Broken Money with Lyn Alden: The Technological Arc of Money and Power

So I think a big theme over the past several decades, there have been more and more financialization and there's like a global arbitrage, right? So when you have 160 different currencies and some of them float against each other and pegs break and there's all these different equity markets, all these different real estate markets. If you're a finance here, you have you have like this whole playground of options to like short one thing and go into another thing. And when you look at the the crypto scene, it's kind of the end stage of that. Like it's kind of the the pinnacle of financialize everything and speculate on everything. Bitcoin is in some ways the reversal of that. It's basically saying that if with the reintroduction of a sound boring good money, it actually can de financialize certain things. Not to an extreme sense, but it can reverse that trend towards evermore financialization and arbitrage. Welcome back to the On Ramp Media archives where we revisit some of the most timeless conversations on Bitcoin, money and markets. Today we're re releasing the classic episode from February 2024 featuring Lynn Alden, engineer, investor and author of Broken Money, one of the most influential thinkers in macro and monetary history. In this conversation, Lynn unpacks the technological arc of money, from shells and tobacco to gold, Fiat and Bitcoin, showing how every leap in communication and settlement has reshaped who controls money and why. She explains why Bitcoin isn't just another speculative layer of financialization, but the technological completion of money itself, the first true form of digital settlement in human history. We also dive into the macro landscape, fiscal dominance, liquidity cycles, and why hard, scarce assets like Bitcoin and gold are poised to outperform in an era defined by debt, deficits, and geopolitical stress. It's a dense, fascinating discussion that's aged even better with time, especially as many of Lynn's 2024 predictions are now playing out in real time. Let's get into it. Broken Money with Lynn Alden. The technological arc of money and power. A consistent theme that I touch on in Broken Money is idea that money is like a Ledger that people either agree to use or some cases forced to use or using a Ledger either in the literal form or the abstract form. And so the big questions to ask are who can censor transactions and who can create more of those units or in some rare cases who can destroy those units in a centralized way. And so, you know, you can kind of think of that as 2 main things. There's commodity money itself, right? So we have a lot of known examples of those. We have grains, we have obviously gold and silver in later years, we have shells. You know, there's all matter of different types of money that people can use. One of the examples that I like is the tobacco example in early United States before they were actually a country, just the early colonies. And the reason is it was kind of like the gold standard, but accelerated. So like all the flaws of money all kind of happened within a pretty short time period because it was it was less sound. And so we kind of ran through the full gambit of all the problems and, and frictions that people find with money. And so when they get to the colonies, there's not a lot of species, there's not a lot of coinage. And so they're kind of gravitating towards other types of money, especially for kind of everyday transactions of, you know, the indigenous people. And they kind of use that money without the ceremony that was normally attached to that type of money by the natives themselves. But they, they just kind of used it for its scarcity purpose. And then they also turned to using tobacco as money, which was a major cash crop. And what's notable about tobacco, it's obviously it's, you know, you get a lot of value per kind of mass and weight relative to other crops. It's a cash crop in that sense. And it was, it has globally desirable crop. And so they start kind of making that into money. They say, OK, well, here's it's legal tender. We're going to use this along with things like wampum, you know, the the shell money. And but then all the natural things start happening, right? So if tobacco is money, it means more people are holding it for reasons in addition to its utility value. And so it's kind of overvalued. It's like more valuable than you'd expected to be based on its utility alone. And so there's a really strong desire to plant more of it because it's, it's overvalued. And so people start planning more of it and you start to get tobacco price inflation. And then so then the authority is like, no, no, wait, we have to put restrictions on who can plan it, right. And so then they have, you know, if you're, it's kind of like the classic, if you're close to the source of power, you're one of the privileged groups that can plan it. Otherwise you can't. Then there's like bootleg tobacco planting because it's, it's still profitable to try to plan it. Obviously there's more risks then there's problems of fungibility. So not all tobacco is the same. It's different ages, different types, different quality. So then they said, OK, well instead of using tobacco directly, we're going to abstract it. Everybody's going to put their tobacco in a warehouse and professionals will grade it and it will have tobacco receipts. And now you have both tobacco that's not really scarce, but you're still using this money. It's got lack of fungibility, but you're now you're abstracting it. So you have like Lily counterparty risk on top of an unsound money. And eventually the system became so untenable and that the economy's developed enough that they they had more species to work with so that they abandoned that system. And in parallel, similar thing happened with the shell money. S the shell money was very valuable to the natives. It was very hard to make. It's got inherent scarcities to it and it has the good properties of money. It's portable, it's long lasting and it has all those attributes. But as soon as you add metal tooling and other kind of sophisticated techniques of gathering shells and then polishing and drilling them and making them into their final form, they could basically devalue the money. They could inflate the supply more readily than was normally the case. And so similar along with the lines of tobacco, they inflated it until was not really useful money anymore and they had to gravitate towards stronger types of monies. So there's all sorts of examples like that, but I find those interesting because they're well documented compared to many other types of monies. And they was all kind of all the problems kind of unfolded over an accelerated pace because you had like a clash of cultures and you had a kind of unique example of a fairly developed civilization, but in a new environment. So they were kind of cut off from their more developed core. And so you had kind of the clash of folder money systems, new money systems, all kind of coming together. One thing I described in the book is that in the development of money, there's basically 2 technological paths that are happening simultaneously. 1 is what we're actually using as money itself, which we just touched on. For example, if our technology is too good for shells, we can't use shells anymore. We have to use something that even our new technology can't make more of quickly, like gold, for example. So you kind of move up the hardness scale in terms of different types of commodity monies that that's one technical path, but the other technical path could basically be described as analog encryption or various technologies that overlay on top of those monies and allow the ownership of it to move around more quickly. Because when you're moving and transporting commodity money, especially gold bars and things like that, both the transport of it securely and then the auditing of it down to its core, these are time consuming, inefficient, expensive processes. And so going back literally hundreds and in many cases thousands of years, there's various types of proto bankers, kind of before the modern banking establishments and early bank, they were trying to find ways to make this more efficient. And so going back to ancient Egypt, for example, there'd be papyrus bills of exchange. And there's also early examples along the Silk Road in like Central Asia and a lot of things that we don't really consider technology today. We're all ways to make the transfer of monies quicker and more efficient. So coinage, for example, is one of the classic monetary technologies. You put them into standard units with various anti forgery techniques or anti shaving techniques on the metal itself to make that exchange more rapid. There's also the invention of paper and then the invention of book binding and then the invention of, you know, different types of inks and then you have analog encryption. So for example, if I give gold to a merchant and that merchant signs a piece of paper that I can then transfer to another city and exchange at a different merchant for gold. Again, obviously those merchants in their network have to have some sort of anti forgery technology on top of it to make sure that people can't just copy those paper receipts and just redeem gold that they never put in. And so you have the development of this various kind of anti forgery encryption techniques in the analog sense. Then things like the printing press, which again is today, it's not new technology, but back then that was a big deal. I mean, complex paper instruments that are standardized and and complex became cheaper to do. And so that that expanded the number of things you can do with paper, like widespread usage of banknotes and things like that. So there was that, that technological path over top of the commodity money angle. And these were kind of developing along the simultaneous lines. And then when you get into the modern era, you get even further developments. And I contend, for example, that the Telegraph was an enormous stepwise change in the speed of money globally. So prior to that, there's virtually no way to send information faster than matter, right? So even with complex banking and Ledger systems, those ledgers still only moved at the speed of people. So foot horses, ships, you know, rare low bandwidth exceptions of like fire signals in the night, you can't send information long distances quickly, faster than ship. But what made the Telegraph so interesting is that now you could send higher bandwidth information around the world very quickly. And the first time in thousands and thousands of years in human history, we had this big gap between how quickly we could transfer information versus how quickly we were still confined to transferring matter. And I think most historians, when they focus on that, they focus on the geopolitical implications. But there's a pretty straightforward monetary implication, which I don't see discussed that often and why I chose to emphasize it so much, which is that information, transferring information allows you to make transactions, but especially in a low bandwidth setting like then, it does not allow you to make settlements. And so the gulf between settlement transactions and settlements became larger than ever. So prior to then there were still somewhat of a gap. So there's various paper instruments I mentioned. They basically increased the gap between transaction speed and settlement speed, but it was still like a manageable size. But this just completely blew open the the scale and the speed of those two things. And what I would argue is that basically we had a century and a half of just extreme levels of financial centralization. And most of that was to bridge that gap between those transaction speeds and those settlement speeds, basically because you had to rely on some sort of trusted entity in in the middle until we basically just dropped the idea of settlement altogether. We just dropped the idea of using any sort of underlying gold and the Ledger itself became settlement. And going to the modern era, what makes Bitcoin so interesting is that finally technology and bandwidth globally came together enough that we could do digital settlement, not just digital transactions. And that really could not have occurred much earlier than it happened. Obviously the development of the Internet, you had to have not just low bandwidth Internet, but fairly high bandwidth Internet pretty globally accessible. Then you had to have pretty advanced that's encryption techniques. Some of them were only invented less than a decade before Bitcoin came out. And so as these things came together, we got the emergence of Bitcoin, which is digital settlement. And so that's what I describe as closing that gap between transactions and settlements. And the kind of the take away point is how much technology influences who controls money. So if you go back centuries, the idea of surveilling every transaction is like science fiction, whereas now it's it's almost like people say, why? Why wouldn't government surveil every transaction, right? It seems normal. And if you kind of question it, it's almost like you're the weird one. You're like, well, what are you up to then if you don't want every transaction being surveilled? And so basically the, the technology, the speed, all these things are heavily influenced by technology. Even though a lot of monetary history books focus on human decisions, which I, you know, they're, they're relevant for certain times in certain areas. But that link between technology and money and how fast it allows money to move and who controls it, I think is something that was generally underexplored and why I emphasize it so much. One of the themes that kind of indirectly comes up in the book is the idea of kind of technological determinism, which is that when certain orders of events happen, one kind of leads to the other. And so if we use another example, there's, if we were to rerun this human history 100 times, you know, either 99 to 100 times the bicycle would be invented before the automobile and before the airplane, right? Because one kind of leads ones like a necessary but insufficient part of the next one, right? So something really weird would have to happen to like invent the airplane before you have something like a bicycle or something like a car. And the same thing is kind of true with money, which is that, you know, we kind of saw the emergence of pretty common paths, right? So first there was proto banking. That's kind of it's like channel like banking in the modern context. It's almost like lightning came before Bitcoin in the sense that you'd have these bankers that are basically they have direct connections with other merchants in other cities and they can allow for the transporting of money pretty quickly. It's more about actually transferring money than credit, even though it relies on credit to make that transfer. And then you had the development of, you know, more free banking type of arrangements. But the problem is that when all the gold kind of gets put into a couple different hubs, like a couple different major banks, the governments know where all the gold is now, right? Instead of being diffused throughout the population, it's in certain hubs. And there's ledgers built on top of those hubs that allow people to transfer the ownership of it more readily. That was basically, for example, the whole point of banking in those Italian city states is that they'd have the gold in one spot. And you'd have a Venetian merchant and an Arab merchant. And they could just go to the banker and say, well, OK, we transferred these spices and now we're going to just transfer these Ledger entry for who owns this amount of gold. And the gold would still just kind of be sitting in the same vault. And the problem is that that all coalesces and governments know where it is. And so they can say, well, OK, now every bank, every bank has to put all or some of their gold into this big central vault. And then also you have the constant tendency towards duration mismatching. But there's all these debates around fraction reserve or full reserve banking. I prefer to kind of describe it as either full, either duration matched or duration mismatched banking, which is basically your, your, your liabilities are you're making promises that you only probabilistically can keep. So you have this kind of ultimately unsound arrangement that leads to kind of cascading crises. And then one of the solutions for those is central banking. But then it come, it's almost like a deal with the devil in the sense that it fixed. So you're immediately problem, but then it further over decades further centralizes the system. So one of the things I argue is the fact that gold failed almost everywhere at the same time. Other than Switzerland and a few others, it pretty much all failed at the same time. And the fact that when you look around today, there's no countries on a gold standard, like not one. There's no country that does full reserve banking, even though it's inherently more stable of a system. It's just the incentives have not worked that way. I generally argue that the, the, the, the path of technology that was available so strongly tilt incentives towards some directions that 99 or times out of 100 it leads towards those directions, at least until another technology comes along that swings those incentives back in another direction. So for a century you'd have sound money advocates or Austrian economics proponents saying how things should be and just kind of getting ignored. They're kind of making arguments about and it's just kind of nation states for like that's cool. And they just ignored them. Whereas I kind of view Bitcoin as the first tool that actually gives them the burden of power, right? That they that things now a little bit kind of tilt the scales back in their favor to some extent. So yeah, I kind of view a lot of it as even though there were human decisions that can be described as some case ethical, some cases unethical, and they can affect the timing of certain things. When you generally see the whole world move in a direction for a period of time, it's usually the case that technology has kind of strongly tilted the scales in that favor, at least for that era. All right, just a quick break. If you're not subscribed to the On Ramp Research newsletter, I certainly encourage you to do so. If you're a fan of the last trade and other shows here at On Ramp Media, I know that you'll find a lot of value in the newsletter that Brian on our team produces each week. We just sent out the weekly roundup this morning and Brian really dug into the sovereign accumulation watch, as he called it. So dug into what is happening around the world as nation states approach Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset. So again, if you're interested in what we do here on the research side and want to follow our research updates as well as team updates, product updates, head to our website on rampbitcoin.com and you can put your e-mail in right on the homepage you see here. I've been giving like a two year view more than a one year view. It's like higher conviction in that period because almost anything happened in one year. Whereas 2 years I think the directions matter more. The structural directions are harder to not go a certain way. And so I do expect that within the next two years we'll probably have another pro liquidity cycle. We we've been in this kind of period of stagnant liquidities, quantitative tightening, partially offset by all these treasury actions we've been talking about, you know, draining the reversal of both facility things like that. But I do think that within the next two years we'll probably have another significant up leg in liquidity. And one of one of the strongest correlations with Bitcoin is liquidity, especially global broad liquidity measures. So I do think that that will be a tailwind for Bitcoin. I think the halving will be a tailwind for Bitcoin. You know, one thing I argue is that the halving, the timing is not always perfect for Bitcoin bull runs. If anything, liquidity correlates with that stronger than the halving. But the halving is certainly still a factor, especially for magnitude, especially for helping reach higher highs and higher lows as it goes through these cycles. So the fact that the halving is coming up, I think is bullish. I think the washout of a lot of the excesses of the past cycle is mostly done, which kind of just sets the floor for Bitcoin. And I also look at the huddle wave, for lack of a better word. There's, there's more sophisticated ways to measure too, like looking at addresses that mostly accumulate Bitcoin and rarely sell Bitcoin and kind of looking at their percentage relative to the whole, but different ways of looking at it is roughly the question of has there been a distribution cycle yet? So generally stronger hands in Bitcoin tend to sell somewhat into strength. So if Bitcoin goes up 5X or 10X, some of those addresses tend to be trimming their holdings. You know, maybe it's because they're rebalancing, maybe it's because they now can consume something that they couldn't consume before, but they want to buy the house that they couldn't buy before and so they're selling some Bitcoin to do it. Generally when you see a significant amount of that distribution and a lot of new investors coming in, that's when you're maybe getting closer to a top in the cycle and that's not really started yet in this cycle, even though we're off the lows by about double or more, there's not really been that distribution cycle yet. And so far that's very clean compared to prior this stage in the bull market like an early bull market environment where prices off the lows, sentiments improving is not really dead anymore. But there's also been virtually no reason for those strongly held coins to go back onto the market. And so I think that most of the catalysts still point toward pretty good two year returns in my expectation. And you know, the longer I go out, you know, the higher conviction I can be. So I might be very uncertain for the next 6 months, pretty high conviction for the next 24 months and obviously higher conviction would say A5 year view. Well, so one thing that's interesting is that the entire reverse repo facility basically represents excess demand for T-bills beyond the amount that is available. And so, and that that's a market that I've been following pretty closely throughout my just kind of macro career. So for example, back in 2019, we had the opposite. We had a repo spike and we had that engage in repo activities and that was partially just because there were too many T-bills, relatively available liquidity to absorb those T-bills after all the QE that happened during the during the pandemic stimulation and lockdowns and all that. You had this build up of excess cash that wanted to be in T-bills. And so they set up all the reverse repo facilities, things like that to ensure that T bill yields don't get driven below their the lower bound of their interest rate targets. And so as long as that pool of capital exists, policymakers, specifically the Treasury, have the option to tilt duration towards the shorter end to try to meet that excessive demand for T-bills and relieve the potentially insufficient demand for longer dated securities. And so we've seen kind of a gamification of that in the past year or more. And one of the kind of the dilemmas you face as the Treasury is you're trying to issue debt. I mean, you're not the Treasury's not the one that the term what the deficits are. That's mostly Congress and the president and all that kind of comes together. But as the Treasury, it's your job to figure out what types of bonds to issue to meet those demands. And if you go back long enough, that wasn't always the case. It used to be that Congress would basically authorize every type of bond to pay for every type of debt. And eventually they said, OK, that's the micromanagement is getting too silly there because the whole apparatus is getting too big. And so they said, OK, well, we'll just set a limit. Here's a debt ceiling, and the Treasury can go out and figure the. Details of what bonds to issue and what durations and any sort of parameters they want to do. And so the Treasury has this job of meeting this very large deficit and they have different parameters that they're trying to meet. So one is obviously they want to have the lowest cost available to the government. That's a big variable, right? So if there's different part to the Treasury curve, you can potentially save some money by issuing debt on the on the cheaper part of the curve, but it has other consequences. Another big one is obviously liquidity. If you don't want to cause a liquidity problem, you can issue bonds on the more expensive part of the curve, but that is more conducive to liquidity and asset prices and things like that. So I'm, I'm, I'm like monitoring the reverse repo facility and the rate of QT to be a little bit more important than the rates themselves, partially because the rates themselves weirdly have a dual aspect. So they are tightening to some parts of the economy. But as a point I've been making is they're actually stimulating other parts of the economy. And that's really only the case when you have public debt to GDP this high, right. So back in the Volcker era when you had 30% debt, the, the higher the rates go, it's mostly just depressing the economy. It's mostly an anti inflationary, anti credit creation effect, which is why Volcker did it. But the problem is when you try to repeat that when you now have a percent debt, the GDP just for round numbers, on one hand you are having the same effect of pushing down on interest rate sensitive sectors of the economy, right? So commercial real estates, small business bank lending, residential real estate turnover and things like that, that all that all effects is similar. But another hand, you're completely blowing out the fiscal deficit, which is stimulating parts of the economy. They're not as interest rate sensitive or not interest sensitive at all. And so if you're on the receiving side of those deficits, one or another, if anything, you're propensity to spend is now higher and so that effect is more muted. Whereas liquidity is still pretty much liquidity. So QT is generally still not good for asset prices unless it's being countered by something else like for example, the draining of the reverse repo facility. So I've been paying a little bit more attention to the balance sheet more so than the rates. Another factor with pointing out is that as inflation has cooled down to varying degrees, flat interest rate profile results in widening real rates. So if, if they just hold interest rates flat and interest rates are declining, that means they're increasing real rates. And so they actually have a capacity to mildly reduce rates while still remaining at say the positive real rate level that they had some months ago. So that might be a, that might be a path that they approach. They might, they might trim rates, for example, but say that they're just kind of maintaining the level of hawkishness that they're already at. They're actually that not really viewing it as less hawkish. I think it's one way of looking at it. Of course, you could get the inverse effect. If you get some sort of energy shortage or some sort of inflationary re acceleration, then simply holding rates flat might become more dovish over time because the interest rates are inflation is increasing and real rates are reducing. And so I do think that they're going to air less hawkish this year. I you know, I think they've been signaling that pretty clearly. I do think while the Fed tries not to be immediately political. So when we think about separation of central banking and the executive branch, it's mostly in the acute sense so that, for example, that a president can't just call up the head of the central bank six weeks before an election and say, I'm going to fire you unless you raise rates, right. There's there's certain separations of powers that make that sort of acute or obvious, you know, interaction not really possible. But when things get bad enough or when things get structural enough, there is integration between them. So the obviously examples during World War 2, that was the most direct example of basically the central bank being entirely captured by the Treasury because they viewed it as viewed as a national emergency, not to. And in the more recent sense, you know, Fed officials generally are almost by definition pro establishment. They generally favor establishment candidates. It might not be as acutely, but to the extent that they can put their thumb on one side or the other, that's kind of the direction they're going to point at. So I do think that they have a fairly significant incentive not to have an acute recession this year. Doesn't mean you can't have a slow down, doesn't mean you can't have sector specific weakness. But I think that they're going to probably do their best not to have some sort of full blown whole labor cycle acute recession if they can help it. Over the past 40 years, especially in the United States, there's been this kind of structural tilt towards disinflation. SO4 decades of declining structural inflation, 40 years of declining interest rates. And therefore both stocks and bonds were very good performers. They had partially thanks to those reductions in interest rates, you had higher equity multiples that made sense relative to interest rates over time. And that's kind of a virtuous cycle for as long as it lasts until you hit zero and stay at 0 for a while at least. And so we had this kind of 40 year period where owning stocks and bonds together made a lot of sense. When you look at longer data sets or more multi country data sets, we are not just picking the best equity market in the world of the reserve currency country, right? If you're, if you have a more global view or a view that does not just include that kind of 40 year distillationary regime, generally more diversified portfolios hold up better than the stock bond portfolio. So it could be as simple as adding say a gold slice historically. So instead of saying 60% stock, 40% bonds, if you said 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% gold, there are decades where neither stocks nor bonds do particularly well, but gold does amazing. So the 19 and the two would be examples of that. Those tend to be the more inflationary decades. All else being equal, they tend to be weaker dollar decades. So where the dollar index rolls over, you get international equity outperformance, you get commodity outperformance, you get gold outperformance relative to U.S. stocks and bonds. So I think especially in this era of fiscal dominance where we're no longer in that kind of 40 year structural disinflation monetary dominance cycle, I generally think that having that inflationary segment in a portfolio is useful. So that can include probably describe it either as real estate in some contexts, but more specifically, it's kind of commodities, commodity producers and hard monies. And so for example, that can include energy, right? If you, if you map energy prices to inflation, energy prices are kind of like a high beta version of inflation. If you're trying to hedge inflation, one of the best ways to do it historically is having long exposure to various energy assets. And then hard monies have a more complicated relationship to inflation because they're more specifically about currency debasement. But overall they, they, they kind of protect you from similar types of decades, decades where neither stocks nor bonds do particularly well. We could call them stagflationary decades, we could call them weaker dollar, higher inflation, higher international decades. There's different flavors of these types of decades. But in general, those things that have been under invested in during the disinflationary cycle and the potential are the causes of the next inflationary cycle. They're the things that have become scarce. They tend to go up when other things don't. And we've seen in recent years that, you know, during kind of years where both stocks and bonds do poorly, it's those energy and commodities and more inflationary assets that do well. So I do think that's really important. And then having that scarce asset slice, that hard money slice in older eras, that would be gold. Now it could be Bitcoin or it could be a hybrid of gold and Bitcoin, depending on that investors view, their age, their volatility tolerance, how much they've researched those two types of assets, for example. But I do think that if we do enter a more sustained period of a more stagflationary type of environment, which doesn't have to be extreme, it doesn't have like the 70s. It could be like the two, for example. It could be like the 19, which is a decade that I use a lot as an analog that not many other analysts do. I think it now it's becoming more common, but that's if you go back to if you want a third example, the 2019 and the 40s, that'd be another one. I do think that most research shows, you know, there's the Dragon portfolio for example, by I think Chris Cole, he put that for some years ago, he kind of modeled out 100 years and said what kind of portfolio would do well over that longer cycle, not just this 40 year cycle. There's also portfolios, call it the permanent portfolio or other things like that. They kind of model these longer time frames and they generally show that, yeah, having something other than just stocks and bonds tends to be very helpful. Could be gold, could be real estate, could be energy producers, could be Bitcoin. You know, we take for granted that the US stocks always go up. First of all, it's not always the case that there are long stretches where, especially in inflation adjusted terms, stocks don't go up for 15 years or more. And then 2, when you look globally, that happens a lot more frequently. I mean, Japan goes 30 years without new highs or Europe goes 20 years without new highs. These things happen on a regular basis, especially when you start with very high equity valuations, a lot of foreign capital pushed into your area. So in the late 80s it was Japan. Everybody was like, OK, Japan's taking the world. We all want to own Japan. Their market cap to GDP became very kind of imbalanced in the late 90s. Early sheet, the creation of the euro, it was very optimistic time for Europe. There was quite a bit of capital pushed into Europe, you know, not to the extremes of Japan, but fairly high starting valuations and high expectations, which then we're not met. And it's so you had 4020 years of not very good on average European equity performance. And right now it argued that the US equity valuations are quite expensive. They it's not new. I mean, they've been expensive in the past five years and they've only gotten more expensive pretty much the the percentage of global capital that's that could be in the USA. Lot of it is in the US, right? So there's not necessarily a ton of capital just sitting there that could decide to come into the USA. Lot of it's already in the US. And so should some of these virtuous cycles start going the other way as they have done in the past in certain decades, so the 70s or the 2 or maybe more structurally, at some point in the future, you could have a shift where the US equity market, you know, maybe doesn't crash, but maybe it just underwhelms for 10-15 years or more. And being in other assets are where it's at. And it could be that those assets go up in price. For example, maybe Bitcoin captures market share, adds A0 to its price for example. Hey everyone, hope you're enjoying the show. Just want to give a quick word from on ramp. If you're not familiar, we have an incredible new institutional line of products that have come out, including fundamentals research series that Glenn Cameron, our head of Institutional has been working on. 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You can find it on our website at on rentbitcoin.com. On to the rest of the show. So people can check out broken money wherever books are sold. They can also check out lyndalden.com. Overall, I think that you know this, it's just a very dynamic environment. I describe some decades as being macro heavy and other decades as not being particularly macro heavy. And I think this is a very macro heavy decade where things like liquidity, things like geopolitics, these can impact asset prices more than in a decade that's not macro heavy and they tend to feed on each other. One thing I point out, for example, is that the sovereign debt crises are likely to lead to war and wars likely to lead to sovereign debt crises. So you can't get that vicious cycle. And the same is true like, you know, peace can lead to disinflation and disinflation can lead to peace because things are kind of when orders present, it tends to lead to more order until for something changes it. And so because we're in this macro heavy decade with high public debts and usual liquidity situations and now kind of a breakout of geopolitical conflict that things tend to add together. So surprises are usually towards more macro, not less macro. And so that just, that's just my overall kind of framework for this decade is to kind of expect the unexpected, stay humble and, and like I said, kind of have a, have a sketch of where I think things are going, but then be very quick to adjust that as time goes by. So for example, I've been using 1950 as well as other analogs to help me construct a mental framework of what this can look like. But of course, no one can see the future. I don't know what countries will be in war a year from now. They're not in a war now what wars might end or, you know, what might have happened with country XY. Is it surprise assassinations or this happened or you know who and all that stuff has to be kind of adjusted to overtime. And so I think that just stay humble, have an outlook and then it just keep adjusting to new information.