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“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.”

“Goldman Sachs published a note late last Thursday, revealing that systematic hedge funds, the algorithm driven funds known as CTAs or Commodity Trading Advisors, bought 86 billion of stock exposure over the last five trading sessions. That ranks as one of the largest buying surges in the history of these funds. They further estimated another 90 billion could follow over the next five sessions if the signal stays aligned.”

“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?”

“My view at this point was, you know, I'm not trusting this economy anymore. All right. They need to dollarize and get rid of their currency altogether. I wrote a short op-ed to that effect. Meanwhile, Mark wrote a paper as well. Do you want to talk about that for a second, Mark?”

“In a way, it is a toll road on America's aging water pipe replacement cycle. But daily average sales growth is down. There is a clear demand cooling trend. Private construction is soft. Tariff driven input costs, uncertainty, another overhang here. It is, in many ways, a high quality infrastructure distributor at a multi-year low valuation.”

“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.”

“Steven and Mark join us today to discuss whether dollar dominance is here to stay. You guys have a nice paper co-authored. It's the reason we're here really together to talk today. It's called Dollar Dominance is Here to Stay for the Forseeable Future. The real issue for global economy is how and why. And we'll provide a link to that in the show notes.”

“The Byzantine Empire gets short shrift. In my view, it was characterized by fiscal prudence. One of the things that was important was that, for many centuries, despite having hostile rivals and enemies on all borders, it basically lived within its budgetary means. So the pressure to debase the currency, issue more coins of less value in order to divert more resources to the government and the military. That pressure was not so intense. So that enabled, if you will, the solidus to retain its value for a long time. It circulated around the Mediterranean, but also into Asia and and India and elsewhere.”

“I didn't do much pressing. Obviously, the US doesn't intervene in foreign exchange markets. One still had to manage the meager foreign exchange holdings of the US, SDR transactions with other countries when they wanted to. We kind of got out of the credit stabilization business. There was Mexico in the mid-90s, there was Uruguay subsequently in the early 2000s, but it became difficult to do such operations.”

“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.”

“Another fact I was reminded by in the course of writing the book is that the dollar hasn't been the dominant currency in The United States for the entirety of this country's history. So Alexander Hamilton, famously created the US Mints in the early eighteen nineties, but there was such a shortage of gold and silver in the country before the California Gold Rush and the Nevada Silver Rush that the dominant unit used for transactions were Spanish silver coins, pieces of eight, you know, Spanish pesos or or dollars that were cut up like a pizza in eight slices. It was legal tender in The United States as late as 1857.”

“The industries where they said we'd see the most wage gains from reduced labor supply are actually seeing slower growth in the broader economy. Employment in those 41 immigrant dependent industries fell by 90,400 in February from the previous February, while overall employment grew 298,000. The fundamental economic concept at work here is a lump of labor fallacy.”

“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.”

“The Chinese, have for for for a number of reasons, but but I would say primarily because China, the Chinese Communist Party does not want, to, give up its control over the flows of money across its borders. There are financial reasons for that. There are also political reasons for that. They, you know, they worry that, that, you know, that rich people will take their money out, because of, you know, because they don't like the regime. The other another very important factor is is the the the communist party's control over courts. That means that, you know, foreign investors have to worry that, if they have a dispute over their assets that are held in China in renminbi form, that the courts will rule against them.”

“My view at this point is that plain vanilla cryptos are still volatile, and, therefore, they're least likely to be used in actual payments on day to day basis. And if they're not used in payments that will limit their use for other things, that stablecoin the case for stablecoins is yet to be proven. I think central bank digital currencies are coming. So I would put my money, I think, on combination of central bank digital currencies and tokenized bank deposits, not on stablecoins and Bitcoins.”

“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.”

“There is a story, which, we were hearing a good bit more about, lately, that, that the reason the dollar survived that period is because there was a secret agreement between The US and Saudi Arabia. There's a, you know, an entertaining story, which is much loved by, the crypto people, because they like to argue that the dollar is founded on a kind of a, you know, dirty energy consuming basis, that it was a secret, handshake deal between The US and and Saudi Arabia, that, The US would protect the house of Saud, the the ruling family, on the one hand, and the, and the Saudis would promise to price oil in dollars. In the course of researching my book, I I, I I found that it actually is much less to that story than than, is commonly believed.”

“Alternative Asset Managers are very rate-sensitive. Higher for longer rates, they compress private equity deal activity, they slow realizations, they reduce fundraising momentum. There's definitely a lot of downside risk because of how private investments are valued and oftentimes you don't know how bad things are in private markets until they get really bad.”

“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.”

“If you worry about being the target of sanctions, you put that gold on a boat and you bring it back home. You vault it at home where it's safer from sanctions than our dollar deposits or US treasury securities. But if you bring it home, you can't use it for anything. It become it it's hard to use for payments. It's dense and and if you've ever picked up a gold bar, you know it's dense and heavy, and it can't be lent, pledged as collateral, whatever.”

“In seventy three and then in seventy nine oil doubled or tripled, and by the end of the decade oil had gone up like well six seven times and dollar prices less. In real terms, we've only gone up whatever fifty percent max from spot oil, I mean sort of for Brent and for WTI and the next month future. It's a little higher for delivery in Asia.”

“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?”

“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.”

“A typical global reserve portfolio is now at fifty seven percent dollar, so the notion that reserves are the source of inflows in two dollars is a bit dated. A reserve portfolio will typically have a lower dollar share than a standard return seeking equities fund, which, just because of the outperformance of the US large caps, will be more overweight dollars.”

“CTA flows are a short-term momentum signal. They are not, not, not, not, a fundamental endorsement. The algorithms are buying because prices are rising. They don't know and they don't care whether the war ends, whether earnings hold, or whether the consumer cracks. The smart money is in. But the smart money isn't always right. It's just faster.”

“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.”

“So I used to say the the recipe for an international currency was size, stability, and liquidity. Big economy, stable economy, liquid financial markets, but I would add security as a fourth ingredient. Military security, first, the ability to defend your own borders. Secondly, the ability to protect your trade routes.”

“Traders have abandoned their bets on a stronger dollar, and the greenback is on course for its worst month since August. Dollar index is down 2.3% from its late March peak. The euro has recovered almost all the losses it made in the conflict's first week. The dollar's loss ground against every major currency except the yen so far in April.”

“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.”

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

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

“I do worry worry about excessive financialization. I think we saw its pernicious effects during the global subprime crisis and the global financial crisis between 2007 and 2009. And I worry about private credit and and and AI investment in the present present context. But I I I I don't think it's the dollar's international role that is primarily at work here. It's simply that our highly developed financial markets are attractive places for highly compensated people to play and concoct new financial instruments in in in in ways that may be channeling resources into activities that don't have the highest possible payoff.”

“The balance of payments break even of Saudi went from sixty to ninety to one hundred. So in order to have a current account surplus that needs to be invested abroad, the Saudis now need an oil price of roughly ninety five. They did not get that last year, so they were running budget deficits. They are running a current account deficit which was financed by borrowing from the world.”

“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.”

“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 teapots are a set of refineries, based largely based in one province in Northeastern China called Shandong. ... what happened over time, as you saw, the government increase the quotas for these teapots to import Iranian oil. And what that meant is that more oil moved from the state owned giants who essentially exited the market along with Western countries and Asian nations that were buying Iranian oil. And these private teapot refineries took over, essentially.”

“China's position on US sanctions is that they don't support them, and they think that they're a unilateral move by The US, and that's US policy, but that and that they don't have to enforce US sanctions. For China, it's also geopolitical. China has a far deeper relationship with Iran than just, buying its oil. ... China saw the opportunity, not only to get cheap oil, but to help a friend, and at the same time, undermine US interests.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The teapots are a set of refineries, based largely based in one province in Northeastern China called Shandong. ... what happened over time, as you saw, the government increase the quotas for these teapots to import Iranian oil. And what that meant is that more oil moved from the state owned giants who essentially exited the market along with Western countries and Asian nations that were buying Iranian oil. And these private teapot refineries took over, essentially.”

“Alternative Asset Managers are very rate-sensitive. Higher for longer rates, they compress private equity deal activity, they slow realizations, they reduce fundraising momentum. There's definitely a lot of downside risk because of how private investments are valued and oftentimes you don't know how bad things are in private markets until they get really bad.”

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

“I am reminded of what famous international economist Rudy Dornbusch said about currency crises that they'd always take longer to arrive than you thought they would, and then they occur more violently than you ever imagined they could. So, you know, it's like who who said there are two ways of going bankrupt slowly and then rapidly. So I think we are seeing the beginnings of the decline of the dollar as a global currency as central banks are trying to hedge their bets, moving out of dollar US Treasury securities into gold and other nontraditional reserve currencies. The analogy I sometimes use is, like an iceberg, which melts very slowly until a whole chunk big chunks calve off all at once.”

“But what The US blockade has demonstrated is that quite easily you can use force to disrupt that entire operation and, and the threat of force even because you don't necessarily even have to, intercept ships to do that. You just have to create a sense of fear that The US will. ... The blockade, at least for now, is ensuring that Iran can't export oil and therefore it loses access to its financial lifeline.”

“There is a fundamental difference between financial markets and the real economy. They are not the same thing. Markets can be at all time highs while the economy is struggling. Now, where we are right now is not a struggling economy. It is a labor market that is a bit more weak, a bit weaker than it was last year. It's a consumer that is a bit more strained by inflationary pressures.”

“Bitcoin remains in a 60k–74k range.”

“I think that probably the worst aspect of this is is the attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve because if, obviously, if the Federal Reserve is gonna be pressured into just, you know, printing whole bunches of money to to to in an effort to bring interest rates down, which is what Trump has been pushing for. Well, why would people wanna hold dollar assets? They have to worry that the value of those will, you know, will be will decline over time because of the purchasing power of the dollar being eroded. So, and then, you know, there's also the passage of the so called one big beautiful bill, which, you know, worsened the already quite grim outlook for American, budget deficits and debt.”

“I agree with Mark that the plans for dollarizing have been put aside, mainly because they don't have the dollars to do it. They're focusing on stabilizing the economy, which is the right way to go. And my view is if they succeed in stabilizing the economy, then that's when they should dollarize in order to preclude another fallback into chaos.”

“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.”

“But what The US blockade has demonstrated is that quite easily you can use force to disrupt that entire operation and, and the threat of force even because you don't necessarily even have to, intercept ships to do that. You just have to create a sense of fear that The US will. ... The blockade, at least for now, is ensuring that Iran can't export oil and therefore it loses access to its financial lifeline.”

“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.”

“There is a fundamental difference between financial markets and the real economy. They are not the same thing. Markets can be at all time highs while the economy is struggling. Now, where we are right now is not a struggling economy. It is a labor market that is a bit more weak, a bit weaker than it was last year. It's a consumer that is a bit more strained by inflationary pressures.”

“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.”

“Traders have abandoned their bets on a stronger dollar, and the greenback is on course for its worst month since August. Dollar index is down 2.3% from its late March peak. The euro has recovered almost all the losses it made in the conflict's first week. The dollar's loss ground against every major currency except the yen so far in April.”

“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.”

“Until China, which doesn't didn't love the US before, decides that it is willing to change how it manages its currency and how it manages its economy, it is compelled to go into the market and buy if it's exporters want to convert dollars for you on. And when it's exporters are not converting dollars for you on, they're still holding dollars.”

“I would tell them read more history. I would tell them that the shift from one dominant currency to another is rarely smooth. It comes with disruptions, and we all know that the best defense against disruptions is diversification, not putting all your eggs in in in one basket given all the stuff that's going on in the world at the moment. I think sometimes the obvious advice can be the best advice.”

“Basically, in my view, Argentina is a country that overborrowed domestically. The central bank ended up monetizing the debt, causing hyperinflation. They borrowed excessively abroad to finance themselves. The markets gave it to them. Don't ask me why, but the markets did. And then it serially defaults. So at the core of Argentina's problem is excessive borrowing. And that's the issue that needs to be tackled.”

“Korea is a very petroleum intensive economy, A lot of petrochem's energy intensive industries in addition to the memory chips and so, and it energy poor, fossil fuel poor. So it is on the one hand benefiting from this giant positive shock memory chip surgeon price surgeon demand, AI is helping Samsung print money hand over fist, and then the economy is on the receiving end of a pretty big negative shock because of the loss of oil flow.”

“I think the renminbi can come into more widespread use among countries that are geostrategically allied with China, but not globally. The problem is not that China trades too little. It's the leading trading partner, leading trading power around the world. But there are those political constraints that Chinese authorities can change the rules of the financial game tomorrow morning. The People's Bank of China is not independent of the government. It is required to take marching orders from the executive branch.”

“They have the most oil and they also have some of the lowest break even prices, So any oil above sixty means a big current account sort plus, those countries are not going in a position to capture this windfall, so you've kind of taken Kuwait a rock Ua out of the picture.”

“In some cases, proceeds from the oil sales are sent directly to Chinese construction companies who take the money as payment for building infrastructure in Iran. So there's this barter system that means that that, money never even has to touch the international financial system and and be overseen by The US. One of the other things it could do is it gets paid for the oil in a in a bank account in China, and then it could use that money to procure things in China that, Iranian importers need.”

“When I when I was starting the book, there was oh, I was almost hysteria about the e c n y, about the Chinese central bank digital currency. They had lotteries. And if you you won, you would get a, you know, you would get a that you directly to your phone, you would get, you know, 200 you, yuan worth, for free to spend. Oh, once China has, you know, has launched this on a worldwide basis, just imagine, you know, everyone will be will be using it. And, you know, people in Kansas and Iowa and Idaho, I don't know, they'll have this in their phones and their and their personal information will be beamed back to Beijing. Even in China, the e c n y, people wanna use WeChat and and Alipay. The the ECNY has is is, you know, just hasn't caught on.”

“The other thing I would look for, and these are this would be a very awful scenario if there's a war between US and China over Taiwan. Well, then the world would probably split into two blocks, one dominated by the dollar, the other dominated by the renminbi. That would be awful, and the dollar would not be as dominant as before globally. But, that would be the least of our worries, wouldn't it?”

“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.”

“Goldman Sachs published a note late last Thursday, revealing that systematic hedge funds, the algorithm driven funds known as CTAs or Commodity Trading Advisors, bought 86 billion of stock exposure over the last five trading sessions. That ranks as one of the largest buying surges in the history of these funds. They further estimated another 90 billion could follow over the next five sessions if the signal stays aligned.”

“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.”

“The crypto industry, has latched onto this as as one really great use case for this kind of, monetary transmission. And the and most stable coins are in I mean, there are some that are in other currencies, but almost, I think, 98, 99% are are are backed by dollars. I don't think it'll hurt the dominance of the dollar, but I'm very skeptical that it'll help much. There's a great irony here, of course, because the crypto a whole technology was started as a as a revolutionary. The idea was it was, you know, going to completely circumvent the governments and, and the dollar and the fed, and it's kind of hilarious to me that that they're now because it's, you know, in their financial interest to do so, promoting, stablecoins as, as as wonderful for US national security.”

“One particular Iranian ship that might be part of the ghost fleet of tankers, it would get loaded with Iranian crude and move from the Persian Gulf... and then it might go to the Gulf Of Oman to the middle of the sea. And at that point, it might turn off a tracking system that it's supposed to have on the, on the tanker that reports its whereabouts. And at that point, maybe you might see another ship tie it's tied up to the to the first ship, and you'd see the crude move between the different ships, and that's called a ship to ship transfer.”

“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.”

“Interest rates would be higher than otherwise because the treasury would not have kind of automatic insured market for additional treasury debt from foreign central banks and governments, so they would have to offer higher interest rates to place that debt. And we wouldn't get that automatic medic insurance when a bad thing happens. In 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, we did the bad thing, but the dollar strengthened. So I think those effects that it would become harder for us to import and export, interest rates would be higher, and higher treasury interest rates spill over into higher mortgage rates for your Ohio truck driver.”

“What you might just see as a result of all of this is that there is this this push by these countries, this anti U. S. Bloc, you know, led by countries like China and Russia and Iran to create systems that cut out The U. S. Entirely and cut out the U. S. Dollar. And so mean that there's less oversight by Washington of what countries around the world are doing.”

“One particular Iranian ship that might be part of the ghost fleet of tankers, it would get loaded with Iranian crude and move from the Persian Gulf... and then it might go to the Gulf Of Oman to the middle of the sea. And at that point, it might turn off a tracking system that it's supposed to have on the, on the tanker that reports its whereabouts. And at that point, maybe you might see another ship tie it's tied up to the to the first ship, and you'd see the crude move between the different ships, and that's called a ship to ship transfer.”

“The industries where they said we'd see the most wage gains from reduced labor supply are actually seeing slower growth in the broader economy. Employment in those 41 immigrant dependent industries fell by 90,400 in February from the previous February, while overall employment grew 298,000. The fundamental economic concept at work here is a lump of labor fallacy.”

“In a way, it is a toll road on America's aging water pipe replacement cycle. But daily average sales growth is down. There is a clear demand cooling trend. Private construction is soft. Tariff driven input costs, uncertainty, another overhang here. It is, in many ways, a high quality infrastructure distributor at a multi-year low valuation.”

“CTA flows are a short-term momentum signal. They are not, not, not, not, a fundamental endorsement. The algorithms are buying because prices are rising. They don't know and they don't care whether the war ends, whether earnings hold, or whether the consumer cracks. The smart money is in. But the smart money isn't always right. It's just faster.”

“The Japanese took the view. You know what? We're having this great success with the system as it is, and we don't wanna change it. They didn't want the yen to be, to be internationalized. They had strict controls over how much of it could could could go abroad. Anyway, they did finally, give in to American pressure and saw it as being more of an advantage to, to open up. But by the time the Japanese did open up their financial market, was, the the the mid nineties, and then the bubble the bubble had burst, and, everyone was, you know, the hopes for Tokyo to become the world financial capital were dimming, you know, week by week.”

“China's position on US sanctions is that they don't support them, and they think that they're a unilateral move by The US, and that's US policy, but that and that they don't have to enforce US sanctions. For China, it's also geopolitical. China has a far deeper relationship with Iran than just, buying its oil. ... China saw the opportunity, not only to get cheap oil, but to help a friend, and at the same time, undermine US interests.”

“The exception is Florence, whose florin was probably the dominant currency in Europe from the late thirteenth century into the early fifteenth. They were not a first class military power. They were too small. A city state in Tuscany with modest hinterlands and no natural resources to speak of, but a lot of commercial prowess and the first, crew international bankers. They used finance to project financial power and encourage use of their currency despite the fact they that they weren't a dominant military.”

“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.”

“What you might just see as a result of all of this is that there is this this push by these countries, this anti U. S. Bloc, you know, led by countries like China and Russia and Iran to create systems that cut out The U. S. Entirely and cut out the U. S. Dollar. And so mean that there's less oversight by Washington of what countries around the world are doing.”

“In the book, I have a kind of a central thesis, which is, that the dollar's dominance is all but impregnable barring catastrophic missteps by policy missteps by the US government. I still think that the basic thesis is right. Sure. Catastrophic missteps could could, you know, lead to the dollar losing its dominance, but I think they have to be even more catastrophic than what we've seen because the dollar's dominance, remains as strong as it is for for a whole bunch of fundamental reasons, but one of which is the lack of of of alternatives, any other currency to replace it for for use in international transactions.”

“In some cases, proceeds from the oil sales are sent directly to Chinese construction companies who take the money as payment for building infrastructure in Iran. So there's this barter system that means that that, money never even has to touch the international financial system and and be overseen by The US. One of the other things it could do is it gets paid for the oil in a in a bank account in China, and then it could use that money to procure things in China that, Iranian importers need.”

“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.”

“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.”