E121: Macro update, Fed hike, CRE debt bubble, Balaji's Bitcoin bet, TikTok's endgame & more

I think... they should have done the opposite—they should have raised 50bps. It would have created a little bit more chaos in the short-term, but it would have set us up to understand what was fundamentally broken ... They took the worst option.

This credit bubble is here, and it's being manifested right now in these very sophisticated parts of the market. And eventually, they'll ripple to the broader economy at large.

This is why, I think, again, the Fed needed to take leadership this past week and actually do the hard work of either cutting 50bps or raising 50bps. And this middle path is the absolute worth path because trying to thread a needle in this complicated economy, I think, is just going to be impossible.

That's the general theme here in case, everyone isn't paying attention at home is that the Fed, the US government, will continue to print money and create programs to effectively support asset values such that there isn't a crippling economic ripple effect.

We can't say yet that Balaji is wrong. Do I think that we're gonna have $1M Bitcoin in 90 days? I personally find that very unlikely, but you can't say yet. He stuck his neck out, making a prediction that will be easily falsified if he's wrong second.

If Bitcoin, or crypto assets in general, were truly a legitimate off-ramp and salvation from US dollar hegemony and all of this stuff, why isn't Bitcoin at least at $35,000 a coin right now? It's barely above $28,000. It really hasn't moved that much.

They clearly reacted way too late to the inflation ... We had that surprise inflation print in the summer of 2021, 5.1%. They said it was transitory. They didn't react until November ... They didn't even start the first rate increase until March of 2022. So, they were really asleep at the wheel and late to react to the inflation by about 9 months.

I think that the right decision here was to either cut rates or to stand pat ... I probably would have just stood pat, because again, we've just seen this banking crisis. Why don't you just wait one month to see?

We had the biggest spike in discount window borrowing since the 2008 financial crisis ... This exceeds anything that happened in 2008. The warning sign should be flashing red over something like this.