The Treasury announced August 19 it would double long-dated buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, aimed at the 10-to-30-year sector from September 9 through November 4 — days after the 30-year yield touched a 19-year high. Druckenmiller's verdict, read on stream: 'this wasn't liquidity management, it was price management, and a mistake far larger than 4 billion dollars suggests.' The numbers he recited: inflation running 3-4% and above target since 2021, unemployment at 4.1%, a deficit running ~6% of GDP — 'a number America's never before produced in peacetime at full employment' — the national debt at $40 trillion, and net interest set to exceed $1.1 trillion this fiscal year, more than the defense budget. His closing line, which threadguy flagged as the thesis: 'if the 30-year must trade at 5.5%, that isn't a crisis, it is an invoice.' threadguy read Bessent's old praise of Druckenmiller back — 'the combination of George Soros and Jim Rogers... stands in one person' — and called the op-ed the market's message that the last competent man in government is 'feeling the heat from all angles.' A tweet he read put the trade plainly: 'there is no plan... the only way out is up, and one of the only ways to escape is BTC.' Chat was already running 'Zimbabwe mode' jokes — a segue he took seriously, walking through Zimbabwe's 2008 hyperinflation (500 billion Zimbabwe dollars to $1, a billion-dollar salary worth less than a cent) and the 2024 gold-backed ZiG currency as the cautionary tale under the whole debasement debate.
The open printed green everywhere: SPX +0.36% at 7,680.98, NASDAQ 100 +0.67%, SOX +4.5% at the open, and DRAM reclaimed the $55 range, +3.4% to 561.3. Biggest gainers were semis — Marvell +6.5%, Bloom Energy +5%, Sandisk +5%, Micron +4%, SK Hynix +4%, AMD +4%, Intel +3% — with NVDA +1.5% into earnings tomorrow, alongside Salesforce, CrowdStrike, and Synopsys. Odds and ends from the tape: Pelosi bought $1.5M of Intel, Apple app-store sales fell for the first time in a decade, HOOD +6% near $110, Coinbase +3.5%, Circle +3.5%. A CNBC clip with Tom Lee and requisite capital's Bryn had Lee calling the Treasury buyback 'a wise thing to do... really an indication of value,' while Bryn noted the 20- and 30-year are illiquid and 'no one signals off' them — the real levels are the 2, 5, and 10-year. Both pointed to Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole keynote Friday at 10am ET as the week's clearing event; the data-center political backlash (governors floating moratoriums in Ohio, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania) was framed as the risk to the AI trade that Jensen can reinject confidence into. On the Saylor-vs-Tom Lee question, threadguy's hot take: 'Bitmine wins big — I think BMNR outperforms MSTR,' because 'Saylor disrespects his equity like none other,' and he noted David Hoffman is soft-launching a full ETH re-entry above $4K.
The DEX screener was ripping: cyber leek +20%, Hashcat high $233 now $182 after adding a pump version, PONS at 57, $GUITAR 240, BULL 34, and FWA having hit an all-time high in spins the day before. Tibor — 'the best-performing meme coin over the seven-day mark,' up ~65% — drew his bewilderment: 'nobody can tell me what it does. Nobody knows. Still in stealth mode, it's like two years old.' He did note the backstory floating around: backed by ribbit capital's Mickey, an early Robinhood investor, and a friend who 'isn't really a crypto guy' was obsessed with it. The KATE segment was the biggest: $70M market cap, 38,000 people bought KATE as their first-ever coin on the FOMO app, 160K users have bought at least once, 24K unique users have posted a thesis — 'that is a monster number.' He read Leo's take on air — 'KATE is a way to long FOMO growth' — and walked through TikTok comment sections full of $20 degen buys: 'I put $20 in and it's still down, should I be worried or no?' His read: the meme-coin story on TikTok 'feels genuinely like important.' By close, chat was up in arms that Frank D. God's reportedly loaded up on KATE to lure copy traders before dumping — 'what's the point of copy trading if you know he's gonna dump on you?'
His 'favorite on-chain coin' minted its first NFT collection — 111 supply, with the NFTs thrown into the spins pool as 'the most fair launch mechanism you could enact.' The numbers he pulled up: ~$350K in one-day revenue, more than Aerodrome, Jupiter, PancakeSwap, Lighter, MetaMask, and PONS — 'they did triple PONS's revenue' — 14,000 spins yesterday against a 16,000 all-time peak, and 1,000 ETH in fees flowing to depositors, 133 to buybacks, 133 to the protocol. The take ran 94% right after a spin before settling around 10%. Someone paid 6 ETH for his own NFT, double the floor, on 135 ETH of collection volume. 'I see how this could get kind of crazy — people want to do a collection, X copy wants to do a collection. If we're running NFTs again, it's going to play out so beautifully.' Even so, he kept the disclaimer: 'PA of this thing is so cursed... but a thousand ETH in fees is insane. I like the coin. I'm allowed to say.'
The stream's P&L watch reached new extremes. Mochi, the Hyperliquid trader he says sued ZachXBT, is down $27M all-time at a 78% win rate — his biggest loss was $18M in XPO in 12 days, plus $13M on ETH — yet was long 25x ETH on $2M margin (21,000 ETH), 40x BTC on $1M margin (600 BTC), and 10x HYPE at $1.6M margin. Flood, who he's racing to $10M, was +$1M on a 20x BTC long on a quarter-mil margin with a $28K NVDA short on the side. He also flagged an account with a $170M all-time perp P&L — 'I thought this was like a delta neutral thing. I've never seen this before. That is fucking unbelievable.' The 'mandate of heaven' rundown: Ansem, Donald, and Mochi all have the touch right now, Donald's pick is Mona, and an unnamed trader joins the stream next week — someone who torched 500K HYPE and ran it back roughly 5x in a week. 'There's traders that get tossed the mandate... often all you have to do is follow the traders that have the mandate.'
His under-the-radar pick of the day: VVV, the Venice token — an open router for private AI models that don't store your data, doing ~$100M annualized revenue with 4 million users, up from $1 to $20 this year and recently consolidated around $18.5-18.9 after he first mentioned it at $8. 'It's rare that a crypto app is crushing it outside of crypto and also has a token attached to it, and the team is focused on delivering value to the token.' The comp he kept coming back to: OpenRouter, sold for $7 billion to Strike — 'no chill with that baton shit, it's by fucking pump fun' — and the 'uncensored AI' narrative: 'we are in the flock camera era, it's why Zcash is going to thousands... the same way you should have uncensored access to AI.' Diligent Plane's on-chain position got a shout too: 1,600 shares at $789 average cost, $1.3M into the position.
The 'Anthropic losing their minds' segment: the company is reportedly asking prospective employees in culture interviews how they'd feel if the stock went to zero; Dario and the co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth into an effective-altruism-aligned trust that's worth tens of billions — he heard numbers from $27B to $76B on an All-In episode — while Anthropic sent SF staff home Monday and Tuesday after a notice that SEIU-represented security workers could strike over pay he described as roughly a dollar over minimum wage. The Grindr CEO's viral 'stop using Claude' post ran on screen — 'Claude is crack, I want to get off' — over DoD work, and threadguy read the Hegseth exchange as the moment the company 'lost the mandate': 'a private company doesn't get to decide how we secure ourselves... I view it as a declaration of war.' His summary: '$50 billion in this trust sitting there doing nothing, and they pay their security staff like that — they've just lost it, brother.' Also on the AI side: reports that Broadcom's new 'Jalapeño' inference chip, ~700W, beat Nvidia's GB300 on per-watt and response-latency testing per SemiAnalysis — CRPS dumped ~4% on the headline.
The week ahead got the full rundown: Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash trust into a spot ETF, with trading set for today, August 25, at 'futures turnover at multiples of open interest'; Trump urged Congress to pass the Clarity Act, which he put at ~15% on Polymarket — 'basically going to zero'; regulators are exploring a compliant route for Hyperliquid on Wednesday ahead of the White House meeting between regulators and industry. A sell-side note he read turned constructive after last week's squeeze — $2.6B of ETF flows, 92% of liquidations, 'we return cautious if a negative BTC ETF flow week arrives or price closes back inside the old range below $67K.' The calendar: NVDA earnings tomorrow with the Q2 GDP second estimate and July core PCE Wednesday, Warsh's Jackson Hole keynote Friday August 28, buybacks start September 9, Clarity vote September 15, FOMC September 16. He replayed the 2022 Powell flashback — an 8.5-minute speech that crushed the market (SPX -17% into the bottom, BTC from ~$23K toward $15K) — and ran the Bill Miller IV clip calling last week 'the biggest short liquidation in crypto in the past five years': 'the entire market cap of Bitcoin is smaller than the dollars that have to be invented from just this year's behavior alone.'