Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] These findings are notable because they demonstrate that even though the strength of the correlation may vary based on the time frame, bitcoins price direction generally aligns with the direction of global liquidity. Furthermore, its price direction more closely mirrors global liquidity than any other traditional asset analyzed.
[00:00:26] The best in bitcoin made audible. I am Guy Swan, and this is bitcoin audible.
[00:00:49] What is up, guys? Welcome back to bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we have got a read today, and this one is.
[00:01:03] This one is really, really cool because it appears to be confirmation of something we have talked about on this show, something that it seems very much in line with what Axiom Capital has been doing and focusing on with Alan Farrington and the crew over there, Sasha Myers. And as the author of bitcoin is Venice, by the way, Allen and Sasha. But we've read a few of their pieces. Orange is the new green and repricing the 21st. What is, what was that one titled? Just like repricing the 21st century or something like that.
[00:01:44] Pricing capital in the 21st century? I don't know. I don't know. I'll try to. I'll dig up those episodes because they are really fantastic, and I think they're really relevant to this piece. But we've got a piece from Lynn Alden today, and I don't want to lead it too much. I don't want to lead it too much because it's just awesome. And it's such an important thing to understand when we think of what money does and the, the role that it provides in allocating resources and coordinating resources at a global level and what the best money would do. Like what would money be able to do that no other good service or traded item is able to do because of its role, because of its liquidity, and because of its scarcity, because of the degree to which it is able to react to the conditions of the market. But I want to go ahead and just get into it. But before we do, anybody who listens to this in the next couple of days or, honestly, next couple of weeks, I, for those of you who know, I'm from North Carolina and the western part of the state, we were fine. We had like a kind of a rough ish thunderstorm for a little while, but there wasn't really much in our area to speak of. But the west of this state, all in the mountains got hit, was basically the worst rain and floods from Hurricane Helene that in like a hundred years, it's like, since 1916 or 1940, the last time that there was a flood this bad. And there are literal, like, mudslides that took out entire towns. And I'm. And that's not even an exaggeration. Like, I've been to Boone, Banner, elk, chimney Rock. Like, these places. We go to these places every year. We go up to the mountains. We love these areas. And they have all been just. I mean, I watched the helicopter footage of Boone and the whole thing, like, all of the downtown, like, everywhere that we go, it's all underwater.
[00:04:01] And there were crazy mudslides that just took out. I mean, you. You look at lake lure right now. I just saw footage of Lake Lure, which is a lake up near chimney Rock. And they're worried. They're still worried about the dam potentially breaking, but I'm hoping that most of that fear has subsided. But lake lure, the whole thing is just filled with parts of houses. Like, it's just wood. There's, like, a deck floating around. There's cars. Like, and I'm not even joking, like, like, one piece is just stacked behind the other piece. Like, you. It's hard to find just normal water. It is a horrible, horrible mess. And it's very possible that some of these towns just don't come back. Um, like, I don't know, like, a situation like chimney rock. And, like, if you see the main part, like, these are small towns, you know, and chimney rock was all, like, mainly in one big area on one street. And the whole, the whole street, that whole area is just wiped out. And a lot of these towns in that area, too, they, the main roads are literally along the waterways because it's just like, that's the easy place to cut through the mountain and get a road in place. And just because of the degree of the flooding, like, most of the roads, access roads are just destroyed in so many different places. And a lot of these places only have one road in and out. I say all of this just to, if you are available, if you're in the area, if you can donate anything, if you just think about anything, the number of people who need just, like, toothbrushes and baby wipes and diapers. Like, we're going out this morning, actually, in just a. In about an hour or two to drop off a lot of supplies. And I already started, started raising money on noster, and we got, like, $2,000 worth of bitcoin from you guys. Just zaps. Thank you so much. I think I'm going to go. To go with Samaritan's purse. But I want to get back, get word back from my good friend.
[00:06:14] My best friend lives out there and he also, he was in the coast guard and he works for search and rescue now. So he might have a better recommendation or a better place to go where I can send the funds and I can probably send him the bitcoin directly because he's a bitcoin er, but regardless, I'm just trying to figure out the best place for the funds to go. And we'll be donating just a bunch of stuff because there's a bunch of church groups and just community groups that are pulling supplies together in our area, packing it up, and they're just going to be heading straight out there, even all the way on the east coast, which that's like a five or six hour drive across the state. My, my wife's parents are doing the exact same thing. They have a group and they're packing up and they're getting ready to head out there. So basically everybody's helping out except for the federal government. So. Anywho, um, if you can. If you can help out in any way, um, it, it goes further than you think, um, especially in a situation like this. I know a lot of people are going to be out of power for weeks, months even. I mean, just in our area, when we've had like a really bad flood or like a really bad hurricane, I know they're a little. There have been literally people who go three weeks, four weeks, just completely without power. Another really important thing is just getting information in and out. If anybody has any details about what roads to take. I mean, I think there's a main road in and out of Asheville. And then from Asheville you can still get to some of these smaller areas, but like Bat Cave, chimney Rock, Black Mountain. No, they're actually, I know there is actually a road out of Black Mountain that is working. And I'll try to get my, my friend's parents because they, they managed to get out of Black Mountain. But a lot of these other places are literally only, you can only get there by helicopter right now. So legit helicopter fuel. There's, there's actually a service that just donates, just, just takes helicopters to disaster areas. If you have anything that you can contribute, even just information or there's somebody that you want to get a message to or somebody you want to reach, I can at least forward it to the people that are headed out there. I'm certain that they're going to have lists of, like. Can you check on this person. And I also know someone who's gone out and set up like four or five star links and then made public where they are so that if someone can get to them, they can get word out. Basically all cell towers are down. I think there's some spotty service in Asheville still. But please hit me up on Noster, hit me up on Twitter, wherever. I'll try to have whatever links. And actually I'll have the donation address in the show notes in the description of this show, just if you want to just, you know, send a couple of bucks worth of bitcoin, whatever it is. And of course you can zap on Nostra. I'm sending anything forward and I just went ahead and emptied my noster wallet, whatever was in there for this as well. But anyway, I don't want to bog down this episode. I just wanted to share that for anybody who didn't know and then also thank thank you so much to everyone who has donated. Like somebody sent us like $500 worth of bitcoin, which is like a quarter of the donations. And I just want to say thank you so much everyone. Whether you sent $500 worth or you literally sent, you zapped 21 sats. Seriously, thank you. Okay, enough of that. We have got a really, really awesome read and it is from Lynn Alden and it's titled a global liquidity barometer by Sam Callahan and Lynn Alden.
[00:09:59] This research piece on the correlation between measures of liquidity and the price of bitcoin was compiled and written by Sam Callahan and commissioned and advised by Lynn Alden.
[00:10:13] Executive summary Bitcoin moves in the direction of global liquidity 83% of the time in any given twelve month period, which is higher than any other major asset class, making it a stronger barometer of liquidity conditions.
[00:10:30] Bitcoins correlation with global liquidity is high, but not immune to short term deviations caused by idiosyncratic events or internal market dynamics, especially during periods of extreme valuation.
[00:10:42] Combining global liquidity conditions with bitcoin on chain valuation metrics provides a more nuanced understanding of bitcoin cycles, helping investors identify moments when internal market dynamics may temporarily decouple bitcoin from liquidity trends introduction understanding how asset prices move in response to changes in global liquidity has become crucial for investors aiming to enhance returns and manage risk effectively. In today's market, asset prices are increasingly shaped by central bank policies that directly affect liquidity conditions. Fundamentals alone are no longer the primary drivers of asset prices.
[00:11:26] This has been especially true since the global financial crisis. Since then, these unconventional monetary policies have increasingly become the dominant force moving asset prices. Central bankers pulling on their liquidity levers have turned the market into one big trade. Or, as economist Mohammed El Aryan puts it, central banks have become the only game in town. Stanley Druckenmiller echoed this sentiment when he stated, earnings don't move the overall market. It's the Federal Reserve Board focused on the central banks and focus on the movement of liquidity. Most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It's liquidity that moves markets.
[00:12:12] This is particularly evident when examining how closely the S and P 500 has tracked global liquidity post GFC.
[00:12:22] And here we have a chart of the S and P 500 compared with the global M two supply, and they follow each other almost exactly from 2013 to 2024.
[00:12:34] The explanation for the chart above boils down to simple supply and demand. If there's more money available to buy something, whether that's stocks, bonds, gold or bitcoin, the prices of these assets will generally rise. Since 2008, central banks have flooded the system with more fiat currency, and asset prices have responded accordingly. In other words, monetary inflation fuels asset price inflation.
[00:13:04] Given this backdrop, it has become critical for investors to understand how to measure global liquidity and how different assets respond to changes in liquidity conditions to better navigate these liquidity driven markets.
[00:13:22] How to measure global liquidity there are many ways to measure global liquidity, but for this analysis we will use global m two, a broad measure of money supply that includes physical currency checking accounts, savings deposits, money market securities and other forms of easily accessible cash.
[00:13:46] Bitcoin magazine Pro provides a measure of global M two that aggregates data from the eight largest economies, the United States, China, the eurozone, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Russia and Australia. It's a good proxy for global liquidity because it captures the total amount of money readily available for spending, investing and lending on a global scale. Another way to think about it is as a measurement of the total amount of credit creation and central bank money printing occurring in the global economy.
[00:14:22] One nuance here is that global m two is denominated in us dollars. Lyn Alden explained why this is important in a previous article.
[00:14:33] The reason dollar denomination is important here is because the dollar is the global reserve currency and thus the primary unit of account for global trade, global contracts and global debts. When the dollar strengthens, it hardens the debts of various countries. When the dollar weakens, it softens the debts of various countries. Global dollar denominated broad money is like a big liquidity metric for the world. How quickly are fiat currency units being created and how strong is the dollar relative to the rest of the global currency market?
[00:15:08] When global m two is denominated in dollars, it encapsulates both the relative strength of the dollar and the pace of credit creation, making it a reliable proxy for measuring global liquidity conditions.
[00:15:24] While there are alternative ways to measure global liquidity, such as accounting for short duration government debt or global fx swap markets, for the remainder of this article, when you read global liquidity, think global m two why bitcoin could be the purest liquidity barometer over the years, one asset that has exhibited a strong correlation with global liquidity is bitcoin. As global liquidity expands, bitcoin tends to thrive. Conversely, when liquidity contracts, bitcoin tends to suffer. This dynamic has led some to refer to bitcoin as a liquidity barometer. The chart below clearly shows how bitcoins price tends to track changes in global liquidity. Here we have a chart similar to the one before, except the bitcoin price compared to global m two. One of the interesting takeaways, in my opinion, is that it loosely follows it, where you'll see a small peak in global liquidity and you'll see large price moves in bitcoin. But as we get into the 2019 2021 years, the correlation between bitcoin and global liquidity is actually far, far closer.
[00:16:41] Similarly, comparing the year over year percent changes of bitcoin and global liquidity also highlights how closely the two appear to move in tandem with bitcoins price rising when liquidity increases and declining when liquidity falls. Another chart except rather than showing the nominal price, it's showing whether or not the price is moving up or down, and comparing global m two versus the bitcoin price, and generally just showing the same peaks and troughs in the two, correlating at the same time.
[00:17:15] Given the charts above, bitcoins price appears to be highly sensitive to changes in global liquidity. But is it the most sensitive asset in the market today?
[00:17:27] Generally speaking, risk assets are more correlated with liquidity conditions. In a pro liquidity environment, investors tend to adopt a risk on approach, shifting capital into assets considered more high risk and high reward. On the contrary, when liquidity tightens, investors typically shift capital toward assets they perceive as safer. This explains why assets like stocks often perform well in rising liquidity environments. However, stock prices are also influenced by other confounding factors unrelated to liquidity conditions. For instance, stock performance is partly driven by things like earnings and dividends, so their prices are also tied to the economy's performance. This can negatively impact how purely stocks correlate to global liquidity. In addition, us equities benefit from structural buying through passive inflows from retirement accounts like 401s, which further influence their performance. Regardless of liquidity conditions. These passive flows could buffer us stocks as liquidity conditions fluctuate, potentially making them less sensitive to global liquidity conditions.
[00:18:42] Gold's relationship with liquidity is more mixed. On one hand, it benefits from rising liquidity and a weakening dollar, but on the other hand, it's also viewed as a safe haven asset. During periods when liquidity contracts and risk off behavior emerges, demand for gold can increase as investors seek safety. This means that gold's price can hold up well even when liquidity is being drained from the system. For this reason, gold's performance may not align as closely with liquidity conditions as other assets.
[00:19:16] Bonds like gold are also seen as safe haven assets, so their correlation with liquidity conditions is likely to be low. This brings us back to bitcoin. Unlike stocks, bitcoin lacks earnings or dividends and doesnt have a structural bid to impact its performance.
[00:19:35] Unlike gold and bonds, at this stage of bitcoins adoption cycle, most pools of capital still view it as a risk asset. This potentially leaves bitcoin with the purest correlation to global liquidity relative to other assets.
[00:19:51] If true, this could be a valuable insight for both bitcoin investors and traders. For long term holders, understanding bitcoins correlation with liquidity can provide deeper insight into what drives its price performance over time. For traders, bitcoin offers a vehicle for expressing views on the future direction of global liquidity. This article aims to deeply explore the correlation between bitcoin and global liquidity, compare its relationship with that of other asset classes, identify periods where the correlation breaks down, and share insights on how investors can use this information to their advantage in the future.
[00:20:34] Quantifying the correlation between bitcoin and global liquidity when analyzing the correlation between bitcoin and global liquidity, it's important to consider both the relationship's magnitude and direction. The magnitude of a correlation reveals how closely two variables move together. A stronger correlation suggests that changes in global m two have a more predictable impact on bitcoins price, whether it moves in the same or opposite direction. Understanding this magnitude is key to gauging how sensitive bitcoin is to shifts in global liquidity.
[00:21:14] When analyzing data between May 2013 and July 2024, bitcoins strong sensitivity to liquidity is clear. During this period, bitcoins price exhibited a correlation of 0.94 with global liquidity, reflecting a very strong positive correlation. This suggests that bitcoins price has been highly sensitive to changes in global liquidity over that timeframe. When looking at the twelve month rolling correlation, bitcoin's average correlation with global liquidity falls to 0.51. This is still a moderately positive relationship, but notably lower than the overall correlation.
[00:21:57] This indicates that bitcoin's price doesn't track liquidity as closely on a year to year basis. Furthermore, when examining the six month rolling correlation, the correlation further declined to to 0.36.
[00:22:12] This suggests that as the timeframes get shorter, bitcoins price deviates more from its long term liquidity trend, indicating that short term price movements are more likely to be influenced by factors specific to bitcoin rather than liquidity conditions.
[00:22:30] To better understand bitcoins correlation with global liquidity, we compared it to other assets, including the Spyder S and P 500 Etfemen SPX, Vanguard Total world stock ETF or VT iShares, MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, iShares 20 plus year treasury bond ETF, Vanguard Total bond market ETF and gold over a rolling twelve month period, bitcoin has the highest average correlation with global liquidity, followed closely by gold. The stock indices had the next strongest correlations and as expected, bond indices had the lowest correlations with liquidity. When analyzing the correlation between the assets and global liquidity on a year over year percentage change basis, stock indices exhibit a slightly stronger correlation than bitcoin, followed by gold and bonds.
[00:23:31] One reason stocks may show a tighter correlation with global liquidity than bitcoin on a year over year percentage basis is bitcoin's high magnitude volatility. Bitcoin often experiences large price swings within a year, which can distort less significant price movements, keeping them more closely aligned with the year over year percentage changes in global m two. Despite this, bitcoin still demonstrates a moderately strong correlation with global liquidity when analyzed on a year over year percentage change basis. The data above highlights three key takeaways. One, the performance of stocks gold and bitcoin is closely tied to global liquidity. Two, bitcoin has a strong overall correlation and the highest correlation over twelve month rolling periods compared to other asset classes and three, bitcoins correlation to global liquidity weakens as the time frame shortens.
[00:24:32] Bitcoins directional alignment with liquidity sets it apart.
[00:24:38] As we mentioned previously, a strong positive correlation doesnt guarantee that two variables always move in the same direction as each other over time. This is especially true when one asset like bitcoin is more volatile and may temporarily deviate from the long term relationship with a less volatile metric like global m two. This is why combining the two aspects, magnitude and direction, can provide a fuller picture of how bitcoin and global m two interact over time.
[00:25:14] By examining the directional consistency of the relationship, we can better understand the reliability of their correlation. This is especially true for those interested in long term trends. If you know that bitcoin tends to track the direction of global liquidity for the majority of the time, you can feel more confident predicting its future price direction based on shifts in liquidity conditions. In terms of consistency of the directional alignment, out of all the assets analyzed, bitcoin has the highest correlation with the direction of global liquidity.
[00:25:51] Bitcoin moved in the same direction as global liquidity in 83% of twelve month periods and 74% of six month periods, underscoring the consistency of the directional relationship.
[00:26:06] The chart below further illustrates bitcoins directional alignment with global liquidity over twelve month periods compared to other asset classes. These findings are notable because they demonstrate that even though the strength of the correlation may vary based on the time frame, bitcoins price direction generally aligns with the direction of global liquidity. Furthermore, its price direction more closely mirrors global liquidity than any other traditional asset analyzed. This analysis shows that the relationship between bitcoin and global liquidity not only strong in magnitude but is also consistent in its directional alignment. The data reinforces the idea that bitcoin is more sensitive to liquidity conditions than other traditional assets, particularly over longer timeframes. For investors, this means that global liquidity is likely a key driver in bitcoins long term price performance and should be considered when evaluating bitcoin market cycles and forecasting future price movements. For traders, it means that bitcoin offers a highly sensitive investment vehicle for expressing views on global liquidity, making it a top choice for those with strong liquidity convictions.
[00:27:31] Identifying breakdowns in bitcoins long term liquidity relationship despite bitcoins overall strong correlation with global liquidity the findings indicate that bitcoins price often diverges from liquidity trends over shorter rolling periods. These deviations are likely driven by internal market dynamics exerting greater influence than global liquidity conditions at certain points in bitcoin's market cycle or by idiosyncratic events specific to the bitcoin industry.
[00:28:07] Idiosyncratic events refer to incidents within the broader crypto industry that lead to rapid shifts in sentiment or trigger large scale liquidations. Examples include major bankruptcies, exchange hacks, regulatory developments, or the collapse of ponzi schemes.
[00:28:26] Looking at past instances where the twelve month rolling correlation between bitcoin and global liquidity weakened, it's clear that bitcoin's price tends to decouple from liquidity trends around significant industry events. The chart below illustrates how bitcoins correlation to liquidity breaks down around these major events.
[00:28:48] Key events such as the Mount Gox collapse, the unraveling of the plus token Ponzi scheme, and the crypto credit contagion caused by the terra Luna collapse and the bankruptcies of several crypto lenders generated fear and sell pressure that was largely disconnected from global liquidity trends. The Covid-19 market crash of 2020 provides another example. Bitcoin initially dropped sharply amid widespread panic selling and risk aversion. However, as central banks responded with unprecedented liquidity injections, bitcoin quickly rebounded, highlighting its sensitivity to shifts in liquidity. The breakdown in correlation around that time can be attributed to an abrupt shift in market sentiment rather than a change in liquidity conditions.
[00:29:40] While the impact of these idiosyncratic events on bitcoin's correlation with global liquidity is important to understand, their unpredictability makes them less actionable for investors. That said, as the bitcoin ecosystem matures, infrastructure improves and more regulatory clarity emerges. I expect the frequency of these black swan events to diminish over time.
[00:30:07] How supply side dynamics impact bitcoins liquidity correlation beyond idiosyncratic events another notable pattern during periods where bitcoins correlation with liquidity weakens is that these instances often coincide with times when bitcoins price reached extreme valuations followed by sharp declines. This is evident in the bull market peaks in 2013, 2017, and 2021, where bitcoins correlation to liquidity decoupled as its price significantly dropped from elevated levels.
[00:30:43] While liquidity primarily influences the demand side of the equation, understanding supply side distribution patterns can also be helpful in identifying periods when bitcoin might diverge from its long term correlation with global liquidity. The primary source of for sale supply comes from older holders taking profit as bitcoin's price rises.
[00:31:08] Supply also hits the market from new issuance from block rewards, but this is much less and will only continue to decrease with each having event. During bull runs, older holders often trim their positions and sell to new buyers until incoming demand becomes saturated. At this moment of saturation, bull market peaks typically occur.
[00:31:33] A key metric for assessing this behavior is the bitcoin one plus year hold, a wave, which measures the amount of bitcoin held by long term holders at least one year as a percentage of the total circulating supply. Basically, it measures the percentage of the total available supply that long term investors are holding at any given point in time. Historically, this metric declines during bull markets as long term holders sell and rises during bear markets when they accumulate. The chart below emphasizes this behavior, with red circles marking cycle peaks and green circles indicating bottoms.
[00:32:16] This illustrates the behavior of long term holders throughout bitcoin cycles. Long term holders tend to take profit when bitcoin appears overvalued and tend to accumulate when bitcoin seems undervalued. The question becomes how do you determine when bitcoin is under or overvalued to better predict when supply will flood or be drained from the market?
[00:32:42] Although the data set is still relatively small, the market value to realized value z score MVRVZ score has proven to be a reliable tool for identifying when bitcoin has reached extreme valuation levels. The MVRV z score is based on three components. One, market value, the current market cap, calculated by multiplying the price of bitcoin by the total number of coins in circulation.
[00:33:11] Two, realized value, the average price at which each bitcoin or Utxo was last transacted on chain multiplied by the total circulating supply, essentially the on chain cost basis of bitcoin holders. Three, the z score. This measures how far the market value deviates from the realized value expressed in standard deviations, and highlights periods of extreme overvaluation or undervaluation. When the MVRV score is high, it means that a large gap exists between the market price, the realized price, meaning that many holders are sitting on unrealized profits. This intuitively is a good thing, but it can also be a signal that bitcoin is overbought or overvalued, an opportune time for long term holders to distribute their bitcoin and take some profit. When the MVRVZ score is low, it means that the market price is either near or below the realized price, indicating that bitcoin is oversold or undervalued. An opportune time for investors to begin accumulating. When the MVRVZ score is overlaid with the twelve month rolling correlation between bitcoin and global liquidity, a pattern begins to emerge. The twelve month rolling correlation appears to break down in periods when the MVRVZ score declines sharply from historically high levels. The red rectangles highlight these time periods below. This suggests that when bitcoins MVRVZ score begins to fall from elevated levels and the correlation with liquidity breaks down, internal market dynamics such as profit taking and panic selling, may influence bitcoins price more than global liquidity conditions.
[00:35:06] At extreme valuation levels, bitcoins price action tends to be more driven by market sentiment and supply side dynamics rather than global liquidity trends. For traders and investors, this insight is valuable because it could help identify those rare instances when bitcoin diverges from its long term correlation with global liquidity. For example, lets say a trader is strongly convinced that the dollar will fall and global liquidity will rise over the next year. According to this analysis, bitcoin would be the best vehicle for expressing his view due to its role as the purest liquidity barometer in the market today. However, these findings suggest that the trader should first evaluate bitcoins MVRVZ score or similar valuation metrics before putting on the trade. If bitcoins MVRVZ score signals extreme overvaluation, traders should be cautious even in pro liquidity environments as internal market dynamics may override liquidity conditions and drive a price correction. By monitoring both bitcoins long term correlation to global liquidity and its MVRVZ score, investors and traders can better predict how bitcoins price may respond to shifts in liquidity conditions.
[00:36:27] This approach allows market participants to make more informed decisions and may increase their odds of having a successful outcome when investing or trading bitcoin.
[00:36:39] Conclusion Bitcoins strong correlation with global liquidity makes it a valuable macroeconomic barometer for investors and traders. Its correlation is not only strong, but also has the highest degree of directional consistency with global liquidity conditions relative to other asset classes. One can think of bitcoin as a mirror reflecting the rate of global money creation and the relative strength of the dollar. Unlike traditional assets such as stocks, gold, or bonds, bitcoins correlation with liquidity remains relatively pure. However, bitcoins correlation is not perfect. These findings showed how the strength of bitcoins correlation declines over shorter timeframes and also shed light on the importance of recognizing periods when bitcoins correlation with liquidity is prone to breaking down.
[00:37:37] Internal market dynamics, such as idiosyncratic shocks or extreme valuation levels can cause bitcoin to temporarily decouple from global liquidity conditions. These times are crucial for investors to identify, as they often mark price corrections or periods of accumulation. Combining the analysis of global liquidity with on chain metrics such as the MVRVZ score allows for a better understanding of bitcoins price cycles and helps pinpoint when its price is likely to be driven more by sentiment rather than by broader global liquidity trends.
[00:38:14] Michael Saylor once famously said, all your models are destroyed.
[00:38:21] Bitcoin represents a paradigm shift in money itself. As such, no statistical model can perfectly capture the complexities of the bitcoin phenomenon. But some can be useful tools to guide decision making, even with their imperfections. As the old adage goes, all models are wrong, but some are useful. Since the global financial crisis, central banks have distorted financial markets with unconventional policies and made liquidity the main driver of asset prices. As a result, understanding shifts in global liquidity is critical for any investor looking to navigate the market successfully today. In the past, macro analyst Luke Groman has described bitcoin as the last fully functioning smoke alarm due to its ability to signal changes in liquidity conditions, and this analysis supports this label. When bitcoins sirens ring, investors would be wise to listen so that they can manage risk and position themselves appropriately to capitalize on future opportunities in the market.
[00:39:36] All right, so that wraps up the piece, and there is a, there is a short appendix after this. This is just kind of talking about or exploring why it is that stocks actually follow liquidity, global liquidity better than emerging markets and global like kind of international ETF's, which were the EEM and VT metrics that they talked about. Like why did those not follow? Or why is it not the typically best indicator of global liquidity? Why would bitcoin be better at it? Because emerging markets and international markets have a lot of the same sort of attributes or kind of logical reasonings as to why it would be quick to respond to global liquidity and be a very good measure of it is they're typically far riskier than developed markets. And because of that, only in high liquidity environments is it likely for money to flow in that direction. Whereas in low liquidity environments, where money is scarce and harder to get a hold of, developed markets are likely to retain a lot of that capital, whereas emerging markets are likely to not get the flow that they are typically getting. Like money would go in the opposite direction then. Also, a lot of emerging markets, at least looking at the last 50 years and the whole IMF and World bank situation, well, I guess really just the fiat paradigm in general is that emerging markets are highly dependent on foreign financing. So foreign financing, when money gets scarce and you actually bid up the price of monetary, of liquidity, like liquidity becomes more difficult to obtain.
[00:41:20] The emerging market financing is the first thing, or it logically seemed like the first thing that is likely to go or be squeezed. And it also kind of lends itself to the obviousness which we obviously see in all of the economic downturns in the west or in the US in particular, how damaging or how much more strenuous on emerging markets and international markets a strong dollar is than it is on the US economy specifically. So it's important to remember that when the dollar gets tightened while it affects the US at, let's say it's just make up a number, like it's some sort of a 5% drawdown or strain on liquidity or something, it's far more likely to manifest as 10% or 15% in smaller emerging markets in the third world, especially that which is highly dependent on western financing, et cetera, et cetera. These things dry up much faster away from, or the liquidity dries up the further distance you go from kind of the us standard as the, as the baseline for judging where liquidity should be allocated and how much liquidity there is to allocate. But the crazy thing is that this analysis suggests that bitcoin is the better option. And there's a number of different reasons why. But I honestly think, Sam, just, just the level of idiosyncratic events and regulatory changes in all of these other environments that have their own local effects on whether or not they are going to respond to that liquidity. I think there's also an element of everybody has their own currency and they're all kind of fighting from an import export perspective in a competitive national environment, and especially in one where so many people are competing with whether or not they are selling more to dollar denominated countries so that they can hold a harder currency. But then also just in general. And Sam brings us up to is just geopolitical instability. And, you know, this can be regional, this can be like all over the place. But I just think there's so many other factors involved and it's so heavily driven by financing in that way. The emerging markets are so heavily controlled with the whole IMF World bank model, I guess that broad geopolitical tendencies or action can have a really big effect on liquidity. Like, for instance, global liquidity spiked up in 2022, or, excuse me, 2020, with everything with the COVID response. But you also had massive capital controls going down the competition with Russia and the BRICS and dollar nations. And I imagine, granted, I didnt really look at the analysis specifically, but I would suspect that had a big role in whether or not certain markets or broad sections of markets and ETF's indexes were actually correlating with global liquidity, or they were coordinating, are correlating with geopolitical friction. But this, I think lends itself as to, or a good reason as to why bitcoin actually ends up being a better indicator or correlator to global liquidity is because it is specifically without borders. It is decentralized and exists in the same way. And every. It's probably one of very, very few currencies that has liquidity, has tradable liquidity in every country on earth, practically. I think it's really easy to discount how powerful that is. There are a shockingly few number of currencies that get that level of privilege, that level of market exposure, I guess, or saturation, because it's not overall saturation, it's not a massive amount of liquidity in every country, but it has liquidity in every country specifically because it is accessible everywhere. I don't know the first thing about how to get Zimbabwe in dollars in the United States, but I can get bitcoin. I also don't know the first thing about how to get Zimbabwe in dollars or argentine pesos in anywhere in Europe. But I know I can go to all of those places and trade and use bitcoin. Foreign currencies rely on foreign currency infrastructure within the jurisdiction that you are at. It requires local infrastructure for a foreign currency, for a foreign unit of account. Whereas my exposure or use of bitcoin, my access to bitcoin is identical. It's got like, my. The infrastructure for bitcoin is already everywhere by default. And I think this helps explain why it can be such. Or it's less likely to be highly affected by any sort of regional shift, a political shift, because, you know, typically a political conflict is where one region suffers, and one region, one region is amplified or benefited from some sort of tension. I mean, oftentimes it could just be that both of them are damaged. But regardless is you typically have some sort of a dynamic where there is a relative shift. And if your asset. If the asset of bitcoin exists in liquid markets on both sides, then it will basically be evened out by the regional conflict. And that could specifically make it something that is actually a very good barometer, even in the cases of large political conflicts with the United States, with the dominant dollar regime, because it has such a strong dollar and non dollar market that essentially allows it to behave as a bridge between the conditions, or a communicator, a band aid, a means of getting bandwidth of economic information and value information in and out of those markets. Now, I want to hit a couple of quotes from the piece that I think really hit the nail on the. The way to think about this and why I think this is really important. So one of the quotes is, generally speaking, risk assets are more correlated with liquidity conditions.
[00:48:27] In a pro liquidity environment, investors tend to adopt a risk, adopt a risk on approach, shifting capital into assets considered more high risk and high reward. To the contrary, when liquidity tightens, investors typically shift capital toward assets they perceive as safer. This explains why assets like stocks often perform well in rising liquidity environments. However, stock prices are also influenced by other confounding factors unrelated to liquidity conditions. For instance, stock performance is partly driven by things like earnings and dividends, so their prices are also tied to the economy's performance. This can negatively impact how purely stocks correlate to global liquidity. So I bring this up just because two things. First is actually more like four things. The first is realizing what it means when things like stocks and housing become, become monetary substitutes. They become the assets of society that carry monetary premiums and start to react to global liquidity. Like, if you look back, if you account for m two, actually, and look back historically, the stock market doesn't go anywhere. The stock market doesn't just nominally grow. It only does so because of the growth in the monetary base. Otherwise, it should be a stable, a roughly stable portion of the economy as a whole. And when accounting for m two, if you look at that chart, that's kind of what happens. There are peaks where, you know, things are overvalued and there's too much activity in the market, and then it collapses back down, and it kind of works its way back to the mean. But overall, these assets can be tied to the expansion of the monetary base. Housing is the exact same way. Like, if you, it's funny, I actually had this conversation with a friend who was talking about how inflation, money printing isnt the only thing that can. You cant explain all of the inflation in housing with money printing. And I was like, well, yeah, you can. But I know from his framing what he was thinking, he was thinking CPI, that is inflation. In his mind, I think thats one of the greatest gaslighting that has occurred through the quote, unquote, academic economics is to call price inflation and monetary inflation by the exact same term. And I think that was deliberate in a kind of a subconscious manner, is when inflation became a focal point or it became a concern. And suddenly there was conversations about inflation. Is that if you can conflate that conversation with something that looks better, you can point to a metric that actually diminishes the real impact of what is happening, you're incentivized to do so. And in an entire industry in this giant monopolistic corporation that we call government, they have every, every incentive and every mechanism and every reason in the world to try to conflate things that twist things to their benefit. It's exactly why they have coincided, or they have equated credit deflation with natural deflation in the money, and why they have equated price inflation with inflation in the monetary supply. Because if you look, in fact, there's another Lynn Alden piece where specifically a Lynn Alden piece that she talks about.
[00:52:11] Which one was it? I can't remember. She was talking about. If you actually look at what monetary inflation is and what it has been throughout history, it's a 7% year over year growth in the money supply, both through the issuance of new debt and there's just the flat issuance of new dollar bills in m two. M two. The easiest metric is m two. And despite the fact that it has changed recently, we're not going to worry about that, because it still is roughly the best way to just get a broad picture of this. And if you just go over a long enough time span, it's 7% year over year increase and expansion of the money supply. And during this conversation, my friend was saying that his parents or grandparents, I think in like 1960 or something like that, bought their house for something like $3,500, you know, $3,500. And that now that house is worth Orlando, the market value of that house is something around $300,000. And he was saying that you can't possibly account for that in price inflation. And all I could think was that the only thing that could possibly account for that is inflation. The only thing that could possibly account for that. And it's so crazy that people don't recognize that you can't sustainably sell stuff for more money than people have.
[00:53:40] You have to have the money available. Like, people think that a corporation can just sell the next iPhone for $40,000. And there's. And so somehow there's no pushback against that. There's no flow, you know, an ebb and flow. There's no, there's no reverse mechanism to prevent that from being possible. It's just the general greediness of the corporations at any particular time. And so I actually did it. I was curious. So I went to the, you know, the national inflation calculator, which goes by the CPI, which again, the CPI has been changed like four times during that period as to how they calculate it. And what's funny is they, they basically base it off of what people purchase, which is hilarious, because that means that price inflation itself actually has nothing to do with the cost of goods. What it has to do with is what people can afford, what people can buy. So if your wages only increase by 10%, but the prices of everything increase by 20%, you stop buying steak and you start buying chicken instead, or you stop buying butter, real butter, and you buy margarine, like, or I can't believe it's not butter instead, because it's a, you know, it's 50% cheaper and it's some soy based crap. Well, the basket of goods that they now compare it against is based on what you buy. So if you can't afford nice things, you buy cheaper, crappier stuff. And now there's no price inflation because what you put, what you've purchased is still just about this price. And what is that going to reflect? What are the, what are those prices going to change according to your wages, what you have available? And it will completely shift what's available in the market, it will absolutely take over the market. All steak will disappear from stores and it will be filled with chicken. And you can literally transform the entire foundation of a nation and appear as if there is no inflation because you've simply changed what people can afford. But so I went to the national calculator for the inflation calculator, and based on the CPI, and if you punch in that 3500 and go from 1960 to 2024, it says, oh, it's going to be worth 37,000. And without a doubt, this is the framing that my friend has. That's what he thinks is legitimate. And then somehow there is this 100 or no, excuse me, a ten x multiplier on top of this. That is some market phenomenon where all houses are just drastically higher in price when it doesn't, there is fundamentally not possible. Only with an increase of the money supply can you actually, is there any sustainable market for that increase in price? It has to come from somewhere else. If you have like three, three different goods or three different items in the market, you have an apple, an orange and a watermelon, and they're all worth a dollar, and then suddenly watermelons are $2 on the market. You literally, people have to stop buying oranges or you have to cut down the price of oranges and apples by 50 cent in order for it to be even slightly sustainable. To sell the watermelon at dollar two, because there's literally not enough money to do so. The watermelon can only do that by doubling their market share and simultaneously removing the market share, basically demolishing the market of people buying apples and oranges. Because you have to have twice as much of the proportion of the economic activity go to watermelon, which means it has to go, it has to leave from somewhere else. So if we're talking about a ten x in housing across the board, that literally means that we have to have like a 90% drawdown in like a huge number. Real estate is a vast, vast market. It has to result in the destruction of so many other markets and industries that would have steep, steep declines relative to real estate. In order for that, it even be slightly possible without an increase in the money supply. And clearly that hasn't happened. In fact, quite the opposite. They say, look, everything grows because they just point at stuff that responds to the amount of money that's been pushed into the economy. And so I just went back and did the, what I knew to be the difference in the m two money supply, which was a 7% year over year, which again isn't perfectly accurate. But Lynn Alden showed her work in that article. And so I was like, okay, that's a great simple baseline to just work off of. And I did the $3,500 in 1960. None of this was like perfectly accurate. It could have been like 1957 or 1962, I don't remember. But it was something then. And even showed me like a picture of it, which is really cool. But I did the calculation starting from that and then doing the 7% compounding year over year inflation in the money supply. And what did I get? It was like $280,000, just shy of 300,000.
[00:58:45] It's all about the money supply. It is all about the money supply. And that's what's interesting about the limit. When you think about the limitations of, and the consequences of stocks and real estate and these things as the dominant stores of value of society as the dominant assets with monetary premium, is that they are necessarily a very poor indicator because houses rot, houses fall apart, houses can be purchased with debt that we don't actually know are sustainable. Housing has shifts in market region. They get demolished by storms. New technology allows us to build and alter the supply of housing very, very quickly. And the same, so many of the same sorts of caveats go for stocks. These are not stable supply assets. Therefore they are necessarily noisy information mechanisms. They're extremely noisy when it comes to their ability to trans or to relay economic data throughout the markets. Now going back to bitcoin as a risk asset, right now that it's sitting in this middle ground between becoming a monetary good and a purely speculative asset where people are just trading it, they just see it as a high risk, high reward asset that is still nascent.
[01:00:14] But also the important caveat is that it doesn't rot. It doesn't. The supply doesn't change. In fact, it's one of the scarcest. It is the scarcest and lowest changing fundamental supply on the market that you have. Which means the only thing that you need to be asking in regards to supply that really matters is not what the mining reward is, but how much, how likely are people to be selling or buying at any one particular time. It's going to tell you more about market sentiment and the market actors than it will anything else, which is going to be a result of global liquidity. How much capital is flowing into what kinds of industries, and how much is available for risk assets. This is the value case of bitcoin. Going back to what I mentioned at the beginning of this is axiom capital and their piece, or Axiom BTC and their piece capital in the 21st century.
[01:01:13] The whole idea is repricing the world in bitcoin, slowly but surely. As bitcoin infiltrates more markets and more purposes, more higher liquidity into broader payment, payment environments, and actual economic moves, where it becomes part of the actual national currency conversation in El Salvador, where it becomes reserves, this is going to become more and more clear that it is the purest signal in market as a market indicator for global liquidity, until it becomes the thing that is the mirror to the dollar itself. And what will happen is that its shorter term volatility will diminish over time. Those short term swings that go in some other direction because of the idiosyncratic events that Sam brings up will continue to be less and less exaggerated.
[01:02:12] I think this trend will get cleaner and cleaner until it starts to become a barometer itself. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If this becomes the way to judge global liquidity, then it starts to become a piece itself in the story of global liquidity. And then the bitcoin market starts to have reflections into fiat markets. And I think this lends itself to kind of an analogy or a demonstration of why it is that bitcoin will be the best pricing mechanism in the world eventually on a long enough time scale, and anybody who uses it and anybody who plans buy it. Right now, short term plans are very difficult and are not opportune or not optimum in a bitcoin standard. But long term plans are. Long term economic data appears to be most accurate in regards to making a bitcoin or being on a bitcoin standard. And as its market broadens and more people realize it as a foundational asset, this will continue to be true, more and more true as time passes, and then it will become used as a direct monetary good, as a medium of exchange, and ultimately a unit of account. It's just a very, very long journey to get there. And this is kind of a proof of when we get there, the economy that lives on bitcoin will just be that much better planned, and that much it will have far higher economic signal than any other market that chooses to use something that is either printed viciously or is simply an inferior asset, like a stock or real estate that has too many other conflating factors to affect its price and what, what economic signal is actually trying to transmit. I think this is a form of proof that when we get there, bitcoin is the best money, and that we will simply out economic signal the noisy fiat world. And I think the thing that demonstrates that specifically today, or shows what potential outcome, how powerful the outcome could be, is look at anyone right now who's making a ten year plan in fiat, and anybody right now, who is making a ten year plan in bitcoin, and ask me which one of those looks more sustainable. And I want to go back to something that I talk about quite a bit. In fact, probably the best example of this, of my argument for this is the money is not real wealth. Two sats video is that debt and savings are in the simplest form of being of understanding.
[01:04:56] Debt is the consumption of the net consumption of resources, the net destruction of value, with the intent of by leveraging your future to produce more in order to pay it back. Savings is the net creation of value, the net production of goods and services in the economy, such that we have resources available in the future. If these things are not balanced, if debt is winning out over savings, well, then we are literally cannibalizing society. That is what it means. We would not keep track of it otherwise. It means a net destruction of resources. So going back to my point as to which economy looks like it has a stronger ten year outlook, and which one will be more robust and healthy and sustainable on a ten year timeframe, is you ask today, who is saving more versus going into debt more? Someone in fiat or someone in bitcoin? Because those decisions today, those incentives to do one or the other, to borrow today, or to go into safe, to save as much as you can today, will be the incentives that tell us what our ten years out is going to be like, you can look at the ingredients of the cake before you bake it to get some sort of a sense as to whether or not it is going to taste good. Right now, the decisions we are making today, that is the recipe for the cake we are baking.
[01:06:29] Who is saving, who is going to have resources for the future, and who is going to be out of luck. The broader and more liquid the bitcoin market becomes, the shorter and shorter the timeframe in which that continues to be true, and the more protected from those one off idiosyncratic events bitcoin will be, and thus the shorter the timeframe on which it will continue to progress as a strong savings incentive. Right now, you only have the people who seed that ten years out, who get that benefit and fundamentally change those market conditions. But then in the not too long future, that will be people who look five, five years out and four years out, and three years out, and two years out and eight months out. And the more liquid, the more robust, and the more in every jurisdiction, there is massive amount of capital being exchanged, which may very well just be because of its ability to be a barometer for local global liquidity at all, the more that game theory plays out. This is all about accurate price signals. And over a long enough timeline, no price signal will be as accurate as bitcoin.
[01:07:44] Now, there's another element. Looking at it from a short term lens, and this is a, this is another quote from further down in the piece. Quote. For traders, it means that this is after talking about how investors, it's a. It's a. Over long timeframes, it's a barometer for global liquidity. But then in reference to that, or in, I guess in opposing to this, what is it for traders? So for traders, it means that bitcoin offers a highly sensitive investment vehicle for expressing views on global liquidity, making it a top choice for those with strong liquidity convictions. So here's something that's really cool because of its relative illiquidity in comparison to.
[01:08:27] In comparison to the dollar, the global dollar market. And then also due to its extreme scarcity, the fact that it responds almost entirely now to market conditions and market sentiment and its change in supply is virtually irrelevant at this point to the broader market trends. Because of this, bitcoin acts not only as a directional correlator over long periods of time, but an exaggerated directional correlation in the sense that if global liquidity goes up by 5%, the bitcoin move may be by 50%.
[01:09:08] This makes it behave like an independent long duration options contract without expiration. It has exaggerated gains or losses in reference to or in response to the changes in global liquidity. So if you want to bet on global liquidity changes, your best bet to do so is bitcoin.
[01:09:37] In other words, this is an indication. This is direct analysis that suggests bitcoin is the best way to short sell fiat inflationary pressures over long periods of time.
[01:09:53] You ever seen the movie the big short?
[01:09:56] Bitcoin is literally the big short on global m two.
[01:10:03] And then we'll close this out with my favorite quote of the piece.
[01:10:07] This is just from the conclusion. One can think of bitcoin as a mirror reflecting the rate of global money creation and the relative strength of the dollar.
[01:10:21] So when we say this is why also, actually, going back to my friend as the example here, when you say bitcoin is an inflation hedge, there's actually strong analysis that not only is it an inflation hedge, but it's the best inflation hedge in the world. It directly shows this. It is the barometer. It is the best barometer for global liquidity, but it is not a price inflation hedge. It is a monetary inflation hedge. And people need to understand that when the expansion price inflation is a very, just very lagging indicator, it occurs well after monetary inflation occurs. In other words, bitcoin is going to predict when we might have price inflation. It will occur before, because it is the better barometer as to what is happening at the monetary layer.
[01:11:19] And as this becomes more known, I think that will make it a really, really powerful player in the market. And so many other things begin to extend or become layers on top of its performance in this role.
[01:11:37] As it becomes very clear and very valuable price signaling.
[01:11:45] It starts at the deepest market possible, global liquidity, and then it will slowly but surely work its way up into every single market.
[01:11:54] But it's just crazy to see this analysis because something we had suspected, it's something that we talked about, it's something that has been mused about on bitcoin forums since freaking 2012, that, you know, it would become a major pricing signal for the dollar. It would be the flip side of the dollar coin. And now we have pretty hard data that it is exactly that. And kudos to Lin for commissioning this and Sam for putting this together.
[01:12:34] That's just, it's really, really cool. Also, it also caveats a lot of things, too, is that it is still a risk asset. Like, it responds viciously to global liquidity because a lot of people still don't have that monetary bay. It is. It isn't money to them. It is a risk asset that experiences the experiences, these swings in the market. And it is nothing.
[01:12:57] I like the analogy, or I like the metaphor, that is treated and in the same place as emerging markets, because that's essentially what bitcoin is. It is a global emerging market.
[01:13:07] And going into it with that framing and then understanding the taking out the whole idiosyncratic events, the FTXs and the Mount Gox's and all the things you simply can't calculate for. I think putting that in line with the MVRV and MVRV Z score, I think is a really strong way to make long term positioning and to understand exactly where we are in certain cycles. And it doesn't tell you how long a cycle is going to go or whether or not it's going to be stretched out and we're going to have a bear market in between. You know, we could all, we could also start clearing the four year cycle and doing a little. It would actually be more accurate in relation to global correlating with global liquidity if we had fewer of these spikes. The spikes are actually times where it just gets out of control.
[01:14:05] We should expect these to diminish over time and all of these movements to really spread out over really long stretches. But I do think also that we will continue to have these rough or aggressive cycles and periods of extreme overvaluation for at least the foreseeable future. If you're not trying to waste your life trading every two weeks or trading on a one month timeframe, and you want to look at two years out, three years, four years, and you just want to make a broad, slow, singular framing for when you should expend capital and when you should double down on saving capital, or you should leverage it so that in a comfortable or in a sustainable way, I think in combination, these could give you a really good framework for when to make those decisions and when it was less of a concern, or where, where we might be in the transition from overvalued to undervalued or undervalued to overvalued, etcetera. So all of that is basically a call to action. To go to this article, check out the charts, check out the links that he has to this more fundamental data. Stop trading, get your bitcoin off of exchanges, put it on your cold card or your bitbox or youre a whatever your hardware wallet is. I actually haven't opened it yet, but I've got a Keystone pro they sent me, which I was a big fan of. The cobalt cobo vault before they switched to Keystone. So I'm going to try that out too. But there's so many different hardware wallets that you can choose and try out. Just get it on. Hardware wallet. Make sure that you know that you own your keys. I have the coin kite, a discount code. And you guys know I love the cold card. I actually just bought myself four new tap signers. So get your, get your money off in exchange. It's not hard. Go own it, get it in your nunchuck wallet or whatever you want to use. And stop trading short term, because over the long term you might actually have a strong play. And if you set yourself up comfortably and carefully and give yourself time and you do not over overextend yourself, you can prevent from having to sell during the bear markets, but still use those resources as needed. And you can be sure to stack while it is undervalued and basically close those obligations when it is highly overvalued and kind of balance that out. And importantly is if you start doing that safely, if you don't do it like a trader, but you do it like long term positioning, that makes sense. And where even if it goes against you for a extra year that you weren't expecting, that you can still play, you can still make this work. If you do that, you actually start to even out the market. You become a market stabilizer, and slowly but surely those big short term swings start to dampen. And what used to be a 30% dump now becomes a 24% dump and then a 20% dump and then a 17% dump. And slowly but surely it calms down. And we go into this slow, gradual, but consistent climb into bitcoin being the best price signal on earth. And I genuinely think that's where we're headed. So plan accordingly. What's your ten year plan? You better have some bitcoin on it with that last shout out to Tim. Uh, Tim, Lynn and Sam, I just can, I don't even know where the tea came from for this great piece and always for putting out great work. Uh, and just for being generally cool ass people. What's up, Sam? What's up, Lynn? I hope you guys are doing good. Uh, and thank you to everybody who supports the show, who zaps on fountain and streaming sats and all that good stuff.
[01:18:21] You mean the world to me, and you were the reason why I can keep doing this, and I love it. So any support is massively appreciated. And of course, one of the best things you can do is simplest things that you can do that costs you nothing is leave a review on Apple Podcasts, share it out with the people you know and the people who you know are interested in bitcoin. This show has only and forever basically moved by word of mouth. So that is a massive help and much appreciated. I'll catch you on the next one. And until then, everybody take it easy guys.
[01:19:10] Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
[01:19:22] Oscar Wilde.
