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 crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, September 26th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

Our main conversation is about stocks and just how poorly they're performing. But first, let's do a quick recap of some of the topics that we looked at earlier in the week.

First, let's discuss the FinCEN files.

This was the big leak of thousands of documents that banks had sent to the U.S. Financial

Crimes Enforcement Network that were leaked about a year ago, but which BuzzFeed

News and about 108 different news organization partners have spent the last year pouring over.

Interestingly, these things kind of landed with a dud. They didn't get the big response and

angry energy that you might have expected. And I think

there are a couple reasons for that. First of all, I think that some people are confused about

where the wrongdoing came in. In previous leaks like this, like the Panama Papers, we had

secretive files that showed people specifically trying to avoid paying taxes or moving their

businesses offshore to avoid regulatory regimes, etc., etc. These leaks were something different

because banks were doing what they were supposed to do. They were reporting potential suspicious

activity that might involve money laundering to the

authorities exactly as they were supposed to do. I had some comments on my show about this on

Monday saying, well, look, what else do you want them to do? Now, the reality is that these banks

then chose to continue banking these suspicious accounts, to continue processing these billions and

billions and trillions of dollars in payments that they believed to be suspicious and likely money laundering.

Effectively, they just passed the buck, and as we discussed on Monday, because they filed these reports, they had almost

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