We're back for the 1031 timestamp recap. I'm joined by the real John Arnold. John,
how was your weekend? As good as it can be when you're four weeks deep into a military mission
with World War III level implications and an uncertain timeline. Beyond that, it was good.
You had to stay off the timeline on the weekend, never doom, touch grass.
Never doom. You go to Palm Sunday Mass. Exactly. Anchor yourself in what's going on,
what's really important. Then we can come here Monday and reconvene and talk about the big
thesis that you really touched on in the newsletter over the weekend, which is there's a lot of
discussion about the Federal Reserve and whether or not they're going to hike. Probabilities
across the board seem to be pointing at an increased chance of the Fed hiking at the end
of this year, but you're drawing a line and saying, no, you don't think they can.
why are you drawing this line? Yeah, I mean, to some extent, this week's newsletter is the result
of me being tired of schizo posting about different things that could happen in the
straightforward news. And I feel like everyone's tired of reading about that. So I tried to take a
bit of a different tack this time. But I actually think this was maybe one of the more interesting
and underreported stories of last week, as everyone stays focused on, you know, minute to
minute updates out of Iran. Yeah, as you said, market increasingly looks to be pricing higher
odds. And at one point late last week, basically coin flip odds of at least one, if not two rate
hikes by the end of the year. You can see that on the chart here. This was taken from the CME
FedWatch tool. And this is in response to an assumption, probably correct assumption that
the amount of time that the straightaway news has been closed and the amount of disruption that's
happened to global energy markets just in the last month, again, even if everything ended,
you know, today, that's going to have a bullwhip effect and kind of flow through to inflation.
and that'll put the Fed in a position where they actually have to hike rates and get more
restrictive and less accommodative to kind of combat that. And you can kind of see that being
priced in somewhat here in FedFund's futures. And I, you know, if you were on FinTwit at all
over the last week, if you've been reading any mainstream financial press that, you know,
this is a headline you're seeing trumpeted about a lot. And I have no idea, as I said,
the newsletter, what different transmission mechanisms look like, what, you know, the Fed
may be able to do on creating different alphabet soup facilities to offset a potential rate hike.
But the general gist that I was putting out in the newsletter this weekend was, yeah, kind of
drawing a line on there's less room than the market thinks, given the fiscal state of the U.S.,
us, particularly if we're going to, in Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth's words,
allocate another $200 billion to kill bad guys on an already massive federal budget.
Given where we're sitting with non-discretionary spend as a percentage of receipts, we can't have
blended interest rates, blended interest expense on federal debt much higher than they are today.
Right. And you can see that. And if you flip to like, I'll just flag the chart on page four,
we've talked about it a bit on the show previously a couple months ago, but you know,
it doesn't take a ton of crazy math to, to realize that that's the case. And yes, here,
here just shows we're already kind of bumping up on the ceiling and you, you go much higher and you
get into this pretty bad territory pretty quickly. Um, assuming you don't have the ability to,
you know, make meaningful cuts elsewhere in kind of these, these non-discretionary items.
And I just think that's for many reasons, politically untenable and not going to happen,
especially in a world that's getting much more multipolar. So that puts us in kind of a rough
position already. If you flip back though, to a slide two, you know, perhaps even more immediately
concerning is, you know, the, the move index is now getting squirrely. So this is the kind of
comparable to the VIX for treasury volatility. And, you know, we're now back to levels that,
uh, we were seeing at liberation day last year. And this is, this is a big problem by itself,
even outside of the multi-year kind of projections on federal interest expense, because if you look
down to page three, we talked about this chart in the newsletter in previous months, but
increasingly there's a lot of levered hedge funds that are deep in the treasury basis trade. You can
see in that bar how much net issuance has been absorbed by such hedge funds, as well as other
foreign private actors, which can mean a lot of different things. And there's a good amount of
volatility sensitivity in those groups, right? They get the tap on the shoulder when regardless
of the level of the 10-year yield, as volatility picks up and then it flows through to equity
market volatility, there's a quick reaction function to degross, to sell positions, to go
to cash. And that can quickly turn into a vicious cycle on the most important bedrock asset in the
modern financial system. And so there are all these kind of factors conspiring that basically,
to me point to, regardless of what happens with inflation and printed inflation, the Fed does not
have the leeway to get substantially more aggressive or more restrictive across its
different facilities and different tools on the strategy market and on rates. So I, you know,
as I said in the newsletter, we're far from rates traders. I'm not making any kind of forecast on
where anything's going, you know, month to month or quarter to quarter. But I think broadly,
that's a theme that I would fade as we go forward this year, that the Fed's just going to, you know,
practice fiscal rectitude or try to impose fiscal rectitude on the country and, you know,
just respond mechanically to higher inflation with higher rates.
Well, I mean, you said it in the newsletter to anyone who believes the Fed can't be accommodated
for fear of inflation in the face of commodity shocks, your grandparents might beg to differ.
I think another sort of parallel that people are looking at right now is the 1970s oil shock to today.
But I think as you just described if we looking at all the debt and specifically the debt to GDP ratio that exists today in the United States compared to then it is far different And then we been talking about it who knows how systemic the private credit sort of contagion becomes I think it yet to be
determined. I think there's other funds. I believe Morgan Stanley gated a fund, a private credit
fund last week. It does seem like there are analysts out there who aren't worried about
contagion, sort of breaking containment of this sort of retail oriented private credit vehicle
or these BDCs that exist out there, but who knows?
Maybe it does break containment.
You do have a systemic contagion that triggers a domino effect
of liquidity crunches within the financial system.
And that's sort of been my MO, observing this
and looking at people saying they're going to hike rates.
Obviously, this disruption to oil and gas,
global supply chain infrastructure is massive,
but I think there's just going to be forces,
whether it's the war itself or a potential liquidity crisis in the back end of the financial
system here in the U.S. that spreads globally, that's going to dictate the Fed needing to be
more accommodative. Yeah, right. That's a great point. It's certainly like, you know, there's
debate right now on how relevant the private credit complex is to the overall system. It's
relative size, it's overall leverage. And, you know, perhaps it's either not going to perform
as poorly as some predict, or even if it does, that has less relevance than, you know, poor
performance of the major commercial banks leading up to 08. So that may or may not be the case. But
certainly you could say like, it doesn't help, right? So any kind of like massive squeeze in any
pocket of levered pocket of the economy is not going to be received well. And, you know, we've
seen not to compare the private credit complex to say SVB, but SVB was a large bank, but not a bank
that a lot of people even heard of probably in the US, it was top 20 by assets, but in a couple
of days, right, all very little needed to happen for that to become, you know, the most important
story in financial markets and something that the Fed had to aggressively respond to that the
parallels largely in there, you know, private credit is not the same as banking. But my point
is just in a very challenged environment, anyway, the last thing you need is like a cascading daisy
chain of liquidity crunches in those types of vehicles. And I think that will pile on to if
that really escalates and accelerates in the coming months, like that, that piles onto the
things that the Fed has to further respond to. And I think it's really like, the thing I was
saying over the weekend was like, in, in a shock, it's often said like correlations go to one,
you know, everything, just people, there's a scramble for liquidity, there's a scramble for,
for dollars that you often see, you often see the Dixie, the dollar index rip when everything else
is dumping in crisis environments, as people just kind of scramble for some level of certainty and
kind of get out of whatever they can, you know, they sell what they can, not what they want.
And I think there's an element that people need to start thinking through, which we haven't really seen in the last 50 years, 50 plus years of correlations going to one in government policy as well.
Like there's this view that, you know, the Fed and the Treasury and Congress and different state governments and the military are all kind of these different organizations that have their own priorities and their own ways of operating.
and definitely like in peacetime, I think that's very much true as you move into a higher and higher
volatility environment, both in terms of financial markets, but also just globally and militarily.
I think you see correlations go to one in all government institutions as well. And I think
this is kind of what I was referring to in the newsletter, you know, with your,
the way that your grandparents might beg to differ about what the Fed can and can't do.
You know, if you, if you go back and look at, say people talk about the seventies, like you said,
I think the forties is, is an equally interesting, if not more interesting kind of analog where,
you had a radically expanding debt to GDP and in, and, uh, fed and treasury, uh, direct coordination
to make sure that that wouldn't flow through to treasury yields and spike treasury yields.
And you could normally, and you would say, well, that would just spike inflation, right? Like that
we, we couldn't possibly do that again. Well, the, the way that that was managed, right. In the 40s
was price controls and rationing, right. A huge amount of goods were subjected to with, with
consummate US propaganda. You just, you gotta love the vintage propaganda here.
We're subjected to rationing cards and anti-hoarding measures, quote unquote, for a wide
variety of consumer goods. I think you literally saw the analog of CPI. I don't think it was CPI
at the time, but we went from like early forties CPI was like double digits. I think like 14%,
between 10 and 14% and then fell reported CPI fell to like 1% because you weren't actually
seeing inflation, but no one could get anything or like not, not meaningfully. Right. At least in
the consumer economy. And then once those were released, you saw reported inflation spike back
up to like, you know, 15% like 1947. But all the while the 10 year was at like two and a half
percent, like the entire time, even as death GDP went from 50% to like 120%. And so I think it's
just worth thinking through. I don't even know if we could actually functionally do that today.
I don't know if we have the political will, the political unity, and nor do I, nor am I calling
for this, nor do I think it's like, would be a good thing for any of us to experience. But I think
it's just important, like to, as you're positioning yourself to realize, like, there are times in
history when correlations go to one in governments. And that means like the Fed and the Treasury and
Congress and the military are all going to be very aligned on what needs to happen. And I think this
book, Freedom's Forge, is a great one to look at. It's less about the rationing kind of price
control side, but more about the complete industrial remaking of America in just a couple years to
respond to the European and Japanese theaters up to World War Two. And we went from being
extremely industrially unprepared to very, very prepared in just a few years with, you know,
massive mobilization and government control of industries. Again, not recommending that
necessarily. There are meaningful downsides to that. But I just think like this is the kind of
thinking that the market is not yet really doing. And, you know, I think people price it at like a
0% chance. And I think this is it. We're getting into a position where this is like 10%, 20%,
30% type odds that you need to be thinking through on, you know, the scenario tree.
Yeah I mean it funny that the market isn beginning to even price in a low probability of this coming in because you been covering it in the newsletter we talked about it too but this sort of light nationalization or industrialization of certain industries that we seen from the Trump administration going back to last
year, buying stakes in heavy metal companies, in industrial metal companies, in energy companies,
in a range of different companies that may prove to be integral in a re-industrialization
during a wartime effort at some point in the next six months, potentially, if things don't
turn in the other direction towards more peaceful reconciliation to what's going on in the Middle
East. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you're seeing, if you flip to the next slide, we highlighted some
headlines from this past week, but the unfortunate thing is you're seeing this already,
versions of this already in parts of the world, many of which are actually our allies, the
Philippines, South Korea, Australia, like this is already starting to bite in a variety of different
ways. And there's been some good writing out there that we fly to the newsletter this week as well
about the downstream impacts on wide variety of commodities. And, you know, refined goods that are
maybe, you know, one level up from, you know, base inputs like oil, it hits everything in a variety
of different ways that we're not even currently expecting. And like, you're already seeing
governments respond exactly as governments always do in this case. And so I yeah, I think we should
be probably we being the U S if you're listening from the U S you know, the, the classic dark joke,
I guess, is that the U S sneezes and the rest of the world gets a cold. So there's some level of
insulation for, you know, a net energy, energy exporter, that's relatively kind of independent
on food supply. Although there are asterisks on that as well, the U S should probably fare better
than a lot of U S allies. But the reality is like, it's flowing through already everywhere,
even in places that, you know, are, are not only allied with, with the U S. So yeah, I think we,
the market should increasingly be pricing in that something like this would be a response that we
would see here, you know, as well. Yeah. And tying this back to the core thesis of
this newsletter, being that the Fed cannot hike rates and they're probably going to have to be
more accommodative than people expect right now. This should be a tailwind for Bitcoin, correct?
Yeah, you would think so. I mean, admittedly, like the era of rationing, price controls,
et cetera. And, you know, industrial mobilization was also the era of executive order 6102,
which famously removed one of the major, which was the seizure of privately held gold or the
banning of privately held gold under FDR, which famously removed one of the clearest kind of
response valves and escape patches that you would have to deal with an environment like that.
I think there are reasons to believe, and we've talked about it before internally,
you've talked about it on TFDC, reasons to believe that Bitcoin has a greater level of resistance
to something like that, or the government to try that. But I also think the pieces that are lining
up right now suggest that that may or may not be the actual path that this administration wants to
take. So maybe we can kind of move in that direction, because we got some, I think we got
some really interesting headlines last week about Bitcoin and its increasing integration into a lot
of different facets of the economy. I was going to say off the top of my head, I think probably
the biggest announcement was Fannie Mae, Freddie, basically recognizing Bitcoin as an asset. I think
officially now, and then Coinbase launching their 30-year mortgage with Better Homes, I believe,
is the company that allows you to put Bitcoin up as collateral for a 30-year mortgage. And I mean,
I tweeted it out and feel comfortable talking about it. I can't say exactly who I got my mortgage
true, but I have a 30-year mortgage that is dual collateralized with Bitcoin. And this is something
that we've been talking about internally at 1031. And I think you and I specifically have been
waiting for this moment within Bitcoin, where it becomes a preferred collateral asset in credit
stacks, in this case, a 30-year mortgage. And I think the most exciting thing about this not only
is the validation that Bitcoin is pristine collateral that financial institutions are
willing to sort of recognize and engage with for people who have built Bitcoin wealth and don't
want to sell it, but want to tap into it. But I think the most important thing is duration really
beginning to enter the Bitcoin credit market, for lack of a better term. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
like it's the, I think the really interesting piece of, you know, what really is unlocked by
the fanny news to the extent that it really kind of continues to roll out, we need to see that it's,
You know, there aren't gremlins kind of in the fine print or, you know, some, some effort to stop that. But the ability for those loans to, to be conforming mortgages that can be purchased by Fannie and Freddie and enter the secondary market brings a whole new level of potential liquidity to those loans and thus makes them much easier to, to originate. Right.
So you could start to see over time the ability for a lot more dollar financing to come into Bitcoin back lending and bring rates down as that develops.
Right. That's a huge backstop for all these loans.
And I think a key blocker for the ability for them to really achieve like commercial scale.
So that's, you know, I think that's a huge, huge piece of news.
it would not insulate you from a 6102 type attack, obviously, to have a Bitcoin locked up in one of
those highly centralized loans. But I think what it's telling you is that the government is not
currently attempting to discourage, but rather to encourage more exposure to Bitcoin ownership.
And I think there's an argument that you can say you want more people holding an asset that
participates in an upward kind of liquidity impulse if you are indeed going to do a lot of
the things that we described, albeit, you know, participation via heavily kind of controlled
wrappers, but you want broader ownership and broader exposure to that kind of liquidity
impulse and an asset that will meaningfully benefit from it to avoid and curtail political
pushback that you might otherwise get.
You could take the, you know, the hammer approach that has been taken in the past, or you could
kind of take, you know, the catching more flies with honey than vinegar approach of bringing
people into Bitcoin linked products.
And I think like that an interesting confluence at this time as you seeing more and more need potentially for control of elements of the economy and a more a more creative relationship
between the Fed and the Treasury, let's say, to have this greater institutionalization of a
normalization of kind of Bitcoin oriented financial products. Yeah, I mean, a pressure release valve
for the government, just use this neutral reserve asset that's floating on the free markets. And
Yes, we're going to go do all these inflationary.
We're going to go try to stimulate the economy where it's via the Fed being accommodated or the Treasury issuing more debt to support the war effort.
Give the people a release valve that will benefit whether or not you can get to the ethics of having that there.
I would say it's a good thing.
But there's an external wealth effect that exists within Bitcoin.
if you can integrate it into the traditional economy more and more,
it's going to be massive.
And so going down this line of thought,
I mean, today as well, I don't know if you covered it in the newsletter,
but I think you may have touched on it,
but Square was just making Bitcoin payments automatically,
just auto enabling them for the merchants.
I believe all the merchants, except for those inside New York,
I would imagine are the only ones who may not be able to
accept Bitcoin as payment because of the BitLicense.
I could be wrong there, but Miles Suter,
head of Bitcoin product at Block across their family businesses. He was tweeting out
earlier today that it was going live and they want to make Bitcoin everyday money.
On top of that, we had some ETF news last week, both on the flows perspective and a new entrant
into the market. ETF flows are almost flat on the year, despite massive volatility, which shows that
the market is resilient. And no matter what the headlines are telling you about Bitcoin,
despite the fact that it's down 48% from its all-time high. Last October, early November,
there is still demand from institutional buyers and people who access exposure to Bitcoin via
ETFs to get exposure. And then I think the big news, as Eric Balkunas from Bloomberg says,
I think it was a bit of a shock. He's calling it a semi-shock. Morgan Stanley
filed for a Bitcoin ETF. It looks like it's going through the approval process rather quickly in
other marketing that they're going to charge 14 bps of fees, which undercuts BlackRock's
IBIT ETF by 11 bps.
And Morgan Stanley doesn't issue that many ETFs.
And it was very interesting.
I think they have maybe 17 or 18.
And now the Bitcoin ETF is one of them.
Yeah, I think it's fewer than that.
I think it's like seven with the actual Morgan Stanley flagship branding.
And this one will have that.
So I think they filed a month or two ago.
But the update on what they'll charge is just interesting because I think it tells you that the fees are obviously really low already.
So it's not like they had a huge amount of cushion if they wanted to be competitive.
But to go meaningfully lower than Ibit, I think suggests something interesting about what they view as strategically valuable here and how big they believe the AUM opportunity of this could ultimately be.
and how much demand they are likely seeing from the wealth channel to get this out there, to put it under, again, the flagship branding,
and then to price it so much lower to make sure that advisors, as Eric says, are not conflicted and feel comfortable channeling clients into it.
Not trying to just price with IBED and go for slightly higher fees, but actually price meaningfully lower and just gather AUM into the vehicle.
I think that's telling you something about, especially seeing that in the middle of this environment, like you said, where we're 50% off all time highs, a lot of kind of mainstream interest is, is, is, has moved on to other things.
You know, this is not the kind of thing that we saw last, last time we had had price action like this, particularly in the middle of, you know, everything that we've talked about earlier on the show with, with semi World War III beginning.
So that you would see something like this in this kind of environment is, I think, very telling.
And again, it does not, to me, point in the direction of a government that wants to outlaw or avoid people channeling wealth into Bitcoin.
And again, we can debate what the best way is to do that and the vulnerabilities that come with doing that through an ETF.
But in any case, this happening to me, all of these things happening points in a very different direction than we might have been headed in just a few years ago.
Yeah, it seems like just build the paths for people to get on the life.
But as we do this crazy stuff on the reindustrialization and the wartime footing, as an American, it's like, okay, at least this stuff is happening in the background.
Stuff that I care about, stuff that we focus on, it's good to see.
To your point, which is just sort of reiterating my point, but I think it should be reiterated more and more as this happening in this type of price environment is very unique in terms of the tenor around Bitcoin right now is honestly pretty piss poor.
Somebody who's been in it for 13 years almost reminds me of 2015.
2015 was, I think, the worst from a sentiment perspective that I've ever experienced.
These last six months are very close to that.
But the fact that we have Fannie Mae, I'll just pull the headlines up here too, accepting
the first crypto-backed mortgage products.
We have Morgan Stanley putting their name on it.
We have block enabling, auto enabling of payments and ETF flows.
If you were just looking at pure flows with no knowledge of what the price is doing, you'd
probably think the Bitcoin price has been flat for the last six months. But it hasn't been down
48%. A long way to go. John, any final thoughts before we wrap up here? Just got to stay humble
and stack stats and fade every tweet from or every true social post from our president and
fade every response from the Iranian parliamentary members that are firing back at him on Twitter.
Yeah, the meme warfare reaching the levels that it has. And we got Lego AI generated videos.
We've got true social posts in the morning, tweets.
It's crazy times.
We'll be back next week.