The Breakdown

The latest Long Read is "Crypto Dollars and the Evolution of Eurodollar Banking" by Avi Felman and Max Bronstein.  This piece covers: The Dollar Milkshake Theory Why the demand for the US dollar remains so high  Why demand for dollars is increasing rather than decreasing  What "eurodollars" are What the shadow banking system is How eurodollars and shadow banking contribute to USD demand How stable...

As states shutter economic activity because of preventable COVID-19 outbreaks, it’s deja vu all over again.  This is a movie we’ve seen before: Rise in what could have been preventable COVID-19 cases A call for shutdowns (plus voluntary closures) Rampant politicization of health and economic issues rather than common sense approaches Persistent jobless claims plus new layoffs  Wall Street nerves t...

Today on the Brief: A consumer spending rebound A new crypto regulatory regime in Europe A bitcoin warning from a famed investor Our main discussion:  Tuur Demeester is the managing partner of Adamant Capital, a bitcoin investment firm that earlier this year published “The Bitcoin Reformation.”  In this conversation, he and NLW discuss: The four preconditions for a reformation, and how they apply...

Today’s edition of The Breakdown is an extended version of the Brief, this time covering five topics. New Jobless claims - sticking stubbornly at ~1.5 million new claims per week, despite economist expectations  The “whack-a-mole” economy - Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers predicts as much as 30% of the economy may need to close to get COVID-19 under control PlusToken scam pressure on BT...

The economy is nothing if not confounding right now.  Across every domain, from real estate to oil to retail, there are bull signals and bear signals.  In this episode, NLW looks at those signals in the following areas: Markets - strong stock recovery vs. growth in cash deposits Employment - growth in jobs vs. persistent continuing jobless claims Retail - growth in foot traffic vs. demand destruct...

Today on the Brief: PayPal and Venmo reportedly adding crypto buying and selling Trump executive order temporarily suspends H1-B visa program Continued growth in bitcoin derivatives Our main conversation: Tracy Shuchart is an oil- and commodities-focused trader in the private equity space known for her wide-ranging insights on financial Twitter (FinTwit).  In this conversation, she and NLW discuss...

Today on the Brief: New Federal Reserve research suggests reaction to Facebook’s Libra basket approach was overblown Italian Banking Association pushing to test a digital euro U.S. housing has worst month since 2010 Our main conversation: Earlier this month, Messari hosted the Mainnet virtual summit. At that event, NLW moderated a session called “Macro Investors Sound Off!” featuring BlockTower Ca...

A reading of two pieces How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Money Printer by Jill Carlson | CoinDesk + Fight the Fed Jesse Felder | The Felder Report 

The big narrative in financial media for the last few weeks has been the insurgent Robinhood rally, led by the AC/DC-blaring Pied Piper Dave Portnoy, owner of Davey Day Trader Global Global (DDTG Global).  As people try to make sense of the strange retail trading phenomenon, one perspective is the participants (average age of 31 on Robinhood) are reacting to a market that has left them behind. In...

Today on the Brief: FTX lists two Compound tokens Reddit partners with Ethereum Foundation on Layer 2 scaling Black-In Freedom Festival reimagines Juneteenth Our main topic:  Dr. Vikram Mansharamani is a lecturer at Harvard and author of “Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst” as well as the just released “Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Ar...

Today on the Brief:  Powell says private companies shouldn’t be involved in Central Bank Digital Currencies According to former NSA head John Bolton, Trump told Mnuchin to go after Bitcoin Interest around Compound driving speculation around a DeFi-driven bull run  Our main topic:  This week’s U.S. jobless report brought bad news. Whereas economists had expected new claims to fall to 1.29 million f...

On the Brief: Big tech vs. the American political right and left Why TikTok users are pretending to love China for clout Decentralizing venture capital  Our main conversation: The Crypto Dog is one of crypto Twitter’s best known characters. In this conversation, he and NLW discuss: Mining bitcoin in 2011 The difficulty of hodling across a decade The emergence of the crypto trader in the Ethereum e...

Today on The Brief: An unexpectedly good retail sales report drives market confidence  Are we in for a second wave of white-collar layoffs?  The latest rumblings in central bank digital currencies Our main conversation: Jesse Felder is an independent financial analyst and one of the best financial curators on Twitter.  In this wide ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss: The Robinhood rally and...

Today on the Brief: Stocks down on coronavirus fears Demand destruction The looming retirement crisis Our main theme:  Bitcoin is up more than 30% on the year. After a crash alongside equities, it has proved incredibly resilient. There are famous new entrants to the space like Paul Tudor Jones II.  So how can a Bloomberg editor argue the year has been bad for bitcoin?  In this response podcast, NL...

After a week where bankrupt Hertz pumped 890%, the question is: what is the historical precedent?  Luckily, we have finance history guy Jamie Catherwood to fill us in. In this essay "Rubbish Rallies" (written by Jamie, read by NLW), Catherwood tells the story of an 1820s scam that turned into an 1860s market mania - even though everyone knew it had been a scam the first go around.  History might n...

The stock market has long been disconnected from the underlying economy, but much of what happened this week - particularly the pumping of bankrupt company stocks - suggests that something new is afoot.  In this episode, NLW breaks down three long-term trends suggested by the so-called Robinhood Rally, including: The “insurgency” aspect of a generation of young professionals who are willing to pla...

Today on the Brief: Why bitcoin sold off A bank-the-unbanked narrative for the digital dollar It’s Dave Portnoy’s world and we’re all just living in it Today’s main topic: Why inflation isn’t the only bitcoin narrative that matters. When bitcoin’s halving coincided with the most aggressive central bank policy of all time, it set a clear narrative framework for bitcoin as an inflationary hedge. Thi...

Today on the Brief: Three Arrows holds more than 6% of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust New platform for censorship-resistant blogging Coinbase announces new token potentials as anti-surveillance hodlers flood out  Today’s main topic: Why the Fed keeps denying its role in inequality  Some key takeaways from yesterday’s Federal Open Markets Committee meeting: Interest rates are likely to stay near zero thro...

Today on the Brief: A record week for peer-to-peer exchanges in the developing world A digital dollar gets discussed in Congress  Previewing the Federal Reserve’s FOMC guidance  Our main topic: A brainstorm on digital property rights Here’s a radical idea. What if by virtue of the fact that you had put so much time and effort into building a following on social media and filling that following wit...

Today on the Brief: Saudi Arabia injects $13 billion in bank liquidity via blockchain. China’s state TV CCTV says Binance is still allowing crypto trading in China. MakerDAO community greenlights real world collateral.  Our main topic: The “Robinhood Revolution.”  The next time someone tells you crypto markets are too irrational or volatile, point them to stock markets right now. The largest 50-da...

On today’s episode of The Breakdown, we introduce the Breakdown Brief - a look at three key topics in bitcoin and crypto. Today, the Brief covers: Brave browsers auto adding ref links to Binance.us  The disconnect between Wall Street and crypto when it comes to inflation expectations A 2018 Pentagon war game including bitcoin  Our featured interview is with Jake Hanrahan, founder of Popular Front...

The Breakdown Weekly Recap looks at the key themes that shaped the week. On this week’s episode, NLW discusses: The modern significance of Tiananmen Square, and why this week’s U.S. protests show why the tools of surveillance need to be applied to states, not citizens. The importance of “narrative violations,” or fighting to see things without falling into popular but often wrong conventional wisd...

The U.S.-China relationship has an outsized impact on global economics and politics. As that relationship comes even more into focus in the wake of COVID-19 and a return of trade tensions, this episode provides a historical primer.  Graham Webster is editor-in-chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center. He’s also a China digital economy fello...

The conventional wisdom is that central banks are the most important economic actors in the world. Markets hang on their every word.  Yet, what if that power has less to do with actual monetary policy and more to do with how the performance of that policy creates a self-fulfilling prophecy as market actors respond to media coverage? Jeff Snider is the head of global research at Alhambra Investment...

Every day that protests continue and the stock market goes up, more people ask what the disconnect between markets and the real economy is. In this episode of The Breakdown, NLW peels back the story of today’s economy by looking at five numbers: The growth of the S&P500 since the March 23 low Current unemployment stats and a Bloomberg Economics estimate of the number of jobs at risk The performanc...