Trump recently said “certain levels of inflation” could help pay down the national debt “very rapidly.” everyone laughed because lol sure, just inflate away $ 40T. But if you put together what’s happening with Treasury yields, stablecoins, the GENIUS Act, Japan finally raising rates after decades of basically free money, and the insane amount of debt being raised for AI… eyyy wait a second what if the plan was never to pay the debt off? look at GENIUS. if stablecoin reserves are held directly in Treasuries, those Treasuries have to mature in 93 days or less. 93 days lol say $100 goes into USDT and the issuer parks it in a 3-month T-bill. 3 months later it matures, but the guy still owns his USDT. Tether still needs somewhere to keep that $100. another T-bill. 3 months later? “same again?” now multiply that by a stablecoin market Treasury thinks could eventually reach several trillion dollars. America just got a potentially enormous pool of money that keeps coming back to short-term debt. now Trump’s inflation comment gets funny. inflation is great when you borrowed at 2% for 30 years. years pass, the dollars you owe are worth less and the lender eats it. try that with the 3-month guy. his bill matures and he comes straight back like “yea I saw the inflation numbers. what are you paying me now?” so inflation can make yesterday’s debt cheaper while making tomorrow’s refinancing more expensive. which makes repeat buyers pretty damn useful. some guy in Argentina dumps pesos for USDT because he wants dollars. he doesn’t care about Treasury auctions. but if that’s new dollar demand, the issuer needs new reserves, and some of it ends up in T-bills. guy loses faith in pesos, Washington gets a buyer. incredible arrangement lol and not all stablecoin growth is new demand. if I move $100k from a Treasury money-market fund into USDC, the money may already have been in government paper. the interesting part is money that wasn’t in dollars before people can now dollarize themselves with an app instead of waiting for their central bank to do it. and THEN Japan starts making sense. Japan spent decades near zero because it couldn’t get inflation going. yen became dirt-cheap funding and global finance borrowed it to buy higher-returning stuff elsewhere. now Japan finally has inflation and the BOJ is hiking. one of the world’s old pools of almost-free funding is getting more expensive right when America needs an absurd amount of capital. and apparently Big Tech does too Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have issued roughly $220B of bonds over the past year while the AI buildout eats capital at a deranged rate. government borrowing through the ceiling, AI companies borrowing hundreds of billions, rates around 5%. you’re literally sleeping on a bed made of debt and leverage and somehow acting like this is fine??? apparently everyone is making the same bet: borrow now and hope whatever you’re building makes today’s debt look small later. AI is the growth bet. stablecoins help keep buyers coming while everyone waits to see if it works. which is a pretty funny place for crypto to end up. it spent 15 years trying to escape the dollar system, and now its biggest product helps distribute dollars around the world while part of the reserves finance Washington. maybe the next crypto bull market happens because crypto finally found product-market fit with the US government. Ahhh how depressingly ironic

if you trade stocks or crypto you should probably understand why the bond market is acting fucking possessed right now because this is one of those boring looking things that decides whether your portfolio gets another liquidity sugar high or you end up selling feet pics to make rent so lemme explain three things👇 1. why Treasury yields keep climbing 2. what actually makes them stop 3. why “yield down” can mean either AMAZING or OH FUCK for BTC and tech quick refresher: people buy Treasuries, price up, yield down. people sell, price down, yield up. so why did the 10Y hit ~5.3%, the highest since 2002? basically everyone wants money at the same fucking time. inflation is still above the Fed’s target, so the Fed has less room to cut. if short rates stay high, investors aren’t gonna lock money up for 10 years at some shitty low yield unless they think rates are about to fall hard. Washington is issuing mountains of Treasuries to fund the deficit. AI is another giant borrower. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have issued roughly $220B of debt this year to fund the buildout. so Washington and Big Tech are standing in front of the same investors going: “hi can I borrow an obscene amount of money pls 🥺🙏” “sure. pay me more.” the funny feedback loop is high yields partly come from fear the Fed stays tight, but once the 10Y gets high enough, mortgages and corporate borrowing get more expensive anyway. the bond market starts doing some of the Fed’s choking for it. and 5% is a BIG fucking difference. for much of the post-financial-crisis era, the 10Y was way below this. during Covid it went below 1%. now Uncle Sam is offering you around 5% on a 10Y like some formerly ugly guy who came back from summer break six feet tall with a trust fund. the bond selloff starts fading when yields get high enough that buyers finally go “ok fine, THAT’S worth buying.” around 5%+, pensions, insurers and bond funds start paying attention. then oil cools, jobs soften, Fed-hike odds drop, and suddenly it becomes: “oh shit what if 5% doesn’t last?” lock in ~5% today and similar bonds yield 4% later, yours gets more valuable. basically a rent-controlled apartment before the neighborhood blows up. but yield down can mean two VERY different things. inflation cools, oil behaves, the Fed backs off a little and the economy stays fine? yields drift lower, boring bonds get less attractive, financial conditions loosen. great for stocks and crypto. but yields also collapse when something breaks. recession, credit accident, whatever. markets price aggressive Fed cuts, scared money runs into Treasuries, bond prices rip and yields fall while BTC can still be getting absolutely murdered. so a falling 10Y by itself tells you almost nothing. slow bleed lower while inflation behaves? beautiful. vertical collapse in three days? maybe check what caught fire before opening a 20x long. this is why the $40T debt clock matters less for trading. everyone knows America owes a stupid amount of money. what changes is the return investors demand to keep lending to it. and when Treasuries pay 5%+, everything else has to compete. expensive tech, BTC, your shitcoin, all of it. Treasury auctions are the live test: Washington puts more IOUs on the table and sees whether 5% is enough. September’s 5Y auction was ugly as hell, weakest bid-to-cover in nine years with a ~3bp tail, and nearly another $120B of 3Y, 10Y and 30Y supply is coming through. strong demand makes it easier for yields to come down. if buyers still want more, yields keep climbing. the dream for your bags is incredibly boring: yields slowly come down and nothing dies. if they suddenly fall through the floor, maybe don’t celebrate too fast. anyway. America still needs buyers. a lot of them. where do you think they’re gonna come from? what if they already found a way to turn the rest of the world into one?

This whole openai/navier stokes thing made me think of another headline from few days ago: Andrew Wiles carried Fermat’s Last Theorem with him for 30+ years before finally becoming the first person to prove it in 1994. Meanwhile, Claude formalized the proof in 11 days for a problem humanity had been stuck on for more than 350 years. Obviously turning years into days is incredible. But so much of human progress came from people willing to give a completely unreasonable amount of their life to one thing. Wiles looks romantic now because we know he was right. Meanwhile, most people who spend 10 or 20 years chasing one idea probably really are “wasting” their time. But maybe civilization only gets the occasional Wiles because enough people are willing to make those ridiculous, concentrated bets with their lives. And now we’re getting very, very good at removing EVERYTHING that made those bets hard. Getting stuck, searching for weeks, going down dead ends, doing something badly for years before you become good at it. We call all of that “inefficiency” now. But maybe some of it was exactly what turned people into experts. okay, the obvious counterargument is that better tools should make someone like Wiles even better. And i think that’s true. The people who are naturally obsessive are probably going to become terrifyingly capable with ai. Well they’re not really the people anyone’s worried about when they talk about downsides of ai. It’s the “everyone else” (aka majority of ppl) who became great at something partly because life once gave them no shortcut. Not every expert started as a kid who wanted to spend 30 years on one subject. Sometimes you just stayed with a craft, a field, a problem long enough that one day you knew it in a way most people never would. ai makes more and more of that friction optional. Ofc if there’s an easier way, most people are going to take it. You get the answer faster, you switch fields faster, you can code without really knowing code, read outside your field, write about almost anything, become impressively “well-rounded.” And being “well-rounded” is treated as obviously always good now. i’m not sure it is. Maybe society should be well-rounded, but that doesn’t mean every person should be. A lot of extraordinary people were incredibly lopsided. Too much of their life in one field, one craft, one stupidly specific question. Terrible diversification, amazing outcomes. What is rational for an individual is not automatically what produces the most interesting civilization. If everyone keeps their options open, nobody makes the ridiculous concentrated bet. And the thing is that if there is a cost to all this “convenience”, we probably won’t notice it immediately. Productivity will go up first and everyone will look more capable. And well, then, the obsessive people at the top will become even more powerful. It might take 10 years to notice that fewer ordinary people ever became genuinely deep in the first place. Maybe that never happens. But we’ve never run this experiment before in human history: giving almost everyone a shortcut around the struggle that used to turn some of them into experts. i have no idea what that does to us.

No wonder she climbed to the top of a far-right party so fast. She’s basically the perfect face for AfD. Lesbian, immigrant wife, ex-Goldman, PhD, speaks Chinese, lived abroad. So every time people call AfD homophobic, xenophobic or backwards, they can just point at her. She makes hard right politics look weirdly normal and respectable. What a packaging

If you don’t believe life keeps giving you the same lesson until you pass it, go read the script God wrote for Leopold Aschenbrenner. > graduates Columbia at just 19 > joins FTX future fund > FTX blows up > joins OpenAI superalignment > gets fired for a “leak” > raises a $20b AI fund > fund blows up > and he’s not even 26 yet If he runs it back from here he’s a legend forever. If he doesn’t, he’s 25, he can just do it twice more.

Been a bit over a month since I posted this 6 month oil thesis. Back then half the “experts” were screaming Brent $150 soon. Glad I stayed skeptical. Oil dumped hard after, then Brent clawed back to ~$100, right into the zone I said to respect. Still see $100-120 as the level that matters. But should trim some cash off here right now. Almost certainly still get violent dumps before midterms (September - October?) once trump starts cycling the peace-deal/break-peace-deal playbook.

Reading this brought back a very specific feeling. I’ve been in crypto 13 years, long enough to watch things arrive looking like the future and leave without anyone announcing they were gone. Late 2017 I was flipping cryptokitties almost every day while eth went straight up. I explained them at dinner, to grown adults, and I probably sounded insane, but I wasn’t talking about cartoon cats. I thought I was looking at the beginning of digital ownership, culture moving onchain, and a new kind of internet where users could actually own the things they created and collected. I didn’t think I had caught a mania. I thought I had seen the future a little earlier than everyone else. Then 2018 came and robbed me blind… the money disappeared fast. But the belief took years to die. And even then, it didn’t really die. It just kept coming back wearing new clothes. NFTs, creator economy, socialfi, onchain social, creator coins. Not all of them were the same, obviously, but somewhere underneath them was a future I had already wanted to believe in once. That’s why the ideas that hurt the most when they die are rarely the obvious scams. Nobody mourns those. It’s the BEAUTIFUL ones, the ones that made sincere people think, “if this works, crypto actually changes the world.” You don’t just invest in those ideas! You build your life around them! You make friends through them, attach your name to them, spend years defending them, and start living inside a future that hasn’t arrived yet!! Then one day the market goes somewhere else. Usually there’s no dramatic ending. The users stop showing up. The group chats get quieter. The people who used to post about it every day slowly move on. The thesis still sounds beautiful when you say it out loud, it’s just that nothing is walking toward it anymore. You’re the last one standing in a room explaining what it was supposed to become. That’s a hard thing to admit, especially in public. Because you’re burying years of conviction, relationships, reputation, and a version of yourself that genuinely believed you were helping build what came next. Reading @jessepollak’s post today reminded me I’ve watched this happen over and over again, to other people and to myself. People outside crypto think the hardest losses are financial. After enough cycles, you realize some of the hardest losses are the stories you had to stop believing, and the futures you had already started living in. I still don’t know if I’ve fully let go of all of mine. Probably not.

Most crypto traders don’t actually want to learn stocks. They spend all their time looking for the stocks that require the least stock knowledge. Then still wonder why they’re not profitable when the reason is painfully fucking obvious.

To sum up the definitely “not suspicious at all” moments from the World Cup lately: > Argentina just became the first country in World Cup history to reach the semis without facing a single top 15 team > England’s goalkeeper hits his own teammate. Norway complains and gets the game’s only yellow card. > Croatia’s goal gets disallowed because the sensor can detect a fking strand of hair touching the ball. > England’s goal stands because the exact same sensor apparently can’t detect the ball smashing into a giant camera cable. Incredible technology. It even knows which country it’s supposed to work for.

If you’re not aware of your capacity to harm, your “goodness” is fragile. FAKE. Easily broken. Y’all should be careful around those who make “but i’m a good/harmless person” their whole identity. The worst are the self-appointed saints. They’ll guilt-trip you into being “good” by their definition, moral-police everything you do, while holding themselves to none of it. Because in their head they’re always at the moral high ground, aka “PURE”, so the rules are for you, not them. Naive people often get possessed by the same forces they deny exist, because they genuinely believe “I could never do that/how can anyone do xx?!” A “harmless” person who’s never been truly challenged isn’t good. They’re just WEAK. Seems fine now. But one thing snaps and they turn on you worse than any openly shitty person could, because you never saw it coming. I’m not saying the obvious assholes are better. I’m saying real goodness was never the absence of darkness. It belongs to those who’ve been pushed to their limit, who’ve stared straight into their own capacity for harm, felt the pull… and still chose NOT to. Every single time. Deliberately. That’s the only good I trust. The kind that had every reason to break and didn’t.

If you give up on crypto every time the price dips, you'll never make money in Web3. Go ahead and spread FUD if you want. But if you're yelling "Web3 is dead" just for engagement, you never believed in the first place. Real conviction isn't shouting about decentralization when everything's pumping. It's believing the world will come back when everyone's calling it dead, your wallet's bleeding red, and the market feels frozen solid. $BTC dropped from 20k to 3k in 2018. For two and a half years, nobody even mentioned crypto. The world thought the bubble had popped for good. Then 2022 hits and it crashes from 69k to 15k. Mainstream media writes "digital gold is dead" again. What happened? The people who stayed through it all became the ones everyone else calls "lucky." The volatility you're seeing right now is nothing compared to what this space has survived. The ones who hold their conviction at the bottom are the only ones who deserve the next cycle's celebration. Web3 isn't just technology and finance. It's belief. And belief means you still trust it when everyone else has walked away. So where do you stand right now?

I swear this entire world is a fking joke. OpenAI named its 3 new models Sol, Terra, and Luna. So… somewhere inside OpenAI, a crypto intern put the 2022 collapse starter pack into a naming doc as a joke. Then 14 directors, 6 branding people, 3 lawyers, and one guy named Chad from product all said: BEAUTIFUL. Ship it. Yea, this feels like the future. Is someone trying to warn us about the post-IPO price action?

Why am I not surprised that Europe somehow managed to make air conditioning into a sin? So their braindead logic in summary is: If planet gets hotter it’s climate change. If winter gets colder it’s also climate change. If electricity prices explode, it is because we must fight climate change. If you want cheap energy to not die in a heatwave? You’re a selfish asshole. If you support schools and hospitals having ACs so people don’t get slow roasted like supermarket rotisserie chickens, then you’re a far right eco-terrorist. EXCUSE ME, where is policy in modern politics anymore? If you want cheap energy you’re a populist scum. If you want safe streets you’re a fascist. If you want borders you’re a nazi. If yall love suffering that much as a passion might as well consider finding a cave and go back to the Stone Age

Lately every other headline is some “expert” warning oil’s about to rip to $150. I got curious and went and tested it. Pulled the inventory, flow and freight data and checked whether any of it backs the call. Short version: the risk is real, but $150 is the wrong thing to root for. Oil’s elevated and staying there. Crude’s genuinely stressed, Hormuz still isn’t normal, the buffer’s wearing thin, US crude drew 7 weeks straight and the market’s already leaned hard on SPR releases. The squeeze window is late June into July. So the tail is real. But $100-120 is the level I respect, call it 60% over six months. $150 plus is one in four, and only if the buffer truly snaps. Brent’s around $90 right now while the US and Iran trade fire and float a Hormuz reopening deal that could land this weekend. Even at the peak of the panic this spring, physical Brent never even made it to $150. Nobody’s betting $150 next week. Me neither. And if that deal lands, this cools off faster, not slower. The setup I actually want is dull. Brent grinding between $100-120 with a slow, messy normalization is the zone where the people who move oil get paid, cargoes shoved onto long routes, ships busy, system inefficient, demand still intact. Push it to $150 and hold it there and you kill that. Runs get cut, demand caves, less to ship, and high oil flips to bad-for-freight. The moonshot eats the trade everyone thinks it creates. And the tankers already agree. If the shock were here, freight would be printing. It’s dead. Rates 50-80% under stress, MR Atlantic at $35k against an $80k median, boats everywhere with nothing to haul. When those rates crawl back toward stress, that’s the tell. Not yet. So instead of playing (or praying lol) for the $150-160, I’m personally watching the $100-120 grind, because that’s where it pays.

How to fuck 500 million people at once: Be @saylor. > phase 1: never sell your bitcoin > phase 2: sell a KIDNEY before you sell your bitcoin > phase 3: we sold the bitcoin > phase 4: i never said the company wouldn’t sell > phase 5: anyone with half a brain knew that > phase 6: enjoy your one kidney bestie

funny how so many of the big IPOs seem to be getting squeezed into Q4 funny how that‘s also when midterms election happen got a strong tingle that’s when the AI mania finally pops (financially) and US equities absolutely eat shit. something about this timeline feels way too neat and we’re about to witness one hell of a rug pull.

So I recently sold all my houses, cars, and most of my physical assets. Told some friends and… well they all think I lost my mind lol I’m not saying world’s gonna end tmr. Those who know me know I’m actually annoyingly optimistic. People say we’re already in a recession but I genuinely think the real correction hasn’t even started. And honestly a crash you’re prepared for is just opportunity. Prep the cash flow now and be ready when it hits. Few months ago I tweeted a 1920-1939 side by side with 2020-now and I was like aha this earth simulation game isn’t even trying to be surprising. America First was literally a 1920s slogan. Middle class getting wiped, kids going hard left, the right cashing in on the backlash, yada yada. Same movie. They didn’t even bother changing the lines. But it’s not just the 1930s. This “coincidental” pattern keeps showing up Every time in history you get this specific set of things at once: > “empire” past its prime but won’t admit it > up and coming power that stopped playing nice > new tech nobody has rules for > wealth gap gone cartoonish > globalization reversing > institutions bleeding trust while pretending everything’s fine UNFORTUNATELY, it’s never ended quietly. Crash, war, usually both. Looking back, 1890-1914 literally looked unstoppable. > globalization booming, tech changing everything > markets ripping, rich getting richer, international trade at record highs > everyone convinced world had become too interconnected for a major war BUT then reality arrived. > 1914 WW I, 1918 spanish flu, 1921-1923 Weimar hyperinflation, 1929 great depression 1939 WW II. Just imagine you’re a civilian living in between any one of those events, literally each one felt like the worst thing that could happen until the next one hit. And I know how this sounds. This random green cat on X reads a bit of history and suddenly thinks the sky is falling. i would’ve scrolled past this a year ago too lol. But just look at how familiar the setup feels rn. A debt spiral. A rising challenger. AI detonating entire industries. Institutional trust collapsing. Millions of young people looking at the future and deciding they got sold a lie. You see it too right? That’s usually not when history calms down. And sure, you’ll say the system survived 2008. Central banks have the tools. The world’s too connected to actually break. You know who said basically the same thing? Everyone in 1913. A famous economist Norman Angell wrote a bestseller arguing war between major powers had become impossible because their economies were too intertwined. And guess what? A year later they were at war. The irony is he wasn't even wrong. The thing everyone pointed to as proof the system was safe ended up being what made the fallout global. Look at the positioning now. Stocks at all time highs. And everyone, I mean everyone, priced like things stay calm forever. Markets, governments, companies, all quietly betting on stability while the ground under it gets shakier every year. Trigger? No idea. Nobody ever knows. Franz Ferdinand (the dude who got shot and basically started WWI) wasn’t on a single dashboard in June 1914. So yea, I sold most of my illiquid assets. Still got stocks and crypto. Stocks prob exiting before end of year. Maybe I look crazy for a year or two. But I’d rather be wrong than be the dude on his knees in financial ruins asking God why he saw the train coming and stayed on the tracks anyway. “This time is different” is probably the most expensive sentence in history. And lately it’s the only thing I hear. And before someone says I’ve lost my mind, ask yourself something. Why do so many billionaires keep buying land in New Zealand? Why do people with private jets, intelligence briefings, and more money than they’ll ever spend keep building backup plans? Maybe they’re paranoid. Maybe I’m paranoid. Or maybe ordinary people are always the ones told everything’s fine right before they become fuel.