저자: BillMiller · 외국인
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비트코인 대형 보유자 Bill Miller는 시장 거품 경고를 두고 현 시점을 명확히 거품이라 단정하지 않으며, 인플레이션 헤지 서사에도 강하게 베팅하지 않는다. 미국 6월 CPI는 전월 대비 0.9%, 전년 대비 5.4%로 상승했고 근원 CPI는 전년 대비 4.5%로 예상(4.9%)보다는 낮았다. 인플레이션 해석은 일시적이라는 연준 입장과 금리 인상 우려가 대립하며, 비트코인 진영은 인플레이션을 핵심 논리로 본다. 암호화폐 변동성이 기관 투자자와 헤지펀드를 통해 전통시장으로 전이될 수 있다는 '스필오버 FUD' 논의가 확산 중이다. 영란은행 보고서는 비트코인 가격이 4월까지 6배 상승 후 5월 약 50% 폭락했으나 전통시장 전이는 제한적이었다고 평가했다. 바젤위원회도 은행의 암호화폐 익스포저에 대한 자본 적립을 논의 중이다. Square(Block)는 잭 도시 주도로 비트코인 하드웨어 월렛과 서비스를 개발하기로 확정했다. 모바일 우선, 멀티시그, 보조적 자가 보관(assisted self-custody)을 원칙으로 한다. NYDIG 등 기관급 비트코인 플랫폼의 은행 연계 확대도 언급되었다. 메인 주제인 Bill Miller의 분기 서한은 거품 논쟁을 다룬다. 마이클 버리, 제레미 그랜섬, 스탠 드러켄밀러 등 8명의 투자자가 대폭락을 경고하지만, Miller는 15개월 전 3월 폭락 후 회복 중인 현 시장을 대체로 적정가치로 본다. 다만 일부 저평가/고평가 영역이 있으며 포트폴리오는 완전 투자 상태를 유지한다고 밝혔다. 그는 인플레이션을 예측할 수 없다고 하면서도 과거 1970~80년대 인플레이션 문제를 시장이 잊었다고 지적한다. Miller는 아마존 장기 보유(83% 비중)와 2020년 기준 비트코인 평균 단가 약 500달러 투자로 부를 회복했다고 언급되었다. 진행자는 Miller의 비교적 비이념적이고 조심스러운 태도가 인상적이라고 평가하며, 비트코인 보유자의 기반이 생각보다 이념적으로 다양하다고 정리했다.
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it's super interesting to see such a large bitcoin holder and advocate and not go all in on the inflation story and the bitcoin as inflation hedge narrative i think it gets back to a story of bitcoin that never really leaves although it often takes a back seat to whatever the narrative du jour is that is bitcoin as non-correlated bitcoin as a new type of force bitcoin is a thing that just keeps plugging along no matter what we try to say about it bitcoin as to quote david s pumpkins its own thing welcome back to the breakdown with me nlw it's a daily podcast on macro bitcoin and the big picture powershifts remaking our world the breakdown is sponsored by nydig and produced and distributed by coindesk what's going on guys it is tuesday july 13th and we're talking about why bitcoin bull bill miller doesn't think it's a market bubble even though others seem to think so first up however let's do the brief first on the brief today it is cpi day and i don't need to tell you guys as regular listeners of the show how contentious the debate around inflation is right now the fed is invested in trying to convince everyone that the numbers are high but transitory based on specific dislocations related to the world coming out of corona wall street is invested because they're worried that the cheap money party will come to an in their minds premature end if the fed is forced to take action and raised rates bitcoiners are invested because inflation eating away people's savings and generally making their lives harder is a key part of their philosophical thesis for bitcoin in the first place all of this added up gives the release of new numbers a pretty serious significance well the latest numbers are out and they're pretty sure to make this debate rage even hotter the consumer price index jumped about 0.9 percent in june month over month 5.4 year-over-year the monthly change was the largest one-month change since june 2008.
when you exclude food and energy the so-called core cpi month over month was also 0.9 and year-over-year was 4.5 percent this was more than expected bloomberg economists had predicted 0.5 monthly and 4.9 year-over-year the big drivers of inflation are sort of what you'd expect increased demand particularly around things like travel and there also continues to be supply shortages although many commodity prices like lumber are starting to come back to earth there are also shifts in employee expectations a lot of people are making different decisions and are looking to be paid more for the first time in a long time some of these costs are being passed on 47 of small businesses rose average selling prices in may and that was the highest share since 1981.
now as always there is a ton of hemming and hawing about the implications of all this and i'll just point to one tweet that i think nails it from melton to mirrors she writes cost of living cpi is up 5.4 year over year with june alone seeing a 0.9 percent increase median price to buy a home is up 23 year over year wage growth is up 3.7 percent returns to labor are less than the returns to capital and you ask why everyone is becoming an investor what i like about this take is that it's just observational in a world where increases in wealth happen almost entirely by deploying capital and markets versus deploying labor to work no wonder more people are trying to get in on that game so what should we be watching for around inflation from here so far it's easy to dismiss a lot of this as an issue of base effects base fx refers to the fact that when you have a year-over-year measure if there was a major dislocation a year ago that would explain some of these seemingly high numbers may 2020 was sort of peak base effects it was a peak contraction in economic activity and so from here on out every month farther away from may 2020 that we get there's going to be less power for base effects to explain high inflation so that will be something to keep an eye on if and how it changes the larger public discussion for now in this brief however let's move over to let's move over to crypto markets here is a new fud narrative that i see emerging let's call it spillover fud the argument in a nutshell is that crypto is super volatile it involves people trading with high leverage that exacerbates huge swings in the market and i'm increasingly seeing folks in the traditional finance and regulatory side calling out how that volatility and those major swings could increasingly represent a systemic risk to other asset classes as well in other words crypto risk might spill over to traditional markets i noticed a bit of this in the recent house financial services hearing on crypto in particular one of the expert witnesses described how as hedge funds get more exposure to crypto they could effectively translate risk from that asset class into other asset classes the concern is that if hedge funds get some huge margin call based on a massive down move it could cause other assets in their portfolio that aren't crypto to get liquidated the example of archigos is high in everyone's mind where when in march it couldn't meet a margin call a bunch of banks offering prime brokerage services started to liquidate billions in stock ultimately credit suisse lost about 5.5 billion nomura lost about 2.9 billion morgan stanley lost 900 million and ubs lost 775 million the concern that something like this could start in crypto and then move to other areas is exacerbated by the opacity with which hedge funds operate up until now crypto has been so retail focused that its risk has been largely self-contained sure individual consumers who bet with too much leverage might be hurt but it wasn't going to spill over now that institutions are moving into the crypto space on mass the concern of systemic risk is growing and since we have no ability usually to see what type of bets hedge funds are making it makes it very difficult to see how particular market action could cause a problem now one testimony does not a narrative make however check out this headline on coindesk today bank of england warns of crypto spillover to mainstream markets the boe just released about a 50-page report on financial stability that has a short section on cryptos quote the increase in risk taking is also manifested in the price volatility of certain crypto assets alongside these indicators rapid appreciation of crypto asset valuations and recent high levels of price volatility in these instruments could highlight potential pockets of exuberance prices of major crypto assets such as bitcoin and ethereum experience sharp appreciation over the 12 months prior to april 2021.
in particular the price of bitcoin rose six-fold over that period but it then sold off sharply in may such that its price fell by around 50 and has remained at this lower level and remains particularly volatile with price changes skewed to the downside in june 2021. spillovers to broader financial markets from this episode were limited market intelligence suggests crypto assets are largely held by retail investors with institutional investors having limited exposure at present however there are some signs of growing interest in crypto assets and related services from institutional investors banks and key payment systems operators these developments could increase the interlinkages between crypto assets and other systemic financial markets and institutions so as you can see it's nascent but they're making this connection last month as well the basel committee of the bank for international settlements started to discuss a similar issue suggesting that banks should set aside enough capital to cover losses in full so to me the blending of crypto and traditional finance is inevitable and there is a version of these discussions that isn't fud it's just preparation for an inevitable reality what i'm watching for is if and where this volatility spillover narrative is used as a way not to institute best practices for handling that volatility but instead as a justification to try to prohibit or restrict crypto last on the brief today a story from last week that i didn't have a chance to really cover you remember at the beginning of june that jack dorsey tweeted that square was considering making a hardware wallet he started off the possible effort with a thread that explained their guiding principles which included one that bitcoin was for everyone and that a non-custodial solution had to be for everyone as well two that holding crypto on exchanges wasn't sufficient aka no keys no cheese three that there was room for assisted self-custody that was a term they introduced four that any solution had to be mobile first but five that they had to recognize the challenge of mobile six that any solution had to blend availability and security seven that safety is complicated eight that we needed to find recovery mechanisms that didn't burn money nine that there were real questions around the necessity of displays 10 that trust can't be required 11 that any mainstream hardware wallet had to have native layer 2 support and 12 that it needed to be integrated with native apps anyway a month or so later dorsey and square have confirmed that the project is on project lead jesse dora gusker tweeted we've decided to build a hardware wallet and service to make bitcoin custody more mainstream we'll continue to ask and answer questions in the open this community's response to our thread about this project has been awesome encouraging generous collaborative and inspiring the questions and principles we surfaced in our original thread resonated we have a lot of questions and issues to reconcile and we'll start with this product direction bitcoin first global distribution multisig to achieve assisted self-custody and prioritizing mobile use so if this is something that excites you and you're interested in joining their team they have put out the call email hard wallet at squareup.com i would love for breakdown listeners to be involved in this effort the breakdown is sponsored by naidig the institutional grade platform for bitcoin as long time listeners know nydig is a major force in the bitcoin space and they're now making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers to offer bitcoin that mainstream access is critical for all of us and you can learn more about it at nydig.com nlw that's nydig.com forward slash nlw let's move to our main topic there is a ton of discussion around bubbles these days yet one investor a legendary value investor turned bitcoin bull bill miller isn't quite sure his new quarterly letter is an interesting contrarian take on the market before we look at that letter however let's discuss who bill miller is miller had an absolutely epic run his flagship fund the leg mason value trust beat the market 15 years in a row in 2008 however it absolutely dumped crashing 55 percent he had made leveraged bets on bear stearns freddie mac and others but the fed's action underwhelmed what he thought they were going to do after that 55 crash withdrawals from the fund were insane he went from 77 billion under management to about 800 million dollars under management that plus a divorce settlement led to miller having a 90 cut in personal wealth in just a few months even surrounding all this though he did a couple of things right first he was a long-term buyer and holder of amazon starting from just after ipo in 1997 and even increasing his stake after the dot-com bubble burst he had to sell a bit after those fun withdrawals in 2008 but he bought a ton of call options when amazon tanked that same year those shares have gone from worth under forty dollars per share in november 2008 to over three thousand dollars now in 2020 amazon made up 83 of miller's personal portfolio and he guesstimated that he was the largest individual shareholder in the company whose quote last name isn't bezos still according to a baron's interview earlier this year another bet of millers has exceeded his amazon stake in value that is you guessed it bitcoin miller started buying bitcoin between 200 and 300 a coin and said his average cost basis is around 500 despite that insane 2008 fund cratering miller is a billionaire again thanks to his amazon and bitcoin stakes or at least he was in april when he was doing the interview where he discussed all of this so you've got something really interesting here a classic old-school value investor who also got in on bitcoin really early let's get back to his letter the main subject is whether we're in a bubble here's how he sets it up as i was gathering some material for this market letter i came across this headline in a well-known business publication michael bury jeremy grantham and other top investors are predicting an epic market crash here are their greatest warning so far jeffrey gunlock leon cooperman and stanley druckenmiller expect to downturn too without quoting every one of the eight investors views here's a typical cross-section greatest speculative bubble of all time bury full-fledged epic bubble grantham saying the market was anything other than overvalued versus history is just to be ignorant of all the metrics valuation gun lock i have no doubt that we were in a raging mania in all assets druckenmiller then stan added i also have no doubt that i don't have a clue when that's going to end he pointed out that quote i knew we were in a raging mania in mid 99 but it kept going on and if you shorted the tech stocks at mid 99 you were out of business by the end of the year the others quoted in the story mostly did not appear to share stan's cautiousness about the risks of actually acting on predictions of a dramatic decline in stocks i recall george soros saying in 2008 that he had predicted that financial crisis he then riley noted that he had predicted many financial crises over his career that never materialized so as you can see miller is getting into this confusing dynamic of it being possible for there to be a bubble but for the bubble to have more room to inflate and that that being where investors make their money or not he quoted another article called a killer wave in the nasdaq bubble quote many technology stocks were fundamentally overvalued while many of the meme stocks cryptocurrencies and other coveted winners will prove fundamentally worthless there is nothing inconsistent about expecting further big gains in asset prices that are already fundamentally overvalued this should be obvious to anyone who experienced the 1989 japanese bubble the 1999.com bubble and the credit bubble of 2008 but here's where miller's contrarian take comes in quote what is a bit curious about the bears predicting an epic market crash is that we had one only 15 months ago the market went down the most in history in a four week period ending on march 23rd due to the panic over covet 19 before beginning the remarkable recovery that we are currently experiencing i think the thing that miller is noticing is that there is an entire cottage industry in the sky is falling in a world of exuberance it can seem extremely clever to be the naysayer the problem of course is that when the perma-bears predict their umpteenth market crash it weakens their ability to actually move people to action they become cassandra's prophets doomed to tell the future with no one to heed their warning of course many of them also have paid newsletters or other financial interests specifically designed around their doom or prophesizing on the topic of inflation miller says that he has no idea but he does think that we've collectively forgotten the real problems of inflation quote inflation has been too low as the fed sees it for long enough that most investors have forgotten the 1970s and early 1980s when it was a major problem it is perhaps ironic that 50 years ago president nixon took the us off the gold standard during the post-war period through 1971 global banking crises were few since going to a system of floating exchange rates there have been many bitcoin was born out of the 2008 crisis and was designed to be free of government control and manipulation to be the ultimate in an inflation-proof asset it is an open question if it will be an enduring store of value with many strong opinions on both sides ultimately miller's main point is that we simply don't know and that at least to him things seem kind of fine quote a recent study of inflation forecast by economist consumers in the bond market found no significant ability to make value-added predictions quote as the new york times puts it as far as major shifts in inflation go we are all in the dark just as we are all essentially clueless about where the stock market is heading or the price of oil in 2022 or the date of the next recession the worries that one reads about regularly in the press and in research reports are already priced into the market commensurate with the market's assessment of their probability the market looks broadly fairly valued to me with most stocks priced to provide a market rate of return plus or minus a few percent there are pockets of what looks like appreciable overvaluation and pockets of significant undervaluation in the u.s market in my opinion we can find plenty of names to fill our portfolios and so remain fully invested so to wrap up i find this analysis fascinating for a couple of reasons first it is just so comparatively calm and non-ideological which is a real change of pace for those of us who hang out on crypto twitter two it is almost willfully non-committal other people disclaimer their financial op-eds with not financial advice but this guy is really not really giving a lick of financial advice third it's super interesting to see such a large bitcoin holder and advocate and not go all in on the inflation story and the bitcoin as inflation hedge narrative i think it gets back to a story of bitcoin that never really leaves although it often takes a back seat to whatever the narrative du jour is that is bitcoin as non-correlated bitcoin as a new type of force bitcoin is a thing that just keeps plugging along no matter what we try to say about it bitcoin as to quote david s pumpkins its own thing it's easy to forget that the broad base of holders is far less ideologically homogeneous than bitcoin twitter would make one think and that ultimately what they are interested in is an asset with no precedent in human history anyways guys let me know what you think about miller's assessment hit me up on twitter nlw and if you're enjoying this show please go take a minute to rate and review it i really appreciate everyone who does that until tomorrow guys be safe and take care of each other peace
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