Between the Lies Podcast

Kroger just lost $12 billion in sales to Amazon and Walmart, and it's not because they lost touch with their customers. It's because 700,000 lower-income shoppers made 30 million fewer trips to the store this year, priced out by a cost of living crisis nobody wants to put a real number on. I sit down with Luke Tatum from Perfect Spiral Capital to dig into why Kroger, Target, and Aldi are all scram...

Luke Tatum is back, and Rob Brayton and I are trying out a new roundtable format, grab bag of news, see what's falling off the wheels this week. Top of the list: the Treasury just doubled its bond buybacks trying to prop up bond prices, and it barely moved the needle, all while the market's pricing in a 60% chance the Fed hikes rates anyway. Then we get into the story that actually stopped us cold...

Real estate investor Sean Wantulok built his way up from $475 in the red every month to running a car wash, a duplex, a tax lien portfolio, and an ATM route, all while treating his life insurance policy like the smallest banking experiment he could get away with. In this IBC IRL conversation, Brian Pritchard and Luke Tatum sit down with Sean to talk about the plateau that pushed him into real esta...

Nvidia doesn't have a demand problem, or so they'd have you believe. This week Rob Brayton and I dig into the news that Nvidia wants Wall Street to build out a $500 billion financing ecosystem so its own customers can afford to keep buying its chips. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are the names attached to it, and the pitch is that AI compute should be treated li...

For thirty years, the smartest money in the world ran the same play: borrow yen for basically nothing, dump it into something that pays more than nothing, repeat. It's not a scandal. It's arbitrage. But arbitrage built on a central bank promise is still just a promise, and last week that promise cracked. This week Rob Brayton and I get into the yen carry trade, what it actually is, how it survived...

Two Yahoo Finance articles dropped this week, both built around the same number: $100,000. One says you can ease off the gas once you hit it. The other tells you what to do with it, pay off debt, build an emergency fund, start a sinking fund, max your retirement contributions. Rob Brayton and I go line by line through both, and honestly, it didn't take long to figure out why this advice keeps peop...

I love when we get to do these "in real life" episodes, because it's easy to nod along to Luke and Rob talk theory every week, but it hits different when you hear an actual guy in Springfield, Missouri tell you he used his policy loan to take down a dying maple tree and then buy his way out of the worst financial decision of his life, a leased Honda Pilot.   This one's a conversation between Brian...

Gold's always king, right? Except right now, China might be trying to prove that most of the "gold" the world thinks it owns doesn't actually exist in a vault anywhere. This week Luke, Rob, and I dig into a video from Tom Bilyeu that got all three of us talking about what China's been quietly doing with its gold reserves, and why it should matter to you even if you've never bought an ounce of it i...

Most people only know two roles in banking: depositor and borrower. But there are actually five key roles — and the people who understand all of them keep way more of the profit. In this episode, Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton break down the five roles involved in the banking process (depositor, borrower, lender, banker, and bank owner) and show you how to move from being a customer to taking control...

Elon Musk just became the richest person in the world by a margin that's hard to even process. $1.1 trillion in personal net worth. Jeff Bezos is sitting at a distant $240-something billion looking like a participation trophy. And the thing that pushed Elon over the edge? SpaceX going public. Now, the internet had its predictable response. Half the world wanted to know why he doesn't just give it...

You ever wonder why the dollar hasn't collapsed yet, even though by every reasonable Austrian economics metric, it should have?   Rob and I spent this episode pulling apart the answer, and it comes in the form of a stablecoin launched by SoFi Bank. Here's the short version: SoFi just rolled out a dollar-pegged stablecoin under the framework opened by the Genius Act. It's backed one-to-one by US Tr...

So here's an embarrassing confession to kick things off: I host a financial podcast, I've talked about yield curves, I've connected bond markets to recession indicators, I've done the whole thing, and I still couldn't tell you what a bond actually was in plain English. Rob Brayton fixed that real quick. And it turns out, once you understand the basics, the current situation gets way more interesti...

You know what's great about cheap energy? Everything. Literally everything gets cheaper, food, travel, starting a business, going on tour with your band. You know what's not great? When a war we didn't have to start keeps gas prices elevated long enough that you start doing the math on whether it's worth visiting your family this summer. That's where we are in Episode 036. Luke, Rob, and I dig int...

I'm going to level with you. The numbers we talked about this week genuinely made me stop and stare. The University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index, which they've been tracking for 74 years, just hit 47.6. That's lower than where it was during the 2008 crash. Lower than COVID. The all-time high was 110.1 back in Y2K when everyone was eating brownies and convinced the world was about to end...

The SEC Chair walks in with 54 life insurance policies, and the internet collectively loses its mind. Yahoo Finance, Forbes, Fortune, they're all writing the same hit piece with the same confused energy: "Why would anyone do that?" Yeah. Why would anyone do that. This week Luke, Rob, and I dig into the Paul Atkins disclosure story, and honestly, it's one of those moments where the establishment do...

Remember when The Circle came out and everyone kind of laughed it off? A social media company that just… becomes the government? Cute little dystopian fiction. Yeah. Elon Musk is pushing X toward full "everything app" status, payments, savings accounts, a Visa partnership, money on deposit. It's being sold as convenience. And it probably will be convenient. That's kind of the problem. This week Lu...

There's a move they run every single quarter and it works every time. Some government agency throws out an economic number. It's good. It makes the front page. The world moves on. Then a month later, quietly, that number gets revised down. Then revised again. And by the time the truth shows up, it's page 63 of a policy wonk newsletter that three people read. This week on Between The Lies, Luke, Ro...

They gave it a name. A fancy, Hollywood-sounding name. The Magnificent Seven. Once again reality does it's level best to ape fiction. Welcome back to Between The Lies. I'm Nicky P, here with Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton from Perfect Spiral Capital, and this week we're talking about the seven largest stocks in the S&P 500 — Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple — and why every s...

You've probably been hearing the word "stagflation" thrown around a lot lately and thinking — I have no idea what that means. Don't worry. Neither did I exactly. So I asked my experts.   Short version: prices go up, jobs disappear, and the economy stops growing. All at the same time. Fun stuff.   The reason this word keeps popping up right now is that we're already living in an economy that's been...

You know that feeling when you're watching a movie and you already know exactly how it ends, but you can't look away anyway? That's basically every episode of this show. And Episode 029 is no different. We're talking about private credit — the $2 to $3.5 trillion shadow lending market that most people have never heard of. Stack on private equity (another $8-10 trillion globally), then add in the i...

War. Who is it good for? If you answered "Raytheon shareholders and K Street lobbyists," congratulations — you're paying attention.   This week on Between The Lies, Luke Tatum, Rob Brayton, and I dug into the economics of war and why the "war is good for the economy" argument is one of the most persistent lies in mainstream financial thinking. With another Middle Eastern conflict dominating headli...

Blue Owl Capital just told its investors "just kidding" about being able to get their money back. If you missed it, they halted redemptions on their private equity shares. Permanently. As in, you thought that was your money, but it turns out it was their money the whole time.   Welcome to the world of non-depository financial institutions — what Luke calls NDFIs, what we call No Diffys. These are...

Rob spent the weekend with some of the sharpest long-range thinkers in finance and came back with something worth unpacking.   Welcome to Between The Lies, where Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton from Perfect Spiral Capital help me make sense of a world that keeps trying to pick your pocket while telling you it's doing you a favor. This week, Rob attended the annual Nelson Nash Institute Think Tank for t...

As we prepare for the Fed to change leadership, I'm reminded that Trump might be the worst person in the world at making political appointments. Welcome to Episode 025 of Between The Lies, where Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton from Perfect Spiral Capital help me understand why Kevin Warsh - Trump's likely pick to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair - represents everything wrong with our monetary system....

Silver and gold going up simultaneously should tell you something about your dollar.   Nothing good to my mind.   Welcome to Between The Lies, where Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton from Perfect Spiral Capital help me understand what it means when precious metals hit all-time highs while everyone's celebrating stock market records. Spoiler: It's not about gold getting more valuable.   What We Cover: Gre...