MONITOR DEBT

“Private credit has moved from a niche sub-asset class to a major, permanent part of the investment landscape.”

“The party has changed, and we’ve lost that sense of bipartisanship that used to define how we get things done in Washington.”

“The UAE telling the Trump administration, 'You started this war. If we run short of US dollars as a result of it, either you will give us dollar swap lines or we will be forced to start transacting oil and gas in Chinese Yuan and other currencies.' Let that sink in. A US ally is openly threatening to settle oil in Chinese Yuan if Washington doesn't provide emergency dollar liquidity. This is how the petrodollar system erodes.”

“Interestingly, turn of events, the Arbitrum Security Council recovered $70 million in ETH in a pretty unprecedented violation of chain state, basically seizing the stolen assets by Dow governance vote, kind of opening up Pandora's box about what immutability means on layer twos. There are a ton of conversations that kind of sprawl out from this.”

“Ball Corporation is the world's largest aluminum beverage can manufacturer. It also produces aluminum containers for personal care and household products. It is more than anything a pure play aluminum packaging name after a history of also being in the aerospace defense industry. But that sold off in February of 2024. What you're seeing is, well, big volume catalysts, sporting events, historically drive meaningful can volume.”

“The oil story intensified dramatically. Crude oil surged over 12%, its best session since 2020 and closed above $90 a barrel, up 36% on the week. Cutter warned that all Gulf producers may have to shut down production within days, a scenario that could drive oil to $150. Kuwait has reportedly already started cutting production.”

“I think for everything digital, like we are in the probably 12-month period of max danger because we are now seeing AI systems at a certain level... they're able to find insane zero days, not just in smart contracts, but in traditional like web to like operating systems, browsers, like all of these things. It is really, really scary what is possible now.”

“For the first time since its launch, Stretch topped $1 billion in a single day of trading volume. That's an all-time record for the product. According to STRC.live, Strategy is estimated to have acquired around 17,000 Bitcoin last week through Stretch alone, buying nearly 14,000 the week before. It's turned into one of the most powerful Bitcoin buying machines in the industry.”

“I think for everything digital, like we are in the probably 12-month period of max danger because we are now seeing AI systems at a certain level... they're able to find insane zero days, not just in smart contracts, but in traditional like web to like operating systems, browsers, like all of these things. It is really, really scary what is possible now.”

“2023 also saw the roots of a global banking crisis arise out of four American regional banks, the two largest being Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank. 2021's inflation surge moderated in 2023, while the Federal Reserve continued to raise its interest rates in the first half of the year.”

“When Mundy first arrived in Georgia, she was kept apart from the other elephants by a fence. Carol Buckley, who cares for the animals here, says she wasn't sure how the others would react. But one of them, called Tara, took an interest right away.”

“If you build your system with the assumption that any individual component can break, and ideally that like maybe two different components, three different, however many components break, that you still can limit the damage. I think everybody has to assume both in the crypto ecosystem or generally, you are going to get hacked at some point... you need to have a plan for what to do when it happens.”

“And silver is interesting because silver and Bitcoin are almost been perfectly correlated recently. I don't know if you noticed that. Silver is down 7% today. It's not surprising. It's become the Nuvo Industrial Medal. And so the fact that silver and Bitcoin are new, there's nothing Bitcoin centric about what's happening today.”

“The market is pricing, this drags out for a little while. It ultimately gets resolved in a kind of negative-ish but not horrible way where oil starts flowing again. And geopolitics is between the US and China, and we don't care. And everyone just kind of retreats into their bubble of not much has changed, right? That's what the market is pricing. That's where the malaise is coming from.”

“I think while I do think that this was a good action in this case when we view it in isolation, I think, were I on the Security Council, I likely would have gone along with this. I think that a lot of people who are right to celebrate it in the moment, we're going to look back on this, and it really has the potential to set bad precedents in a lot of ways going forward.”

“The success of direct lending is now inextricably linked to the success of the private equity industry.”

“Wholesale prices rose sharply in the latest report, pointing to persistent inflation that could complicate Federal Reserve policy decisions. This unexpected uptick in producer prices suggests that inflation, well, the fight is far from over, despite the earlier optimism about cooling pricing pressures. The bond market is trying to balance safe-haven demand against persistent inflation concerns from energy price spikes.”

“When you buy a tech stock at a massive premium, you're basically buying the promise of huge profits 10 or 15 years in the future. But if interest rates are high today, the mathematical value of those future profits shrinks drastically. When Capital Economics says inflation is sticky, they are saying the easy money era is over, which means the justification for these astronomical tech valuations evaporates.”

“Wall Street often profits regardless of whether the underlying investments succeed.”

“The core issue they are pointing to is the infrastructure cost. If the cost of building out the servers, the power grids and the massive data centers for AI outpaces the actual dollars and cents it generates in revenue, the math simply stops working. It becomes a black hole for capital.”

“February non-farm payrolls came in at negative $92,000, an outright decline, completely upending the labor market stabilization theme and better growth sentiment from the ISM prints that we saw earlier this week. Prior months, in fact, were revised down another $69,000. With that, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% and the participation rate dropped half a point to 62%.”

“Bridgewater Associates has executed a massive portfolio pivot that completely contradicts the mainstream narrative. We are talking about cutting their holdings in Meta by over 46 percent, alphabet position by 40 percent, and they even cut Microsoft by 10 percent. These are the companies that completely defined the 2024 and 2025 bull run.”

“April 18th, we had a hack in DeFi, likely North Korea's Lazarus Group... exploited KelpDao's Layer powered bridge to create 116,000 RS ETH tokens. That is the restaked ETH token out of KelpDao without any backing. So, extra tokens minted, they then deposit those tokens into Aave V3 across Arbitrum and Ethereum mainnet to borrow $236 million in wheat... leaving Aave with about $280 million in bad debt that it cannot recover.”

“Goldman Sachs has now filed for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, a product that would give investors Bitcoin linked exposure while also generating income by selling options. This isn't a pure Spot Bitcoin ETF, it's a more structured, income oriented product designed for investors who want Bitcoin exposure but in a format that feels familiar to traditional finance. Goldman is leaning further into Bitcoin and this looks like a first step before following BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.”

“Trump comes out and basically repeats his normal talking points. He more or less quoted truth social. And the markets are like, holy fuck, he doesn't know what's going to happen. Remember, everyone in the market, in the media market, is very negative on Trump. And so, it's just that's true. I mean, look, the mass media is against him, thinks that this is going to be a disaster.”

“Ticker HTZ is Hertz Global... It emerged from bankruptcy in June of 2021 and it's still carrying some pretty hefty leverage, $15.8 billion in long-term debt, negative free cashflow that is projected to be positive next year. In spite of that, it's still projected to lose money. It has not made money since December of 2023. Bottom line is they are executing a genuine operating turnaround, but at the same time, there are still some structural weaknesses in this company that could lead you to say, okay, high risk, high reward. It's certainly not for the faint of heart.”

“Volcker had debt to GDP floating between 25% and 32% or something. Some would argue we're at 130%, right? It's not the same environment. He could hike to 20% without crushing the economy. What he did was he starved it. People were borrowing to spend. He starved it. People, investment was off the charts. And unions were basically demanding crazy pay raises. And unions mattered a lot more back then than they do.”

“We have a hot war in the Middle East, disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, an ongoing oil supply shock, and the IMF cutting its global growth forecast, and yet Bitcoin has been holding strong in the $70,000 range. In fact, Bitcoin has quietly outperformed both gold and stocks since the conflict began. That matters because it suggests the market is starting to view Bitcoin a little differently, not just as a risky bet, but increasingly as a safe haven.”

“Interestingly, turn of events, the Arbitrum Security Council recovered $70 million in ETH in a pretty unprecedented violation of chain state, basically seizing the stolen assets by Dow governance vote, kind of opening up Pandora's box about what immutability means on layer twos. There are a ton of conversations that kind of sprawl out from this.”

“For the first time since its launch, Stretch topped $1 billion in a single day of trading volume. That's an all time record for the product. Strategy is estimated to have acquired around 17,000 Bitcoin last week through Stretch alone, buying nearly 14,000 the week before. It's turned into one of the most powerful Bitcoin buying machines in the industry.”

“Private equity firms are lending billions of dollars to AI start-ups entirely outside the purview of traditional banking regulators. If one major AI start-up defaults on that private debt because their models don't generate the promised revenue, the contagion in that unregulated debt market could be incredibly rapid and entirely opaque until it is far too late.”

“Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said the US needs an emergency 'break the glass plan' that is targeted and short-term and on the shelf so it's ready to go when we hit the wall. He added that when we hit it, it will be vicious. This is the man who led the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, and now he's warning that the next crisis could be even harder to contain because governments have far less fiscal room to respond.”

“They're recovering from the trauma that they experienced living in captivity. And for them to open up and trust you while you are there with them, helping them work through it, it's indescribable.”

“What they did basically was to replace the RPC nodes they have deployed with a malicious RPC node, which showed fake data, right? And this fake data were piped into the validator network, which was not a network, which was just one node, was a one-of-one. And based on this fake data, it said, oh, there is a deposit on the unit chain of this amount of restrict ETH, of kelp-dell ETH.”

“The party has changed, and we’ve lost that sense of bipartisanship that used to define how we get things done in Washington.”

“Goldman Sachs has now filed for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, a product that would give investors Bitcoin linked exposure while also generating income by selling options. This isn't a pure Spot Bitcoin ETF, it's a more structured, income oriented product designed for investors who want Bitcoin exposure but in a format that feels familiar to traditional finance. Goldman is leaning further into Bitcoin and this looks like a first step.”

“Paulson said the US needs an emergency 'break the glass' plan that is targeted and short-term and on the shelf so it's ready to go when we hit the wall. He added that when we hit it, it will be vicious. This is the man who led the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, and now he's warning that the next crisis could be even harder to contain because governments have far less fiscal room to respond.”

“When there's too much capital chasing too few deals, the quality of those deals and their terms usually suffer.”

“The TVL and Aave plunged from $26 billion to $17 billion kind of as like panic withdrawals happened. In response to this attack, Aave paused the RS ETH markets and the WETH reserves across multiple chains just to kind of constrain the damage. Now it's got $180 million in bad debt.”

“We have a hot war in the Middle East, disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, an ongoing oil supply shock, and the IMF cutting its global growth forecast, and yet Bitcoin has been holding strong in the $70,000 range. In fact, Bitcoin has quietly outperformed both gold and stocks since the conflict began. That matters because it suggests the market is starting to view Bitcoin a little differently, not just as a risky bet, but increasingly as a safe haven.”

“The dominant political story of the year has been the 270-day-long speakership of Representative Kevin McCarthy, whose slim majority in the House of Representatives has enabled a far-right rebellion to exert more weight over the lower chamber. The battle between the rebellious Freedom Caucus and McCarthy has been at the heart of an averted debt ceiling crisis.”

“The only things that we know for sure are that if oil goes up and he loses control of it, it goes towards 150 or 200, it will trigger a demand shock. It's already doing it. Airplanes flying, prices have just gone way up. I'm going on a trip in a couple of weeks, we were going to meet somebody and they said, no, forget it. The plane tickets are way too expensive to go. So you're going to see a big demand shock about that.”

“In crypto, a hack is a physics event. It's closer to an aerospace, right? Because if you have an issue in an airplane, people die. In crypto, okay, if you have an issue, people don't die, but it's still very severe, right? And you have these irreversible damage, and now we see like systemic even.”

“What they did basically was to replace the RPC nodes they have deployed with a malicious RPC node, which showed fake data, right? And this fake data were piped into the validator network, which was not a network, which was just one node, was a one-of-one. And based on this fake data, it said, oh, there is a deposit on the unit chain of this amount of restrict ETH, of kelp-dell ETH.”

“The IMF issued a sobering outlook warning that global public debt is on track to approach 100% of global GDP by 2029. The concern is straightforward. If debt keeps growing faster than the economy, investors start demanding higher yields to lend to governments. So borrowing costs rise, pressure spreads across markets, and the whole system becomes more fragile.”

“The United Arab Emirates, one of America's closest allies in the Gulf, has begun talks with the US about a financial lifeline. Macro analyst Luke Gromen's tweet summed up the message bluntly: 'You started this war. If we run short of US dollars as a result of it, either you will give us dollar swap lines or we will be forced to start transacting oil and gas in Chinese Yuan and other currencies.' This is how the petrodollar system erodes.”

“If you build your system with the assumption that any individual component can break, and ideally that like maybe two different components, three different, however many components break, that you still can limit the damage. I think everybody has to assume both in the crypto ecosystem or generally, you are going to get hacked at some point... you need to have a plan for what to do when it happens.”

“April 18th, we had a hack in DeFi, likely North Korea's Lazarus Group... exploited KelpDao's Layer powered bridge to create 116,000 RS ETH tokens. That is the restaked ETH token out of KelpDao without any backing. So, extra tokens minted, they then deposit those tokens into Aave V3 across Arbitrum and Ethereum mainnet to borrow $236 million in wheat... leaving Aave with about $280 million in bad debt that it cannot recover.”

“The TVL and Aave plunged from $26 billion to $17 billion kind of as like panic withdrawals happened. In response to this attack, Aave paused the RS ETH markets and the WETH reserves across multiple chains just to kind of constrain the damage. Now it's got $180 million in bad debt.”

“I think while I do think that this was a good action in this case when we view it in isolation, I think, were I on the Security Council, I likely would have gone along with this. I think that a lot of people who are right to celebrate it in the moment, we're going to look back on this, and it really has the potential to set bad precedents in a lot of ways going forward.”

“Wall Street often profits regardless of whether the underlying investments succeed.”

“The change in the interest rate environment has transformed the returns available to credit investors from meager to attractive.”

“In crypto, a hack is a physics event. It's closer to an aerospace, right? Because if you have an issue in an airplane, people die. In crypto, okay, if you have an issue, people don't die, but it's still very severe, right? And you have these irreversible damage, and now we see like systemic even.”

“The rise of direct lending is one of the most important developments in the financial world since the Global Financial Crisis.”

“They are stating that the AI-fueled stock market bubble is going to burst starting right now in 2026. Their thesis is that starting in 2026, those spectacular gains are going to unwind precipitously because rising interest rates and a higher, stickier inflation rate will essentially act as gravity on these sky-high equity valuations.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence and large language models dominated not only the economy but has also been at the root of a Hollywood double strike conducted by Writers Guild of America and a SAG APTRA strike. These were part of a larger phenomenon of labor strikes across the country.”