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. Tether led a $1.4 billion round into a humanoid robot company. It out-bid nvidia and amazon to do it. Nobody is asking the obvious question: where does a stablecoin issuer get robot money? 👇 ◢ The Answer is Your Dollars When you hold USDT, you've parked a real...

20,623 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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🚨NEW: Adam Curry nicely breaks down how Stablecoins work, Tether, and the likely future of the US Digital Dollar system. (Worth a watch if you don't know about this subject) "A stablecoin is a digital dollar thats pegged to the dollar so it's always a dollar. It's already being used all over the internet and the world. The only reason it's worth a dollar is because the stablecoin company that creates it has debt and paper to back it up. They buy America's debt, they buy treasury bonds or T-bills that pay a dividend that gives interest, and for each dollar they've bought in treasury they can create stablecoins. If you look at the company Tether they've bought more of the US debt than most countries. They have $160B worth of US debt. For each of those dollars they have a stablecoin. There's like 50 people in the company. They have $160B at 4% interest annually, they're making BANK just for holding this debt. I think that President Trump is very smart in seeing that we can flood the world with our stablecoin and we get a 2-for-1. We create a dollar of debt and we create another dollar that can be used all over the world as a reserve currency and that should result in some new monetary system that we need to come up with to have our dollar valued properly but also still remain the reserve currency and remain a strong export country. We don't make anything that we sell abroad, we can't all serve each other burgers and fries -- we have to build something. All of that went overseas. There's something big coming, and it has to happen. Trump is a meta guy. He's going to re-finance the country. It'll be digital and he Bitcoiners don't like this because they want Bitcoin to be the one currency that everyone uses but its now more like a digital gold that's much easier to move around. It's useful but it isn't money or currency the way it was originally intended -- but it is still very important and will be part of the US' strategic reserve. It looks to me like Stablecoins and Tether in particular will be the future of the US dollar payments. A lot of people on the right are afraid of being controlled on a grid because you can stop stablecoins -- but it seems there's no way of getting around some form of a digital dollar. I still like Bitcoin as a backup to protect from that control." Great breakdown Adam Curry - curryirc.com

Autism Capital 🧩

365,538 views • 1 year ago

Jeff Bezos looked at a government waiting room and priced it at a hundred billion dollars. Bezos: “This is a $100 billion business, by the way. This is huge business.” That number is not ambition. It is a measurement. A company that size does not create a hundred billion dollars of new value here. It recovers a hundred billion that is already being destroyed, on schedule, in public, by a process everyone has agreed to call normal. The size of the opportunity is the size of the wound. Bezos: “They almost always say yes, they just make you wait a long time.” So the verdict was never in question. Only the delivery date. Which means the months bought nothing. They were storage. Your project sat in a room while the word yes waited its turn to be said. Nobody in there was deciding. Someone was scheduling. And the room bills by the day. Suarez: “The daily carrying cost, one day of interest, 200 to $400,000 per day.” Now find the recipient. There isn’t one. No school funded, no inspector paid, no safety review performed. A tax at least moves money into someone’s hands. This deletes it at four hundred thousand a day, and every dollar was real before the queue touched it. Bezos: “And that doesn’t count the frustration.” Count it anyway. It lands on a body long before it lands on a spreadsheet. Suarez: “Which is infinite. I have some white hairs as a result of this stuff.” That is the invoice. The money has a rate. The rest gets charged to the man, and he pays it whether the answer comes back yes or no. No one has ever been refunded a year. Every other cost in this economy can be hedged, insured, refinanced, or written off. Waiting is the only one that is final. A man will forgive being told no. He will never get back the time he spent standing there waiting to be told yes. We built a civilization that can move a decision at the speed of light and still schedule it at the speed of a man’s hair turning white. Bezos: “It should give you a yes or a no in 10 seconds. And if the answer is no, it should tell you the 6 things you have to change to get a yes.” For four thousand years the wait was honest. Someone had to hold the entire code in one head and walk it line by line against your drawings. Reading was slow because reading was human. That stopped being true in less time than it takes to approve one building. Bezos: “Maybe with AI it can just read all the plans. And it knows all the codes. Spit it out.” The constraint is gone. The wait stayed. Anything still moving at the old speed after the cost of thinking collapsed is not slow. It is choosing. The queue never protected you from a bad building. It protected a signature from a bad outcome. Nobody gets fired for the wait. They get fired for the answer. An institution has no lifespan, so time costs it nothing. You have one, so time is the only thing it can take. Every queue is a trade between something that dies and something that doesn’t, and only one side is ever charged. That trade held for the whole of recorded history because the mortal side had no leverage. It does now. Somebody is going to build this. A hundred billion does not sit in a waiting room forever. And the day it exists, the wait stops being a fact of the world and becomes a decision with a name attached. The hundred billion was never the prize. It is the receipt for how long we agreed to stand there. We are the first people alive who get to stop signing it.

Dustin

17,035 views • 18 days ago

Big Tech just forced the US government into bailing ITSELF out. This morning the US Treasury announced it will at least double the size of its own bond buybacks, because for two months almost nobody else wanted them. The 30-year Treasury bond hit its highest yield since 2007 last Thursday, then did it again yesterday. The long end has been in a buyers' strike since late June, meaning the pension funds and insurers who normally absorb 20 and 30 year government paper stopped showing up. This morning it auctioned $16 billion of 20-year debt at the second-worst yield since that bond was reintroduced in 2020. So the Treasury tore up a schedule it had published two weeks earlier. It doubled the maximum size of each long-bond buyback from $2 billion to at least $4 billion, and went from two operations a quarter to four. The 30-year yield fell 9 basis points within minutes. Stocks rallied. By early afternoon the 10-year had given almost all of it back. BUT the thing is, this operation changes almost nothing, because the underlying problem is untouched: The tidal wave of hyperscaler debt sitting on top of very large government deficits. Hyperscaler means Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and Nvidia. The Wall Street Journal went through the footnotes of 9 tech companies' filings on Sunday and found roughly $3 TRILLION in AI commitments sitting outside their balance sheets. That is 5x the $600 billion of capital spending those same companies reported over the past year. Alphabet alone discloses $811 billion in purchase and contractual obligations. Three months earlier it was $332 billion. All of it has to be funded somewhere. And this is where it collides with the government: Data centers, chip supply agreements and 20-year power contracts are long-duration assets, and long-duration assets get financed with long-duration debt. That is the exact product the US Treasury sells. There is a finite pool of investors willing to lend money for 30 years at a fixed rate. That pool does not get bigger because Meta needs another campus in Louisiana. So when the largest companies in history issue hundreds of billions of long-dated debt at the same moment the Treasury needs to roll a national debt approaching $40 trillion, both sides are bidding for the SAME buyers. One of those bidders can offer whatever yield it takes and book it as growth. The other one is the US government, and this morning it folded. Treasury does not create money for these buybacks. It funds them by issuing shorter-dated debt instead, so the obligation does not disappear. It gets pulled closer to the present, to be refinanced at whatever rate exists in a year or two. The government is buying back the debt nobody wants by selling more of the debt people still take. The 30-year Treasury yield is the number that prices your mortgage. The average 30-year fixed sits at 6.67% today. But there IS a real argument on the other side: Buybacks are routine, and $4 billion is nothing against a $30 trillion market. Plenty of serious people will call today housekeeping. But housekeeping shouldn’t require tearing up your own published schedule two weeks after you release it. The AI buildout is now financed at a scale that competes with sovereign borrowing, and the sovereign is losing bidders. Nobody voted on that, and people will pay for it in their mortgage rate long before anyone calls it a crisis. What do you think?

Ricardo

55,167 views • 1 day ago

Tomorrow a company that holds close to 5% of all ethereum is set to join the russell 1000. Once done, index funds that have never had an opinion on crypto will be forced to buy it. Nobody in those funds chose this, a benchmark rule did it for them 👇 ◢ How index inclusion actually works Getting added to a major index is one of the strongest demand events in markets, and it has nothing to do with whether the company is good. Funds that track the russell 1000 have to hold what the russell 1000 holds, or they stop tracking it. So, when a stock joins, every passive fund benchmarked to that index becomes a forced buyer, at whatever the price is, on the schedule the index sets. Passive vehicles tend to hold something like 20 to 25% of a large-cap stock, which for this one points to roughly $2B of buying that arrives because a rule says it must. ◢ The part that makes it crypto Bitmine is not a normal company that happens to get indexed, it's an ethereum treasury, sitting on millions of $ETH as its core balance sheet. So the chain runs like this: the index adds the stock, passive funds are forced to buy the stock, and the stock is essentially a wrapper around a giant pile of ETH. The result is that ordinary equity index money ends up with ethereum exposure without a single person deciding they wanted it. No ETF approval, allocation vote or opinion required. ◢ A side door, not a front door Everyone in crypto watches the spot ETF as the official entrance for institutional money, the thing that needs sign-off and gets headlines. Index inclusion is the entrance nobody guards. strategy walked a bitcoin treasury into the nasdaq 100. Coinbase took a crypto exchange into the s&p 500. now an ethereum treasury is stepping into the russell 1000. Each time, the underlying business didn't change. what changed is who was suddenly required to own it. ◢ Why front-running it is harder than it looks The mechanism is concrete, but the easy trade around it usually isn't. The inclusion isn't final until the reconstitution actually closes, so the flow is conditional, not guaranteed. The stock is already down around 50% on the year, which is a reminder that a one-time wave of buying doesn't repair something tied to ETH's price and to confidence in the treasury model. And there's a quieter problem: "diversified" index funds are now obligated to hold a leveraged, single-asset crypto bet that most of their investors would never have picked on purpose. What it means that the biggest new buyer of a crypto-linked company is a rule, not a person, and that millions of people now hold a slice of ethereum because an index told their fund to?

Onur 🍌🦍

14,337 views • 1 month ago

🚨Peter Schiff: China🇨🇳 is silently dumping the dollar, a US🇺🇸 dollar crisis is coming soon! ‘China is gradually weaning themselves off of the dollar. That’s why, if you look at their holdings of US Treasuries, they’ve actually gone down a bit over the years. If you look at all the new Treasuries we’ve issued over the years, the fact that the Chinese haven’t bought any of them is a big deal because they used to be a main buyer of these assets. Instead of buying more Treasuries, they’ve bought more gold. So if you look at US dollar debt as a percentage of all the reserves the Chinese own, Treasuries are a much smaller percentage of their total reserves than they once were, especially if you consider the appreciation of gold. I would guess the reason they’re not moving more dramatically is because they probably don’t want to cause a crash, the dollar to implode, the Treasury market to implode, because they are trying to sell and want to get a decent price. So I think they’re happy to slowly bleed it off to try to get that good price. They just have to worry about the impact on the dollar, because if they try to dump too many dollars at once, the dollar could go down, and especially if a lot of other countries see that and want to get out. There could be a run on the dollar. If all the holders decide they want to get out, they don’t want to be the last one holding the dollar, and so it becomes a rush, and we could be in a US dollar crisis relatively soon anyway… I think we’re heading for a real crisis in the US, and I think countries that are smart would be trying to get ahead of that by selling whatever they can, as quietly as they can, out of US dollars and any US dollar-denominated debt.’ -Peter Schiff on Going Underground

Afshin Rattansi

107,856 views • 6 months ago

$315 BILLION in stablecoins are now backed by US Treasuries. And I don't understand why no one's questioning this. Goldman's David Solomon and former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin just did a victory lap on stablecoins. Their pitch: Stablecoins strengthen the dollar, create demand for Treasuries, make it easier for people outside the United States to hold dollars. Sounds great. Until you look at what's actually happening underneath... The GENIUS Act passed in July 2025. First federal stablecoin framework in US history. Stablecoin market cap has grown 50% year over year. Tether alone holds $141 billion in US Treasuries, making it one of the largest holders of American government debt on the planet. Washington's pitch is simple: every time someone in Argentina, Turkey, or Nigeria buys USDT, they're buying Treasuries by proxy. Dollar dominance strengthened. Problem solved. And here's the part they REALLY love... The US ran an $1.8 trillion deficit in fiscal 2025. CBO projects $1.9 trillion this year. National debt just crossed $39 trillion. Interest payments alone now exceed $1 trillion annually. Meanwhile, the biggest foreign buyers of Treasuries (China, Japan, Canada) have been pulling back for years. ARK Invest found that the share of Treasuries held by the largest foreign creditors dropped from 23% to just over 6% in the past 13 years. The Fed is STILL running down its balance sheet. So who's going to buy all this debt? Washington's answer: stablecoin issuers. Treasury Secretary Bessent said it himself: "A thriving stablecoin ecosystem will drive demand from the private sector for US Treasuries and help rein in the national debt." Think about what that actually means. The government is counting on a $315 billion crypto product (run largely by a company in El Salvador that just got its first real audit last week) to help finance a $1.9 TRILLION annual deficit. Stablecoin issuers currently hold less than 2% of outstanding Treasury bills. Even if the market hits $2 trillion by 2028 like Standard Chartered projects, that's still just a rounding error against $39 trillion in total debt. This is literally a NARRATIVE designed to make the debt problem sound manageable. But the Federal Reserve published a study showing that for every $1 that moves from bank deposits into stablecoins, bank lending contracts by roughly 50 cents. Stablecoin issuers can't make loans. The GENIUS Act prohibits it. They can ONLY hold Treasuries, reverse repos, and cash equivalents. So when deposits leave banks and flow into stablecoins, that money stops funding mortgages, small business loans, and commercial credit. It starts funding government debt instead. The US Treasury itself estimated stablecoins could drain up to $6.6 TRILLION from the banking system. That's not "strengthening the dollar." That's redirecting the lifeblood of the real economy into government IOUs while starving Main Street of credit. And then there's the run risk nobody wants to discuss. Fed Governor Michael Barr said it yesterday: Stablecoin issuers have every incentive to chase higher returns on their reserves. But unlike banks, they CANNOT access the Fed's discount window. If a stablecoin run happens, issuers dump Treasuries into the market all at once. Stablecoin inflows push Treasury yields down 2-2.5 basis points. Outflows spike yields UP 6-8 basis points. Easy in. Ugly out. Meanwhile, Tether is the 800-pound gorilla. $185 billion in circulation. 550 million users. And until last week, it had never had a Big Four audit. It just hired KPMG after 12 years of operating with nothing but quarterly attestations. This is the entity Wall Street is celebrating as the future of dollar dominance. A company headquartered in El Salvador that fought transparency in court twice and LOST both times. Here's what Solomon and Mnuchin are actually telling you if you listen carefully: Stablecoins create captive demand for short-term US government debt. Foreign governments don't want to hold Treasuries anymore. So Washington's solution is to get 550 million retail users in emerging markets to hold them instead through a digital wrapper called a "stablecoin." The holders get zero interest. The GENIUS Act explicitly prohibits it. The issuers pocket the Treasury returns. Tether made $10 billion in profit last year. And the real economy loses credit while the government gets cheaper funding. This is a classic Wall Street pitch to sell financial innovation as progress: "This strengthens the system. This is good for everyone." Then the leverage builds, the risks concentrate, and the people who sold you on it are nowhere to be found when it unwinds. Stablecoins are NOT saving the dollar. They're a $315 billion shadow money market fund with no Fed backstop, no deposit insurance, and run dynamics that could destabilize the very Treasury market they're supposed to support. If you want to hold dollars, hold dollars. If you want to own the asset that central banks are actually buying instead of Treasuries, you already know what that is... 🥇

George Noble

90,823 views • 4 months ago

🚨 WARNING: NVIDIA x ELON MUSK DEAL IS BUILT ON FAKE NUMBERS!! Michael Burry published an analysis calling the structure “Fugazi”, meaning fake. If the structure is real, we could be heading for a COLLAPSE: He is alleging that BILLIONS of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing. Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 BILLION worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor. Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 BILLION of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale. Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models. But here is what Burry is flagging. Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 BILLION in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory. They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies. Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 BILLION as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle. Now here is where American retirees enter the picture. Valor needed $3.5 BILLION in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 TRILLION under management and $834 BILLION specifically in private credit. Apollo raised the $3.5 BILLION, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene. Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans. When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center. The numbers inside Athene are most alarming. Athene holds $74.2 BILLION in reserves. It has moved $217 BILLION in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight. Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 BILLION, is classified as Level 3 assets. Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth. The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times. Burry's says: Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing. Nvidia books the revenue. Apollo collects the fees. xAI gets the computing power. And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 BILLION in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists. I’ve been in finance for more than 15 years. When I EXIT the markets completely, I’ll say it here publicly, like I always do. Turn notifications on. If you’re not following yet, you’ll understand why that was a mistake later.

WhaleTwits

48,759 views • 2 months ago

Elon Musk just put a number on the flaw at the center of Nvidia’s empire. Wall Street has not done the math yet. Nvidia’s Blackwell is the most sought-after silicon on Earth. Every AI lab wants it. Every sovereign nation is bidding for it. Blackwell runs every model, for every company, in every data center on the planet. That universality built the empire. It is also the fracture point. Musk: “We believe the AI5 chip will be about a third of the power of an Nvidia Blackwell for roughly comparable performance. And much less than 10% of the cost.” One-third the power. Comparable performance. Less than ten percent of the cost. Musk: “This is a chip that is very much optimized for the Tesla AI software stack. It’s not meant to be a general purpose chip.” Nvidia builds silicon that serves a million different customers. Every transistor spent on universal compatibility is a transistor not dedicated to one task. Tesla is building silicon for exactly one customer. Itself. When you strip away every function you will never call, you do not get a lesser chip. You get a weapon. Here is what the market refuses to see. Data centers drink unlimited power from the grid. Robots run on batteries. Musk: “In order to have a functional robot, you have to have a great AI chip. And it needs to be an inexpensive chip and it needs to be very power efficient.” You cannot put a Blackwell inside a walking machine. It would drain the battery before it crossed the room. The entire AI revolution lives inside air-conditioned buildings bolted to the electrical grid. Musk is not competing for that market. He is engineering the silicon that survives outside of it. One-third the power is not a spec sheet footnote. It is the physics threshold that severs intelligence from the wall socket. Without that number, every robot on Earth stays tethered. With it, the algorithm walks. Less than ten percent of the cost is not a pricing strategy. It is the line where a machine brain stops being a capital expenditure and becomes a commodity component. When the chip inside a humanoid costs less than the motors in its legs, you do not manufacture hundreds of robots. You manufacture millions. Wall Street is valuing the AI revolution by who dominates the data center. Musk is building the only silicon designed to leave one. Nvidia built the brain of the cloud. Musk is building the brain of the physical world. No one has priced that in yet.

Dustin

160,633 views • 4 months ago

A finance professor manages $200M with AI agents, and he told everyone why: "Large language models are at the level of a fourth-year PhD student in every field" Alejandro Lopez-Lira's AI fund, Autopilot, returned 56% last year. The S&P did 16%. There are 52,000 people with money in it, and most of them just watch the machine work. What he automated is the same six-step loop every fund on earth runs: find an idea, code it, backtest it, deploy it, read the autopsy, learn from it. A quant at Two Sigma runs that loop once a month, and the salary time alone costs around $50,000 per hypothesis. All steps from this loop now fit in AI trading text box. Plain English in, executable strategy out, five-year backtest in 12 seconds, live on a broker 90 seconds after you typed the sentence. He runs $200M with AI. You can run same AI fund in two clicks, free to try: Step 6 on this loop is where everyone is stuck. Your agent has no memory. Every strategy it kills goes into a log nobody reads, and the next one starts from zero. Nobody keeps negative results. Not Citadel, not Man Group, not a single repo on GitHub. Fix that and the agent remembers every hypothesis it killed and the regime it died in. It stops burning cycles on your old mistakes. Jane Street pays 3,500 people to run this cycle and made $39.6 billion doing it. Five sixths of it is now free. Bookmark & read full map of this loop in the article below. Most people still think AI trading is out of reach for them - it isn't. Don't want to spend a dollar for testing this? Kalshi just opened a perps exchange and gives US users $25 free to start ->

cvxv666

81,854 views • 14 days ago

For months, everyone called this a liquidity problem. It is not a liquidity problem anymore. It is not just investors pulling money out. It is investors who no longer want in. That is the bigger problem. The whole boom was built on flows. Wealth managers, pensions, insurance, the public. The machine had to keep moving. Now it is reversing. New direct lending issuance fell from 74.6 billion to 44.8 billion in one quarter, per Reuters and PitchBook. A drop of roughly 40%. And the redemptions keep coming. BlackRock's HLend capped requests after investors tried to pull 13%. Up from 9% the quarter before. The run is accelerating. It is not one fund. Blackstone hit its limits. Cliff Water's requests grew. Partners Group capped a private equity fund near 10% of NAV. The pressure is not staying in one lane. Now the public tell. Publicly traded BDCs are not bouncing, even as the market soars. They are the liquid version of the same trade. The bargain hunters are not showing up. That is a buyer strike. And the real fear is the dividends. If you expected 9% and get 4%, why take the risk on the rest? You do not hold the fund hoping Blue Owl turns out right. The stress is spreading. Software loans are down 4.7% this year while the index is up 1.2%. And software sits across both leveraged loans and private credit. Defaults just matched a 2023 high in a 300 billion dollar private credit index. And defaults lag. The amendments, the extensions, the PIK come first. Here is the mechanism. New money slows, old money wants out, so managers protect liquidity. They lend less. Deals slow. Exits disappear. Distributions shrink. Fundraising weakens. The loop closes on itself. It does not need a Lehman blowup to feed on itself. It is not one explosion. It is a system that can no longer clear. The argument from inside is that investors do not know what they are talking about. That this is all nothing. But this many people wanting out, and this many refusing to come in, is not nothing. Private credit can survive bad headlines. Problem loans. Even redemptions. What it cannot survive is a buyer strike, because the whole boom assumed capital would keep arriving. So this is not 2021 anymore. The credit cycle has changed. And the people who asked for their money back were never confused. They were just early.

Jeffrey P. Snider

32,147 views • 2 months ago