Scott Bessent Just Changed the Liquidity Setup | Macro Mondays: August 24, 2026

0:00Andreas Steno:Summertime is maybe good, summertime is maybe shit. It's Macro Mondays, big picture, clear play, stocks, bonds, FX, crypto on the way. Get context, strategy right now on your screen. Macro Mondays, level up your week, oh yeah.

0:22Mikkel Rosenvold:Hello out there, welcome to Realution, welcome back to Macro Mondays. My name is Mikl Rothenwald, and as usual, I'm joined by you, Andreas. And Andreas, let me kick off the show. We have a great agenda today, but let's kick off with the good old question. I've been missing this. How back are we right now?

0:41Andreas Steno:We're back. At the very least, we're back. And I actually think what we got out of the news outlets this morning supports the notion that we're back. But we can get into the details of that in a second. But I'm willing to say we're back.

0:59Mikkel Rosenvold:We're obviously hinting, or I am at least, hinting at crypto, the Bitcoin trade, the long-suffering crypto trade here. I know lots of our listeners are still in crypto. Some may have opted out during the past slide here, but things looking up interesting. Let's dive in on that initially, then we'll get back to talking a little bit about more into the dollar trade, the war speech on Friday and also the big Besant, the other thing Scott Besant is doing right now, the economic D-Day. We'll get back to that a little later, but let's start with Besant's treasury gymnastics or the sledgehammer, as I call it.

1:38Mikkel Rosenvold:How much of this Bitcoin rally that we've been seeing and gold is brought along by Scott Besant and what's more fundamental in your opinion?

1:47Andreas Steno:Okay, Miguel, let's start with the laugh of the week because I actually think it relates to what we're going to discuss now. I love this. I posted this, I think a day or two after the SpaceX IPO. And at the time, it was mostly meant as a joke, but who knows? I mean, at least that's kind of the direction of travel currently, even though SpaceX has made a comeback as well. Having said that, I think what Besson did last week mattered more, optically speaking, than fundamentally speaking. And let me show you why on page five, because I actually think this was a very clever way of doing it from one of the Bloomberg strategists in my feed on the Bloomberg screens.

2:34Andreas Steno:So they've basically calculated the amount of times that the word debasement is mentioned in financial media on a running basis. And then you have the gold price in the white line, right? And you typically see a spike in the storyline, the narrative around dollar debasement when we have these rallies in gold and in Bitcoin, kind of the same trade, right? Having said that, I'm a bit surprised to see this many stories around dollar debasement based on what Scott Besson did last week. He essentially decided to double the buybacks of longer running US Treasury bonds. initially which was my reading of it as well a buyback basically means that well you you issue a t-bill to buy an already existing already issued say 30-year bond and in that during that exercise you don't really create a new dollar right you issue one bond to remove the other bond from the market.

3:43Andreas Steno:Of course, you absorb so-called duration risk, the risk of holding treasury bonds for longer and the corresponding risk of long-term inflation running wilder than what's penciled in and all of that. That risk is removed to some extent by this twist of the issuance, but you don't create new dollars. You can argue that there are some indirect sources of dollar creation in such a debt buyback. If you manage to remove volatility from the treasury market, it may be easier to post-treasury as a collateral, meaning that you could borrow against it. There are some indirect impacts on liquidity. But this morning, which may be the most relevant news of the day, even though we've had tariffs news, we have the upcoming B-Day against Iran and all of that, And a couple of officials from the US Treasury leaked to CNBC that they may use the so-called TGA to fund these buybacks.

4:49Andreas Steno:So let's look at page six and kind of a timeline of what's been going on here, right? So on August 20, he said that they could more than double the buybacks per operation to$4 billion from$2 billion. And then this morning, they said that they could use the TGA to fund these buybacks. So we've essentially had a development here from what was initially, in my opinion, a nothing burger from a liquidity perspective, more or less. to something that becomes incredibly relevant as soon as you include the TGA in this equation. And let me go through the mechanics on the next page, because they're not irrelevant for investors in gold and Bitcoin and the likes.

5:37So I typically look at two types of liquidity.

5:42Andreas Steno:One is the very narrow liquidity that is used to settle transactions between banks. And that's what we have in the top panel here. So we're talking trillions of dollars used in interbank settlements, and you need an account of the Fed Reserve to be able to use these dollars. And why is that a relevant metric? It's a relevant metric because it's basically the oil of the system. Without sufficient structural liquidity between banks, you'll start to see higher interest rates on repurchase agreements. So the exact repurchase agreements that I referred to when I said that liquidity is needed to ensure that treasury markets functions properly.

6:28Andreas Steno:And now that they potentially intend to use the TGA, which is the red line in the second panel here, they intend on using dollars that have already been issued. So they're already created. They issued a bond a while ago, and then they used the proceeds to put in a war chest, basically. So those dollars are currently parked at the Fed. If they use those exact dollars to buy back bonds, those dollars will go from the Fed into the banking system. So it will eventually turn that idle dollar into a live dollar for the financial system. My best guess, and I'm guessing right now because we don't have the details from the Treasury yet, is that they may be tempted to use as much as$350 billion,$400 billion worth of ammunition here over the next years.

7:19Andreas Steno:They can actually run this program for quite a while if they do it via the TGA. And that is a running liquidity addition, meaning that you can see the dotted line at the very top of the panel. If you forecast that, we're going up. And I've said, based on my calculations, it's a long technical calculation, how much do we actually need to ensure that the market is really functioning well? We probably need, say, between$300 billion and$400 billion more than what we have right now. And those dollars may be delivered by the Treasury now instead of the Fed, because I think initially, Besson probably hoped that the Fed would deliver those dollars.

7:59Andreas Steno:They can also create them. So it's big news. Again, I'm guessing currently about volumes and sizes here, but the direction of travel is pretty clear if we get liquidity additions from the Treasury. Why is that super relevant? If we go back to the chart again, the last part of this very detailed chart on page seven is the spread between sulfur and the effective Fed funds rate in yellow towards the bottom of the panel. right? That spread is, in my view, the most telling spread for the health of the plumbing in the system. If that spread is below zero, which it probably should be, the interest rate on a secure transaction software where you use a treasury as collateral in a lending operation is lower than an unsecured effective fence fund rate, which is essentially where you want to be if you want the repo market to be functioning well.

9:00And we're now roughly at zero.

9:03Andreas Steno:We've been below zero for a few times during the summer and early summer. But if you look at the past year or two, right, we've had many hiccups where this yellow line kept jumping and we've had long periods where SOFR priced too expensively. So if we get back to a very smooth sailing in the SOFR market, in the repo market overall, And if we ensure that there's plenty of liquidity in the system via this buyback transaction funded by the TDA, it's very good news for risk taking because it essentially means that hedge funds and such accounts can use their treasuries to lever up their portfolios.

9:42Andreas Steno:They can absorb more treasuries when they're issued. And when you look at page eight, that is more relevant than ever. And this is probably an eye over to many. I've seen a load of accounts telling me that the UK is now starting to buy a lot of treasuries. That is absolute bollocks and bullshit. Obviously, the UK is the main hedge fund's jurisdiction, right? So the reason why the UK is buying a lot of treasuries is that they're the host nation to a lot of these levered accounts. So in short, what we see here is that Japan is no longer the marginal buyer of debt. China is certainly not the marginal buyer of debt anymore.

10:23Andreas Steno:Hedge funds are. So all of these gymnastics, all of these attempts to ensure that the leverage market functions properly, they're all designed to ensure that this light blue line continues to go up because hedge funds have become the marginal buyers of treasuries. And therefore, I have to salute Scott Besson for all of these tricks up his sleeve because he certainly knows what he's doing. And they haven't had a whole lot of luck with pushing international investors into buying treasuries with their terrorist policy. I think that was part of what they wanted to do. It hasn't really worked. So now they're trying to orchestrate a strong marginal bit from the leveraged account side, which is essentially the light blue here, which is why they're trying to add liquidity, which is why they're orchestrating these debt buybacks via the TGA, and which is why they've implemented this whole supplementary leverage reform that we've been banging the drum on for months.

11:26Andreas Steno:So all in all, we've gone from a nothing burger to something relevant now. And I think it's fair that the debasement storyline is back. So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now.

11:51Mikkel Rosenvold:So how sustainable is this? I mean, could this path be changed by some of the actors? And how sustainable? Because to me, it looks unlike Andreas. We've talked about all sorts of potential turning points for Bitcoin. We had the Clarity Act, which is still probably coming up relatively soon. been talking of a Bitcoin reserve, because this seems to me, perhaps a simple analysis, to be the sort of story that should drive off Bitcoin. We're back to the sort of the origin story of Bitcoin, which to me is very, very positive about this rally and why I'm really pumped about it. Do you agree with that?

12:30Mikkel Rosenvold:And how sustainable is this for Bitcoin and for gold, potentially?

12:35Andreas Steno:So I think the key here, if we move back to page seven, is whether we're talking about a temporary liquidity addition or a permanent liquidity addition. What I pencil in here is a running buyback funded by the TDA down to a level around$500 billion from the current 937, as far as I remember. So a substantial addition of more than$400 billion. Is that sustainable? Yes, it's certainly sustainable, but it requires the US Treasury to announce that it permanently aims at having a CGA level that is lower than what it currently is. Because if you look at the red line here again, the equilibrium is around, say, 850 or 900 billion.

13:24Andreas Steno:So it requires a change of strategy from the Treasury. And it may be that Scott Besant, also after having watched Kevin Walsh for a couple of press conferences, basically decided, okay, we're not going to wait for the Fed here. We're going to do something about this ourselves. What's their... Currently, it seems like they're really getting at it, if you know what I mean, right? So if the red line only drops for it to return to normal, return to 850 or 900, then you'll see a liquidity withdrawal again on the back of the liquidity edition, right? And that's not really something that leads to a lasting sustainable impact on markets.

14:03But if they decide to bring the level of the TDA lower permanently, then it's worth noting and something really sustainable.

14:13Andreas Steno:Can they fund this buyback from the TDA for a long while? Well, if you look at page six, they can easily up the buyback pace. because as far as I can calculate, we're talking about an envelope size of 30, 40 billion, depending a bit on the operation size, whether it's 4 billion at a time, a quarter. And as you can see from the red bar, I've penciled in a max wallet of more than 400. So it basically leaves them years of buying via the TGA if they do it this way. remember that he said that could be more than four ball a billion he said that explicitly so they've only promised for it but they can do six or eight or ten if they start doing that wow then it's something worth noting and i mean we have an um an election coming up so why not try to front load this a little bit i i'm really on the watch for for more details from from the Treasury Secretary here on whether to expect more than four.

15:19Andreas Steno:He kind of hinted so, right? But what if they do 10? Or what if they do 20? I mean, they can do that, of course. So it's certainly something that's worth noting this. And I think, at least for the rest of Trump's administration, running until 2028, unless he seeks re-election. We had a lot of stories around that over the weekend. There's plenty of firepower to keep this running until 2028, no doubt.

15:49Mikkel Rosenvold:Yeah. At another point, we'll discuss the long-term implications and the signal value of this. But right now, this is what matters. This is what you trade. So this is what we focus on, absolutely. Okay, Andreas, a little break here before we get to the other Besant news, the other Besant sledgehammer discussions on that. Remember, guys, this is our free weekly show where we give you a sneak peek into our view on the world of macro and geopolitics. To get the full spectrum of our analysis, you need to check out your options at realvision.com. We issue three or publish three weekly articles on the approach here.

16:27Mikkel Rosenvold:That also includes our macro portfolio, but we also have a lot of content on the cheaper outfits here. We run an ETF portfolio and publish a weekly digest of our readings there. It's slightly more fairly priced, you might say. So check out that as an option as well. We are developing our publications there week by week. But tomorrow, Andres, only for the ProTier, not for the Alfredshire, but for the ProTier, we're running the Macro Meets Micro Show. Now, we've talked a lot of macro. Is that going to be dripping into the Macro Meets Micro Show tomorrow? What can people expect there?

17:02Andreas Steno:So, you know, a sneak peek into our portfolio. We did a few changes during July in anticipation of a week or dollar. It was basically what our now casting told us. It was also what, you know, the divergence between inflation markets and the Federal Reserve speech. We'll get back to that in a second, told us. So we've had that lean right coming into these changes made by Scott Besant. It's, of course, not the only variable moving. we have issues in the Strait of Amooz again also in the Red Sea just today. I see the Houthis are claiming that they've hit another Saudi Arabian tank, right? So on one side of the equation, we have a very weak dollar outlook, given everything that we just went through on the Treasury side.

17:50Andreas Steno:Then we have an unsolved energy market, which is still an issue for that dollar view. So we're going to discuss tomorrow how to balance those two things in the portfolio. Also, of course, we have updates on great performers within the biotech pharmaceutical space where we've had a couple of home runs this year. We've had a couple of home runs in technology, of course. And everything in our portfolio is very frontier driven, right? So expect lots of focus on open AI and anthropic as well. And maybe that's a good segue to give just a sneak peek into that, Michael, because currently we don't hold any Anthropic or OpenAI in our portfolio, right?

18:33Andreas Steno:But if you go to page 10, I'd just like to highlight to everyone watching this show that I think it goes without saying right now that OpenAI has got a much better business momentum than Anthropic, which is the exact opposite conclusion of two months ago or three months ago. And I still think it's the case that every single investment manager and pundit will tell you that Anthropic is the better business of the two. So what happened here? On the screens, we have the annualized recurring revenue of code versus OpenAI's codecs.

19:11Mikkel Rosenvold:I'm just trying to zoom in on the live here, Andreas. Hopefully it works for people because it can be a little bit tricky to see the movements, but it's very, very critical for people to see the movement up here.

19:20Andreas Steno:Yeah. So I think what you should note here is that code has basically been flatlining from a revenue perspective since mid-June, early June. We're starting to see an uptick again, which is relevant and something that we need to watch the coming weeks. But the way I read this is that Anthropic has been very laid back in terms of compute capacity. And I've said that, I actually said it already when Dario Amadeg went on the wires and said that, well, we don't want to commit to compute. Obviously, the deal that they made with SpaceX, was it in June, actually, right? is the most expensive deal we've seen on compute so far.

20:00Andreas Steno:So it is in many ways a panic. I know why they had to panic into this deal because they were simply running out of capacity. So I don't buy the notion that code flatlined from a mental perspective because of too large bills for corporates and some of those blue chip stories where corporates were dialing back on their budgets because the budgets are up everywhere. And you can see that the spending per employee is up everywhere over this period. So I think it's essentially clock code telling users and also potential new users, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold. We need to be able to deliver. As two super users ourselves, Michael, we've noticed this, right?

20:46Mikkel Rosenvold:You can feel it just on an anecdotal level. I think Raul posted about this last week as well. You can clearly feel it that the prompts that would usually take 30 seconds is now taking 20 minutes, essentially. And I mean, some of it I can wait for. It's okay if it's doing my job. It can take all day. I don't care. But it's a very clear signal that they are at limit of their capacity right now. Absolutely.

21:11Andreas Steno:And I've had a range of research papers out on this for the pro tier at Real Vision on how to look at these two cases into the IPOs. that are, and I can say, most likely upcoming, right? I think it's slightly nasty for Anthropic that they've lost momentum from a revenue perspective into this IPO. We had a leak from their investor presentation, I think it was last Monday. Maybe we can show that on page 11 because even though I'm telling you that it's a business that has lost momentum, we're talking about the rate of change and something that is improving, right? the league put their ARR at$65 billion a year.

21:52Andreas Steno:Remember, this is a company that had no clients 15 months ago, more or less. And now their revenue is the same as IBM or Accenture. I guess Accenture is a 500K employee company, something like that, but it's not more. So, I mean, it's still crazy. what does it take for anthropic or open ai to be self-sustaining in terms of what how much revenue they need to to generate for them to be able to pay their compute bills probably still forex from now like they need to go to 250 300 billion something like that in annually recurring revenues is that doable um latest piece of anecdotal evidence from my side well um for example, accounting software, they're slowly but surely opening up for Claude and OpenAI and others to work directly within their software, right?

22:50Andreas Steno:And you'll end up seeing that everywhere in the software space, obviously, right? Because that also creates vertical integration from existing software providers, making it more difficult to scrap their licenses. And yeah, all of a sudden, it becomes normal to use tokens for everything that you don't use tokens for right now, or at least you don't use as many tokens because you'll probably ask Claude, okay, if I need to do something like this in this program, how do I do it? And then you spend some tokens. But if you ask an agent to run automatic exercises, then you'll spend a lot more tokens.

23:26Andreas Steno:So I still think it's very doable to to 3 or 4x this revenue within a couple of years. So in short, expect some contrarian takes on the whole AI situation. But overall, I still think the revenue side and the business momentum, despite the lack of compute capacity at Anthropic, supports the notion that we haven't peaked yet. And everything that Scott Besson just did probably prolonged the cycle. Remember that as well. I mean, it is much more likely today than it was two weeks ago that the cycle will run through 2027 as well, in my opinion. Interesting. Great news.

24:03Mikkel Rosenvold:We'll dive even more into this story tomorrow on Macro Meets Micro for pro subscribers with Real Vision. I just want to touch upon finally, toward the end of the show here, Andreas, two interesting speeches this week. We have Scott Besant in about two and a half hours explaining, hopefully, the economic D-Day against Iran. I'll have some notes on that. And then I'll let you talk a little bit about the upcoming Jackson Hole and the Kevin Walsh speech there. So just a few notes here on the Scott Besson speech and the economic D-Day. We don't know the exact details, but we do have an idea of what's going to happen.