If you could teleport gold from Tokyo to NY in a couple minutes, people would like it.
#Crypto
It's not digital currency. It's digital property. It's capital preservation for everyone.

Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money | Lex Fridman Podcast #276 - YouTube #Saylor
Inflation CPI understates the suffering inflicted upon the working class and on companies by the political class. It's a massive shift of wealth from working class to propertied class. Shift of power from freemarket to the centrally governed or controlled market, from people to government. Saylor
In an environment where you're infating the money supply and keeping assets constant, assets will appreciate in proportion to money supply, and the scarce desireable quality will determine value of inflation. Money supply expands 7% per year on average. Many houses have gone up in price more than 300x in 100 years, or around 6.5% per year. You're sucking 6% of the energy of the fluid that the economy is using to function. Currency moves economic energy around.
All government policy is inflamatory and inflationary. Any policy. It interferes with free market and prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper, more efficient way.
Wars (and other policies) are never paid for with taxes. It's too transparent. If people understood the true cost, you will lose 95% of everything, you might reconsider a policy and vote for a politician. A lack of humility. People overestimate what they can accomplish. Experience causes you to reevaluate that. Our mistakes are our good ideas that I enthusiastically pursued, to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150% of my attention to propser. People pursue to many good ideas. There's a limit to what you can accomplish. Everyone underestimates the challenges of implementing, overestimate the benefits of the pursuit. Overexuberance. As the exuberance of the government expands, so must the currency supply.
Inflation is completely misunderstood. Inflation is a vector tracking price change in every good and service.
You can't blame them, because economists don't even understand economics. If they did, they would measure every price of housing, the full array of foods and the full array of assets, and they'd publish this every month.
The primary problem is ‘The government will try to do good.’ It will do more harm than good. They will try to pay for it by expanding the monetary supply. They won't realize this. They'll collapse their own currencies, and mismeasure how badly they're doing that. They'll say the dollar lost 95% over 100 years. Actually it lost 99.7% over 80 years. They'll overestimage their budget and means to pay for it. They're oblivious to the damage they do to civilization. The mental model they're taught, it's Ok we can print lots of money, is defective. ... Other countries lost 99.9% or all (currency failed).
If house prices are going up 20% per year and I say this is great for the American public because most people are home owners, I'm misrepresenting it because it's really a negative.
Look at the ship next to us. What if I told you your ship leaked 2% every year. It's rotting 2% per year.

MIT costs hundreds of years of many families earnings. Inefficient. The seats are uncomfortable, too. Now we have the same teachers you watch on your chair at home. You need PHDs. A PHD is $1m. There's 10m in the world. How many people COULD get a PHD if it were affordable?
If you try to solve this by throwing money at it, you can throw a trillion dollars. $10t, you still don't get there. Harvard can't educate that many.
Education can be infinite and for everyone.

Open, permissionless, not censorable. Non-sovereign bearer instrument. Property. Irregardless of anyone else or government. Twitter stock will never be property in China. It will never be trusted. Property is low-frequency money. If you wanna hold it for a decade, maybe you buy a house, maybe in a decade you sell the house and buy the property again.
What makes bitcoin ethical (to endorse) is no person can change it (well, but they can if they have influence or power). No one can do what they could if it were a security, print 1000 more copies tomorrow.
Bitcoin is the first time we created a digital property. Everything else is securities. Sending money digitally is an IOU.
An armed society is a polite society. If you disagree, you can always withdraw your resources from it.
You can promote a property to the extent that you don't control it, ethically. There's an interest still, but that's different from a conflict of interest.

8b people with mobile phones serviced by 100m companies doing billions of transactions per hour. The companies are settlings on the base level, and the companies are dealing with the consumers on proprietary layers like layer 3, and on occasion people are shuffling assets on layer 2 (moving $50 or something).

You can't trade with a company in Nigeria. No amount of money or time. You get shut down at the banking level (you can't link a bank there with a bank in the US). At the credit card level (because they don't have the credit cards so they won't clear). At the compliance/FCP level your system is from a different political jurisdiction and it can't interface with theirs. You can do it with crypto, fast, cheap, with anyone.

Bitcoin's a universal trust protocol. So is English. No one's payment system works everywhere. US payment systems in Russia? But bitcoin also can't be done easily in these places.

No security can be a currency for the internet. Only a property can be.

If bitcoin goes up, because of how much he owns, Saylor could become the wealthiest person.

The Canadian trucker protest educated millions of people and made them start questioning their property rights and their banks. War in Ukraine was the second shock, Russian sanctions. Hyperinflation in the rest of the world a fouth shock and persistent inflation in the US a fifth.

Bitcoin's volatility attracts all the attention, massive gains and losses, which sucks money into it. Also, it results in massive gains for traders, and that attracts capital.

Temu spent $1.7b in 2023 to advertise and got, in a year or two, 161m users, nearing what Amazon has. It might spend $3b in 2024 on Facebook, Insta, Tiktok, Suprebowl. Temu replicates what Ali did. In 2023 sold products at a loss of about $7 per order. But others say it isn't really losing money.
Temu connects factories with customers, cutting the middle man.
Temu gamifies shopping with games on the app to win prizes. They have countdown timers running on each product to show when a sale ends.
Temu shows that consumers are willing to wait (not fast shipping) as long as the price is cheap.
Morgan Stanley reported they think their growth is cresting.
The quality is low. Safety is a question.
There is a data risk.

China considering liberalizing household registration program. Currently migrant workers in cities can't access any social benefits because their household is registered back in their village. If they change this, they can buy apartments etc in the city.

China is buying ETFs, stimulating their market similar to US did.

If China changes just a smidge in the right thing, they'll attract tons of foreign investment.

China government has the money to spend.

China continues to clash with Philippines fishing boats etc. Some concern it could go too far.

There are hundreds of millions invested in Bytedance out of the US, which represents billions in value.

This week lots more headlines on China, not negative, some modestly positive.

China growth more in lower-tier cities. Tier 1 and 2 are 20 or 30% of economy, 6 or 7% of population.

China the companies that have outperformed have been doing outside markets. Growing rapidly overseas markets. Appliances and durable goods benefit from this trend, maybe.

Some China sectors in bull market of 20% off low. Materials, renewables, smaller cap tech.

Miniso CFO discusses company's plans to add about 1,000 stores a year over the next 5 years - YouTube
#Retail #China

In some countries (Nigeria currency) it's ‘staggering how much wealth was preserved.’ 'Until you get countries that run more credible fiscal policies, people are gonna wanna buy that story, and it's a story that's spreading.'
The monetary policy for this ecosystem was set in code by Satoshi whitepaper.

Chinese space company founders are coming in significant part from Finance (like America). Samo thinks maybe they're coping it from America, but that they don't have an Elon-tier person so it won't happen. But even if they did it would be, internationally, so controlled, similar to exporting nuclear reactors, where you better be on good terms from US or a similar Western country if you want to buy these instead of making them yourself.

Jack Ma may have been an example of the highwater mark of how much impact on Chinese society can a purely commercial or technocratic actor that's not aligned with the CCP have. The ceiling is pretty low. Not even critiquing their policy.

China is not like Singapore, which will use a sovereign wealth fund that will try to develop a totally new product, a novel solution to a problem. (Singapore working on insect protein, which is kind of what you need for a tiny city state to feed its population.) When China says they're going to invest in AI, it probably means close the AI gap by copying the US. What makes the individual threatening to the CCP is their popularity. If they offer something Chinese people want or like, they'll be liked too much.

Might be a spot ETF for bitcoin in HK, and there's a lot of interest.
To do this, you need a bunch of financial institutions working together. The stock exchange, regulated asset managers who can manage the product, licenced brokers called participating brokers, and depository services who support the running of the fund. In HK also asset custodians in cash and crypto sides. And good quality market makers to support a product after it starts trading on an exchange.
They've seen how the US did it and can use that roadmap.
The HK might have an advantage over the US product because you can actually pull Bitcoin out from the funds.
The HK fees have to compete so be as low as what they US ones were set at.
They can't launch too fast because they think most important is to have a product people like, a quality product.

Eth etf race. US hasn't approved any product yet, so there's a more global race for that. Being first to market is critical for players investing in that space.

China, reportedly the young are really spending, and it's their income that is limiting their spending.

S&P large cap around 15x the mag 7. While the Russel2000, looking at the profitable companies, around 12x. ... When rates cut there will be multiple expansion plus risk appetite growing, perhaps. Tom Lee

‘The fallacy of a 2% inflation target by the Fed’ - Bookvar
Because of technology, 'prices usually fall. Tech prices are keeping a lid on goods prices, and that's 0, then something else has to rise by 4% to get to the 2. So J Powell is actually rerouting for higher other prices to offset that natural decline in prices from technology, and that makes no sense.'
The reason why there’s a 2% inflation target is not for the best thing for the economy. ‘If the inflation is at 2, ideally we would have a Fed funds rate of maybe 4, and if we go into recessoin we’ll have 400 basis points to cut in a downturn.' ‘It’s right for their own policy.'
But they do also think 2% is good for the economy. It greases the wheels of the economy. You want a steady modest rise in inflation so people go out and spend. ... But there are a lot of people who would say the right level of inflation is 0.'

Restaurants don't have a lot of productivity levels to raise to offset higher wages. You only have one and that's to raise your menu prices.

VISA sees everything, every type of consumer. If the consumer is trading away from Macdonalds and going to Taco Bell, VISA sees the spend.
They see basically no weakness anywhere on last call.

There's also a shift in how people spend and pay. They pay with cards and don't even carry cash. They buy less for stuff around the house and go out to eat more.

BofA says there are still excess savings. The lowest savings accounts still have a few thousand in there. They have 4x than what they had saved pre-covid.

Cruise lines said they've seen no slowing in spending. Home restoration supplies are a little soft, because they've been booming for several years and that's already done.

Fed might have been suprised by QT not having an impact. Then the AI boom in 2023 and earnings recovery animal spirits. Fed might have been thinking they were sailing into a deflated direction but AI boomed, and tech companies buying from each other meant high revenues.

Nvidia's biggest customers today are trying to be its competitors. They're all trying to make their own chips.

When a stock goes vertical (on good news or whatever) you're pulling forward a lot of future returns. It matters what you pay. A stock parabolic move can pull earnings forward 25 years.

There's a pro-shareholder thing going on in hottest stock market Japan and hottest EM India. Whether they're actually doing this for the stock market not sure. Whether they're looking at US and saying Hey maybe there's something there not sure.

China's middle class, over the next 5-10 years, will go from 400m to 800m (add the size of US population). Chinese love to travel to Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India. Middle class stories. Chinese travellers sprinkled $250b around the world in 2019. Shopping luxury, eat out, experience things. The more they make the more they wanna buy.

China, even if grows 3% per year for 10 years, in terms of dollars that's still a lot of dollars.

Apple needs another China, but the whole (asia) region will be that. But they have to compete against $10 Chinese phones.

Netflix et all used to be like How do we get these movies to open big in China? Now it's all India.

India printed an 8.4% GDP number for Q4.

Tesla, multiple is still so fat. No margin of safety when fundamentals turned to the downside. Has to reach a bottoming in sales numbers for dip buyers to return, maybe. Hybrids are so hot, and that wasn't assumed years ago, they thought it was EV or not. The hybrid bridge. Toyota was in it, no one else.