Weekend Reading #311
This is the three-hundredth-and-eleventh weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 19th April 2025
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What we're thinking.
Another rollercoaster week notched up with US equities once again under performing. The trends we’ve seen so far this year continue with money flowing out of the US towards anywhere else really. To be honest not much new has happened this week apart from the emerging story of Trump trying to get rid of Jay Powell. This is something to keep an eye on. Away from the world of equities and bonds, Bitcoin has held the line, not selling off with the Nasdaq for the first time in a long time and giving fuel to the believers that this may be the moment where it takes its place alongside Gold in the pantheon of haven assets.
What we're watching.
I know everyone talks about The White Lotus glowingly but I watched the most recent series and I felt it was extremely disappointing with a complete anticlimax of an ending. The problem with these shows is that each season is a bar that needs to be exceeded and there are only so many surprises that can be engineered before it becomes a bit ridiculous. Apart from a few good moments, especially this sensational albeit extremely X rated (like very extremely) soliloquy from Sam Rockwell, it really wasn’t worth the investment of time. I’m not optimistic for the next one. DC
What we're listening to.
Arthur Hayes gave his usual flamboyant pitch on the Unchained podcast. His view is that we are on an inevitable path to more monetary easing and that recent events have simply accelerated this path. He is also a recipient of no less than a presidential pardon from President Trump, but funnily enough he doesn’t seem to know what this means. As always, it’s worth listening to how he maps out the world and the monetary environment to come.
Someone who I have spent a lot of time listening to recently is Julian Brigden, who has called events this year almost literally to a tee. He predicted the shift out of US assets into Europe in particular and he is back with more, talking about how this is likely in his view only the beginning of a monumental shift. This is a view we share as our base case here and listening to him articulate it far better than we ever can is compulsory listening for us and anyone who wants to understand how things are unfolding.
Le Shrub and PaoloMacro, two anon accounts I follow very closely on Twitter came together on Demitri Kofinas’s Hidden Forces podcast talking once again about the “End of American Exceptionalism” as Le Shrub calls it and how the US is becoming an emerging market, which is PaoloMacro’s main theme. This is a brilliant conversation once again highlighting the cognitive dissonance evident in markets as most participants just can’t quite get themselves to understand that we may very well be in the midst of the biggest regime change we’ve seen in decades.
And to complete my list of favourites this week, George Friedman with another master class on what is really going on in terms of geopolitics. His insights into what Trump is doing and why are far better than the mediocre analysis one may get from reading the FT and the like.
All of these guys this week are a pleasure to listen to because they simply analyse things as they are without the deep emotion and bias that pervades most opinions these days. DC
What we're reading.
It wasn’t that long ago that we were dealing with the fallout from FTX and the subsequent contagion which gave us a very profitable trade in Silvergate Bank. Around the same time, Silicon Valley Bank had also been taken out, punching a hole in the VC-fuelled startup industry, which SVB primarily served. But at the other end of the country, in New York, another bank which we had indirectly used as correspondent bank for USD transactions, Signature Bank, was also involved in crypto – and despite having otherwise healthy balance sheets, it was seized and shut down. Collateral damage, they said, but this article posted by Nic Carter on twitter paints a very different story – an alternative recount of events that suggested Signature Bank was solvent and entirely able to weather its storm, but was nonetheless forcibly shut down in order to engineer a narrative for a “systemic” banking crisis and subsequently create the justification for bailing out the 94% of SVB’s $175bn deposits which were uninsured.
Caveat here is that Nic Carter is squarely in the pro-crypto camp, understandably upset about all the shenanigans pulled off in the previous administration against crypto, including what was ultimately revealed as Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Either way, dead banks aren’t coming back, but if the trajectory of revelations continues, perhaps we’ll find out which version of history is true, and if there was self-sabotage of the highest order going on – eventually. EL