The ACID Capitalist Podcast

Send us a textBloody hell. So much for stable coins. Fight it out in the comments; does anything matter anymore if the crypto well has been poisoned by lies and malfeasance? The Acid Capitalist saw a debate on twitter about whether he was a misunderstood genius or a pretentious riddler. Neither, he's a fool in a foolish world.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textThe Alchemist explores the mysteries of hedge fund management further. This week's deep dive sees him wearing a suit! Can he cut it? The Acid Capitalist had a rough night but he's taken a magic pill to restore his superpowers and he eventually finds his mojo. This week we review central bank rate hikes. Surely, its the end, not the beginning? Private providers of credit have been raising rates since the summer of 2020. The US economy contracted last quarter. Official economic data is heavily revised in later years. Did the British economy relapse into recession last year? Just why are they insistent on more rate hikes? The Acid Capitalist is afraid, very afraid that equity markets might need to reverse all of their post covid glory.But rather than accentuate the negative, he wants to offer guidelines and solutions. He believes that they should plead a mea culpa, their primary responsibility rests with preserving asset prices. Only by revealing that they're essentially custodian officers charged with preserving the collateral that underpins the huge debt mountain will we move forward. Better yet, they should move to enfranchise those citizens that have no assets. They should create a sovereign wealth fund. QE has only prolonged the depression. Better to impose a withholding tax on mercantilist nations that choose to park their trade bounty in treasury markets. These countries forsake endogenous domestic growth in favour of chasing exports. They perceive this as a more robust economic plan. But the world of international trade is the business of robbing Peter to pay Paul.To enact their cunning strategy,  global savings must rise. In China, savings rise because their currency is set too low, preserving a comparative trade advantage that market capitalism would otherwise bid away. Without their state interventions their currency would rise to bring the world  into balance. Chinese households' incomes would reset higher and they might reasonably consume more. This does not happen. Instead savings rise; the share of consumption to gdp is remarkably low for such an advanced state.The same  applies elsewhere. With their comparative advantage, their lower relativeSupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textThis week's episode is probably the most profoundly ridiculous exercise in hyperbole ever attempted. The boys are sensing a regime shift. Volatility is like a prolonged period of high pressure in the atmosphere. Hedge fund types gunned it for all it was worth. Leverage, concentrated portfolios, lies and misdemeanours, they raked up huge profits and made themselves into billionaires many times over. But the times, they are a changing. Risk-less businesses are been revealed as risky. One by one, these feted masters of the universe are coming unstuck. We discuss. But we end on a deep dive into the theory of money. With US GDP contracting just as the Fed has committed itself to an aggressive hiking sequence of higher rates, we examine why they always seem so blind to events in the real world. Hiking during a depression has never worked. We've had four such calamities: 1830-1900, 1873 to 1900, 1930 to the onset of WWII and ever since 2008. They all ended with innovations: the railroads and the discovery of Californian gold, the chemical revolution of leaching that opened up the enormous S African gold supply and the mass adoption of telephony that facilitated  correspondent and then eurodollar banking.At each turn, the free world attempted to rid itself of tyranny. First we removed monarchs and kleptocracies from their nasty habit of specie clipping, then we successively removed governments from money printing. One hundred years since the introduction of the land line, does bitcoin offer the prospect of removing the banks from money? It's a tantalising prospect and it goes far to explain why the Feds are hopeless with money and hence the economy. Truth be told, they're no longer active in the domain of money creation.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textThe alchemist doesn't speak, he yells; he's a proclaimer seeking the truth. Hear ye, hear ye, he bellows, the apocalypse is coming. Fear, greed, loathing, they're all set to knock the financial world off its perch once again.The Acid Capitalist has seen it all before. A block of digital energy, he's vibrating wildly in his bunker and taking down all that antagonises him; poison pills, suave, beige, star hedge fund managers, Netflix, those that purport to save the planet by banning hydrocarbon extraction. This week he's uncut, unkempt, unruly, and channelling a higher frequency. This is financial improvisation at its most unexpected. Wannabe hedge fund stars stay tuned.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textThe Reverence Episode. The Alchemist @writes_sweeney finds himself exalting at the triple religious whammy of Easter, Passover and Ramadan. But it's Franz Kafka that holds sway. The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival. The  Acid Capitalist  proclaims that the mysticism demanded to see the future for risk assets demands that you listen to those pursuing deviant pathways. He offers up his wooly hat as evidence...reject the front pages, listen to the Church of Acid Capitalism.The editing this week has been excessive, "buts", "umms", " "halting silences", they've all been eliminated. The result being that the boys sound as though they've dropped some speed. Have no fear, wisdom awaits the patient. First on the block, the recurring message that society's fear for the planet has left the hydrocarbon complex under-valued, priced for imminent death and yet the impervious Saudi dollar peg sits unchallenged. Acid wisdom states that when the lego bricks don't fit, you have a  giant trading opportunity. Where have all the dollars gone? A common refrain at cyclical turning points. Stocks are down, government bond prices have been massacred, just where are those dollars? The Capitalist reveals the perils of turning points. That when dollar assets are destroyed, dollar liabilities remain forever, setting off a mighty stampede to deleverage. The Fed's greatest nightmare. In the 1920s the credit system was predicated on gold, by contrast it is dollar collateral that feeds today's eurodollar credit system. Gold scarcity, and the demands placed on society to cover gold deficits in the 1920s, caused the global economy to crash spectacularly in the 1930s. Could the same thing be playing out again with the dollar? Will the touch  point be a renminbi devaluation? Ruminations and distant rumblings are laid bare. The Alchemist has discovered Libya. Has he dropped some acid? The Capitalist adopts the Ringo Star note of diffidence when pressured to film the Let it Be album there. But in a world constantly changing, in a world where the giant Australian superannuation funds are suddenly pouring money into UK public sector assets, who is really the mSupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textThis week, the Acid Capitalist is restored to his spiritual home, Blanc Bleu and boy is The Alchemist on form ! He's dug up some ancient manuscripts from 2007 from the legend, James Dines, the original gold bull. The foolish reject what they see, the wise reject what they think and accept what they see. Except, the Acid Cap is about to do the unpardonable and reject the wisdom that defined his hedge fund career.He's been looking at the Ruble. He refers to it dismissively as the Barney Rubble. The Barney has eliminated all of its losses since the shock of the unexpected military campaign against Ukraine.  Men in Suits are adamant that this marks a profound moment in economic history. That Vlad the Bad is Vlad the Economic genius.The decision to peg to gold, a modern day gold standard, has many in the financial community proclaiming this as the moment Russia defeated the proxy economic war. But more than that, they claim it as a great pivot in history. Where Russia goes, we will follow. Huh??The Acid Cap is having none of this. The screen price of the Barney is paint taping propaganda. It doesn't trade except by invitation. It's the preserve of the monetary authorities in Russia and those shameful nations that continue to dance with the Bear. Russian citizens certainly can't sell their Barneys, foreign nationals still holding Russian assets can't sell the rally and, heck, even Russian exporters must return their dollars to the kleptocracy.A gold standard is feasible in Russia because they've defranchised their citizens but elsewhere, democracies rejected the rigours of gold a century ago. The Wizard of Oz captures this poignantly. In the 19th century it was the elites that determined the outcome of elections. The lion depicts the mighty William Bryan Jennings, the populist presidential candidate who ran 2x and lost. The elites robbed him of his courage...Gold ain’t neutral. It favours the creditor over the debtor, forces the pain on the We, the People. With no vote, the people back then had to take it on the chin. When Treasury Secretart, Mellon, said purge the system of its rottenness in 1929, he was set to crucify the populace on the cross of gold. Thankfully, saner heads prevSupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textThe unplugged episode. The Acid Capitalist appears down on his luck this week. Recovering from another bout of dengue fever and yet another evening of rock and roll indulgence, he laments that if only he had found more time to prepare, perhaps the show would have been more spontaneous?  Have no fear, the show is interrupted as the French police arrive to question the Acid Cap, the screen drops to an intermission and  he returns  only to knock out his mic. This is a wild ride. Watch the mayhem unfold.This week, the membership is asked to reflect on the meaning of mysticism, fantasy and the occult. The Achemist, is incredulous that investors might turn to corn as an alternative to dollar reserves to preserve their wealth. An exasperated Chris demands, " who would do such a crazy thing?" Crazy, retorts the Acid Cap? No more crazy than the faith based system that underpins today's fiat money. I believe... believe...I believe. Our financial world is a religious cult collateralised by blind promises; a score card of broken promises.Wealth denominated in paper money. China owns around $3 trillion greenbacks at last count, The attraction seems to rest on a promise to pay the bearer on demand. But scratch further and you uncover a web of deceit and broken promises. A promise not to confiscate your assets, to maintain a civil, enterprising society, a promise to uphold civil liberties, a promise that the state serve We the People, a promise of free movement of labour and capital, a promise not to engage in reckless military adventures overseas. He who casts the first sone? No system is faultless but the dominance and endurance of the dollar as the reserve currency of choice testifies perhaps to fewer broken promises... Coca-Cola jealously guards the secrets of its magic formula. Imagine, instead, if the most successful nation in history were to broadcast its secrets openly to friend or foe? Surely other nations would seek to copy the "sauce" as they sought to emulate if not over take the hedgemon? Despite the transparency, many large economies seem reluctant to steal such a march. Few leaders are willing to let go of their iron-grip control. The Acid Capitalist doubts any command based economSupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textMacro Confessions Part XXXII, The Sweeney Alchemist (@writes_sweeney) is worried that the Acid Capitalist (@hendry_hugh), has been detained in Kyiv en route back to his Blessed isle. Recent images reveal a stark concrete bunker. Just where is he this week? He calls upon the aid and inspirational insight of the political economist @MkBlyt, The Tangerine Bishop of Dundee. It's an unforgettable, Scottish ménage-à-trois that will have you reaching for the closed caption service sooner rather than later.Men in finance have a tendency to talk to themselves, to be swallowed up in a grey, prohibitive universe to the exclusion of the rest of us. Not here...the bunker gets the spray can graffiti treatment, bass guitars are played loud and badly by the Acid Cap and with a swinging rhythm by The Bishop.What wanna hedgie can resist the exploration of money by those in the know. The contracts governing the external economic relationships of sovereign nations are revealed for all to see. Myths are exploded. Gold, Bretton Woods and the Eurodollar system are assessed and judged. The boys can see a fourth turning point emerging in this mysterious chess game between continents. But what will replace our dying monetary order? The question is pursued with vigour.Take red pills, get angry, get even...a market based system that seemed set to reset asset values to zero was effectively rescued by a put option, previous generations called it a cross of gold. A system of winners and losers. Where asset values have to be maintained to support the debt, a support system paid for by the serfdom of the working classes.Either divide our monolithic world into smaller pieces that aren't too big to fail or award asset values to the debtors, to those unlucky enough to be unable to afford assets. Rather than have the Fed accumulate $7 ton of useless laundromat tokens via QE, lets distribute economic tokens to the 99%. Thatcher did it with the public assets. All privatised. The public housing stock, returned to the home seekers. Awarding assets to the majority sparked the moribund economies of the 1970s back into life, could it work again?? The Bishop has a proposal...Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textMacro Confessions Part XXXI,  a very tired Acid Capitalist, having flown half-way across the globe, joins the The Sweeney Alchemist (@writes_sweeney), in London Town to review the week when risk markets rallied.But first Chris is intrigued by the re-emergence of Adam Newman and his crypto plan to save the planet. We Work for the Planet but really? The idea is rubbished by a sceptical Acid Capitalist as way too many blue pills and not enough red. And the boys start quoting Madonna, "How High can we go". This graced the cover of the Eclectica April 2007 investor letter just 4 months before depositors at the failing bank, Northern Trust, formed orderly British queues to withdraw their savings as the financial world tilted into a devastating crisis.Chris pursues his journalist's curiosity. How are Hedge Funds trading the war? Are they redeeming wealthy Russian clients? Why bid for soccer clubs? And just how many computer screens does a manager need to take on holiday? Twitter is celebrated. Hugh reveals he spends more time scrutinising the platform than traditional newspaper outlets. Did you know that the Russian foreign minister's flight to China was aborted mid way into its journey?But the big news is China. Has China pivoted from its allegiance with Vlad the Mad? Is it the allure of the $85 trillion global economy versus exclusive rights to Russia's imploding $1.7 trillion?  Or was it stark signs of the dreaded economic dominoes starting to crash and set off a chain reaction that could humble the mighty Chinese economy? Is this the real explanation behind the 25% reversal in the oil price?War propaganda, objectivity, dark political arts...just how high can we go? In the week that Bono's peace poem was ridiculed by many, the Acid Capitalists concludes, "Like a thief in the night, see the world by candlelight". No wanna be hedge fund student wants to miss this provocative take on the week's events.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...

Send us a textMacro Confessions Part XXX,  the Acid Capitalist is joined by his trusted lieutenant, @ToStRo and together with The Sweeney Alchemist, they brew a heady mix of Putin Put Downs and attempt re-set the global macro chessboard. Chris busies himself with a meaty cheese burger..Convexity has jumped from our computer screens to the theatre of war. The asymmetry of urban war was well understood by all those not intoxicated by the greed and fear of fascist states. Urban assaults favour the defenders, but like a Bloomberg scenario analysis, convexity has leapt from the city to the surrounding fields and outer limits of the metropole. Anti-tank and anti-aircraft technology supplied liberally to the democracy of the Ukrainian statehood is making this war more asymmetric than any one could ever have hoped for. Putin hasn't lost his marbles. Rather his gangster political system has left him bereft of proper intelligence. State corruption has fostered an almighty state failure in intelligence. It's as though the former KGB has been transformed into mammoth PR agency intent on amplifying the wishes of its only client.Ok, enough war-war. Bretton Woods died in the 1960s. Those that seek to right off the hegemony of the dollar collateral system owing to the escalation in the world's first truly global war are mistaken. Is the world shifting, tilting on its axis? You bet! But not as the apologists and doomsayers would have you imagine. The axis has always been defined by the supposed might of the current  account surplus nations versus the receding power of those nations succumbing to current account deficits. Think again...Channel all your paradoxical thinking. It's been a Wizard of Oz illusion all along. To quote the mighty Wizard, My people have been wearing green glasses so long that most believe this really is the Emerald City. The Acid Capitalist spells it out. Having assets that people crave, that they must own, gives you power. If you can't create enough assets in your own currency that outsiders really want then you never had wealth in the first place. This chimera of wealth is simply the confiscation of other nation's benevolence. The world is changing, hallelujSupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...