Fed Watch

Battle over the Digital Dollar - FED 134

Hosts: Ansel Lindner and Christian Keroles

Special co-host: Nolan Bauerle, @countbtc

Fed Watch is a macro podcast with a clear contrarian thesis of a deflationary breakdown of the financial system leading to bitcoin adoption. We question narratives and schools of thought, and try to form new understanding. Each episode we use current events to question mainstream and bitcoin narratives across the globe, with an emphasis on central banks and currencies.

In this episode, we are joined once again by Nolan Bauerle. Our topics are very interesting in this episode. First, of course, we cover the bitcoin charts and some other important macro charts, like the dollar, the stock market and the US 10Y Treasury. The overriding sentiment in the market is that a major recession is coming. If we start from the premise that the markets are smarter than we are, and I think that is very much not in dispute, we have to look at these markets and see what they are telling us. We go astray by trying to find out why they are mispriced.

Second, we get to our headline topic, a brand new bill in the US Congress that calls out an attempt for a digital dollar by executive order. The bill tries to block that. We read through it and other important material straight from the Federal Reserve's own report on CBDCs from 2022.

Lastly, we scan through the rapidly evolving situation in regards to China. Not only is there diplomatic and military news, but there is a ton of financial news. We focus on the latter. Story #1 is about Chinese banks getting a tongue lashing from CCP, putting them in their place as lubricant providers, not part of the "new elite". Story #2 is about China falling out of the top-3 most attractive destinations for foreign investment. Our final article is about mainland China making it more difficult to get brokerage accounts in Hong Kong which enables Chinese citizens to invest abroad. We tie this last point into the news about Hong Kong also opening back up to Bitcoin.