You are a free subscriber to Me and the Money Printer. To upgrade to paid and receive the daily Capital Wave Report - which features our Red-Green market signals, subscribe here. The Financial "Whoppers" Of The Decade (No. 1 Should Be No Surprise)From "transitory" to "Terra..." Oh, the lies we tell ourselves...
Dear Fellow Traveler: You know what I love about financial history… It's not the crashes… the bubbles… or the spectacular frauds... (Although… Victor Lustig and the Romanian Money Box is a great story…) What gets me … whenever it comes to markets? It's the lies. And I’m not talking about white lies we told people in college or to friends about portfolio performance after three beers. I'm talking about the industrial-grade, weapons-grade, Federal Reserve-certified whoppers that reshape reality until reality bites back. These lies age like milk on the hood of a black car in a Maryland parking lot in August... I've been collecting these gems like baseball cards… But instead of calculating the rookie stats, we calculate the financial damage… The last decade has been a never-ending harvest of BS so pure and refined that future historians will need hazmat suits to study it… or crush it up on a mirror and ingest it to try to replicate the feeling of insanity that so many of us feel today… So… let’s count down to the top whoppers of the last 10 years… and if I’m missing any, please feel free to add your own in the comments… No. 7: The Bitcoin Reformation: From Fraud to “Inventory”In 2017, BlackRock CEO trashed cryptocurrencies. Larry Fink called Bitcoin… “an index of money laundering." Now, fast forward to 2025… and the company now operates the biggest Bitcoin ETF in history… The iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), managed by BlackRock, now controls about $85 billion in BTC. But… the money laundering!!! Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon chimed in with his own assessment… He called Bitcoin "worse than tulip bulbs" and a "fraud" in 2017. He said he would fire any trader caught touching it. Fast forward to 2025… and you know what’s coming… JPMorgan isn't just touching Bitcoin; they're accepting Bitcoin ETFs as loan collateral. They went from "I'll fire you for trading it" to "I'll lend you money against it." What changed? Don’t give me the… “Well, they educated themselves about the magificient future of BTC as an alternative asset…” If you fall for those PR lines (written on the shores of the Potomac River by political lobbying shops that brilliantly influence public sentiment…) I don’t know what to tell you… Reality is that these banks figured out how to extract fees from it. It's like watching your grandfather discover TikTok. At first, he complains about the “kids these days…” A few years later, he has four cameras around his house and he’s doing dance challenges on the patio…. However, this is a much greater hypocrisy… because we now have institutional capture of an entire asset class. And it’s not just BTC… They had to control the ecosystem before they’d ever embrace it… Funny how that works… No. 6: A Janet Yellen After School SpecialOn March 16, 2023, Janet Yellen (she comes up A LOT), testified before Congress… She said… the American banking system was "sound and resilient." Within 72 hours, Silicon Valley Bank was deader than my faith in Bernard Malkiel’s book... Signature Bank followed. First Republic went down like it owed money to the mob. These weren't slow-motion train wrecks. These were the first TikTok/Twitter bank runs… These runs were digital, instantaneous, and over before the risk managers could update their Excel files… The insane part… While Yellen was reassuring Congress, the FDIC was already measuring SVB for a body bag. "Sound and resilient" apparently means "currently on fire…" Of course, I understand what Yellen was trying to do: instill confidence in the banking sector, while Bank of America was down more than $100 billion on paper because it owned a lot of government debt that had seen yields spike. The GILT Crisis was a reminder that the SAFE asset is typically the asset that leads to a crisis. From mortgage bonds in 2008 to GILT bonds in 2022… it was the same in 2023 with U.S. debt. And rest assured… We’ll have another big crisis in our lifetimes… Which… funny enough, is another Yellen whopper… While 2017 was big for Fink and Dimon, it was Yellen who said that year that we likely wouldn’t see another financial crisis in our lifetimes… Then we had crises in… 2018, 2020, 2021 (Archegoes), 2022 (GILT), 2023 (SVB), 2024 (Nikkei Crash), and 2025. And remember… she just got a big job at PIMCO… famous for… bond trading… No. 5: The Soft Landing That Wasn'tIn 2024, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that we were “on a path consistent with a soft landing." Two things… First, there was a bit of a spasm in the Money Markets in April of that year - largely due to withdrawals around tax season. Second, the Nikkei collapsed in August, effectively ending the Fed’s real independence and obligations to the American people. This is where we knew it was all theater… The soft landing did come… if you owned assets. Your stocks went up, your house appreciated, your 401(k) looked healthier than a CrossFit instructor named Thad or Lad or Brad… But if you're one of the 100 million Americans carrying credit card debt? That landing felt as soft as concrete. It’s in the data… A recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that roughly 70% of Americans believe the American Dream is dead or never existed… Never existed? That is devastating… That figure is the highest level in the 15 years of polling on the topic. (And remember, that polling started AFTER the Great Financial Crisis…) With 20%+ APRs and delinquencies climbing, the only thing soft was the Fed's grasp on reality. But the S&P hit records, so mission accomplished, right? Luckily, there are people funnier than me who can point all of this out now… Here’s Mo Amer dissecting my entire graduate career in five minutes…  No. 4: The NFT Renaissance That Was Just A DMT TripRemember Beeple… In March 2021, when one of his NFTs sold $69.3 million… he said… "This is the next chapter of art history." The next chapter turned out to be about three pages long and mostly consisted of the word "rug" repeated 10,000 times and people getting punched in the face over and over again… Maybe Orwell was wrong about the boot, because he hadn’t thought about the stupidity of NFTs back when writing 1984… By 2024, studies found 95% of NFTs effectively worthless. It was a huge money grab. Again, the NFT industry didn’t see 50% of the artwork and digital whatevers down like 45%… And not “illiquid” - worthless when there aren’t buyers during a crisis. No, this crap was actually worthless. Similar to Confederate money, but this was something people thought would appreciate. This was supposed to be a revolution… Instead, it was a steady experience of losing money to glorified Microsoft Art experts. BUT DON’T WORRY… I’M TOLD THERE WILL BE ANOTHER RENAISSANCE HERE!!! No. 3: The Democratization of Bag-HoldingChamath Palihapitiya is a smart guy… But he was the face of a movement that looks insane in hindsight… One of the greatest money grabs in business history - with tons of insiders pulling money out of businesses while they collapsed… all in the name of “capitalism…” that wasn’t… Chamath talked about democratizing access to high-growth companies. I was told that this was bringing Venture Capital forward when writing articles on the subject. In theory, this was an interesting idea… the idea that retail investors could get in on the ground floor of new innovative companies… But the ground floor was actually a trap door. By 2022, 90% of de-SPACs traded below $10. Sponsors kept their 20% promotion fees while retail kept the bags. It wasn't democratization… It was a wealth transfer with better marketing. There are still countless SPACs out there that are going to Zero… They’re easy to spot… they all behave the same way… big promises that never materialize… No. 2: The Year of Bitcoin and Crypto Assets…You might not know this one… But in the world of crypto it’s a wild one… Do Kwon was the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs. This was the parent company of the stablecoin TerraUSD and cryptocurrency Luna. In January 2022, he said, "By my hand, DAI will die." Do Kwon's hand ended up killing $60 billion of his own ecosystem instead. The man threatened to destroy a competitor and ultimately crushed his own business on live TV. UST/LUNA proved that "algorithmic stability" is like "jumbo shrimp" or "government efficiency…" These words are a paradox. He went to prison… Then, there’s Sam Bankman-Fried. In November 7, 2022, he said publicly that his crypto company "FTX is fine. Assets are fine." Ron Howard voice: But they were not fine. They went bankrupt days later... He then faced a criminal conviction and went to the same prison where P. Diddy lives…. And his customer funds? They took an extended vacation… Where? We’re still looking… And No. 1: "Inflation is Transitory"In early 2021, Jerome Powell looked America dead in the eye and said inflation was just passing through. Inflation turned out to be that distant cousin who just needed a place to crash for a week, but then lived in the basement for three years and drank all the Dr. Pepper. If you owned a roofing company and got the measurements as wrong as they did, you’d have been stripped of any licensing you had. They couldn’t have gotten this more incorrect if they tried… However, since no one is accountable, no one seems to really care at that level. He would blame inflation, like Yellen, on "transitory supply effects…" Not… you know - all the money they dropped from the sky. You know what else turned out to be transitory? The purchasing power of your paycheck. The great Silicon Valley Bank. The cost of breakfast… You needed an underwriter to buy eggs at one point… While Powell was playing word games, CPI surged to 40-year highs. And again, those are just the official numbers. The Chapwood Index shows that places like New York and Chicago had compounding cost-of-living increases each year that surpassed… 12%. To address all that money printing, they hiked interest rates up like the guy at the gas station changing prices during a hurricane. They hiked so fast they murdered three banks in the process - while calling the financial system stable. And here's the kicker… in April 2025, Yellen was STILL out there claiming it was mostly supply chains. What Have We Learned?Absolutely nothing. The same people who told these whoppers are still running the show. Powell's still printing and will probably take a job as a professor at Georgetown or something… Yellen's still reassuring and working for PIMCO. And Wall Street's still "innovating" one thing at a time that can continue to extract money out of the next person’s pocket. Maybe it’ll be the next ODTE, triple-leveraged ETF options on Tesla or NVIDIA. Why not? There’s still a market for this madness… At least we got front-row seats to the greatest comedy show in financial history. And unlike many people’s portfolios, these lies actually appreciate over time. They age into punchlines. But… we're all part of the joke. Stay positive, Garrett Baldwin About Me and the Money Printer Me and the Money Printer is a daily publication covering the financial markets through three critical equations. We track liquidity (money in the financial system), momentum (where money is moving in the system), and insider buying (where Smart Money at companies is moving their money). Combining these elements with a deep understanding of central banking and how the global system works has allowed us to navigate financial cycles and boost our probability of success as investors and traders. This insight is based on roughly 17 years of intensive academic work at four universities, extensive collaboration with market experts, and the joy of trial and error in research. You can take a free look at our worldview and thesis right here. Disclaimer Nothing in this email should be considered personalized financial advice. While we may answer your general customer questions, we are not licensed under securities laws to guide your investment situation. Do not consider any communication between you and Florida Republic employees as financial advice. The communication in this letter is for information and educational purposes unless otherwise strictly worded as a recommendation. Model portfolios are tracked to showcase a variety of academic, fundamental, and technical tools, and insight is provided to help readers gain knowledge and experience. Readers should not trade if they cannot handle a loss and should not trade more than they can afford to lose. There are large amounts of risk in the equity markets. Consider consulting with a professional before making decisions with your money.
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