In keeping with my “Wrath of God” type thinking this week, I wanted to run a couple more thoughts past you about how deep in the thick shit I really think we are with markets.
Aside from the coming bond market induced stock implosion I predict, I was thinking about crypto this morning, and about how certain I am that most of it is worth $0. For example, as of this morning, Fartcoin, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Dogwifhat and Moo Deng alone are currently worth nearly $19 billion. Not only am I certain you haven’t heard of all of these, I’m even more certain you never have, and never will, need to use them for anything.
Think about that. It is $19,000,000,000 worth of digital nothingness that will go to $0.00 overnight, or close to instantly, during the next real market panic. It’s almost a certainty. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. People are barely certain they can trust Treasuries at this point, so I think it’s safe to say there will be no “flight to safety” in Fartcoin during the next market panic.
Here’s an actual image from an ▶actual YouTube video I found this morning:
I at least understand Bitcoin. Whether you think it should be worth $10,000 or $10 million, there is at least a somewhat coherent reason for it to exist: it is a scarce digital bearer asset that can be owned and transferred without a bank, company or government in the middle.
But after that, the case gets remarkably stupid remarkably quickly. Depending on exactly what you include, there is roughly $1.2 trillion of market value sitting in crypto outside Bitcoin, spread across thousands of meme coins, governance tokens and proprietary currencies.
And I keep coming back to the same question: why does any of this crap even exist?
The world already has money, stocks, bonds, commodities, banks, payment processors and exchanges. If you start a business and I give you money because I think it will become more valuable, we’ve already invented an instrument for that. It’s called equity. I give you money and receive an ownership interest and a claim on the economics of the business.
Crypto often takes the opposite approach: give somebody money, receive a token, and then create an ecosystem in which people need that token to participate. Demand for the ecosystem creates demand for the token, the token rises, and its rising price is then cited as evidence that the ecosystem is valuable.
Imagine I open a restaurant and refuse to accept dollars. Instead, you have to buy QTR Bucks, a currency I invented yesterday. There are only 100 million QTR Bucks and, conveniently, I own 30 million of them. People start trading them and the price triples. Have I revolutionized finance? No. I’ve made a Dave and Busters Power Card.
That’s how I view a shocking percentage of crypto. It doesn’t mean blockchain technology is useless. Blockchain could become enormously important for settlement and financial infrastructure. But blockchain being useful doesn’t mean thousands of cryptocurrencies need to exist, just as the internet changing civilization didn’t mean every dot-com stock deserved its valuation.
Stablecoins recreate the banking system’s oldest risk…more short-term money-like liabilities backed by assets that may not remain liquid when everyone wants their money at once. And they introduce a different question for me: is all the money actually there?
Tether, for example, had Tether International, the entity it identifies as the issuer of USDT, audited by KPMG U.S. in 2026. But neither the audited financial statements nor KPMG’s audit report was publicly released. And that entity was still a subsidiary of a larger, unaudited entity, to the best of my understanding.
And as obvious as concern should be here, crypto may simply be one piece of a multi-trillion-dollar black hole hiding underneath financial markets.
