Bitcoin’s $100 BILLION Wall Street TAKEOVER Is Just Getting Started | Eric Balchunas

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
Bitcoin's $100 billion Wall Street takeover is just getting started. That is referring to the ETFs having a total of $100 billion at the peak last week. All good news. Now we've got Eric Balchunas joining from Bloomberg in a bit, but first it's going to be me and Andrew breaking down everything that's happening in the market. Let's go.
What is up everybody? Welcome to my Lakeside Retreats here where I'm spending the rest of my summer in Narnia. I hope that you're all having a wonderful day. Big shout out to my non-sponsor, my future sponsor, LaCoury, and their delicious flavor, Pomplamoose. They haven't called yet, but I feel like they will.
I feel like they're going to call. Andrew, good morning, sir. How are you?

**Andrew** (1:01)
What's up? How are you doing? I think the subject header should just be Black Rock's $100 billion Wall Street takeover, just getting started, given that last week alone, they took in $3 billion in Bitcoin inflows. I think the total number for the whole Bitcoin category was like $3.1 billion.

**Scott Melker** (1:28)
That went well. Let me bring this up. I literally tweeted this this morning. Black Rock's customers just bought the dip alone. Alone. Yes, because yesterday the big stories were like, inflows are back after that one day of outflows on Friday, but it's all Black Rock.
206 million of the 217 million.

**Andrew** (1:46)
I don't know if we'll ever get a meaningful delineation. Maybe we'll get it in some sort of denomination a year from now, when it's very obvious that the whole hacking slash data issues with cold storage was a very, very meaningful event in terms of the movement of Bitcoin. But my guess is that the movement of Bitcoin from cold storage into ETFs is faster and larger than we know right now. Like $3 billion in the last week of August. That's a lot, man.
That is a lot, a lot.

**Scott Melker** (2:29)
Why BlackRock? Like, what's the, you know, what's the answer?

**Andrew** (2:32)
Well, because that's the easiest name. That's the easiest name when you're sitting at a Morgan Stanley, you know, on a call with Morgan Stanley and your advisors and the team that you work with, Meryl Lynch, you know, anybody that that's the name that you default to because they're other than Vanguard, they're the biggest in the game. And here's the truth about, you know, wealth management, right? So Vanguard was kind of a thorn in the side of actual true wealth management for a long time, right? Because they came in and they just hammered fees. And so Vanguard, even though they're the biggest on the block, just a little bit bigger than BlackRock, wealth management guys, they don't love Vanguard, right? So they would rather put stuff into BlackRock products than they would Vanguard.
And it was largely self-directed. Like you could open a Vanguard account and just put money in there and you don't have to even deal with an advisor. It's very different than most products on Wall Street.

**Scott Melker** (3:36)
I mean, I guess it was Goldman that acquired NEOs. I don't remember. So everybody's trying to compete, right? And at this point, you can just merge and acquire your way into the ETF race.

**Andrew** (3:46)
Well, it's because, listen, there are so many narratives associated with ETFs that matter having to do with market structure and the way that markets move now, right? Like, nobody will shut up about rates. Nobody will, you know, two months ago, nobody would shut up about the Strait of Hormuz. Two months before that, nobody would shut up about Iran. Two months before that, nobody would shut up about something else. And yet the markets just go up or stay at or near all time highs. Why? Because ETFs exist and boomers exist, and boomers matter more than bombs at this point, right? Boomers have learned and understand that even if there's a war, even if there's a crazy person in the presidency, even if Congress is a bunch of eunuchs that can't get anything done, I'll just put more money into the markets via ETFs because all it does is go up. So, you know, McGlone, right? He's kind of the anti-hero slash superstar of Macro Mondays, right?
Yeah, so...

**Scott Melker** (4:53)
You're like Undertaker Triple H.

**Andrew** (4:55)
Right. I don't remember that. So, here's the thing that I'm surprised that McGlone doesn't understand, right? So, the reason why Bitcoin has a real difficulty going much lower, and in a macro way, McGlone, for like two years, has been on the sidelines preaching the market's going to go lower, and when the market goes lower, Bitcoin's going to go even lower. The market hasn't gone lower, it hasn't happened. Here's the reason why. Let's take a look at Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF.