MONITOR DOLLAR

“The market is just a giant derivatives trade. It's what happens when everything gets so centralized and everyone's asset management looks the same. If you have this beta neutral book, that's generally a lot of hedge funds, that's the guys moving the books around. And it's a lot of like, they do things in unison as much as they think they're original thinkers.”

“The dollar seems to be structurally flawed in the sense that even a bigger oil moved this year than 2022, but a much smaller dollar move. And so that when you look at correlations over the last week or two, it's very clear a lot of this has come on the back of the dollar getting pushed lower.”

“Retail's chasing the strength hard, buying on their platform is unusually aggressive for an up day. They're in the 90th percentile in call buying now. So now, retail is chasing to the upside calls, which is like, that's where you just got to step back and be like, okay, this got really wild.”

“Inflation is going to continue. The Fed's not going to get in front of it. So who's left holding the bag here? And it's regular people. And then he looked at the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, all time lows in consumer sentiment. Where does that track? Tracks into the midterms.”

“The policy is pump stock market. That's what it is. I feel like there's room here for them to do something. Obviously, the cost that we just talked about is inflation. But who cares about inflation if the stock market is going up, right?”

“Iran may accept stablecoins for Strait of Hormuz tolls — a potential blow to the petrodollar.”

“speculation that Iran may accept stablecoins for Strait of Hormuz tolls — a potential blow to the petrodollar.”

“Bitcoin remains in a 60k–74k range.”

“XRP’s largest institutional surge (25% planning exposure in 2026)”

“Morgan Stanley’s new Bitcoin ETF, and Binance dominating Q1 2026.”

“Bitcoin keeps running into a wall of selling above $70K — roughly $20M/hour in profit-taking — and now that wall has geopolitical weight behind it after the Islamabad peace talks collapsed, Iran's Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed, and Trump ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports starting this morning. That's pushing oil toward $100/barrel and forcing tanker traffic into a full reroute away from the Gulf.”

“If those December contracts move over 100, the world is a very different place than it is right now. And that will cause revaluation of various assets. And that will cause, certainly in our administration, doing everything they can to print money. The truth is with AI and with everything going on in the economy and with oil prices going up, it actually cuts economic growth. It cuts the aggregate demand.”

“Our political system in the United States is broken. I mean, it's not just that people think Congress are a bunch of parasitic jackals, which is true, by the way... But it's actually worse than that. It's just completely dysfunctional. That is a large part of this. I mean, if we knew we were going to have a new Federal Reserve Chair in May, which you would think would be known, I think markets would be very different.”

“The dollar's long-term slide continues — now just 46% of global FX and gold reserves, a 26-year low — even as M2 keeps expanding at 4.8% YoY, and central bank gold holdings have officially eclipsed US Treasury holdings for the first time since '96. That's pushing oil toward $100/barrel and forcing tanker traffic into a full reroute away from the Gulf, which benefits US energy exports but hammers Japan, South Korea, and India hardest.”

“The WLFI vs. Justin Sun feud is turning into a full legal brawl over a $75M loan dispute, backdoor token blacklisting, and accusations flying both ways — exactly the kind of circus that undermines crypto's push for institutional credibility. This adds to the geopolitical weight already slowing markets after the Islamabad peace talks collapsed, and Iran's Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed following the new naval blockade.”

“The narrative is all about this big crypto summit that's happening at the White House. That starts on Friday. It's the first ever crypto summit at the White House. And the tokens that are recovering are the ones that are recovering around the summit. It's the USA coins that are actually starting to recover.”

“One of the theories out there is that Trump is trying to his best to reduce the interest rates before they start refinancing this debt. Imagine you're Trump and you've got $10 billion or $7 trillion of debt that needs to be paid in the next six months. If you don't repay it, effectively what happens is you need to refinance it, right?”

“This is again, this is a negotiation tactic. You start off by imposing the tariffs. Once the tariffs have been imposed, then you start the negotiation, then you start getting what you actually want. But as I said to you, as this happens, what happens is that the markets actually start taking a hit.”

“Tariffs do not create inflation. Printing money creates inflation. You have a balanced budget, there can't be inflation. It doesn't mean one product could be more expensive, and one product could be less expensive. China has the highest tariffs in the world... and they don't have inflation.”

“The Dixie is, it's almost like crashing down. It's at 104.5, which is huge. What that means is that that means that the market believes that interest rates are gonna be coming down soon. That's pretty much what the market is telling you.”

“Bitcoin keeps running into a wall of selling above $70K — roughly $20M/hour in profit-taking — and now that wall has geopolitical weight behind it after the Islamabad peace talks collapsed, Iran's Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed, and Trump ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports starting this morning. That's pushing oil toward $100/barrel and forcing tanker traffic into a full reroute away from the Gulf.”

“If those December contracts move over 100, the world is a very different place than it is right now. And that will cause revaluation of various assets. And that will cause, certainly in our administration, doing everything they can to print money. The truth is with AI and with everything going on in the economy and with oil prices going up, it actually cuts economic growth. It cuts the aggregate demand.”

“Our political system in the United States is broken. I mean, it's not just that people think Congress are a bunch of parasitic jackals, which is true, by the way... But it's actually worse than that. It's just completely dysfunctional. That is a large part of this. I mean, if we knew we were going to have a new Federal Reserve Chair in May, which you would think would be known, I think markets would be very different.”

“The dollar's long-term slide continues — now just 46% of global FX and gold reserves, a 26-year low — even as M2 keeps expanding at 4.8% YoY, and central bank gold holdings have officially eclipsed US Treasury holdings for the first time since '96. That's pushing oil toward $100/barrel and forcing tanker traffic into a full reroute away from the Gulf, which benefits US energy exports but hammers Japan, South Korea, and India hardest.”

“The WLFI vs. Justin Sun feud is turning into a full legal brawl over a $75M loan dispute, backdoor token blacklisting, and accusations flying both ways — exactly the kind of circus that undermines crypto's push for institutional credibility. This adds to the geopolitical weight already slowing markets after the Islamabad peace talks collapsed, and Iran's Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed following the new naval blockade.”

“After the Second World War, we put together an economic order centered around the US and the US dollar, and that's coming apart. You can see an acceptance that it's coming apart. You saw it last week in the political discussions you saw in Europe about where we're going next. But clearly, the old system is coming apart. There's nothing to replace it. That's where the catastrophic risk component comes in.”

“We can justify the pricing if you assume that there's no catastrophic risk to worry about. But if you do bring in catastrophic risk, then the market becomes worrisome across the board. Whether it's Mag-7, not Mag-7, global equities, US equities, collectively, there seems to be too much of an acceptance that we'll figure a way through this without serious pain.”

“I think that transition, more than a collapse, is what's going to be painful, because there are going to be, you know, there are going to be some businesses, they're going to find a way to get to the other side easily, and other businesses are going to struggle more. But I think that struggle's got to be priced in more, and whether that means lower earnings growth or higher risk premiums, markets haven't quite decided yet.”

“How do you go from the US dollar as the central currency to something else? Because there's nothing else out there right now that can replace the US dollar as a global currency. So I think that that transition, more than a collapse, is what's going to be painful, because there are going to be some businesses that find a way to get to the other side and others that struggle.”

“Europe has lived in the reflected protection of the US for 70 years and essentially been able to focus entirely on economy building, leaving defense and the expense of defending Europe to the US. So this is not just a US problem. The US might have more to lose than everybody else because it's been at the center of the post-World War II economic order. But it's not just the US.”