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 Sunday, July 13th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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com slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, today we are talking about one of the big themes driving Bitcoin

and crypto conversation in the public markets, which is, of course, the Treasury companies.

And you can tell that these things have become a major theme because they are getting critiques

out the woodwork. Today, we are looking at two critiques, neither of which I particularly

love, but both of which I feel like are instructive in some way, as a way to get a sense of where

the discourse is. And with the first one, we're going to go super mainstream. The piece is by

a Bloomberg opinion columnist Lionel Laurent, and it's called When Coffee Shops by Bitcoin,

things get frothy. Let's turn it over to the 11 Labs version of me, and then we will come back and discuss.

Economist Carlotta Perez once described the peak frenzy of boom-and-bust investing cycles

as the moment when capital gains are copy and pasted, with financiers indulging in

the intense repetition of the same successful recipe, from building canals

to launching dot-com startups. It rarely ends well. Perez was writing over 20 years ago,

but it's easy to see the similarities with the latest froth on financial markets. Companies that

tap capital markets for cash, use that cash to buy cryptocurrency, watch their

shares rise and do the whole thing again. What began with Michael Saylor's Micro Strategy

Inc, now just strategy, a software company valued at more than 200 times revenue because of the

...