Episode 079

News and Links

BTC White Paper

Erik Voorhees and SBF Debate

Italy Inflation hits 12.8% – highest since 1996

Costa Rica lawmaker proposes law eliminating BTC taxes

Egypt’s currency slides 13.5% to a record low against the US dollar, as IMF and Cairo reach a $3 billion loan agreement

German CPI hits 11.6%

Japan spending $200 Billion to counter inflation

UK Lawmaker Committee Approves Stablecoin Regulation Bill

US Q3 GDP rises by 2.6%, the first increase in 2022

World’s Largest Public Bitcoin Mining Firm Core Scientific Says It May Run Out of Cash: Halts Debt Payments Amid Solvency Risk

European Central Bank hikes interest rates by 75 BPS to 2%

FTX/SBF working on a new Stablecoin

Credit Suisse cutting 9000 jobs

Bank of Canada hikes 50bps, less than the expected 75bps

A year after Nigeria launched its CBDC, only less than 0.5% of Nigerians are using it

Cashapp enables lightning payments

October 30, 2022 Weekly Close (USD)

BTC – 20,633.28

ETH – 1,589.79

ADA – 0.405952

Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://newpodcastapps.com/

I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Website

https://satoshis-plebs.com

Music Credits

Rock Guitar Intro 07 by TaigaSoundProd

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/8342-rock-guitar-intro-07

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Funky Life by WinnieTheMoog

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6040-funky-life

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Transcription

Hey, sat stackers. It’s October the 31st. This is episode 79 of Generational Wealth
with Cryptocurrency. I’m your host, McIntosh. Of course, no one on this podcast is a financial
advisor and all information presented on this podcast is for informational purposes only.
Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let’s jump on in.
We’ll begin as usual with our market update. This week has shown some signs of green.
We’ll discuss our weekly close first, which happened a couple of hours ago, of course,
at the time of recording. We had a Bitcoin close price of $20,633.28, Ethereum at $1,589.79,
so $1,589. ADA closed at $0.405952, so basically $0.40540. All right, so there you go.
All three of those, of course, are up from last week. We have had a trend. We had a fairly
dramatic day. I want to say on Tuesday, that’s correct. We had quite a strong jump,
and then that was followed up again by Wednesday as well, good climb. And then we’ve kind of topped
out. So actually Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and now on Sunday so far, we’ve been
somewhere around $20,500 and $21,000 or so. We top out at about $21,100. So what we’re forming is a
fairly tight range that’s basically, it’s kind of bumping up against that. I’m not convinced.
There’s a lot of people thinking that the bull market is back on. Y’all probably know me. If
you’ve listened to enough of these episodes by now, that frankly, I’m a fairly pessimistic person.
Not in the long term and certainly not for the future, certainly a Bitcoin,
but I’m fairly pessimistic at this point that this is going to go up. I do not think we will
just immediately be rebounding and heading up to $30,000 or some number like that. We’ve got a long
way to go to even prove we’re starting a bull market. And as I have said many, many times,
of course, much of this market does depend on the Dow Jones, S&P, the US stock market,
in general, the world stock market. Although somewhat frankly, to be honest, the Bitcoin
crypto market has somewhat separated. The US market has continued to trend down other than
the last few days and Bitcoin has held steady. I should mention, of course, that there’s been
a number of altcoins that have actually pumped even more than Ethereum and Bitcoin have.
Dogecoin actually, I think, had 100% gain over the last week or so, which of course is quite
dramatic, but these are small caps currencies, the crypto, they’re very small and frankly can be
manipulated. I don’t know what else to call it, but they can be manipulated far easier than Bitcoin,
for example, because it has a much larger market cap. It’s harder to move that.
So, it’s not surprising that you’re seeing these kind of things. I, of course, have long term for
Dogecoin or whatever the meme coin is, or even many of these other assets, we of course don’t know
if they’re going to be around next year, two years from now. Dogecoin is getting some publicity
because, of course, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk. It’s not a news story for us, but it is part
of the news, if you want to call it that. And of course, Doge is very much associated with him.
There’s rumors, and I do mean rumors, that he will integrate that into Twitter. And of course,
that’s helping the price of Doge in particular. So, there you go. I did want to mention,
it’s very interesting because, and I may put this out on Twitter later, if you recall,
two weeks ago, I think it was two weeks ago, we were talking about the Bollinger Bands,
and how on the daily scale, I think is what I was looking at, the bands had tightened up,
and you see that very pronounced, kind of very tight area. Well, it is now moving out of that.
Now, so far, it’s moving up. It does seem to have met this resistance at 21,000 or so.
It remains to be seen if it will break through that. But those bands are expanding, and it’s
not really allowing, but it’s allowing, if you’ll allow me that. It’s allowing the crypto,
the Bitcoin, to move up. I hope that made sense. This is one of those cases where graphics would
be really great. All right. We will move on. Overall, good week. Just took a little bit of
good week, just in general. We’ve seen green. It remains to be seen where we go from here.
As always, what do we say? DCA. Buy your Sats. You should do that daily, weekly,
monthly, whatever your schedule is. Of course, the finer your granularity,
the better you are to catch these closes or, well, the better you’re able to catch these dips,
if that makes sense. Right? If I’m only buying once a week, and we have a dip,
and then it comes right back up within the week, you miss the dip. That’s just the reality.
If I’m buying every day, as it falls, I’m buying some. As it goes up, I’m buying some. So,
I would encourage you, if at all possible, to buy at least weekly, if not daily.
And as I’ve mentioned before, you can do that on strike. You can do that.
There’s a number of places, I think, that you’re getting where you can do daily buys.
All right. What’s next? So, we’ve got a lot of news this week.
And the truth is, beyond the amount of news that we’ve got,
which we’ll be discussing in a little while, there’s not anything major that came up this week.
I would somewhat like to continue the discussion from last week, because
whether you realize it or not, this thing that’s going on right now with regulation
is very important, and how regulation is done. As I’ve said, regulation is coming,
whether we like it or not. It’s just a matter of how it’s done and at what timeframe.
SBF, Sam Bankman Fried, who was the founder of FDX, which of course is a centralized exchange,
a fairly recent one at that. I think it started in 2021. Anyways, he has really pushed this
narrative that we as a crypto community, so to speak, should kind of draft our own regulations,
sort of. And of course, he outlines this, did that on his blog post. I talked about that last week.
That was not received well, and that was not just me. Of course, I talked about that last week.
It was not received well by many people. In fact, I would say the majority of the people
in the crypto community. On the one hand, I kind of, I do kind of get what he’s saying,
but I do think that frankly, he’s going about it in the wrong manner. I also think that
he did not come across properly, and maybe he’s not even the person to do this.
One of the issues is he is the head of FDX. He is the head of a centralized exchange.
So, FDX is a private company, so he doesn’t have to cater to shareholders. And actually,
I just found out it’s actually incorporated in the Bahamas, and it’s headquartered in the Bahamas,
according to Wikipedia. However, to operate in the United States, it has to agree to the United
States rules regulations. And with such a large exchange, I promise you that he’s in close contact
with people in the SEC or any of these other governmental regulations,
agencies that would deal with cryptocurrency. And for lack of a better word, that taints him.
It doesn’t make him an evil person, but it is somebody who he’s out there having to
have those interactions and getting that pressure from the US government.
I don’t think that puts him in a very good position for this discussion. He’s not
somebody who’s been involved in crypto, in Bitcoin, for example, for years and years.
I don’t know how he got started, but as far as I know, it had nothing to do with crypto.
He has a lot of money. I believe he’s a billionaire, actually. But I don’t think
he got it in crypto, unless I’m very mistaken. So, he’s just not viewed in a good light.
In a good light. People view him as being compromised. So anyways, all that being said,
one of the things that happened this week is that I guess Bankless, which is a podcast and
whatever else did they do, put together what amounted to a debate between SBF and another
gentleman who does have a long history in Bitcoin, among other things, and his name is Eric Voorhees.
Now, I understand he lives here in the United States, has a US perspective. You can follow
him on Twitter if you’re interested. But they had a debate for the Bankless podcast. It also
got put on YouTube. I will have a link in the show notes to that. You might want to check it out.
I’ll be honest, just in listening to it some and reading about it, I don’t think it went well
for Sam. I think he was in over his head. Now,
I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Eric does or says or whatever, but I do think
it was useful to really bring out and open this conversation, this discussion.
Yes, the United States, the EU, individual countries, they’re all going to have regulations,
and we’re going to see around the world, those are actually going to differ, maybe even dramatically.
And you’re going to have places who encourage crypto adoption, and they do that in order to
bring in trade, to bring in industry, and this kind of thing. I’m thinking about places like
there’s some islands off the coast of Africa, Sicilies, I never can quite say it right,
that they are very much pro crypto, and there’s no taxes on crypto, and they encourage people to
be involved in crypto there. Another item, which I’ll just go ahead and pull this up,
we’ll discuss this briefly, probably in the news, but Costa Rica, a lawmaker has proposed a law
that would eliminate taxes on Bitcoin. Now, I actually checked, it’s very specifically
as Bitcoin. So they are going the Bitcoin route. There are other places, on the other hand, who
they go the crypto route where they say, well, if it’s any kind of crypto that there’s no taxes
or whatever. So it does vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and I think over the next 10 years
that what these countries do is actually going to be very important to their future. So in my opinion,
we should be promoting what we think is best overall, which probably isn’t what’s best for
maybe individual companies. But these debates that we are seeing, these are super important.
So we need to pay attention. We need to understand what’s going on. I would encourage you to actually
take the time to listen to that, understand the characters. Like I said, you got SBF on one side,
who’s essentially the owner, the founder, at least of FTX. He’s a very, has a lot of influence in the
cryptocurrency community, and I do mean cryptocurrency. And on the other hand, you have people like
Eric, who are very much Bitcoin oriented and very much anti-regulation. Now, I think everybody’s
realistic enough to realize that if you’re a US citizen and you live in the United States,
that there will be regulations on these things. That’s just the reality of it. However, that
doesn’t mean that we have to just kind of just tell the government, you know, hey, whatever,
you just do whatever. You just tell us what to do. IRS, for example, who makes it extremely difficult
to be legal and lawful in terms of even just trading, because you trade the way that the trades are reported. It’s just, it’s crazy the amount of detail
that you had. You can not even be a day trader, not even, you know, just trade every few days.
And at the end of the year, you will literally hand in a stack of paperwork, if you’re being honest,
to the IRS, that’s a hundred or more pages of transactions. Every trade that you make,
it involves a number of transactions typically. And you have to track the price at the time of
the trade and all of these different variables. And it’s very difficult. It has to be computerized.
You can’t do it by hand, essentially. And it’s just, it’s like, how can we set you up for 50?
It’s like, how can we set you up for failure? Right? Now I realize they want their money.
They want, well, let me rephrase that because that’s an incorrect statement.
They want our tax money. They did not earn that money. The trader did in this case.
I get that. I understand that, but a little making it easier would probably
bring better compliance, just my thought. All right. So all that being said, I want to go
ahead and jump in the news because we have a lot of news this week. Oh, so I’m going to leave that
there. I would encourage you to be aware of these discussions that are going on. I would encourage
you even to go listen to that podcast, that YouTube that I’m going to share in the links.
It’s well worth the listen. It’s important, finally, that we do raise our voice in these things.
And you may disagree. You may completely agree with what Sam Bankman Fried has to say. And that’s
okay. I’m perfectly fine with that, but let’s all make our voice known. All right. Let’s talk about
supporters this week. It’s the last episode of the month, and I wanted to provide an update to kind
of our top 10 list for one thing. I also want to throw this out. To be honest, I haven’t had a whole
lot of support this week. And in fact, even though I’ve got these promotions running with Fountain,
where a lot more people are seeing the podcast and listening to it, my support has gone down.
Now, there’s a couple of possibilities. One, people don’t like what I’m saying.
I’m perfectly open to that. I’m willing to change a little bit about my format and this kind of
thing. I don’t know if that’s the case here. It may be. The second is I use Satoshi Stream to manage
my… They basically operate as a lightning node, and that’s the way that all this streaming stuff
works. The streaming of sats, the boosting, that kind of thing. I know the other day,
it got really quiet. For a day, I didn’t get any streaming sats or any boost. And I finally,
I said something in the channel, the Telegram group channel. I said, is there a problem? And
they kind of kicked things around and came back and said, yeah, we’ll get it fixed. And that’s
okay. I wonder if it’s actually been going on longer than that. And I did get a couple of
boosts in the last 24 hours or so, and there was a little bit of streaming. But just in general,
frankly, this is basically back to where I was when I first started streaming.
So maybe that’s the problem. And that is something that I think in the long term,
I would like to go back to running my own node, but I’m going to do it privately this time. I used
Voltage, and it was $20 a month, which my support, the reality is, it’s not even close to covering
that at this point. I can host it here myself and have the same experience, essentially. And of
course, it would be a lot less. Now, I have to have a machine to run that on. I don’t really have
anything to do that right now, but maybe I can arrange that. I don’t know, I don’t have
I don’t know if Satoshi Stream really is the problem, then maybe that solves that.
I have a suspicion, to be honest, it’s probably more of the first choice, so to speak.
I’m not sure people are receiving what I’m putting out there. And I would ask you this,
respectfully, if that’s the case, I put a lot of time into this. And I do it to try and help
people. This isn’t something because this isn’t an ego thing for me or anything like that. It’s
honestly purely to try and help people. And if I’m not helping you, I need to know that.
If you don’t like something, if you could send me maybe an email,
macintosh at genwealthcrypto.com, you can direct Twitter message me, it’s macintoshfintech.
I’m on Mastodon at the podcastindex.social instance, so it’s macintosh at podcastindex.social.
Or you can boost me, and you can boost however few Sats it can be. I’m not sure,
it may be 10 on some of the platforms at this point, which is far less than a cent. And
then send me a 500 character message or whatever it is. And I’m not going to be mad about that.
I’m not mad. I’m trying to figure this out, to be honest. My numbers in terms of people
listening are going up, but it has probably got a lot to do with the promotion that I’m running
with Fountain. And I don’t want to discount that. But what I do want to do is make sure that this
loop, this feedback loop that we’ve built here, that we use it so that I can continue to improve
this show. So I’m done with the transcripts actually. And I’ll just jump into this real
quick. Next, rather than saving it more towards the end, I’m going to be implementing chapters next.
So that on the podcast 2.0 platform set, that’s a bit, and actually I think even some of the other
regular podcast players, this would show up. So for example, if you don’t like the market segment,
you can skip that and that’s cool. Or you don’t like my intro music and you can skip that
and that’s fine. Plus it will give me the ability to implement right into the podcast itself,
things like that Bollinger Band compression pattern I was talking about earlier. So I do
think that will be another improvement. I’m always looking to improve. I’m time limited,
which is why I can’t just run out and do all of this all at once. But I am always continually
working on that. So I would solicit your feedback. I would welcome it. I’m not going to be mad about
it. Even if you say, Hey, McIntosh, you suck. I stopped listening to you long ago. Of course,
you wouldn’t be sending me a message, but I get it. All right. So we did get a couple of boosts,
actually three, and it was two episodes. One was one of our promoted episodes. So I guess this was
maybe somebody who’d never listened to us before. CryptoCenus sent a hundred sats was listening to
it’s a dilemma, security speed and decentralization. And his message said N-O-I-C-E. So I don’t know if
that’s like a, maybe it’s like noise. I don’t know. Or he misspelled it. It’s supposed to be nice.
Either way, I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks for the support. And Val Hall sent 99 sats for
last week, another week, another hack. And then we, of course, we talked about Sam Beckman-Friedman.
I say I’m SBF Sam Beckman Friedman. And no message. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
And then Meremortals Podcast sent in 2200 sats, which I certainly really appreciate. Again,
another week, another hack last week’s, he sent a great message here. If you recall,
I was discussing maybe just kind of doing this live and not really cutting anything out and
kind of maybe a little lower level stuff about podcasting, but cutting out all the ums and
stuff, which I do at this point. Anyways, he said, I’ve experimented with both cleaning up
and completely freeform talking about podcasts. My audiences, my audience didn’t seem to care
if it was free of ums and errs. And it’s way more effort to make sure the edit has done well. That
is absolutely true. So I jettisoned it. Would recommend at least giving it a try without edits
or a bare minimum. And I think that’s kind of my plan. I was, I’m going to try that very soon.
Not tonight, but very soon. And we’ll see how y’all receive that. So that was it for the support. Oh,
I did want to go through the top 10 list and this is awesome. So I think I’ve done this one
at a time. I’m planning on doing this at the end of every month. So this is for October. Of course,
this is a cumulative list. I will start from the bottom. Our friend Thomas Borsengelaber,
Thomas from Germany, number 10, 338 sats. Brian of London, 386 sats is number nine.
The next two are users, 517, 538, 630, 128, 8162 at 442 sats. 530, 369, 602, 543, 68, 24, at 495 sats.
Pippipooch, P-I-P-I-P-U-C-H, 706 sats. Peter, or Petar, I’ve heard it pronounced both ways, 2200 sats.
Martin from Sweden, 3056 sats in fourth place. And Martin, I hadn’t heard from you in a while,
buddy. I hope you’re still out there. Signs of New Growth at 3300 sats.
And our friend Jenny Jams in second place at 3,410. I hope you’re enjoying the music still,
Jenny Jams. And Mere Mortal’s podcast, 26,584 in first place. So they are making good progress
towards our first level. Appreciate all these, of course. It’s just kind of a fun little thing we do,
little game, I guess. So there we go. We’ll see where we’re at next month.
I unfortunately at this point don’t have any way of kind of resetting it every month. So
we’re just going to have to keep doing the cumulative for now. They’re doing some very
interesting things in terms of stats actually right now with Podcasting 2.0. And ultimately,
I think something like that will be very easy to integrate and we’ll do that. But that’s what
we’ve got. All right, jump into the news and there is a lot of it. So maybe the biggest news
of the week or certainly the second biggest news of the week, Cash App enabled Lightning payments.
So now with Cash App, you can send on Lightning, you can receive on Lightning, and that is 40
million people. So that is not something to sneeze about. One of my kids actually uses Cash App. So
that’s cool. All right. Next, a year after Nigeria launched its CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency,
only less than 0.5% of Nigerians are using it. Now, Nigeria, like a lot of the countries that
we are talking about these days, high inflation, currency issues, so on and so forth, they’re
trying to use their own central bank digital currency. So that’s just basically the bank running
at the central bank of Nigeria. And what they’re finding is that nobody wants to use it because
a lot of Nigerians have already started using Bitcoin specifically. It is very popular in Nigeria.
And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. I wonder if maybe the Nigerian government will pivot and say, well, this central bank thing isn’t working, so maybe we should look at Bitcoin, which we know that a lot of these people are using. The Bank of Canada hikes their interest rate for loans, 50 bips or half a percent, less than the
expected 75 bips. So they were forecasting it was going to be raised three quarters of a percent.
It was raised half a percent. I don’t know what that did to the Canadian stock market.
I find that a little surprising. Actually, one of the things I noticed in this article, okay, so they raised theirs to 3.75%, 3.75%. The Swiss Bank, which this is a huge bank,
probably one of the largest in the world, is cutting 9,000 jobs. Now, why are they doing this?
They’re doing this because they’re not doing well. The rumor on the street, and it’s just
rumor, but the rumor on the street is they may end up having to kind of do some kind of bankruptcy
or re-org type thing, not doing well at all. And so one of the things that they’re going to do is
they’re going to cut a bunch of jobs, which is of course really bad for those people. But a lot of
times can be really good for the bottom lot of a company. They actually registered a net loan
of $4 billion in U.S. dollars in the third quarter. So in three months, $4 billion.
That had a lot to do with it, I think. So they’re going to restructure to cut exposure to risk
weighted assets and leveraged exposure. Oh dear. Right. So they’re changing their positions,
essentially. They were using leverage and investing in riskier things. And of course,
in this environment, I think that had a lot to do with their losses. This week, it was revealed,
FTX, which is Sam Bankman Freed’s centralized exchange is working on a new stablecoin. Giving
everything that I said earlier, I just don’t think this is going to go over real well. I just don’t.
We’ll see. Maybe it will. European Central Bank hikes interest rates by 75 bips. So
three quarters of a percent to 2%. So they are way behind in terms of what they’re charging,
the interest rate that they’re charging for their loans, compared to the United States,
which I believe is almost double that, if not double that. And to be honest, I don’t think that
bodes well for the European Central Bank system, for the European Bank system, because I guess
time will tell. But to me, it seems, and we’ve got several more inflation rate reports that we’re
going to talk about here in just a few minutes, Europe in general is leading the European Central
Bank, Europe in general is leading the way, so to speak, when it comes to these interest rates.
They have higher rates than the United States. They have higher rates than Canada
and the industrialized Asian countries. But they have some of the lowest interest rates out there.
I believe they were negative even a few, maybe six, eight months ago, a year ago.
So I don’t know. I mean, I just don’t think that’s a good idea. I think their interest rates at this
point need to be higher to combat this inflation. And I’m afraid the inflation is going to be worse
even than it would be if they raised their interest rates. All right. Here’s something
that we need to discuss for the overall crypto environment, for Bitcoin specifically. I chose
not to make the podcast about this. There’s a lot of other people who’ve talked about this on other
podcasts and other forums, but it is certainly newsworthy. So earlier this week in public filings
that they have to make because they’re a public company, Core Scientific, who is the largest
public Bitcoin miner out there, they have roughly, from what I understand, 100,000 hosted units
where somebody like me, for example, who’d want to get into mining, we shipped them a mining unit
and they put it online, and 100,000 of their own units, so 200,000 Bitcoin miners. They filed to say,
I’m going to read some of this. As previously disclosed, the company’s operating performance
and liquidity have been severely impacted by the prolonged decrease in the price of Bitcoin,
the increase in electricity costs, the increase in the global Bitcoin network hash rate,
and the litigation with Celsius Networks, LLC, and affiliates. Now, I don’t know what the lawsuit is.
Of course, Celsius is the one who is in bankruptcy with all the Taraluna stuff. So,
somehow that ties into this. As a result, management has been actively taking steps to decrease
monthly costs, delay construction expenses, reduce and delay capital expenditures, and increase
hosting revenues. In addition, the board has decided that the company will not make payments
coming due in late October and early November 2022 with respect to several of its equipment
and other financing. As a result, the creditors under these blah, blah, blah, I don’t want to read
it. That’s the main point. They’re slashing costs. They’re probably slashing staff as well.
They’re doing everything they can because they’re running out of money. Now, not too long ago,
they sold off most of their Bitcoin. They have literally 24 left. So, that’s 24 times 20,000,
roughly $400,000 or so, I think, dollars. If I did that, 480, roughly half a million dollars.
Not a whole lot for a really large company like this. I’ve heard a lot of analysis of this
situation. Oh, and then, of course, after they announced this, their stock dumped. It was
already way down, but it dumped 75% in one day. It’s at like 20 cents a share now, 24 cents.
If this market stays down the rest of the year, this company will not remain solvent, I fear,
unless somebody steps in and injects a bunch of cash. So, 200,000 miners will essentially go
offline. Now, some of them will just get moved to other services and come back on fairly quickly.
But the 100,000 miners that this company owns directly will at least remain offline for a
number of months. So, the mining equipment price will go down. It already is, but it will go down
more. The hash rate will go down because they’re not operating all these machines.
I don’t know what that will do directly to the Bitcoin price. It could probably, in my opinion,
pull it down. So, this is something that needs to be monitored. This could actually be what triggers
the fall down to 14K or so. And everybody will point to it and say that this is what caused it.
When in reality, it was just a overall market, but these things tend to… We see events like this that they show up that way. They look like this was it, when in fact, it was actually a number of things. And this was just
kind of the one thing on… What is the expression? The straw that broke the camel’s back, right?
All right. So, definitely something you want to keep your eyes on. I believe there’s a decent chance that if this market continues, another miner called Marathon may be going through something very similar within a few months. The US GDP rises by 2.6%. The first increase in 2022. So, GDP is your gross domestic product. That actually came in higher than they expected. And that’s actually a problem because you don’t want growth. Growth, they believe, maybe erroneously in my opinion, but they believe, these Keynesian economists believe that growth is actually what is causing the inflation. So, really when they’re ratcheting up the interest rates,
they’re trying to stop growth, which is what it does. So, they’re trying to stop growth.
They’re trying to stop growth, which is what it does. I just don’t think that those two things
are necessarily related directly. So, this may cause the federal… The FOMC federal… I can’t
remember what it’s called right now. The Federal Reserve meeting next week, which is next week.
I believe it’s Wednesday. They’ll be releasing their notes or whatever. And that may cause them
to increase rates by even 1% versus three quarters of a percent. I could be mistaken about that,
but I could see this as being a cause of that. Most people think that it would be three quarters.
Some think they may even come in less than that. I would personally be surprised if it comes in
at half a percent. You will see the stock market shoot up, in my opinion. UK Lawmaker Committee
approved stablecoin regulation bill. Of course, we’ve got a lot going on in the UK right now.
They just elected a new prime minister. The last one was in office for a grand total of 44 days,
if from what I understand. God bless her. She just, I don’t know, probably made some pretty bad
mistakes, at least in regards to legislation. She tried to move through a package that would
cut tax rates on high income earners or businesses or something like that. I think I had to do more
with personal taxes, if I’m not mistaken, but I’m kind of out of my depth on this. And she got
torpedoed because of it. She did not read the room on that one. Of course, the UK is experiencing
high inflation and this kind of thing, along with the rest of Europe. Japan
is spending $200 billion to counter inflation. Oh man. Of course, Japan has inflation.
Japan has an extremely high debt load. I think they are the highest debt load in terms of a
percentage at 235% or something. I discussed that a few weeks ago. And they’re going to spend more
money to try and combat inflation, just like the United States supposedly did or did with a bill
a few weeks ago to combat inflation. We’re going to spend $400 million or billion dollars, I should
say, or whatever it was. I don’t know. It’s just insanity. I don’t get it.
So, the next bit of news is about Germany and their inflation. The annual CPI, which is Consumer
Price Index, rose to 10.4%. It was expected to be 10.1%. There’s a second way of reporting it,
which I’m not familiar with, Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, HICP. And this is actually
preferred by the European Central Banks for their gauge of inflation. And it said that inflation
was 11.6% compared to their estimates of 10.9%. So, either way, they were both higher. They were
both higher than expectations, and that’s bad. So, their inflation continues to ratchet up,
certainly tied a lot to energy with their situation there.
I’ll mention in brief, Egypt, their currency slid to a record low against US dollar. It was
down 13.5%. The IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and Cairo, the capital of Egypt, reached
a $3 billion loan agreement. So, I’ve discussed the IMF. Bad, bad, not good. Moving on.
Italy hit, and Italy has for a long time had issues. So, anyways, Italy, their inflation hit
12.8%. So, that was actually even higher than Germany’s, and that is the highest rate since
1996. So, it is higher than what they’ve had in a while, but not like, if you look at Germany’s
inflation, one place said it was the highest Germany had ever had. I don’t know if that’s true
or not, but certainly in a long time. I will, of course, have the link to the Eric
Vorhis and SBF debate. And today, the day that this is getting released on October the 31st,
it is the 14th anniversary of when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper.
I will have a link to that white paper in the show notes. If you have not read that Bitcoin
white paper, it is eight or nine pages. Anybody can read it. You may not understand every detail
in it, but you can understand a lot of it, and it is fascinating. If you’re involved in crypto,
I would highly encourage you to read that white paper. Any asset that you are holding as a long
term, this is my ride or die asset, you should have read the white paper. Ethereum, ADA,
I don’t know, Dogecoin. I don’t know, do they have a white paper? I have no idea.
But whatever that asset is, you should understand it, and that will help you.
The Bitcoin white paper, frankly, should be a model for these other assets. Not that they want
to be exactly the same, but in its clarity, in its simplicity, and in its thoroughness at the same
time. All right. That was a lot of news. If y’all want to have less news, if you want me to stop
going over individual countries’ interest rates, that kind of thing, feel free to let me know.
And if you don’t want that read on the air, I’m going to read it on the air unless you tell me to.
Okay. Just full disclosure, I’m not trying to hide anything. If you want to tell me something
privately, just say, hey, please don’t read this on the air or whatever. And that’s cool.
I would certainly do that for you. And you may want to say something. I don’t want to read on
the air, but I’ll still read it if you want. That’s fine. Okay. So there we go. That’s all
our news in general. What are we seeing? The inflation is continuing. It creeps higher and
higher. And these central banks are raising interest rates as a way of fighting that.
And we even see countries like the United States, Japan. I believe something similar is going on in
the EU where they’re trying to spin their way out of it. So, I don’t know. I don’t know where this
ends. I don’t think we’re at the end. I told my wife a few days ago, just to give you an idea,
just to give you an idea, I said, my best guess, and this is a guess, is that this will drag on
at least through next year. There are people who literally think this is basically going to be over
by the end of this year and next year, things are just going to magically get back on track.
And I don’t see how. All of this stuff means something. And we’re inundated with all kinds
of information and whatever, but when you filter down through it and you talk about things like
all of these countries who are experiencing high inflation, high interest rates that are only going
up, and these problems are not solved quickly. So, I don’t expect this to magically turn around.
I hope you guys are doing okay out there in terms of your life, in terms of managing your finances
and that kind of thing. Yeah. I think we’ve got quite a bit to go before, and it may go on past
that. If we get to the level of the Great Depression, that went on for a number of years,
it was not a quick fix. And it’s been argued here in the United States, there’s this argument that
the jobs program essentially that the government did, the CCP, Civilian Conservation Corps,
and other things like that, quote, solved the Great Depression. And I don’t really agree with that.
It put people to work, no doubt. I don’t know that they cured the Great Depression. I think
really World War II cured the Great Depression in the end. And we were basically in an economic
malaise until then. I think that’s the proper word. Let’s wrap this up.
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I hope you all have a great week, and I will talk to you soon.
Bye!