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.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, March 13th, and today we are talking about the

Binance executives that remain detained in Nigeria. Before that, however, if you are enjoying

the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive

deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show

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Hello friends, lots of pretty interesting things to discuss today. As I mentioned, our main story

is going to be these finance executives that are stuck in Nigeria and the U.S. government's

lack of a response to that, but first let's do a quick macro check-in to lead us off.

Yesterday we got February's CPI numbers, and they came in a little hotter than

expected. More important than that, though, they showed that inflation is stuck well above target.

Headline CPI climbed slightly to 3.2% on an annualized basis compared to 3.1% the previous month.

Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, dipped a little to 3.8% compared to January's 3.9%. Still, it's now been

eight months without a meaningful drop in inflation, with CPI failing to break below 3%.

The big implications of this is that lackluster progress will make it very difficult for the Fed

to justify rate cuts any time soon. Markets are currently pricing in three rate cuts this year beginning in June.

Bitcoin seemed to react strongly to the data release, plunging by 3.6% to hit 69,300.

Drop was partially filled within the hour recovering to 71,500, and the recovery continued throughout

the day, with today beginning at fresh all-time highs above 73,000. This price action does suggest that

Bitcoin is currently doing its best to ignore macro headwinds, doesn't need rate cuts to perform

over the short term. Here's how the Kobayisi letter summed up the situation. They write,

...