Chris Tipper | 📈 ₿ 🥇🥈

More US dollars were produced during COVID than in the entire history before it. That is the scale of the boost. The debt is now large enough that the extra money has to go somewhere if inflation is to be contained. It has gone into asset prices. Social unrest is the crack. A crash is expected and cannot fully arrive while the money is still flowing. That is the bind.

Headline inflation is sitting around 3 percent and people are calling it the new 2 percent. Wages are tied to that number. It only measures consumer goods. Asset prices are the rest of the picture. That is why property is out of reach, why younger people are stuck, and why the middle is feeling the squeeze while anyone who already owns the assets is not. The rich own the thing that is inflating. Everyone else is measured against the smaller number.

A lot of the men she works with will throw another year at a business that is not working because home is harder to look at. No sex in 12 months. Grumpy with the kids. 10 to 20 kilos on and embarrassed by the mirror. That is the hard truth she puts on the table. The business feels like the problem you can still control. The rest does not. Which one are they actually avoiding?

Bitcoin is tracking global liquidity the same way gold does, with adoption as the multiplier on top. That is the gold 2.0 argument. It has not been tested for 5,000 years. That is the gap. On the other measures, ETFs, US government legitimisation, and the way it responds to liquidity, it is serving the role. Central banks are not yet competing for every coin. That is more about age than about the function.

Kateesha shut down a successful LinkedIn agency in June and went all-in on coaching men who run seven and eight figure businesses. Most of them are crushing it at work and losing at home. She was unwell for almost a decade. Her take on burnout is that you benefit from it. Secondary gain. Attention, sympathy, an excuse not to face the harder thing. She had a CEO write out three pages of ways she secretly gained from being burnt out. Once you admit the gain, you can stop feeding it. She does not believe in balance. She believes in priorities and presence, and you cannot set either until you know your actual values, not the ones on the office wall. Home is more confronting than the business for a lot of the men she works with. No sex in 12 months, grumpy with the kids, 10 to 20 kilos on. It is easier to throw another year at a company that is not working than to look at that. She will say the hard thing. One client got told he was a master manipulator in the second session and asked for another invoice in the third. The universe rewards the brave is how she ends every keynote. The ripple is the kid who says dad is less angry at home.

The dollars in your wallet are not backed by anything except government debt. Calling it a Ponzi is not dramatic. Fiat supply is up and to the right and increasingly exponential. That is the chart. Precious metals sit on the other side of it because they are not someone else's liability. The growth in the amount of currency is the thing most people are not watching while they watch the price of everything else.

I had 2,100 Bitcoin when it was early and sold the lot for one dollar. At the time it felt like the greatest trade in history. This was when I was a high school business teacher looking for something to show the seniors. The return on the cents I held looked enormous but the price then did what price did.... I used to tell the kids I would punch myself in the face every morning after that lol!

The headline global liquidity number has slipped a bit further to US$196.1 trillion, about $500 billion below its recent peak, so it is no longer making new highs. At the same time the Shadow Monetary Base has paused its recent slide and ticked up slightly to US$107.9 trillion after falling from near US$112 trillion earlier in the year. Three-month growth on the base is still negative, but it is less negative than it was a couple of weeks ago. The collateral multiplier remains near a record at 1.82, which continues to prop up the headline even while fresh creation stays weak. Bitcoin has kept falling and is now around $78,000. Gold and silver have dropped further as well. Stronger PBoC injections this week helped the base find a pause, and that is still the side of the picture gold is more sensitive to, while Bitcoin continues to trade more like the Western liquidity conditions that are softening. Bond volatility is sitting just below 100, still well above the quiet range it held through the middle of the year. This week’s letter is the headline pool easing back while the base finally stops falling for a week. That pause is real, but it does not look like the start of new liquidity creation. I am still cautious near-term on Bitcoin and more constructive on gold and silver. Pullbacks can still be used for accumulation as treating this like a fresh cycle does not make sense to me. tipperanalytics.substack.com…

When your auntie, your mechanic and your landlord are all talking about the same no-brainer trade, that is usually the exit, not the entry. The more worrying version is when major outlets and large accounts with big followings are leading people the same way. It happens at the top of every cycle. The FOMO is louder now than it was when prices were lower. That is not a coincidence.

The band-aids on Japanese debt have worked until they do not. When they stop working, that is the shape of a broader crisis, and gold is the insurance for that window. Geopolitics, debt loads and the yen are all pointed at the same problem. Nothing has broken yet. The risk is that the next break is not contained to one market. Dhruv's point is that the setup looks like previous periods where the patches held right up until they did not.