The Real Reason Bitcoin Stopped Going Up | Mike Novogratz

**Mike Novogratz** (0:00)
Listen, Bitcoin had a horrible year. Why do I think it happened? Well, we had a $9 billion seller. I had a friend that wanted to buy a sports team, so we sold some Bitcoin to buy a sports team, or to buy a boat. Everyone took a few chips off the table, and I think we put a low in at 60 I'm not 100% convinced, but I'm pretty convinced. And so, yes, I've been buying some Bitcoin recently. And I think one of the reasons why crypto's not going away is it.

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:24)
All right.

**Mike Novogratz** (0:25)
I like this desk.

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:26)
It's nice, right? You know why?
Our team got mad at me the other day because they were like, you're on stage, and I was still texting them to get stuff done. And I said, yeah, it's easy. You know, I can just do that. People are very confused in this room. They feel like the last 10 years investing, I don't want to say it was easy, but it was definitely like everything was up and to the right. You could just make money. You could buy S&P, you could buy Bitcoin, whatever. It now feels like we are in a much more complicated kind of macro-oriented world. You've been in the macro world for, I don't know, 30 years, 40 years, 60 years.

**Mike Novogratz** (0:57)
A long time.

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:59)
What's going on?

**Mike Novogratz** (1:01)
I had hair like you when I started. Yeah. Listen, it's complicated. I was sitting with two of my mentors who are 72, and we were, and their kids, I don't know if they did it right or wrong. Their kids are roughly the same age as mine. And I said, would you ever think about, you know, giving your kids some money to manage, they can make their own decisions with it. Like, how do you empower them? And they looked at me like, are you insane? They were like, we are entering the hardest 10 years of our careers in how to preserve and grow value. And we're at least pretty good at this. We have no idea if those kids are gonna even be, you know, an iota is good. And so, no. And I thought about that because, you know, they're right. Right? There's so much changing right now that it makes value and understanding where to have your capital. A, just to stay level. Right? If you measured yourself in gold, you didn't have a good year last year unless you owned a lot of gold. Right? And so, do you mean, does it mean run into gold now? I don't think so. I think gold and silver, certainly silver, put in the cycle high. If you look at the silver chart and you lay it over any other bubble in history, right, the Nasdaq bubble, the micro strategy bubble that we had, you name the bubble, the Nikkei bubble in 89, take the silver chart, put it right over it and tell me you want to buy silver. You might buy it tactically because it gets oversold and it bounces, but I will bet my clothes, I'll show them this day's naked last year, silver puts it next year, if silver puts it a new high. But it was an amazing story last year. And so, what I think is happening is the United States is losing its position as the reserve currency of the world. And you can see that by the amount of treasuries held by, you know, foreign central banks, foreign countries, they're going straight down. Partly, this is by design. This is an administration that has told neighbors, allies, we think you've cheated us, you got a better deal. You know, we're very belligerent in our negotiating tactics. It can be called the art of the deal, or it can be called being belligerent in your negotiating tactics. But what you saw from Mark Carney and Davos and Pierce Starmor, they're like, okay, we get it. You don't want to be our partner. We don't trust you anymore. We will partner with China. We'll diversify our assets. And so the good news for the US is China is nowhere close to being the reserve currency because it's a closed current account. I was actually just in Asia and I asked four different Chinese billionaires, guys who were living in Hong Kong but mainlanders, how soon before China opens up and has a convertible currency?
The most optimistic prediction was 20 years. They were like, no chance. There will be so much capital flight. It's going to, you know, what are currencies about? Currency is about trust. I trust the people in charge to be fair with my money. And so China doesn't have it. So Europe, when I graduated from college in 1987, European and US GDP was roughly the same and today the US was almost double. And so you're like, oh yeah, Europe is not this great growth story. Listen, they have a lot of good stuff happening in Europe, but it's not going to be the reserve currency. And so we're going to be in a world where we're in between, where there is no reserve currency. And so last year it was gold and silver. The year before it was Bitcoin. Got to be in Bitcoin, got to be in Bitcoin. Bitcoin went from 16, 18,000 in 2022 to 130,000. Pretty damn good way to increase wealth, but then it had its movement and it crashed for a lot of reasons we can talk about. And so you got to constantly be on the move to figure out what's working. The trades this year that I said made sense about a month ago and I didn't put enough on. Short mega cap in the US and long the rest of the world. Look at what happened just in the last week in Korea and in Japan. European and Asian stock markets are way outperforming the US. That makes sense flow of funds and they've been undervalued for so long. And so I think sitting in your seats is a much harder job than it's been in the past 15 years.