#739: Quarterly Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
I had to tell you to stop sharing your screen, so I want to share mine. We met at the end of January to do the Q4 2025 update, I believe.

**Matthew Mežinskis** (0:48)
Yeah, I'm changing it up, actually. Frankly, I know I'll continue to change it this quarter. It was actually Q3. It's going to be Q4 now.

**Marty Bent** (0:55)
So it was Q3. Last update was at the end of January, a month before the exploration, the wars, the still wars, the ceasefire, I don't know, whatever's happening in Iran, whatever we're calling it now. It was a month before that. And to your point, focusing on Bitcoin, I mean, that's one silver lining, at least from our perspective of, I think what's happened over the last two months is that I think the world is waking up to the need for a neutral reserve hard capped currency monetary system that's not controlled by anybody. And I want to pull up the screen share. We published this on January 31st, but when we met, things were not looking good for Bitcoin, and we had a price to gold specifically, as you can see here. From this chart going back, it was at the lower bound, the 0% bound of the power trend.
And many people were wondering, okay, has Bitcoin jumped the shark? We're living in a gold world, gold hard money world now.
And it seems like the tides have changed. I mean, a few days after we recorded, we fell down to the low 60s, dipped the high 50s. And since then, we were range bound for a couple months, and now climbing out, approaching 80k again, currently sitting at $78,126. So a lot has changed. We'll last a few months, three months.

**Matthew Mežinskis** (2:33)
Yeah, we should do price actually right now, just as everybody's favorite, just to kick it off. I got a few base money stats, but yeah, a little bit, I don't know if I've shown this yet, a little bit more of an upgraded experience here on the charts and yeah, continue to go through the process, but it's going to be good. And eventually, we'll have access to subscribers, where people can get this as well, because people would ask it all the time. And I have some good, unique data that you really can't get. It's a lot of painstaking work. There's no APIs for this from the IMF or whatever. But in any event, the gold thing is very interesting. And just to remind our listeners, here, what the power curve is. It's a different type of growth. That really only Bitcoin is exhibiting, which is really unique. So here is a gold chart. All right, just gold dollar. Back to 1971, all right. And you can see the January top right here, all right. We got up to $5,200. Now we're down to $4,800 gold, okay, as of this recording.
So far, this is, if you talk about actual trend lines, this is not like Elliott Wave, ABC, 123 Corrections. This is just statistical analysis where everything is in sample. I have a lot of data points here.
The gold in general is, it's an exponential asset, but it's growing on the trend, only about 5.3% CAGR. See that from 1971 August 15th to today, 5.3% CAGR. I have this extended out to 2050, but this is the CAGR till today. A lot of the gold bugs like to quote this 9% figure, but that is directly catching the $35 an ounce, which really was even higher in August 1971 because it was breaking the peg, to today, they just do the quick back of the math or the back of the envelope with the present value, future value calculation, and you will get... This has been a rising figure, by the way. It used to be like 7%, 8%, but with this boom in the last couple of years, it's now 9% CAGR. But the question, of course, is if you've been holding gold for that long, if you've gotten that CAGR.
But the big thing here, and the thing I just am relentless about, I try to remind people all the time is, whether it's gold, apple, stocks, bonds, that stuff grows exponentially, and exponentially basically means constant growth. Like I said, these CAGRs, you can pick any point on this curve, this black line here, the OLS, you can just pick from one point to the next. On a compound annualized number, it's only 5.3% growth. You could have more than that if you buy under, you could have less than that if you buy up, and that goes down. But that's the bottom line. Now, Bitcoin is interesting in that, and I'll go back to the dollar Bitcoin chart here, right? So as you said, we're getting close to 80 grand, okay? Bitcoin is interesting because if you just look at this chart, which you know very well, I know very well, if you look at it in log linear scale, it's not a straight line. You know, I'm relentless on this, but it's just not a straight line. It looks different. The R squared is a very good fit, 96 percent.