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 CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, August 1st, and that means this is the breakdowns

weekly recap. Last week, the show was all about the increase in the rhetorical battle between

the U.S. and China. We had seen

the dueling consulate closures. We'd seen Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talk about how

China needed to be thwarted effectively and a new era of freedom ushered in. Basically, it was

hard to look at that week and come off it without thinking

that there was such a focus on the U.S.-China relationship. This week was a little bit different,

although I do think that the China thing plays into it. It felt to me like this week was a lot

of setting the stage for the fall, and I mean specifically setting the stage

for the economic dimension of the political battle that is about to engulf the U.S. in a major way.

So let's go through a few of the different elements that I noticed.

Let's talk first about the Fed and what the Fed was signaling.

We had a Fed Open Markets Committee meeting, and really, in many ways, there was nothing new under the sun. However,

if you listen to my interview with George Guncalvez on Thursday, his argument was that the

subtle kind of read-the-te-leave signal that the Fed was sending is that

they are, in fact, sort of running out of different types of options, and in fact, fiscal needs

to do more, right?

We need the government, not just the Fed, to step in in a bigger way.

That coincided with four days of debates between Republicans and Democrats in Congress

...