The Real Crypto Cycle: What Happens When Global Liquidity Peaks | Michael Howell

What you can see right now is that we're transitioning, unfortunately, out of a period that I've labeled the everything bubble. And that everything bubble is basically illustrating the fact that liquidity has been abundant relative to debt. Now what has gone on? Well, the first thing that's happened is that every crisis that we've seen pretty much since the GFC has been addressed by policymakers throwing liquidity back into markets, the celebrated QE trade, okay, that has been going on. And maybe we're about to restart that. Michael Howell, welcome to Bankless. It's an honor to have you, sir. Well, it's great to be here. A lot of things going on in markets right now. I think we we need to keep abreast of them. We do. And I think that I want to keep, abreast of global liquidity and looking at that through this lens. So your life's work has really been mapping money to flows, global liquidity flows. You help investors track global liquidity. I feel like I'm an investor, and many bankless listeners might be in a similar position as myself that kind of understands global liquidity but doesn't fully understand it. And I see a lot of noise out there, people talking about, well, you know, Fed said this and therefore this. Or they'll look at charts of m two and say, this is bullish or this is bearish. And I'm really looking for signal, you know, in this episode and in our conversation because I think you can provide it on global liquidity because you position global liquidity as a master variable that really drives cycles and crises and asset prices and certainly a lot that's happening in crypto. So can you talk about this? Maybe we can get into the one on one conversation. Is your basic position that that global liquidity acts as almost a a theory of everything? Well, I mean, I'm maybe it wouldn't go that far, but I'd I'd go, I'd I'd go fairly close to that. I think the, I think, you know, the interesting point to ponder is what, you know, why why did we get why did we get to this position? Why is looking at global liquidity so important? Why is why money flows and watching where the money is really, a key factor in understanding asset prices today? And I think the, you know, the beginning of my insight, was that I used to work for the American investment bank, Salomon Brothers. And Salomon Brothers was a big trading firm. It pretty much was for many, many years the bond markets internationally. And Salomon used to pride itself on not just research, but actually having, a big trading engine and a trading floor that was physically enormous. And part of the idea of that trading floor was that you could basically, see money moving, from desk to desk. And, you know, I used to sit in my my office in, in the research department. …