Mr. Arnold, I must apologize. Apologize for what? Two things. First, last week, I used the wrong
mic. I was speaking through my MacBook Pro. Audio still came through, but not as good as the shore
mic that you're hearing me through now. Second thing is, you're catching summer, Marty. I'm at
the beach on the weekends. I wake up early, drive back to my desk by 9 a.m. Monday morning. I got
a little, haven't shaved yet. Got a little like beach flow here, still rocking. Got the hat on,
So sorry, I'm not as buttoned up as I should be for the quality of the show and the analysis that we just you just got that European vibe.
You know, hit that hit that out of office automated message starting right after Memorial Day.
Come back September.
That's all right.
No, no, no.
We're still grinding.
Drop in for a few podcasts.
That's all right.
We get 48 hours of rest on the weekend here in the United States.
And even then, you're still talking to your client around the beach like, hey, I got this idea for Monday.
But you get back to work on Monday.
The summer doldrums don't exist when we have the world unfolding as it is right now.
Yeah, definitely no summer doldrums over in the Middle East right now.
No, well, that's what I was going to say.
I have to apologize for a third thing, and that's to our audience, because we said we
weren't going to be hermuse-maxing much more.
But of course, as is par for the course with this incursion into the Middle East, the latest
incursion from the United States, it's never ending, it seems.
And as we've said many times over the last couple of months, the incentives for both sides are to keep this going as long as possible.
We have the latest escalation, which is back and forth attacks from Iran and the United States.
Iran attacked three ships in 24 hours.
Trump officially ended the memorandum of understanding for the ceasefires, calling the Iranian leaders scum.
and Iran has expanded attacks on Gulf states after the U.S. struck Iranian Iranian assets
in retaliation for the ship attacks. What's your take on this, brother?
Yeah. I mean, look, guys, you know, don't don't blame me. Don't blame us. We were on the horn
with the Ayatollah last week saying, don't do this. We don't want to talk about it on the pod
anymore. Please don't do this. You know, to no avail. So so here we are again when the this the
story that seems to never end. And yeah, I think it's interesting to consider if what the incentives
actually are for this to continue kind of on both sides. Certainly there's a hardline faction
in Iran, which we wrote about a little bit in the timestamp over the weekend, that's getting a little
more attention. There's an IRGC group that clearly just isn't interested in any kind of deal at all.
And there's clear internal division there, which is now, I think, becoming more of a mainstream
viewpoint. And it was a little more the provenance of tinfoil hats a few months ago, but it's
becoming a little more clear. So there's definitely an incentive to just cause as much kind of chaos
as possible and prevent a deal from happening in general, kind of the one major leverage point that
the country has left that and arguably the nuclear program. And on the U.S. side, we've talked,
we've documented extensively on the show, maybe some of the downstream benefits to the U.S.
strategic position that have come out of this just this morning. It's not on the slide here,
but Trump mentioned, I believe, on CNBC or maybe Fox Business that the U.S. is happy to be the
guardian of the strait, and we should be compensated for that appropriately. So it's a
little potentially groundwork laying there for where things may be moving. But in any case,
This is it. We're back in a spot where there's no clear off ramp until one side or the other decides to to blink.
And, you know, maybe midterms will be the forcing function for that.
Maybe the the Iranian oil situation, which, you know, the country was already having trouble moving a huge amount of its backlogged oil to anyone.
And now that's not going to be any easier. So, I mean, we'll see if that causes enough pressure to cause a relief valve here in the next few weeks.
But yeah, we're back at it again, unfortunately.
Yeah, that means that rates are reacting.
We have the 10-year jumping up last week above 4.55.
Currently, I guess at the time of the screenshot was at 4.561.
Markets not as calm as they were when the medium, or excuse me, the memorandum of understanding was in place.
And I think that's one thing to keep watching here is what are rates doing in reaction to these developments in the Middle East and across markets.
Obviously, we have it on the list, too.
We'll get to Japan, but I think a lot of people are focused on the Japanese government bond markets as well.
And you have this backdrop of war in the Middle East, this reindustrialization here in the United States.
Obviously, the AI wave still pressing forward, new models, new frontier models being released that are extremely impressive.
But then you have this backdrop of the United States debt situation and are tethering to these bond yields that I think everybody's keeping an eye on.
And when they get to these levels, this is when you begin to see things happening from the Trump administration.
Yeah, for sure.
I think an interesting point or kind of wrinkle on this is that this is the leader, the leading image, the header image for the newsletter this week.
And I just thought it's kind of interesting that you have seen this is the 10 year and blue.
So the 10 year move back up on kind of this news and it's over four, six this morning.
So it's gone up even more. But the flip side is, you know, you're seeing in the oil market this morning.
I think we're back above 75 again when these headlines started to hit kind of early last week.
We went from high 60 to 75, but then kind of fell back, at least on WTI.
I think Brent had a similar kind of move.
Fell back to roughly pre-war levels.
Now we're kind of back in that mid-70s range again.
We'll see how it continues to move.
But in the energy markets, at least in the oil market, you weren't seeing kind of an immediate kind of gap up back to where we were a few months ago.
And you saw also kind of an interesting version of that or something along the same theme with move index, which is what you have here in orange, as rates have gone back to kind of what has historically been over the last few years, an informal kind of line in the sand for the 10 years.
So the four or five, four, six level where it seems like generally the, the, the fed and the
treasury get, get kind of queasy bank system gets a little queasy and there's some sort of, you know,
taco event or some headline that gets, uh, yields back down typically over that period.
When you've gotten to that same level here, the move index, which is the bond volatility index
for treasury market, uh, the BAML runs, um, has kind of not, uh, not gone up correspondingly.
you've got this series of, you know, if you were a line squiggler by trade, you would kind of call
these lower highs each time. You're not really getting a blowout thus far in volatility with
any of these spikes. You had the biggest one was obviously in the spring, right before the ceasefire
was announced. You had bond volatility going up the whole month. We had a ceasefire that kind of
brought everything down. You had another big spike in like mid-May, maybe early June. And, you know,
move did go up then, but not quite as much. And now over the last week, you've really seen like
it's kind of bobbing along in this range. Not too early to call whether that's going to continue,
but I think there's a lot of interesting analysis, especially from guys like Michael Howell,
suggesting that treasury is much more, not much more, but at least meaningfully concerned with
bond volatility as much as the kind of absolute level of rates And if that the case and if volatility is in one way or another sufficiently managed either through just market expectations or treasury operations in the background that maybe gives you more headroom to kind of deal with rates at a current at you know the current level for at least some additional
time we've done math in the past and in the newsletter showing that this this level of race
is probably over like a meaningful time frame about all you can really handle you really can't
get into like the five plus five plus range without starting to really crimp the fiscal
math meaningfully in an extremely uncomfortable way. But if you can kind of keep it in this level
with volatility also manageable such that you're not getting big collateral haircuts or, you know,
forced unwinds, that could be an interesting, you know, way to manage this. And moreover,
I think it's just telling you thus far, if something like this chart continues,
I think this is kind of telling you like investors up to this point are not necessarily that queasy,
that worried about months and months more of what we've seen over the last week. Maybe that'll prove
wrong. But I think a notable kind of set of two lines you're going to watch, going to want to
watch closely over the next couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Can they maintain the volatility?
Like, because that's, I mean, the 10 year, 30 year drifting higher. I mean, it seems structurally,
again, going back to line squibbles on the chart, that the long term, the new long term trend for
for yields is higher. And I guess that maybe that's the sort of fallback option that the Fed
and the Treasury have is like, all right, if that's the case, let's just manage the volatility
so markets can adjust on the go. Speaking of volatility, obviously bombing in the straight
Hermuze is going to lead to volatile reactions from the Gulf states, one of which over the weekend
is Qatar pausing the push to ramp up their LNG production after Hermuze tanker attacked. And so
we're seeing disruption in energy markets in this case lng in qatar and when we first began covering
the saga in in iran i think this is one of the biggest things that people were worried about is
the the refineries the natural gas and lng refineries in qatar being hit and creating a
cascading effect so it looks like um that variable is back in the equation which is disruptions to
Qatari LNG production. Yeah. So this is, you know, this is kind of the opposite story of the oil
market where you pretty much saw, have seen after the big spikes in WTI, as we just mentioned,
you saw kind of the prices returned to roughly pre-war levels and we're still kind of bobbing
around there. You can see on the right side here, this is kind of the basic, the European kind of
natural gas benchmark. And all the charts over the next like six months kind of look like this
from August out to January of next year, where you didn't really get the same retrenchment
anywhere close to pre-war levels.
And now we're back up, moving much more meaningfully toward recent highs.
And so if you look at the U.S. benchmark for this is Henry Hub, and that's basically just
bobbing along like a recent bottom.
It's because of our relative kind of positioning that we've talked about on the show, much
less problematic.
But this is what the Europeans are kind of looking at right now.
I think a similar dynamic is prevailing in Asia, which we'll get to maybe on the next slide and kind of the downstream impacts of that.
But this is kind of the one of the big things that from a global perspective, not as much a U.S. perspective,
but a global sovereign debt perspective and a global positioning perspective that I think will be important to watch as we get closer and closer to the fall and the winter where natural gas becomes very, very important.
you know, what do these charts do and how much pain can kind of the countries that are
dependent on and most affected by this kind of disruption? You know, the Rosloff facility,
I believe, is the largest LNG facility in the world. And if that continues to be disrupted
for longer than the market currently thinks right now, at least as you look, if you look at kind of
the move index, if that goes on longer, what's the downstream impact for kind of non-U.S.
countries that are more dependent on this infrastructure. And right now the charts are
not looking great. So this will be, I think, one that we definitely keep an eye on.
Yeah, I explicitly mentioned them earlier, and John just alluded to them, but Japan,
their benchmark bond yield is extending its rise after hitting a 30-year high.
And so I think this is long been stated. Japan has long been stated. Their bond market has long
been stated as the canary in the coal mine. They were the first country to really go out and do a
QE-like experiment in the 90s and they've been riding that wave for 30 years, give or take.
And many people have been looking at Japan for many years saying if they lose control of their
yield curve, that's when things are going to get a bit hairy for the global financial system because
many people have been dependent on the carry trade, taking out cheap debt in Japan, buying
other sovereign bonds, ripping the yield, ripping the arbitrage there, and then pouring it back in.
And if that unwinds, it could create a particularly hairy situation.
And as John just mentioned, Japan is one of these countries that is very dependent on oil and gas from the Middle East.
And if those input costs are going to go up, it's going to put a lot of pressure on the Japanese economy.
Yeah, for sure.
There's a lot there's a lot going on in Japan.
And I I want to resist the urge to, you know, do the something is breaking all caps headline.
because I think the energy piece is huge.
Growing kind of inflationary pressures in the country are huge.
And I think this has always been, you know, the poster child for kind of a long-term QE insanity.
And I think that that's meaningful.
The flip side is, you know, Japan has been, the BOJ has been embarked on a rate hiking cycle now for, I think, well over a year.
And if you look also at what Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in the U.S. has said, generally he's been endorsing this kind of rate hacking cycle.
So I think there are various policy reasons and strategic reasons that the U.S. might want more normalization of Japanese monetary policy.
But the flip side, of course, is you kind of manage it against the in-carry trade that you alluded to.
It can't get disorderly, right?
It's got to be something where you're not seeing crazy volatility spikes, people getting blown out of positions, needing to force sell, force liquidate U.S. assets.
So it's a delicate balance.
But I think this is obviously a key chart that is a bellwether for a lot of different things we talk about.
And I think the trend here is pretty well established.
But the BOJ looks like it's going to continue its rate hiking cycle.
And I think the question will be, can can that happen? Can they walk and chew gum at the same time relative to all of the objectives that the U.S. wants to achieve?
Or, you know, do you get into a much more kind of hairy situation much more quickly?
But I do think it would behoove all Bitcoin holders, all people who are or gold bugs or anyone who's been watching this for a long time to pump the brakes a little bit on the something is breaking narrative.
Because I think there's a there's a very fine line trying to be walked here between the U.S. and Japan.
And we know what the pressure points are. We know what the failure modes are.
Obviously, this is going to have massive ramifications when you look at a key marginal buyer and a key holder of U.S. treasuries in a situation like this where domestic rates are now becoming relatively much more attractive than they've been for like 30 years, getting these 30-plus-year highs.
that's obviously going to have meaningful trade-offs and impacts, but I would just
kind of benchmark it against and comp it against, you know, what Besson has been saying and kind of
endorsing as it relates to this rate hiking cycle And you know ask yourself if you think that that line can be walked and that needle can be threaded because I think that there a lot going on here under the hood Yeah and it something that we all been aware of
I mean, it's famous now, the Manhattan Institute fireside chat that Scott Bissent had
in the lead up to the 2024 election in which he said there's a global monetary reordering happening.
I want to be on deck in the captain's seat with the president as we're managing that.
And to your point, you have to imagine that over the last year and a half that there has been some reshuffling and some sort of reordering behind the scenes in terms of what's happening between the Treasury and their counterparts across the world.
And maybe it's a setup to allow these yields to rise without the volatility that you mentioned, John.
So maybe they got the infrastructure in place under the hood and behind the scenes.
Like, it's OK, we can we can let these things rise now.
Who knows?
Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons you're seeing things like, you know, the SLR loosening, right, of trying to bring more private banking capacity into the treasury market again.
But I think that all dovetails nicely into into this this next headline, which is the descent doctrine.
The days of America being played are over.
We're not going to get bullied anymore.
we're not going to get pushed around. We're not going to be taken advantage of. This was
an opinion piece, a guest essay in the New York Times released last Tuesday. So day after we
recorded. Yeah. I mean, I think this is, this is an interesting vibe shift to me to see this in
the Times. Now it's, it's a guest essay, right? It's so you could argue like it's not necessarily
the direct endorsement of, of the paper, but if you read through it, it's, it's Muhammad Al-Aryan,
who's a famous macro commentator,
fixture of CNBC and all the business shows.
But he basically walks through the speech
that Besant gave about a month ago at,
I can't remember what it was,
one of the institutes in New York.
The New York Economic Forum, yeah.
We talked about it when it happened,
gave quite a lot of airtime to it
right after it on one of the shows.
But he basically just kind of walks through
everything that Besant laid out in that speech
and encourages analysts and readers
to think of everything that he lays out there as permanent and kind of systemic and all working
together within a framework that Besson has, not just kind of these ad hoc random measures that
Trump is kind of throwing out without much thought. You know, he frames it very much as
something that's intentional and kind of here to stay and that other countries will borrow too,
right? Other countries will start doing similar kind of industrial policies, similar tariff
policies to protect kind of domestic champions. And I just think this is like, if you read it,
if you've been listening to the show, nothing in it is going to be super needle moving to you.
And if you, if you watch that speech from a month ago, you know, it's largely kind of a summary of,
of everything Besson was saying there. But I think again, this is, you know, the times is
whatever your, whatever your opinion of the failing New York times is clearly a widely read
and widely respected outlets still for tastemakers and opinion makers all over the world.
And for this to be for this kind of headline to be prominently featured in the Times is,
I think, an interesting bit of not necessarily predictive programming, but I think it's there's
maybe some ideological pump priming going on here to get opinion makers and opinion leaders
throughout the world to maybe be a little more on sides as to where the major where the puck is
going for a lot of key policy worldwide.
Mimetic seeding is how I would say it.
Mimetic seeding, that's good.
And to your point, I think that is going to dovetail directly into our bread and butter,
which is Bitcoin.
And it's not really our bread and butter, but we're forced to cover a crypto.
And I think what you're highlighting here on this slide is a validation of what you just
said, is that there's a concerted effort to remodel the global economic system.
I mean, it's been pretty, the Trump administration has been pretty transparent.
They believe Bitcoin and crypto have a part to play there, and they are going to do everything
they can to make sure that the industry is primed here in the United States to go out
and build the new infrastructure that is necessary.
And I think you highlight two headlines here on the left that show that there's actually
action happened.
The first coming from February 11th, 2026.
So earlier this year, ABA urges OCC to provide stronger safeguards, clear rules for charter applicants.
And then less than five months later, July 10th, so last week, right before the weekend on Friday, Circle received final OCC approval to establish a national trust bank.
So it looks like they're moving pretty quickly behind the scenes to grease the skids to make sure that the crypto and Bitcoin industry can do what it needs to do.
Yeah, I think that on the left, the really interesting nuance to me is the ABA, the Bankers Association, the Bankers Lobbying Group has been, I think, doing the opposite, right?
Like not creasing the skids, trying to get in the way.
And if you recall, I don't know if we covered it, but earlier this year, kind of a letter went out to the OCC and other regulators basically saying, like, stop moving forward with granting additional regulatory approvals to Coinbase and Circle and Kraken and all the companies that had applied for different charters.
We need to pump the brakes on this and have clearer rulemaking timelines and basically the classic run out the clock type move to just throw sand in the gears and make things take longer.
And a few months later, the OCC, which is part of the Trump administration, effectively said, no, I don't think I will, and continued to move ahead.
And I think we've also gotten Circle wasn't the first. We also got Kraken, I believe, might have been the first within this overall process to get the same designation.
Someone who's more familiar with the regulatory plumbing might be able to correct me.
But in any case, a very interesting headline as it relates to which which side kind of the broader regulatory apparatus is on right now.
And, you know, your latest data point showing that the government is, you know, moving more and more to work hand in hand with the, you know, I'm not going to call it the crypto industry because I just, you know, I can't bring myself to dignify that.
So I'll call it the digital assets industry broadly. But, you know, this is despite a contingency, a major contingency of relevant lobbyists from the banking industry trying to throw roadblocks in the way, you know, the OCC has moved forward with this.
And your latest version of that, your latest indication of that was Circle this past week.
And, you know, that maybe dovetails over to the thing on the right, which is OpenUSD, which was in the last timestamp newsletter.
We didn't get to talk about it last week. We ran out of time.
But I thought we should bring it up just because if you look at the, we don't have to go into all the architecture of this, but basically a new stable coin, quote unquote, for a new dollar stable coin.
And it's run by a run administered by a consortium of companies that you can see here on the right.
And if you look, it's just like an absolute murderer's row of like all the biggest payments, companies, traditional payments, traditional financial services, fintech, you know, custodians, BlackRock, B&Y, tech companies like Google.
You've got Stripe. Obviously, you've got your digital assets, whether it's like Coinbase in there.
But this is I think a really interesting uh update to your latest data point on stable coins which I think is a term that ultimately going to be very outdated uh in just just a few years but let call them digital dollars having a having a certain look and a certain architecture um and specifically moving forward under the guise of and the guidance of some very well and important companies domestically
And I think to just tip our hat
or to to to to our own horn like a little bit,
I think if you look at what's available on OpenUSD right now,
there's not a ton available in the docs yet,
but this all looks very, very much like everything
that we were outlining a few months ago
as it related to the future of stable coins.
So if you go to 1031 timestamp.stablecoins, you can read way more than you probably ever wanted to about why we thought it was going this way.
But I think this is like showing you the puck going like in exactly the direction we were talking about, which is ultimately like, you know, there's no long term meaningful role for blockchains here with this consortium of financial services, heavyweights kind of running the show.
And if you go look at the website, you'll see kind of the way they talk about it validates that.
But I think most importantly, even outside of the debate over blockchains and their use here, I think it's just a really interesting latest data point on the trend of we've talked about reshoring as it relates to manufacturing in U.S. industrial capacity.
I mean, I think this is a big piece of the kind of reshoring like U.S. control over the dollar, like what it means to have a dollar, to use a dollar.
And we've talked about the massive euro dollar market and the offshore dollar market on the show many times before.
Besson has made comments about wanting to reassert U.S. supremacy over that.
And we've talked about different ways that could happen.
And I think OpenUSD is – I don't know who the winner is going to be.
Maybe you'll have many winners.
You'll have OpenUSD, Circle, Tether, other constructs we haven't thought of yet.
Or maybe OpenUSD will be the absolute winner.
Don't really necessarily care so much about that.
But I do think if you could pull off something like this and you could have U.S. domiciled institutions, you know, running a digital dollar effectively that slots into the way that, you know, effectively the banking system, the payment system, all the different tools people already use.
You can make it kind of invisible under the hood of what the dollar system is.
and effectively if then what it means to hold a dollar is to basically hold a digital balance that
is itself holding treasuries as collateral. And that's the way that a dollar is getting defined.
That moves treasury much more kind of front and center into controlling what we think of today
as monetary policy. This is all very embryonic and I think it can fail in a lot of ways. And I
think it's not necessarily totally clear exactly how it will all line up. But everything that I
think we're seeing here on this on this slide and that we've talked about over the last few months
is pointing in that direction right of kind of reshoring U.S. control over the dollar system and
like what it means to have and to use a dollar and I think that'll maybe have some very interesting
implications for financing headroom for the treasury going forward and also you know what
we have on the next couple slides. Yeah sorry for butchering that transition from the ABA headline
to to circle but you corrected it correctly and then all good you're very humble you're very humble
saying we wrote, you worked on that stablecoin piece.
That was all you.
So go read John's stablecoin piece.
I mean, we gave some feedback,
but you did a lot of the legwork there
to put that thesis out there.
Extremely thorough.
Go check it out, 1031.xyz slash stablecoins.
But as John said,
Bitcoin may not be front and center
with these policies in most people's minds.
But in the background, again,
it does seem like the push
for Bitcoin strategic reserve is very real.
It's happening. And what we're seeing now is that the hurdles that we're facing come down to who's actually going to be running the Bitcoin strategic reserve, reserve, which department is going to be treasury?
Is it going to be commerce? Who's actually going to steward the United States Bitcoin strategic reserve?
Yeah. I mean, I think this this headline got played, you know, if you saw it on like a Bloomberg terminal or something, you know, I think it got played as as pretty negative.
And certainly I think if you wanted this to happen or if you thought it should move forward, then any incremental hurdles for the SBR would be a problem.
And that's all fair.
But I think the more interesting piece of it is just the way that this is framed as two government departments vying to run the strategic Bitcoin reserve and kind of this turf war between Treasury and Commerce that to me signals that, A, all the people that are the architects of what we just talked about with reshoring the U.S. dollar system
and kind of reframing what it means to kind of use a dollar and interact with the dollar system,
that they continue to care enough about the SBR to be the ones to, you know,
further wait around and try to be the ones who run it and administer it, I think is pretty meaningful.
And it tells you, like, I don't know how long it will take to start this out
and what various kind of statutory questions that have to be resolved, you know, ultimately will be.
But I think the much more meaningful piece of this headline, in my view, was that all the relevant decision makers who are at the controls of everything we've just talked about are continuing to push to get this done just in the way that they want to benefit their department's fiefdom.
But that probably doesn't happen if this is either fully on ice or just completely irrelevant to them.
And it's funny. Is there an ego battle between Bestent and Howard Lutnick?
I can't imagine.
Eking in.
because we know they've had a very good relationship at the beginning.
In the lead-up, too, wasn't Lutnik buying for Treasury?
Yeah.
Sort of boxed out.
And then I think Basen has had some choice words for Lutnik,
or at least reports have said that he's had choice words for Lutnik.
But we're not here to gossip.
We're here to talk about it.
This is the last slide we have, which I think is positioning and reinforcing
and laying out the thesis for our listeners here
of why a Bitcoin strategic reserve makes sense for the United States
when you consider the incredible lead we have
in terms of Bitcoin adoption in the United States
and the amount of Bitcoin
that the government currently has domain over.
Yeah, you know, this is pretty self-explanatory
and I think we've talked about it on the show before,
but just to wrap up, like this is,
River put this out last week.
I think this is their update of a series of slides
that we've talked about before,
but just showing, you know,
if you highly recommend people go look at this,
you know, I think it's called America
is the Bitcoin superpower.
You can just see the U.S. government
has basically an uncontested lead
in Bitcoin holdings.
Now we can talk about the provenance
of those holdings.
And I think as Americans,
we should maybe be concerned
with how some of those holdings
were attained.
But nevertheless,
just thinking about it
from the government's perspective,
the strategic implications perspective,
that advantage,
as well as just the amount of Bitcoin
that's held privately
by both individuals and companies,
and one company in particular,
in the U.S., I think, positions Bitcoin as or positions the U.S. as uniquely advantaged in
the Bitcoin sphere to the extent that, you know, it wants to exercise that advantage.
And I think if you look at what we've talked about for the last 10 minutes,
all the incentives point to the U.S. and the Trump administration having every reason to
kind of move forward and press this advantage to the extent that, you know, it's interested in
kind of re-architecting the dollar system, the financial system, and what it means to kind of
interact with U.S. productive capacity kind of through the dollar system. So again, I don't want
to overplay this one. It's a picture's worth a thousand words, pretty clear to people, but
we can leave it there. You might want to get some just in case it catches on,
wise man once said. Don't sleep on Bitcoin. We'll see you guys next week.
Thank you.