A lot of people, including some really well known ones, cite the figure that the U.S. has to roll $9 trillion in debt over the next 12 months, as though it’s a disaster.
Sometimes they assume the average interest rate is spread over the full Treasury debt duration evenly, including from years ago.
But in reality, most of what is maturing is short-term debt, which will have similar interest rates as it had over the past couple years, and mostly the same holders will refinance it. Only a minority is longer-term debt, meaning lower-rate bonds will mature and get refinanced by higher-rate bonds. Not a giant deal.
I’m first in line to talk about debts, deficits, and interest expense becoming a problem. I even have probably the best-known single meme about it. So, zooming out, yes it’s a major deal.
But most of the time when people cite the gross refinancing numbers over the next 12 months, it’s a flag that they’re unfamiliar with the subject, and getting caught up in alarmism.
I remember back when Israel went into Gaza, and markets took a hit, bitcoin was down notably and many tradfi macro folks who I otherwise respect for good market analysis were like “Why is bitcoin down today? I thought it’s a safe haven, lol.”
Similarly, today when bitcoin is up amid market turmoil, the bitcoin bulls celebrate it.
I’d be cautious about all one-day moves. If you over-emphasize them, you risk looking like someone with a memory of a goldfish, or otherwise operating with selection bias.
However, a point I have made in the past, and will repeat today, is that there are different types of risk-off events. A risk-off event that hurts liquidity is likely to hurt bitcoin. A risk-off event that demands more liquidity, or that is unrelated to liquidity (eg tariffs attacking corporate margins), is more likely to benefit or at least kind of spare Bitcoin.
Focusing on Bitcoin as a risk on or risk off asset is first level thinking. People who understand it deeply and self custody it tend to view it as risk off period, for good reason. But not always in terms of price. In terms of price, whether it functions as a risk on/off asset varies based on what type of risk on/off catalyst it was.
This catalyst risks hitting margins, not liquidity, and thus so far the reaction makes sense. But it still pays to be careful not to celebrate one-day moves too much.
Cautiously bullish.
“You can just do things” is one of my favorite meme phrases that I see out there.
Back around my senior year of high school, I consciously decided to shift to that mindset. I went from kind of operating within rules, and trying to leave a light touch around me, to being more assertive and creative about what I want to do. It was kind of a quiet “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me” vibe shift.
At the time I think the terminology I filtered it through was Sagan’s pale blue dot. Like, everything that has ever been done is on this crazy little ball spinning through space. So it’s okay to just do things, to take chances, to think outside of the box. Because the box itself is already actually kind of crazy.
And then in the mid-2010s, like around 2016, I did kind of a checkup on how I’m doing, and felt that while I had used that strategy well, I wasn’t thinking big enough. I had primarily used that strategy to climb up the ranks in the engineering world, with the goal of making things better for myself and my colleagues/division; I would just do things and be the person who pushed to say “yes” a lot and it had worked out really well.
But for my next phase, I felt I needed to “just do things” outside of an organizational structure as well.
So I started my namesake website. I previously had a small anon website on stock investing which I was able to sell to some publisher and that gave me experience, but this one would be different. It would have my face on it.
Any sort of content creator starts by being a little crazy. It starts with the improbable concept that you could create written or audio or visual content that thousands or millions of people will actually want to see and get value out of, in the sea of endless content that already exists.
But it starts somewhere. With just doing things. My view was that I would do my best, leverage the experience that I had, and give it my honest shot.
Never looked back since. It’s been a wild journey.
I find myself in this situation in Egypt sometimes.
I’ll be at a buffet and they have one type of butter packet, and it has soybean oil in it.
So I’m at my table with family or friends basically being the Karen like “how do they not have even one *proper* butter option?”
My March newsletter talks mainly about AI, and some of the nuances between datacenter AI and portable AI.
