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, August 22nd, and that means it's time for the

breakdown weekly recap. On this weekly recap, I'm going to go through five themes that stand

out to me from the past week.

This will be brief, short, to the point precise. Let's go.

Number one, people aren't buying the Great American Recovery narrative.

So earlier this week, one of the biggest things to happen this week was that the S&P 500,

or as you probably heard me call it on Wednesday, the S&P 5, is now back at all-time highs. It is completely

erased its losses from the COVID crash and is now back on track for all-time highs and everyone

is happy, right? Well, the problem is that that is both a reality, but it's also a narrative.

And the narrative is that politicians try to use the stock market as the great economic scoreboard.

They say if the stock market is doing well, America is doing well, and you are doing well.

And the problem is that third part that you are doing well. Because as it turns out,

50% of Americans or more

can't access or don't access at least the stock market. They don't have stocks, they don't have

big money tied up in it. And so it is not a lot of support or comfort for them when these stock

prices go up when jobless numbers continue to rise as well. Those are two things that we don't

want to see correlated at the same time. We don't want to see stocks going up as jobless numbers continue to rise as well. Those are two things that we don't want to see correlated

at the same time. We don't want to see stocks going up as jobless claims are going up as well.

And so it's interesting to me. I was really fascinated to see how mainstream media, how

...