18th September 2025 > > The most important CCC ever.

tl;dr

QE will be back next May. You best be prepared. The UK makes yet more promising noises about cryptos, but we know we will just get let down once again.

Market Snap 

Market Wrap

The kindest comment one can make about the hapless Jerome Powell, chair of the Fed, is that he managed not to cause any damage with his 25bps rate cut and his post-cut commentary, which almost certainly ranks as his greatest achievements to date. Putting the prosperity of billions of people in the hands of an unelected bureaucrat who either publicly bends to the will of his approved political masters or tries to pretend he isn’t when he doesn’t approve of them, is the height of folly. This system is broken and broken badly.

Next year, once Powell has moved on to a job with fatter pay and more lucrative pension rights, the Fed will become an overtly political organisation with Trumps’ pick Stephan Miran as chair in place of Powell. That is not an outcome of which I approve (the Fed should play no role whatsoever in setting interest rates), but it does at least publicly return total responsibility for the economy to where it belongs – in the hands of the elected representatives. More on this topic below.

Curious Cryptos’ meme corner

h/t The Milk Road

https://mrcrypto.milkroad.com/subscribe?ref=o5CmCFhBAK

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The Fed

The meme above isn’t quite accurate – it should show Stephen Miran in the winter coat, but none of us would recognise him yet.

Miran was confirmed to the Fed board just two days ago in a 48-47 vote in the Senate, an ample demonstration that the Fed is political to its core.

Let’s get the good news out of the way first, for he is on our side:

Now for the bad news.

Miran has proposed a new mandate for the Fed alongside its current responsibilities of price stability (how’s that going Powell?) and maximising employment (how’s that going Powell?) – to pursue “moderate long-term interest rates”.

Well, well, well. That means one thing, and one thing only. The permanent operation of QE (quantitative easing), a policy designed to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. Proponents of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) must be cheering to the rafters in support of Trump and Miran, much to their own surprise I suspect.

In some respects this is the logical end-game of running uncontrollable annual deficits that have now racked up an unpayable total on-balance sheet debt of $37.5 TRILLION, more than $324k of debt per taxpayer in the US:

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Remarkably, when Bill Clinton was President, the national debt was nearly wiped out. Financial markets faced huge uncertainty with the prospect of no further issuance of US government bonds. Since then successive Presidents of both parties have shown no fiscal restraint at all. How times have changed.

Powell’s tenure as Chair of the Fed ends on May 15^th, 2026. That is the day historians of the future will point to as the start of permanent QE.

…

Your task between now and next May is to accumulate as many hard assets as you possibly can, in any currency, for other governments will be forced to follow suit. Interest rates across the curve will be far lower than they should be – we know that following the Covid experience. Government spending will spin further out of control, with no bond market pain from issuing excessive debt. Central banks worldwide will be monetising that debt, but contrary to most economists’ understanding of the world, that will not cause inflation so long as supply chains are kept open, though tariffs won’t help in that respect.

In short – fiat will devalue against hard assets, but not against consumer goods. I bet you can guess my favourite hard asset to own as a hedge against that devaluation.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The UK

In an absolute first, the UK’s regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has raised the possibility of drawing up new regulation that is in favour of the crypto industry.

I know, I nearly fell off my chair too.

The FCA has released a discussion paper:

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-shares-proposals-promote-good-business-practices-amongst-crypto-firms

This paper raises the prospect of reducing (yep, reducing, not increasing) the regulatory burden on crypto firms, specifically around the concept of Customer Duty. Customer Duty entails a mass of regulations and requirements, each of which may sound sensible in isolation, but collectively add up to a huge burden on all regulated banks. The banks themselves are highly supportive of Customer Duty, its complexity, its cost of compliance, and the painful financial penalties that come with any actual or perceived breach, for it acts as a very effective barrier to entry against new competitors.

Which undoubtedly means that TradFi will lobby hard against reducing or removing Customer Duty responsibilities from crypto firms, to reduce the risk of losing lucrative business to new entrants to the markets.

And so, the sceptic in me comes to the fore. Given that the FCA is a bureaucratic organisation, more focused on rules than encouraging innovation and development (a cultural change brought on by the current Governor of the Bank of England, the equally hapless Andrew Bailey, when he was head of the FCA), there seems little doubt that the end result of this discussion paper will be to recommend that Customer Duty applies equally and in full force to crypto firms.

Which may or may not be the right decision. But why pretend to go through the motions? This is why:

“The government said the plan signals the UK is “open for (crypto) business” but closed to fraud and abuse.”

Ever since Rishi Sunak (remember him?) became Chancellor of the Exchequer, UK politicians’ lies and obfuscations around cryptos became turbocharged at his behest. That tradition is alive and kicking.