The Bitcoin Bottom Case Gets Stronger Every Day #CryptoTownHall

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
Well, good morning, everyone. After glitches, don't know how many people are here.
Of course, I should always ask the question before I talk for too long, can people hear me?

**David** (0:10)
Well, I'm clear.

**Ryan** (0:11)
Yeah, we can hear you.

**Scott Melker** (0:12)
Oh, good. Okay, cool. Yeah, well, I'm also in a hotel out in Las Vegas, and it's a bright, sunny morning here at seven o'clock in the morning, but hey, it seems like a little bit sunnier for markets this morning, although it's kind of hard to say why or what's going on other than basic stock markets being flat, crypto getting a little bit gold and silver of a little bit crude oil down big, because peace-ish, I don't know.
I've run out of thoughts on this one. All I can say is that, and I like the title, although I didn't name it, the notion that Bitcoin is going to plunge to new lows. I mean, it could happen. Obviously, anything could happen. But it certainly feels like there's exhausted sellers out there. The only thing that's really interesting today is just how all, pretty much every top crypto is more or less the same and correlated in trading the same way. So who knows? It could be a Monday bounce, and tomorrow we'll see a bad Tuesday. Like we have the last few weeks, we've seen a few of these.
But not a whole lot going on. So curious, what are you guys thinking about? I mean, David, looking at the macro side, I mean, you know, anything in particular you're looking at this morning, other than the fact that it just seems to be more of the same, and we're talking about the same thing every day.

**David** (1:39)
Well, we've got inflation numbers coming later this week, people talking about, I think Jamie Dimon came out earlier today and said that a tidal wave is coming for the US consumer. So I guess, you know, inflation's working its way through the pipeline.
Read some other commentary over the weekend, talking about how Kevin Warsh basically is going to let inflation run higher for longer, and obviously try to help manage the US debt that way. All of which sets us up for, you know, good anti-inflation hedges. And, you know, gold certainly seemed to be picking up. One would hope that Bitcoin would catch a bid off of all this as well.

**Scott Melker** (2:21)
I mean, we had our Monday show and we talked about a lot of the macroside stuff, so it's boring for me to repeat it. But I think the most important point is, if you're Kevin Warsh, what is the most likely thing you're gonna do if you think that the Fed kind of got us into this mess, but we're in this mess? Well, what's the first thing you're gonna do? You're gonna stop having, you're gonna stop talking and stop making predictions when the predictions are so damn bad. And so the fact that he didn't submit a dot in the dot plot, to me is completely on brand, made perfect sense. And that's exactly what I would have done.
And I think that markets are gonna have to learn, what is actually happening. And you have to understand what their goals are, right David? I mean, their goal is to finance the deficit and to finance business investment. That's what they care about. I mean, you can say, and they wanna do that without ruining the consumer from a consumer inflation point of view.

**David** (3:19)
Yeah, I mean, arguably also from an inflation standpoint, you wanna try and put a floor under housing prices. You also wanna try to broaden out economic growth.
If they were to raise interest rates, obviously, that wouldn't do anything for housing, which arguably is the largest item on people's personal balance sheets.

**Scott Melker** (3:40)
Yeah, you know, housing is fascinating because it is, yes, it is what you just said is absolutely true. It is also the one asset that's turning on its head decades of policy, which has been to try to promote asset prices at the same time as suppressing consumer prices. And why do I say that? I say that because young people can't afford houses anymore because houses are one of the assets that they've managed to pump up, you know, over the last n number of decades. I was just reading a, I wouldn't call it a eulogy because he wasn't a great complimentary of Alan Greenspan. But, you know, Alan Greenspan was, you know, for those who don't know that he died today, and I don't want to speak too ill of him. But what I will say is that essay he wrote when he was 40, he was very much a sound money gold adherent and then proceeded through most of his career to effectively ignore his younger self.