Just in the past few days, the mood on Wall Street has begun to change and not in a good way. Despite the propaganda that everything is fine, that AI will solve everything, that bitcoin is going to the moon, the reality that U.S. manufacturing isn't reenergized, that tariffs are causing inflation, that the U.S. government - despite ending the ugly, longest-ever shutdown - refuses to tackle its deficit problems, and that the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are going badly for the "good guys", meaning the U.S., Europe, and Israel.
Add to those issues the burgeoning collapse of households struggling with excessive debt, high prices, rising delinquencies on car loans, student loans and credit cards and the makings of a massive liquidity squeeze and a recession are beginning to take shape.
The White House confirmed yesterday that because of the shutdown, October Non-farm payrolls and CPI data would not be released. White House Press Secretary, Caroline Leavitt said Thursday at a press briefing, "The Democrats may have permanently damaged the Federal Statistical System..." which, of course, is pure bunk. The data is out there. The government just doesn't want everybody to know just how bad things are. Leavitt didn't just leave it there, continuing to say, "All of that economic data released will be permanently impaired leaving our policy makers at the Fed flying blind at a critical period."
OK, we get it. The government, other than Democrats, isn't going to be blamed for the collapse of everything because the data is all corrupted or lost. The Fed is off the hook as well. Americans might as well try paddling a rudderless raft upstream through rapids. The government is lying, as usual, covering up what are sure to be horrible economic numbers. They have the data. They just don't want you to know how badly you're being screwed.
And then, there's bitcoin, and the imploding fraud of the crypto universe.
Since October 7, bitcoin is down 23.6%. Ethereum is down 34%. That is just in the past month, and the declines appear to be accelerating.
Crypto-linked equities were hit hard once more, especially miners with heavy AI infrastructure and data center exposure. Bitdeer (BTDR) plunged 19% and Bitfarms (BITF) dropped 13%, while Cipher Mining (CIFR) and IREN lost over 10%. The rest of the crypto equity sector also saw steep losses: Galaxy (GLXY), Bullish (BLSH), Gemini (GEMI) and Robinhood (HOOD) were all down 7%-8%. - Coindesk, 11/13
Top and trending altcoins XRP, Binance Coin (BNB), Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA), Zcash (ZEC), and AI coins tumbled 5-12% over the past 24 hours. Meme coins including Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Pepe Coin (PEPE) further erased their earlier gains, with PEPE now down 80% year-to-date (YTD). --Yahoo, 11/14 (Full Story)
Ok, so what is Pepe Coin, anyway? Who is using it? Will my mechanic accept it?
This is the problem. Once blockchain technology became ubiquitous, every scam operator and quick-buck grifter saw the opportunity for ridiculous returns on pure speculation. People like Michael Saylor, Anthony Scaramucci, and the monstrosity that is BlackRock became heavily invested in the bitcoin/crypto myth machine.
Saylor, CEO of Stategy (MSTR, rebranded from Microstrategy), settled with the SEC in 2000, paying $350,000 in penalties and a personal disgorgement of $8.3 million for inaccurate reporting of financial results. In 2024, Saylor settled a tax evasion lawsuit brought by the Attorney General of Washington, D.C. by paying a $40 million fine.
Anthony Scaramucci, probably best known for his 10-day stint (July 21-31, 2017) as White House communications director before being abruptly fired by President Trump, became involved in crypto with his fund, SkyBridge Capital, which invested heavily into various crypto ventures as Scaramucci (the "Mooch") made outrageous pronouncements about bitcoin going to a million dollars or more.
As of March 2023, Skybridge's assets had dwindled to about $2 billion from a peak of $9 billion in 2015. Investors lost about 30% from the beginning of 2020 through March 2023. The fund had reduced the ability of investors to withdraw funds and reduced staffing. Scaramucci recently told investors of a New Orleans hotel that they were facing a 100% loss.
Bitcoin, and the thousands of altcoins, memecoins, stablecoins, and other crypto-related nonsense are based on an "asset class" that has nothing more than a white paper authored by a shadowy figure known only as Satoshi Nakamoto as a basis. There is nothing backing any of it except blind faith and a healthy dose of stupidity. Bitcoin and crypto are likely to go down in history as the greatest scam ever perpetrated, involving trillions of dollars in the "coins" themselves and trillions more in derivative bets.
There's a growing likelihood that the losses in bitcoin and crypto-related endeavors will feed directly into stocks, sending everything down the tubes in a torrent of paper losses, which, at the end of the day, result in real losses to stock portfolios, endowment funds, sovereign wealth funds and every other kind of investment.
Stocks, for what it's worth, have been overvalued for a very long time, probably since the recovery off the lows of the 2008-09 financial crash, and especially since the disastrous events of 2020 and 2021 with COVID.
Now, with investors worried that AI is simply more pie-in-the-sky promises from the usual hucksters and tech barons, a reckoning is underway. At the back of it all is the fractional reserve, fiat monetary system itself, which has reached its ultimate end, the U.S. dollar having lost more than 98% of its purchasing power.
Skeptics will note that gold and silver are being sold off as well. That's a normal function during a liquidity crisis. They will recover. For now, and it's very early, the declines in gold and silver represent buying opportunities for anybody interested in sound money.
Things are heating up...
At the Close, Thursday, November 13, 2025:
Dow: 47,457.22, -797.60 (-1.65%)
NASDAQ: 22,870.36, -536.10 (-2.29%)
S&P 500: 6,737.49, -113.43 (-1.66%)
NYSE Composite: 21,534.40, -272.93 (-1.25%)
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