Hosts: Ansel Lindner and Christian Keroles

Special co-host: Nolan Bauerle, @countbtc

Fed Watch is a macro podcast with a clear contrarian thesis of a deflationary breakdown of the financial system leading to bitcoin adoption. We question narratives and schools of thought, and try to form new understanding. Each episode we use current events to question mainstream and bitcoin narratives across the globe, with an emphasis on central banks and currencies.

(Find all associated charts and links at bitcoinandmarkets.com/fed136)

In this episode, we are joined once again by Nolan Bauerle to bring you reporting on this crazy week in bitcoin and macro. Of course, we cover Credit Suisse, their long history of corruption and current crisis. Next, we tie this into the US banking crisis that started with FTX, to Silvergate, then Signature, with Silicon Valley Bank also failing along the way. Lastly, we discuss February’s CPI and PPI out of the US to see if that can be added to an analysis of the global financial situation giving us a more clear picture of what is happening.

Throughout the entire episode, I try to build a narrative that what we are seeing in the bank failures, bailouts, and CPI/PPI crashing is a deflationary story. This is a tale of credit tightness and collapse, bailouts notwithstanding. In this context, bailouts only confirm the dire state of the private financial system and lead to deeper tightness and stagnation.

This episode goes perfectly in the entire multi-year theme of Fed Watch. While bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, we don’t find ourselves in an inflationary scenario. What we are living through today is the end of a multi-decade inflationary credit bubble, and what do all bubbles eventually do? They bust. That will look like a monetary shortage, not a monetary abundance.

In these credit bust situations, money without counterparty risk is a great advantage. I’m alluding to bitcoin here, as it is both a hedge against inflation and credit deflation. The great thing for bitcoin, as well, is it has a long way to go in its monetization, meaning its dollar value will expand greatly as it absorbs monetary functions.

As people are looking for a monetary alternative during periods of monetary shortage, it is an absolute advantage if that alternative asset is nascent and its value can expand dramatically as it is adopted. For instance, people that adopt gold in this role only expect perhaps a 5x upside, where bitcoin could see 100x.