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 Thursday, August 10th, and today we are talking about Coinbase's

attempt to bring the world on chain. 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

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breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, as you heard from that introduction, today we are talking about

Coinbase's base layer two, day one was yesterday, but before we do that, we need to do a little

check-in on CPI. Today was CPI Day, and this is always a good chance to get a gut-level sense

for where the macro is at the moment. And of course, to get a gut-level sense of the macro, or

specifically the Fed's part in the macro, there's perhaps no one that markets listen to more than

Nick Timoros, the chief economics correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, who is widely

seen as having the most direct line to the Fed. A couple days ago, he tweeted, Wall Street forecasters expect the

July CPI to show the headline in core indices rose 0.2% each from June. That would lower the 12-month

core CPI to 4.7% from 4.8% in June, while boosting the headline index to 3.3% from 3.0% in June.

Now, given that the markets really started to consolidate around this prediction, a lot of the

discussion was not so much about what the numbers would be, but what the anticipated slight

increase in inflation would represent from a narrative interpretation standpoint. The Kobayisi

letter wrote,

The fight against inflation is about to get really interesting.

Inflation is set to begin rising again just as a Fed pause is expected.

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