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 Friday, August 23rd, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. 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.com slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, today we are back with another Friday 5 with me and Scott Melker.

It is yet another politic-y week with a big side of innuendo and rumor.

Pretty fun discussion here to be had, though, so let's dive right in.

Good morning.

Daniel, how are you?

Yeah, man, I was, I had my hair, my hair was good. I saw your hat, threw mine on last second so that we could have dueling Formula One. I had to wear this hat because the only other hat I have around is, I got a consensus, I think, and it's some crypto company that I have no idea what it is. So, you know, it's a great hat, but I can't, you know. Oh, if you put the hat on and they like rug pull next week or something. I know, then I'm getting a caller from, from Gary Gensler, you know. That's right. You'll be getting a call from Gary Gensler. But before we dig into crypto, politics, Gensler, etc. first story of theS. added 818,000 fewer jobs and thought, adding to

concerns about the economy. So, of course, this ties into the fact that Jerome Powell speaking

at Jackson Hole today. I think all eyes on the Fed, people looking for hints as to what he's going

to do as far as rate cuts seems baked in that we're going to get at least 25 bips in September, but also

leads to a debate as to whether we can believe the data, whether this was cooked purposely to

make the economy look stronger. I mean, this amounts to basically 68,000 jobs per report,

and those were strong reports because they beat by largely less than 60,000 jobs.

So we had a problematic job market this entire time that was somehow being hidden or that

they just missed it in the data on the revisions.

Yeah, I mean, so a couple, a couple things.

So one, even with these revisions, it still doesn't show the, you know, jobs market declining or anything.

It's just growing at a slower rate than they had thought. Two, my general belief until

proven otherwise is that the Occam's razor explanation for things is usually the better one.

And their systems for tracking this stuff are kind of old, and there's a bunch of factors that

they haven't really figured out how to deal with.

...