Crypto Miners: A Miner Against the Doom Daddy's Sermon
Why calling the US fiscal system a Ponzi scheme fails, how record leverage raises the stakes for options traders, and where a crypto miner fits.
The Ponzi That Collects Taxes
Peter Schiff is back, and I picked him because the herd treats him like a sage. His latest sermon holds that the American fiscal and monetary machinery is a Ponzi scheme, with doom waiting for anyone who fails to move their savings into gold. The debt problem itself is real, and I have yet to meet a sober person who denies it. The Ponzi label is where the argument leaves the rails.
A Ponzi lives on a single trick: fresh money from the newest victims pays the earlier ones, there is nothing underneath, and the whole thing folds the moment inflows dry up. Washington runs on tax receipts, borrows on creditworthiness the rest of the planet still honors, prints the currency its debts are written in, and holds the tools to steer spending and borrowing. The permanence matters too. A con man's house of cards carries a shelf life; the state outlives the people shouting about its collapse.
Schiff also treats the debt as an absolute figure. What counts is the pile measured against the economy carrying it: while growth outruns borrowing, the ratio stays manageable and the system keeps working. Reality keeps quietly contradicting him, which leaves me wondering whether his gold pitch deserves the label he throws at the Treasury.
Leverage When the Music Stops
The maximalist reflex, everything into one asset because the rest is fraud, has a cousin in the tape. Options volumes and leveraged single-stock ETFs sit at unprecedented levels, and investor confidence has climbed to record highs on years of fat returns plus a friendly political wind. History treats that combination badly; frenzies of this kind tend to resolve in sharp corrections once the exuberance exhausts itself.
For anyone trading options this changes the character of the risk. While Schiff yells gold and his mirror image yells Bitcoin, the actual danger sits in the leverage nobody is checking, the kind that turns a modest drawdown into a wipeout when the music stops. The edge in that environment comes from the boring virtues I keep preaching to the MacroDozer community: self-study, discipline, and relentless execution of strategies sharp enough to survive a crowd that has stopped counting.
A Quarter Point Feeding the Frenzy
Christopher Waller has been signalling that the Fed keeps turning toward easing, with a quarter-point cut on the table at the December meeting provided the employment data allows it. Disinflation looks stalled, so the cut would arrive as short-term relief, and relief of that sort pours fuel straight onto the speculation above. Cheaper money, louder leverage, a loop feeding itself. That loop, and the labor prints deciding whether it turns, hold my attention, along with every word of Powell's guidance around the meeting.
The one genuine bright spot is manufacturing. Construction of new plants keeps rising, spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act, a sign that someone believes in domestic production again even though factory hiring still lags the building boom. The prophets love calling government inefficient. Well-aimed policy producing actual growth is a decent rebuttal, and a reminder that the economy underneath the frenzy has more substance than the sermon allows.
A Miner Against the Sermon
Since the whole intro went into taking the gold maximalists apart, the trade follows the mood. It is an options play on a crypto miner, built to prove the gold crowd wrong over the next four to six weeks. The details, as always, live in the Public Chat. A maximalist of either flavor treats one asset as truth and every other as heresy, and I prefer a time-boxed position against the loudest dogma of the month to a lifetime of waiting for the apocalypse.
Getting rich overnight with options remains a fantasy, and the record leverage in the tape is what that fantasy looks like at scale. My version is smaller: one target, one window, one dogma put in front of the market and asked to hold up. The market keeps honest score, which is more than the prophets manage.
Get the next Tuesday Target free
One options trade. Every Tuesday. Scored in public. The exit rule is on the card, and the letter is free to read.