The Breakdown

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, Reddit’s WallStreetBets channel was featured on the cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek as an emerging market force. 

Since then, between the surge in signups for Robinhood and the wave of followers of Davey Day Trader Global Global, these day traders have taken an even bigger place in the conversation about the stock market. 

While many finance professionals (and, most certainly, traditional financial media) have treated the movement with skepticism, paternalism or outright derision, Slow Ventures’ Jill Carlson has a very different view. 

To Jill, this group represents a new wave of investors who are unwilling to wait for permission to play a game that has been largely closed off to most. 

In this conversation, Jill talks about why the Robinhood revolution is very, very real, and what opportunities for entrepreneurship and investing she sees in terms of financial education, new exchange tools and more. 

Find our guest online:Website: jill-carlson.com Twitter: @jillruthcarlson

Satoshi Nakamoto is often recognized for his technical genius in solving the double spend problem. He is also widely revered for his willingness to walk away from the protocol to make it stronger, something no other entrepreneur who has created anything on the scale of Bitcoin has ever done. 

What people discuss less often is Satoshi’s marketing instincts. In this illuminating conversation, serial bitcoin entrepreneur Dan Held argues: 

• Satoshi had strong instincts about how price would drive bitcoin adoption
• The bitcoin white paper document was a marketing pitch aimed specifically at the cypherpunks 
• The competition between bitcoin narratives is something that gives the protocol strength
• The competition to shape bitcoin's narrative is truly free and open to all

What would you do if you were approaching your 40s, burned out and realizing the type of financial success you had been pursuing wasn’t actually serving your true goal of freedom? 

If you were George Gammon, the answer would be to change everything and start globetrotting in search of new opportunities. 

George Gammon is the host of the rapidly growing George Gammon YouTube channel and Rebel Capitalist podcast. He is rapidly building one of the most rapid macro and investing fanbases around.

In this Free Ideas Festival conversation, he and NLW discuss:

• The pursuit of personal freedom
• Producing a home-flipping TV show in Colombia 
• Why inflation is at the heart of people’s economic discontent 
• How crony capitalism is driving young people to Communism 
• Building a rapidly growing podcast and YouTube empire

June 2020 will go down in the history books as an extremely chaotic and confusing period. 

In this “Best of the Month” retrospective, we look at some of the best guest conversations from The Breakdown, including:

• Human Rights Foundation CSO Alex Gladstein on the importance of cash for privacy
• DigiChina Editor-in-Chief Graham Webster on China’s decade-long turn away from liberalism 
• Alhambra Investments lead researcher Jeff Snider on why the Federal Reserve’s power is a myth
• Popular Front founder Jake Hanrahan on the media’s veneer of objectivity
• Castle Island Ventures’ Nic Carter on why people should have rights to their social media profiles
• The Crypto Dog on mining bitcoin in 2011
• Independent macro analyst Jesse Felder on the Fed’s role in increasing inequality 
• BlockTower Capital’s Ari Paul on how people lose faith in central banks
• “Think For Yourself” author Dr. Vikram Mansharamani on the recipe for inflation
• Independent oil and trading expert Tracy Shuchart on how easy money enabled the shale revolution 
• Adamant Capital’s Tuur Demeester on historical analogies for seething discontent

The latest Long Read is "Crypto Dollars and the Evolution of Eurodollar Banking" by Avi Felman and Max Bronstein. 

This piece covers:

• The Dollar Milkshake Theory
• Why the demand for the US dollar remains so high 
• Why demand for dollars is increasing rather than decreasing 
• What "eurodollars" are
• What the shadow banking system is
• How eurodollars and shadow banking contribute to USD demand
• How stablecoins and cryptodollarization could create demand for crypto 

As states shutter economic activity because of preventable COVID-19 outbreaks, it’s deja vu all over again. 

This is a movie we’ve seen before:

• Rise in what could have been preventable COVID-19 cases
• A call for shutdowns (plus voluntary closures)
• Rampant politicization of health and economic issues rather than common sense approaches
• Persistent jobless claims plus new layoffs 
• Wall Street nerves turning into new Federal Reserve and Treasury action

Rinse, repeat, economy!

Today on the Brief:

• A consumer spending rebound
• A new crypto regulatory regime in Europe
• A bitcoin warning from a famed investor

Our main discussion: 

Tuur Demeester is the managing partner of Adamant Capital, a bitcoin investment firm that earlier this year published “The Bitcoin Reformation.” 

In this conversation, he and NLW discuss:

• The four preconditions for a reformation, and how they apply today
• How hyperinflation contributed to the French Revolution
• Why inflation is becoming a more significant threat today
• How bitcoin memes function like unifying doctrines from past revolutions
• Why millennials could be the Greatest Generation 2.0 

Find our guest online:

Twitter: @TuurDemeester

On the web: Adamant Capital

Today’s edition of The Breakdown is an extended version of the Brief, this time covering five topics.

• New Jobless claims - sticking stubbornly at ~1.5 million new claims per week, despite economist expectations 
• The “whack-a-mole” economy - Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers predicts as much as 30% of the economy may need to close to get COVID-19 under control
• PlusToken scam pressure on BTC price: Has scam selling suppressed the price of bitcoin since early last year? 
• Biggest ever bitcoin option expiry; more than $1 billion in notational value BTC options are set to expire tomorrow, Friday, June 26
• Apple’s UX privacy triumph: Users will have to opt-in to allow apps to track them across other apps as well 

The economy is nothing if not confounding right now. 

Across every domain, from real estate to oil to retail, there are bull signals and bear signals. 

In this episode, NLW looks at those signals in the following areas:

• Markets - strong stock recovery vs. growth in cash deposits
• Employment - growth in jobs vs. persistent continuing jobless claims
• Retail - growth in foot traffic vs. demand destruction
• Oil - growth in demand (but not in economically productive diesel)
• Real estate - surge in mortgage applications vs. worst home sales since 2010
• Dollar - declining confidence vs. there is no alternative 
• COVID-19 - reduced death rates in the U.S. vs. growing caseload

What’s the answer? Is this just a narrative mirage recovery? Listen and find out.

Today on the Brief:

• PayPal and Venmo reportedly adding crypto buying and selling
• Trump executive order temporarily suspends H1-B visa program
• Continued growth in bitcoin derivatives

Our main conversation:

Tracy Shuchart is an oil- and commodities-focused trader in the private equity space known for her wide-ranging insights on financial Twitter (FinTwit). 

In this conversation, she and NLW discuss:

• Why the shale revolution of the last 10 years shifted the power balance in global energy among the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia
• How easy money in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis enabled the shale revolution as much as new technology
• Why after the 2014-2016 oil crash it was inexperienced private equity firms that picked up where banks left off with shale
• How a growing focus on dividends and cutting costs was creating structural problems for shale even before the COVID-19 crisis
• How COVID-19 coincided with a contentious negotiation between Saudi Arabia and Russia that ultimately sent prices to less than $0 

Find our guest online:

• Twitter: @chigrl