Bitcoin Is Stuck While Stocks Keep Ripping | Fidelity’s Jurrien Timmer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Introducing Meta Glasses.
Hey Meta, any last minute tables for a two tonight? Sure, there's a great Italian restaurant 15 minutes away.

**Scott Melker** (0:11)
Hey Meta, where's the nearest flower shop?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
Five minutes away, straight down Broadway, past the bodega.

**Jurrien Timmer** (0:17)
Their lilies are trending on Instagram.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
Just saying.

**Jurrien Timmer** (0:21)
Hey Meta, am I forgetting anything else? How about setting a calendar reminder for next year? Metaglasses, available in more than 20 styles.

**Scott Melker** (0:31)
Bitcoin is stuck while stocks keep ripping. The S&P made yet another new all-time high yesterday, breaking 7,800 for the very first time as Bitcoin continued to languish. I'm going to discuss everything driving markets in the macro with one of my absolute favorite guests. It's been way too long since I've had him on, Jurrien Timmer, the Director of Global Macro at Fidelity. We're going to dive into all of it right now. Let's go.
Good morning, everybody. Happy Friday and welcome to the show. Now we're going to dive into a quick few stories that I just want to review before I bring Jurrien on because I think there's two of them that are absolutely huge this week and worth discussing that have happened and are not necessarily macro stories. So first of all, rest in peace to the Tether truthers who for years have been telling us that Tether does not actually have backing for their assets. I mean, this is a pretty savage tweet from my friend Pallo, the CEO of Tether over here, about when Tether audit now and he used the gladiator meme, are you not entertained, which I thought was bold. We've been hearing for years that their assets are not backed. They did finally get a big four audit from KPMG and have all the assets I said they did. They went as far as to actually go and count every single gold bar in the vault one by one, checking the serial numbers, checking every transaction. Tether is fully backed in case you did not believe that before, which I did. I will say, I'm sure that in the early days, they were backing Tether with much less reliable assets, like I said, it was Chinese paper and all these other things. But I think as they became more reputable over the years, fully backed, no more question marks about that. Number two story that before I bring him on, I just want to cover is the absolute disgrace that is self custody for crypto right now. Trezor warns 14,000 customers after fulfillment partner suffers data breach. I wrote about this at length in the newsletter this morning. We had the cold card exploit last week. And this week now their third party shipper has unfortunately had their data hacked, which means that 14,000 customers got an email from Trezor today saying that your phone number, your address and the fact that you are self custodying crypto has now been released on the dark web. This is not just a theoretical threat for anybody who's been following what's been happening in France for the past three years. Effectively, somebody was accused rightfully of selling information from the French equivalent of the IRS to hackers who have been perpetrating wrench attacks against crypto holders in France. There's four times as many of them in 2026 and there even were in 2024, multiple times. This is physical hacks. This is one of the founders of Ledger had his finger cut off literally in a $10 million ransom because people had his address to do that he was in crypto.
Very, very hard right now.
I think a bit of an existential crisis for crypto self-custody because it's one thing to be your own bank. It's another thing to be your own bank security, right? Because of counter-party risk. We were told in 2021, 2022, not your keys, not your coins, which I think is still a very good lesson. The problem is the lesson was that you couldn't trust the counter-parties in the exchange. Well, now you can't trust the counter-party and the hardware provider that is sending you your wallet and doxing your address and phone number. Very ugly stuff. I do not want to talk about it too much, but be careful out there. I'm going to go ahead and bring on Jurrien now. Good morning, sir. How are you?

**Jurrien Timmer** (4:22)
Good morning, Scott. Nice to see you.

**Scott Melker** (4:26)
I was going to say, it's been way, way, way too long.
But glad to have you here. So this show obviously crosses over from Bitcoin to macro. It's something that we discussed. And I think we're in that moment now where you really can't discuss Bitcoin without discussing macro. It's not like it was 10 years ago. So maybe you can set the table how you're thinking about markets and macro in general right now and then later we can get into where Bitcoin fits into that.