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So it's a beautiful day in New York City. I'm having real lizard thoughts, you know what I mean, Like, I want to believe what you mean. Okay, let me explain. I want to believe I'm more complex than Oh, the sun is shining and the air feels good, but I'm not because when it's nice outside the weather, I am immediately so much happier. So in that way, I kind of feel like a lizard. Just simple.
Yes, I thought we were gonna tire the fact that you have plans to leave this podcast and go home and take your.
Turtles out to the roof to some I have some baby turtles in my apartment that I've been taking care of. This is what reptile brains. I've been taking care of them over the course of the winter, and they're going to be going back outside very soon. That's where they primarily live. But anyway, it's nice to take them to the roof and feed them their mealworms in the sunshine. They tend to like that.
You and they both signing yourselves.
Yeah, pretty much warming our scales.
Hello and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levian and I write The Money Stuff Colum for Bloomberg Opinion.
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
It's another all tariffs edition of the Money Stuff podcast.
Yeah, you know, it started as a joke and then it got really real. It's hard to talk about anything other than what is going on with the US trade policy.
Yeah, we're gonna try. Yeah, It's like it's not really an all tariffs.
But it's like at least a third tariff's maybe half a certain.
Amount of what is going on in the world.
I feel like we need to say what day we're recording it, since it changes so much. We'll talk about whether or not that is the strategy. But we are recording this on a Thursday. It's the twenty fourth of April.
When last I looked, the market was up today.
Yeah, after being yesterday, Yeah, and the day before.
It's not literally a first in the last three months, but it feels like that.
Well, it's funny that we're rallying so hard right now because you have China on one hand insisting that the US and China are not talking, that negotiations aren't currently happening, they do not exist. And then you have President Trump saying that no, they had a meeting this morning, and then a reporter asked him the follow up, what administration officials were involved in discussions? Who are you talking to? And Trump said, it.
Doesn't matter who they is. We may reveal it later.
But they had meetings this morning, and we've been meeting with China. So it's unclear what is actually what is actually going on, whether or not the US and China actually are talking. But it seems like the market just really wants the Trump administration to blink and is rallying merrily along hoping that they have right.
It's so odd that, like the explicit statements from Trump as candidate and as president were tariffs are great, let's have lots of them, and the market in the lead up to his inauguration clearly, like very heavily discounted that. Yeah, and then the Liberation Day happened in the market crash realizing that in fact, he was serious about tariffs, and now we're right back to.
Nah, he can't be serious about tariffs. Yeah, it feels very like first Trump administration where this sort of mantra was to take Trump seriously but not literally. And it feels like we're back there.
Yes, and like we say, the all tariffs episode. But I feel like the other sort of big thing hanging over this week anyway, is firing Trump Powell. Yeah, get rid of FED independence.
Yeah that was pretty well.
It also seems to have been walked back, but who knows.
Yeah, so Trump, in denying that he had any intention to fire trum Powell said that the media ran away with it. But you did have Kevin Hassett, who is the top White House economist, say last Friday that Trump is looking at options here when it comes to removing Jerome Pal. So it wasn't entirely just the media.
Right. Also, he's like been in truth, so I was tallying about stupid.
Yeah, said he can't wait for his termination.
Yeah right. You combine like the legal team studying Rais to fire him and Trump saying how bad he is.
In both situations, both when it comes to trade and the possibility of removing Pal from the FED. It kind of feels like Trump is just negotiating with the markets, like seeing how far the markets will let him go before long dated treasury yields skyrocket higher, which you've seen that happen, and then you see the Trump administration back off.
But someone made the point today that it kind of feels like every time we see a little bit of green in the equity markets because maybe there's hope that we're going to get to a more reasonable place on trade, that it seems like the Trump administration has felt more emboldened by that, and we just enter this cycle again. But it's on the third day of the rally.
People talking about the phrase the Trump put gets turned around, right, So, like you have like the classic like Powell put or whatever the Fed chairs at the time. You know, the idea that if things get bad, the federal step in to rescue the market, and so there's some floor under
stock prices. My impressions that people think of the Powell put as being like kind of close to at the money, where like, you know, if you're the Fed, you're interested in steady economic growth, and like any sign of wabbling in the market is a negative. The Trump put that we've maybe seen this week feels like it's quite far out of the money. You know, It's like things have to go really off the rails to have the trump put kick in. And also, like you just said, it's
like it's not just a floor. It's like yeah, right, Like if the market gets too good, it's like, oh, we have weird stuff. Right, the market gets too bad, you stop the word stuff. It's like a it's like a carter. It's like a like a call spread.
Yeah, that's I don't know. It's a very tactical market. It makes for some real tactical trading strategies.
I had a headline this week that was like, at least the market isn't boring, and so we're back. You're like, yeah, it's great if you're trading this market. And it's like, yeah, I got like a high vacancy trading for like you know, like it's so good for some people. Yeah, right, Like if you're a degenerate gambler, if you're a market maker, probably this is great, right, Like market makers that I have on volatility, some of them blow up on volatility,
but yeah, a lot of them, it's probably great. And then if you're like a you know, like a manufacturing CEO trying to decide whether to.
Build a factory or you know, or to hire or fire people. Yeah, it's been interesting. And some of the earnings reports you've seen companies, you know, you report your numbers and you give guidance. You've had a lot of firms either downgrade their guidance, pull their guidance all together. You've seen a few companies come out with like a range of options for what could happen, like different blueprints for different scenarios, which I think is kind of one
of the airlines didn't. I wish I could remember, But I mean, what else can you do? It's impossible to forecast what six months from now will look like.
My intuition is that that's just that, right that like being able that's a stupid saying. Being able to plan six months ahead is useful for business, right, Yeah, Like an economy wide basis, you would rather have businesses generally be able to plan basic macroeconomic building blocks six months ahead than not, right, Yeah, And so one possibility is that this is all error, right, Like they're just like they're not doing a good job of stewarding the economy, right,
which seems to me like probably the correct analysis. But like people want there to be some sort of plan here, right, They want there to be some sort of explanation here that is more satisfying than like they keep changing their mind or they don't really know what they're doing, or the messaging is just treamly ud clear for no reason.
Yeah.
I don't know if that is though.
Yeah, the end game is a question that comes up a lot when it comes to, you know, the shifting trade winds coming out of the administration. I mean, we know that Trump loves tariffs, We know that they want to rebalance the global trade landscape. What that actually means seems to be sort of shifting goalposts.
I think I've read a few times, Like one way to interpret their statements and actions is that they want America to be reindustrialized, to find like they say, but also like definancialized, right, Like shifting from having a lot of foreigners selling goods to us getting cash and investing it in US financial assets, shifting to like investing the
cash they get into US you know, manufactured goods. Right. Yeah, so we're selling fewer financial assets, and like the financial sector becomes a less important part of the American economy relative to like manufacturing. Right. That's one way I think to interpret some of the stuff that Trump Economic team does and says, But then you look at the actual effect and it's like, if you were going to high your kids are training, frame like, this is amazing. There's
so much volatility. And then if you were at a manufacturer, you're like, this is terrible. There's so much volatility.
Well, also, you don't know if these tariffs are going to stick, like you have no visibility into that. And there's also the very real question of what incentivizes a company to bring manufacturing back to the US. The Whirlpool CEO said on their earnings call this week that first of all, they think that actually they're going to benefit from tariffs. But the CEO, even with that in mind, said that twenty percent tariffs aren't going to you know,
move factories away from China. And you think about like about one hundred and perhaps, but you think about, you know a lot of these pharma companies who make their drugs in Ireland, for example, they're probably not going to shift those factories to the US. They're probably just going to have to accept that things cost more now. So I don't know if tariffs are the way to incentivize bringing manufacturing back versus tax breaks for example.
One thing that is happening here is that it seems so haphazard as a way of encouraging manufacturing, right, Like, if you wanted to encourage manufacturing, you would do things like not imposed tariffs on raw materials and intermediate goods so that you could make it easier for people to start factories here. But like you're constantly reading stories about like people who run factories here who like find that like their inputs have gone up because of tariffs, and
so they can't run their factories anymore. Yeah, it's just it's it's not like a industrial policy designed to support manufacturing. It's like tariffs are good.
Yeah, I don't know.
People want there to be an explanation that is like a human you know, either like clever or like galaxy brain bad. Like one reason for the recent the rally the last couple of days is like Scott Bessant giving a speech at a closed door investor some it saying basically, we're gonna have like a thaw in the China situation.
Very we're scandalized by that, and like it's definitely like you can definitely read like takes that are like this is like corruption and the whole thing is like for cronyism and to like give the favored people, you know, a lot of volatility trade and a lot of inside information about what the decisions will be, which is honestly like a more optimistic view than my view, which is that people just.
Change their mind constantly and are not really yeah planning that nefariously far ahead.
Well, the cynical takeout there too is that you know, Trump changes his mind based on who he lost. I don't know. I don't think you got notes from Neil Duddo of Renaissance Macro No, okay. He had a really interesting note oubt this week that he used the NT function on his Bloomberg terminal, which is way to chart news trends. He found that since the beginning of March, the S and P five hundred has shed a total of seven hundred and nineteen points on days that Howard
Lutnik and Peter Navarro have been the biggest story. By contrast, if Besson has been the biggest story on the day, the S and P five hundred has advanced a total of fifty two points. So he concludes Bessen is good for about one percentage point up on the S and p. Five hundred. By contrast, the others are a drag of about thirteen and a half percentage points. So I mean those are the dueling forces. All three of those men are dueling for Trump's attention.
Yeah, I mean there's a story about like Lutnik and Bessant actually rushing into drum when Navarro was like in the right. You might imagine someone thinking, we have the guy who's good for the economy, and we have the guys who are bad for the economy, So let's turn out the dial and the guy who's good for the economy. But I don't think that's your description of what's going on here.
Yeah, it seems like Bessen at least looking at the reporting from this week, and things shift all the change. But apparently, you know, Bessen had a big hand according to people familiar and talking Trump off the ledge when it comes to firing Jerome Palell. Also, like you said, there was that story that when Peter Navarro was at the White House cafeteria or something along those lines, that
him and Lutnix in We'll see. I mean, I don't know how to segue to this point, but I do want to make the point that Besson is also apparently, you know, playing a leading role in trade talks with Japan. He's also expressed that he would like the US to basically make agreements with its allies on trade and then
they'll all approached China as a group. But it seems like that is very much not happening, because on Thursday you had two different stories drop One was that Japan is going to resist Trump's efforts to form a trade block against China, and then you also had a story about how the EU and Beijing are basically in talks.
Right like one analysis that I saw of the Liberation Day situation, right or Trump announced enormous, fake reciprocal tariffs on every country.
Incredibly I was with my grandmother, as discussed.
And then in a fairly short time period walk them all back, except he raised tariffs on.
China one hundred and forty five percent.
One reading of that was that Trump had just announced giant TIFFs on China and also like small towers on the rest of the world. Then everyone would have been shocked and trade would have shifted away from the US to China. But by instead doing it in this shocking Liberation Day way and then walking to that all back. He primed people to think, oh, this could be a lot worse, and in fact he's only targeting China, so we should make deals at the US and cut out China.
And so this was a sort of shock therapy way to reorient the talks to make it a essentially trade block of the rest of the world, or at least the US and its allies, with China on the outside, right, So it was a way to accomplish exactly that sort of like, you know, make deals with everyone else and then have the upper hand against China. And I don't know that was a reading of what happened, but it
doesn't seem to have. No particularly had that effect. And because you're optimistic to think it'll have, you have to be like like, oh, people are so relieved and so happy that the tariffswordt as bad as we thought that now they'll be rushing to negotiate with Donald Trump. But the alternative reading is people will be like, this was so erratic and chaotic that we should be rushing to negotiate with China because like they're predictable.
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, I could definitely see the argument for that strategy, but the narrative also exists out there that no, the US is just an unreliable trading partner, and who knows if you agree to a deal that it'll stick. I mean, you think about what's going on with Canada and Mexico right now, the USMCA, that was Trump's trade deal and now apparently it's just been ripped up.
Yeah, yeah, right, And it's related to the point about insane volatility in the market right like, none can plan ahead. This is not an administration that places any value on predictability. And in a lot of domain spritability is really useful.
It's going to be interesting to see what access like this stabilization mechanism. It seems like the bond market does have some with Donald Trump, so bond investors.
I think the sample size of that is small.
It's small. There was also an interesting note doubt from thinking Chada over at Deutsche Bank. So he lowered his s and P five hundred target to sixty one fifty from seven thousand, sixty one to fifty. Sounds incredible to a lot of people right now because we're like at fifty five hundred on the SMP five hundred. But he said that if you start to see approval ratings drop, then that might cause an actual I forget the word he used, but that's when you might actually see things
calm down. Maybe that will be the over.
Some I've seen that. Secondly, I don't know why that's a mechanism.
I mean, the pushback to that point is that, Okay, he's in his second term. He's not going to run again. Unless he does, that's also an open question. So who knows.
Maybe he decides to run again, approval ratings will not be an impediment.
No, no, But I mean there is some momentum building behind that idea that if you see approval ratings drop in a big way, maybe Trump would soften his stance.
I'll think the other side of that, I think I would rate the bond market above appropal ratings. But I don't know what I know.
Okay, Well, goodbye everyone, goodbye?
Oh wait, other things?
Oh right, right right? What else is there going on? Golden Goldman? The good thing is that David Solomon and John Waldron are going to be paid a lot of money.
What does a lot of money mean? I mean they're getting paid. It means they got their eighty million dollars special retention.
I got to tell you, I was, you know, biting my nails over this one.
It was closed, like both of the big Chryler advisory firms said they shouldn't get them.
And still they won sixty six percent of the vote.
Though it's not that high.
It is down from I think it was in the eighties the last time.
You get on Pivot.
We don't have the exact summer kind of a loss I prepared. So I want to tell you last year, Golden won eighty six percent of the vote from shareholders, despite also opposition from Glass Lewis.
Yeah, these guys get paid sort of market rates for big bank CEOs, right. I think David Solom got thirty nine million dollars last year and Waldron got thirty eight million dollars, which is like, you know, comparable to like a Jamie Diamond or whatever. And so getting an extra eighty million dollar bonus just for being good guys and wanting them to stick around seems high, right, Like they're getting paid market rate. It's like, why do they need
the extra bonus? And part of the answer is, literally, like Waldron, who is the number two at Goldman, there's a reporting that he was approached by Apollo to come be some sort of high up executive there and offered what the article character has that's life changing money even for him, which is like, I don't know if I made thirty eight million dollars a year, you would need a lot of money to in my life. But I think they offered him that.
Well, it's like, I don't just want my great great grandchildren to be well off. I want their great great grandchildren to also do well, right.
Like, I don't have a conception of how your life could change above making thirty eight million.
Well, that's just a lack of imagination, I know.
And I should I should, I should be thinking bigger. But anyways, he was offered life changing money, and he decided to stay because, yeah, he likes Goldvin it's a good place whatever. Yeah, but also because they were like, yeah, I we'll find out I any paid more. Right, So they got't paid any million dollars more.
Something that I find interesting is I like to imagine how you know, the rest of Goldman feels about that. You had Mike Mayo from Wells Fargo say that this could be alienating to Goldman's workforce. He said, that before the vote, and in one of the articles written by Todd Gillespie, he did write that under Solomon's tenure, payouts for its top brass have been a thorny issue that until now was mostly expressed by the bank's partner class.
Some privately grumbled that packages for its leaders were excessive relative to the firm's performance, and the awards being set aside for the rest to the staff.
Yeah. So one thing I've written about a lot over the last few years is like Golbin has long had this partnership culture where there's a group of people who are called partners. They're not exactly like partners in the classic sense, but.
They were like they're sort of.
Successors to the partners when Goldman was a private partnership, and they sort of viewed the firm as a continuation of that partnership where the partners had a big say in running the firm. There was a sort of egalitarianism among the partners where the CEO was like sort of the managing partner, but he wasn't like the boss of
all the partners or anything like that. And I think under Solomon that has really changed, and they've consolidated into being much more of a normal public company and maybe not the most important, but one symptom of that is it used to be that Golden was like a partnership run for the benefit of the partners, and so like if they had a good year, the partners all got paid, right, And now under the Solomon regime, it's a little bit more like we're going to pay like a public company
and sort of maximize shareholder value and like not just toretiously pay partners just because you know they're going to them based on competitive pressures. And there's like sort of a walk in the opposite direction with like Solomon and Waldron, where like they're getting paid a lot of money as the partners are no longer like the people divan at
the pod. So I think that like the partners, on the one hand, some of them resent being like relegated to a second tier status and no longer feeling that they run the firm. And on the other hand, they're like, these guys are getting paid so much money, right, Yeah.
Well maybe they should go all work as an alts manager.
Yeah. I mean, like one thing that that toddyts to be right is that Goldman is trying to position its off as an ALTS manager because that's better, you know, you get a better multiple as everyone's trying to position, like we've talked about black Rock on this ship, like the position itself as an ALTS manager because you get a higre multiple as an AULTS manager then as a you know, Index one manager.
It's also it's like me trying to reruin myself as a podcaster versus you know, a TV anchor.
It makes sense, are multiple podcasters?
Yeah, there you call Goldman sex Hasset managed. They have about five hundred billion dollars of private assets under management. Blackstone for contacts has more than one trillion dollars. So I mean they are up there.
They're really you know, I remember being you know, I was at Goldman. I Hurt did Goldman more than fifteen years ago. I were fifteen years ago, and there was a big focus on private equity as a you know, important component of the firm. You know, I was a fairly junior person, and I experienced it as like almost the recruiting thing where like, you know, the cool place
to work in finance was private equity. So for Goldman to be able to be like we run private equity was good for you know, recruiting young people, but like similarly, it's good for recruiting shareholders because you're like, you know, the multiples that are given to alts managers are higher than the multiples given to investment banks. Yeah, and like the you know, the revenue is a little bit more stable, and like it's a little bit certainly its executives get paid more.
Yeah. So I mean to put some numbers to Blackstone Trades at a p of like thirty seven. Goldman's closer to twelve, which is less than thirty seven. But I mean Blackstone KKR those are pure play alts managers.
What that means They're not pure playing.
Relatives relative to Goldman. Yeah, I mean when I think of Goldman, my first thought isn't their alts business?
Obviously of course, right, no, they're not primarily business. But I think of KKR like as a growing capital markets business. Like the big alts managers want to get bigger. I'd want me to get bigger, is to get into some of the businesses that like the Goldman's of the world are in, right, Like, there is a convergence, and obviously you'd rather have the multiple of being a more or less pure alts manager than being a more or less
pure investment bank. But like they're in a lot of overlapping businesses.
Yeah, and the KRE people.
Get paid more. So. One thing I wrote this week is like some of that is like the youth of those firms, you know, like those rooms, you know, they went public after Goldman did. They were founded way after Goldman was. They were still like at like the sort of closing stages of the like giant private equity like gold rush of the you know eighties and nineties and two thousands, whereas like you know, investment banks has been
a lot around longer. Like they're no founders. I mean there are founders, right, they're founders of investment banks who've made very good money. But like the founders of like Bacon pulchbracket investment banks, right, like those guys, you know, those those banks a one hundred.
Years old, they're resting peacefully.
Yeah. Some of what's happening is that the alts managers, like the people who are senior executives there, took real risks getting into new businesses, whereas like people who grew up as partners at Colman were like in a you know sort of well established business. So like, of course the people who took those risks to start the alts managers get paid a lot more.
Yeah, like took the risk to become a podcaster. It should be for that. Yeah, reading your column actually listening to it on my text to speech chiefly motivated me to find where there are still inefficiencies in the market.
Do you think it's podcasting in terms of.
The media landscape? Perhaps certainly doesn't seem like it's linear television.
But you know what it is. Oh No, it's like some it's a horrifying fourth thing.
God, it's like you it's YouTube's like twenty years old.
If I even said, it's like TikTok uh, you can picture me shaking my fist at a cloud. It's it's sure is where the kids are at some form video so entirely other thing it's like it's like a brain implant.
Yeah, it's brutal out there. Maybe glasses that you put on and it's just our faces. I was gonna say, it seems like the inefficiency still left to till in the market, to plow in the market. I don't know what farming metaphorm trying to use. Perhaps we should all just start bit coin treasury companies.
I do think that, like so much of the crypto boom has been like people from traditional finance being like, oh my god, look at the bits spretz here. Right, It's like, yeah, crypto is so inefficient, and also you could kind of get into it efficiently, so like all these people from traditional finance like jumped in to capture those spreads. But yeah, so this week the amazing thing is twenty one.
Twenty one one great net for a company.
It is twenty one is a merger between a counter Fitzgerald spack. Right, the cantor raised the spack a special purpose acquisition coming they sold stock, so one hundred million dollars with the stock to public investors a while back, and like they had that pot and they were like looking around for some sort of operating company to merge with and take it public with this pack. And what
they found was not an operating company. It was a pile of bitcoin managed by Tether, and also a pilo of bitcoin managed by bidfin X, which is sort of related to Tether, and also a pileo of bitcoin managed by soft Bank, and also probably some other piles of bitcoin. But Anyway, they mushed all these things together, counters one hundred million dollars of cash and then all the other people's bitcoin. You mush them all together. You have a giant pot of bitcoin that is publicly listed because the
pack has a public listing. And so they announced the merger this week, and it's always it's a very easy merger because everyone is just a pot, and so you can be like, okay, so your pot is one hundred million dollars, so you get like one hundred million dollars worth of stock. Your pot is three billion dollars of bitcoin, so you get three billion dollars with it. So you like, you know, allocated based on how much stuff the different
pots bring to the thing. And so you know, the counter Fitzgerald Spack got roughly one hundred million dollars worth of the pot and it probably like tripled in price. Yeah, so that suggests roughly that the stock market values the bitcoin in this pot at roughly three times the actual lure of the bitcoin.
Of the Yeah, it's amazing.
It's not like they invented this. No, this investor presentation which is amazing and which is like look at micro strategy or now it's called Strategy. You know, the Strategy company which has been buying bitcoin, putting them in a pot and selling shares for twice.
The value for like five years.
Now, I don't think it's literally five years.
But it feels like no, I think it was like twenty twenty.
Yeah, I think, yeah.
You're right time.
But you know they've been doing it forever, and there's room for more.
Apparently my natural reaction when I saw this headline yesterday was how many strategies do there need to be out there? Apparently there's room.
Right. It's like they came to it from opposite directions, right, So Strategy was like a company and it's CEO got really into bitcoin. Then CEO now Chairmanry Taylor, and he was like, what if we bought a lot of bitcoin because like that would be a good investment for our company, right, Like we should own bitcoin because it'll go up and our company will be worth more. And that metamorphosed than to like what if we were only a lot of bitcoin because people keep wanting to pay more for our
stock than the bitcoin is worth. So they just did more and more buying and bitcoin. But like they started from a place of like we're a public company and you'd like to buy bitcoin. Twenty one starts from the place of I mean, I don't know how the merger conversations came to you. Yeah, but essentially starts in a place of like, we are Tether, Yeah, we own some bitcoin.
By the way, it's weird that Tether own so much bitcoin. Yeah, because Tether is mostly in the business of like selling stable coin tokens for dollars and parking the money in dollars. But they have some like legacy businesses owning bitcoin. And also they've made so many profits that they invest in bitcoin,
so they own a lot of bitcoin. And if you're a pot of bitcoin, if you're a crypto native owner of bitcoins, and you look at strategy, you're like, wow, those guys can get incredibly cheap funding for their bitcoin because they can sell stock at two x the value of their bitcoin. So if you're just like a bitcoin manager, how could you not be tempted to get into that business.
Yeah, And so they did, and.
They did it by like essentially buying a public company, but like in this case, buying a spact to make it really clean. And so now they have a public listing for their pot of bitcoin, which is worth three times with the bitcoin is worth.
I do just say I like the ticker XXI twenty one, got it. So Jack Maller's is going to be the CEO. He's thirty one, which is my age. But he made that point as a selling point that we're not a pivoting company, we're pure bitcoin. And also talking about Tether, he said that how the deal came together was just that he's known tether for a while, that you know, a decade ago, there weren't many bitcoiners out there, and I had the same reaction to Tether is a stable coin? Is sure?
That usually ship with bitcoin. It's more interesting. They are now basically in the business of taking dollars and parking those dollars and treasury bills. But like the history of the producing dollars out of bitcoin is an interesting one, right, I mean, they have been making collateralized loans against bitcoin to create more tether dollars, like they're an interesting business.
But yeah, interesting business is you know, pretty diplomatic.
But Jack Maller's I did seriously, but also yes.
I'm taking you you know at your word at face value, tetherin is an interesting business. Jack Mallers went on Bloomberg TV to talk about this deal on Wednesday. I didn't interview him, my colleagues Caroline Hyde and At Ludlow did. It was so fun. So he's going to be the CEO of this company. He's also going to be the CEO of Strike And they asked him about that and he said, you can just do things and I'm going
to lead both businesses. I truly believe my purpose on this planet is to try and help bitcoin have a chance to change the world.
This is not a business, this is a part of bitcoin.
Well, they asked him, what is your day to day going to be If you're just stroke the bitcoin, you're just accumulating bitcoin, what do you do all day? And I mean he basically said, is my job and what I've dedicated to do for our shareholders is grower bitcoin per share. That's what he's going to do, so, which just means he's going to buy bitcoin.
Anyway, I did explode and you said that, but let me say a couple of things. So one like growing your bitcoin for shore just buying bitcoin bit fineey yeah. Two. No, they say in their presentation that they're going to do bitcoin education and branding, including branded video media, and acting as the go to content partner for major conferences, web three firms and fintech institutions. Which makes sense because like my analysis of these things, by which I mean Strategy this,
and like there's like forty imitators. My analysis is like you're sort of like Meme stocking bitcoin, right, Like you're sort of like finding people who are so excited about the story you're telling that they're willing to pay two or three times the value of the bitcoin in your pot for your stock, right, So how do you sustain that?
I mean, like one thing is you have to like be very visible, right, And like Strategy and Michael Saylor have done a really good job of being visible and identified with bitcoin, and like these guys have a great head start because they're like Tether, right, They're like they're people who are visibly identified with bitcoin. But you can't just rest on your laurels. You got to keep producing
branded video to make people think no bitcoin. And also because I like bitcoin, I got to buy the stock of twenty one.
Yeah, so I want to read you more of this interview. I really enjoyed watching it. So he said, I want to grow our bitcoin per share his BPS. When you buy a share of twenty one, let's say our BPS is zero point zero five, our intent is to be able to grow that to zero point zero six, et cetera. Whereas a vehicle like an ETF, your exposure is static. He said, we will never have negative bitcoin per share, at least that's our intent. How would they get there negative bitcoin? Yeah? Does that?
I think he means negative bitcoin per share growth? Right?
He said we will never have BPS negative at least that's our intent.
He must mean negative growth.
I was just there. I was at my desk, I was watching the interview, was typing curiously, and I guess that's.
Like the inverse bitcoin exchange.
How would you just like sell? How would you have negative bitcoin for sure? How do you get there?
Borrow a lot of money and then you sell every I don't know. I don't have a great answer. I don't think.
I think he must mean negative growth, Jack, friend of the show, come on, tell us what you meant?
Yeah, negative bitcoin for sure? I should start that.
I wonder if that would you know? Why would you ever issue?
What you do is you borrow in bitcoin then you buy bonds?
Yeah, well I should do that.
Right, because like the basic theory of these bitcoin treasury companies is you borrow in dollars and you buy bitcoin. Like that theory isn't even true, Like they mostly issue stock and buy bitcoin. Like these these things all say like, oh we're super levered, they're not that lever. Yeah, but no, the way you would do a negative bitcoin company is you would go to like crypto firms, uh huh, borrow bitcoin from them, and then you'll use those bitcoin to
buy treasury bonds. Okay, have negative bitcoin.
For share, yeah, because the vast majority of companies have zero bitcoin. Yeah, zero.
Negative would be weird but doable, possibly worth doing. I should start this company?
You should? Why not?
A lot of reasons.
We'll see what multiple you got.
Negative multiple, It would probably be terrible, just like you know, because bitcoin is very volatile, and the bitcoin treasury companies that we're gonna be levered bitcoin in vestments are one not that leverage, and two they're smartly levered, like they do you know, long term non margin callable convertible debt to buy bitcoin, right, So like they're really not taking on a lot of near term leverage risk. Right, If you borrowed bitcoin and used to buy treasury bonds and
then bitcoin went up a lot. You could get margin calls from your crypto. Not fun people to deal with.
Necessary that could be you getting.
The margin calls. Yeah, no, never mind, I'm not doing it, but telling should do it. It'd be fun, be funny. All right.
Well, I've got turtles to go sit out.
In the sun, go enjoy your mealworms.
They're kind of big, so I have to actually cut them up for the turtles. So I've thought jump on mealworms by accident. Okay, I want.
To hear much more about the cutting up of the nail ORMs.
They're just like an inch long, and the turtles are also an inch long, so it's too it's too big the turtle. To be clear, they're dead the mealworms. Right, let's go home.
And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
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