The Breakdown

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Latest Episodes:

The Breakdown Weekly Recap | March 28 2020 Mar 28, 2020

Show notes

The full week's episode, in one convenient file.

Monday | Unlimited QE and Why Markets Can’t Price In COVID19
Tuesday | Cronyism, Zombie Companies and the True Cost of the Corona Crisis, Feat. Morgan Creek's Mark Yusko
Wednesday | How the U.S.' $2 Trillion Stimulus Will Expose the Monetary System’s Flaws
Thursday | How BlackRock Ended Up on Both Sides of the Bailout, Feat. Meltem Demirors
Friday | From Corporate Socialism to Dying for the Dow: 7 Themes That Defined the Week

Corporate Socialism to Dying for the Dow: 7 Themes That Defined the Week Mar 27, 2020

Show notes

In this episode of The Breakdown, @NLW reflects on the themes that defined an absolutely wild week in global markets and society.

Those themes include:

Unlimited QE - broad new powers (corporate bond buying anyone?) and an unlimited checkbook for the Fed
Digital Dollars - a surprise inclusion of a digital dollar in an early Stimulus draft shifts the Overton window
Narrative Shift to “Grandma Dies For The Dow” - narrative analysis that suggests that the “just the flu” of two weeks has become “business closures will kill more than COVID”
Stimulus as Corporate Socialism - a huge bailout for businesses explained away by something that Taleb says is decidedly NOT a Black Swan
The Last Break of Institutional Trust - jobless claims were 4x higher than the previous record on the same day the stock market went bull again - trust in leadership is dead
Surveillance - a growing concern with surveillance - such as the new CDC program earmarked in the Stimulus package
Bitcoin difficulty adjustment - as Preston Pysh put it “this thing is so resilient it’s almost laughable”

How BlackRock Ended Up on Both Sides of the Bailout, Feat. Meltem Demirors Mar 26, 2020

Show notes

The Senate passed $2T in Stimulus. That includes a one time $1,200 check to impacted individuals and….you guessed it, billions and billions for corporate relief. Included in that are hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate bond buying programs. The Federal Reserve has recruited asset management giant BlackRock to administer three of those programs.

Here’s the kicker. As Bloomberg describes it: “under the arrangement [BlackRock] could buy some of its own funds on behalf of the central bank.”

Outrage is running rampant, and to help listeners sort through it, @NLW is joined by Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares. In this conversation, they discuss:

The government mechanics behind the “money printer go brrr” meme
The unfathomable failure of US intelligence in seeing the pandemic coming
The deficit of leadership across the political spectrum
What Blackrock means and why “they’re not even pretending anymore”
Why Twitter memes on their own can’t change the world
Why bitcoin can and should be a gateway and tool for evangelizing more systemic change

How the U.S.' $2 Trillion Stimulus Will Expose the Monetary System’s Flaws Mar 25, 2020

Show notes

CoinDesk’s Chief Content Officer Michael Casey and Head of Research Noelle Acheson join for a lively debate about the new $2 trillion stimulus package and era of “unlimited” QE, including:

Whether (and on what time scale) fiscal and monetary stimulus might lead to inflation
Whether the Fed buying corporate bonds amounts to a nationalization of the bond markets
Why the appearance of a ‘digital dollar’ in an earlier stimulus proposal was a huge surprise
How a digital dollar in the form proposed would upset the balance of power between the Fed, commercial banks, and citizens
Why trust in governments and financial institutions is likely to achieve new lows in the wake of COVID-19
Why people are reevaluating the meaning and purpose of money

Cronyism, Zombie Companies and the True Cost of the Corona Crisis, Feat. Morgan Creek's Mark Yusko Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

Mark Yusko is the founder of Morgan Creek Capital Management. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and @NLW discuss:

Why bitcoin has fallen with stocks over the last few weeks
Why price and value are not the same thing
Why stocks have been manipulated
An argument for buy backs being illegal
Why cronyism is not capitalism
Why bailouts and other types of intervention help zombie companies that should perish
A debate about whether the “cure is worse than the disease”
The costs of a 0-risk tolerance
The polarization of health vs. economics
Why there should be a market holiday
Why bitcoin is the last and only free market
Why the big market announcements are always on Sunday
Why we’re headed to debt jubilee
There is a non-zero probability that Trump tries to cancel the election
Why a lack of leadership is the biggest cause for pessimism today

Unlimited QE and Why Markets Can’t Price In COVID19 Mar 23, 2020

Show notes

Last October, Ikigai Asset Management’s Travis Kling predicted that Central Banks would have to “juice QE to infinity” in order to save markets from recession. Yesterday on 60 Minutes, Fed President Neel Kashkari said “there is an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure there is enough cash in the financial system.”

This was followed this morning by an announcement that the Fed was giving itself effectively unlimited capacity to intervene in markets. Markets were...still not impressed. In less than two hours, an initial gain had entirely retraced.

On this episode of The Breakdown, @NLW looks at:

Specifics details of the Fed Announcement
Why FinTwit and Bitcoin Twitter are focusing on inflation
Why some think that this action amounts to a nationalization of markets
How the ‘money printer go brrr’ meme is taking hold

The Breakdown Weekly Recap | March 21 2020 Mar 21, 2020

Show notes

The week's episode, in one convenient file. Also including short clips from CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti and SwanBitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten.

Monday | Can $700B in Quantitative Easing Calm The Markets? Feat. CoinDesk’s Michael Casey and Noelle Acheson
Tuesday | Gov't Stimulus Goes BIG and Why Bitcoin Is the Only Truly Free Market, Feat. Dan Tapiero
Wednesday | Is the COVID19 Fiscal & Monetary Response An Overreaction? Feat. Bruce Fenton
Thursday | Off
Friday | State Power & Authoritarianism After Coronavirus featuring Peter McCormack

State Power & Authoritarianism After Coronavirus featuring Peter McCormack Mar 20, 2020

Show notes

Peter McCormack is the host of What Bitcoin Did and the Defiance podcast. He recently returned from travel to a number of countries in South America including Venezuela and Colombia as well as the Turkey-Greece border.

In this off-the-cuff and wide ranging conversation, Peter and @NLW discuss

Bitcoiner politics and the bitcoin community’s reaction to the potential for increased state power in the wake of Coronavirus
Which types of state power growth we should be most concerned with
How to push governments to retract power growth on the other side of crisis
How travel around the world has informed Peter’s perspective on bitcoin and politics
Why nuance is both disincentivized and sorely needed in times of crisis

Is the COVID19 Fiscal & Monetary Response An Overreaction? Feat. Bruce Fenton Mar 18, 2020

Show notes

In his daily Coronavirus press briefing today, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said “our main scramble now is ventilators.” The state anticipates that within 45 days, it could need 37,000 ventilators. It currently has 3000.

Bruce Fenton was one of the early crypto community canaries in the coal mine warning of the impending threat of Coronavirus. As the world has caught up to the warning, he has shifted his attention to helping coordinate an open source network that is trying to address that exact problem.

On this episode of The Breakdown, Bruce joins to discuss:

Where the US is in its awareness cycle
Why bitcoiners are worried about the long-term economic ramifications of massive stimulus
What a voluntarist alternative to government intervention might look like
How an open source network is trying to solve the ventilator shortage
What regular people can do to contribute to the fight against Coronavirus

Gov't Stimulus Goes BIG and Why Bitcoin Is the Only Truly Free Market, Feat. Dan Tapiero Mar 17, 2020

Show notes

President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced a significant slate of upcoming stimulus measures, including deferred taxes and direct payments to Americans (although those details remain to be seen).

On this episode of The Breakdown, 10T holdings CEO Dan Tapiero joins to discuss:

How this forthcoming stimulus might impact the bitcoin narrative
Why some traditional safe havens like bonds might not fair well in the coming markets while others like gold are poised to thrive
Why markets could be positioning for a major bounce back
Why the Fed has more tools in its toolkit than popular media and opinion are suggesting
Why the dollar’s global strength is a major concern
Why bitcoin is the only truly free market in the world

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected