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James Ypma
8c46a15e3066b3a9e78a41370d0c9c73e5a04510a6d00827c0618c2097ba2dd6
God fearing Dad trying to be smarter every day.

Building a solar Mars rover. It occurs to me he could actually do this for his job one day

Dr., put a smile on that laser eye pic! You’ll be everyone’s friend, at least that’s what grandma said.

My 5 yo drew this at Kinder and told me it’s a Pokémon. Boys, I have questions. nostr:npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4u nostr:npub1guh5grefa7vkay4ps6udxg8lrqxg2kgr3qh9n4gduxut64nfxq0q9y6hjy

nostr:npub1s5yq6wadwrxde4lhfs56gn64hwzuhnfa6r9mj476r5s4hkunzgzqrs6q7z orange pilled me in early 2020 via his podcast. I have orange pilled a couple of people since. I wonder what the web of progress will look like in a few years.

I was talking to one friend I had orange pilled about listening to Preston’s show. He said “Preston has a show?” We figured out that he knows a guy locally named Preston who is big into BTC who had also been orange pilling him. He had always just assumed I knew his buddy. Lol!

Excited for this cohort to go through the next few quarters. Hopefully they will pass the torch.

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.

Thanks Lyn. Took multiple reads for my gorilla brain to understand but you got me there.

Kids asleep. Some evening study.