Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

One of the big macro questions is when will the US banking system run into the liquidity floor, requiring the Fed to end quantitative tightening? Due to current regulations and the "ample reserve" regime, banks generally have liquidity requirements relative to their overall size, and their overall size keeps growing nominally.

-Big banks ran into the liquidity floor in September 2019 at $1.5 trillion with the repo spike, and the Fed had to end quantitative tightening and resume mild quantitative easing (which was then overshadowed by the giga-liquidity-bazooka in 2020/2021).

-Smaller banks ran into the liquidity floor in March 2023 at $3.0 trillion (the new floor) with the regional bank crisis. Both the Fed and the Treasury provided liquidity in response, although the Fed has maintained quantitative tightening. Liquidity has been maintained above that level without being greatly elevated, which is probably what would have happened post-2019 if not for the pandemic/lockdown stuff thereafter.

The New York Fed thinks the liquidity floor will be reached sometime in 2025, and that they'll go back to gradual balance sheet expansion then. Andy Constan, formerly of Bridgewater, thinks it'll be late 2025. I debate him a bit on this since both of us cover this closely, and I generally think it'll be mid 2025, although there are enough moving variables that neither early 2025 or late 2025 would surprise me, so conservatively I say "by the end of 2025."

I was talking to a large institutional investor today, and he said that his contact who is a major repo operator at an investment bank, thinks the current floor is now $3.3 trillion, which is roughly where it is currently. That basically means any further quantitative tightening has to be offset by reverse repo drainage, or they'll have a repo issue and the Fed will need to end QT. My estimate is somewhere in the $3.1-$3.2 trillion range for the liquidity floor, meaning I think there's a bit more room than that repo operator. But either way it's pretty tight.

This is all kind of rambling but generally when that liquidity floor is reached and is responded to, it tends to be good for a lot of liquidity-driven assets, including bitcoin. And it'll probably be with a whimper more than a bang, kind of like the September 2019 repo crisis that nobody other than macro nerds remember.

Beautiful thesis Lyn, my general question therefore remains, why would the global price of bitcoin go up when it's the US causing the expansion, as opposed to say Egypt's form of QE in Egyptian Pounds.

Sorta seems like the price increment globally depends on what only the Fed or Tether does

Do you disagree with this assesment

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This is only a guess but my guess would be that if you are using Egyptian pounds or whatever to buy Bitcoin or Monero or such that the price in that particular currency would go up although it would affect the US dollar price very little because the Egyptian pound or whatever is very small compared to the US. So when they inflate, it has very little effect due to their relative size to the rest of the nations. But when the US inflates, it makes a major change in the price because of the fact that so many people buy with US dollars.

When the US does QE it generally weakens the dollar relative to other currencies for a period of time. Many countries have dollar-denominated debt, and so a weaker dollar improves their domestic liquidity conditions. Bitcoin’s strongest correlation is with global liquidity conditions, of which the US is the biggest variable, and China second.

So you're saying that trading pairs of BTC/EGP, BTC/NGN et al are really measured from dollar converted denominations. And not as a result of monetary expansions in these countries??