The Melting Dollar
The dollar has lost about 88% of its purchasing power since 1971, the melt is compounding, and the world will end up measuring in something that does not melt.
Articles tagged: macro
Henrik Zeberg Says Bond Yields Will Collapse: The Cycle Thesis, Examined
Henrik Zeberg, the Swissblock strategist, is calling the most contrarian trade in the market: bond yields are about to collapse, the recession has already been signalled, and the bitcoin top is behind us. This episode states his cycle framework at full strength — inflation lags the labour market, and a payroll run-rate near thirty thousand sits where the previous eight recessions began — then sets it against the record. It reports where he beat the tape, concedes the credit-spread test he supplies that this series should have built itself, and marks the destination trades in dollars, gold and equities that have already turned against him. Where the mechanism holds and the clock is soft, this examination says so plainly.
Jack Mallers on Europe: Where the Case Breaks (Part 3 of 3)
The final part of our examination of Jack Mallers and Europe is where the case meets its limits. We name the three omissions inside his mechanism — an unused central bank backstop, France's excessive deficit procedure, and a central bank that has itself been tightening — and we test his timing against the central bank's own data, where the August calm sits in the middle of a range that held for forty-four months and the fracture arrives in October alongside a budget and a collapsed government. We correct the figure that cuts broadest, give him the yen, the direction and the dating, name the claim that cannot fail, and leave eight dated markers by which the argument settles itself in public.
Jack Mallers on Europe: The Record So Far (Part 2 of 3)
Part two of three turns the earlier verdict on Jack Mallers' debt-and-dollar thesis into a comparison. Where a working operator reading real-time markets and a series triangulating documents reach the same conclusion by independent routes, both readings get stronger — and on the roll, the interest bill, the fading foreign buyer and the direction of the debasement trade, they do. Then the record beside his older claims: yields, the mortgage rate, the deficit level and the size of the debt aged well; the eight point three trillion refinancing figure, the Asian surplus flow and the demographic share never confirmed; and the claim that no country survives debt above one hundred and thirty per cent of output is contradicted by Japan and Singapore.
Jack Mallers on Europe: The Case Examined (Part 1 of 3)
Jack Mallers, the founder of Strike, hosts a show arguing that the euro system breaks before the American one. This first pass states his case at full strength: a central bank that hiked into forty trillion dollars of debt, a refinancing bill that grows on its own arithmetic, an intervention that sold euros rather than dollars, and a France he calls the first crack. His numbers largely hold, and two pieces of evidence, the euro's fall of nearly five per cent against the yen and Japanese holdings of French bonds, are real. His motive for it all remains, in his own words, speculation.
A Private Credit Cycle Inside a Sovereign Funding Cycle: The Synthesis and a Realistic Way Forward (Part 3 of 3)
Two theses about the next financial crisis survived the first two parts of this trilogy intact and unreconciled — one holds that the crisis variable is the speed of private credit growth, the other that it is the funding cost of the sovereign itself. This final part stops asking which man is right and states the synthesis the evidence actually supports: a private credit cycle running inside a sovereign funding cycle, where one sets the shape of the shock and the other sets the price of the answer. It weighs the show's own debasement prior against the prices on the screen, names the versions of both claims that cannot fail, and sets out six dated, published markers — from auction coverage to the breakeven against the real yield — that will settle an argument between two sound mechanisms.
Testing Both Debt Theses Against the Record: What the Data Supports, What It Cannot Settle, and What It Contradicts (Part 2 of 3)
Part one set Richard Vague against Jack Mallers: one saying the crisis risk sits in private debt, the other saying government debt is the trap. This part is the ledger they agreed would settle it, testing each claim against the Treasury's own debt and interest data, the Bank for International Settlements, the Treasury International Capital series, and live market prices. The money-creation mechanism is confirmed by the Bank of England's own bulletin, and the current private-debt level of one hundred and forty per cent checks out exactly. The claimed one hundred and fifty-three per cent peak cannot be reproduced, the market is not pricing debasement, and the roll, the gap between the average cost of the debt already issued and the marginal cost of new borrowing, is the strongest item either guest brought. The verdict is mixed.
Private Debt or Government Debt? Two Theses on the Cause of a Financial Crisis (Part 1 of 3)
Richard Vague says the variable that causes financial crises is the speed of private credit growth, not the level of government debt, and that the deficit argument is aimed at the wrong pile. Jack Mallers says the danger is the funding cost of the sovereign itself, that Treasury issuance has floated to the front end of the curve, and that the arithmetic of constant rollover ends in a weaker dollar. This first of three parts states both systems at full strength, names each man's incentives, separates the four places they genuinely collide from the places where they are talking at different layers of the same object, and reports the one mechanism they both affirm and read in opposite directions.
Doomberg's Four Horsemen of the Diesel Apocalypse, Tested Against Our Own Thesis
Doomberg and James Lavish describe a diesel market in which four mechanisms are tightening at once: an American export restriction, sanctions on the buyers of Russian crude, Middle East escalation, and a global refinery fleet running at the edge of its design envelope with its maintenance deferred. Their claim is that Europe, which imports almost all of the diesel it burns, is the party that pays. This episode states that case at full strength and then tests it against what this series has already published: it reports five places where the two accounts converge, concedes the two places where the guests correct us, names the sharpest disagreement, and closes with dated markers that will settle the argument either way.
Jordi Visser's Bitcoin Thesis, Tested: Is Bitcoin Still a Liquidity Asset?
Jordi Visser, a macro investor with thirty years behind him, argues that bitcoin is not a liquidity asset: that the crypto community's debasement framing is a mistake, that the liquidity cycle is broken, and that rates can rise while bitcoin rises with them. This examination states his system at full strength, from tokenisation as the next channel of liquidity and artificial-intelligence agents as the users he says are arriving, to a duopoly of two unlisted laboratories and crypto's ghost rails waiting for tenants. It reports where his account converges with our published thesis, concedes the two places where he genuinely corrects us, names the sharpest disagreement, corrects three of his figures, and closes with dated markers that will settle the argument either way.
Oil, Bond Yields and Private Credit: What Would Have to Change for Each to Get Better
Three markets are doing badly at once — oil, government debt and private credit — and this examination asks the forward question rather than the backward one: for each, what would it actually take for things to get better, and what would move first if it began? The answer runs through the plumbing rather than the price: the war risk insurance premium for oil, the term premium and the auction book for bonds, the redemption queue and the marks for credit. It finds demand destruction the only lever still working in oil, a long end that has stopped listening to the central bank, and a private credit market paying its caps while nothing that would constitute a repair has happened yet — then sets eight checkable markers so the series can be held to account.
Princes of the Dollar: Why QE Is Over, Tested Against Our Own Thesis
A piece that ran on The Mesh Point, then on Bombthrower, then on ZeroHedge under the house byline Tyler Durden argues that quantitative easing is over and that the state must now direct credit rather than let the bond market allocate it. This examination tests it against our own published debasement thesis and is candid where the argument cuts against us: directed credit is the one form of money creation that could plausibly raise output enough to meet an existing debt stock, and if it works, our debasement arithmetic loses its middle term. What it cannot do is tell the reader how to know: its headline arrives with no measure, no date and no mechanism, and its theory of credit sits awkwardly beside a claim about the central bank's balance sheet. The verdict, the three tensions, and the markers that would confirm the article or falsify us.
Joel Litman on Debt, the Dollar and Gold, Compared With Our Own Reading
Joel Litman, chief investment strategist at Altimetry and president and chief executive of Valens Research, told Miles Franklin Media that the data says no to a coming crash and a dying dollar — corporate credit is the canary, and it is not singing. This examination states his system at full strength, including the instrument on which he genuinely improves this series: the corporate swap market as a live leading indicator, and a supply explanation for a heavy long end. Then it holds the claim against our own published numbers and finds the load-bearing step failing. The average borrower is priced as though nothing can go wrong, at two hundred and seventy-six basis points; the weakest is priced as though something already has, at one thousand and eighty-five. The average is calm and the tail is not, and the argument is settled on dated markers either way.
The Freest Money: Does Bitcoin's Boom and Bust Confirm the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle?
A listener's proposition — that bitcoin is the only money in the world with no protection of any kind, and that its boom and bust should therefore be the Austrian business cycle running in the open — is tested here rather than admired, and it turns out to be half right in a way that is more interesting than being wholly right: the Austrian mechanism does run inside crypto, from the private stablecoin money backed by short-dated Treasury bills to a liquidation in 2022 that ran to completion with nobody rescued while the conventional banks were made whole the very next year, and yet the deepest busts were imported from the fiat system, the biggest leverage was borrowed from the bond market, and the drawdowns are getting shallower as the safety net bitcoin was built to escape arrives quietly from outside. The examination closes on what is supported, what is contradicted, what remains genuinely unresolved, and the four markers that would settle it.
Shaun Rein on China and the Chaotic World Order, Compared With Our Own Reading
A China analyst with three decades on the ground makes his case at full strength — the chaotic rather than new world order, the K-shaped economy, the chip boom the export controls created — and then meets this series' own document-built verdict. Where the two converge, the conclusions get stronger; where they part, one forecast is missing the variable that decides the decade.
The World Keynes Built: How One Theory Became the Operating System of Every Government, What It Cost, and What Today's Economy Looks Like Through Austrian Eyes
Keynes did not win the argument about theory; he won the argument about consequences, and his conclusions were absorbed into the machinery of every government that was being built anyway — including the negotiation at Bretton Woods that he himself lost, the welfare state and the full-employment commitment, and a synthesis that won rather than the General Theory. This examination then reads today's zombie firms, empty offices, private credit, debt-financed computing build-out and equity valuations through the three tools Mises and Hayek left behind, and states plainly what would have been better and what would have been worse under their system.
The Two Economists: Mises, Hayek and Keynes — What the Austrian School Argued, What Keynes Argued Instead, and Why the Debate Never Ended
In the nineteen thirties Vienna and Cambridge gave two rival answers to the same question — what is an economy, and what should be done about it — and this examination sets out both in their own terms, from Mises on money that is never neutral and the impossibility of calculating without capital goods, to Hayek on dispersed knowledge and the price system as an information technology, to Keynes on an economy that can rest at an equilibrium with willing workers unemployed. It then follows the fight itself, Hayek's review and Keynes's reply and Sraffa on the natural rate, and asks why one side became the language of every government while the other spent decades in the wilderness — and why what actually won was a synthesis, not the General Theory.
The Debasement Trade, Re-Tested: What the Stressors Do to Gold and Bitcoin, and Why the Fiscal Story Has Not Been Paid For
The debasement trade is right about the world and wrong about the price. This examination re-tests it against its own scoreboard — money supply, deficits and record central bank gold buying on one side, and the falling prices of gold and bitcoin on the other — and finds the mechanism that explains both: the real yield on inflation-protected government debt, up from one point eight eight per cent to two point six two per cent this year.
The Other Stressors: Real Estate, Employment, Inflation and the Consumer, Ranked by What Could Actually Bring the Economy Down
The stressors other than oil and bonds — commercial and private real estate, employment, inflation, the consumer and the banks that hold the property loans — each scored on transmission, severity and trigger proximity, and ranked by which of them could actually bring the economy down.
The Fiscal Doom Loop — Bitcoin Macro Thesis (Updated March 22)
Updated with Lyn Alden's Flywheel of Chaos framework. Fed gradual print meets Iran war, Hormuz closure, energy crisis. 7 parts, fully sourced.