ROLLUP: Will FAILING Banks Bring Down the Economy?!

The reason Powell is raising rates is because he's trying to fight inflation. And the more he raises rates, the more economic turmoil that seems to be causing. Namely, and we're gonna get to this in a little bit, in in the uh realm of bank failures. Okay, so that's starting to happen. Another bank failed this week, which we'll talk about in a minute.

Bankless Nation, it is the first Friday of May. It's Friday morning. Hope you brought your coffee. David, what time is it?

Uh Ryan, it's the uh Bankless Friday weekly roll-up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier. How you doing this week?

David, I I I'm doing well. I don't know if the banks can say the same though, because we got more bank failures.

On the menu.

Season

That's a big topic. Big topic of conversation. We're also going to talk about Jerome Powell and the Fed raising interest rates. How high can they go? That's the question we got to ask. David, what else are we covering today?

Uh Bology waves the right white flag on his bet a little bit early. He capitulates says Bitcoin's not gonna go to one million dollars in the next

six weeks.

I think June 2nd.

17th.

June 17th was when it was over. Okay, well it is May 4th. So he he's waving the white flag, donated, donated $1.5 million. And so we're gonna cover that. And then also, uh, there are some other mainnets just dropped. So Eigenlayer mainnet, the Suey mainnet, the Axelar has an announcement, and uh Lens has uh a layer three that we talked about last week. We got some stats, and then speaking of mainnets, not really mainnet, but Coinbase International, new exchange, just got announced. So bunch of stuff to run through in this Friday weekly rollout.

Yeah, totally. Always jam-packed for you guys. Of course, if you like this episode, if you like what we're doing over here at Banklist, make sure you like and subscribe. That's how we pop up on the charts on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube. You know how to do it. Just like subscribe. It's very important. Yeah, especially in the bear market. All right. Can you spare a like, guys?

One thing before we get into the markets today, David, we gotta talk about our friends and sponsors over at let's get to the markets today, alright? How are we looking on a Bitcoin on the week? Are we up? We down, we sideways.

It we are sideways, sideways week. Uh literally nothing to report. $28,000 and 900.

You're telling me we could have just skipped this entire week. It didn't even matter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's about right. Yeah. Not even one percent move on either Bitcoin or Ether or the ratio.

Same

Both just flat, flat? Eighteen hundred and eighty eight dollars. The most interesting thing about Ether right now is that there are three eighths in the price. Uh-huh.

man, we could have just uh saved the last roll up recording clip and just put replayed it, huh? Same price.

Nothing too. Well yeah, we got some volatility. We uh went down to eight hundred. Oh, we almost got back above two thousand, but uh oh

Coin ratio also flat.

Also I'm changed.

This is weirdly flat.

Yeah. But also, Bank Lost Station, I'll remind you, please pull up your tracker apps, your price trackers, and make sure that the prices have not moved in the last 24 hours.

And if you want some of the best charts in the biz, you gotta go check out uh Kraken Pro over here, pro.craken.com. Professional interface. So all of my charts look uh very professional these days, David. It wasn't like that before. And I'm learning how to chart a little slowly. Slowly but sure. It's taking some time. Uh let's talk about the big news today, David, which is uh the Fed raising rates, the big news this week at least. So the Fed just raised rates, interest rates, by point two five percent, or as you like to call it, twenty five basis points. I love looking at that.

That.

I know you always are speaking in terms of basis points.

So here's the uh the press release. If you want to read something uh you know kind of boring and what the uh what the what the notes are about this, but 5.25% between five and five point two five percent range. That's a 16 year all time high. We haven't been higher in interest rate um in 16 years. It was 16 years ago. When was that, David? It was before 2000 uh and eight, before the you know financial crash.

Hmm.

Um yeah, we're talking like mid 2000s. What were you doing in the mid 2000s? Last time the the rates were this high?

Were you buying a house?

No.

I was not under strain.

Did you know that rates existed?

Not at all. No, I just understood that my parents were stressed.

Oh like no, this was pre- this was pre-housing crisis. Never mind. Yeah.

Yeah, no, everything was fine. But it was about to get things were about to get

Yeah, right, right, right.

Well it does make sense that high interest rates created the housing bubble to pop. That makes sense.

Do you think uh kids in middle school right now are talking about inflation or interest rates uh at all? Are they just still just kids?

More than I was when I was in telling us.

The kids are getting smarter every generation. That's what's happening, I think. Um, but you know what? This this is kind of the uh the decision point here, right? Because Jerome Powell has a question. Uh they want the reason Powell is raising rates is because he's trying to fight inflation. And the more he raises rates, the more economic turmoil that seems to be causing. Namely, and we're gonna get to this in a little bit, in in the uh realm of bank failures. Okay, so that's starting to happen. Another bank failed this week, which we'll talk about in a minute. And I kind of feel like Powell is choosing maybe the worst of both worlds. Like, so we're gonna end up with high inflation anyway, and also bank failures? That's my critique as to what's going on. On the other hand, like, I don't know, maybe the guy's actually not in control of anything. It just seems like what happens, David, if we tighten so much that we cause a cascade of 2008 like economic effects, right? We we just had our third major bank failure this week, and we're still raising rates. It seems like a bad time to be raising rates, but I'm not a central banker.

I wanna yeah, I want to present the actually the counter argument to that point. Go for it. So we gotta we gotta raise rates because inflation is still up, right? Core inflation has not gone down. Uh the the more volatile, more expressive in uh inflation has come down, but core inflation, things like services, services and goods have gone up, right?

That's the hard part. So that's why we gotta keep on raising interest rates. And then when the bank failures uh occur, that's a sign, that's a sign of raising interest rates. Of course, uh economics and finance are just harder. And I think that what the Fed is able to do with bailing out these individual banks as they fail is like the Fed is raising interest rate more surgical and then they are catching the distressed banks on the way down. So it's not a like an impact. They're just cradling the bank failure into the ground, and then they're letting and then they're catching the next one. And so they are actually able to continue to increase rates because they are surgically catching the catastrophes that they are causing, which allows them to continue to raise rates because they're not there, they're like, oh, there's contagion, go, gotta go catch it. And it's working.

So far.

So far and maybe but also has a whole bunch of unintended consequences as well that we'll get to and I worry about one of which

But like bank consolidation into too big to fail banks so that the banking sector becomes nationalized doesn't sound like it's unintended.

That's kind of what's happening, right? But I do think the the the picture you just painted is what the central bankers and Powell would like to have happen, right? Right. I just worry I think we're gonna get there's a very real possibility, David, at this point we get the worst of both worlds in that we're not able to cradle the banks on their way down, but we just get cascading bank failures and also

massive high inflation, right? So just like what was the point? I don't know. That's the risk that we're running.

Inflation but economic deflation. Oh, that sounds awful.

We'll have to see what happens. I I uh we do know this

that is what stagflation is. Um

From the policy statement this week, anyway, the language saying that the the Fed, this has been in you know previous uh Fed language that it anticipates further rate increases would be needed. That wasn't in here.

Right.

So this does seem like this is the last

The top

rate

of

rise.