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 Monday, January 26th, and today we are getting caught up on a wild weekend. Before we get into 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 notes or go to bit.ly slash Breakdown Pod. All right, friends, first off, sorry this is coming out a little bit late.

It got caught up in the big storm that happened this weekend. In any case, though, Bitcoin is stalling out as gold surges to new highs. Bitcoin ended the week with another Sunday night collapse, plunging to $86,000 to mark a five-week low. Meanwhile, gold is seeing a blue sky breakout, heading above $5,000 for the first time ever. Gold is now up 50% over the past six months, 15% since the year began, and a full 8.5% just last

week. Silver is firmly over $100 and close to returning to the 1980 high. Other metals are having

similar runs with short squeezes rolling through the sector. At this point, it's difficult to say this is just about the safe haven bid.

With precious metal volatility spiking, this looks like a full-blown speculative mania.

In many ways, gold's performance seems to be drawing attention and liquidity away from Bitcoin.

And while the speculative surge in gold is noteworthy, the safe haven narrative also can't be written completely off. U.S. foreign policy is increasingly volatile and capricious, to put it mildly. On the domestic front, civil unrest is at the risk of spiraling into something altogether more dangerous. In the background, we have record treasury issuance that's only expected to increase this year. These factors are helping drive foreign central banks to buy gold and volumes that haven't been

seen in decades. The gold breakout has been, in fact, so profound that crypto industry folks are

forced to pay attention. Some analysts are even looking to gold as their next big call.

Charles Edwards of Capital Management wrote, some of the possible price targets for gold here

might sound pie in the sky. As always, any and all of these trends can reverse at any time.

That said, gold trends tend to be sticky. They last five years on average. A typical gold

outperformance rally runs on and off for a full decade, and we are just 18 months into the current

gold bull market, giving the potential for a lot of runway from here. His note attached a $12,000 to $23,000

per ounce price target to gold over the next three to

eight years. Gold overwhelming Bitcoin's narrative seems to be an important driver for market

dynamic so far this year. Zero Hedge noted that the algorithmic Bitcoin traders took a full 24

hours to react to news that made a government shutdown more likely at the end of the week.

Prediction market odds surged on Saturday night after Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer threatened to filibuster funding bills if they don't exclude DHS funding. Quinn Thompson of Lekker Capital tweeted, said the same thing last weekend, shows the level of apathy in the asset class that it takes so long to react to obvious bad news. In both instances, traders had almost a full day to short Bitcoin on very clear

negative news. Strange market behavior. Are there no sellers left? Many are now tying their

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