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, January 10th, 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.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends, back with the first Friday 5 of 2025. On the surface this week seems kind of quiet, but I think that there's a lot that's actually quite interesting here. I mentioned in the show that I think it's a combination of postscript and prelude, by which I mean, some of the big stories were about clean up from before, getting a better picture of what was actually going on with the FDIC during Operation Showpoint 2.0, but a lot of its prelude in the sense of looking forward, or maybe just

anticipating unknowns in the future, be it about Trump's economic policies or inflation.

Anyways, it's a good conversation, so let's not delay it any further. Here we go.

Most of these weeks, we've had a ton of news.

We were obviously off last week.

Well, it's been a little bit slower this time.

Now I think we have a little more macro to discuss, a few, you know, regulatory things,

but not the heavy hitting stories that we've been having over the past month.

Yeah, it's a lot of postscript and prelude right now, you know, kind of clean up from the past,

anticipation for the future. And weirdly, I think that even flows over into macro.

You know, we've got a lot happening based on very little information, which always sort of

reflects, say, tensing, you know, more than actual

reality. So it's been pretty interesting, although certainly quiet, relatively speaking.

Yeah, I think this is one of those moments when you go back to markets hate uncertainty,

right? And we're in this transitional period between, obviously, Biden and Trump presidencies

with a lot of unanswered questions as to what is coming,

but also a lot of confusion in data, in my opinion, which is making things a little more muddled,

right? Obviously, we've had quite a few rate cuts and we have yields flying, right?

And I don't think many people expected that mortgages would be at

multiple year highs after the Fed started its cutting cycle. Adding to it, I mean, if we're just

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