The Breakdown

Today on the Brief: Markets gain as Pres. Trump’s condition stabilizes SEC Chairman Clayton sees future where all stocks are tokenized Uniswap had more volume than Coinbase in September  Our main discussion: central bank coins and financial privacy.  The EU recently released a new research paper on a possible digital euro. Like many other official central bank reports, it assumes there is no possi...

Today’s Long Reads Sunday selection is “How To Avoid Paying the Cruelest Tax: Inflation” from the Wall Street Journal. NLW argues the piece reflects a changing conversation in mainstream financial circles about the possibility of inflation on the other side of new Federal Reserve policy.

A recap of September, which NLW calls a transitional month between the post-lockdown excitement of the summer and the growing macro insecurity around second wave fears and election volatility.  Featuring some of the most interesting insights from our guests, including: Luke Gromen on the four options for countries that can’t pay their debts Tavi Costa on the Fed’s new “mandate” to keep asset price...

Today on the Brief: Market reaction to Pres. Trump contracting COVID-19 Subpar September jobs report Decentralized exchanges have third straight 100%+ growth month    Our main discussion features Stephen Palley and Preston Byrne of Anderson Kill.  Yesterday, BitMEX was targeted with both civil and criminal complaints, with the CTO being arrested for violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.  In this conv...

When popular finance writer Morgan Housel asked followers on Twitter to share the commonly held investing beliefs they most disagreed with, the internet responded with vigor.  A thousand or so replies later, NLW ranks the top 10 investing ideas we should be questioning, including: Ignoring compounding interest in our 20s Buying homes rather than renting  The idea US Treasury bonds are risk-free Li...

Today on the Brief: Coinbase offers severance to employees who want to leave over new politics policy Long-term job cuts hamper any idea of V-shaped recovery Last chance for a stimulus package before the U.S. presidential election Our main discussion is a narrative shift from DeFi back to bitcoin.  Over the summer, DeFi led the crypto charge. From growth in total value locked to narrative dominanc...

Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published the innocuously titled “Coinbase Is a Mission-Driven Company.”  While the post talked a lot about Coinbase’s core mission, its real goal seemed to be to make clear Coinbase would not be engaging with any other social or political issues beyond that, and to the extent employees wanted to do so they needed to do it on their own time.  The reactions were...

DeFi is one of the breakout crypto categories of 2020. Indeed, yield farming and the grand game of “money legos” has been so profitable that many are following every new protocol with rapt attention.  This is all the more true for projects graced by YFI creator Andre Cronje. So when word got out about a new, pre-release game economy engine called “Eminence,” the DeFi degens took advantage of the p...

Today on the Brief: After four weeks down, bitcoin bounces back on suspicions that recent bearishness was overblown KuCoin exchange gets hacked for somewhere between $150 million and $280 million Jack Dorsey outlines Twitter’s blockchain and bitcoin beliefs during Oslo Freedom Forum appearance Our main discussion: Digging in to bitcoin’s 64-day run over $10,000 Bitcoin has been above $10,000 for l...

This week’s Long Reads Sunday is a reading of “The Currency Cold War: Four Scenarios” by Jeff Wilsner – part of CoinDesk’s Internet 2030 series.  In it, Wilsner talks to experts about four scenarios: A multi-currency scenario, where exchange is abstracted away via digital wallets A China-led scenario A U.S.-led scenario A bitcoin/non-state currency-led scenario In addition to reading, NLW gives hi...

On this edition of The Breakdown weekly recap, NLW looks at the fourth painful week for traditional markets in a row.  He discusses the factors contributing to the trouble, including:  A normal correction from too-high valuations The return of COVID-19 lockdowns The end of easy recovery gains  Diminishing likelihood of a stimulus bill Election volatility

Sven Henrich is the founder and lead market strategist at NorthmanTrader. Well known for his appearances on CNBC, CNN Business and MarketWatch, Sven is also the host of the Straight Talk podcast.  In this conversation, he and NLW discuss: The ever-weakening economic cycle Why the Fed has boxed itself in  Why the asset price bubble is contributing to wealth inequality  How market capitalization-to-...

Today on the Brief: Initial U.S. jobless claims up to 870,000 Partial lockdowns begin in earnest in Europe and Israel The global demand for American stocks Our main discussion: Did corporate insiders perfectly time the market top?  August saw the largest volume of insider selling since 2015, with more than 1000 corporate officers offloading $6.7B in stock. Subsequently, the market has seen a 10% d...

Corey Hoffstein is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Newfound Research LLC, a quantitative research and investment fund. He is also the host of the “Flirting with Models” podcast.  His most recent research is “Liquidity Cascades: The Coordinated Risk of Uncoordinated Market Participants.”  In it, he examines three popular narratives about what is driving radical swings in markets, includ...

Today on the Brief: Where the digital euro fits in Lagarde’s economic integration plans New stablecoin guidance from the OCC Mnuchin and Powell head to the Hill Our main discussion features Marty Bent.  Marty is the author of one of the best known daily bitcoin newsletters, as well as the host of “Tales From The Crypt” podcast. He also is one of the leaders of Great American Mining, a new project...

Today on the Brief Stocks down, dollar up on COVID-19 resurgence fears People’s Bank of China says digital yuan needed to fight USD dominance 140,000 have claimed UNI tokens Judge stops Trump WeChat ban Nikola founder resigns Our main discussion: The FinCEN Files  The FinCEN Files are a leaked cache of suspicious activity reports filed by banks with the U.S .Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. T...

On this week’s “Long Reads Sunday,” NLW reads macro analyst Lyn Alden’s latest: “A Century of Fiscal and Monetary Policy: Inflation vs Deflation” The article looks at: When monetary policy is effective versus when fiscal policy needs to take over  How short-term debt cycles add up to long-term debt cycles that have very different remedies Why long-term debt cycles inevitably end in default or deva...

On this edition of The Breakdown weekly recap, NLW looks at: DEXetition – Uniswap’s battle with SushiSwap heats up as the former dropped the UNI governance token in what some likened to a crypto stimulus check  The Fed has no clothes – After another FOMC meeting of “nothing new,” the mirage of Federal Reserve omnipotence is fading TikTok and WeChat banned from U.S. app stores – Is it just a negoti...

MicroStrategy made waves when it announced in early August it was moving $500,000,000 in treasury reserves out of cash. At least $250 million were to be moved into bitcoin.  Earlier this week, the company announced its final bitcoin purchases totaled $425 million.  In this conversation with NLW, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor explains: Why he’s always treated the company with a long time horizon...

Raoul Pal is CEO and co-founder of Real Vision, a platform fundamentally disrupting macroeconomics and financial media.  In this wide-ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss:  Hot takes on the most recent Jerome Powell/Federal Reserve press conference Why central banks can’t do anything more until they merge with treasury departments  Why stablecoins are disrupting how we think about global reser...

Today on the Brief: Kraken is the first crypto exchange to become a U.S. bank FTC preparing antitrust lawsuit against Facebook Gold-standard fan Judy Shelton doesn’t have the votes to be confirmed as Federal Reserve governor  Our main discussion: The battle for the soul of finance.  In this episode, NLW looks at the power competition between governments on the one hand and the decentralized networ...

Today on the Brief: MicroStrategy increases its bitcoin reserves by $175 million  The Oracle-TikTok deal starts to smell fishy The SEC is investigating claims of fraud involving Nikola Corp. Our main discussion: The rise of zombie firms.  A zombie firm is a company that can’t afford to service its debt from operating income. These companies are made possible by artificially low interest rates, and...

Today on the Brief: Crypto exchange volume sees highest month-over-month increase since February 2018 Uniswap overtakes SushiSwap in total value locked What Coinbase vs. Apple means for the future of decentralized applications Our main discussion: NLW looks at the business of geopolitical competition, including: TikTok, Oracle and the new politics of deal making in the “new Cold War” “Mulan” contr...

On this week’s Long Reads Sunday, NLW looks at recent statistics suggesting that, based on a comprehensive set of measures of well-being, U.S. citizens are worse off than they were a decade ago.  One potential explanation is the U.S.’ “USD Dutch Disease” - a peculiar set of consequences resulting from the role of the U.S. dollar in the world.  This week’s reading is “How to Diagnose Your Own Dutch...

On this edition of the Breakdown Weekly Recap, NLW looks at: The “holding pattern economy” – why stocks, jobs and central bank policy seem stuck in place Why Joe Biden’s China plan shows that, no matter who wins the presidential election, U.S. economic policy towards China is likely to get more aggressive The surveillance state gets stronger as Amazon appoints a former NSA head to its board of dir...