저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
요약 보기
Fed는 정치적 임명직이므로 독립성을 재검토해야 하며, 금리 결정은 국채 경매·자본시장 오라클 등 시장 메커니즘으로 대체 가능하다고 주장. 2025년 상반기 파산 371건(2010년 이후 최다)을 제시하며, 제로금리 장기화 후 2022년 급격한 금리인상이 부채기업 파산을 초래했고 이는 필요한 구조조정이라 봄. 중국식 국가 자본 개입 모델 및 미국 정부 지분 참여 필요성도 언급. 금 가격 3,400달러 돌파 등 하드에셋 선호 흐름과 2.2조 달러 규모 상업용 부동산 대출 만기 리스크를 지적.
다듬은 글
The more important issue for me is just acknowledging these people are political appointees. These are partisan employees. And this idea that the Fed is independent is maybe something that we should revisit because most of the things that they do can be done by Treasury and other people better. We all we could we could all read it and realize what was happening to the economy which was like okay it's time to find a glide path.
meaning a glide path means 25 25 wait 25 not 50 then zero okay that's not a plan but fed funds isn't even specific anymore it's now a range they don't give a specific rate they give a range because they don't know and it's okay to not know but we should just acknowledge that that's where we are today which is we have precise data in the free markets imprecise data in a group of 2025 is quickly becoming a year of reckoning for big business in the United States.
According to SNP Global Market Intelligence, 371 businesses have gone bankrupt in the first half of the year. This is the most since 2010, right after the financial crisis. There were 63 bankruptcies in June alone. There 64 in May. This is setting the stage for one of the busiest bankruptcy years in over a decade.
This increase is not a fluke. Companies used to count on easy refinancing because debt was cheap. But now that costs are going up, liquidity has dried up. The Federal Reserve won't lower rates even though growth is slowing and the Trump administration's push for global tariffs is lowering customer demand.
This is putting even more pressure on businesses that were already struggling. There are a lot of similarities to 2010. Back then, there was a hard reset because of the financial collapse. Analysts say that the Fed's actions like keeping interest rates near zero for a decade and then raising them at record speed when inflation got out of hand caused the mess.
The result is an uneven economy. Some industries are still strong, but areas with a lot of debt like retail and real estate are starting to break down. Chimath Palahupisha says on the All-In podcast that this is long time for firms that are weak and have too much debt to be wiped out. David Friedberg and David Saxs sharply criticized the Fed's mistakes, which helps us see what's really causing the wave of bankruptcies.
I think that the Fed is no different than any other appointee to a part of the government, which is that they are partisan. Meaning, if I said to you, is the Supreme Court viewed as partisan or nonpartisan? I think that most people at this point would say that the president that appointed them did so because they aligned with his ideology.
If I asked you the political appointees to any department of the United States federal government, are they political or non-political? And the answer is that they're political. And the idea that we still can't admit that the Federal Reserve is political is part of the problem. The reality is that the people that appointed these governors did so because the people that were appointed were aligned with their philosophy.
And so we should stop pretending that they're independent because they're not. And in as much as they are closer to a regular civil servant than the Supreme Court appointee, which is to say a lifetime appointment, which it's not, then I think it's very reasonable to say that any sitting president should be allowed to remove a Fed governor if he believes it's not aligned with the wishes of the electorate and the voters and the plan that was voted in.
I think that that's a reasonable thing. It's true for the rest of government. It should be true here. That's the narrow issue. But the bigger issue, I think, is asking from first principles, what does the Fed actually do in 2025? So, we have an extremely vibrant and complicated and interconnected $130 trillion global economy.
It's moving at the speed of light. The Fed gets together once a month, tries to divine what monetary policy, what the money supply should look like based on data that is often incorrect. We see that in the BLS data. We see that in the GDP prints. We see it in all of the inputs. And so we've turned over responsibility to a handful of humans using bad inputs.
So I think the real question is there are certain parts of what the Fed does that they can continue to do and I think everybody would probably say it's an okay thing. So just to be very specific here so I get this right. Could they be a lender of last resort? Personally, in my opinion, no. I think that Treasury does a better job.
I think we saw Treasury do that during GFC and I think that Treasury has a better mechanism to get the American taxpayer a win than the Fed does. Do they actually create monetary policy and price stability? I would say that the capital markets and the free markets actually do a better job of that. They define much more what the spread is.
I think sofur is a much better rate mechanism than the Fed funds rate at this point. Do they do banking supervision and regulation? Yeah, they probably do a reasonably good job of that. That is probably something that most people would say they could continue to do. Do they do a good job as a payment system and a clearing house?
Again, probably something that's pretty uncontroversial that they could continue to do. So, I guess my point is Jason, the bigger picture is the two things that are the most dynamic, they are the worst at doing. And so I would actually question whether that responsibility should sit with a handful of humans looking at faulty month old data.
So for example, today the commerce department did something that was pretty exceptional. They said we're going to start publishing data to the blockchain. All the GDP data is now going into a blockchain. So can you imagine what this starts? I think and we've talked about this before. I think employment data from all these employment companies and payroll companies should get published this way.
GDP data can get published this way. All kinds of economic measures scrub for anonymity should get published so that you can have pricing oracles that actually tell you what's happening in real time and the markets will then react and set rates in real time. Those are the two most sensitive things that I think the Fed does that creates controversy that they shouldn't be doing anymore.
First of all, Bill Pi is an exceptional American. He's a brilliant businessman. He's actually probably better served sitting at the Fed in some role quite honestly because he has been in the rate markets and the mortgage markets his whole entire life. So if Bill Py was able to get this in a in a reasonable, fair, and transparent way, which I have no doubt that he would have done anything other than that, the data is what the data is.
I don't know. I'll let somebody else litigate whether that's important. The more important issue for me is just acknowledging these people are political appointees. These are partisan employees. And this idea that the Fed is independent is maybe something that we should revisit because most of the things that they do can be done by Treasury and other people better.
And it was a historic tightening cycle. meaning the shock to the economy was incredible because the rate and the velocity of which he raised rates was unprecedented. So the real question is had he been truthful going into a nomination process and done it much sooner would the economy have been better off and the answer is probably
should the Fed do that is valuable today meaning when it was created I could understand how the government moved faster than industry I could I I think I can give that claim it was about providing liquidity too but 50 60 70 years later where all of private industry is operating literally at nancond scale using infinite data using a financial motive to price risk.
How is it possible that a handful of humans looking at data that's a month old? Because we all we could we could all read it and realize what was happening to the economy which was like okay it's time to find a glide path. But meaning a glide path means 25 25 wait 25 not 50 then zero okay that's not a plan.
Chimath Palahapisha says the rise in bankruptcies isn't really caused by taxes or political noise but by a long overdue reckoning. The Fed's zero rate strategy gave the impression of stability for more than 10 years. keeping companies going that should have gone out of business years ago. Then all of a sudden in 2022, rates went up 16 times faster than ever before in what was the fastest rate hike cycle in history.
That shock drained the last sources of cash, leaving businesses with a lot of debt with nowhere to turn. The damage is now much worse than just stores like Party City and Jo-Ann Fabrics. models that use a lot of debt, like commercial real estate and private equity roll-ups, are running into trouble.
In Chimath's view, it's a necessary purge of weak companies that have been around for years because of easy loans. But as more banks go bankrupt, the markets are putting more pressure on Powell and the Fed. If chaos spreads, the markets will probably force a policy change. On the Olan show, not everyone agrees with Chimoth.
David Friedberg thinks the wave is just the way things work out after too many years of zero interest rates. David Saxs, on the other hand, says the real crisis is still to come, especially in industrial real estate. Their different points of view show how businesses are becoming less united and how people have very different ideas about what should happen next.
You're saying something really important. Okay, can I just want to pause on this? Let's You talked about this and what you said was the markets reacted and they went down. You're absolutely right, but you know what they did? They also repriced that risk well before the Fed got back together. It was within a few weeks that the market had completely repriced what was happening with tariffs.
This is why I'm telling you that we are better off imparting the rate setting mechanism to the free market because when you have places like commerce and treasury increasingly publish all this real-time data into a blockchain you can have pricing oracles Jason that make these decisions in real time and repric this just like the stock market does every day.
Oracle explain to the audience what you mean by that. You mean an AI would tell us what the rate should be? No. Every bank will have oracles that divine what they believe the risk-free rate would be. Then what happens is when you have a treasury auction, in an auction, you submit a bid. And when people submit bids, what happens is you converge on a market clearing rate.
That happens independent of the Fed. And so what I'm saying is that if you actually inspect the ability to finance the United States government, the two critical things that happen can be done and are done well today by Treasury plus the free market. So you want to abolish the Fed? No. For for this purpose for for setting the rates.
Listen to me. They have four major responsibilities. I think that if you revisit what's happening, you can find two of those responsibilities that probably they can continue to do with a lot of usefulness. But it is clear that the free market does a much better job of setting the actual rate. It's called sofur.
We all use it. We use fed funds as a guide. But fed funds isn't even specific anymore. It's now a range. They don't give a specific rate. They give a range because they don't know. And it's okay to not know. But we should just acknowledge that that's where we are today, which is we have precise data in the free markets, imprecise data in a group of people.
I think some historical context is important. In 2006, Hujenta gave this speech and in that speech he talked about, you know, six or seven boxes. And the way that he described these boxes was that these are the critical parts of the Chinese economy that they must persevere and win over the next 20 or 30 years to ensure safety, security, and prosperity for the Chinese people.
And in those boxes were things like semiconductors, were things like rare earths, were things like pharmaceutical APIs. And what it described was a willingness by state governments in China as well as the federal government in China to use the balance sheet to support those companies incrementally. Jason, as you said correctly, they would also ask for a golden vote.
In return, what did they do? I can talk to you about rare earths as one very specific example through my involvement with MP and and now with Intel. The Chinese have an extremely sophisticated market driven approach to how they help when they are on the cap table. They'll price shape, they'll price dump, they will change the spot markets, they'll perturb the ability for other people to compete.
And what that does is it locks the capital markets because it says we can't compete with these companies, so we're not going to finance an alternative. That has long-term strategic negative consequences for everybody that isn't those Chinese companies. So, let me just pause there. Now, look at the United States.
What the United States has always done is we have been the lender of last resort, but we've never participated in the upside that being that lender of last resort has given us as the American taxpayer. So, for example, in 2008, you know, we created TARP where we bailed out all kinds of toxic assets.
What did we get in return for that? Nothing. We barely got our money back. When Warren Buffett stepped in to backs stop Goldman Sachs, he was able to get the United States government to help him backs stop that. Who got all the gains? Buffett and shareholders of Berkshire Hathway. Who put up more money?
The United States taxpayer. Those are but two examples. I think that this approach is the much better approach, which is to say we can do exactly what China did with a couple of tweaks. It's way better, as you said, Jason, to just put in the equity, own something on the balance sheet of the United States, not have a golden vote, have complete transparency, allow the capital markets to finance these businesses, but give them a chance to compete all around the world, and then the US taxpayer gets some of the upside.
That is awesome. What we have done up until now, until what Lutnik has done and what the president has done is the opposite, which is we have given money away in times of duress with absolutely no upside and I think it has to change. David Saxs adds to the criticism by saying that Jerome Powell is making monetary policy political.
He thought Powell cut interest rates very sharply to help Biden and Yellen, but then he stopped the loop when Trump took office again. If it's true, it means the Federal Reserve is no longer a fair judge, but a politician using interest rates as a weapon, and the economy is stuck in the middle. The markets are already responding.
Gold prices have broken above 3,400 yuana an ounce, and silver prices are close to multi-year highs. Investors are buying hard assets like gold and silver as a hedge against inflation and institutional distrust. In the past, rising valuable metals have been a sign of falling faith in fiat currency, and Powell's perceived bias could speed up that trend.
The next fault line is likely to be in business real estate. There are over $2.2 trillion in loans that are due before 2028. A lot of them are for buildings that don't make money at the rates used to be. Many of these zombie properties, which are mostly in places like New York and San Francisco, are empty because the landlords don't want to put money into them again.
Local businesses and banks will remain under stress until they are written down, sold at auction, and recapitalized. There is now a very important choice. Will Powell lower interest rates to ease systemic stress, which could lead to more inflation? Or will he stay strong and let more banks go bankrupt until the reset is complete? Stocks, commodities, and credit are all likely to be volatile on either road.
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