machines to do a lot of the

(59:50):
routine stuff for us so we can do other things where people get spooked is when you have machines
so good that like a lot of people can't find any work that they can do that is better than a machine
so even though tractors replaced farmers at farming or at least allowed one farmer to do
the work at 10 those people could still say okay well the tractor is doing that so i'll go

(01:00:11):
research medicine or something right you had you had other types of work the the where that game
could change is if you have machines that are so good that that people meaningful percentage
population um not just you know certain say at the current stage there are disabled people that
have trouble being economically kind of uh functioning in any capacity but if that if the

(01:00:34):
kind of the percentage of population has that happen to them and it becomes a very meaningful
percent that's when you get kind of a unforeseen territory what does that look like um people have
talked about ubi people have talked about revolution that i that's where it's it's a
hard to predict outcome uh but in general there's that difference between what happens in the kind

(01:00:56):
of disruptive near term versus structurally what we want which is we do want machines and energy
to replace as much work as possible to to free people up and that there's that kind of
march toward that end wherever possible. Yeah. I think the scary part of this is that
it's not only going to replace sort of manual labor. It's, you know, it's almost everything,
like accountants, teachers, finance people, people working in medicine. Like it seems like

(01:01:21):
across the board, it's going to replace a pretty decent number of jobs. And what's left, I guess,
is the question. And this is why like UBI at this point, I don't know if I'm being doomed here,
but just seems baked in a cake like i don't i don't know what other outcome there could be
yeah i think there are pockets that will end up demanding and i think i think the silver lining
is that basically there's a huge difference between data center ai and portable ai

(01:01:46):
aka robots um i mean the human brain runs on 20 watts of power uh in order to do that in a data
center you need megawatts of power like this same amount of processing power now obviously certain
things a computer can do really cheaply, like a calculator. We've had that for like a century.
But in terms of all the things a human brain does, the amount of bandwidth it takes in from the

(01:02:07):
environment, all the automatic processes that are running, and then on top of that, a conscious
decision-making process that can help handle edge cases. And then it's a self-healing robot
as well. That's super advanced technology. And so I'm actually kind of like, especially in timelines,
like i robotics certainly will play a bigger role in our life we already see if you go to japan i

(01:02:32):
mean robots play a bigger role in in their a lot of their functions than here so first they just
get to japan and then you'll get further than that so we are going to get more robotified
um but for example the idea of a robot coming out to your house and like uh fixing your hvac system
right and basically going out into the field dealing with all the edge cases
that I think is an extraordinarily long way off.

(01:02:55):
It's data center AI that I think is the star of the show right now,
which is basically displacing a lot of white collar work.
The bonus is that it allows each remaining white collar person
to kind of do more because rather than just all those tools
running completely autonomously,
it's basically extensions of a person

(01:03:15):
where they can have some data collection do something for them.
They can have this thing edit their thing better, you know, faster and cheaper than a human could and all that stuff.
But there's still there's still decision makers and governors in that whole process.
And so, yeah, I think we get disruption of white collar stuff a lot quicker.
And ironically, I think you can get kind of a boom in some, especially in the field, blue collar stuff.

(01:03:37):
So it's easier to automate things in a very controlled environment like a manufacturing floor.
It's much harder to automate things out in the broader world where all those edge cases come into play.
And then when you have, say, a massive number of robots, a massive amount of data center, all of that has really high turnover.
GPUs have to be replaced.

(01:03:57):
None of this is self-healing.
This is like literally a constant replacement cost.
A lot of it relies on, you know, kind of semi-rare materials that can run into shortages and get expensive.
You can have environments where a society starts pushing back on robots and vandalizes robots if they find them kind of out in public and almost like kind of forced keeping human in the loop.

(01:04:19):
So I think that will happen too.
I think there are kind of basically self-correcting loops, both positive ones and some negative ones, that especially in terms of like all work across all fields, I generally fade that sort of hyper bullish thing, at least in any sort of investment or kind of planning time horizon.

(01:04:40):
I'm not talking about what happens in the 50 years or next century, but what happens in, say, a 10 to 20 year period, data center AI is a much bigger deal, in my opinion, than portable AI and basically in the field.
So I think that there's kind of a potentially a forced shift toward people kind of doing more physical work and also communities somewhat being more self-sufficient.

(01:05:05):
If a whole kind of area gets kind of disfranchised by AI, that's a lot of people out of work.
Well, that's a lot of people that together are out of work.
So it's like someone's got to build the home.
Someone's got to do all this.
And they don't have enough.
I guess if there's robots, they can't afford the robots to come in and do it.
So they got to work with each other.
And you kind of almost restart the whole what an economy is.

(01:05:28):
And of course, the challenge there is the path dependence along the way.
as you have societal breakdown, as you have deterioration of the social contract,
and then more extremism or whatever based on that, that's where I think the real issue is,
rather than that, say, AI replaces 99% of jobs in sort of a generation. That's not what I'm

(01:05:49):
concerned about. It's more like what happens when it replaces 10% of jobs and those 10% of people
are really angry. That's, I think, the actual thing I worry about rather than that kind of
more extreme scenario. Yeah, that's a scary scenario anyway. But I mean, it's good to hear
that you're bullish on humanity, at least for the short term. I needed to hear that, Lynn.
Before we close out, can we just very quickly touch on gold? Because if you'd have asked me a

(01:06:13):
year ago, if gold would have this insane bull market while Bitcoin was flat, I would have put
that at a pretty low probability. Why do you think that's happened? What's going on there?
Well, it's funny because I've been a gold bull, but I'm surprised as well that it hit
4,000 this year. When it still had a 2,000 handle on it, I was eventually looking forward to the

(01:06:37):
3,000, but I didn't think you'd just race right to 4,000. So I'm happy it did, but wouldn't put
it as my base case, especially given the size of the market. It's a huge multi-trillion dollar
market cap increase in it. There's multiple shifts happening. One is ever since 2009,
you've had a gradual shift towards sovereign reaccumulation of gold.

(01:07:01):
So prior to then, you had a multi-decade kind of
divestment of gold among sovereigns and toward treasuries.
Starting in 2009, that gradually reversed. It got kicked into
overdrive in 2022 because then you have
potential risk of confiscation or freezing of assets. If a sovereign
is holding their securities of another nation, they're not really

(01:07:25):
sovereign assets. And so there's kind of been a shift toward that. Then there's the increasing
awareness of fiscal dominance and the increasing awareness that nothing stops his train, which says,
well, if this is just going to happen for 5, 10, 15 years, maybe I want to own some gold.
That's the one that's got an established track record. So big pools of capital already know what

(01:07:45):
to do with it. They don't have to research it. They already know what gold is. And then in addition,
this is not really even though the stock market is near all-time high it's it's because it's so
narrow it's mostly not even a risk on environment like i mentioned before we've been in an usually
long period of kind of like like flat yield curve pmis like purchasing managed indices of like

(01:08:07):
manufacturing and other other signs that are just kind of like in stagnation um outside of ai the
stock market is pretty flattish, kind of consolidating. And so it's not a very risk-owned
environment, even though liquidity is good. So when you have kind of pretty decent liquidity
up until maybe very recently, and then you have kind of stagnating broader economy,

(01:08:31):
the Fed still trying to tighten things where it can, the things that have taken off has been
ai gold uh like kind of the what the market ironically looks as low risk they they view ai
as low risk even though the pockets of it that are obviously not but they viewed as low risk
because they viewed as like a sure thing it's like okay that's cycle resistant let's let's go to ai

(01:08:53):
then they say gold okay that's low risk um bitcoin until pretty recently was in that bucket was
benefiting uh from liquidity um from kind of gradual adoption um but as you have kind of like
a flattish environment, Bitcoin cooled off.
So I think basically gold's behaving kind of, you know, rationally, just a little bit,

(01:09:17):
you know, these things tend not be linear.
So you tend to overshoot to the upside, then overshoot to the downside, then overshoot
to the upside.
So this did overshoot to the upside faster than I would have thought.
But I think it's a gradual realignment for things we've talked about in prior podcasts,
a more multipolar world, less kind of a focus on every country just holding one country's
bonds as the reserve asset and saying, okay, we'll hold those, but we also want to hold these

(01:09:41):
other, say, three things. We want to hold gold. Maybe we want to hold another trading partner's
currency around the margins. Smaller ones might say, well, let's look at Bitcoin a little bit.
You get that kind of gradual broadening of assets that are viewed as kind of reserve assets. And
gold, as the incumbent, has kind of been the chief beneficiary where we're talking about

(01:10:01):
the market's being increasingly spooked about these tens of trillions of dollars of sovereign
debt so whether it's the u.s it's europe it's elsewhere the market is kind of long term says
okay what's the end game here uh and you have gold which is a much smaller market despite being huge
than those sovereign bonds it only takes a small gradual spillover for investors to start kind of

(01:10:27):
going into gold they don't have to do a ton of research because they know what gold is
yeah one of the things i found really interesting is the kind of retail fomo around gold um because
as we were saying earlier in the show there's really not been a huge influx of new retail
participants in bitcoin but i don't know if you saw the pictures going around twitter and stuff of
people literally queuing on the street outside gold shops i think they were actually here in

(01:10:48):
australia um yeah has that surprised you and like one of the things we talk about often in bitcoin
is like the unit bias obviously the unit bias for gold is lower but as a market it's huge compared
it's a bitcoin so the short answer is it hasn't surprised me because so back when gold was like
three thousand one of the interesting things at the time was that it was not retail driving it

(01:11:09):
so when you looked at like interest in gold etfs or interest in physical coinage uh it was kind of
lukewarm uh whereas the price was going up anyway and it was because sovereigns institutions were
driving it it was kind of like gold moment of like um the treasury company thing right it's like
big pools were interested in it China and India were interested so their retail was interested

(01:11:32):
but kind of the western retail was like they other things are going on when the mag 7 was soaring no
one's like they're like yeah gold's okay but you know I'm not really interested in it it's only
really in in in kind of the second half of this year uh where we're retailed western retail did
start to fomo into gold so that's kind of a later later stage portion of it so first first

(01:11:53):
institutional than retail. And that's generally how things go. So if anything, if you'd asked me
last year, I'd be, I'm surprised there's not a little bit more retail FOMO than there is right
now. But then I would also not have guessed you've gotten a 4,000. But when you do get to 4,000,
I'm not surprised that, yeah, you start seeing lines outside of gold stores, either to buy it

(01:12:13):
or sell it. Because actually both tends to happen. There are people that need money and have,
you know, a gold ring and they want to go sell it. And there are other people that are then
FOMO-ing into it is how these things tend to go. And, you know, if Bitcoin can have a cycle like
that, where if you break the four-year cycle, you have an up year, institutions are positioned,
and it starts to rip, you can bring in retail. So it's like, just because retail is not here

(01:12:37):
now doesn't mean they can't come later. And unfortunately, retail tends to be kind of the
later phase of a given bull run. Now, but I think I view gold in a similar way that I would view AI,
which is that it can get into a local bubble,
but that I still think it's structurally fine.
The last time I gave a warning of that sort was back in 2020.

(01:13:00):
Gold, of course, had a very big moment.
And I was like, I could see it taking a breather here.
It took a little longer breather than I thought,
but then it did this whole kind of next doubling that it did.
And I view it kind of similarly,
which is sure it's over at Skis right now,
but I don't view it as like structurally overvalued if anything it's going from being

(01:13:21):
just kind of structurally undervalued just like back closer to like what I think makes sense
and so yeah I just view gold and bitcoin as kind of two different assets gold still because it's
incumbent it has more of a risk off aspect to it it's got more of a sovereign interest in it
whereas bitcoin is still kind of collectively lumped into a tech play even though from those

(01:13:42):
that people understand it, it does have, you know, digital gold, digital cash attributes
that can be viewed as risk off as well. Just the price action tends to correlate more of the risk
on type asset. That makes sense. Okay, Lynn, last question. Bitcoin's just above 90,000 now. I'm
not asking for a price prediction here, but just like directionally over the next 12 months,

(01:14:02):
what do you think? How are you looking at Bitcoin? My guess is up. I don't have a view of the next
quarter um i've i always do try to avoid price predictions when i get quartered into one like
for 2025 i was like yeah anything under like if we don't hit 150 be a little disappointing of
course we only got to like 125 or so so it's on the disappointing end um i i do expect that you

(01:14:26):
know in 2026 we'll be back into the six figures i mean anything can happen between now and year end
um and whether it's 2026 or 2027 i think we'll be seeing new all-time highs most likely
um and it's funny when i because i watched twitter sentiment when bitcoin is absolutely soaring
i get sometimes dunked on by bitcoiners saying why do you own any gold why do you own any stocks

(01:14:49):
why aren't you 100 bitcoin and it's like well because i like some degree of diversification
here uh and then when bitcoin's crashing i get the gold bugs coming out and saying oh like uh
you know they should just own all gold they're like why do you own any bitcoin at all and it's
funny how that emotional trend goes. And one of the ways is to say, okay, well, you don't want to
de-worsify so that you own a little bit of everything. You still want to have opinions

(01:15:13):
on assets and you can make concentrated bets. I mean, I'm quite structurally bullish on Bitcoin,
for example. But that's also why I own gold and I own equities that have nothing to do with Bitcoin
because there are different size markets, different performance patterns that they go through.
And for me, it's not just about owning what I think is going to be the fastest horse.

(01:15:35):
It's okay, I'll put extra on the fastest horse, but I want to own a handful of horses.
And so when you structure a portfolio like this, it's like, okay, I'm disappointed in Bitcoin this year, but I'm enthused by what gold did.
And if you structure a portfolio that way, you take the edge off for a lot of these things.

(01:15:56):
and so I think we'll see a rotation at some point
where I'll be disappointed in the gold side of my portfolio
and I'll be enthused about the Bitcoin side
and then probably it'll repeat again
so yeah nothing's really changed around my view of any of these assets
it's just they catch on at different speeds
and they have different correlations

(01:16:16):
and like I said before I think that a year ago
or six months ago
some percentage of people bought Bitcoin for maybe the wrong reason
They bought it because they think Uncle Sam's going to buy it rather than buying it for its own qualities and kind of the longer term story of what it is and what it changes.
In addition, I think the broader crypto space is basically out of narratives.

(01:16:41):
And that's basically dead weight now.
So other than Bitcoin and stable coins, a couple small tech rails to run that kind of stuff, at a macro scale, there's really no there there in the broader crypto space.
And so I think that that's part of why kind of the whole space is bearish.
There's a lot of people that own Bitcoin own other assets.

(01:17:04):
And they view it as not just a bad cycle, but that there's just, what's the next narrative?
You had ICOs, you had NFTs, you had DeFi, you had meme coins, which is basically the
most cynical narrative is saying that we're just flat out saying there's no there there.
Then even that kind of eventually rolls over.
and you know there's really no kind of you can always be surprised by another one kind of coming

(01:17:28):
out of the hat but i think a lot of that is kind of tested almost every directional narrative that
it could and is kind of set for structural stagnation so bitcoin has to kind of decouple
from that dead weight to the extent that it's going to keep kind of reaching higher highs
i totally agree with that i mean the altcoin side of things i think is is over

(01:17:50):
um i don't want to speak too definitively because you never know what might come out but um i've
been i've started having the text from the people sort of close to me who might have bought bitcoin
for the wrong reasons being like is this going to go down to 50k and all this stuff and i obviously
i've no idea but like the the best message i think is just just do nothing if you're not sure just do
nothing like just wait because like i know that 90k is not going to be the top of bitcoin forever

(01:18:15):
um lynn i always love talking to you thank you so much for doing this um i'm gonna see you at
cheat code in march yeah i missed last year but i was there the year prior i believe so definitely
i definitely think it's worth going i love the conference uh and it's great to see everyone
it's gonna be fun we've got you announced as a keynote and jack mallers at the moment we're
gonna be dropping some more speakers soon so cheat code.co.uk there's my little shill um lynn

(01:18:40):
where do you want to send anyone uh who wants to find out everyone knows who you are but who wants
to find out more.
Just check out lynnaldon.com.
Everything can be found from there.
We're at lynnaldoncontact on Twitter
or Broken Money on Amazon or elsewhere.
But thanks for having me.

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Bitcoin, Gold & the Coming Liquidity Pivot | Lyn Alden

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Bitcoin, Gold & the Coming Liquidity Pivot | Lyn Alden