Gold Sets the Bar, But Bitcoin Can Catch Up. Here’s How: Bits + Bips

I would say since inauguration, Bitcoin specifically has become a risk asset. Whether you like it or not, Bitcoin's done very well in periods of monetary accommodation, but I think at some level it was in many ways a victim of its own success. I do think it needs to get to a point where it has a more currency-like volatility.

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Bits and Bips the Interview. I'm your host Steve Erlick and I'm here today with a repeat guest Steve Saznik, the chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. So Steve, welcome and why don't you briefly introduce yourself for any of our new listeners?

Sure. First of all, great to be back with you. Thanks once again for the invitation. My name is Steve Sausnik. I'm the chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. I apparently just completed 30 years with the firm. That came out like an internal email and I've been getting bombarded with congratulations. Not a gold watch, but congratulations are nice.

I joined the firm having been on the sell side for a few years before that with some of the bulge bracket firms. At the time, Timber Hill, which was the firm I joined, was an options market-making firm. We were just getting big into equity options trading, and they hired me as someone who understood the risks of both options and individual equities.

For almost 25 years, I was an options market maker. Along the way, I somehow got the opportunity to talk to people like yourself, and I became a talking head and then a writer. As we moved away from options market-making, which we don't do anymore, we strictly became a customer-facing business. My role changed over time to where I became a full-time commentator, author, strategist, etc.

As a firm, this is a crypto-oriented discussion, and we are not one of the pioneers of crypto. We prefer to deal in environments with a bit more regulatory clarity, being a very heavily regulated firm on so many levels. Though over time, we've recognized that while we maybe weren't at the first, we certainly need to be in the game, and we offer a full slate of major crypto products. We've actually just announced that you can now fund accounts with stable coins.

We understand the potential, though we want to avoid some of the frothier, less regulated, less transparent portions of the business.

Well, that's great, and I have to say if they do try to give you a gold watch, you should ask for Bitcoin instead.

Well, I guess maybe not depending on the gold speed today. We're going to get into that. So maybe at least for the short time, gold could be the way to go. But a lot to talk about today. Greenland, everything going on in Davos. As we're speaking, I believe the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on whether or not Donald Trump can fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. So much to discuss, and we're going to get to all of it.

But before we do, just a brief disclaimer. As always, nothing that you hear on this program is investment or financial advice. For more disclosures, please see unchained.com bits and bips.

So, Steve, let's dive right into it. The world's attention today is on Davos. President Trump spoke earlier this morning. I guess he assuaged markets a little bit by ruling out the possibility of using force to take over Greenland and its 66,000 inhabitants, although that could always change depending on how Europe responds to that, I guess. But markets are clearly on edge.

When I was trying to think of how to start this discussion, this is one of those real moments where cryptocurrency needs to take a hard look at itself because again, gold is setting new all-time highs, precious metals demand is going through the roof. People are looking to the safe havens as yields on treasuries and Japanese bonds go up. Bitcoin's struggling. And this is just another reminder that although it's purported to be a safe haven, it hasn't earned that narrative just yet. So, how are you making sense of all this?

It's funny you bring this up because I literally alluded to this in a piece I wrote, and today you can find these all on Interactive Brokers ivare campus or interactivebrokers.com. Look for traders insight or search for me. I did allude to this, and I think you raise a very important point. For a lot of time, we were hearing about, is Bitcoin digital gold? In one sense it can be because it's a non-dollar. I'm going to say decorrelating, but it's not. Let me get to that. But certainly in many ways it exists outside of the mainstream of finance. And I mean that in a positive sense in this case.

It is non-dollar, it's non-fiat, all that sort of stuff. But what it's showing us is, on a in a period like this where it's hitting the fan, you'd expect something like this to be doing better and it's not. I think we've seen certainly in the last calendar year, I would say since inauguration because we're one year in, crypto in general, Bitcoin specifically has become a risk asset whether you like it or not.

Bitcoin's done very well in periods of monetary accommodation, but I think the turning point at some level was in many ways it's a victim of its own success because the ETF launches were among the most successful ETF launches ever, if not the most. I think IBIT is literally the most successful ETF launch by many measures. Crypto became an investment for normies.

It hit me when a few months ago I was invited to speak at a crypto conference here in Connecticut. I'm based in Fairfield County, Connecticut. A friend of mine who I used to work with invited me to speak. They host some crypto conferences. It was around the time where I was saying that regardless of your opinions on crypto, I don't think digital asset treasury companies are really the way to do it because to me it seemed like you were paying $2 for a dollar's worth of coins, which for better or worse in many cases has played out that way.

I thought I was being invited in there to be the crotchety old grandpa, saying, see kids, this is what happens. Don't go crazy in the stock market, even if you like this as a crypto investment. I was pretty much closer to the average age of the room. The other two guys on my panel were crypto natives, guys in their 20s, early 30s kind of thing. They actually didn't push back too hard on my digital asset treasury idea because quite frankly they're not stock market guys, they're crypto guys.

I realized that the people in the room in many cases were stock market guys and they were investing in crypto because they could do it in their retirement accounts and because they could just do it like a normal stock. The problem is we already had a pretty high correlation between the price of Bitcoin and the NASDAQ 100. I think that reinforced it, the enthusiasm over the president leaning into crypto. At the same time, it became very easy for normal average investors who are not necessarily crypto natives to get into it.

It means that they're looking at it the same way they're looking at everything else in their retirement account. If they are, again, if I'm in the median, that means half the people were older than me, and that means they're retired or close to retiring. They don't want to deal with a 30% drawdown. So what we've seen recently is we had this little bounce recently where I guess we went from call it 90 to 97. I think that was largely there was a lot of buying from the said digital asset treasury companies that I think propelled it.

But when push came to shove, when the risk hit the market, they went out of crypto and they've continued people have continued to buy gold and to some extent silver as a hedge. Silver is off in its own world too. I'm going to say actually in many ways silver is the original and current crypto favor in its own way in terms of being a very speculative risk asset. The divergent performance between gold and quote unquote digital gold is quite telling.

And this is a narrative that we've seen plenty of times before. I'm curious if there's anything unique about today's circumstances that you want to point out?

Unique I'm not sure. I think this is it's it in many ways it's all too typical. It's a movie we've seen before over financial history in terms of you've got an asset and it's made a lot of people a lot of money through speculation. I'm going to say maybe not to the in terms of magnitude this is greater than most, but we have seen periods where all sorts of risk assets have gotten very popular, have seen big waves of appreciation, and then gravity inertia you need fresh money you need fresh enthusiasm to maintain momentum and at some level the bigger the momentum the more the more you need of it.

That's where it hit me that a lot of the people were looking that were now in this are not in it because of any great love of or appreciation for the merits of crypto or blockchain or any of the other stuff. They were buying it because it was going up. Now that it's not going up, it's not in some ways like a stock where you could say, "All right, I'm going to buy the dip." You did see people buy the dip and it hasn't worked as well in crypto because this is where it's a negative. There's no earnings. There's no revenues.

I can't tell, we can debate what the right valuation is for Nvidia, let's say. We know that at some level there's a value to the asset to the productive assets that Nvidia controls. Bitcoin is not inherently a productive asset in the same way that gold isn't a productive asset the same way that really dollars are. It's just it's different. It's a store it's a store of wealth. As a result, it's not as you know it and in this case it's a particularly volatile historically store of wealth. That's where you get into the that's where you sort of find find ourselves in this in the situation we're in.

A couple questions on that because I just want to go a little deeper into the store of wealth and sort of the safe haven narrative that we've been discussing. You're a good person to ask because you sort of cut your teeth in trades, but you are cryptocurious if I could be so bold. I understand all the reasons why Bitcoin should be a better store of value in a way than gold. It's easily divisible. It's easily transferable. There's a finite supply. Whereas nobody knows how much gold there actually is in the world, let alone when some meteor comes and we start mining gold in outer space. All these things can happen.

Is it just a question of time horizon like for instance like Bitcoin could experience drawdowns of 30% in a matter of days or weeks or month whereas gold perhaps not. Maybe it's a difference of perspective like safe haven during acute moments gold clearly is better but I've heard many people I mean I've interviewed on this show and talked Bitcoin is sort of like the doomsday hedge like Bitcoin is the is the asset when the really hits the fan and things completely go go go to hell. Is the debate more nuanced than why isn't Bitcoin just acting and gold during periods like this or I'm curious your thoughts on that.

You raise some important points and part of it is historical. Gold has a lot buzzes and years of thousand year head start on Bitcoin. An EMP wouldn't wipe out gold holdings, but it would severely hamper your ability to trade to trade your access your crypto and convert that. It's still there's, you know, the in both cases, neither is really useful as a currency. You have to convert it into something else to use it. I guess in theory I could go into a supermarket with Krugarans and spend them or whatever, silver coins, but realistically nobody's going to do that.

I think though the difference is just it in many ways it's how it's been operating in in more recent times and who and who owns it. Gold is because of gold's thousands of years of history and it being perceived as a stodgier counterpart to the much more exciting crypto. It hasn't had the sort of day-to-day volatility. It's just much less volatile. Its volatility is more akin to that of a currency than to a pure risk asset. It's gotten a bit more volatile recently, but still it's more currency-like volatility or certainly no worse than let's say equity-like volatility.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin specifically and then the smaller the market cap of the coin, the more volatile it gets. These are very volatile instruments. So it's very difficult to view a store of wealth in the same way when you can have huge daily or weekly price swings.

One of my favorite little features as we've seen this rally in gold and this move in Bitcoin is a lot of ink or pixels have been spilled pointing out how much how gold has drastically outperformed Bitcoin recently and stipulated has. The math is the math. Over a two-year period, the performance is actually relatively similar. Gold has pulled ahead in the last couple weeks, but when I first pulled up the chart a couple weeks ago, they were like almost identical over that basis.

I think that flows into the theory of people portfolio shifts having a big role in this because if you're going to allocate, if you're thinking from the normie perspective, or the general portfolio manager perspective of I'm going to have a certain amount of my assets in risk hedges or non-correlating assets, you're going to go to the one that's performing as opposed to the one that isn't. Gold has been performing whereas crypto hasn't. Because they are now both equally easy to trade, Bitcoin's actually easier in the sense that it's always accessible, whereas you don't always have a 24-hour market in gold.

Going back to the broader investment world, that still operates 9:30 to 4 5 days a week to a large extent. We're close to 235 at this point in non-crypto stuff actually, but still it's not the liquidity isn't there at off hours necessarily. The fact that you have big moves in crypto at weird times and particularly over the weekends is another way of saying it's not everywhere all the time 20 24/7 in anything you trade. But I digress.

If you're just saying, all right, I want to have five to five or 10 or 15 whatever percent of my holdings in something that I perceive as being decorrelating, what's the difference if I'm it's very easy for me to sell IBIT and buy GLD if I were so inclined to do so and vice versa.

Let me just put you briefly on the spot. Do you think Bitcoin can ever be a safe haven like gold?

Ever? No. I'm not going to say that. I think it's got some work to do though because I do think it needs to get to a point where it has a more currency like volatility. Remember gold is the original currency. It hasn't been for decades, but century or more at this point, but well decades. It doesn't have that volatility, but Bitcoin is still too volatile to be thought of as a means of exchange and as a pure risk asset.

It depends a lot on where you live. If I lived in Argentina or Turkey or some other country where generally the rule of thumb would be if my government has to borrow money in a currency that's not my own I would want to have a big allocation to gold. I don't see why it shouldn't be Bitcoin especially because it's especially because in many ways it's more funraable and easy to move.

I have one more question on this topic and then we actually have a little breaking news that I'm gonna we're gonna discuss. I'm just interested too because you mentioned other countries. Is it possible that any demand like safe haven demand that could be going to Bitcoin perhaps could be going to stable coins instead?

Absolutely. Think about going back to the volatility argument, right? If I can be reasonably assured and I don't want to open the whole can of worms about what's underlying certain stable coins, but let's stipulate that these stable coins are in fact backed one to one by T bills or some other sort of hard asset. Because I don't have volatility that way. I've got all the advantage I've got all the advantages of fungeibility and the ease of movement.

It would be a non-coral, you know, it would be again if I own if I'm living in if I'm living in Buenosy, I'm holding US dollars as opposed to Argentine pesos. This way, at least if I know that I'm putting in X amount, if I'm buying X amount X dollars worth of something, I have a reasonable belief that it's going to be continue to be worth X dollars of something. As opposed to something that can fluctuate wildly. If four months ago I was trying to move money out of Istanbul, would I be much better off if I'd put it in a stable coin or would I be much better off if I put it in Bitcoin? The answer should be obvious.

I do think that stable coins there there's a value there, but then of course you have the other con consideration of cryptos are truly decentralized. stable coin you have somebody managing them with assets. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. But to answer your question I do think stable coins have have taken a lot of that luster.

One thing worth paying attention to as well and tokenized gold is still such a small percentage of the overall gold market obviously and bitcoins too. I know that a trading volume for tokenized gold overall AUM is going up, but that is something also to worth to consider moving into the future because that can also perhaps siphon off some demand from from from Bitcoin to get the benefits of gold without necessarily with with the the benefits of gold and the benefits of blockchain rails together. Anyway, I promised you some breaking news, so let's let's get to it.

Curious what you think it might be. So but I'm not going to I'm not going to put you on the spot. So a new truth from Donald Trump outlined framework for future Greenland deal after NATO meeting with Mark Root tariffs postponed VP JD Vance Secretary of State Marco Rubio to lead negotiations. If you'll indulge me I'll just read it really quickly. Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the secretary general of NATO Mark Root. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. We have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and in fact the entire Arctic region.

This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America and all NATO nations. Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st. I believe those were 10% with 25% by June. Additional discussions are being held concerning the Golden Dome. That's a missile defense system as it pertains to Greenland. Further information will be made available as discussions progress. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witoff, and various others as needed will be responsible for the negotiations. They will report directly to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Before I ask you for a response, as far as I can tell right now, I know that the Unchained team is looking into this. I don't see any comment from NATO any representative of Denmark or other European nations. So we'll have to kind of see what happens with that. But just at first glance, Bitcoin has already shot up from about 88% to 89%. I imagine if we look at a chart, other risk assets are also going to perk up at least temporarily and then depending on what happens the rest of the day and and after additional commentary, things could change. But we were going to get to this anyway. So, I think this is a great launching off point to just kind of I want to get your reactions to this.

Well, this is this news, it's obviously a one-sided post. We have not heard back from the Europeans but right and that's here and here there have been two premises and again this dubtales in with what I published earlier today which now to some extent is obsolete because of breaking news but number one is geopolitics don't really affect stock markets per se and the reason being is for the most part they don't really have any direct effect on the things that really directly affect stock prices.

If you tell me that something's going on between the US and Venezuela, US and Greenland, etc., etc. I'll ask I'll give you the counterargument of how does this what does that mean for Microsoft for argument sake? It doesn't because Venezuela has not really been part of the world economy. The only US company really operating there in size was Chevron and it's clear that the other companies didn't really have much of an interest. In terms of Greenland, it's 55 or 60,000 people. That has, with the exception of a couple of like critical mineral stocks and things of that nature, it doesn't have an there's there's no real impact there.

It became a stock market event when the president threatened tariffs because all of a sudden 10% tariffs with some of our biggest trading partners that's that that does you know there there is a very very distinct answer to how does that affect any number of companies and so the key to the element here was not so much that there there may or may not be the framework of a deal because honestly we don't there's no details there. If he's backing off the tariff threats, well then that takes away a lot of the concerns that markets have about a whole Greenland affair.

I think you're not seeing the markets rally all the way back to yesterday's levels because we've seen him change his mind. This will also raise questions about a phrase I've heard a lot today and various people have asked me about today is the taco tree, which I don't like really using that, you know, but let me let me let me state it more apolitically because that's, you know, I'm I'm not a political analyst. So, let me, you know, I just want to say here, you know, the Trump put, speaking as a former options tradeoff for many years.

Before you continue I mean that may not necessarily be applicable here. I know there was I know like the market dropped maybe like 2% or something yesterday but that's still far cry from the big crashes that we saw back in April before it recovered. So taco probably isn't the right analogy in in this case even though that is the parallel that everyone's drawing right now.

It's not and I agree with you for that reason because he even said it in his speech this morning. He basically dismissed yesterday's decline as no as no big news. So, this will probably get interpreted as he always chickens out. I'm sure he's gotten an earful from a lot of people at Davos who are not fond of the tariff idea. I think it's act you know we can argue that it's a terrible you know it in many ways it's a policy that's completely not at all productive toward either you know to anybody's goals. Taking it off the table is fine.

I understand why there's a bit of a risk on bump on this news. We should have one. I see as I'm look I'm turning my head to look at because to look at my other screen. We got Bitcoin back up to like 90K, which is sort of to me this line in the sand between risk true risk on risk off. Money's flowing into small cap stocks. Russell 2000 zooming, but I think that's again just largely momentum as much as anything else. We are seeing more than a percent rally in in in most major stock indices. But we should if there are tariffs coming if the if there was a tariff threat that got the markets nervous and then there's and then the threat of tariffs is being withdrawn, we should cut back a lot of it.

I don't think we're necessarily going to race to get back everything because there are other things going on in the world. Much stronger Chinese yuan, a much much weaker Japanese government bond market. There's other things affecting stocks and and other asset classes and you know in US bond yields but you know certainly you know I understand why there's a bit of a risk on bump on this news.

Let's talk about bonds because I I was meaning to bring that up earlier today. The 10 year is up, longerdated bonds are up, and then, there's a lot of fear about what this means for the Japanese put, with their bonds going up, too. I know I'm sure you had some thoughts on this this morning. May has that changed at all with this kind of recent news or or not? I mean, how how big of a force is that visav what we just heard?

I think actually that's that it's a separate category here just I just saw you know I see now US bond the 10 years about 426. I know I noted on Friday that I was concerned that the yield popped up through 420 on Friday that's been sort of a line in the sand but it did it on light volume so I was a little bit dismissive of it. I think with the with the further rise in Japanese yield builds over the weekend that really that really put a that put a damper on on global bonds overall US bonds as well.

A key element when we look at what's goes on in Japan is the carry trade where people borrow money in yen and then use the yen to move elsewhere. Now you're losing a lot of the yield advantage because there was a good yield advantage to borrowing in yen as opposed to the US dollar. That's not fully evaporated. It is at the long end, but in the short end it's still there's still a little bit of an advantage. The lack of confidence in the Japanese bond market has caused the yen to weaken relative to the dollar. So you're not seeing people unwind their carry trades whether those and and also I think after the shakeout last year the carry trades are not as big as they were.

That does have an effect on risk assets and again as I stipulate Bitcoin is it Bitcoin other cryptos are a risk asset still and so that that's something that bears watching. I do think it had a lot, I don't think it's a necessarily a coincidence that part of the reaction that we saw in Bitcoin over the weekend could have been a bit of a front running of the Japanese bond market. It's very, this is where it becomes difficult to disentangle things. I can't fully disentangle all the pieces of spaghetti here, but they all do have a big influence on on people's risk tolerance.

Just going back to to Europe briefly, I'm curious what you think this means for the US EU trade agreements because it still has to be ratified by the EU. I know there were statements that it was pretty much being put on hold because of this new drama over Greenland. We're talking right now and don't know exactly what the reaction is going to be from from European counterparties to whatever these negotiations were in Davos, but how big of an overhang is is that on on markets and if because of this issue which I would imagine even if the US is somehow able to acquire Greenland, which I don't even know how that process would work, it would be months or years before that would probably happen. I'd imagine that kicks down kicks out the deadline for any trade agreement between the EU and US ratification of it, implementation of it much further along the much further down the line. What do you think the market impact is going to be on that from that?

Literally the headline hit that they were declining to ratify the deal while the president was speaking. I don't think that timing was a coincidence. We have to remember other countries, other you know, have cards to play. That is one of the cards that they have to play. We don't know what's going on behind the scenes at Davos. We don't know I don't know what conversations the president's been having.

The president was supposed to speak on CNBC. When I got on the call, they were teasing that he with you. They were teasing that he was going to come on any minute. I have it on on silent in the background. He still hasn't come on yet. Probably because he was doing whatever he was doing that led to this truth social post. These are all very moving targets. When you step back I mean if we wanted to exercise a bigger presence in Greenland it it's doable. There are treaties that say we can go open bases pretty much all around the country if we wanted to do so.

As Scott Besson put it as basically we'd rather we'd rather own than lease. I guess speaking in terms of the real estate you know idea that the president you know that president's background in real estate it's a fluid situation and and but and I guess the problem is whenever it comes to tariffs these are situations of our own making they they come up as a problem they come up as a problem because the president chooses to use them as a tool.

The other thing that we still have to hear about, we haven't we didn't we could have heard as early as yesterday. We certainly didn't hear today how the how the Supreme Court's going to rule on the tariffs and what the remedies may or may not be if they rule that the tariffs are, you know, were not done with the proper authority. Even if they knock down the tariffs, there's other measures that they can put them back in. Do they have to repay the money? there's a there's a there's so many moving parts when it comes to it, but ultimately as we learned last April, you know, the tariffs sort of exist at the president's whim to some extent, at least in their current form.

At this point, he chooses to threaten or implement them and he also chooses to renegotiate or withdraw them. That to me, as someone who's spent his life trading volatility that adds volatility because because you never quite know where you stand. I think the president views that his personal volatility as a as an asset. Makes him harder to pin down in his mind. But from a market point of view, it's actually sort of remarkable that the stock market's just rolled with this, you know, his personal volatility and his policy volatility.

I think that comes down too to just this whole idea of I mean like my background as I think you know before I even got into crypto is in geopolitics. I've been thinking a lot today about about NATO because I've been there like I've I've met soldiers from the Baltic states and I mean for them and this is more than 10 years ago. I mean after Russia started making treaties into Crimea but before like the big invasion in 2014 and stuff like this is a a life or death situation for them. Like they see NATO membership and the existence of NATO as existential to their future as independent like sovereign nations. Like you talk to people from Estonia and they still remember the the cyber attacks on on Talin and and all those types of things.

The reason I'm bringing all this up is because it it sort of reminds me of how much goodwill the United States has created for itself. Ever since the end I mean World War I when we became like the global financial superpower and then especially after World War II and then even more so after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the whole idea of Pax Americana and sort of like the predominance of liberal democracy and our sort of role as the benign hegeimon and the the fact that I mean with all of the like all this like I guess whiplash for lack of a better term from policy creates all this doubt, all this volatility as you said, a lot of markets are taking it largely in stride because I think of the power of the US and and the belief in just overall policy stability over decades like notwithstanding this particular blip regardless of of where people stand on the president personally and and the efficacy of these policies.

It's really it's really kind of fascinating and and I think that's important perspective to to keep in mind. I mean geopolitics like as you said it's I used to work for a political risk firm and like it's very easy to say politics affects everything and that's that's an oversimplification but like it is still relevant and there's times when it's acute there's times when it's more in the background but but it's still relevant and that's something that it's always kind of interesting to to remember. It's really interesting to see what's what's going to happen with with all of this and and I mean the future of NATO like that'll have huge impacts on markets and and so on and so forth.

No, I again I think that I'm encou I think I'm encouraged by the idea that it seems like the discussions were with NATO today because you know maybe somebody reminded him and may you know I don't know if it's a feature or a bug in his mind but that you know weakening NATO that is like literally Putin's wet dream. You're playing right you're playing right into his hands by antagonizing the other NATO members, and the idea of actually almost outright threatening other NATO members is is insanity from a geopolitical point of view, at least as I perceive it.

Believe it or not, Russian it might have been either the main Russian spokesperson Pescov or or the foreign minister Larv actually put out statements praising the US's policy towards Greenland and like clearly I mean their whole Russia's like goal of the last I don't know how decade plus has been to delegitimize and break up NATO. So this is like exactly what they're hoping for. It's going to sort of bind the US's hands, I believe, from negotiating an end to Ukraine and the war, too, if the US is pursuing its own territorial expansion. But any anyway, yeah.

We could go we could go on, but again, I don't want I don't want to make it too political. I wasn't You and I could talk offline about politics, but for from our thing, I got to stick to I got to stick to markets. Fair enough.

Let's go to one more big market story before we start to wrap up. Today the Supreme Court held hearings on whether or not Donald Trump could fire Lisa Cook. The Supreme Court has upheld his ability to fire heads of or commissioners from other regulatory agencies, but the Federal Reserve by statute is independent and has always kind of even in the eyes of this conservativeleing Supreme Court has sort of had a special type of status. From what I've read about the hearing, it seems like the justices are not disposed to letting Trump fire Cook.

This comes on the back of a number of Republicans standing up to, I guess, the Janine Piro's investigation into Jerome Pal. What do you think that's going to mean for the dollar? There's obviously a lot of things are in flux right now, but it certainly seems like there is some resistance and there's an and there's bipartisan this there's bipartisan desire for sort of an independent Fed and sort of cons continuing to ensure the the domination of the US dollar. I'm curious like your thoughts on that and how that plays into everything else that we discussed here today.

I think that there's a broad consensus bipartisan consensus that Fed independence, central bank independence is of paramount important part importance for markets. What was one of the examples of a currency that I gave you if you know if you live was