The Breakdown

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Business
**The Breakdown**

The Breakdown dives into the deepest topics in crypto, blockchain, and the macro forces shaping markets and power structures. Each episode breaks down complex ideas into clear, grounded analysis — separating signal from noise across crypto, finance, and geopolitics.

Hosted by David Canellis, The Breakdown features explainers, interviews, and conversations with the people building, regulating, and challenging the financial system.

A Blockworks podcast.

Subscribe to The Breakdown newsletter: https://the-breakdown.carrd.co/

Latest Episodes:

How Real Is Bitcoin’s Rally? 8 Interpretations of the $11k Surge Jul 29, 2020

Show notes

It was a beautiful Monday.

Bitcoin crashed through $10,000 and got all the way up to a new yearly high of about $11,000 before retracing slightly.

As with any dramatic price action, people were quick to start giving their interpretations of why it happened.

In this episode, NLW explains eight of those interpretations, including:

Banks stacking due to changes in custody rules
Money printer go brrr
Stock to flow model
Robinhood traders piling in
DeFi gain recycling
Buyers exceeding sellers
“Perfect storm”
Dollar crash, negative real interest rates and the search for a new reserve currency

Ultimately, NLW argues that it is this last factor driving up not only bitcoin but gold and silver.

SPACs 101: A Bubble, the Future or Both? Jul 28, 2020

Show notes

Special purpose acquisition companies have been around since the 1990s, but have seen a significant uptick in popularity in recent years. Companies like Virgin Galactic, Draft Kings and Nikola have changed SPAC’s reputation from a tool for second- and third-tier private equity shops to win fees to a legitimate alternative to initial public offerings. In 2020, SPACs have made up roughly 40% of the IPO market.

Recently, chatter around SPACs reached a fever pitch with the listing of Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Tontine Holdings - the largest-ever SPAC.

In this episode, NLW breaks down:

What a SPAC is
Standard SPAC terms
Why the traditional IPO process has generated growing discontent, especially from Silicon Valley
The benefits of SPACs for companies and investors
The downsides of SPACs for companies and investors
A number of reasons explaining why SPAC popularity is surging now
How Robinhood retail traders are creating an important bridge buyer for SPACs
Why Ackman’s Tontine Holdings SPAC could change how we think about SPACs in the future
Are SPACs a bubble?

Cited resources:

SPAC Man Begins - Alex Danco

SPACs as a Call Option on Hype - Bryne Hobart

SPACs: the most ludicrous bubble we’ll ever see… why not $IAC? - Yet Another Value Blog

Return of the SPAC - John Street Capital

The Economic Conflict That Will Shape The Next Century Jul 26, 2020

Show notes

This week on Long Reads Sunday, our selection is “Whose Century?” by Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books.

Nominally a review of four recent scholarly works on the conflict between the US and China, Tooze main argument is that the central problem with viewing this as a new Cold War is the idea that it is new.

Instead, we need to understand that, contra Fukiyama’s famous essay, history didn’t end in 1989 - at least not for the Chinese. What’s more, the narrative of having “won” the Cold War fails to take into account our spectacular failures in Asia.

Only by reframing our understanding can we make sense of the most important geopolitical conflict of the coming century.

As Economic Indicators Get Worse, the US Revs Up the Next Multi-Trillion Stimulus Jul 25, 2020

Show notes

This week on the Breakdown Weekly Recap, NLW covers:

A terrible week for US-China tensions, with dueling Consulate closures and an incredibly hawkish speech from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
Worsening economic indicators, particularly around jobless claims which saw their first weekly rise in four months
The likely size of the next US stimulus bill - $1T to $3T

Could the European Recovery Plan Actually Break Europe Apart? Feat. Tuomas Malinen Jul 25, 2020

Show notes

Today on the Brief:

Which industries are recovering the best
China retaliates against U.S. after consulate shutdown
Dollar heads toward its worst month since 2018

Our main discussion features returning guest Tuomas Malinen, CEO of GnS Economics.

In this discussion, Tuomas and NLW discuss:

An outline of the European Union’s new recovery plan
The new debt issuance structure that marks a first for Europe
The challenges of currency unions
How Europe’s debt crisis changed how Europeans think about economic integration
Why the current plan amounts to “stealth federalization”
Why some member states are in a state of mutiny over the fund

Find our guest online:

Website: GnS Economics

Twitter: @mtmalinen

Will Big Tech Enable or Destroy Small Business? Feat. Sahil Bloom Jul 24, 2020

Show notes

Today on the Brief:

Disappointing jobless claim numbers with first increase in 4 months
US banks now allows to custody crypto
Senate hears arguments for a digital dollar in the context of US-China economic competition

Our main conversation with Sahil Bloom

Sahil Bloom is an investor with Altamont Capital Partners and a prolific author of financial literacy Twitter threads.

In this conversation, he and NLW discuss:

Today’s jobless claims
Long term economic impacts from COVID in the travel industry
“Forced efficiency realization”
How remote work opens white collar professionals to global competition
Whether tech platforms are a destructive or enabling force for small business
Why financial education is essential and sorely lacking
Why the Robinhood rally crowd represents a positive opportunity for bringing new voices into the markets

Find our guest on Twitter: @sahilbloom

A Simple Explanation of DeFi and Yield Farming Using Actual Human Words Jul 23, 2020

Show notes

Today on the Brief:

US Gov’t forces China’s Houston consulate to close
US previously-owned housing market grows 20.7% May to June
Insider stock selling reaches record levels

Our main discussion: DeFi 101

Today’s episode of The Breakdown is a primer for anyone who has lost track of the terminology surrounding decentralized finance. In it, NLW goes over:

DeFi’s background and origins
Market making in a traditional context
Automated market making
How liquidity mining incentives economic participation
How decentralized exchanges differ from centralized exchanges
What “yield farming” actually means
Why we shouldn’t be concerned about the Yield Farming bubble

Is the Fed About to Start Promoting Inflation? Jul 22, 2020

Show notes

Today on the Brief:

EU leaders agree on $2 billion stimulus package
LinkedIn job cuts show weakness in the professional sector
Has DeFi jumped the shark?

Our main discussion: The Fed’s changing inflation strategy

University of Oregon professor and Bloomberg columnist Tim Duy recently penned a piece called “The Fed Is Setting the Stage for a Major Policy Change” arguing that we’re likely to see more inflation, promoted by the Fed.

In this episode, NLW breaks down:

Why the Fed is turning away from its traditional inflation forecasting method
Why the Fed is likely to let real inflation hit 2% before doing anything
Why some are calling the move “simply asinine”
Why some think the Fed is full of hot air and has no power to actually create inflation
Why the Fed is trapped by its definition of inflation

Audio clip featuring Alhambra Investments head of research Jeffrey Snider in an interview with Emil Kalinowski.

What Is GPT-3 and Should We Be Terrified? Jul 21, 2020

Show notes

Today on the Brief:

Mastercard, Standard Chartered and PayPal all deepen their engagement with crypto
Japan inches closer to a central bank digital currency
The real estate “doom trade” opens up

Our main discussion: GPT-3

Generative pertained transformer-3 – or GPT-3 as it’s better known – absolutely took over the internet this weekend.

It’s a new AI language model that can do some truly incredible things, from writing poetry to composing business memos to generating functioning code from natural language descriptions.

In this episode of the Breakdown, NLW provides a 101-level overview of GPT-3, including:

What an AI language model is
Why AI for language is more difficult than image-based AI
The background of OpenAI, the Elon Musk-backed project behind GPT-3
Some examples of what GPT-3 can do
Why reasoning and narrative still elude the technology

Reference posts:

GPT-3 Examples, a Twitter Thread

Jonathan Johnson on AI Language Models

Rob Teows: GPT-3 Is Amazing – And Overhyped

Are Stablecoins Eurodollars 2.0? Long Reads Sunday Jul 19, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s Long Reads Sunday, we look at two essays about stablecoins previously published on CoinDesk.

The first is called “USD Stablecoins Are Surging, but Zero Interest Rates Complicate Business Model” by Hasu and was one of the first pieces to recognize that demand was coming not just from the crypto space but from emerging markets facing crisis time currency pressures.

The second is “Hyper-Stablecoinization: From Eurodollars to Crypto-Dollars” from Pascal Hügli. The piece argues that stablecoins are likely to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. In effect, they are a better version of the critical eurodollar system.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected