Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and circle, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, June 23rd, and today we are talking about some

contra signals on the idea of it being a new bear market. So yesterday, folks were starting

to get dreary. Obviously, the crypto markets haven't

been great for a while now, but there were some big psychological milestones that were crossed

yesterday and crossed in the wrong direction. The two biggest, of course, were Bitcoin dipping

down under $30,000, effectively retracing the entirety of 2021, and Ethereum going below below 2000 and meaningfully below for a while.

I've spent a fair bit of time on this show talking about why the market has been turning,

but I think it's worth reviewing here briefly as we set up the rest of today's show.

First, I believe that there is macro structural weakness.

We are now in the post-vaccine, pre-tapering phase of COVID-era macroeconomic policy.

That means that normal economic activity is resuming.

Indeed, some of the economic activity is even abnormal, as people catch up on things like

trying to build houses and move.

That's putting inflationary pressure on the system, which we see

even in the traditional measures like PCE or personal consumption expenditures or CPI Consumer

Price Index, holding aside any critique of those measures as tending to underestimate true

inflation. The Fed for their part has been saying that those pressures are transitory for months.

Inflation being transitory, of course, means that it is insufficient to get the Fed to consider

a change in policy, a withdrawing of support in the form of either bond buying or near-zero

...