Latest / What Bitcoin Did / Is This The Start Of A Financial Crisis? | Jeff Snider
Transcript
- 0:00shadow banking and private credit it went nuclear essentially in 21 and 22 everyone in the space
- 0:08convinced themselves they could generate high levels of return that were essentially risk-free
- 0:12which whenever you hear that alarm bells should be ringing because there's no such thing in finance
- 0:17how big and systemic can this become bubbles tend to take the same forms each and every time they're
- 0:23given you know a different coat of paint a different facade nothing bad has happened therefore
- 0:27nothing bad can happen, which means I take even more stupid risk. And it just gets bigger and
- 0:31bigger and bigger to the point that the imbalance is inevitably going to reverse. And then the
- 0:36question is what it means on the other side. That's the danger when it gets to forced selling
- 0:41becomes distressed selling becomes fire selling. Everything just amplifies as the dominoes fall
- 0:46one after another after another. How do people position themselves? Like what should you be
- 0:50looking at as a way of sort of surviving this? I would buy a ton of...
- 0:54Jeff Snyder welcome back to the show sir thanks Danny good to see you again it's been a while
- 1:02it has been a while I always like talking to you because I mean I think you probably have one of
- 1:06the best views into how the actual sort of financial system works in the plumbing and
- 1:12you've been saying some scary stuff recently you've been saying that you think we're in a
- 1:16financial crisis so do you think we are I think I've been more measured there are a lot of people
- 1:23will say, hey, you know, we've heard from Jamie Dimon and Mohamed El-Aryan and others who say,
- 1:28hey, I see a lot of 2008 similarities. And you're going to see what they're saying. The pattern is
- 1:33the same because the pattern is human behavior, not necessarily the actual format. But I don't
- 1:38know, you know, financial crisis, it's too early to call. We're dealing with different animals than
- 1:43what we did back in 2008. However, there is a lot of evidence that suggests that the big portion of
- 1:50the credit market did entertain a bubble and was in a bubble for quite some time, and that that
- 1:57bubble has shifted. Whether or not it's a complete and utter bust and it leads to a financial crisis
- 2:03is a matter that, you know, hasn't been settled just yet. But there are a number of telltale
- 2:07signs that suggest that is a far greater possibility than maybe most people should be
- 2:13comfortable with. And that seems to be the market position that seems to be, you know, everything
- 2:17like you keep getting developments across the system that suggest there's a lot of trouble
- 2:21brewing there. But it's still an open question about what it actually all means and where it
- 2:25all boils down to. But what is it that you're specifically seeing that makes you think
- 2:30potentially we could be? Like you say, is it in private credit? And what does that actually
- 2:35look like? What are you seeing? Yes, shadow banking and private credit. People who may not
- 2:40be familiar with the terms, shadow banks are simply, they're like banks, but they're not
- 2:45They're not registered in regulated banks.
- 2:47Essentially, investment funds.
- 2:50And after the 2008 crisis, when the regulated banking system was essentially broken for good,
- 2:56more and more throughout the 2010s, these non-bank shadow banks began to step in and fill that void
- 3:02because there was a need to redistribute credit to especially smaller and middle-sized businesses,
- 3:07the more riskier borrowers that the regulated banks were just staying away from
- 3:10because their balance sheets were impaired.
- 3:13And so you had these clean balance sheets among shadow banks who could go into some of these riskier areas and essentially relend.
- 3:19They were getting their funding from the banks who were, you know, they looked at these shadow banks as less risky than lending directly.
- 3:26So they get funding from the banks and just relend into these other parts of the economy that were started for credit.
- 3:32That went nuclear essentially in 21 and 22, the aftermath of the pandemic.
- 3:38The shadow banking just went absolutely crazy for a bunch of reasons.
- 3:41largely because everybody thought initially anyway
- 3:45it was going to lead to a permanent plateau of prosperity.
- 3:48So why not take a bunch of risk
- 3:50because it was going to lead to nothing
- 3:51but positive results going forward.
- 3:54So everyone in the space convinced themselves
- 3:56they could generate high levels of return
- 3:58that were essentially risk-free,
- 4:00which whenever you hear that,
- 4:02alarm bells should be ringing
- 4:03because there's no such thing in finance.
- 4:05There's no such thing as high rates of return with low risk.
- 4:08It's high rates of return with what are perceived to be low risk
- 4:11until they're not actually low risk.
- 4:14So you had a hyper extension of private credit,
- 4:18essentially shadow banking, whatever you want to call it.
- 4:21The Fed calls it non-depository financial institutions.
- 4:25But you had these investment funds that were out there
- 4:27raising tons of money and relending it to the real economy,
- 4:29believing that there was no downside to doing so,
- 4:32which is the fatal conceit in every debt-fueled bubble
- 4:35that we've ever seen in human history.
- 4:38So lots of money went into the space.
- 4:41A lot of it under really bad assumptions, which is all the ingredients, which are all the ingredients for a credit market bubble.
- 4:48Then last year, we started to see signs that for the first time, people were questioning all the assumptions that fed that bubble, mainly about the real economy, mainly about the situation in the labor market.
- 4:59You know, maybe Jay Powell wasn't correct.
- 5:01The economy wasn't booming and solid this entire time.
- 5:04And that there was more risk in some of these riskier parts of the credit markets than people had been anticipating.
- 5:11And then it got even worse than that, because while those are natural questions to begin asking, we started to see these irregularities. First with Tricolor and then First Brands and then Renovo and a bunch of them last fall. Then there was one just yesterday in the UK, what Jamie Dimon artfully called cockroaches.
- 5:28And the importance of the cockroaches were not just that there's a bunch of bubble behavior, overextended, overleveraged risk taking in the private credit space, but there was basically no controls over it.
- 5:43You expect that the big banks who have been burned in the 2008 crisis and repeatedly along the way would at the very least have done a little bit of due diligence and underwriting and extending credit to these shadow banks before they extend credit to the rest of the borrowing public.
- 6:00What we found out in these cockroaches is that nobody cared to do even the most minimum underwriting or due diligence.
- 6:06That's what these cockroaches uncovered was stunning levels of fraud and just basic fraud.
- 6:12Like, for example, a bank would lend funds to a like Tricolor or First Brands expecting that they were basically safe in doing some because Tricolor or First Brands are now MFS issued collateral against those loans.
- 6:26So you think, OK, worst case scenario, this this little firm, this shadow bank blows up, but I've got collateral that I can depend upon.
- 6:33I'm protected. But nobody ever checked the collateral.
- 6:36Was it real? Was it what they thought it was?
- 6:39And so in case after case after case, what became clear is that the collateral was either fraudulent, double posted.
- 6:45And what it really suggests and what it really pointed to is that nobody did any homework.
- 6:50The bubble behavior that went on for years was a lot worse than we thought it was.
- 6:55And so the importance of the cockroaches is that one after another after another, it showed.
- 7:00Nobody has any idea of what these credits actually look like, whether it's the actual credit providers, the shadow bankers themselves,
- 7:07those who are providing the leverage and the funding through the banking sector,
- 7:12or even the hedge fund investors or the institutional investors who seeded these shadow banks to begin with.
- 7:17Nobody did any of the basic standards of due diligence and underwriting.
- 7:21They just lent because everything seemed to be just fine.
- 7:25And if everything seems to be just fine, then it's easy to buy into that fairytale fantasy of high returns with no risk.
- 7:33I mean, no one doing any due diligence reminds me very much of 2008.
- 7:37It sounds pretty similar.
- 7:38But if you had to compare this to like a previous financial crisis, like the situation we're in today, obviously 2008 was all around mortgage backed securities.
- 7:47I don't know my history well enough to know exactly what caused the sort of Great Depression 1929 crash.
- 7:52But like where would this fall?
- 7:54How big and systemic can this become?
- 7:58It's not anywhere close to either 2008 or certainly not the 1930s, but it is substantial enough that it could lead to significant problems in the financial markets.
- 8:07as we're seeing a little bit now,
- 8:08but also, you know, more damage to the real economy
- 8:11and significant damage
- 8:12because the real economy is not in really great shape
- 8:14to begin with.
- 8:14So it is a serious problem.
- 8:16It's not an end of the world type of situation,
- 8:18but it's enough that, you know,
- 8:20create even more misery on top of old miseries
- 8:23that still haven't been healed yet.
- 8:25There are a lot of similarities, like I said,
- 8:26you know, bubbles tend to take the same forms
- 8:28each and every time.
- 8:29They're given, you know, a different coat of paint,
- 8:31a different facade, you know,
- 8:32different, you know, modern technology
- 8:34and modern innovations.
- 8:36but they're basically, it all comes down to the same types of behavior.
- 8:40Everybody becomes convinced that nothing bad can happen.
- 8:43In large part, it becomes confirmation bias
- 8:45because you think this goes on year after year after year.
- 8:47Nothing bad has happened, therefore nothing bad can happen,
- 8:50which means I take even more stupid risk and do more stupid things,
- 8:53do even less due diligence,
- 8:55and everybody just prioritizes volume over everything else,
- 8:57over common sense, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger
- 9:01to the point that the imbalance is inevitably going to reverse.
- 9:04And then the question is what it means on the other side.
- 9:07So, yeah, not 2008, certainly not 1930s, but significant enough where if it starts in private credit, which seems to have already done,
- 9:15that it could definitely spill over into other areas and create even more difficulties like leveraged loans and high yield corporate credit.
- 9:23Financial markets, obviously, the stock market's not going to do well if we continue down this road.
- 9:27in those financial markets like the stocks,
- 9:30if they start to become shaky again,
- 9:31if they start to really fall off,
- 9:33that's gonna have macroeconomic feedbacks as well.
- 9:36So it's significant enough without being,
- 9:38you know, a nightmare type of scenario.
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- 11:46Okay, so you have this framework
- 11:48of the three stages of financial crisis.
- 11:50Can you explain what each of those stages are
- 11:53and where we are today?
- 11:55To be clear, it's a conceptual framework
- 11:58to give people kind of a sense of where things are.
- 12:00It's not like a hard and fast,
- 12:02stage one is exactly this,
- 12:05and at this particular date, it shifts into stage two.
- 12:08It's far more ambiguous than that.
- 12:11And then there's often ebbs and flows,
- 12:13nothing ever goes in a straight line.
- 12:15We could go from stage one to stage two and not really notice it
- 12:18because things kind of blend together.
- 12:19together. But conceptually speaking, just to get your head around what this process could look like
- 12:24so you can create a mental roadmap of what might be going on and kind of give yourself a sense of
- 12:30where you think things are in terms of progression. That's the problem that we keep coming back to.
- 12:35I know we'll talk about this a little bit more, but as we keep going through time, we get more
- 12:40escalation, more escalation, more progression, more progression, never de-escalation, which suggests
- 12:44we're moving further into these processes. But just briefly to put it together in a brief framework,
- 12:51as we just talked about with the bubble, the bubble is easy to understand. Money just flows
- 12:54into it. Nobody asks any question. Everything seems to be as good as a fairy tale. High returns,
- 13:00low risk. Nothing can go wrong. So money only goes in the one direction. But eventually something
- 13:06happens, and it's usually a combination of some things that take place, which causes people to
- 13:11say, you know what? That's ridiculous. There's no such thing as high rates of returns or risk-free.
- 13:16We need to start taking a closer look at what's really been happening. And as more people start
- 13:20asking questions, they don't like the answers that they get. And suddenly, for the first time,
- 13:25what I call stage one, is where money starts to flow out. Now, there's always money in and out,
- 13:29but by and large, during the bubble period, money flows in overwhelmingly in that one direction.
- 13:35In stage one, more than usual money starts to flow out because people are asking questions for
- 13:40the very first time.
- 13:41They're actually scrutinizing what's been taking place.
- 13:44And they're not liking what they're seeing
- 13:45because, of course, you're not going to like what they're seeing
- 13:47because we just went through a bubble
- 13:48with all sorts of stupid and garbage and everything else.
- 13:51So for stage one, some money starts to go out.
- 13:54However, that's really,
- 13:57it doesn't lead to any further consequences
- 13:59because as in stage one being a preliminary
- 14:01early part of the process,
- 14:03there are still people who are going to believe
- 14:05in the fairy tale and the fantasy.
- 14:06So there's still investors who are willing to put in money,
- 14:08especially if they think they're getting a discount for it.
- 14:12Plus you have the financial system, the regulated financial system, the banking sector,
- 14:16which more likely than not is going to stand behind, in this case, shadow banks
- 14:21as they start to experience some uncomfortable conditions with outflows.
- 14:26So you've got some money that goes out, but you have ways to rebalance money
- 14:30so that these shadow banks, for example, that are experiencing outflows
- 14:33don't have to actually start selling assets,
- 14:36which is what really determines a financial crisis.
- 14:38When there's forced distress and even fire sales,
- 14:42that's where things really get bad.
- 14:44So in stage one, you've got people questioning the bubble
- 14:47and all of the assumptions that went into it.
- 14:49You've got enough people who are doing it
- 14:50that you get some significant outflows.
- 14:52But in stage one, they're relatively balanced
- 14:54by bank emergency lines of credit
- 14:56or new investors bringing money in.
- 14:58And so largely, you can tell something is different,
- 15:01but it doesn't really look all that bad.
- 15:03And that's kind of where we went through
- 15:05for like the last six months, lots of stage one.
- 15:07We've seen confirmation for it.
- 15:10Hedge fund investors have been redeeming,
- 15:12have been withdrawing funds from a lot of these hedge funds
- 15:14to the point that it's created issues for the hedge funds.
- 15:17But we've also seen banks that have issued lines of credit
- 15:20or have allowed these shadow banks
- 15:22to draw on their lines of credit.
- 15:23So they haven't had to really force sell anything
- 15:26until recently.
- 15:28So what happened last week
- 15:29was one of the most well-known shadow bankers,
- 15:31Blue Owl, admitted they just had to sell some assets.
- 15:35And it wasn't voluntary.
- 15:35It was a forced selling.
- 15:36So that was the first instance of stage two behavior.
- 15:40Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that we are in stage two.
- 15:42It means that for the first time, we can confirm that something like stage two has taken place.
- 15:47So stage two is where we go from stage one.
- 15:50But the outflows either pick up or usually investors get more investors get cold feet.
- 15:56So the outflows begin to pick up on that side.
- 15:59And on the other side, there are fewer new investors willing to put money in because they're starting to ask their own questions.
- 16:04And for the first time, when you get deeper into stage two,
- 16:07the banking sector says, you know what?
- 16:10Even though you have a preexisting line of credit with me,
- 16:12I'm not gonna honor it.
- 16:13I'm gonna cut that thing up and just cut my losses with you.
- 16:16Because right now, all the losses are being borne
- 16:18by the regular banking system.
- 16:20So in stage two you get to the imbalance So you have money flowing out for the first time in stage one but then the money outflows pick up to the point where they not being balanced by inflows or the ability to find bridge financing And so for the first time what you see is forced selling
- 16:35Because if you have more money going out than you have money available to come in,
- 16:39you have to sell your assets.
- 16:40It's just basic maturity transformation.
- 16:42We see this in every single crisis.
- 16:44That's why this is a basic crisis template, not just private credit.
- 16:48So you get the forced selling that tells you that things have progressed another step into stage two.
- 16:55Can I just ask you a quick question on the stage two there?
- 16:57Because when that happens, you said Blue Owl have started this essentially.
- 17:01Is it the kind of thing that once someone spots this as a problem, it's like a domino effect?
- 17:06Because once they start forced selling things, everyone else is then put in a position where they need to start selling the same assets.
- 17:11That's the danger when it gets to forced selling becomes distressed selling becomes
- 17:17fire selling. So there's a progression within progressions. And that's why, you know,
- 17:21it's a simple example just to understand conceptually what's going on. But yeah,
- 17:26that's really what happens when you progress from stage one to stage two and eventually stage three.
- 17:30It's really just that once the selling starts, it creates these knock on effects.
- 17:35So what Blue Owl was forced to sell and their price, they made sure that everybody knew the
- 17:39price was very close to par. It was actually a bit less. There was a bit of a discount there.
- 17:43But then this week, we got confirmation of another fund called New Mountain that actually had to also
- 17:49sell assets at around 94 cents on the dollar. Now, it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison,
- 17:55but it is conceptually what you just said, Danny, which is one person sells and the next sell,
- 18:00the price goes down and the price goes down. And as more selling is forced to take place,
- 18:05the price goes lower and lower and lower. It causes more selling because everybody sees the
- 18:09lower prices and they think, oh, crap, I better get out while I still can. And so you have more
- 18:13sales, fewer buyers because there's less money in the space. Prices go lower and lower and lower,
- 18:18and it triggers that cascading effect that leads to eventually, if it goes too far, that's where
- 18:24you get to stage three, where it's everybody panicking. So that's stage two is where you
- 18:28start to see the forced sales because money flowing out is flowing out more than money is
- 18:33coming in replacing it. And then stage three is where these distressed sales create more price
- 18:39effects than the system can manage. And it leads to not just selling in the area we're talking about,
- 18:45in this case, private credit. It leads to market prices that fall farther and farther. And then
- 18:50they spill over into other market segments and other potential markets, which leads to lower and
- 18:55lower prices. And that's when you start to get the big consequences where, in this case, it won't be,
- 18:59you know, we're not going to see another Lehman Brothers fail, but we could see some of these
- 19:03private credit funds go belly up. That's that's absolutely something that could happen. And we
- 19:08really don't know what that would mean as far as the functioning of the system. But that's more
- 19:11stage three. So you get the sales, you get more outflows, you get the banks that are pulling back.
- 19:16There's less liquidity across the entire system, across the entire marketplace. Prices go down
- 19:21and then you get to stage three where it's just everything just amplifies as the dominoes fall
- 19:26one after another after another.
- 19:28And how long does this,
- 19:30I imagine this can take a matter of hours
- 19:32or a matter of weeks or months or years.
- 19:33Because if you watch Margin Call,
- 19:35it reminds me of that
- 19:36where they start the morning
- 19:37selling their stuff for like 95 cent on the dollar.
- 19:40And by the afternoon,
- 19:41they're selling it for like 65 cents on the dollar.
- 19:43That obviously happened in like a day in 2008.
- 19:45But like, do you expect this to be a much more-
- 19:47Yeah, that's the worst part of stage three.
- 19:48That's toward the end.
- 19:50You expect this to be much more drawn out?
- 19:53They're always drawn out.
- 19:54See, the problem is people have this conception that a crash happens overnight.
- 19:58Like one day everything's fine and the next day everybody's panicking.
- 20:02That's not what happens.
- 20:03Crashes, even the most violent crashes like 2008 were several years in the making.
- 20:08Yes, several years.
- 20:10Same thing with the 1930s.
- 20:11The Great Depression did not happen overnight.
- 20:13The stock market crashed in October 1929.
- 20:16It actually peaked in September 29.
- 20:17The actual depression didn't happen until 1930, 1931,
- 20:21after you got a couple waves of bank failures.
- 20:23So these are drawn out processes and it takes a while for these things to go because you got to remember at every step along the way, there are lots of people who believe this is all a big nothing.
- 20:34We're overreacting to what is just basically a small thing.
- 20:37So like I said, stage one, a lot of investors see, OK, there's some irregularity over there.
- 20:42That allows me a buying opportunity.
- 20:44I can put my money in and get stuff really cheap.
- 20:46So there's always this back and forth.
- 20:48There's never this clear, decisive signal that says we are moving in this direction.
- 20:54And so that back and forth leads to it takes up a whole lot of time as this process plays out.
- 21:01But ultimately, what matters is not the length of time.
- 21:04It's whether or not these imbalances that were created during the upswing in the bubble period can be handled without leading to more systemic consequences.
- 21:12It's a difference between a credit crisis and a liquidity crisis.
- 21:16A credit crisis is something like we saw in the 1980s and 1990s with the SNL crisis.
- 21:22You had a credit crisis in a segment of the banking sector that led to more than 1,000 banks failing in the U.S., but it didn't lead to a depression.
- 21:30It didn't lead to massive market chaos because it never really became a full-blown liquidity crisis.
- 21:36That's the difference between the SNL crisis in the 80s and 90s and 2008.
- 21:412008 started out as a credit crisis in the same way.
- 21:44You had overextended lending for a lot of stupid reasons.
- 21:49A lot of stupid things took place.
- 21:51A lot of leverage that had been added onto it.
- 21:54So you had a credit crisis.
- 21:55There were losses that need to be taken by the system.
- 21:58But they were so big and so large and so misunderstood that it led to liquidity, the markets breaking down.
- 22:05It led to the entire monetary system breaking down.
- 22:07It led to the banking system breaking down.
- 22:09So it led to much further consequences, which is a credit crisis became a full-blown monetary crisis.
- 22:15And in this current iteration that we're going through, we really don't know how shadow banks, the interplay between banks who are funding a lot of the shadow bank activities and the shadow banks themselves, how that could spill over into other areas.
- 22:30So at the very least, what we're looking at is potentially a credit crisis with some signs and symptoms that suggest it could become a liquidity crisis if it continues.
- 22:40And the reason why we think it's a credit crisis is because it's just the stupidity, the cockroaches and everything we talked about at the beginning of this video.
- 22:46Can you explain that to me? Because I'm not sure I fully understand.
- 22:48Like, why would a credit crisis not become a liquidity crisis?
- 22:52Like, what are the different things there?
- 22:54Yeah, because in a credit crisis, what it really means is that there are hidden losses in lending, right?
- 23:01You lent to people that you probably shouldn't have.
- 23:03Those loans are worthless.
- 23:04Everybody has to take their losses.
- 23:06They're widespread.
- 23:07But it doesn't necessarily lead to all the stuff we just talked about.
- 23:10You can have a credit crisis that never goes past stage one.
- 23:14So the credit crisis is there's lots of losses to be taken by this person, this person, and that person.
- 23:19But it doesn't lead to distressed sales because maybe it's not that big of a deal.
- 23:23Some of these funds that take losses are not sharp enough that it leads to a complete draining of their liquidity facilities.
- 23:30They're never forced into selling assets at distressed prices, which is really what gets into the crisis.
- 23:36So there are lots of losses.
- 23:38In some cases, firms go out of business, banks go out of business.
- 23:43But it doesn't lead to systemic problems further down the road because it doesn't create the downside across markets.
- 23:51It doesn't lead to the real depression in prices.
- 23:54The sort of domino effect that you talked about when, you know, a lot of forced selling,
- 24:00distressed sales lead to further distressed sales.
- 24:02The link in the chain is broken by something that proves to be more resilient.
- 24:07Therefore, just as a bunch of credit losses that need to be taken by the system, the system
- 24:11takes those losses usually over a prolonged period of time, but it never really goes past
- 24:15stage one or maybe early stage two.
- 24:18So is the idea there that it doesn't snowball into sort of public markets?
- 24:22Banks are able to sustain that with their balance sheet instead of having to go and like tap repo markets in the Fed and things like that.
- 24:28Is that the right way of thinking about it?
- 24:31Yeah.
- 24:31So you can think about it like in the example of the S&L crisis.
- 24:34You had a lot of smaller banks who were exposed and actually got into repo, but a lot of smaller banks are exposed to mortgage crisis.
- 24:41But they didn't have to sell their assets because there were larger banks, these euro dollar banks, who were available to buy the assets from them before it became a cascading effect.
- 24:49So in other words, there were bigger banks that were willing to supply funds to the marketplace as needed to keep it all relatively stable.
- 24:56And relatively is doing a lot of work, a lot of the work here.
- 24:59But it was relatively stable that it didn't become a systemic break like 2008 or 1929, 1930, because there was capacity in the system to be able to absorb not just the losses, but those who took the losses, but also to stand behind and provide new funds and new liquidity as necessary to maintain, you know, some minimal level of capacity before it really did snowball into something bigger.
- 25:23If you had to put like a percentage on it, how likely do you think it is that we go into sort of full blown stage three here?
- 25:30Oh, it's really, really impossible to tell.
- 25:33What I would say is that it's a non-trivial risk at this point.
- 25:37So, I mean, greater than nothing, but certainly not, you know, potentially a base case.
- 25:42Though I will say the markets have been pricing something like this for years now.
- 25:46and as we continue to go along,
- 25:49everything seems to move in the same direction
- 25:51as what markets have been telling us
- 25:53to expect the entire time.
- 25:54So that's not exactly a positive scenario to begin with.
- 25:57And what I mean by that is markets have been saying
- 25:59over the long run, interest rates were gonna go down.
- 26:02They were gonna go down by a lot
- 26:03and they were gonna stay there for a very long time.
- 26:06And so for the last several years,
- 26:08I've been sitting here telling other people to sit here
- 26:10and think about how do we get from there?
- 26:12Or how do we get there?
- 26:13How do we get from where we were,
- 26:14say in 2022 and 2023, where central banks were hiking rates and everybody thought interest rates
- 26:18are going to go into the double digits, to the market telling them, no, interest rates are going
- 26:23to go down. They're going to go down by a lot and stay there for a very long time. And as we
- 26:27continue to progress, you see weakness in the economy. We see job losses take place last year.
- 26:31That's the macro side of it. And on the financial side of it, we've got a private credit bubble that
- 26:37is certainly going bust. That would fit into a range of scenarios that lead us to interest rates
- 26:42going down and staying there for a very long time.
- 26:44So if it does get to stage three,
- 26:46that would certainly fit the forecast
- 26:47that the markets have been sending for several years now,
- 26:50several years during the entire period
- 26:52when this stupidity was building up
- 26:54in the private credit space.
- 26:55So that's why I say the potential for a stage three
- 26:59is probably higher than we would like it to be
- 27:01because it fits within the scenarios
- 27:02that we've been looking for for years.
- 27:05That still doesn't mean it's a done deal,
- 27:07it's gonna take place
- 27:08or that the results of it will be catastrophic.
- 27:11it just means that there will be significant enough
- 27:13disruption, disorder, and deflation
- 27:15that it does lead to a situation
- 27:17where we have, you know, the economy's down,
- 27:20more job losses, unemployment's rising on the macro side,
- 27:23there's financial volatility, there's losses to be taken,
- 27:26there's going to be, you know, disruption,
- 27:27certainly in the stock market,
- 27:28if it goes that direction.
- 27:30All that kind of stuff that you associate with it,
- 27:32that would fit into the overall framework
- 27:35that we're looking at.
- 27:36So the chances are high enough to be paying attention.
- 27:39Yeah, I mean, that's probably the best way
- 27:40to put it because, you know, when you put a number on something, you got the numbers change.
- 27:45The probabilities change all the time as we get more and more information.
- 27:48So, I mean, that's I think that's probably the best description I've ever heard anybody
- 27:52say.
- 27:52It's enough to pay close attention to it.
- 27:55Hey, I'll take that.
- 27:57When you say the markets have been pricing in like low rates for a long time, even during
- 28:01sort of the fastest rate hike in history, they've been pricing this in.
- 28:04Is that right?
- 28:05And where have they been pricing that in?
- 28:07forward markets, interest rate swaps, the yield curve.
- 28:11The euro dollar futures curve, the old euro dollar futures curve,
- 28:14the far superior euro dollar futures curve,
- 28:16inverted back in December of 2021.
- 28:19So that was the market saying whatever the Fed's going to do in the short run,
- 28:22interest rates are likely to go lower after a certain period of time.
- 28:25So never since then.
- 28:26The curves have been completely upended.
- 28:28So you had inversion in the yield curve,
- 28:30the treasury market yield curve, March of 2022.
- 28:34And it had been inverted and heavily inverted.
- 28:37and historically inverted from March of 2022 on and off in the initial stage,
- 28:42but all the way until September of 2024.
- 28:44So the market was saying, eventually, once the Fed gets its inflation hysteria out of its system,
- 28:50rates are going to go down and they're going to go down by a lot and stay there.
- 28:52So from the very beginning, from the very beginning of 2021,
- 28:56the markets have said, over time, this is what we should expect.
- 29:00Not interest rates going into the future, going into double digits, soaring into the skyward.
- 29:04It's not the 1970s.
- 29:06There's no lingering inflation.
- 29:07We should expect things to go the other way.
- 29:09And I mean, to me, that seemed to make sense
- 29:12because the economy tailed off right in 2022.
- 29:15It didn't fall into a recognizable recession,
- 29:17but it was every bit the recession.
- 29:19We've seen the job market weaken along the way
- 29:21in the macroeconomy, not just in the US,
- 29:22but across the entire world.
- 29:24And that makes sense too.
- 29:25You think about what happened in 2021 and 2022
- 29:28while all this financial irregularity
- 29:30and stupidity was going on,
- 29:32the entire world of the vast majority of it
- 29:34was impoverished.
- 29:35You had prices that soared ahead and incomes that didn't come close to making up the difference.
- 29:40So in other words, everybody fell further behind almost at once.
- 29:43It was like this one big slap in the face.
- 29:45How is that ever going to work out any other way in the future?
- 29:48Especially as these middle market players, these shadow banks were extending credit on really stupid assumptions that everything was just going to work out fine.
- 29:57It just got worse and worse and worse over time.
- 29:59but it did so in a way that wasn't recognizable to most people
- 30:03and what they think of and when they hear the term recession.
- 30:05But the macroeconomic-based case has always been from 2021 onward
- 30:11that we would end up in this situation for that reason,
- 30:13because you can't impoverish the vast majority of the world
- 30:16and expect it all just to work out fine and dandy.
- 30:20So when you say that rate cuts are basically baked in the cake at this point,
- 30:24like Kevin Walsh is obviously almost likely coming in as Fed chair in May, I think.
- 30:29What do you think the difference he will make there will be?
- 30:33And maybe it's worth explaining why you think the Fed doesn't matter as part of that answer for anyone who's not heard you before.
- 30:39Thanks for anticipating my answer.
- 30:41I really appreciate it.
- 30:42No, it won't matter.
- 30:43Jay Powell, Warsh, or anybody else who got the job, whether it was Waller or maybe even Jeff Schmid from Kansas City, who is the biggest hawk on the committee, wouldn't matter.
- 30:52What the markets are saying is that conditions develop to the point where the Fed has no choice.
- 30:57like 2008. Before 2008, the Fed had no intentions of lowering interest rates. In fact, when they
- 31:04look at inversion and euro dollar futures in 2007, they said, what the hell is the market pricing?
- 31:08We don't see anything bad taking place. We're not going to cut rates. We just raised them. We just
- 31:13stopped raising rates. Why would we cut rates? So it's not, it's what the market is saying is
- 31:17regardless who's at the Fed, conditions are going to be such that they have no choice but to respond
- 31:23in the way that we think they're going to respond,
- 31:25which is if we have a credit crisis
- 31:27that leads to higher unemployment,
- 31:29it doesn't matter what anybody at the Fed says today,
- 31:32they're going to lower rates
- 31:33and they're going to lower rates by a lot.
- 31:35It's not the Fed's choice.
- 31:36It's the conditions around the Fed
- 31:38that the market says the Fed will have to respond to,
- 31:41which is why lower interest rates,
- 31:44contrary to popular perception,
- 31:46lower interest rates are not stimulus.
- 31:49It is officials reacting
- 31:50to what's taking place in reality.
- 31:53So that's why interest rates go down during recessions rather than interest rates go down and stop the recession from happening.
- 32:00They're responding to the recession that's developing or the financial crisis, whatever comes along with it.
- 32:05So that's what the market is saying.
- 32:06The market is saying the Fed is likely, balance of probabilities, to respond to whatever conditions they are, respond in a way that they did in previous cycles.
- 32:16They're going to bring rates down, not all at once, as we've seen.
- 32:19I mean, this is a drawn-out cycle.
- 32:21It's one of the most drawn-out rate-cutting cycles that we've seen.
- 32:23But over time, eventually, they get there.
- 32:26And they get there because they don't have a choice.
- 32:29I don't know if I've ever asked you this question,
- 32:31because I know you don't like the Fed.
- 32:32But do you think we should get rid of the Fed?
- 32:35It's not that I don't like the Fed.
- 32:36It's the, well, I mean, there's lots of questions about the Fed.
- 32:39The Fed isn't what people think it is.
- 32:42And the Fed isn't what the Fed advertises itself to be.
- 32:44That's what I really have a problem with.
- 32:46The Fed has you believing that it this money printing engine when it doesn have a money printer And in fact if you put a gun to Jay Powell head he would admit it to you In fact it a dirty secret they never talk about One thing you never hear come out of Jay Powell mouth is money money supply money circulation money anything
- 33:02They say monetary policy,
- 33:04but that's really interest rate policy.
- 33:06It's not monetary policy.
- 33:08They are not targeting a money supply.
- 33:09They're not doing anything with money supply.
- 33:11So they've given this impression
- 33:13that they're a monetary institution when they're not,
- 33:15which is my biggest beef with the Fed,
- 33:17is they are pretending to be what they are absolutely not.
- 33:20So can we get rid of the Fed?
- 33:22That part of it, yes.
- 33:24Now, that doesn't mean that some parts of the Fed are salvageable.
- 33:27For example, I use the Fed all the time in terms of information.
- 33:31It is one of the few sources of information into these dark spots
- 33:35that we otherwise would not have because of the Eurodollar system
- 33:38and its opaque nature offshore,
- 33:41hidden in the footnotes of bank balance sheets,
- 33:43and a lot of stuff doesn't even show up on bank balance sheets,
- 33:45or shadow bank balance sheets in these days.
- 33:48So the Fed does have some use.
- 33:50It uses its power of subpoena and regulatory authority,
- 33:54macroprudential power to force some kind of transparency,
- 33:57not nearly enough.
- 33:59But the idea that the Fed controls the economy
- 34:02and the monetary system
- 34:03and then can generate predictable positive outcomes
- 34:06by moving the federal funds rate around,
- 34:08that's total horse crap.
- 34:11So it's just a statistics and PR agency at this point.
- 34:14Yeah. I mean, you listen to what I mean, how do the feds when they talk about interest rate policy, what they say is it works through long and variable lags that immediately should raise alarm bells.
- 34:24What they're saying is if we raise rates, we have no idea when the effect of raising rates will take place.
- 34:31At some point, the outcome that we were anticipating by raising rates will take place and then we'll take credit for it.
- 34:37In other words, it could take three years. I mean, think about it this way.
- 34:39the Fed as you mentioned already most aggressive quickest rate hiking campaign in its history yet
- 34:46here we are three four years later still talking about inflation risk why is that the case long
- 34:51and variable legs they anticipated the outcome and they're waiting for that outcome to show up so
- 34:56they can take credit for it it's essentially turning correlation into causation which is what
- 35:01the Fed has been doing basically its entire history but more so since the euro dollar development in
- 35:06the 60s and 70s. So whenever the Fed does something, most people don't pay attention to what it is they
- 35:12do. And if it correlates with the outcome the Fed is, you know, they've taught you to believe in,
- 35:16you think the Fed is responsible for it. But like I said, you know, if that was the case,
- 35:21we would never have recessions because the Fed lowers interest rates heading into a recession.
- 35:24We get the recession anyway, which leaves the Fed to say, well, it would have been worse if we
- 35:29hadn't lowered rates. That's the other way they get around this. Long and variable lags or jobs
- 35:34saved like in 2008. Well, it would have been 1930s if we hadn't acted with QE. So that's my problem
- 35:39with the Fed. It's giving people the wrong impression about what it is and what it actually
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- 38:18What do you think about the sort of eroding independence of the Fed
- 38:22with Trump pressuring Powell and then bringing Walsh in
- 38:24and presumably Walsh is going to do,
- 38:26I'm sure they've had long conversations
- 38:27and he'll do whatever Trump really wants there.
- 38:30It's just another extension of the mythology.
- 38:32The idea that the Fed is this all-important institution,
- 38:35which by the way is absolutely central to its policies.
- 38:39Its policies are expectations policies,
- 38:41which means you have to believe in it.
- 38:43I mean, the Bank of Japan's former government, the colorful Hirohaiko Kuroda back in 2015, gave away the game when he said, it's like Peter Pan.
- 38:52If you believe you can fly, then you can fly.
- 38:54That's what their policies really are.
- 38:56What they believe is if you believe that the Fed lowering the federal funds rate, which is not an important rate to begin with, but if that somehow helps the banking sector or the financial markets or the economy or something, if you believe that and then you act on that belief, then you become the policy.
- 39:11which is, again, horse crap
- 39:13because that's not how the world actually works.
- 39:15But in order for that to work,
- 39:16everybody has to believe the Fed
- 39:18is this all-powerful institution.
- 39:20So everything the Fed has done
- 39:22and how it has evolved since the 1990s in particular,
- 39:25and there's a reason why the 1990s
- 39:26had started down this road,
- 39:28it has to maintain this aura,
- 39:31which is why we have these press conferences
- 39:33with Jay Powell standing up in front of the podium
- 39:36with that bank of flags, really impressive,
- 39:38and all the most major mainstream media asking them questions.
- 39:42It's a ritual.
- 39:43It is a religious ritual so that the Fed maintains this aura of power and capability, right?
- 39:52And so the idea of the Fed's independence falls under that entire paradigm
- 39:58because if the Fed's independence is threatened,
- 40:01that somehow threatens the mythology that has been built up around the Fed.
- 40:05when the marketplace, the marketplace where all of this would make it, if the Fed's independence
- 40:10mattered one bit, like the treasury market would have said, oh, crap, this is a big deal.
- 40:15We've heard about the Trump administration threatening the Fed's independence since last
- 40:20year. And we went through the same thing in 2019. People forget we went through the same stuff in
- 40:252019. The market does not care one bit because the market knows the difference here, the difference
- 40:32between mythology and reality.
- 40:34If the Fed's independence is threatened,
- 40:36no one really cares because it won't make a difference
- 40:39where it actually matters.
- 40:40But you say it's horse crap,
- 40:42but like markets, real markets do move
- 40:44when Powell says stuff.
- 40:45So you think that's just enough people
- 40:47believing the mythology essentially
- 40:49and trading on that mythology rather than actual reality?
- 40:53Yeah, in the short run, absolutely.
- 40:55Huh, interesting.
- 40:57You can line up, look at,
- 40:59you can run any correlation you want
- 41:00between Fed policies and market movements.
- 41:02They don't last beyond the short run.
- 41:05Even QE, everybody thinks QE money printing
- 41:07led to the stock market going up.
- 41:08There is zero correlation,
- 41:10zero correlation between the Fed's balance sheet
- 41:12and the stock market.
- 41:14See, I've heard you talk about this before,
- 41:15so I know your sort of reasoning there,
- 41:17but for anyone that's not,
- 41:18that might be a bit of a shocking statement.
- 41:20Do you want to explain why you think that?
- 41:23It's not why I think that.
- 41:23It's what the numbers say.
- 41:26But there is this short run impact.
- 41:28And by the way, it's not just the stock market.
- 41:29The bond market fell for it, too.
- 41:31If you look at bond market history back to the early QE days, even Eurodollar futures fell for it, which is embarrassing.
- 41:38When the Fed first announced QE back in December of 2008, what happened?
- 41:42The opposite of what was supposed to happen, right?
- 41:45The Fed was going to buy a bunch of U.S. Treasuries, which you're taught to mean if the Fed's buying U.S. Treasuries, then Treasury prices should go up and bond yields go down.
- 41:53That's not what happened.
- 41:55The very first QE, bond yields went up, and they went up by quite a lot.
- 41:59What that was, was the market saying, we believe this, this QE stuff might actually work. It might get us out of the crisis. So the bond market had a response. The stock market had an initial response, and then it got disabused of that notion pretty quickly. But in the short run, there are these psychological impacts where you think, well, maybe this stuff could work. And if it's going to work, then I certainly don't want to own a U.S. Treasury because safety and liquidity is not what you want to own in a reflationary period. You want to own stocks.
- 42:24So if this stuff works and you believe QE works,
- 42:26you're going to want to buy a ton of stocks.
- 42:27Same thing happened in QE2.
- 42:29Bond yields went up rather than down,
- 42:31and stock prices certainly went up in August of 2010
- 42:33when Ben Bernanke announced QE2.
- 42:35So there is a short-run relationship
- 42:37with perceptions of what the Fed could do,
- 42:41especially if these policies are new and untested,
- 42:43even though they had been tested in Japan.
- 42:45The idea was the U.S. execution
- 42:47would be different than the Japanese execution.
- 42:48But either way, there is a short-run impact
- 42:50where people think maybe this stuff could work.
- 42:53I don't really know what it is. I don't know what it does. But hey, possibly it could work.
- 42:57The Fed is doing something big. Everybody's talking about how big it is.
- 43:01So maybe I'm going to buy some stocks and sell some treasuries because it could work out that way.
- 43:05But it never lasts that long because in reality, that's not how the world really works.
- 43:09That's certainly not how the monetary system works. It doesn't work on Peter Pan belief.
- 43:13It works on actual money and monetary circulation more than anything else.
- 43:17So there are short run periods and people only remember the short run periods.
- 43:21They only remember the times when the Fed announces QE and the stock market soars.
- 43:25They don't remember all the times when the Fed stops, you know, QE and the stock market still soars or when they're doing something different and the stock market does something different.
- 43:32So over time, there is zero correlation.
- 43:35There are short run correlations, but they don't maintain themselves over time because in a dynamic marketplace, you know, markets are doing the QE and the Fed's balance sheet don't really matter to the operation of intermediate and long term properties.
- 43:47But during like COVID, when the Fed did print a bunch of money, forgive the, I know you maybe
- 43:53don't agree with that framework, but you know what I'm saying.
- 43:55That's what everybody says.
- 43:56I mean, yeah.
- 43:58But no one would say that the economy was in a good place while the world was locked
- 44:01down, like the real economy, but stock markets did soar.
- 44:04So is that not correlation?
- 44:06But was that the Fed or was that something else?
- 44:08Was that just simple correlation?
- 44:10So I would argue that it wasn't the Fed at all.
- 44:13What else would it be?
- 44:15The federal government.
- 44:16It was the federal government reopening the economy or at least creating a pathway to reopen the economy.
- 44:21That led to further second and third order effects, including the price illusion, which was really the price shock.
- 44:26So you had the economy that was shut down artificially, not for economic reasons, which allowed it to be reopened artificially, which led to a complete turnaround.
- 44:36So in 2020, it was slow at first and it really got going at the end of 2020 into early 2021.
- 44:41That wasn't the Fed printing money.
- 44:43that was the federal government reversing its policies
- 44:45or at least creating a pathway
- 44:47to plausibly reverse its policies
- 44:49and people reacting ahead of that.
- 44:52Okay.
- 44:53One of the other questions I have around the Fed is,
- 44:56like, they've obviously got the dual mandate,
- 44:58one of which being jobs.
- 45:00How are they going to manage...
- 45:02There's actually three.
- 45:03Okay.
- 45:04Well, we explained that in the answer too.
- 45:06But how are they going to manage that
- 45:08with AI seemingly starting to take jobs?
- 45:10I don't know if you saw,
- 45:11but Block announced yesterday
- 45:12that they're getting rid of nearly half of their employees.
- 45:14Which is not AI, though.
- 45:17Well, I mean, there's obviously a lot of people
- 45:19that say they hired way too quick in like 2020, 2021,
- 45:21and they had a lot of like a way too big headcount.
- 45:24That's what Jack Dorsey said.
- 45:25That's what he said himself.
- 45:26He said, hey, look, we fell for the illusion too.
- 45:29We did what Amazon and everybody else did.
- 45:30We hired way more people than we needed.
- 45:32Now they're just blaming AI for the layoffs
- 45:34when it was really just being wrong about the economy.
- 45:36But I think given enough, like given a few years,
- 45:39I think AI will start replacing real jobs.
- 45:40And I think even though that may not be the only reason that Block have done this, I do think it's part of the reason.
- 45:45Jack has been at the forefront with this vibe coding revolution.
- 45:50What do the Fed do if AI does start replacing a large number of white collar jobs?
- 45:55Nothing. The Fed can't do anything. The Fed can't meet its mandates.
- 45:59They have to pretend to do something, though.
- 46:01They have to pretend. That's really the issue.
- 46:03And so, again, the mandates are full employment, stable prices.
- 46:07And the third one that people don't know about, which was forced on them in the 1970s because the Fed did not do what everybody said it was going to do or what the Fed is supposed to do.
- 46:18That's not a thing, too.
- 46:19Just to digress a little bit here.
- 46:20I'm going to rant a little here.
- 46:22People don't realize the Federal Reserve was a joke for the vast majority of its history.
- 46:26That's not me saying it.
- 46:27That's the mainstream media, the marketplace, the banking sector, everybody, politicians.
- 46:32After the 1930s, the debacle in the 1930s, the Fed was relegated to the back bench.
- 46:38It was underneath the Treasury's thumb.
- 46:40And even when it so-called got independence in 1951, nobody looked at the Fed to do anything.
- 46:45It was basically left to try to manage Treasury auctions.
- 46:48That's what the Fed did from early 1950s to the 1970s.
- 46:52And then the Fed sat there unable to explain where the great inflation came from, let alone stop it.
- 46:58So up until Volcker in the 1980s, even after 1980s, it really wasn't until 1990 that people started to look at the Fed differently.
- 47:06And it wasn't because of anything the Fed did. It was because of the great moderation that showed up.
- 47:10And the Fed couldn't even explain why the great moderation showed up.
- 47:12But the point I'm making is this idea of the Fed being an all-powerful technocratic institution is a modern invention.
- 47:21It is something that was created largely out of the inability for people to explain where the great moderation came from.
- 47:27And so Fed officials, starting with Greenspan, but really Ben Bernanke was the chief one, started taking correlation and said, look, we evolved away from quantitative monetary measures in the 1970s and beforehand.
- 47:41We started targeting the federal funds rate.
- 47:44Maybe that's where the great moderation came from.
- 47:46So this ocean of prosperity in the 1990s was our doing through moving the federal funds rate around.
- 47:53If you stop and think about it, you think about how ridiculous that sounds.
- 47:57But because nobody had any idea where the great moderation came from and because it was such a unique period of prosperity, maybe it was the Fed.
- 48:04And so the legend of the Fed was born out of a singular instance in an otherwise long history of being a complete and utter failure and joke.
- 48:14So what we're really seeing is the Fed return to type here.
- 48:17It's just going, people are realizing slowly that the Fed is still the same joke that it was.
- 48:22It's just that it hasn't completely fallen into, it hasn't been completely accepted that way just yet,
- 48:28because there is still a lot of people who depend upon either having Jay Powell the god or Jay Powell the villain,
- 48:35which is very useful to a lot of people, right?
- 48:37Why does the politicians keep the Fed around?
- 48:41Because when times are good, the president can point at the Fed chief and say, I appointed that guy.
- 48:46He made the economy great. I'm a genius.
- 48:48And when the economy's bad, what can he do?
- 48:50like Trump. That Jay Powell's an idiot. He's dumb. He's stupid. He's incompetent, right?
- 48:54The Fed is nothing more than a political lightning rod. So to bring this back to your question,
- 49:00sorry about that. With artificial intelligence, the Fed would, if we get higher levels of
- 49:06unemployment, I think they would be more measured in their rate. They would still
- 49:10bias toward lower rates, but they would be more measured because what they would say is, look,
- 49:14this is a labor supply demand issue not something that monetary policy what they call monetary policy can actually fix And then the price stability again not within the Fed mandates And the third mandate which is stable interest rates just to explain that
- 49:31what the Fed has said is why they never refer to the third mandate.
- 49:35And it is required by Congress.
- 49:37It is in the law, the amended Federal Reserve Act.
- 49:41The reason they don't bring up a third mandate is because they say,
- 49:44if we take care of the first two, by default, the third one takes care of itself, right?
- 49:48If we have maximum employment and stable prices, then we will have stable interest rates.
- 49:53So we focus on the first two.
- 49:55Therefore, we don't have to worry about the third.
- 49:57When everything that we've seen during this period shows that that's not the case.
- 50:01We don't have stable prices.
- 50:03We don't have full employment.
- 50:04And interest rates, they are certainly not stable.
- 50:07And even when, even 2010s, you could characterize the interest rates as stable.
- 50:10They're supposed to be stable at moderate levels.
- 50:13That's the word that is used in the statute.
- 50:15They sure as hell weren't stable at moderate levels during the 2010s.
- 50:18They were entirely too low because low rates aren't stimulus.
- 50:22They're a reflection of conditions.
- 50:23So the Fed fails on every one of its mandates.
- 50:27AI is not going to help suddenly help them.
- 50:28It's just going to add to their challenge.
- 50:31Yeah, it's because one of the things that, again, you may disagree with this, but if AI does actually start replacing real white collar jobs to be proven out, but we'll see.
- 50:39And I think probably base case for me would be it will.
- 50:42what happens to all the people that are unemployed and do you think we see some kind of UBI
- 50:48and if we do do you see that as actual stimulus because it's real money going to real people in
- 50:53the economy rather than just creation of bank reserves again is if you think about it ceteris
- 50:59paribus taking the last part first it looks like stimulus but it's actually not because you have to
- 51:03account for the conditions that led to it in the first place so we're redistributing money through
- 51:07UBI, assuming that's what happens, but it's intended to offset a hole that was created
- 51:13from the loss of jobs. So would it actually be stimulus? Well, in a centrist-paribus world where
- 51:19you're starting from scratch, yeah, it looks like stimulus, but it's actually, would UBI be an
- 51:23effective replacement and alternative for lost incomes, lost earned incomes through productive
- 51:28jobs? And looking at it that way, which is the proper way to look at it, it's not stimulus,
- 51:33It's actually, it just nets out of zero.
- 51:35You can argue it's better than zero, right?
- 51:38It's better than the alternative.
- 51:39It's potentially better than the alternative.
- 51:41I don't think the long-run consequences would be better than the alternative.
- 51:43But in the short run, you could say it's better than having people have no jobs and no incomes.
- 51:48But it's certainly not stimulus because it's not offsetting what real earned income does for an economy,
- 51:53which is most consumers are more likely to spend more freely.
- 51:57businesses too when uh they're when when um incomes are generated through natural organic
- 52:03and economic processes then when they're redistributed through some predetermined
- 52:08bureaucratically arbitrarily determined number which was what ubi would be by by the federal
- 52:14government or any government for that matter so ubi would not be an effective offset to lost jobs
- 52:19so the question is whether or not we have lost jobs i'm probably a little bit more optimistic
- 52:23than you about that.
- 52:24I don't think AI eliminates jobs.
- 52:27I mean, yes, it will definitely eliminate some jobs,
- 52:29but I don't think that's what,
- 52:30we're not looking at a catastrophic loss of employment.
- 52:32I look at it as AI being a potential,
- 52:35you know, human-robot partnership
- 52:38where it makes human workers so much more productive.
- 52:40In that case, it doesn't eliminate workers,
- 52:43it eliminates hours worked.
- 52:45So I can see us going, for example,
- 52:46from a five-day workweek to a four-day workweek
- 52:49with some people actually having a three-day workweek
- 52:51because AI will make human workers so much more productive
- 52:54that just like when we went to a five-day work week in the 1920s,
- 52:59businesses will first start out using that as a recruiting tool.
- 53:04Look, come work for me.
- 53:05I'll pay you really well.
- 53:06Plus, you only need to work four days a week.
- 53:07And eventually, that filters for the rest of the economy
- 53:09as that level of productivity really does take place in the real economy,
- 53:13which I think it will,
- 53:14although I think it'll take a lot longer than people are anticipating right now.
- 53:17It might be 10 years from now rather than next year or the year after.
- 53:20But I think long run, yes, there will be some jobs that are eliminated because that's the natural economic process.
- 53:26But by and large, we're not looking at mass dystopian levels of unemployment.
- 53:29We're looking at a positive future where we all have to work.
- 53:32We don't have to work as much.
- 53:33We can all work a hell of a lot less and still produce the same amount of output and probably produce a lot better output because AI, if it works the way it's intended to and what people think, I mean, it has the possibility to, we'll all be better at what we do.
- 53:48Well, that's a way more optimistic outlook.
- 53:50I like that. And that's what deflationary technology should always have been.
- 53:53Like it should be us at an office less and being more creative more.
- 53:58Yeah, you do more. You get more out of less, right?
- 54:00That's what free market economics and capitalism is supposed to do.
- 54:03You have a set of finite parameters and you learn how to use your techniques and processes better
- 54:10so that you get more out of what you're doing for putting less in.
- 54:15So just to go back to the potential that we're entering or in a financial crisis, how do people position themselves?
- 54:24Like what should you be looking at as a way of sort of surviving this?
- 54:28Well, I mean, the easy answer is just safety and liquidity.
- 54:32So, I mean, duration and treasury markets, because, well, not necessarily long duration, but some level of duration.
- 54:39If we do get to a situation where rates are going to go down by a lot because the marketplace sees that even before you get to confirmation of the crisis coming,
- 54:47but the market sees the probabilities rise to a certain point, what you're going to see is short-term interest rates,
- 54:53medium-term interest rates are going to go down a hell of a lot more than long-term interest rates.
- 54:57So the yield curve will steepen out substantially, but do so from the front end.
- 55:00So like the two-year, for example.
- 55:02The two-year right now is a little bit under 3.4%,
- 55:05setting a new multi-year low,
- 55:07which is another signal leaning in the direction of that type of steepening.
- 55:12If that's correct, the 10-year is sitting at 4%.
- 55:15If we assume the 10-year doesn't go, it's actually a little bit low 4%.
- 55:18But if it doesn't go any lower,
- 55:20the yield curve wants to be about 200 basis points steep, upward sloping.
- 55:26It had been inverted for a long time, as we discussed before.
- 55:28It is uninverting.
- 55:29It hasn't gone through the entire un-inversion process.
- 55:32When it does get through the process, which it will, the yield curve should be about 200, 300 basis points steep between the front end and the long end.
- 55:40So just doing some quick back of the envelope calculations, assuming the 10-year doesn't move any more than where it is right now,
- 55:47the front end of the yield curve would have to be down around 2% in order for it to completely un-invert and be 200 basis points steep.
- 55:55So there's a lot of opportunity in that part of the yield curve, right at the two-year spot on the curve, and then even treasury bills, though.
- 56:01I mean, there's no really price speculation in bills.
- 56:03But if you're buying a two-year treasury right now, not only are you getting around 3.5% of a coupon, you have lots of price appreciation built into it.
- 56:10So a curve steepening, bull steepening type of trade would work really well here, assuming that it continues to go in this direction, though.
- 56:19So like I said, we've been looking at this for years.
- 56:21And as we continue to go through year after year after year, we see more evidence of that taking place, not less evidence.
- 56:27So it's a relatively easy thing to do.
- 56:30But that's, I mean, tragedy market's easy.
- 56:32You want to take a little bit more risk.
- 56:34You could buy gold or something like that.
- 56:37I would buy a ton of Bitcoin.
- 56:38If Bitcoin gets down around, you know, 50,000 or less, if the market overshoots on the downside,
- 56:44I'm going to pack up the truck for Bitcoin or something like silver.
- 56:47because those are the things that you're going to want to own
- 56:50in a period of instability, gross instability
- 56:52in a whole lot of different ways,
- 56:54including the economy and the marketplace.
- 56:56So yes, there's a lot of caveats and a lot of ifs
- 56:58and a lot of probabilities,
- 57:00but as those probabilities start to pile up
- 57:02and it looks like more concretely,
- 57:05that's where we're going,
- 57:06that's where you really want to be.
- 57:07All the traditional tools that safe haven
- 57:10to get you through unstable periods.
- 57:14That's cool to hear you talk about Bitcoin in that way
- 57:16because you've always been sort of a little skeptical of Bitcoin.
- 57:19Is it just the fact that it's pulled down so much from its highs
- 57:22that you're interested at this point?
- 57:23Or have your sort of opinions changed on it slightly?
- 57:26No, my problem with Bitcoin, it's not really a problem.
- 57:29It's understanding what it is and where it's going.
- 57:32Not price, but actual function.
- 57:35Bitcoin is not replacing the US dollar.
- 57:37Bitcoin is competing with gold as a safe haven portfolio asset.
- 57:41That's why it behaves a lot like the Nasdaq.
- 57:43It's competing with the stock market or gold.
- 57:47So people look to Bitcoin as potentially a, you know, since it has a relatively small market cap, there's potentially, there's more and more people get interested for any reason, doesn't matter what it is.
- 57:57There's a lot of upside potential from Bitcoin.
- 57:59Even though it doesn't replace the dollar, it doesn't become the next big currency, it can still become a highly appreciative asset, speculative asset or, you know, a store of value asset, certainly.
- 58:11So if Bitcoin goes down with that level of price appreciation, the asymmetry works in your favor because there are so many long run positives to owning Bitcoin.
- 58:20If we see Bitcoin at 20,000, you've got to be buying every last thing that you can, every last bet you can get.
- 58:25So my issue is I don't see Bitcoin becoming a currency system, but I see it becoming what it already is, which is a preeminent digital form of portfolio asset.
- 58:35And there's nothing wrong with that.
- 58:37We can use a digital form of portfolio asset,
- 58:40especially one that has limited supply
- 58:43and limited availability.
- 58:44There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
- 58:46It's not a competition for the dollar.
- 58:49That's really where I have the argument.
- 58:51So we've had that conversation on the podcast before
- 58:53and your issue is around like the inelasticity of Bitcoin.
- 58:56I'll just link that in the show
- 58:58rather than getting to that again,
- 58:59because we've covered that in pretty good depth, I think.
- 59:02So one of the things that I like
- 59:05in terms of the framing of how Bitcoin performs
- 59:07in the short term, how the price moves,
- 59:10is Luke Groman's theory that it's like
- 59:12the last functioning smoke alarm for liquidity.
- 59:15Obviously, Bitcoin rolled over at the end of last year.
- 59:17Do you think that is global liquidity drying up
- 59:19or like the smoke alarm that it's about to dry up?
- 59:23Yeah, I think it's both a liquidity signal
- 59:25as well as a risk-taking signal.
- 59:27It's sort of the marginal,
- 59:30it's at the margins of people's perceptions
- 59:33of whether or not they want to take risk
- 59:34or whether or not want to remove risk.
- 59:36That's part of the institutionalization of Bitcoin
- 59:40through Wall Street and funds and everything else.
- 59:41That's what it kind of becomes,
- 59:42is sort of the easiest thing to sell in a downturn,
- 59:45in this downturn anyway, assuming that's what we have.
- 59:48Portfolio manager, hey, Bitcoin had a tremendous year last year.
- 59:51It's really easy to get out of it.
- 59:52Plus, as it becomes, price goes down,
- 59:55portfolio managers don't want to own it
- 59:56because their clients will fire them for owning it.
- 59:58So it becomes the marginal risk setter.
- 1:00:01It tells you something about the perception
- 1:00:03across the financial markets to take additional risk
- 1:00:06or to take additional risk off the table.
- 1:00:08So for me, yeah, that's one of the things that really stuck out
- 1:00:12is that Bitcoin had, it really is, you know, it hit the high in October,
- 1:00:15but it started to roll over in July.
- 1:00:18When we see a lot of stuff roll over in July, private credit in particular,
- 1:00:21you look at the BDC prices in the stock market,
- 1:00:24you look at leveraged loan prices, for example,
- 1:00:26there is a pretty solid correlation, at least a rough correlation,
- 1:00:30between Bitcoin as a risk gauge
- 1:00:32and what we've seen in, for example,
- 1:00:35the reversal of the private credit bubble.
- 1:00:37So that's how I would look at Bitcoin.
- 1:00:39And like I said, if Bitcoin goes lower for whatever reason,
- 1:00:42just because it happens to be the easiest thing to sell,
- 1:00:46that just presents a tremendous buying opportunity.
- 1:00:49Yeah, I mean, down here in the 60s,
- 1:00:50I think it's already good value.
- 1:00:52It may go to the 50s, who knows, but...
- 1:00:54You know how this goes, Dan?
- 1:00:55I mean, markets always overshoot.
- 1:00:56And Bitcoin's history, right?
- 1:00:58I mean, Bitcoin goes way up
- 1:00:59and then it goes down by what 80 90 and then goes way back up again um so i mean i don't think people
- 1:01:04would be shocked if it gets down to around 80 down from its high which would be what um 30 000
- 1:01:09something like that i mean 30 000 you gotta be thinking about buying a ton of it yeah i mean if
- 1:01:14we get there i will be selling everything i've got to buy more um but you and me both i'll provide
- 1:01:20some leverage we see if i can find some leverage someplace just to close out i know you you're kind
- 1:01:25of tight on time. But and this is quite a big question to close out with. Going into the midterms
- 1:01:30end of this year, Trump is going to want the economy running as hot as possible. Do you think
- 1:01:34he's got a chance of getting there? Do you think this could be a really strong year in the markets?
- 1:01:38No, see, it's always the what people want versus what they can actually deliver. Same thing with
- 1:01:42the problem of the Fed. One of the biggest things I try to get people to get out of is the mindset
- 1:01:47that governments can achieve whatever they set their mind to, because we see examples of this
- 1:01:52not happening everywhere. The recovery after 2008 never happened, didn't happen. China is a perfect
- 1:01:58example. The Chinese have been stimulating their economy for years and it only gets worse and worse
- 1:02:04and worse. Governments don't have unlimited capacity to achieve the goals that they set out.
- 1:02:09In fact, they have very limited capacity, far more limited than you think, which is one reason why,
- 1:02:15again, go back to the marketplace. The marketplace has not budged. There is nothing in the marketplace
- 1:02:19right now that suggests, and believe me, market participants know the Republicans and the Trump
- 1:02:24administration want the economy on the right track before we get long before we get to November.
- 1:02:30This talk about a boom in 2026 is not priced anywhere in the market. And if it was, we would
- 1:02:36have the reverse calculation of what I just went through. If there was any if there was a plausible
- 1:02:42path to the Trump administration simulating the economy this year, what we would see is the yield
- 1:02:47curve steepening out in the other direction. So short term rates would be stuck at 350. The Fed
- 1:02:52wouldn't need to cut rates anymore, right? Because it would be responding to a strong economy,
- 1:02:55which means that the long end of the yield curve would had to be at least 200 basis points above
- 1:02:59the short end, which gets you the 10 year around five and a half, if not 6% or higher.
- 1:03:04It's not moving in that direction. And if this was a realistic possibility in the near term,
- 1:03:09you better believe the marketplace would be already moving in that direction.
- 1:03:13So what the market is saying is, yes, we realize that Trump would love the economy to be red hot running into November.
- 1:03:19We just don't see any way for that to take place.
- 1:03:22The conditions, labor market is too sour.
- 1:03:26People, I want to point this out.
- 1:03:28I don't know even how to put this in the right word.
- 1:03:31We had zero job growth last year.
- 1:03:34I don't know why people don't know that more.
- 1:03:36We had no jobs grow, no jobs in the entire U.S. economy, an economy with 160 million people working.
- 1:03:43We had zero job growth in 2025. And somehow that's not going to have a negative impact on 2026.
- 1:03:49So the point is, the market is saying, look, we've been in this rut for years. It only gets worse.
- 1:03:56It only seems to move in one direction. It doesn't matter what the government wants to do.
- 1:04:00It's the conditions that we have. And then, unfortunately, they progress too far to the wrong direction that we're kind of stuck in this direction, kind of stuck in moving this way.
- 1:04:08Plus, you throw a private credit mess on top.
- 1:04:12And let's not forget, maybe the stock market pops because the AI bubble is no longer supporting that narrative.
- 1:04:19I mean, there's a number of financial risks that are out there on top of the macroeconomic weakness.
- 1:04:24It's a very small possibility that the Trump administration is able to deliver what it wants to deliver.
- 1:04:30I think that's what the markets are all saying.
- 1:04:33It's going to be an interesting 2026.
- 1:04:35Jeff, I always love speaking to you.
- 1:04:37Every time I feel like I'm getting a grasp of what's going on in the economy, I speak to you and realize I need to start again.
- 1:04:42But thank you for coming on the show.
- 1:04:44Really appreciate it.
- 1:04:46Always, Dan.
- 1:04:46I always love talking with you and catching up and revisiting.
- 1:04:51Yeah.
- 1:04:51So tell everyone where they can go to find out more about your work in case they want to check it out.
- 1:04:55Yeah.
- 1:04:55Just look for Eurodollar University.
- 1:04:57I've got a YouTube channel.
- 1:04:58I've got subscription services where if you really want to get deep into the weeds about what all these signals are, what they mean, what they're doing,
- 1:05:04which I mean
- 1:05:05recent events suggest
- 1:05:08that you need to do that
- 1:05:09more now than ever
- 1:05:10to really stay abreast
- 1:05:11of what's taking place
- 1:05:12and what's really happening
- 1:05:13and what it means
- 1:05:14what it potentially leads to
- 1:05:16down the road
- 1:05:17like I said
- 1:05:17the subscription services
- 1:05:18you can find at Eurodollar University
- 1:05:20the website is eurodollar.university
- 1:05:22or just search for Eurodollar University
- 1:05:24Awesome
- 1:05:25Thank you Jeff
- 1:05:26appreciate this
- 1:05:27and hopefully I'll speak to you again
- 1:05:28in a few months
- 1:05:29Yeah soon
- 1:05:30Yeah thank you
- 1:05:34you