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Crypto Crash Worsens As White House Calls Tariff Pause Fake News
Recorded: April 7, 2025 Duration: 1:48:25Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto experts analyzed the potential for Bitcoin to recover from recent losses, with price targets reaching as high as $175,000 by 2025. The conversation highlighted the impact of macroeconomic factors, including tariffs and regulatory clarity for stablecoins, on the crypto market's growth trajectory.
Full Transcription
I'm going to go the egg on the egg.
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I'm going to put to the next video. I'm going to go to the next video. I'm going to go to the next video.
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I'm going to go to the next video.
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I'm going to go to the next video. I'm going to go to the next video. so
GM and welcome everybody into another edition of Coinage.
I'm your host, Zach Luzman, coming to you live from our Brooklyn studios here in New York City as we are watching potentially a bottom forming right now.
Don't want to get ahead of myself, but it does seem that way as we're watching Bitcoin pop off of that $74,000 level and head back towards $80K, which is pretty insane when you think about just a minute ago we were looking at about 16% year-to-date losses for Bitcoin and obviously still in the red, but potentially important bottoms to discuss today and very happy to have on with us.
None other than the guests who's been right more often than not with $175,000 price target
still in play for 2025.
Want to welcome back on coinage Sean Farrell, Fundstrat's head of digital asset strategy.
Sean, good to see you again, man.
And important, I think, to maybe just put all of these moves in context because you
were out there again. Maybe we should have shouted this a bit last week in terms of your
move to stables, really telling people to, hey, be cautious as we go through this chop
around tariffs. But what do you see right now and potentially maybe if we are indeed out of
the woods here as Bitcoin just did cross back above ADK.
Yeah, look, just to recap our views, I think we turned pretty cautious, somewhat cautious in early Feb. Didn't think it was a good time to be adding risks, raised some stable coins in our core
strategy portfolio. And then we're mostly Bitcoin the rest and then following the Rose Garden
mostly Bitcoin and the rest. And then following the Rose Garden interview in which we had the
announcement of the tariffs with the whole poster board and whatnot, it was pretty clear to us that
we were going to move into, the market was pretty shell-shocked by the levels and that it was right
to move to cash and wait for some better buying opportunities.
But fast forward to today,
and I think I'm trying to peek
at headlines right now on Twitter,
but it looks like we might actually be getting
some rumblings of some concessions from the admin.
I think I'm not super surprised to see this at this point.
If you looked at the terminal this morning, you know, you had, you know, spooze crashing another 3%, the largest three-day decline, I think, since the Great statistic. You had the dollar moving lower, but then you had long-term yields actually
moving higher. So the 10-year was actually selling off. And I think if you step back and look at that
picture, it's very akin to something like an emerging market. And it flies in the face of
what Besant and Trump are trying to accomplish with long term yields.
And I think that was the market trying to bring the admin not necessarily to its dees, but perhaps just, you know, slow their role as it pertains to their tariff approach.
And that could be what we're seeing right now. And look if vix over 50 uh high yield was bid today
um and we finally you know retested for bitcoin specifically we retested that old all-time high
range uh the one we had the one we reached back in in march 24 or so well it looks like
all right i think to your point it does seem
that we are seeing um trump's top economic advisor kevin hassett coming out and saying that what we
saw a lot of people call for over the weekend does indeed to be now kind of the direction that the
president is moving in which is a 90-day pause for tariffs in all countries except for china
and that seems to be what has completely swung the markets today, as we see now the NASDAQ up more than 3%. And of course, Bitcoin and the rest of crypto moving in tandem.
But I do think that that's interesting, because given what we saw over the weekend, it was a
who's who of hedge funds and the finance world coming out. You had Bill Ackman, I think we have
this chart of just kind of where he's been, obviously famously going on
CNBC. The Bill Ackman crash out seems to be a bottom indicator across the board. You had Lloyd
Blankfein also coming out and saying, look, we got to hit pause on this. And he was saying,
take the victory lap on what you did for tariffs so far. So, I mean, when you put everyone together,
it did seem like there was this kind of Trump contingent on Wall Street forming saying, look, postpone these
or give us a 90 day window to just pause. A lot of people were calling for that. What do you make
of, I guess, now, if this is the case, what that would do if we did have a 90 day pause? Because
it doesn't necessarily, I mean, you could reintroduce a lot of this volatility again,
just kicking the can down the road. But what says Sean Farrell?
Yeah. And look, the biggest risk is what's
going to happen with businesses if this just keeps getting, you know, this can just keeps
getting kicked down the road. Because if you look at like the recent ISM reports, and business
surveys, there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of capital being withheld from investment
due to all of the policy uncertainty. And, you know,
people don't want to invest in supply chains right now if they're going to have to be completely
reconfigured in a matter of months. And so that is still a risk to the economy. Now, I don't know
the specifics of this 90-day deferral, whether there's other potential agreements that have been made
with certain contingencies. But I think it's important to realize that the longer this goes
on, the more deleterious effects it could have on the underlying economy, which could affect
risk appetite and ultimately will be very constructive for Bitcoin.
But as correlations increase, as risk appetite decreases,
certainly in the short term, that could have a negative effect.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I guess-
In the short term, sorry, just to round that out.
In the very tactical short term, it's clear that the market is viewing this as
terrorists being rolled back.
And that, I mean, that should lead to some upward price action here.
Yeah, no, definitely.
I mean, seeing that play out.
But I guess if you move from the immediate short term,
which is literally, I think, second by second as we're speaking here
in terms of where we've seen price move.
But if you extrapolate that over, let's just say President Trump goes through with it
and you've got a 90-day kind of relief window, if you want to call it that. I mean, I'm bringing up the Lloyd
Blankfein tweet right now, but it's because, you know, he was called for six months, actually,
is what I was looking at. It was not just 90 days. So technically, 90 days would be even lower than
that. But I mean, I guess the idea there, Sean, would be, okay, a lot of people have been talking
about it, including you. It's like things to watch are interest rates on the 10 year where we're at, where the dollar is at and this idea of the Fed.
And when are they going to blink? And I think that that's been kind of one of these interesting dynamics, too, because we heard from Jay Powell on Friday basically saying, look, we're in no rush and let's wait and see what happens.
And I guess good thing they did. But I would take that to mean if Trump is going to move 90 days out, that he's the one who blinked first, not Jay Powell,
because Jay Powell had his chance and maybe got close. I don't know. But it doesn't seem that
he's going to be the one blinking. So what do you make of that if it is the case that, okay,
maybe if Trump backs down, that means interest rates don't come down necessarily by the Fed's
move.
And then maybe that's not as good for Bitcoin anymore. So how do you see this shaping up as someone who still has, I think, if you haven't changed it, $175,000 price target for the end of
the year? Yeah, look, I think that, you know, first the Fed. So the Fed just has no motivation right now to blink, right? I mean, we've had some cooler than expected PC prints. They've stated that they're unsure about how they want to handle stagflation, or rather potential stagflation from tariffs.
Um, you know, and if you step back and think about inflation, ultimately, you know, I think
that any weakness derived from this ongoing trade war will end up doing Powell's job.
And so I just don't see unless there's some kind of credit event, or, you know, we see
spreads start to really gain some steam, and there's a concern about the stability within
the banking system, I don't see concern about the stability within the banking system.
I don't see anything moving the needle for the Fed. And then what were your other questions?
Well, the idea of where we go, because I feel like, I don't know, I don't think anyone had
necessarily on their docket such a tough start to the year. I mean, some people expected a bit of a pullback and then some people expected maybe some jitters around tariffs.
But how do you kind of put, how do we, I guess it's a simple question, really. How do you see
us getting from just back above 80K on Bitcoin to 175 if kind of these dynamics of Trump versus
Powell are going to continue through the year
yeah look i mean we offer a pretty uh real-time up-to-date research service in which we're constantly updating our views and and certainly we like to put out price targets and um you know
like to be accurate around them but i think those real-time insights are probably a little more
I think those real-time insights are probably a little more important than price targets.
And I think right now I'm really focused on where we find some longer-term support.
And then I'll probably start to worry about level of upside later.
I think you mentioned there's a lot of moving pieces right now.
And there's a lot of ways that this could play out.
And it's really going to come down to whether deals are reached and how long it takes for the deals to be reached.
And, you know, I do think long term and what long term means here, you know, I'm unsure of.
And what long term means here, you know, I'm unsure of, but, you know, for a timeframe greater than, say, three months, I think that this whole trade war debacle has, you know, created a pretty, a pretty great environment and a pretty great bull case for crypto going forward. I think if you assume that Trump is going to
find a way to achieve some kind of Mar-a-Lago accord with all of our trading partners,
and we do balance trade, it's going to require a weaker dollar. And it's probably going to end up
probably going to require a scenario in which the US
dollar is less central to global trade.
And so that would be a great environment for Bitcoin and crypto to succeed.
And if, you know, they don't reach a deal, it's likely that all of this, you know, all
of this, you know, debating over trade and stopping and starting within
the economy is going to lead to some kind of slowdown, which will eventually result
in some kind of need for stimulus.
And as we all know, that is also a great environment for Bitcoin.
So it's really, you know, we just have to navigate through this morass over the next,
you know, two or three months, however long it takes.
But ultimately, I think on the other side of it, it's going to be a good environment for crypto.
Well, I think, I mean, it's complicated because, of course, you know, as you've covered and as
Fundstract covered, and again, shout out to the work you guys did because you did kind of predict
some of these moves in terms of you looked at Bitcoin implied volatility. I think that's the
metric that BVIV technically correlates to.
And, or correct me if I'm wrong, perhaps options volatility.
But you did see that and you predicted a move of either 15% to the downside or upside.
We basically got exactly there in terms of where Bitcoin dropped to.
So again, I would reiterate what Sean's saying about Fundstrat's research and paying close attention in the chop. But now as we move through that, I just want to play a little bit of what we heard from Peter Navarro this morning on CNBC, because it did seem like,
and of course, this is going to be expected, as the guy who's the main tariff architect in the
Trump administration, I don't think he's going to back down because it's his thing. That's why he's
there. But it was very interesting to see even Elon Musk break with Peter Navarro publicly on Twitter, basically calling him an idiot,
or that he hasn't built anything over the weekend, which is pretty crazy to see.
But nonetheless, Peter Navarro was steady as she goes when it comes to trade and why they're doing
this this morning. Here's what Peter Navarro said. Now it sounds like President Trump might be
shifting a little bit away from it, but let's just play what we heard from him.
What I'm seeing, Joe, is a beautiful situation where we will hit 50,000 on the Dow, and we're going to have a broad-based recovery in the S&P 500.
The market's trying to find its bottom now.
The thing I would say to retail investors is don't get panicked out by all of this.
And what the president could have added to that fine truth was the fact that the biggest tax cut in American history,
the broadest base tax cut in American history, is coming within a matter of months.
So any discussion of recession seems silly when you factor that in. Plus, the Fed is not going to do its job,
but the long bond is doing it. We're lowering our oil prices, which is just amazing.
And here's the one other thing I want to say macro-wise, Joe, because look,
this is all about people worried about global recession. That's what they're worried about.
about people worried about global recession.
That's what they're worried about.
The restructuring that's gonna happen, Joe, globally,
is gonna start with China and Vietnam and Germany,
heavily export-dependent countries.
They're gonna have to engage significant fiscal stimulus
to reorient their economy.
So that thing is gonna go on.
And meantime, we're gonna boom here. We're gonna boom here, and I don't know if that's true or not,
because we don't know what the president's going to do with this 90-day thing.
So it's all very much up in the air, but we heard the same stuff from Trump on Truth Social 2.
Just want to say that he was out there basically saying the same thing we just heard from Navarro,
saying, look, don't panic.
The United States has a chance to do something that they should have done decades ago.
Don't be weak. Don't be stupid. Don't be a panicking, whatever panicking is. And then he goes on to define that a little bit. But Sean, in terms of why people
shouldn't be a panicking, again, I think just to reiterate the point here from from Navarro,
it does sound like they're still going to kind of chase some of this stuff. And so I don't think
correct me if I'm wrong, but I would be in the camp that we're not out of the woods it sounds like you might be saying that we could
be at a structural bottom i um i i would say that the mid 70s is probably a good place to take a
swing i do think that when the just to be clear too, not to cut you off, but it sounds like that's based mostly on the structural
idea of if we take a zoom out chart of a year, that that's
kind of like where we previously hit a top.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's clearly, there's likely an area
of support there, just broadly speaking. If we move it below that range, perhaps
it's, you know, we're probably entering a bit of no man's land. But yeah, look, to your point on
taking the admin seriously, I think that's been kind of the problem in markets over the past
couple of months is that, you know, Trump's been pretty adamant over his desire to balance trade. And he's said what he's going
to do and he's done it. And I think that's why, you know, there was a big catch up in the reaction
and equities now, you know, like, I mean, Navarro, what he just said regarding the long bond,
I think that I think that's kind of being proven false today, seeing the 10 year move higher.
I think, you know, 30 years moving higher.
So that's an interesting tidbit.
I also think it discounts the whole idea behind reordering global trade and what that means for U.S. equities. I think, you know, for better, for worse, you could argue that
you could argue that a big portion of US equity multiple expansion over the past couple of
decades has been due to policy steadiness and, you know,, an unspoken deal between, um, companies and policymakers around fiscal policy
and trade policy. And if that is reworked in some dramatic fashion, it probably does
necessitate a re-rating of multiples, you know, just from a high level perspective. And obviously due to increased
costs, you know, assuming that there are, you know, large tariffs put in place, you
know, it's going to change margins around quite a bit. And so, you know, I don't know
if it's the way that they're proposing it as just hold on and then it's back to business as usual after.
I'm not sure if that completely syncs.
Those two ideas sync with each other.
I know it doesn't have much to do with crypto, but it's kind of where my head's at.
We're in this world now where a lot of the crypto moves have nothing to do with crypto, which I think is very weird. But there is one
that might be related, which was, of course, what we saw play out today, which was strategy came out
and said, hey, look, we didn't buy. We weren't the buyers last week because they haven't bought
any Bitcoin in Q2 yet. And so I think that that's kind of interesting because you were talking about
it last week in terms of, well because you were talking about it last week
in terms of, well, everyone was talking about it last week in terms of this dislocation. Why is
Bitcoin still holding when markets are down? Uh, what is this decoupling we're seeing play out?
Could potentially crypto, could this be the shift we've all been waiting for that, uh, a flight to
safety is a flight to Bitcoin? Um, definitely not the case as we saw it play out later on Sunday,
but if you don't have strategy who was buying last week, you could say, okay, maybe there's beneficial, you know, still some dry powder there.
If Bitcoin recovers for Strategy to enter the market and provide enough gunpowder, so to speak, to shoot higher.
Or it could be that, you know, it was mostly buys from GameStop and some of the other companies.
I mean, How do you put
corporate buys back into the mix? That was our view last week. I suppose it does look like
strategy was not in the market, but our view is that the relative strength had a lot to do with,
A, it was probably partially due to a lot of risk
clearing before equities out of crypto, and B, due to corporate treasury TWOPs. And, you know,
I haven't looked at, looked for any press releases yet, but, you know, we know that GME, GameStop
raised, I think, $1.5 billion on Tuesday.
So it's likely that they were in the market last week.
And Marathon Digital, the Bitcoin miner, also had about $2 billion in dry powder that I would imagine, or potentially they deployed. That was at the market equity offering, so there's no defined timeframe for that. GameStop
was that capital was raised through the issuance of convertible notes. And so it's likely that
they wanted to deploy that capital immediately after that capital was raised. But it's likely
we, it's possible we had three to $4 billion in in uh you know dollar bids from corporates last
week but um yeah regardless it does look like that proved to be correct um as we did roll over last
night but uh well i just feel like because of the size the size of those buys is certainly like one
of those things if you look at crypto inflows and outflows,
which CoinShares' last report just showed,
actually not that crazy,
which again, I think we've had a few guests come on, Sean,
and say like, don't pay attention to inflows, outflows anymore
because too much shenanigans in terms of, you know,
whether you're playing these carry trades or whatever
don't really give you any indication one way or the other.
But I thought it was interesting to see kind of muted size to the downside
when it comes to outflows last week.
But one other thing, too, as we're seeing more headlines come out right now,
CNBC is saying no one at the White House is aware of that 90-day pause
we were just talking about.
So we are seeing a little bit of weakness come back
in terms of why we flipped back into
the red on the nasdaq right now so this is the volatility we're going to see play on i think
um right and that's actually a negative in and of itself right especially when you have
um such a reflexive asset that depends on a lot of momentum-based capital with all this headline
risk it's uh it's tough for people to get long and stay long in size when you have so much headline risk.
Yeah.
And I think, again, we're probably going to be stuck in this for a while.
But we are seeing kind of Ethereum now swing lower as well.
And I do want to ask you, because we talk so much about Bitcoin, but when you look beyond it, you know, for a while you've been pretty bearish relatively on ETH, been pretty
bullish relatively on Sol. I mean, I assume that, you know, since all these things have been so
correlated, you see that shop, that it would be more of the same in terms of what your advice
would be when it comes to Bitcoin, ETH, Sol, the rest of crypto. I see a lot of people talk on the
timeline about just kind of like a shift if you're in crypto, just wanting to move more towards Bitcoin or in your case, you know,
split between stables and Bitcoin. I mean, how do you kind of give the advice there if we are
expected to just continue with this job? I mean, my advice is just understand that Bitcoin is the new hurdle rate for assets more broadly.
But especially if you're in crypto, if you're holding an asset and you have a certain time
frame and you don't think that you're going to be able to outperform Bitcoin, you don't really have
a purpose behind holding that asset, unless it is you're holding that asset to use it, of course.
holding that asset, unless it is you're holding that asset to use it, of course.
And I think more of the crypto industry is starting to come around to that fact.
But and I think that's why you see more dialogue around just moving your whole portfolio into
Bitcoin. That's not necessarily what I would recommend, because there are opportunities
outside of Bitcoin, especially at
levels that I think are getting to be pretty close to value territory for a lot of these alts.
But I think just being conscious of what your hurdle rate is, is very important, whether you're a fund or if you're just a retail investor, understand your scoreboard.
Yeah, seeing that the Bitcoin dominance rise to 62 and continue to climb. I mean,
it wasn't too long ago that we had Pantera on the show talking about, I want to say December,
close of 24, about how altcoin season was upon us. And that has not played out at all.
Bitcoin season was upon us. And that has not played out at all. Because we have just constantly seen
anything beyond Bitcoin, including ETH, under pressure. I mean, I think I'm pretty sure we've
completely round tripped, Sean, in terms of the ETH BTC chart. I don't even want to bring it. It's
so ugly. I think if we bring it up right now, we'll be taking it. Yeah, it's brutal. I think
we're back to like 2019 levels now
yeah i mean look there's it's the market structure and crypto has changed uh especially this cycle i think a lot of inflows came in through bitcoin etfs and uh there were periods of you know the
tide lifting all the votes right uh because you know people do have allocation of bitcoin despite
what you know people might say uh people have allocation of Bitcoin, despite what people might say.
People have allocation of Bitcoin. So there was a wealth effect.
But you really saw limited amounts of new capital flow into crypto like you saw in prior cycles.
You know, you didn't have capital flowing into ETFs, rotate into, you know, X altcoin.
There weren't the same rotations.
And so that's why we've seen so much volatility and we really haven't seen really any altcoin
regain its Bitcoin pair all time high this cycle.
Well, I mean, when you put all the pieces together and it sounds like you were kind
of touching on something that became pretty evident to me over the weekend, too, just in terms of like the idea of the social contract that is like you
don't as president or the administration come in here and try and undercut markets the way that
we've seen this administration kind of do over the last few days and weeks around tariffs.
The Rose Garden is seemingly going to be one of those things that just kind of,
I think, will be a moment that everyone looks back on and hopefully things get better from there. But just the idea of the numbers being so much worse than, you know, everyone expected, including, it sounds like, Fundstrat 2.
But when you kind of fast forward, specifically for crypto, because I'm in this camp, Sean, it's very weird to see macro kind of deteriorate the way that it has.
But then think about everything that's happening from a regulatory perspective, setting up for Bitcoin and the rest of crypto to be in a kind of ideal spot, which is stablecoin bill and market infrastructure looking pretty healthy.
But if the rest of everything else in D.C. is on fire, then maybe that's not going to be the case the more we move through 2025.
Because who the hell cares about stablecoins if you've got whatever you've got playing out in D.C.?
It just seems like it'll slip down the priority list, but I could be wrong.
If it doesn't, how important is that?
Does it even matter anymore if you've got the rest of everything else in the shitter,
so to speak?
Sure, it matters.
Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, you know, if we get a sound market structure bill, I think
I mentioned this earlier, but the breaking of that social contract uh whether you
think the intention is good or not doesn't matter i think a lot more people you know around the world
are now uh questioning the sanctity of their relationship with the US and the US dollar and
I think imagining a world in which the US dollar is and US treasuries are less central to global
trade. And in that world, in that more multipolar setup, you know, a non sovereign neutral currency backed by a global network of ASICs,
I think becomes quite appetizing of a pitch. And, you know, beyond that, you know, beyond Bitcoin,
you have, you know, decentralized financial rails, payment rails, and applications that, you know,
can function and serve other jurisdictions. And I think all of that technology does well in this
environment that has increased multipolarity and decreased trust in that social contract,
so to speak. And so if you have that going on while, you know,
we're forging ahead with creating good market structure regulations and solid stable coin
regulations, I think, you know, that gives crypto the opportunity to step up and mature and become,
you know, a solution to a lot of the issues plaguing. That's the thing that's so interesting
to me, because it's almost as if and hear me out interesting to me because it's almost as if, and hear me
out on this, but it's almost as if, you know, everyone keeps saying Bitcoin was built for
this moment, right?
Like this idea of like, that's what we're here for is you can have incompetence in like,
by the way, I just need to bring this up because it is true that the White House has come out
in full throat and denied this idea of Trump considering that 90-day
pause that we just saw be the main result or the main cause of why we saw Bitcoin pop on this chart
and now giving it back. Let's shrink this chart down and let's refresh because we were at 78,
78.2. There we are now. Okay. So that's why we're seeing a little bit of it give back those gains
and it's going to be a long session today.
And of course, crypto never sleeps, so we won't stop at four.
But Sean, I mean, I guess that's kind of what I'm getting at, which is, if we're seeing this whipsaw, you hit on it just a little bit earlier, is that you can't have momentum form around these assets.
You can't have a trend of basically anything, and crypto moves that way.
can't have a trend of basically anything and crypto moves that way even though weirdly enough
we've evolved enough to where a lot of these fees or at least maybe there's less so now in ethereum
but it was the case that normally people would look at these blockchains as like oh they're
fee generating things revenue generators but i don't know i just don't understand how we how we
move forward if if we're going from one headline to the next,
in a matter of hours here,
it's like impossible to really see any bottom formation.
Yeah, look, I think that is tough to develop a trend, right?
It's tough to develop a trend in the environment,
but you could certainly find a viable bottom
to weight that headline volatility out. And I do think at some point, the market ends up
becoming somewhat numb to headlines. At some point, it'll just be clear that, hey, these negotiations have gone on
for too long to an extent that the businesses do not have a clear view into where and how much
they should invest, and the economy is going to decrease because of it. And we'll see assets react
and kind of ignore any headlines related to tariffs at that point, most likely.
Or in the other direction, perhaps the market becomes very certain that all tariffs will
be rolled back.
I don't know what would precede that, but sometimes the market ends up deciding in advance
of the headlines slowing down.
So that's something to keep an eye out for.
Well, we will be keeping an eye out on all that stuff.
And, of course, as always, appreciate you coming on to kind of keep us updated as well.
I know, you know, with all these moves, there's a lot on your schedule now.
So thank you for making the time, as always.
And I'll let you run to the next one.
But as always, appreciate you coming on here, Sean.
Great insights per usual.
We'll see if that bottom holds. You nailed the swing. Gotta say, you called the 74
again. So we'll follow your updates a little bit closer, because I think we owe that to the
Coinage community. I appreciate that, Zach. Always a pleasure being on the show. Thanks for having me.
Right on. Fundstrat's head there of digital asset strategy, Sean Farrell, friend of the show.
Genius, if you ask me. And as we continue to watch these moves play out, we're going to be
chatting with Vinny Lingham, former host of Shark Tank, on the show in a little bit of time. But
until we get to him, it's going to be a lot of chart movements on this show and a lot of recapping. What we're seeing play out in the Trump administration as infighting has become the norm.
We saw this on the idea of tariffs.
We heard from Peter Navarro.
We already played a little bit of what we heard from Trump's main architect on the tariff front just a moment ago, speaking with CNBC.
And right after he did that interview, it seems as if headlines on Twitter were circulating about the president hitting a 90-day pause for tariffs, which has now been refuted by the White House and saying that that is fake news, that Trump is sticking to.
Steady as she goes, not going to back down on tariffs.
And really, I think this did play out a little bit over the weekend.
So not a surprise to see that this is where we've gotten to.
That infighting here would potentially kind of start to divide not just Trump supporters, by the way, but also those within his administration.
And there are two points to hit on that.
One is Trump tariff architect Peter Navarro versus Elon Musk, and also those supporters
from outside his administration on Wall Street, such as Bill Ackman. I want to hit those. I guess
we'll go with Peter Navarro first, because that happened just this morning. So we'll start with
the news. And it really honestly started over the weekend because he had Elon Musk coming out and taking pot shots at Peter Navarro.
And of course, look, let me just be clear here. It's not the first time that we've seen this.
Right. We've seen infighting within the Trump administration before. So it's not as if, you know, we haven't seen it before, but particularly at this time when the U.S. needs to stay strong.
If you're playing this playbook, by the way, this isn't my call.
It's not as if it's my opinion.
This is just a fact.
If you get into a trade war like this, you need to present kind of a strong united front that you're not going to back down because this is the way that the deal works.
If you're going to bluff in a hand of poker, you got to follow through with the bluff.
poker, you got to follow through with the bluff. And if you give kind of any insight or inkling
that you're going to potentially back down, that kind of hurts your negotiating position.
And over the weekend, we saw this with Elon Musk coming out in, I think this was a speech with
Italy. We saw him speaking, saying that he called for the US and Europe to establish a zero tariff system
and free trade zone. That by itself, not a big problem. That's fine. The EU and the US were
going to need to figure something out. But what he did next is not necessarily fine. And that was
responding to someone and basically calling Peter Navarro an idiot, saying that it's bad that he has a PhD in econ from Harvard because it doesn't make him a genius.
Or specifically, as Elon Musk said, he ain't built shit, which is a pretty serious potshot at Peter Navarro, given that, you know, they're both technically supposed to be on the same team, Peter Navarro,
appearing on CNBC, responding to Elon Musk saying, look, everything's fine.
We're all one big happy family.
You be the judge.
Here's what Peter Navarro had to say this morning.
What do you tell Elon?
Why is he, if Elon's against him, he's so smart.
Andrew, again, let me finish.
Let me finish.
Let me finish here.
Let me finish here.
I'm just about to tell you.
I'm just about to tell you.
Look, Elon Musk and his Doge team is making a contribution to America in terms of waste, fraud, and abuse.
And that's a very good thing for this country and the American people.
When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House, and the American people understand, that Elon's a car manufacturer.
But he's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler in many cases.
If you go to his Texas plant, a good part of the engines that he gets, which in the EV case, is the batteries come from Japan and come from China.
The electronics come from Taiwan. The tires come. What we want,
and the difference is in our thinking and Elon's on this, is that we want the tires made in Akron.
We want the transmissions made in Indianapolis. We want the engines made in Flint and Saginaw,
and we want the cars manufactured here. It's like this business model where BMW and
Mercedes come in to Spartansburg, South Carolina and have us assemble German engines and Austrian
transmissions. That doesn't work for America. It's bad for our economics. It's bad for our
national security. We want them to come here. And with Elon, it's fine. He's a car
man. He's a car person. That's what he does. And he wants the cheap foreign parts. And we understand
that. But we want him home. We want him home for our national security, economic security. And
everything's good with Elon. Everything's good with Elon. So nothing to see here. No worries
whatsoever. All one big happy family, according to Peter Navarro.
By the way, calling Elon Musk a car guy might be pretty crazy,
considering the fact that I don't even think Elon Musk himself calls himself a car guy.
It's like a tech company that is in a car, but it's not really, I think, fair to say Elon Musk is necessarily a car guy.
I get the point, by the way, in terms of what Peter Navarro is trying to say there.
I get the point, by the way, in terms of what Peter Navarro is trying to say there.
But I think the main important issue to focus on here is that, again, the pain is being felt by everybody.
It's clear that Trump is doubling down on the tripling down at this point.
Because, again, you might have expected, hey, look, things were shaping up to be pretty rough this morning.
Things are in the red.
We're going to see this be a problem.
And, Texas, I just
want to go to the other one that we saw from Trump on Truth Social, because he already told everybody
don't panic. But the other side of the equation is really, you know, staying with this and stay
the course. And again, not exactly a strong negotiating power to be in if you have Elon
Musk breaking from what Peter Navarro was saying
and trying to signal to the market. And that's what we saw from Trump this morning, trying to
again hit that drumbeat of, look, it's working. Everyone calm down. Everything's going according
to plan. Countries from all over the world are talking to us. Tough but fair parameters are
being set. Spoke to the Japanese prime minister this morning, sending a top team to negotiate.
They've treated the U.S. very poorly on trade. And I mean, if you think about all of this,
again, talking about cars here, if you think about all of this, this is the big gamble,
is can you put together people like this and have them stay the course when they have different
priorities to focus on? And if you're only Elon Musk,
this is one of the things that you're focusing on,
which is your stock year to date is off by about 40%.
You had Howard Lutnick, Trump's commerce secretary,
basically coming out a few weeks ago saying,
look, buy Tesla.
The stock's never going to be this cheap.
Well, guess what?
It's that cheap again.
And not only that, but also,
I mean, the ethical concerns
about the Trump Commerce
Secretary coming out and say, buy Tesla. Now you've got him pitted against Peter Navarro.
You got him saying he hasn't done shit on Twitter. So that is an invite that is hugely important
because it comes back to undermining what Trump is doing right now and the pain being felt by everybody. And so it's kind of on the one
hand, once you open this up, you're in it. And if you retreat, you're retreating to basically say,
look, you know, we did this, didn't work out, we're retreating, all that pain's been felt.
At the same time that basically China is there, also not backing down. And so this is the reason why I think it was so interesting
to see not just the infighting within the administration, but let's focus on those who
are outside the administration who have been supporters, basically pulling a 180. And again,
we return to hedge funder Bill Ackman as maybe the poster boy of all that playing out, because
I do believe we have a clip from him in December of 2024 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, basically singing the praises of what President Trump was about to do before we saw this.
What is it now?
Well, we're in bear market territory.
So basically a 20% collapse in the S&P 500.
And let's just reflect on where Bill Ackman was as Trump came
into office. Take a listen to what he said on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
But look, I think the overarching theme is President Trump will do nothing that interferes
with the success of the country, the success of the economy. That's absolutely his number,
other than our national defense. That's his number one issue. So I think he's been very
thoughtful about tariffs. You do?
I think it's a very powerful tool that can be used to level the playing field.
I think that's what he wants.
He wants a level playing field for the country.
Now, of course, keep in mind, Bill Ackman sang there. He wants a level playing field for the country.
Bill Ackman, I believe, also long Nike, which we've seen under pressure because of
all of the things that have happened with tariffs and the way that Nike has often also shifted
their manufacturing outside of China to the other countries around it, including Vietnam.
And that being one of the countries that now you have Peter Navarro saying even shifting to 0%
tariffs wouldn't be enough. They want to go after all of the other things, all the other shenanigans that are happening in trade that aren't good.
And this morning, very interesting to see Bill Ackman again tweeting about this and tweeting about exactly what I just said, which is getting into everyone's conflicting self-interest.
And this is the problem when you bring together a bunch of people that have conflicting self-interest.
And here's what Bill Ackman says.
It was unfair of me to lash out at Howard Lutnick, by the way.
Bill Ackman in prior tweets, I should explain this,
was just saying that Howard Lutnick is pursuing the strategy because he's long bonds.
So he wants equities stocks to go down.
And Bill Ackman basically called him out as pumping his own bags and being a part of this for that reason. But Bill Ackman apologizing. Unfair of me to lash it at Howard
Ludnick. I don't think he is pursuing a self-interest. I'm sure he's doing the best he
can for the country while representing the president as commerce secretary. And basically,
you have him backing down a little bit here too, which is interesting to think about.
And again, all of this is you have more people on
Wall Street coming out and saying, please, for the love of God, Trump, maybe think about hitting
the pause button. And you saw the way that markets reacted when those news, though those headlines
seemingly were incorrect to talk about a 90-day pause because the White House has now come out and denied those.
But nonetheless, the NASDAQ now, at least for now in this moment, swaying back into the green
slightly. And so when you put all those pieces together, I think what we've seen is the market
clearly indicating that they would love to see the Bill Ackmans of the world win out in these
kind of Trump-aligned slash Trump admin battles now playing out in public.
And by the way, what we've heard from almost everybody in the administration is like, look, here's my position, but it's up to the president.
You've heard that from the Treasury Secretary. You've heard it from the Commerce Secretary.
You've heard that basically from everybody, almost even including Peter Navarro.
And so basically the buck stops with President Trump,
but it all comes down to what he wants to do.
And it all comes down to whether or not you believe what he's saying publicly,
which again, some people don't,
that he doesn't care at all about the price in the stock market or in crypto.
Could potentially be true.
Could potentially not be true.
But when you think about all this,
this is the chart and where we're
at right now. And this is the one that matters for us, for people who are watching this show,
for people who are investing and trying to figure out where is the bottom. This is the chart that
matters right now. And if you think about 79K and where we're at on that chart, you just heard from
Sean Farrell basically saying that it's pretty good.
You heard from him saying, hey, look, this might be a buyable bottom here.
And I do think it is funny because a lot of people were expecting Black Monday in the markets,
including Jim Cramer basically saying he was expecting a huge, massive sell-off.
So far, and I do not want to jigs it. We're not exactly getting that today.
We aren't getting that. And you heard from Sean Farrell that 74 may have been the buyable bottom
here. Sean's been right. That's what he says. So there is that. The other piece that I want to
highlight too, because sometimes, you know, we focus so much on crypto prices. We focus so much
on the idea of, hey, we are over here, the rest of the market's over there, and we can focus on
what we do and they focus on what they do. And obviously that's been breaking down the whole
year. But one of the key pieces that we got into just then with Sean is this idea of who's going
to blink first. Is it going to be Trump or is it going to be Fed Chair Powell? And I think on that front, we heard from Jay Powell
on Friday. We took that live, the press conference at Cebu, by the way, which up there, we won a
Cebu award. It's out of frame. You can't see it, but it's right above our YouTube play button. So
award is on the shelf. So it's kind of cool to see Jay Powell speaking with Cebu because that's
our connection. But one of the
questions that is now pretty important is this idea of who's going to blink first, Jay Powell
or is it going to be Trump? And if you look at just, you know, again, this isn't scientific.
I'm not going to say that everyone should put credence on this because I think we don't have
that many responders to this one, but I will bring it up. And if you're watching this, let me link to it in the stream, because I think that it's an important one to get y'all's input on. And so if
you're watching this live, let me slap this in here and you can vote on it, but Texas, we can
bring this up and just show basically the question of who do we think is going to blink first. And
if you look at the results on this one, I guess, can I even vote?
I don't know if I can vote. I don't think I can vote. So you can't even see the results,
but I'll read them to you. Because right now it's essentially, it's 46.53. More people think
Powell's going to blink. And again, I just don't know who's right on that one. But I think that's what this comes down to. And
that's also why we haven't seen Trump back down yet. Because again, it hurts the negotiating
position if you ever kind of hint towards anyone at the table, that there is a crack in your trade talks, that there is a crack and that
you might back down. And so I don't think Trump's going to blink. And if Trump doesn't blink,
what does that mean for what Powell does? And let's talk about that because we've got some time
before we are joined by Vinnie Lingham, who's coming up next on Coinage, former Shark Tank host,
haven't had him on the show in a while. gonna be interesting to hear what vinnie lingam has to say because he was around when we saw um
all of the silicon valley bank problems back before which is another moment in time where
crypto and trad fi were extremely linked as we saw the potential collapse of silicon valley bank
um but one thing that i wanted to bring up is the idea of where
we go from here, because there's a lot of talk right now in terms of Main Street versus Wall
Street. And you could make the case, as a lot of people do, they're not necessarily linked all the
time. However, there is one arena where they do get linked, which is consumer sentiment and the
idea of some of this stuff becoming self-fulfilling. That is, of course, if people feel that things are moving in the wrong
direction, it does impact consumption. The economy is largely consumption-driven. And so if you have
people thinking we aren't moving in the right direction, things start to lock up. They don't
spend as much money. And then where are you left? You're left with a slowing economy. You're left with businesses cutting jobs. And you're left with a negative, vicious cycle. And that is
essentially where a lot of analysts are at. This is a note that Phil Rosen shared on Twitter
last night, looking at recession odds. And Goldman Sachs published this note, countdown to recession.
Essentially, lowering the GDP growth forecast to just almost break even at 0.5%.
And raising the 12-month recession probability from 35% to 45%, not necessarily as bullish,
or sorry, as bearish as J.P. Morgan was,
saying that I'm pretty sure J.P. Morgan said their base case was now moving towards a recession.
And essentially the same thing here from Goldman Sachs, saying,
in our current non-recession baseline, we expect the Fed to deliver a package of three consecutive 25 basis points
consecutive 25 basis points insurance cuts starting in June versus July previously.
insurance cuts starting in June versus July previously.
And essentially that if these April 9 tariffs do take effect, then they expect to change
their forecast to a recession, which is that part in the middle of the note.
And so it's pretty important.
This is why the market is swinging on the sentiment of, are we going to get this pause for 90 days or not? Because that's essentially the whole ballgame is where people are drawing the line in the sand of saying, look, if this goes through, if this goes forward, recession.
I think the drumbeat that we're hearing from Wall Street analysts is this is the line.
And again, I'll show this one again just because it's one that we brought up before.
But we are seeing that from a lot more people in terms of what they are saying.
It's not just the analysts themselves, but also it's the people who are kind of aligned with Trump or have been in terms of, you know, people on Wall Street that have supported him, not just Bill Ackman, but we've read this one off the top of the show, Lloyd Blankfein as well, as I bring this up.
And it's not too hard to connect the dots and see, OK, that's obviously why this matters and why Wall Street and Main Street are never necessarily completely unlinked.
Wall Street and Main Street are never necessarily completely unlinked because obviously recession, bad for Main Street.
Not great.
And, you know, a lot of this chatter keeps happening from like, I don't know who they are, TikTok financial analysts, perhaps.
But this idea of like, hey, we don't own stocks.
You know, there's 50% of America that doesn't own stocks.
And that may be true, but you don't need to own stocks to be impacted by there's 50% of America that doesn't own stocks. And that may be true,
but you don't need to own stocks to be impacted by what's happening right now.
And there's a lot of people saying, hey, look, this is gonna be great. Interest rates fall,
cheaper mortgages, you can buy a house. But you can't really buy a house if you don't have a job,
turns out, I don't think, especially if maybe, I don't know, you're out there like me, you got a big chunk of your net worth in crypto.
Can't buy a house if that's gone too.
So a lot of this stuff matters and a lot of it's important to keep eyes on to at least know the direction of kind of where these things are going.
And I'm just bringing this up one more time because I think it's important to just put a finer point on it.
This idea of not just Bill Ackman, not just Goldman Sachs, not just me, but also Lloyd Blankfein.
And now we've got it up.
Because he's calling for six months in a pause.
And that's not even like what we just saw flash on the screen which was 90 days that gave a little
bit of respite um so i don't know you could take that in two ways that could make you a little bit
more nervous because 90 days is certainly not six months and if the white house is saying we're not
even going to entertain the idea of 90 days.
Kind of makes you a little nervous, Texas.
I don't know if that makes you nervous.
I'll tell you what makes me nervous, and we'll play it again,
which was Navarro this morning speaking on CNBC.
We played you the clip just now of Elon Musk and Navarro's thoughts on that infighting,
but I do just want to play again
what seems to be like the new talking points,
and I'm not sure if this will change day by day, but it does seem like the new talking points
for this morning, at least, and probably through the afternoon, which is steady as she goes,
don't panic. This plan is going to continue until everyone negotiates with us. And I'm sure at that
point, the Trump administration is going to come out and say, look, we won. And this is kind of
what we just saw.
And what I just showed from Lloyd Blankfein is there is a way off.
There's a way to de-escalate.
And there's a way to parade it around politically as a huge win and say, look, the plan worked.
We were able to negotiate all these great deals.
Sure, there was momentary pain, but it was worth it in the end because look at what is happening.
And that, I think, is what a lot of people want to see play out, but it's going to require
backing down.
And if you listen to what Peter Navarro said this morning, it doesn't sound like that's
going to happen.
Take a listen.
What I'm seeing, Joe, is a beautiful situation where we will hit 50,000 on the Dow and we're
going to have a broad-based
recovery in the S&P 500. The market's trying to find its bottom now. The thing I would say to
retail investors is don't get panicked out by all of this. And what the president could have added
to that fine truth was the fact that the biggest tax cut in American history, the broadest base
tax cut in American history, is coming within a matter of months.
So any discussion of recession seems silly when you factor that in.
Plus, the Fed is not going to do its job, but the long bond is doing it.
We're lowering our oil prices, which is just amazing. And here's the one other thing I
want to say macro-wise, Joe, because look, this is all about people worried about global recession.
That's what they're worried about. The restructuring that's going to happen, Joe, globally,
is going to start with China and Vietnam and Germany, heavily export-dependent countries. They're going to have to engage significant fiscal stimulus
to reorient their economy.
So that thing is going to go on.
In the meantime, we're going to boom here.
There's another thing to maybe highlight here too,
which is Peter Navarro mentioned oil prices there,
which I think is always interesting interesting because I don't know one of
those things that you kind of pair crypto with and Bitcoin being one of those
things is a commodity and oil obviously one of those very important commodities
at least you know until we get out of this idea of the real world and the metaverse, so to speak,
in terms of using Bitcoin and Ethereum as digital oil and digital gold, of course, as we all know.
And I think it's very interesting to think about some of those indicators.
And again, these are traditional market indicators.
We have to get
into this. We have to, because it's not always just crypto on Coinage, as you now know, if you've
been watching this show. And very interesting to see some data over the weekend as well from
Charlie talking about crude prices. And I don't think, just to again put a finer point on what
we just heard from Peter Navarro, the idea of oil coming down, I don't think, just to again put a finer point on what we just heard from Peter Navarro, the idea of oil coming down I don't think is the right thing to applaud. It will
certainly make input prices cheaper. But you could make the case that that was really because
OPEC Plus came out last week and put out a huge surge in production that cut prices.
a huge surge in production that cut prices.
That's mainly what's going on there.
And also, again, as Charlie highlights here,
oil prices falling Thursday to Friday of last week,
one of the biggest two-day declines in history.
In the past, big short-term declines have often coincided with recessions,
91, 2020, 08, 09, as you see some of these moves in oil prices and so again i think that that is important
to highlight just kind of given the idea of oil prices coming down um peter navarro using that
as perhaps one of the few things you just heard him say on uh on positives with where this trade
battle is at and you see there that they are linked to recessions.
And so I pair those points, perhaps as maybe you should, in the idea of kind of, you know,
if you just heard from Goldman Sachs saying that, look, we're raising our recession odds from 35%
to 45%. And you're looking at oil prices and what that has historically signaled.
Clearly the market's saying, we don't want this.
And politically, that is getting louder.
And so it does start to put some pressure on President Trump.
And we'll see which way he goes perhaps this week
as we see which way he wants to go, which, again, sounds like this is his call.
There's one last piece to this, which I think is also interesting, maybe the most interesting, if I really step back and think about it.
Because it's one thing to have Elon and Peter Navarro going at it.
I don't think that's surprising.
It's one thing to have Bill Ackman come out and change his position because stocks that he owns are going down.
But it's another thing to have when you got this and you have Ted Cruz, a man who no doubt has always been in President Trump's corner, at least for the last, I don't know, however many years.
But then you have this, which is Ted Cruz coming out and saying, hey, midterms are going to be a bloodbath if these tariffs trigger U.S. recession.
And again, maybe that's not a surprise.
I mean, if you think about it, President Trump got nominated and, sorry, got elected on the idea of inflation being a huge problem
and has now just moved to introduce a lot of things that are going to be inflationary and increasingly seen as a tax. And politically, that may have been fine at the
beginning, but with the markets in turmoil and everything collapsing, politically, very difficult
to push through. And maybe the most interesting break in terms of losing Elon support for Peter
Navarro, sure, one thing.
Again, Bill Ackman, Lloyd Blankfein, backing off because you got a lot of people saying,
look, this is going to lead to a recession, another thing.
Seeing Ted Cruz come out and say, yeah, this might be a bloodbath in the midterms.
That's a separate thing.
That's another thing.
That's a higher level thing, in my opinion.
And so the pressure is mounting. And I think it'd be fascinating to be inside these meetings.
And again, if you're the Fed, I almost just feel like you're sitting there and being like,
we're not going to do anything. We're not going to do jack shit. And I think we saw that play out on Friday. I wish we had a clip of what we saw. I should have cut that one.
That one would have been good to play here at this moment in time,
but it's too late now.
But I'll synthesize what we heard from Jay Powell
because we streamed it for you live on Coinitch.
But essentially, Jay Powell was saying,
look, we are in no rush to cut rates
because we've got to wait and see what the White House wants to do
with this can of worms that they have now opened.
And so I think that it's pretty interesting to see all of that play out now because we have no choice.
But you did hear from Sean Farrell, and you did hear him say that the important thing to watch will be stablecoins.
And I couldn't agree more because that's where we focus the majority of our time.
And we covered this with Paolo Arduino, the CEO of Tether, in a news story we just put out on coinage.media.
So I'd highly encourage everyone to check that one out.
We pushed it out as a newsletter over the weekend.
But increasingly, I mean, if, and this is a big if, because now you've got this
fraction happening, but if there was one bipartisan issue, and I say bipartisan because both Democrats
and Republicans have tried to push this through for years, and maybe, potentially, there could be
a rift between Democrats and Republicans, surprise, surprise, as it makes its way through the finish line. But it does seem like Democrats are willing to play ball on this point, even despite the fact
that we saw them just go for the jugular in the House Financial Services Committee back and forth,
which we'll play some clips of here. And I think the best one being Stephen Lynch,
the House member from Massachusetts, basically coming out and saying,
look, if we approve the stablecoin bill, it's going to open us up to the idea of a bailout.
And I think a lot of this is interesting. A lot of it's interesting because of what I just
mentioned, the Silicon Valley Bank. And we're going to have Vinnie Lingam on in a few moments
here on the show. And I just want to play this part because if you believe what we just heard
from Sean Farrell and you have stablecoins getting approved in D.C., let's just make the assumption that none of the tariff stuff is going to mess any of this up.
If you get them approved in D.C., that's a huge kind of trigger event to have billions of dollars come on chain.
Billions of dollars in additional capital, I should say, come on chain.
dollars in additional capital, I should say, come on, Shane. And depending on what institutions can
do with that, depending on what knock-on effects you have, let's just say everything turns in the
next couple of weeks, turns and Trump backs down on tariffs. And you've got a positive swing there,
plus stablecoins getting approved, plus potentially corporate buys coming from
strategy who was out of the market last week. I'm just saying there could be a positive setup here.
But listen to what we heard in terms of the warnings from Stephen Lynch in the House Financial Services Committee
as they debated the Stable Act to get stable coins approved in D.C.
Take a listen.
When we bailed them out back in 2023, they had the same exact model, one-to-one reserve with the
dollar as the reference currency. It failed. We haven't changed that dynamic. So based on all the
other stable coins that have failed and needed relief. We know this is going to happen again.
And yeah, the bailout will be required and Congress will support it.
Congress will support it because the economy will have crashed.
We saw that.
You know, it's history.
Those of us who were here recognize that danger.
You're a newer member. you didn't go through that
So I don't fault you for that
He was talking to Republican
French Hill, the chair of the Financial Services
Committee there, and of course
You know, this vote needs to happen
For it to become law
It'll go to President Trump's desk
And there's no reason to believe
That President Trump's going to have any problems with that
Because it'll support the creation Or at least allow him to move full steam ahead
with his stablecoin that he's launching in tandem with Binance's BNB chain, USD1. And so again,
I think it's one of those interesting pieces of legislation just in terms of kind of where we are at in 2025 and what it potentially could
signal for kind of where this industry goes and where capital formation goes, where some of these
liquidity flows go. And maybe as we mentioned liquidity flows, it might be worth bringing up
the coin shares chart again, just to dig a little bit more into what we were talking about before
we had Sean come on the show, which is where are we at in terms of institutional interest?
And surprise, surprise, that's dried up a little bit over the last couple weeks.
As you can see there, it's dried up basically all year in terms of the last few weeks.
And in this chart, I think the important thing to highlight is, again,
the only thing that really matters because liquidity has dropped so much is Bitcoin flows.
And in that, $207 million in outflows, leaving total inflows year to date still in the green at $1.3 billion.
So when you add those lines up, Bitcoin inflows, which is crazy to think about.
It's a pretty crazy thing about that, Texas.
$1.3 billion in Bitcoin ETF inflows on the year.
You wouldn't necessarily expect that, but that's the case.
And so maybe still a little baseline confidence when it comes to all these things,
potentially, in terms of the way that markets are looking at crypto.
It might not seem that way when you follow the day-to-day crypto. It might not seem that way when you
follow the day-to-day moves, but it does seem that way when you look at inflows.
So I'll say that much. But let's see. What else do we got here? I want to bring back the charts.
I want to get back over here to the price charts as we await Vinnie Lingham to come on the show
here. And of course, if you haven't
yet, if this is the first time you're tuning
in to Coinage, I want to
thank you for joining us here because
it'd be lonely if we were looking at these charts
alone here in the office today. But this is where
we sit. We got Bitcoin back below
80. 78
is the number. The jitters and the
swings. This is the main swing that we saw
play out.
75, which is in line with Sean Farrell's call of,
hey, look, this is what Bitcoin implied volatility is showing.
We could get back to 75.
And then from there, we had the news headlines this morning
that potentially we could see Trump give in
and have a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs
that he announced in the Rose Garden with that poster board.
The penguins were applauding.
The penguins were very happy.
The penguins said, please don't hit us with reciprocal tariffs.
And the market moved in tandem.
Unfortunately for the penguins and the rest of everyone else, turns out the White House says that that was fake news.
And so that's why we saw Bitcoin fall back below 80K.
And that's where we are now.
And that is why we continue to follow this minute by minute because who knows.
And the reason for that is, as we've explained, you kind of have no choice.
You've put yourself in this position to where you can't back down now.
What the hell are you going to do?
And so I think it's important to not just focus on Bitcoin, Texas.
We should also show Ethereum over here.
Why not?
Why not show people where we're at on that one, too?
Because obviously, again, as a DAO, it has a lot of our money here in coinage.
In Ethereum, this chart matters a bit for us.
Seeing Ethereum now at $15.54.
Earlier in the weekend and this morning, off to $14.30.
It's been a while.
Let's zoom out on this chart.
I mean, honestly, it's been a while to think about ETH and the $14 handle.
Sends a shiver down your goddamn spine when you think about that
because it wasn't too long ago.
In fact, it was earlier this year that we were up at 4K.
Not too long ago.
And so, again, all of these moves matter not just for TradFi,
but do certainly matter for where we go here on the crypto side.
I do want to, because we have a lot of people who are now just joining kind of on the stream,
and they probably would have missed this, but the back and forth between Trump's trade hawk side
and Trump's other side, shall we say, of his administration that wants to see some of this
change. I think it's fascinating. We touched on it a little bit after we said goodbye to Sean,
but I think it's important to highlight one more time because Vinnie Lingham is a man
who understands this as a South African, a man who comes from over there. He's been on Shark Tank and
been on a few different
shows. And he's in the tech world and he's in the crypto world. So Vinnie Lingham understands this.
I don't know if people like Peter Navarro necessarily understand it as well.
A PhD in economics from Harvard, which Elon Musk has bashed.
But I think we should play the Peter Navarro piece just one more time because we have a
lot of people who came on here who haven't watched this yet.
But Peter Navarro versus Elon Musk, I think, is one of the strangest battles that probably
a lot of people didn't have on their bingo card for 2025.
But it's playing out and it's playing out in public.
Let's just take a listen to what Peter Navarro said this morning on CNBC
when it came to him versus Elon Musk calling him a car guy.
Take a listen.
What do you tell Elon?
Why is he, if Elon's against us, he's so smart.
Andrew, again, let me finish.
Let me finish here.
I'm just about to tell you.
Look, Elon Musk and his Doge team is making a contribution to America in terms of waste, fraud, and abuse.
And that's a very good thing for this country and the American people.
When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House,
and the American people understand, that Elon's a car manufacturer.
But he's not a car manufacturer.
But he's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler in many cases.
He's a car assembler in many cases.
If you go to his Texas plant, a good part of the engines that he gets, which in the EV case,
is the batteries come from Japan and come from China.
The electronics come from Taiwan.
The tires come.
What we want, and the difference is, in our thinking, and Elon's on this,
is that we want the tires made in Akron.
We want the transmissions made in Indianapolis. We want the engines made in Flint and Saginaw.
And we want the cars manufactured here.
It's like this business model where BMW and Mercedes come in to Spartansburg, South Carolina, and have
us assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions, that doesn't work for America. It's bad for
our economics. It's bad for our national security. We want them to come here. And Elon, it's
fine. He's a car man. He's a car person. That's what he does. And he wants the cheap foreign
parts, and we understand that.
But we want him home. We want him home for our national security and economic security,
and everything's good with Elon. Everything's good with Elon, but I'm not so sure if that's
necessarily the case or not. And of course, as we are on the air live, important to highlight
some of the new headlines coming out and potentially why we
are continuing to see today's session be such a whipsaw session.
And the main headline there being President Trump saying that there could be new tariffs
on top of China if they do not respond in kind.
And obviously, if you are China, they're responding in kind directly
to what has played out.
And this is the new headline,
Trump threatening retaliatory tariffs on top of it.
Let's get this CNBC pro piece out of here.
China issuing retaliatory tariffs.
This is Trump on True Social about,
oh, I don't know, 10 minutes ago.
Saying, therefore, if China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long-term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th.
So now, April 8th, the new deadline.
The United States will impose additional tariffs on China of 50% effective April 9th.
Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated.
Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will be taking place immediately.
Thank you for your attention on the matter.
Let's go ahead and take a look at the charts as all these news headlines come out.
I mean, if you're thinking about a whipsaw in terms of potentially seeing Trump back down with a 90-day pause, keep in mind, these are two separate things.
I should be clear about that because we're talking about reciprocal tariffs on everybody but China,
which is mostly where I think a lot of the, shall we say, cooler heads, where a lot of the cooler
heads are coming down is basically saying, look, put China in one bucket, keep them over there. But for everybody else, in terms of the reciprocal
tariffs, put them in another bucket and put those on pause for 90 days. Because if this is all about
China, why are you going to tie everything to that? And so I guess we'll see. We'll see what
happens. But again, in terms of where the market's at,
basically holding here. And on the stock side, we did see the NASDAQ briefly pop into the green.
But right now, the NASDAQ back to being off by about 2%. So important to highlight, again,
I think these Bitcoin moves, weird to see the market not reacting necessarily as fast as some of the other swings
that we've seen play out. But nonetheless, here we are. So those are the headlines. It's crazy,
but it's already as if we just heard from Peter Navarro this morning, and we're already seeing
things change just in a matter of a few hours in terms of where the Trump administration's at.
Because you almost thought, you got the sense that a lot of the attention was going to be on these reciprocal tariffs that, you know, again, Lloyd Blankfein, Bill Ackman, Elon Musk.
All of these people were basically imploring the president to shift his focus, to try and focus on that side of the market, to now see it basically flip back to China.
And not just kind of, again, go tit for tat, but now going above that and threatening 50% if China doesn't come back to the table.
The reporting had been that China was starting to dig in as well, basically saying, look, if we're going to play this game,
we're going to play this game.
And that is, again, what has a lot of people worried
because then you have a nuclear basically impossible to de-escalate at that point
because talks break down, everything breaks down,
and that's not good either from all kinds of perspectives,
not only just what we just showed you around recession odds and the idea of what happens there,
but also potentially spilling over into other escalations, whether it's military around the
world. We saw the big conflict when it comes to the Panama Canal. President Trump's been pushing
on that for a long time. And what plays out there,
it doesn't look good. Because honestly, I think that the China piece matters even more in terms
of long term. In the short term, I think the market just showed you we could probably have of, you know, in the idea of where we might see a bottom formation come in here at 78,
potentially 75, but now swinging back down. I wish we had the ability here on a tick by tick
to just show you what we're seeing play out on the Bitcoin chart. But, you know, this does update in real time. And the idea of
what we've heard from other market analysts, you just heard Sean Farrell basically saying,
look, 75, the number to watch. Kind of similar from what we heard from Arthur Hayes as well,
who's been saying holding around there is going to be pretty important.
But I honestly think that this might be the session where things do matter for the make or break because we haven't seen yet.
And I don't want to jinx it.
But we haven't seen what Jim Cramer had called for, which was Black Monday and a move of 7% or more to hit that circuit breaker potentially on the S&P.
I say I don't want to jinx it because we haven't seen that play out,
but it's still only 1130 Eastern. So there's still a lot of time in today's session.
And I would not want to invite that. But I do think it is interesting to think about kind of
where we sit here with 78. Just kind of given all the trade headlines we've already seen play out,
and it's not even lunchtime, Texas. We haven't even gotten our sandwiches yet. And so here we are watching this all and it's a little bit nerve wracking, but we are waiting
for our next guest.
You know him from Shark Tank, Vinny Lingham, going to be joining us in just a few moments.
And I do think it is going to be one of those weeks where if we do see him back down, and again, it's a big if, but you might have that glorious run that people have been waiting for.
And I almost wonder if you're Trump and you see the Fed potentially shifting position, if you need to hold out at least just a little bit longer because you want the Fed to move,
maybe that's what this is potentially happening for is, hey, can we just wait a little bit longer to where J-Powell has to move?
And it could be that.
It could be that, but again, it kind of depends on whether or not you can keep the team together.
But again, it kind of depends on whether or not you can keep the team together.
And one of those other players in the space that we've seen come out, similar to Bill Ackman, he's been in Trump's camp.
He's talked to, over the last few weeks, basically everybody in Trump's camp on their podcast, the All In Fam.
Now Chamath Palihapitiya coming out as well, saying Trump needs to hold the line.
Volatility aside, which matters to traders more than it should matter to long-term investors,
the tariff gambit is working. So here's the thing about communism.
I think it's interesting because we've already seen the breakdown in terms of inflation expectations by party.
Right. The idea of Republicans thinking that things are going to be fine and Democrats, maybe not.
You're now seeing, as we just highlighted a moment ago, Ted Cruz breaking from Republicans in terms of saying it's going to be a bloodbath if we don't fix this.
terms of saying it's going to be a bloodbath if we don't fix this. And I think that's pretty
important to discuss just in terms of you've got some people still holding the line and calling for
Trump to hold the line, but you've got an almost equal amount of people on the other side basically
coming out and saying, please, for the love of God, back down. And so the fractions are starting
to form. And the longer we move through this, I think everyone understands that President Trump is bluffing when he says he doesn't care about prices.
Because obviously we know that this president is one that has been elected on a few things, including the idea of having the U.S. be the crypto capital of the
world. And it's not entirely easy to do that if you're seen as the one man who has now
who has now potentially tanked all the prices across crypto.
actually tanked all the prices across crypto. Not necessarily the case yet. Tanked is relative,
as we all know. So I don't want to say that he's completely tanked everything just yet,
but we're getting close. We're getting close. And so we put it on the whisper.
Anyways, let's recap here. Let's see where we're at in terms of prices and where we
are sitting here. As we cross the 1130 hour Eastern time. You have Bitcoin sitting at 78, 330.
And we've got Ethereum sitting here holding on to that 1550 level.
Important to watch there as we were trading earlier a bit in the 1400 level.
That handle, important for a lot of our viewers who come from the ETH community.
And we are set to be joined in just a few seconds.
I believe he's hopping onto the stream now. Vinny Lingham from Shark Tank going to be joining us. Entrepreneur,
crypto investor, friend of the show. Haven't had him on in a while, but from what I understand,
he's hopping in pretty soon. As we wait for him to join the stream, there are a few things to
still play here, which includes none other than what
we've seen from the Trump trade architect, Peter Navarro, speaking on CNBC this morning.
We'll play it one more time just to set up when Vinny Lingham joins the stream here.
It's going to be very important.
But we've seen the back and forth.
We've seen the idea of retreating.
When you listen to what Peter Navarro said this morning on CNBC, not the case. Seems like
he's holding steady, at least he is. Question now becomes what the president wants to do.
Here's what Peter Navarro said on CNBC this morning.
What I'm seeing, Joe, is a beautiful situation where we will hit 50,000 on the Dow, and we're
going to have a broad-based recovery in the S&P 500.
The market's trying to find its bottom now.
The thing I would say to retail investors is don't get panicked out by all of this.
And what the president could have added to that fine truth
was the fact that the biggest tax cut in American history,
the broadest base tax cut in American history,
is coming within a matter of months. So any discussion of recession seems silly when you
factor that in. Plus the Fed, the Fed is not going to do its job, but the long bond is doing it.
We're lowering our oil prices, which is just amazing. And here's the one other thing I want to say macro-wise, Joe, because look, this is all
about people worried about global recession.
That's what they're worried about.
The restructuring that's going to happen, Joe, globally, is going to start with China
and Vietnam and Germany, heavily export-dependent countries.
They're going to have to engage significant
fiscal stimulus to reorient their economy. So that thing is going to go on. And meantime,
we're going to boom here. We're going to boom here. That's the idea. That's the idea. If
everyone sticks together, which again, I think is very important. And as we come in here,
I want to welcome back, I believe he's here now, I think we
got him. We got Vinny Lingham, friend of the show, former Shark Tank host. There he is.
Vinny, what's going on, man? It's Zach. Good, good. Good to see you again. It's been a really
long time, but it's also been a crazy time. And I know that you always keep your eyes on what's
happening, not just from a macro perspective, but also what's happening from a crypto perspective so
just want to kick off with kind of what you've made over the weekend seeing all the back and
forth and the idea that trump's administration is still doubling down despite the fact that
we're seeing markets continue to sell off yeah i mean i'm'm, look, I think this is just short term ball. We've got a lot of,
you know, we've got a lot of emotions running high right now. It's clearly a negotiation,
like negotiation tactic for Trump to put these terrorists out there. And, you know,
he's trying to remove terrorists that are on American
goods you know around the world would I have done it this way probably not not my style I think this
is a little bit too aggressive and but you know this is Trump style this is what I don't know why
the market's so shocked and surprised by what's happening. This was communicated a long time in advance.
So let's just let it play out. I agree in terms of the idea of, you know, the market expected
probably some of this. I think over the weekend, and Bill Ackman was retweeting this as well,
there was some research from AEI saying that the Trump admin got their numbers wrong in terms of
the poster board that Trump held up in the Rose Garden announcing these tariffs, that they were massively above what
they should have been, even if you did use the right numbers in their formula, I think,
and that potentially that, you know, that they would expect the Trump admin to correct those
numbers and bring them back down. But even when we're seeing this all play out, you had Lloyd
Blankfein Vinny basically coming out and saying, look, put this on pause for six months.
You saw a lot of people calling for a pause in the reciprocal tariffs.
But today we're seeing Trump triple down on going after China for now saying if they don't come to the table, it's going to be 50 percent tariffs on Chinese goods.
So which one of these do you think matters more when you really step back and say, look, there's the battle with China and then there's the battle with everyone else around the globe?
Look, again, why is this a surprise?
It was very clear that they warned China not to escalate, China escalated, and now Trump's
going to re-escalate.
So I guess the fundamental issue here is it's two-way tariffs worldwide that we have to deal with.
So the reciprocal tariff issue.
The second issue, I think, ultimately is China's currency is not floated.
It's not a free market currency.
And Trump has called them a currency manipulator in the past.
I think he probably wants to get to a point where they're forced to float the currency and not have it.
You know, everything is cheap from China because China's currency is not floating against the dollar.
They set the rate.
And I think that my guess is that Trump wants to end that.
When you look at kind of how this is playing out, you know, and you're kind of you sit squarely in between these things.
You know, you're on the crypto side. You're on the macro side.
You see kind of the way that these things play out.
But you've been I think it's fair to say that you've been focused on crypto for a minute.
And the idea of kind of where we are in the way that these two markets are interplaying, I think, is very interesting, particularly at a time where like in the U.S. regulation is completely flipped.
Went from the SEC attacking crypto all the time to now we're seeing a very supportive American government around crypto.
So how do you kind of square those things? How do you square a golden age, I think it's fair to say, of crypto now in 2025 and what we're seeing play out in macro
markets and how long some of this suffering might last? Crypto is a feather in the proverbial wind
of macro, right? Macro trumps everything. Macro is the largest amount of monetary flows in the world,
trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars,
hundreds of trillions of dollars ultimately.
And so when there's liquidity in the macro economy,
there's liquidity in crypto,
and when there's no liquidity in macro,
there's no liquidity in crypto.
And crypto is just a high beta player macro, right? If everything looks
good at a macro level for the world and crypto looks good, then crypto does well. The regulatory
environment obviously has some impact there. But now that we've kind of opened the floodgates for
crypto to flourish under conditions that are positive for macro, I think it will, when
the macro condition is resolved. And right now, the macro is very turbulent, so crypto
is going to be equally turbulent, if not more so.
How do you see that, I guess, shaping up? We had Sean Farrell on the show this morning
from Fundstrat, who's been pretty accurate in terms of calling year-end price targets over the last two years. He's got a price target of 175, 175,000, I should
say, because you never know, that could be $105,000 at the way we're going. 175k, Vinny. And so when
you kind of see this play out, I know there's it's really difficult, especially here in the
short term shop, but I just enjoy kind of taking a step back and thinking about the slow and steady
progress of Bitcoin of crypto over the years. And you know, we could put aside Ethereum and the rest,
but just focusing squarely on Bitcoin, how do you kind of see it shaping up if all this gets fixed,
if everything goes back to normal, if Trump backs down, if deals get made the way he wants them to,
then theoretically we should be shaping up to have exactly what he wanted, which is a weaker dollar, and interest rates moving lower, which have generally been bullish for Bitcoin in the long term.
So kind of how do you see maybe looking at a quarter, two quarters ahead?
Most bear markets tend to last 18 months on average, historically.
I think that we're just officially into the bear market right now.
So we potentially have 18 months, maybe it's the rates.
I think there's a lot of market dislocation that's happening on a global scale,
and liquidity has been gripped.
There's a bunch of macro unknowns with the US dollar strength and weakening.
So I think to predict 175 by the end of the year, I mean look, fun strategy, Tom Lee.
He's been all over the place and been wrong many, many times.
And he's a permable for the most part.
So I think that permables are going to get smashed during the bear market.
You have to at least adapt to the times.
I would say if macro resolved itself over the next six months, then maybe we get out of it in 12.
resolved itself over the next six months,
then maybe we get out of it in 12.
But people underestimate the impact of market dislocation
when it comes to companies and governments.
If the tariffs are dropped and the reciprocal travel is
dropped, then yeah, more money flows.
But now companies who previously relied on supply chains
that were tariffed, they are now not tariffed.
You know, can they get better pricing in the U.S. because now those factories and companies
can export to more markets.
Multinationals are going to have a tough time trying to figure out how the P&L balances
out now that all this change.
There's a lot of changes that happen when the macro conditions change.
And so companies like the S&P can go back to 5,500 or 6,000 in 12 months,
but not equally distributed to the companies that lost the market cap initially. So the mag 7
may not be 35% or 30%, it may be 20%. And you have more of the value spread across the longer
tail of companies. Things like that can happen. And that presents its own set of idiosyncrasies in terms of how the recovery works.
So I don't think it's a simple recovery process where, yeah, in aggregate, it should be net
beneficial to everyone.
But per company, it may not be.
Well, I think that that's kind of the interesting thing to discuss, because it does seem pretty
clear that Trump is trying to, and we heard this from his treasury secretary too over the weekend kind of
talking with tucker carlson about this idea of look 50 of america doesn't own stocks and so
they're not participating in like the big run-ups and so they don't really care when things kind of
but i mean i think and i'm the only guy checking my phone for what's going on in the markets.
Everyone else is training.
No one's worrying.
No one's stressed.
But I mean, I guess there is the spillover effect,
and we were talking about it a little bit earlier,
which is where recession risks are rising.
Goldman moved from 35% to 45% in terms of recession odds,
and we're seeing JP Morgan be a little bit even more bearish, I think.
And when you start to see that play out,
the cracks are presenting in terms of the Trump alliance. And I think that this is interesting to get your take on as a guy who's been focused
on tech for so long, Elon Musk throwing himself into this administration in the way that he has.
And over the weekend, you had him going for Peter Navarro, basically saying that he hasn't built
shit, which I think is interesting in terms of kind of how this is playing out. And Vinny,
just to double down on what you said around,
it wouldn't be the way that you would do it,
but now watching this play out,
when you've got Elon Musk and Tesla shares down 40%,
and you've got Peter Navarro going on CNBC this morning
basically saying, look, there's no problems here.
Elon and I see eye to eye.
It's all fine.
We're all one big happy family.
But like clearly those cracks are starting
to present themselves.
You got Ted Cruz coming out here saying, look, this is going to be tougher midterms.
Trump still operates with political pressures in a way that I think it's fair to say the Chinese Communist Party does not.
And we're about to go into this tit-for-tat battle to where it's going to be very hard to imagine Trump not backing down.
But he's in this now.
And so what would your advice be when you've got these cracks starting to form
in game theory that may have looked great
two weeks ago, but now here we are
and maybe not so much?
I'm in wave and
C mode. I really am. I don't
think that
I think right now there's just a lot of emotions
running very high right now with everything
that's going on. And I just don't think that that I think it's okay to do the trading here and there
but I wouldn't make any long-term decisions you can get the whipsawing that's going to happen
already I mean even this morning the whipsawing that happened like there's a fake fake announcement
that Trump's lifting all the tariffs or for 90 days market rallied like eight percent then
you're going to dumped afterwards when people
found out those fake news. Like it's, I think let's just sit back and see what happens. I think
I think it will resolve this month. Remember, like this is making things clear. Like in my opinion,
getting tariff clarity doesn't mean market recovery. They're two separate things. So
clarity basically means, okay, this is a new playing field
going forward now the market has to adjust for it and i think people are conflating these two things
well what do you what exactly does that look like over the next couple weeks then because
to that point maybe we get clarity but then you don't get a v-shaped recovery like we saw with covid even though this is basically what this is basically what
the v-shaped recovery and this is what everyone's making a mistake on in my opinion the v-shaped recovery happened because the fed was able to slash interest rates down to basically
levels uh and uh they could do that because inflation was under two percent and there were
other cracks that are happening and it was a very special and it was what you know for the most part it wasn't a self-inflicted wound um it was
covert coming in you can argue maybe it was a self-inflicted but you know the policy makers
didn't come up with the idea right now you know i'll just check back to trump and say look this
is your baby uh you you started this you you know we're not going to intervene until you figure out
what you want to do and so he's not cutting rates and if he cuts rates the're not going to intervene until you figure out what you want to do. And so he's not cutting rates.
And if he cuts rates, the market is going to go crazy with inflation.
Like inflation expectations are going to solve the bond market's going to punish.
Everyone crying for lower rates right now is just being petulant.
Like just sit back and wait and see what happens.
Well, I think that that's kind of been the interesting kind of, you know, again,
the game theory playing out between Trump and Powell and who's going to blink first is if you listen to Powell on Friday, didn't sound like he was any rush and basically communicated, look, we can't make any decision until we see where Trump lands on his.
And so we're in no rush. But people keep expecting that there are going to be more and more cuts this year from the Fed.
And I really think the only way you get there is if we continue to see, you know, sustained pain on the market side. And there are a lot of people arguing that,
look, when that happens, and Jamie Dimon was out arguing this essentially, so I'll use his case,
but it's like there are cumulative cuts that like not, maybe not the right word to use cuts,
cumulative damage that stacks up over time if you see sustained pressure over the next few weeks
that like cannot be resolved
just by cuts that come from the Fed past the June meeting or past the May meeting. And so I don't
know, it's a very weird thing to kind of square. But I think you're right to point out this is not
fair to necessarily just because of the most pain that we've seen. And some of the biggest moves
since the pandemic, then it's at all the same situation. And so I think that there is a trap
there maybe to fall into
if people are just kind of going apples to apples.
But I just wonder if there's anything that stands out to you
other than it being wrong to make those comparison points.
I think I lost you there for a second.
Can you just repeat the middle part?
Yeah, just the idea being that, you know,
so many people are thinking that this is similar to the pandemic because you have cuts expected uh but j pal and trump are not seeing eye to eye when
it comes to a lot of that stuff and so i do wonder if there's anything that you would you would add
to saying don't fall into the trap of thinking this is 2020. yeah i i think i think the similarities are more about past experiences, 2008 great financial crisis
where the government bailed things out.
We are in such a massive debt crisis right now.
I mean, we've got probably $8 trillion of debt that needs to be financed and refinanced
this year.
The only thing I can see the Fed doing is blowing up the balance sheet a bit
more, but that's going to be very inflationary, and they know that. So they're in a very tough
spot. Inflation is near 3%. If they create any monetary policy that pushes that up even further,
they're going to have to deal with it. And the only way they can deal with it really is
raising rates. And I don't think they want to do that right now and so i think i think they just they're gonna hold the line in
the whole line where they are right now and that let the dust settle making any any big moves right
now is going to just i think upset the market in in in a much worse way than just letting it play
out like look um you know besan wason was on, I think, Friday,
or I saw an interview on Friday, Saturday,
and they don't really care about the wealthy owning, you know, 88%.
10% of America owns 88% of the stocks.
Like, they don't really care.
Something along those lines, some number like that.
And what they're saying is what wealth
distribution needs to change and so if if everyone who owns stocks gets a little bit poorer and we're
able to fix uh some of the stuff in the economy then we're going to do that and they're not backing
down on that on that so yeah is that like that's a bad thing either i think stocks are generally
massively overvalued right now and so that's putting strain on us as an economy because the valuations are just out of line with reality. And, you know, corporate profits have just been soaring for the past two decades. I mean, I mean, maybe the trade deficits and fiscal deficits. So, yeah, it's the wealthy getting wealthier. And I think there's a good argument
for why they're doing what they're doing.
Now again, I wouldn't have done it the way they're doing it.
I would have been, hey, these are the tariffs,
these are the rates, communicate a way to advance,
we're gonna negotiate, if it comes down, great.
If not, this is what it's gonna be.
You have six months or 12 months.
Not surprised everyone and panic stations, but that's my style versus their style.
But I think ultimately they're trying to get to the same place that I think we should get to.
Yeah, I think it is all very interesting to see kind of execution versus game plan.
And there are sports metaphors to be had there, I assume, in terms of you can put a plan together and then it's all about how you execute.
And I think you and I are probably on the same page that a lot of people might be in agreement
in what's trying to be done,
but the execution is just leaving a lot of people
scratching their heads,
including the whole Penguins thing.
That's what's caused most of the problem
is the execution of it.
It's how the stuff was telegraphed in advance.
It was everyone expected 10%,
the market's priced in 10% and then surprise, and markets don't like
surprises. No, not at all. And I think the other thing too, in terms of all this, Vinny, is if you
square the dots, by the way, which, you know, this being a crypto show, trying to tie it back to that,
if you square the dots in terms of where we're at, I think it is interesting because Trump is
launching his own stable coin, USD1, via World Liberty Financial.
Our friend Mike Belshi at BitGo is going to be custodying some of the pieces tied to that.
And if you think about some of the flipping, you mentioned that in terms of wealth redistribution, which Republicans normally are not in that camp.
in that camp. And I think it's also very interesting because Democrats have been so
And I think it's also very interesting because Democrats have been so anti-crypto.
anti-crypto. To see this play out, I don't know if you've been paying as close attention as we
have, but it's all I have time to do is watch the House Financial Services Committee debate
stablecoins. And we've been looking very closely at it. And it's very odd because last time I think
you were on the show with us was around SVB's collapse and the idea of USDC de-pegging.
And you had a bunch of Democrats warning that we're setting up ourselves,
the U.S. government, that is, to potentially bail out stablecoin issuers
if the same thing happens again.
And I think it's very interesting to see some of these things now kind of merge,
right, in terms of stablecoins becoming a larger chunk of this
if we get a digital dollar and Congress approves stablecoins.
It's very interesting to see maybe some of that shaping up. I'm not sure if you kind of
see any potential problems there or maybe some potential takeaways from the idea of Democrats
and Republicans somewhat flipping in terms of where their parties are aligned on these things.
And maybe potentially the fact seeing a bunch of people lament that Kamala Harris didn't win
because she may have been more pro markets
and steady as she goes than what Trump's doing right now.
So I think we're kind of in this weird twilight zone
and I don't know if you feel the same way.
Yeah, I think people forget like the stable coin business
is basically a proxy for treasury returns, right?
Because you have to keep them in pretty stable treasury accounts.
You have to be holding short, long duration stuff.
And so it's a little odd for the most part.
And obviously, it isn't gearing up because not everyone holding a stablecoin is going to get it.
So it's an interesting business.
I think it's great.
But I think the stablecoin market right now is kind of you know even tether making 15 billion dollars a year
on interest payments from the u.s government uh and and whatnot like think of it that way right so
if rates come down and and the and bond yields drop to two percent one percent those businesses
are very marginal but they're very high utility if they stay where they are right now
different story you know um uh that these businesses are very profitable so i think like
look i think there's a need for stable coins i definitely don't think we need a central bank
issuing them um and i think that these businesses provide a lot of value to the government that
to buy the debt and then let it sit in digital dollars and people's wallets and whatever else.
buys the debt and then that's the digital dollars and people's ballots and whatever else
So I think it's as exciting as there's a lot you can do with more programmable money.
It's kind of what the original vision was for Bitcoin, I think,
having this programmable money, but that's not what Bitcoin changed to.
Yeah. No, I think it's just interesting to think about in terms of, you know,
if you lose some of these nations, and it is true, some readers pointed out over the weekend that,
like, short-term duration versus long-term duration bonds very different and sounds like it's gonna have to be required
to be short-term for for stablecoin holding so maybe not the same exact thing but interesting
to think about exporting dollars and influence around the world um but Vinny to tie it home
and to kind of come full circle here in terms of I guess advice for people because we have seen
President Trump on true social he was just posting a little bit ago in terms of don't panic. He's calling out this idea. I think he's invented
a new term called panicking, which is his advice to retail traders out there. Basically, don't be
weak. Don't be stupid. Don't be a panicking. And I guess more specifically to retail traders,
Vinny, what's kind of the advice if you're in this, you're seeing the chop, you're seeing kind of potentially a technical bear market forming here.
What would be the advice to people watching to be who might be levered more to crypto, what they should be doing now?
Yeah, my personal view is, well, I think crypto is its own world. I don't want to give you financial advice. I think any business you're investing in, you have to understand what fundamental changes
happen in the new sort of paradigm.
And, you know, just because some company was at its all-time highs a month ago, and now
it's trading 50% below that, doesn't mean it's a good buy.
And so I think a lot of retail traders get stuck on the past,
and they get stuck on what it was and where it was,
and thinking like value is discount
from previous all-time high.
There's a lot of examples in history where that's just not
true, where there's a paradigm shift,
the market prices are in appropriately.
So you don't get me wrong.
There's probably lots of companies out there that do really well and get back above their all time highs. But it's not universally true.
Because when when you change things like the macro, the tariffs, some companies will not be
profitable under the new paradigm. Some companies will be some will be way more profitable, some
will go bankrupt. And so you can I think it, this is where like it's safe to bet on obviously
some of the big companies, because they'll figure it out.
But do your own research and just, just don't get stuck on the charts.
I think too many people look at the past as a predictor of the future, but if you change
the underlying variables, it just won't be universally true.
Yeah.
And I think that's
that's a good place to end on in terms of uh kind of some of the the main lessons to take away from
all this and i did look back i apologize because i just threw this at you you're right the calendar
invite didn't necessarily come through here so thank you for rolling with the punches and just
hopping in doing it live baby just just risking it uh but no appreciate you coming on man it's
good to see you again and hopefully we can have you more often back on the show because it's been too long.
But great to see you as always.
Vinny Lingham.
Thanks, man.
Thanks for having me.
Right on.
Very good.
Vinny Lingham there.
I want to thank also Fundstrat's Sean Farrell for coming on the show as well.
We went through it, folks.
Obviously, a lot to stay tuned to.
And we will always, as we always do, highlight the biggest headlines to bring to you with all the market action, all the market swings here on Coinage.
You can head to coinage.media to catch the biggest headlines in Web3 and around now, the macro world, and down there in D.C.
For everybody here at Coinage, for Vinny, for Sean, for our co-owners as well, I'm Zach Uzman saying thank you again for joining us.
We'll see you again soon.
