Ignore The Fed - Watch This Instead

Yo, welcome back to another episode of the Jack Mallers Show. I am your host, Jack, and you are listening to yet another edition of Mailbag Monday, episode 138. Don't hold me to it. Not a professional podcaster, but welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you are well.

Today's episode. Listen, there's not a ton going on, so I figured we would dig into this whole thing called the MOVE Index. And I like to call Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary of the United States, aka Scotty B, aka the chief volatility officer. I want to break that down. What is Washington really trying to go for? What rates should we be paying attention to? What rates matter? Now there's expectations or renewed interest: is the Fed going to hike again? I don't think it matters, guys. There's a difference between the price of money and the quantity of money. Which matters more, especially to Bitcoin? I'm going to introduce some new ideas, walk them through in a lot more detail than I have before. But before we do that, we're going to timestamp this bad boy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking to you on Monday, October 12th at 5:07 p.m. in Chicago with a Bitcoin price. Oh, no, I screwed that up. How do I do, um, how do I do boxing? And in the right corner, standing at $82,541 per coin at a market cap of 1.66 trillion, an all-time high of 126,080 bucks, made 371 days ago on October 6, 2025, sitting at about 34.5% off its all-time high at Bitcoin. Block height 971,145.

Bitcoin. TL;DR, we haven't moved much. Bitcoin remains rangebound in the 80s. Nothing too crazy. We're still about 30% or so off our all-time high that we made now over a year ago. So it's been a year. Your bear market wounds are fresh. We're still in the thick of it. Everybody on the internet's arguing, and that is where we are with the orange coin. Okay.

Oh man, that hurt my throat a little bit. Okay, here's what I'm going to try and do with this episode. I personally think that there's too much attention being paid to the Fed rate hike. I actually got a new animation that I think will be dropping tomorrow that explains fiscal dominance in an animated educational way, because really the debt is what matters. And who cares if the Fed funds rate is at 3% or 3.25% or 2.75%?

There's not a magic number that's going to, like, send Bitcoin and assets to the moon. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what really matters to Washington, to Scott Bessent, to the US government, to the central planners that are making decisions and really trying to financially engineer markets to perpetuate this old analog dying financial system along? And I'm here to tell you that it is actually the quantity of credit, the quantity of money, rather than the price of money. I want to make that very clear distinction. You know, the Fed may set the overnight rate of money, but who cares? What really matters is: are markets in a position to give as much credit as possible, as many loans as possible, as much really money printing and fiat currency units and an ability to refinance all this debt as possible? And we're going to walk through what I mean by that, what the MOVE Index is, how to watch it, how to value the number and the volatility, really make sense of what Scott Bessent is doing.

You know, I think that there is a fairly logical reason Bitcoin reacted the way it did to his buyback program when Bitcoin jumped from 60 to 80. Why did it do that? I think that there's a logical answer buried in this broad topic here. Okay, so bear with me. This will be a shorterish episode. Famous last words. I plan for it to be, and I've got some great Strike updates, and then some more stuff will be launching this week. Fair enough. Here we go.

Okay. I call Scott Bessent, the United States Secretary of the Treasury. I call him Scotty B. I call him the chief volatility officer. And although that makes us all laugh, he is the chief volatility officer for a reason. That reason is the world runs on debt. An immense amount of debt. Now that debt has to be repaid. Okay, so here's the problem. The problem is that the world has borrowed an extraordinary amount of money, and not just the United States. We all know that the US debt to GDP is, call it, you know, well over 100% or 120-some-odd percent, inching towards 130%. But global debt to GDP is well over 300%. So this is not just a US problem. This is a global problem. The US is under the spotlight as the world reserve currency, so on and so forth. But the world has borrowed an extraordinary amount of money, an extraordinary amount of time, energy, effort, and labor from its future. Government, businesses, households, etc. Just a massive pile of debt.

When these loans come due, because these are not perpetual infinite loans. There's some duration to them. There's the three-month, the two-year, the five-year, the ten-year, the twenty-year, the thirty-year. When these loans come due, most borrowers don't just write a check and pay them off, right? Some of us may take out debt and pay it off like an honest man, like a good man, but most of the world, especially our governments, don't have the money to actually repay the debt. They need to roll the debt over. They need to borrow again and refinance the debt. So you guys have to understand the entire financial system, the entire financial system when the world is this indebted, US debt to GDP at well over 100%, global debt to GDP at well over 300%. The entire financial system now depends on one thing, and that's being able to refinance all this debt.

And so what you see on the screen, what I have displayed, is let's say you have a $100 loan come due, but you don't have a hundred bucks on hand. How do you repay the $100 loan that's coming due? So, you have a cash need of a hundred bucks. Well, you borrow a new $100, and then you take the new $100 loan proceeds that you just borrowed, pay off the old one, and now you just have a brand new $100 liability on the balance sheet because you expunged the old one. So, you've paid off the old loan by creating a new loan, and then you just repeat this forever. And that's kicking the can. That's refinancing. That's rolling the debt forward. Okay.

Now, everybody watches the Fed funds rate. Everyone watches the rate and, you know, whether the Fed is raising rates, cutting rates, 25 basis points here or there. But let me ask you guys a question. What does a low rate matter if nobody will lend you the money? What's more important? The price of the rate or whether you can get a loan in the first place? Especially, mind you, the US government, their debt is just a pile of loans. It's not like one giant $40 trillion line of credit. Their debt is a giant pile of duration loans. 10 years, 20 years, five-year T-bills, just a bunch of loans they're constantly needing to roll forward and refinance.

And so you have to ask yourself, what matters more to the United States? The rate at which they're borrowing or whether there's enough liquidity and enough credit and enough abundance for them to refinance at all? Because if they have $40 trillion — now the number is not literally 40 trillion, but it's in the trillions — let's say they have $8 trillion to refinance and roll over. Just like in the last slide where I say, well, the $100 is due. And the only way for you to pay the $100 is to borrow a fresh hundred, pay off the old to create a new one, right? So if the United States has that same equivalent, but let's say that number is not $100, it's 8 trillion, you must create the liquidity conditions and the financial conditions for someone to lend you a fresh 8 trillion in order for you to create new financing to pay off the old, which is rolling it, which is refinancing it.

So why does a low rate matter if no one will lend you the money? You know, Bank One on the screen may offer 3%, but they say no. There's not enough liquidity and there's not enough credit to actually allow you to refinance at a 3% loan rate. Bank Two charges 5%. Sure, that's much more expensive, but it doesn't really matter. They say yes, they allow you to refinance it. So, which one actually helps you at the end of the day? Sure, rates matter, and we'll get into that in a second. And obviously the rates that are being set also impact inflation via the stimulus that, you know, the interest payments the US government is paying on this debt. But the point is that I think that the world — or just maybe not the world, my Twitter feed, the general public, the media — is far too worried about the rate and the price.

And really what I think Bessent has been engineering as the chief volatility officer is a market environment. What him and Powell are really concerned about is can they roll forward this debt? Can they refinance this debt? Can the Treasury market persist? And if, you know, the 10-year rate matters a lot, and the 10-year rate matters a lot because it's how you lose elections, because we've talked about the 10-year rate is how your mortgage is financed, your car note, your credit card. So the 10-year has a lot to do with, you know, the consumer credit market. But generally speaking, the Fed funds rate, whether the Fed funds rate is at 3.5, 3.75, 3.25, it really at the end of the day, you know, it matters. And that again, the US interest expense is growing and eventually needs to come down, but what really matters is stable conditions for the US government to refinance all this debt. So, let's keep going.

Now, what are these conditions that the US government wants? What creates a market environment where they can safely and securely refinance their debt? It's all about the Treasury market volatility, because the Treasuries, US Treasuries, are collateral that the world borrows against. The more volatile that collateral, the less credit is available for people to borrow against. The more stable that collateral, the more credit people can create on top of it. You understand?

So on the screen what I have is on the left, if you have a calm Treasury market, maybe you have $100 in Treasuries and you're able to take $98 against that of just fresh capital to use. Now the more volatile it gets, maybe the Treasury market's experiencing a little bit of volatility, that $100 of pledged Treasuries will only get you $90 of liquidity. This is hugely, hugely, hugely, hugely important. The health of the collateral. Okay.

So much of this analog legacy financial system works like a giant pawn shop. If you want to borrow, you have to pledge something valuable as collateral, like a watch at a pawn shop, right? If you give someone a valuable watch at a pawn shop, they'll give you liquidity in exchange because based on the confidence that they have to resell it. In finance, one of the most important things, period, that you can pledge is US government debt. People treat it money good, risk-free. You pledge $100 of Treasuries, you could borrow $98. But when that collateral, when those Treasuries start to swing wildly, then lenders, the banking system, tend to get nervous and they lend less. Monetary conditions tighten. And there's a difference between the Fed tightening monetary conditions and the market tightening monetary conditions.

This is just banks and credit broadly saying, 'Eh, Treasury market's too volatile. This collateral is not as money good as it has been in the past. Maybe we'll give you $90 against that 100. Maybe we'll give you $80 against that 100.' And all of a sudden, credit is a lot harder to get, even though the Fed didn't touch rates. This has nothing to do with the Fed touching rates. Okay, does that make sense so far?

So the most important thing that we need to look at to understand if credit is abundant and if the collateral is good and if Scott Bessent has the market conditions that he needs to roll over all this debt and continue to financially engineer his way out of this is what's called the MOVE Index. Okay, this is the bond volatility index. What I have on the screen here is over the last six months it's up over 30%. Okay, this is the gauge for the US Treasury market. Why would you care about this? Because like I said, Treasuries are collateral all over the US financial system or the global financial system for that matter. When Treasury volatility jumps, financing gets harder in the global financial system. And in a world that's drowning in debt, that is extremely dangerous.

Just having tighter, tougher financing conditions is a huge problem, especially when the largest borrower is the US government that's $40 trillion in debt, has new loans coming due constantly, and is needing to refinance now in the trillions of dollars annually. That's extremely dangerous. So, like I said, over the last six months, this index, which shows us how strong the collateral is, these Treasuries, it's jumped over 30%. It peaked around 115 last week, and right now it's a little below 100. So, it's starting to come down. Past calm is nowhere near stress. Okay.

There's certain numbers that are obvious as to when central planners start to interfere and when credit seems to be abundant. Whenever the MOVE Index is below 85, markets operate and financing operates without a hitch. Everyone's able to refinance. Credit is fairly abundant. Above 85, markets get a little bit tight. Okay, above 130 we usually have, we're on the brink of a financial crisis or a recession. Do you understand? Bear with me.

So the point that I want to make to you guys is the more that I watch Powell and I watch Bessent and I see their actions in the buyback program, it's not clear to me that Washington cares much about rates, at least for now. I think what they care about is lowering volatility. Okay. So for example, this Treasury buyback thing, this is Bessent really, like in the grand scheme of the debt market, his little buyback program is irrelevant. It's a rounding error. It's not like he's actually making a material impact in trying to lower rates. This is far, far, far from a version of yield curve control that would actually matter. I think he doubled it from like 4 billion to 8 billion. I mean these numbers are tiny, minuscule compared to the size of this market and the size that would be required for him to have a real impact on rates.

So then what is he trying to do? I'm making the point that what he's actually trying to do is smoothen out the volatility because older bonds, longer duration bonds have been increasingly more difficult to sell. And so what does he do? The Treasury is buying back select older bonds, and as opposed to that's, 'Oh, he's trying to lower rates and Bitcoin is jumping because Bessent's trying to lower rates' or 'he's trying to implement some like soft form of yield curve control.' Ah, honestly, not at this size. What he's probably trying to do is create a more orderly market with less volatility by taking instruments off the market that the market has lost demand for. The market wants demand at the front end, not the long end. So, he's picking off older bonds that people don't want, which makes for a more orderly market, a smoother trading and financing. Think of him as the chief volatility officer. He's trying to make sure that markets remain orderly, volatility remains low, which means the collateral is strong, which means there's enough credit and ability to create new currency.

Now, this — I'm trying to find a way to land this plane. This is why I think Bitcoin actually jumped on the buyback program announcement because a calmer Treasury market and lower yields is bullish for Bitcoin because at the end of the day, Bitcoin is priced on future expectations of fiat liquidity. If there's going to be an abundance of liquidity, an abundance of credit, if everyone's collateral is good and everyone can get a $100 worth of liquid loan and credit against a $100 Treasury, assets are going to soar. Bitcoin is going to soar, which I'll get to in a second.

And so, I think Bitcoin — and by the way, Bitcoin is so sensitive. It's the most sensitive asset to fiat liquidity. It's like a smoke alarm. It's constantly telling us the truth when liquidity is abundant versus when liquidity is tightening. And I'm kind of frontloading my episode here, but what I think happened when Bitcoin jumped from 60 to 80 is this buyback program was the Treasury's way of trying to smooth out volatility and create an orderly market. And Bitcoin reacted very healthily to that and started to soar because when the collateral is good and markets are orderly, there's a ton of credit and new fiat units being created and Bitcoin ran to the races.

Now then, Bitcoin started to pull back a little bit and it didn't go straight to 100K. It's been chopping around a little bit and I think that's because the MOVE Index spiked. The MOVE Index went from below 85 up to above 100 and it's starting to cool off again. Okay, so basically in summary, what if Scott Bessent doesn't really care about the 10-year yield just yet? What if he's trying to keep the Treasury market functioning? And I hope I'm explaining the delineation of the difference between the two.

The Treasury has been buying back these older bonds. That's what this buyback program is. And they're buying them back because those have been increasingly hard to sell. And if those are hard to sell and no one steps in to buy them, that's going to spike volatility. Okay? So, this gives these holders a place to sell something that doesn't have demand and that makes the market trade a lot more smoothly because the volatility is just priced on a supply-demand imbalance and that's where you get price discovery. Price discovery is volatility.

So, but I see so much of the media say, 'Oh, he's trying to push the 10-year yield down.' I don't know if they care yet right now. I really don't. I really don't. These numbers are too small. And you can almost see Bitcoin telling you the truth about this. Bitcoin ran from 60 to 80 not because these buybacks are making a dent in this overall market. It's because it's allowed for an environment that's creating a lot more credit and an abundance of fiat units. And I think that this is this broader strategy right now in Washington, which is keeping bond volatility under control because if the bond market gets chaotic and collateral financing gets harder, then refinancing all this debt becomes impossible and you get serious crisis.

And again, this is why I call him the chief volatility officer. He's the plumber for the bond market. And his first order of business, like I showed in the earlier slides, his first order of business is making sure he can get a loan. His second order of business is then making the loans cheaper. But making the loans cheaper before you create an environment where you can get a loan in the first place is counterproductive. Who cares if the rates are low if there isn't liquidity to actually finance all of the rollovers that you need?

So, this is, in my opinion, Bessent's playbook in plain English. He's giving the market more of what it wants, which is selling more short-term debt. There's no demand problem at the front end. People treat bills like cash. There's not a lot of counterparty risk. There's not a lot of inflation risk. There's not a lot of financing competition. So give the market more of what it wants, less of what it doesn't want, and take back what the market is stuck with and can't get off. Okay? So that's sell more T-bills, sell less long bonds, and buy back the old bonds that nobody wants.

This should smooth out volatility, which creates a market condition where he can finance all of this debt, which also though creates market conditions where credit is abundant. So that's why when people are like, 'Wow, the stock market's at all-time highs, but the Fed just hiked rates.' Ignore the Fed right now. It's all about the debt. It's all about the Treasury. The Fed doesn't matter. Who cares that the Fed hiked 25 basis points? What matters is how good is what's collateralizing the financial system? Because if that collateral goes bad, then liquidity is going to nosedive and all assets are going to sell off. If that collateral is good, there's going to be an abundance of credit and financing and Bitcoin's going to go to the moon.

This is why in my opinion — now, you know, I'll never be able to like literally prove this. A lot of this show is, you know, making sense to the world, proposing cool, interesting ideas, trying to break down these complex things into, you know, things that people can understand, right? A show by the common man for the common man. But this is what I think Bitcoin was reacting to was Bessent taking old bonds that nobody wants off the market. That creates smoother conditions for financing. That creates less volatility.

Now, this Bloomberg headline that I put on screen — sorry for the podcast listeners — Bloomberg article titled, 'Bessent will likely cut US long bond sales next month.' Why? He's trying to smooth out volatility. He's trying to give the market less of what it isn't clear it wants and more of what he knows it wants. Now, issuing more short-term bills is highly inflationary. It's highly stimulative. If it were up to him, he would issue everything at the long end. But the thing that he utmost has to care about and has to factor in and has to prioritize is creating market conditions that are smooth, not volatile, so that there's an abundance of credit creation. Again, this is very, very, very good for Bitcoin.

But what's this guy doing? What's the financial engineering? Why is Powell hiking or cutting or who cares about that guy? It's all about Scotty B, the chief volatility officer. This is what fiscal dominance is. The debt is what's in control now. Refinancing the debt is what's in control now. Creating an orderly Treasuries market is what matters. None of that other stuff matters. It matters over the long term. Right now though, it really doesn't. So Scotty B is selling more short-term, selling less long-term, and buying the old dog stuff that nobody wants because a calmer bond market means a lower MOVE Index, which means easier credit, easier financing. See? Okay.

Now, there's actually data — this is from Michael Howell — there's actually data to show that higher yields on the 10-year, for example, aren't necessarily about fear of a debt crisis. It's actually just expected future rates. So, most people see yields rising and think that, you know, what we're seeing in the media right now, like I started to see Time Magazine and Bloomberg and CNBC start to say this is America's debt problem, the debt's becoming unsustainable. Now, all of this is broadly true, but I think it's being overblown in the media. And if you look under the hood, a 10-year yield has two ingredients to it, to the yield that the market gives. One is where people expect the Fed to take rates. Two is extra pay for holding longer duration when you're nervous, which is called a term premium.

The orange line is the term premium. How nervous are people for holding longer duration? And let's see if I can zoom in here because if I zoom in, you can see over the last two years the term premium, which is how nervous people are to hold longer duration, has been flat. This is the orange line. So people aren't necessarily getting more nervous to hold the 10-year, which is counter to what the media is now reporting that there's like an imminent debt crisis.

Listen, I agree. Yes, 40 trillion is a massive number. This is all unsustainable. The 1 trillion-plus dollars of annual interest expense on the debt is ridiculous. Trump wants rates to go to zero. Yes, all of that's true. But let's understand the order of operations that Washington is trying to engineer. Understand how Bitcoin has been trading and reacting. Where's the liquidity coming from? The bond market, or specifically the US Treasury market, is not necessarily saying that the term premium needs to be higher. It's saying rate expectations are skyrocketing. That's what it's saying. That's just a hot economy. Orange is the term premium. Black is the hot economy. And so what's rising are expectations of growth, not fear.

Okay, does that make sense? So again, this flies in the face of what is being reported in the media and this helps confirm what I'm saying, which is the 10-year is rising because the economy is so hot. The economy being hot is driving Treasury market volatility. Treasury market volatility is creating a disorderly market that people can't refinance all this debt. And like I said in the beginning, the world is based on debt, collateralized by debt. If the debt is no good as collateral, everything is going to seize up and break.

So there are really two kinds of tightening. There's the Fed tightening, which means, hey, borrowing costs more, 25 basis point hike. But the real tightening is when lenders stop lending, when financing conditions aren't there. And I'm telling you, I don't think that anyone really gives a damn right now that borrowing might cost 25 basis points more if the Fed hikes. The Fed has been late for the amount of inflation and how hot the economy has been running. The Fed has been extremely late.

And Powell, I think Powell has been delaying on purpose because the market is doing the tightening for him. The 10-year is at 5.25%. Mortgage rates are at over 7%. The market is doing the tightening for Powell. Powell is irrelevant right now. This is fiscal dominance. What matters is: are there financing conditions where lenders can actually lend?

So this is basically what I just said in different words. The market is the brake. So right now the economy is

running extremely hot and everyone is competing for money. You guys know how I've been talking about in prior episodes that AI and a lot of what's happening in the economy right now is competing against the US government financing itself. Would you rather give money to Google to Meta or would you rather give money to the US government running these massive unsustainable deficits that can only pay you back in devalued printed currency? And so when the economy is running hot and everybody's competing for money, yields go up. Riskier borrowers pay more and that cools things down on its own. So Bessent is really just the plumber for the bond market. He's trying to keep it calm, keep this MOVE index low, keep volatility low so that bonds keep functioning as financing collateral. Worsh is more like, I mean, if Bessent is the plumber for the bond market, Worsh is like a plumber for cash. He needs to keep enough reserves in the banking system so that short-term lending doesn't seize up. But again, I think he's hiking slowly on purpose. I think he's behind the curve on purpose because the market is already tightening for him. The MOVE index has been spiking, right? The 10-year has been spiking. The Fed is behind the curve. The Fed is irrelevant. What matters is Bessent. And so Bessent needs to solve, in my opinion, what Washington needs to solve for. They need to cool the economy down because a hot economy is creating funding competition and financing competition for Washington, which is creating yield spiking, which is creating volatility in the Treasuries market. Not good. And so we need a cooler economy.

And we just saw the first signs of this. The first sign of cooling economy. This is Atlanta Fed GDP now estimate going from 6.2% to 3.6%. Now mind you, 3.6% is still plenty hot, but I mean 6.2 to 3.6, that's a massive slide. So here's the first sign of all of this working. This is Atlanta's, like I said, Fed Now estimate. I mean this is a huge Now forecasters expect two to two and a half. So 3.6 is still hot. But now it'll be interesting to watch. And by the way, when the economy is so hot, it's hard for Bitcoin to also catch a bid because money is, when money is in the economy, it can't be in Bitcoin. The monetary conditions that Bitcoin wants, which it'll eventually have to get, is a cooler economy and stable Treasuries market because then there's going to be credit out the wazoo. And again, this is what Bitcoin has been smelling out off the lows of 60. If the economy runs extremely hot, that competes with financing, spikes the MOVE index, makes treasury market disorderly, seizes up markets, they had to cool the economy down, it's starting to cool. Bitcoin starting to run. Bessent implementing the stronger buyback program, he's taking duration off the market. These are all things to smooth out financing so that credit is abundant. This is all forms of money printing. All forms of money printing.

Now, this from Michael Howell also really interesting. As I was reading about this, he has this way to quantify what assets are most sensitive to fiat liquidity, like when rates come down. And Bitcoin is off the charts. Off the charts, 22.4 compared to gold six, stocks three. That's insane. So, like I said, Bitcoin in this environment that I think we're trending towards and is why I'm so bullish Bitcoin over the next 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 months. Bitcoin is the most sensitive asset to fiat liquidity and Bessent is engineering a market environment where there's an abundance of liquidity because the world is run on and collateralized by debt. And he's creating a market environment where that debt collateral is good so that financing and fiat units are abundant. So if you put this whole idea together, the market is putting the brakes on, the economy is slowing down and a slowing economy usually means that rates have to come down as well. So going forward, we're going to keep an eye on the 10-year. The 10-year has stalled out a bit. And I wouldn't be surprised if it tests 6%. But I also wouldn't, I mean, let's see, in nominal terms, you know, obviously, you know, priced in gold, priced in Bitcoin, but in nominal terms, let's check, let's keep a pulse on the yield. Let's see if the yield starts to flatten out and come down. Okay? And let's keep a pulse on the MOVE index. If the MOVE index kept spiking up and remained elevated at 115, 120, Bitcoin would have continued to struggle. Bitcoin seems to maybe potentially have found a floor. The MOVE index is coming down again because when financing is abundant, when that collateral is money good and people can create more and more fiat units, Bitcoin is priced on future expectations of fiat units. There's an abundance of new paper currency that's competing for a fixed amount of bitcoins. The reason Bitcoin is the most sensitive is because it's the most scarce. Very simple idea. Very simple idea.

So, I think that the setup for Bitcoin, I mean this is my way of saying I think it's an unbelievable macro setup for Bitcoin. It's only going to get better. And then on top of all this, once they create the financing conditions, they are going to have to bring rates down. I mean, the financing expense, the Treasury expense at the US government is just unsustainable. So, in my opinion, the things to watch out for and what we'll, again, a slower week. I wanted to lay the flooring for future episodes for us to check on the MOVE index and check on the 10-year. So I think the setup gets good when two things happen together. One, rates start to fall. Two, the bond market remains calm. Okay, path A is kind of this orderly slowdown that Bessent's trying to engineer. He's trying to land this plane. Economy slows, yields start to fall a little bit. Bond volatility remains controlled, financing improves because the market is orderly and Bitcoin could rocket. Now, what if he doesn't land the plane that well? If the economy slows but bond volatility spikes, credit gets harder, financing falls off a cliff, Bitcoin can get hit hard. You can see Bitcoin down 20% in a day and you're going to get a bailout. But understanding what these guys are trying to engineer so that we on the show can keep a pulse of it. It's almost going to be like checking the scoreboard like every, you know, the beginning of the show for the foreseeable future. Let's check the 10-year. Let's check the MOVE index. Let's check the bond auctions and let's see. He's literally trying to engineer this. I'm telling you guys, doesn't really matter what the Fed funds rate is right now. It matters how easy financing conditions are for the Treasuries market, how good that collateral is. Either way, Bitcoin's going to go to the moon. But the option on the right is that we get some form of crisis because they're not able to engineer this environment and we're going to get a huge sell-off of not only Bitcoin, gold, stocks, everything down, dollar up, and we're going to get some form of central planning intervention, right? And we've kind of already seen this. So, I want to just remind you guys on the right here, what you're looking at in white is the MOVE index and I drew a red line there at 130. So, every time, and on the bottom is DXY, is the dollar index. So, every time the MOVE index breaks 130, Washington floods the system and flooding the system with new currency weakens the currency, right? So, I highlighted in the purple boxes, every single time this volatility index spikes, they hammer the dollar lower. Hammering the dollar lower is great for Bitcoin, obviously. So you can see end of 2025, right? Like Bitcoin, that was when Bitcoin made its last all-time high, right? And so this is what we need to keep an eye on. Either this white is going to remain healthily below the red. Bessent's going to engineer market conditions he needs and then every little thing like this little buyback program, not issuing long duration, all these little things like doubling this small tiny buyback program, Bitcoin went from 60 to 80 in a snap of a finger. So these tiny little financial engineering mechanisms, Bitcoin is going to soar because this is liquidity coming back, you see, and we'll keep an eye on it. We'll keep looking at these very clear signals to see if Bessent is engineering, if he's going to get away with this. If something blows up, which is the white spiking above the red, then we already know the policy reaction. Bitcoin's going to sell off until they hammer the dollar lower, which is that blue line, and then Bitcoin's going to take off again. But this is how to understand the game, the true game that's at play. The media is focused on the wrong things. They don't understand what these guys are trying to accomplish. On the Jack Mallers Show, you bet your ass we do. You bet your ass we do.

So the question is not just how much money costs. That's kind of my high level, the way I would explain it in a sentence. The Fed funds rate, sure, they're setting the price of money, but what we care about, what Bitcoin cares about is the quantity of money, whether the system can keep the credit flowing. If the credit starts to seize up, we get a crisis and a bailout. If they keep the credit flowing, Bitcoin's going to continue to grind higher. People are like, 'Man, this is weird. Bitcoin is just kind of grinding methodically higher.' It's because Bessent is engineering credit flow. This is why, I don't know, I tried to jam this all in in 45 minutes. Hopefully this was easy to understand. If not, you guys can call in at ask.jackmallers.com and ask me any questions you want on this. But it's all about creating an orderly Treasuries market so that collateral is money good and credit can flow without bond volatility, treasury volatility, disorderly market. That's why he doubled the bond buyback. That's why he stopped issuing duration. And that's why he's issuing more at the front end. Trust, trust, trust.

Okay, let's get into some Strike updates. What did we launch, guys? 3.6% interest on your cash. In the United States, if you deposit cash, you get 3.6% interest. This occurs daily, paid out monthly in Bitcoin. Okay. These funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000 and there's no minimum balance to enroll. Okay? Now, there is a minimum balance, like, you know, paying out 3.6% on a dollar. Some people are like, 'I deposited a dollar.' Yeah. Okay, guys, listen. You know, I think the minimum balance in order for you to actually get paid out any money, because 3.6% on like a dollar is nothing, right? But I think it's a hundred bucks maybe. But, you know, to enroll, just to enroll, there's no minimum. If you want to start like receiving the payouts, I think it's a hundred bucks. Funds are FDIC insured. So, this is no funny business. This is real, legit interest on cash. What we're doing, listen, industry average, which you can see on the screen, is like three some odd percent. We make our money as a Bitcoin company in entirely different ways. We're not the banking system. We don't take your deposits and keep the interest for ourselves. I don't need your interest to pay my bills. So, we give you guys all the interest that we receive. Hopefully, we can continue to get this number higher. I've talked about getting this number up to four, five, six percent by including our Bitcoin-backed lending program. I need a specific license for that. That's why these rates aren't there yet, but that's where we're going. But this is huge. I mean, we've seen a ton of cash flow onto the platform. Immediate adoption of this feature. You guys have been asking for it for a long time. I'm glad to have finally given it to you. This 3.6%. Hopefully that number just goes up. And we're really proud of where we're starting to be, totally honest with you. And again, this interest accrues daily, pays out on the first of every month in Bitcoin. So it's a way to stack sats without having to buy sats. Have your idle cash earn Bitcoin for you. FDIC insured up to $250,000.

The next day, we launched Stacks. Another highly, highly, highly requested feature. This feature allows you to create buckets of funds on your Strike account. So you guys have said Bitcoin is increasingly your savings account, but your savings has many different goals, many different objectives. You need different ways to organize it. Whether it's savings for your business, an emergency fund, your kid's college tuition, down payment on your first home, holiday vacation throughout the next few years. So you can create different what we call Stacks, which is organizing your savings, organizing your Bitcoin. You can move Bitcoin between your Stacks. You can set up different DCAs for different Stacks. You can say, 'I'm going to stack sats every single hour for our next vacation, every single week for my kid's future college tuition, and every single month for the first down payment on our next family home.' And then if your business savings is doing really well and business is booming, you can move sats from your business stack to your kid's college tuition stack, so on and so forth. It's a lovely feature. Again, it just makes Strike pleasant to use. We want Bitcoin to feel safe, to feel useful, to benefit you, organized. This is the new savings account. This is a way that people are going to afford that home, afford to put their kid through school, afford to pass wealth down generations. And we want you guys, well, this is why we built Beneficiaries, an inheritance feature. This is why we built Stacks, interest on cash, Bitcoin-backed loans, a full suite of financial products so that you guys can benefit your lives with this financial revolution.

On top of that, later that same week, okay, we do not mess around, we launch custom send limits, which is another security enhancement. So, you can set limits on how much money can leave your Strike account on a rolling 7-day limit. And in order to change this setting, Strike requires a five-day cool-off period. This helps against wrench attacks or physical attacks. If someone breaks into your house and steals your phone and tries to take money off the platform, the most they can take is whatever is left of this limit that you set. And if they try and change this setting, it will take 5 days for it to be enforceable. That gives you plenty of time to get in contact with us, prove to us that there's a nefarious actor, someone that's being malicious, something that is wrong. So, this helps against theft, physical theft, wrench attack, physical violence, theft of your phone, of your device. You can set this limit. Changing this limit takes time. And the other thing, I know some other platforms have this, but they don't have it on all controls like on auto withdrawals. So, you know, there is a small hack that people can use, which is routing around these rules on things like auto withdrawals. We took the time and implemented it across all features, across everything that could possibly leave the platform. So, if you want to enhance your security on Strike, I just enabled this. I set mine. There's a certain amount of money that can leave my Strike account on a rolling 7-day limit. So, if someone gets access to my phone, puts a gun to my head, and says, 'Jack, give me the most you can out of your Strike account, or else I'm putting a bullet between your eyes.' There's only so much you can take off. And if they say, 'Raise that limit.' I'm not kidding. I physically can't raise the limit. Strike requires five days for any request to change that limit to be intact so that you have plenty of time to get in contact with us, signal a red flag, call the police, whatever. Adds an immense amount of security to your account, which is hugely beneficial, especially nowadays. Security is top of mind for us at Strike and for the Bitcoin industry. And if you zoom out, all of the security features that we've enabled, we now have these custom send limits, protected withdrawal, so you need 2FA above your threshold on any action that you choose. We have PIN and biometrics, so I have face and I have a PIN to unlock. You can do fingerprinting as well. We have passkeys and security keys. We have anti-phishing code. So every single email that we send you as a company comes with an anti-phishing code that you can pair with on your account. So you never need to guess, wait, is this Strike? Is this Jack that's emailing me? Or is someone phishing? Is someone pretending? Is someone trying to scam me? We email you with a code that you can pair with your app so that you always, always, always know if it's actually from us, if it's actually our support team, if it's actually Strike or me that's talking to you, so you don't get spoofed, you don't get tricked. The last one, this is my secret favorite, device management. Right now, you can log in to Strike via Plaid and pay bills by linking Strike to other accounts. So, as my wedding is approaching, I'm paying all sorts of bills, right? You got catering and alcohol and all this servicing involved with your wedding. And I'm logging into my Strike account on my fiancée's iPad to pay bills as our wedding approaches. And every single time I log in and pay a bill on her device, I log into my Strike account, I see all the active sessions that my Strike account is active on. I can see it on this iPad, on this phone, on this computer. And every single time I go on and pay a bill, I open my Strike account, go into my security, and I wipe all those sessions. I log out of everything in the click of a button, and I make sure the only active session that persists for any time is the one on my phone. So, if I log into Strike on my computer and before I go to bed, I log out. Log in on my fiancée's iPad before I go to bed, I log out. So that nobody is able to steal another device. 'Oh, Jack is still logged in on his Strike account. Let's see if I can do anything fishy.' I'm able to remotely clear sessions from my phone. Unbelievable. And by the way, this isn't the last of it. In a week or two, we're going to launch whitelisted trusted addresses so that any funds leaving your Strike account can't go to a hacker's address. If you want, you can set the addresses that withdrawals have to go to and changing that security feature. Also, you can impose a 5-day cool-off limit so that if anyone, you know, puts a gun to your head or steals your phone or does anything physical and malicious, they can't just change the settings and wipe your account. We want to be the dream Bitcoin account. Security, protection, safety, functionality, lending, brokerage, bill pay, direct deposit, interest on cash, all of it, guys. All of it. This is the complete Bitcoin account. Brokerage fees don't exceed 0.89%. Zero fees. So guys, look at that on the top left. 0.25 to 0.89% brokerage fee. Zero fees on DCA and direct deposit. Free Bitcoin withdrawals to cold storage. You can pay your bills with dollars or Bitcoin. You can get 12-month loans, volatility-proof loans, line of credit, payment-at-maturity loans where you get a loan, you don't have to make monthly payments to us. And now you can get 3.6% interest accrued daily, paid monthly on your cash balance, paid in Bitcoin, and all of the security features that we continue to add to. And there's some custody stuff that we're still working on that isn't ready to be announced, but is incredibly exciting. Let's go. Let's go. Keep the feedback coming. Keep letting us know what you guys want, how we can make the product better. The complete Bitcoin account. We are not, you know, Coinbase. We are not Polymarket. We are not DraftKings. We really truly care deeply about being the best Bitcoin experience for you guys. If you want to take Bitcoin seriously, if you need a Bitcoin financial service performed, we want you to think of Strike. You know, if you want to gamble on the weather, you want to bet on sports, that's neither here nor there. You're totally allowed to do what you want to do. But when it comes to Bitcoin financial service, you don't want a thousand coins in your face. You want a financial account that you can organize, like set a stack for my future home, for my son, for my daughter, for my business. I need a loan. I want to earn interest on my cash. I want to DCA for no fees. I want to make sure that my account is absolutely secure. We got your back. Strike, your Bitcoin company.

Real quick, I have a request for you guys. We are, now that we have our MiCA license, we're doing some European and UK product and market research. I want to understand the Bitcoin-backed lending market over there a lot more. We've had an immense amount of success in Bitcoin-backed loans in the United States. I mean, Strike is about to cross the billion-dollar loans issued threshold in less than 18 months with no marketing whatsoever. I mean, so proud of the team. Absolutely killing it. We've become one of the more prominent consumer and small-to-medium-sized business lenders against Bitcoin in the world. Now we're getting into the institutional game and lending out to high net worths or institutions or family offices. Our rates start as low as around 6% for really, really massive, you know, 50 million-plus dollar loans. So if you need one of those, reach out. We're about as cheap and secure as you'll find. But Europe, I'm going to Europe next week. I'm going to live there for about a month. I just want to understand the market better now that we have our MiCA license. We can do marketing there. We can build certain products there. I really want to understand. So, if you have any insights on the Bitcoin-backed lending market in Europe, who you guys use today, what rates, like how Strike can be helpful, be better, what podcasts we need to sponsor, just, you know, I'm so familiar as an American with the American market. I'm lesser familiar with the European market. So, I'm going to come down there and I'm going to live there. I'll let you guys know. I think I'm going to spend some time in Copenhagen. I'll be in Paris for a little bit. I'll be in Amsterdam for a little bit. I'll be in Italy for a little bit. I'm going to bounce around, try and talk to as many Bitcoiners as possible. But if you guys have any information, are you willing to talk to me and the team? Where do people get their Bitcoin-backed loans from? Do you guys like getting Bitcoin-backed loans in dollars? Would you prefer euros and pounds? Is it the rate that matters the most? You know, how can we best serve you? And we're also going to build a bunch of other features for your brokerage and stuff, but that I feel more confident in. The Bitcoin-backed lending is a newer business for us, immensely successful in America. And we're now able to actually go for it in Europe now that we've got our license and we got the stamp of approval from all the regulators. Then I would really like to hear from you guys, all you European and folks in the UK. What you need from us, who else you use, why you use them, what features you would need, how you think about it, and especially those of you that have a lot of Bitcoin and you may not want to sell it. So anyways, please DM me, reach out, email me. I'd love to hear from you.

And with that, just the schedule this week. So tomorrow, like I said, hopefully we got an animation. And I think we'll do one on fiscal dominance, breaking down what that means and why the debt drives the conversation. I'm going to try and get a Bitcoin 101 episode out on Wednesday, and a Bitcoin history on Thursday. I mean, this is a lot of content. My CEO duties sometimes make me miss a day or two. I'm going to try my best. And then I got an Ask Jack for you guys on Friday. I got you. That's always fun. If you guys want to call in and ask questions at ask.jackmallers.com. And then the last one, or last two, I guess. I'm uploading all the Strike product videos to the channel. I've heard demand that you guys want a video on like how I use Strike or how I set up my security on my Strike account or how I use the Bitcoin line of credit on my Strike account. So, if you guys want more Strike videos, let me know. I've just been uploading our product announcements to this channel. And then, Dollar Bill, I've been telling my dad for months. Like, you guys love hearing from my dad. Love his market insights. I mean, he contrasts me pretty well. He's a Wall Street veteran. He has more financial market experience than I have years on this planet. He's like the best trader I've ever seen. Smartest guy I know. And so, I finally got him to give a market update. It was 5 minutes long. We put some edits on top of it and we released it. You guys seem to really like it and like to hear from him. And so let me know any feedback on that. He said a cadence of like every other week, maybe twice a month, he's happy to pop in, give market insights if you guys want to hear from him more, hear from him less, hear from him on specific things. He really appreciates all the support and the kind words. It means a lot to him. He's more of a behind-the-scenes guy. He's retired on the ocean somewhere. Not to dox him, but he's living the best life possible and the grind of releasing content every day and keeping up with Bitcoiners on the internet is not his utmost interest, but he does genuinely appreciate the community we're building and all the love you guys have for him. And he's more than happy and willing to give some market insights every now and then. So, he's thinking like an every other week cadence. But any feedback you guys have on that, let me know. And that's just more fun content, unique content, that we got for you guys. So, with that, I'm out of here. Thank you for all the love and the support. We're almost at 50,000 YouTube subscribers. We're like less than a thousand away. If you guys can subscribe, that would mean a lot. Helps the message travel further, gives this channel a bit more credibility. The road to 100,000 has always been my goal. I had no idea the show would turn into what it is. But damn is this cool. And so, if you can like and subscribe if you aren't already. And we'll try and get a piece of content out to you guys that's totally unique that you can't find anywhere else every single day. Much love. Take care. See you tomorrow. Animation on the way. Peace.