A Fed move that could drive Bitcoin higher, with Arthur Hayes

Transcript

DM. Good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that gets you into the party that even the bouncers don't know about. I'm your host, Jay Hamilton. It's Tuesday, March the 25th, and today we are so excited to be joined by Arthur Hayes, legendary investor, co-founder of BitMEX, and founder and CIO of Maelstrom, his family fund, where he manages their liquid assets. We are going to discuss three takeaways that Arthur had from the FOMC meeting last week and the shift that he saw in what Powell is saying and why he believes that we're going to get a liquidity surge out of the US. And he's also going to tell us when he thinks

that is going to happen. We also touch on Arthur's expectations for us this year and he talks about why he thinks April could be a bad month for crypto. So, you're gonna want to listen to that. He also gives us his predictions for the end of the year which are mega bullish. We also take a look at his macro outlook for the four biggest economies, the US, China, Europe, and Japan. Before we jump in, tomorrow is Wednesday or the belly button of the week as they like to say in Mexico. And we've got Hive, managing partner from Dragonfly, joining us live at 12:05 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Hit subscribe. Make sure you guys show up to

ask your questions. We'll be talking about his thesis on ETH for the rest of this cycle as well as his outlook on a bunch of other tokens. It's going to be a fire show. So excited. First time Hiv's coming on the show. It's going to be awesome. So, make sure you subscribe right now. Without further ado, Arthur, welcome to the Milk Road Show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. Really excited to have you. Okay, one question I'm not going to ask now, but I wanted to ask by the end of the show is how I get into one of your legendary parties, but we're not going to start with that. Let's start with what's more likely, Bitcoin above 100K or back below 80K. Above 100K. Really? Okay. Why? So I was parsing the uh statements of Powell at the recent FOMC last week and I think

there were uh three major changes in their stance which honestly I didn't really expect to happen this quickly or with only the S&P down 5% or 10% whatever it is. So the first thing is though I lay the context that I believe that the US economy is is very strong whether it's due to like fraudulent government payments or not is kind of irrelevant at this stage. Real GDP growth is growing, unemployment is low and you the US stock market has been doing very very well, you know, post the lows in 2022. And against this backdrop, you know, the Fed had printed something like $4 trillion between COVID and now they've reduced their balance sheet by

about a trillion. inflation, at least according to their madeup [ __ ] statistic, core PCE, is still above their madeup [ __ ] target of 2% a year. And so, you know, if you look at all these factors, there's no reason why the Fed should be cutting rates andor slowing down the pace of balance sheet runoff is a quantitative tightening. Yet, they uh reduced QT in June of 2024. And yet again, Powell got up last week and said that they'll be reducing the pace of QT4 Treasury bills from 25 billion to 5 billion per month. And I think that's very instructive because obviously there's a problem in the

Treasury market. There's too much supply. A lot of the inelastic buyers like China and other large exporters are no longer participating in the same way that they used to given the surpluses that they're generating in their their trade account. the Fed is letting the treasuries mature off of its balance sheet. So, it's not buying and the commercial banks can't buy anymore because their balance sheets are full due to the uh capital charges they take when they buy treasuries. So, you know, Besson has a problem if he's going to get these 10-year rates below 4% or whatever he believes is the target. It's just not going to happen given this backdrop. and Powell stepped up to the plate, did his duty as a a member of the the F Treadfi establishment and reduced the pace of QT when the US economy is

strong and inflation's above target and monetary conditions are very easy and so that's a signpost that whatever things he's looking at and I don't know what it is he believes that there's a problem and he needs to make things easier in the treasury market to fund these gargantuan deficits. That's the first thing. The second thing is he said something quite interesting which was he teased that he'd be starting quantitative easing uh or actually outright buying of treasuries at some point in the year. The statement was something to the effect of he could see in the near future but not a definite that the Fed's balance sheet could be kept constant. However, the $35 billion of mortgage back security runoff could be matched with a $35 billion per month

purchase of treasuries. So technically speaking, it's not QE. Maybe it's like QT twist, right? I I sell down on one hand and I buy on the other. But as crypto traders, we care about liquidity into the treasury market, the most important debt market in the world, and and how this money printing machine is is fired up um from from America. And so he's saying, I'm going to be doing QE of 35 billion a month, you know, TBD, but probably I would imagine within the next few meetings. Why would he say that at the press conference to sort of see the market's reaction to essentially QE for treasuries? And then finally, you know, everyone's worried about tariffs. Are they inflationary? Is it, you know, going to cause all this mayhem in the

markets? And you know, what do we care about as crypto people? We care about money creation. So if tariffs are inflationary, does that mean that the Fed has to then raise rates, increase the pace uh of quantitative tightening, stop QE, whatever, right? Make monetary conditions tighter because there's a big inflationary impact of tariffs in the domestic US economy. Paul said he looks through the impact of tariffs. If there is any inflation, it's transitory, which basically means if I'm cutting rates and easing monetary policy, even if Trump does a 50% tariff and inflation skyrockets in the US, I believe that that doesn't exist, you know, in the medium-term. Therefore, I could continue

cutting rates andor doing quantitative easing. So, we now have QT to QE and we've said that tariffs don't matter in terms of inflationary impacts in the US economy. This means it's game on. This is a similar vein. And I know people have been [ __ ] on me on Twitter when I made this call. Oh, it's not technically QE and blah blah blah. Well, in 2022, Bad Girl Yellen, former US Treasury Secretary said, "Fuck you, Paul. I'm going to ease my trade conditions. I'm going to issue bills and take the reverse repo facility down from 2.5 trillion down to zero." And so if you were stuck in this mindset of, oh, the Fed's raising rates and doing QT, therefore asset markets must go down.

Well, Janet Yellen has a bigger bazooka, and she said, "No, I'm going to take that 2 and a.5 trillion and pump it into the markets." And you would have missed a massive bull market in everything, crypto included from late 2022 up until the present. And so I think people could be making the similar mistake today. Yes, you know, short-term rates are 4% or whatever they are. Yes, technically he's doing QT, but for the thing that matters, US Treasury market liquidity and how much of that is pumped into the global markets, Paul is telling us that he's going to be switching to QE and he doesn't care if Trump go does some 20 50 70% tariff across the board because any inflation in the US, he can going to discount that and continue doing what he's doing. It's easy monetary policy.

So I think this is a big sea change from the US and a pivotal moment in terms of how this particular microcycle is unfolding and therefore I've changed my bearish dance you know my call for 70 75k Bitcoin to one where I think now we can you know surpass 100 through 110 the previous all-time high and go much much higher. Okay, I want to unpack some of that, but first, uh, I just want to give you a chance to explain the seat that you sit in and what you do every day because I think it'll help set up this conversation. And it's interesting to me that at your fund, you really you wear a few different hats and one of them, the one that I'm most interested in is management of your liquid fund. But

let's just talk about what you do every day so everybody understands that. So we is a team that does most of the work run by Ashra Via and uh he and does early stage token deals and advisory stuff. So we write $50 to $100,000 checks into seed rounds of token deals um things that we're very excited about and we also advise uh projects. So probably our standout success this cycle has been Athena. We were one of the founding adviserss of that. It's done u phenomenally well. We were also early investors in Etherfi, investors in Pendle. So we've had some some great wins this cycle. I focus more on the liquid stuff and have a macro overlay.

So I have a view on the market which is I'm bullish now. So I'm going to tell ahat you guys need to increase the pace of deals. You guys need to find more ways where find more places for me to deploy this excess capital that I've that we've generated from profits from other positions that we took, you know, from 2023 into 2024. And so I am like sort of the accelerator like speed up slow down in terms of of what you're doing. And that's sort of my role in in the CEO. I'm not really looking at specific deals. I might have a I might open a narrative here here and there, but it's really the investment team that's doing all that that deep work in terms of what it is that we're actually going to be investing in. Yeah. you you really bring to the table the foresight

to say, "Hey, here's where I think the puck is going next and how we can position ourselves to be there as you allocate." Yeah. And I don't know which altcoins are going to be the one best for pointing. That's that's a shot's job to sort of figure that out. But I'm like, "Okay, well, I think if Bitcoin goes up, everything, the things can go up. If Bitcoin goes down, nothing's going up. So, let me have a view on Bitcoin and why dollar liquidity, fiat, you know, fiat liquidity, euros, yen, yuan, why that's going to go up or down in the future. And then let's sort of adjust how we're going to either do more deals or do less deals and sort of the the altcoin space. If you're only trading on centralized exchanges, then you're not going to make it. The best traders know the alpha is onchain.

Definitive founded by Coinbase alums lets you trade any token on Salana base or any chain all in one platform. What makes definitive different is its advanced order types. You can execute limit T-W and stop-loss completely onchain. Plus, you get the best prices as your order is routed instantly through every DEX and liquidity pool, getting you up to 19 times lower fees. Trusted by Funs, Wales, and the Milkman himself, now you too can trade like a pro. Milk Road listeners, get a tasty glass of milk with zero fees on your first 25,000 at milkroad.finitive.fi. Meet

CSUSDL, the stable coin built for institutions and Dows. Don't just hold basic stable coins, earn yield, all without compromising security. Backed by regulated real world assets and secured with institutional grade risk management by our friends at Steakhouse Financial. Put your treasury cash to work. Earning native yields and protocol rewards built by the team behind Coin Shift, which is trusted to manage over 1 billion in business treasuries on chain, including a Gitcoin, and hundreds of leading institutions. See why CSUSDL is gaining traction at milkroad.com/coinshift.

Okay. So, let's continue with your you mentioned this micro cycle and I that's your first word to use that word. No one's used the word microcycle, but it does feel like that's what we're in right now is we were in a bull cycle. Everybody had expectations of we're all going to Valhalla. 2025 is the year and then liquidity took us in a different direction plus a change in policy in the US and Trump being Trump and causing all this uproar also took us in a different direction. Give us your what's your thesis for or scenarios probabilities for where we go from here? Obviously, I know we talked about Bitcoin, but what's the timelines that you expect to see and how do you think this this will play

out? So I think the probably the roughest month right now is probably the April month for us because US tax season is April 15th. So that's a drain in liquidity as people have to sell things to to pay their taxes. We don't know how the debt ceiling is going to resolve itself. What is the Treasury going to do with their checking account? Are they going to draw it down to zero and then refill it back to 850 billion or some level? We don't know. But I think all those sort of questions will be answered April and and early May. And we already know that Powell has caved. Like you don't cut QT tease QE say that tariffs are not inflationary. That's just like economics 101. Yes, tariffs are inflationary, right? Like it's just like it is whether or not you want to

admit it is just a different is is different that good or bad. But he's caved. He's per he's firm he's firmly been fiscally dominated and he's going to do what he needs to do. you know, he'll try to spin some Saab story about how he's still trying to fight inflation, but doing QE in the Treasury market and whatever, but whatever, that doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, he's on side. And so, I think that, you know, Trump invested his plan, which is to rework the global trade system, which necessitates capital leaving the US, foreign capital, who no longer have dollars generated from trade surpluses.

They have to leave the treasury market. They have to sell stocks or not buy as many as they used to. And therefore we we need another source of liquidity and that's the Fed and that's the commercial bank. So the final nail in the coffin will be when the Fed agrees with Bessant to and the supplemental leverage ratio. And once that's done then it's just like we're going nuts because when you allow banks to essentially create money and buy treasuries and suffer no capital charge to their equity then they could do that in infinite size and so they can finance the US government at whatever price needs to be financed at. And this will be the model. And once the Americans do it, then the Europeans are going to do it to rebuild their defense base, right? European banks are going to load up on boons and oats and, you know,

Italian bonds and whatever, right? To build another juggernaut military. And then China could say, "Oh, great. We can now allow the currency to dirty float because we know it's not going to depreciate against the dollar because the dollar is printing so much." And so we can now unshackle our money creation on shore because right now China is fiscally stimulating on one hand but then the PBOC is tightening liquidity to keep the yuan at around 7.3 versus the dollar which is kind of self-defeating feeding policy. China can reflate if the US is reflating and then you know Japan will do what they do. It doesn't really matter. So I think this change out of the US will allow the Europeans and the Chinese to print the money that they

were going to print anyways. It just accelerates the timeline. So I think, you know, we could still chop around until this summer, but it's I think it's be very clear and the sentiment is going to change, you know, the consensus sentiment will change to, oh, everyone's printing money by the third quarter. And given that Bitcoin should lead that, we should be much higher by uh than by then. And you know, then we can hopefully make 250,000 by the year end. I hope. Do you think that's Do you think that's a realistic target by year end? Yeah. Yeah, I mean went from 70 to 110,000 just because Trump said he was going to do some regulatory stuff.

Not to say he's not going to do it. May not be in the timeline that people thought he was going to do it in. But that's what people traded on and it took the market up, you know, almost double just based on some words. So if we have words plus a lot of printed money, then I think the sky's is the limit. Okay. So you think chop through summer unknown timing on exactly when money printer and liquidity starts to come in but you think it comes in sometime end of summer Q3 is your I think the actual money starts getting printed sometime you know second or late second quarter early third quarter but Bitcoin is going to trade in advance of that if this becomes the the expectation then Bitcoin will rise and it'll probably take out the

all-time high because you know okay we believe that in the near future the money printing is coming and all these other bad things that we were focused on with from 110,000 to 176,000 don't really matter anymore. Bitcoin trades it it's it's so correlated to equities right now which is such a a somewhat misleading thing for it. We we we market it as digital gold and gold isn't correlated to equities but Bitcoin still is. is is talk to me about Bitcoin's correlation to equities and how you think that through and where you think equities could go from here. So I think Bitcoin is correlated to global liquidity more so than equities. It's just I'm so happy

you said that. I mean it's just that NASDAQ is very correlated at the moment at the moment to global liquidity. But I think you know big US tech has been the massive outperformer of the last two decades. I think that outperformance is over because at the end of the day if the Chinese, the Japanese and the Germans are no longer exporting as many things to the US because of tariffs because Trump and Bessant and Rubio and Lutnik are very clear we want to reduce this trade balance. The the flip side is then the financial account balance has to fall which means there's less dollars able to buy US assets. What have what have people been buying? They bought US tech. That's what they bought, you know.

And so yes, you could have the Boeings and the Loheed Martins of the world doing very very well, but you know, I'm not going to pay 30 times earnings for some tech stock. Maybe I'll pay 20 or 15 or whatever it is, right? So the earnings could still be there. the multiple we pay goes down because the foreigners left the market because mathematically they don't have the dollars to buy the stuff or to stimulate their own economies they need to sell the stuff bring capital home and rebuild their supply lines the supply chains just like the US is doing or their militaries so I think US tech will out will underperform the general rise in market not to say that it's going to go down but I think you're going to see

less and less correlation between Bitcoin and tech because the global liquidity won't flow there. It'll flow to gold. It'll flow to crypto. It'll flow to maybe value stocks or whatever that the investment community thinks that is. But I think US tech is going to falter and then we'll sort of dispel this notion that Bitcoin is uh correlated to equity. It's correlated to liquidity. Everything's correlated to liquidity, but stocks just have this additional component of earnings m multiples and this very high percentage ownership of all sovereign funds and very wealthy people who had to put their money in the US. It's the only place liquid enough to store these excess dollars created by the imbalance that Trump has been very clear he wants to

solve, wants to correct. What would be the the red flags that could hap that that you're worried about? What are the scenarios that you're watching that you're thinking okay if this happens in the next 3 to 6 months then I'm concerned anything that's on that's on your mind there I think it's an ideological thing so during 1929 the you know in the US great depression Herbert Hoover presidency Andrew Melon was the treasury secretary and he has a famous quote when asked about you know what do you think you should do about this stock market crash in uh the depression and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't know the the exact words something was like

liquidate land liquidate labor liquidate capital dot dot dot it'll force people to live within their means they've been living too high and you know we'll live better if we sort of delever the system now obviously that's a very painful uh message not very good to anyone really in the short term and politically unsuitable so you know Hoover is excoriated by historians as not printing enough money and everybody loves Frank Delanor Roosevelt because he did the New Deal and printed a bunch of money. So there is not an Andrew Melon type figure in global politics, US or anywhere else.

And so if we saw that the average person supported austerity, meaning okay, all these government programs are going, all this government spending is going for rich people and for poor people, everybody's [ __ ] right? We're going to take all this leverage out of the system, take some pain, and rebuild from here. Then I would be very worried for crypto prices in fiat terms. But I don't see any politicians with that message. Maybe the only one is MLE in Argentina, but that's a very specific case where they've did 50 years of peronist government money. Pretty. It took them, you know, five decades to get to the point of having a MLE. I don't think that this is not what the US person is saying. And I don't even what

Trump said. What does Trump say? Hey, I'm not cutting defense. I'm not cutting your social security check. I'm not cutting your your Medicare check. Yeah, okay. There's some fraud and waste in the government. I'm going to go and deal with that. But I'm going to get deficit from 7% of GDP down to 3%. But it's still a deficit. They're not aiming for a surplus. So the debt still grows exponentially. So again, there's fundamentally no politician around the world is saying, I want to remove leverage from the system, do a restart, and have a healthy balance sheet and grow from there. They want to run a high nominal GDP growth playbook, high inflation playbook to delever the balance sheet. That to them is less

politically painful than running an Andrew Melon type let everybody get [ __ ] and then you know let the chips fall where they may once we're healthy again then we rebuild from there. So we get Andrew Melon in power and around the world. Yeah. And then we're for crypto. Absent that, I think we're in a secular rise in money printing. We really only touched on Bitcoin so far. Uh, crypto has millions of tokens. Uh, you have let me get your takes on everything non Bitcoin. I'll let you uh run go ahead and and swear as much as you want about uh the many tokens that we have. I

mean, we have a lot of tokens. It's at at the end of the day, I think people say, "Oh, I want to have altcoin season." Well, I think meme coins are dead for a while. You know, they had they had the time of the sh the sun. I think they're going to come back for sure. I think there's some useful things in that market structure. But there's been some people on Twitter saying there's, I don't know, six or seven billion dollars of value extraction, mostly from retail people who lost money due to me, trade bots, rugs, whatever you want to call it. And so they're not going to be coming back to the Memecoin casino uh anytime soon. So I don't really think, yeah, there'll be some standout successes. I I trade the Trump coin just because it's I think it's a good barometer of sentiment, but at the

end of the day, I think Memecoins is sort of going to quiet down for a bit. I think that projects with real users and real revenue that have launched already will be showered with capital. So the likes of an Athena, the likes of a Pendle, these are projects that, you know, on a protocol level earn a profit. they have a real use case. There's product market fit, all those sorts of things, right? The the token that is a high FTV, lowflow token with no users, a lot of good marketing, and you know, a major sex listing, I think is still going to be shunned by most retail even if the market is is rising. And then we'll have a new crop of whatever that is that launches between now and the end of this cycle, which is going to be the

new hot thing because it has no history, no baggage. I don't know what that is. I think it'd be very apparent when it comes out, but that's sort of where I see sort of the the altcoin landscape. What that says to me is that you like DeFi because there's so I mean a the ones that you I like cash flows. I'm not sure it's going to be the the highest price performing thing, but I like project with cash flows because a project with cash flows is going to be there with real earnings. Yeah. And yeah. Okay. The bent of our portfolio is not to take a lot of losses to aim for the thousandx, right? You know, trading the, you know, 50 million market cap coin because it's going to go to a

billion, right? That's just not our game. I'll take a two to 3x on my capital, but I know I can put a lot more capital in it and it's not going to go down 75% just because, you know, some dev [ __ ] up something uh or somebody said something wrong in the Discord channel, right? This not my game. Different game for a different type of investor. And and you said that you think a lot of flows are coming into these cash flow projects, these fundamentally based projects. Where do you think those flows are coming from? What makes you say that? You think that's coming from retail or do you think that's coming from institutional?

I think it's coming from crypto holders, right? Anyone who holds Bitcoin, right? You're rich in Bitcoin. Okay. Where's what do I want to buy? Okay, I want to buy the things that I use. What do I use? I use a DEEX. I use lending protocols. I use stablecoin things, right? The things that I actually use. They've been around. I could see sometimes they're giving away some of their cash flow either buyback and burn or staking revenue to token holders. I I like those. I like those things. And I think progressively as you know, retail has gotten burned every cycle on, you know, they've gotten less scammy over time, but like less shittier of types of projects, they're more discerning, right? like people I don't want a high FTV low float token that's

just going to get dumped on by the VC. Okay, that's a very smart thing way to look at it. So I went and I traded meme coins which from a EV perspective expected value. You were more likely to make a 100x in a memecoin than you were buying the newly listed token on a major sex. That's just math and that's why memecoins proliferated. I think that pe but there are some projects that survive this downturn. They're still here. They still work. We all use them. And so I think they're going to attract flows from retail people who say, "Okay, I want to participate in something other than Bitcoin. Let me use a project that actually has users, actually has revenue." Even though retail will still go after the casino, whatever that casino is, whether Yeah, of course they will. Whether it be memecoins or if

you're thinking about what the coin that exists now that in the universe where I can trade right now that I know of, I think those are the things that'll do well. The thing we don't know what the the new new thing is going to be that everyone's going to latch on to. Yeah. And there I think you're totally right. There will definitely be a new new thing at some point. Do you think we're going to see a uh a bank fail in the US? Like or do you think now that Jay Pow said this that the that we don't need a bank to fail in order to get I mean the only bank that failed they the only bank that they allowed to fail were the free crypto banks because they wanted to exact upon the flesh and that was it.

Right. every other bank is I think there were two or three subsequent bank failures due to the um held to maturity treasury issue and they all were met with a sweetheart loan to JP Morgan or bank like that. The bank bought the the defaulted bank and they merged together and depositors were made whole. bank failures are outlawed in the United States. Like you run I mean you might lose you might get a zero on your equity but I think as a depositor the authorities have demonstrated that they will not tolerate any any bank failures. I maybe they will if it's a politically you know the politics of the bank are the wrong way whatever that is don't know but I think in general there is no such thing as a bank failure anymore in the US

when when we look at blockchains there's so many of them so many L1s in particular and there's some that have real users and real adoption and some that are in the top 10 by market cap that seem to not have much but seem to continue to rise. How do you think about like a an XRP or a Cardano versus like an Ether or Salana? Yeah. So, I mean I've been very vocal. I think XRP and Cardano are complete pieces of [ __ ] Right. However, they whether from luck or from skill, timing was good, price was good, right?

So, you know, XRP and Cardano bag holders got in early. You know, these are coins that launched in the first cycle of L1's post Ethereum or right around the same time. And therefore, people moved up a few ladders in the economic sphere by being long these tokens. And that's why they're rabid supporters. Doesn't matter what they do or what they don't do. Uh, in reality, they'll be on socials, you know, bashing anyone who disagrees with them and bigging up any announcement that is complete nothing burger because they got rich. And this is an example for founders right now, which is look at what they did, right? I know maybe it wasn't intentional, but at the end of the day, if you make users wealthy with

you, they will be your best biggest supporters regardless of what you actually do in the project. So instead of just like dumping all this highly priced stuff on the market, engineer a way to give your token or sell your token or whatever it is at a very very low price so that you have a greatl looking chart that goes up and to the right and you have a lot of people who got who moved up a station in life because they believed in you and they're going to be your best supporters and they're going to make sure that everyone knows about your project instead of having, oh, I need to have this massively overvalued listing on a major your sex it list, then the thing goes down 75%. And after the error drop, no one's like, "Oh, okay, whatever. Next

one." And there go you're you're ignored and you just die a slow death. So I think that's a lesson from Ripple and Cardano that I try to impart on founders. ETH versus Soul, which one do you think wins long term? I think ETH still has a possibility to win long term just because there's so much hate. And so usually when something is super hated, then it's the best performing from that point in time. I think Soul has an interesting problem that the meme if the memecoin, you know, fad has really faded for the time being. That's going to be a big hit to transaction volumes uh and revenue on chain in the sole ecosystem. And so I'm not sure.

Yeah, Soul's going to go up in in price for sure if if everything's going up in price. But will it outperform ETH? I don't know. Will there be another L1 that doesn't have uh that baggage that that could go up a lot in price? For sure. Obviously, I'm a big Aptos um supporter. I think that they have some interesting things that they're cooking that could really juice their token price going forward. But at the end of the day, I think Solana is going pegged as a memecoin chain and that really worked in their favor in most of 2024 and early 2025. And now that I think that section of the market is going to be more brown for a while, they need to find the new narrative. But it's a very big asset that they've got to

lift, right? to 70 billion or whatever market cap coin. Big big coin. So, they need a a big big new source of transaction value. What would you be watching for from Trump or Bessant to say that would make you feel like we're done with the pain that they've been pushing us through and the change that they've been pushing us through? Oh, my point is that well, they haven't really even started. if they're really serious about this global realignment. Now they're just having conversations. Now it's I'm gonna threaten you with tariffs unless you do whatever it is. We'll see how that works. But I think the message is that even the little bit that they've done so far has scared Jalow so much that he is

now accommodating monetary policy. So, if anything, they're going to go even harder because they know that the money is going to be printed by the Fed to buy the treasuries that the foreigners aren't going to buy anymore because of the changes that they're pushing through. So, again, I'm not afraid of tariffs because Powell said he doesn't care about tariffs anymore. He's still printing money. I also, you know, believe what they say. They're going to try to remake the global trade system. Fine. Okay, cool. But you need to buy for those treasuries and it's going to be the banks. Besson was on all in podcast. He said, "I want to get the supplemental leverage ratio exemption for banks." I think he quoted something like, "It's going to be a 30 to 50 point basis point reduction in the 10-year yield." Probably could could be. I mean,

he's he's a smarter guy than me, so that probably is the case. At the end of the day, they're going to go harder. They have the they have the money printer behind them to change the things they want to change and not have the ill effects of destruction of the Treasury market. How do I get into one of your parties? Oh, there we're having a party in Dubai for Toka 2049. It's easy. Of course. No, we spook them for sure. Come on in. Well, for for those who don't know, why are your parties so legendary? Uh, I really love um partying and I love house music. So, it's a it's a passion of mine. I like throwing parties. I've been throwing parties since I was in university. So, it's something that we do. Um, it's uneconomic, but I just really enjoy it. And I think You think

it's uneconomic? Really? No. I mean, I would have thought that you would say that like the relationship building and all that is so important. Yeah. But I say like we don't make any money on these parties. So it's not like Yeah. We're selling tables and all this kind of stuff, but it's just kind of like funds the cost because obviously it's great for branding for Maelstrom, right? Because at the end of the day, we want our name out there. People think we throw cool parties and want to hang out. That's that's great for um the company. But, you know, I've been throwing parties long before it made, you know, sense. We we did it at BitMX again. Did uh a massive party to club be needed to get more traders on board? No. But I did it anyways because I like doing it. So, I think that's what makes a good party,

right? Is you, you know, or a good artist in Vinnie can. You have to sort of almost downgrade the commercial viability of the enterprise for it to be something that's worthwhile to go to. And you know, I love the music and so I have a great, you know, me and my chief of staff have a lot of fun picking DJs and doing all this sort of stuff uh around throwing a party even though it doesn't make us any money uh at the end of the day. Who was the uh that makes me think of um I don't remember which project I think they bought a plane and filled a plane on going to token 249 last year and then I've heard about that. Do you remember that? Was that you? That was you.

Yeah, there was like hundreds of people on this plane and it just to to everyone outside of crypto, it looked awful. Like it just looked like a bunch of young [ __ ] partying on a plane without any consideration for the rest of the world. But to everyone in crypto, everyone was like, "Okay, yeah, there's Toga 24 certainly had a lot of money last year and was was firing on all cylinders." Uh bullish buys were happening there for sure. Arthur, been an absolute pleasure to get you on the show. Last question. Any bold predictions for the rest of this year? Bold predictions? I think still the bold prediction is $250,000 Bitcoin by the end of the year. I think a lot of people are a bit scarred from this natural healthy correction during a bull market, but we're still in it. It's uh money is still printed. We're going

higher. Let me let me ask you this. Do you think that we continue to see the same cycles that we've been seeing? We've been in this four-year cycle trend for se several cycles now. Is that going to continue or are we shifting into a different cycle or different? I think we've always I think you know probably starting in 2017 we shifted into a global liquidity cycle and for whatever reason it kind of align with this fouryear thing that we have in Bitcoin. But again, I only focus on global liquidity and I don't really care about anything else because at the end of the day, I view Bitcoin as technology plus fiat liquidity. The technology is pretty constant unless there's some massive change in Bitcoin core could happen, but

not really in the cars right now. So, it's all about fiat liquidity where how what's the pace? Is it slowing down? Is it speeding up? What's the expectation? And I think if you use that as a a framework, it's very instructive to identifying, you know, a broad area of a top and a broad area of a bottom. Of course, you're never going to sell the top and buy the bottom. Like, don't even try. It's just a fool's errand. But as long as you have a general idea and you know, oh, I don't feel so good about that or I feel great and everyone doesn't, but look at this. I see the money printing happening. I should be going along blah blah blah. Right? So, that's kind of how I operate. And I try not to be dogmatic in any, oh, it has to be a four-year cycle and the month of

March has to be like that. No, it's everything is everything changes. It rhymes. Just go with the flow. You're still listening to the show. First off, high five. Thanks for your time. Truly appreciate it. Before I let you go, I want to tell you about a product that I really like in crypto and that is salt. What is salt? Let me tell you. But first, one thing that we talk a lot about in crypto is is there a way to never sell your Bitcoin, to never sell your ETH. If you really believe in the long-term potential of these assets, you might never want to sell them, but you still want to realize gains from them.

Well, how do you do that? One of the best ways to do that is through loans, to take loans against your Bitcoin. and Salt is one of the leading platforms for that. They offer cryptoback loans with over 575 million in loans that they have already given out. They offer flexible loan terms 12 months, 36 months or 60 months with competitive interest rates. So whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum, any crypto that you are super long on that you want to hold, you can get loans on them in order to start to get some gains from your crypto. Hit the link in the show notes. Check out Salt today. Go with the flow. Just get on the dance floor. Go with the flow. Feel the feel

the music in you and get after it. Arthur, pleasure to get you on the show, my man. Really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Thanks for listening everybody. Have a wicked awesome day. We'll see you back again tomorrow. As always, if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one. There's also a link in the description to our free fiveinut daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh. And if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game, we're going to also leave a link for Milk Road Pro. You get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying. This is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto. One final

note, this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice. Investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. Thanks so much for listening in my friends.