Bitcoin ABOVE $63K As Trump Halts Iran Strikes And Oil Crashes 9%

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
With the Bitcoin community reeling from one of the more concerning hacks, basically ever, on cold storage, Michael Saylor selling Bitcoin, all of that happening at the same time that oil prices are crashing, gold is rallying, and yen intervention is signaling maybe the start of yet another amount of monetary easing globally, we have a lot to talk about on Macro Monday. Let's go.
Well, let's bring up Mike and we'll have Kyle from Milk Road joining us and Peter Cheer joining us as well. But let's get started with the morning meeting, Mike, because you guys have a lot to talk about today for the first day of August, and everyone's supposedly on vacation. Always seems that way, doesn't it?

**Mike** (1:00)
There you go. Well, in Europe, we know that's kind of the trend. In America, most people go back to school in mid-August. But from starting with Anna Wong, our economist, she initially focused on the results from the FOMC, post FOMC, she thought worse just did a bad job of sounding evasive.
And her focus on maybe him shifting from two, six meetings from eight was kind of not unlikely to happen because it's become a bit of a problem for a global situation, i.e. the BOV, the Bank of England, the ECB and Bank of Japan, all kind of follow that mantra now. So that's probably not going to happen. They switched the cutback in meetings. And then she focused on the data. Non-farm payroll, she's expecting payrolls to be around 65,000. Typically, she says we underperform the consensus in August. I think the consensus is around 60 And she expects labor force participation to be a problem. The unemployment like to kick up to 4.3 percent. A lot of that's seasonal stuff. Ira Jersey on rates, pointed out the 30-year reached the 19-year high. She thinks it's mostly technical reasons. The key thing is the move has been severe in real yields for two main reasons. Valta is going up in growth. We do have growth.
Most, unfortunately, some of it's from the stock market.
He doesn't expect much from the refundings. He doesn't expect them to increase coupons until next February. Chris Crane in equities pointed out for the last two months now, equities of S&P 500 has been stuck in a very narrow range, 7,600, 7,300. But volatility is declining on an index level, but surging on an internal rotation extreme. His quote was, we might be shifting to a stock picker's market. Average pairwise correlations are low, and momentum is a key factor, has been a major factor has been waning lately. Audrey Chill Freeman on FX just dug into dollar yen. She thinks it's going to continue to be pressured a little lower. Pointed out the intervention obviously we all know is quite coordinated between the US and the Bank of Japan. It came on the back of the dollar getting a little weaker in the US. So probably some good timing. SpaceX have to continue.
For me, I focus on it's volatility seasons just kicking in. When you put on a position in April, May, you have to be careful because you're heading towards the summer, now getting towards the end of the summer. I just focus on some of the positions and manage money net positions. Still way long copper. Copper is at a key risk of just sitting a few stops. Still way long soybeans, still had a few stops there. They don't really care about crude oil. Crude oil is a non-event. $78 of barrel management and net positions are basically the same as they've been the last few years. Then, I just point out headwinds from commodities, most notably non-income producing assets like cryptos and metals, most notably precious metals should remain heavy until stocks go down. I pointed out one key fact along with this. The 100-day correlation between copper and the S&P 500 at 0.64 is the highest ever. Copper futures started trading in 1988 in an up market.
Okay.

**Scott Melker** (4:09)
Well, I kind of want to dig into the yen story. So it's fascinating. Kyle, thanks for joining.
The yen story is funny. So the first thing is this is hopefully you guys can see. Do you see Bessent's tweet here? Hold on. Yeah, there we go. So our Treasury Secretary who I have quite a bit of respect for, word smith this announcement. The Trump administration delivers for trusted partners, our coordinated foreign exchange action counter disorderly yen movements. Well, we're going to look at the chart in a second, but honestly, the yen's movement has been anything but disorderly. It has certainly been pushing higher, but it was not volatile. The volatility happens after this, so it's actually kind of amusing. But what's really important here is, I don't know if you can see it when I highlight it on the share screen, but the FIMA repo facility is an important backstop. We would encourage it to be upsized in the current month. Translation, we will give them free money, which we are monetizing. We will let them monetize debt in order to keep the yen where it needs to be. Now, what is what needs to be? We've talked about this for the last two and a half years, Mike. Somewhere over 160 red signs flash in Japan, and we didn't know when it would happen, but we've been speculating that they would do something like this. Now, what's fascinating, of course, is this. I'm trying to stop this one, and now let's check this one. That's probably a better way to do this.