The Julia La Roche Show

Michael Howell, CEO of CrossBorder Capital, an investment advisory firm, and author of Capital Wars, returns to explain why the global liquidity cycle peaked in late Q3/early Q4 of last year — and what that means for the rest of 2026. His core argument: money is fungible but finite, and a booming real economy is now pulling liquidity out of financial assets, which compresses P/E multiples even as earnings look fine. That puts us in what he calls the speculation phase: rising bond yields, strong commodities, pressured crypto, and low-quality equity returns where index gains mask widespread underperformance. He also pushes back hard on the popular "debasement trade" explanation for gold, arguing the real driver is the People's Bank of China injecting liquidity to devalue the yuan internally while holding it steady externally — with Chinese retail locked out of crypto and the Shanghai Gold Exchange now setting the marginal price. On the bond side, he lays out how the Treasury is quietly monetizing through front-end issuance and buybacks — private-sector QE under Treasury direction — a strategy that works until it doesn't, with Japan's move from 50bps to nearly 3% as the cautionary tale. His bottom line: range-bound Wall Street, no bonds, gold and silver on weakness, and watch commodities for the first sign the boom is ending.

Thank you to our partners
Augusta Precious Metals — To learn more, visit https://juliabuysgold.com/ or text “Julia" to 35052
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Links: 
Website: http://www.crossbordercapital.com/
Twitter/X https://x.com/crossbordercap
Substack: https://capitalwars.substack.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Wars-Rise-Global-Liquidity/dp/3030392902

0:00 The call: range-bound market, own gold
0:20 Welcome back, Michael Howell
1:19 Two pools of money: markets vs. the real economy
2:30 The liquidity cycle has peaked
3:20 What this phase looks like
4:48 Why a booming economy is bad for stocks
5:22 The P/E multiple is where liquidity shows up
6:34 Late cycle, explained
7:38 Augusta Precious Metals
9:29 Global liquidity vs. the world business cycle
10:45 Atlanta Fed nowcast near 6%
11:54 The K-shaped economy is global
12:45 Monetary inflation vs. Main Street inflation
14:45 Speculation now, turbulence next
15:15 The cycle map
17:55 Monetary Metals
19:49 Gold: it isn't the debasement trade
20:30 It's China: PBOC liquidity
22:15 Why gold and not crypto
23:14 Inside the PBOC balance sheet
25:00 Yuan gold and the 27,000 line
26:15 Bond yields track nominal GDP
27:40 NGDP at 7-8% vs. a 4.7% ten-year
28:18 Treasury QE: funding at the front end
30:20 Who's actually buying the debt?
30:51 The beach ball under water
32:35 The two-year note leads the Fed
34:30 The 2022 analogue
36:00 Why MOVE matters more than VIX
37:08 Treasury buybacks and the volatility cap
38:30 Margin debt and the 2026 range call
39:31 Parting thoughts: commodities as the warning
40:30 Gold, silver, and the ratio to watch

In this episode of The Wrap with Chris Whalen, Chris breaks down the week across mortgages, rates, and precious metals. He opens with United Wholesale Mortgage, explaining why he believes Matt Ishbia should resign after the company hedged the balance sheet of an acquisition target it didn't own and never won — a misstep that produced a six hundred million dollar loss and forced a rescue from Oak Tree on onerous terms that leave common shareholders at the back of the line. Chris contrasts that with Rocket's standout quarter and lays out his broader housing view: investment banks hold this market together until the IPO fees are booked, then step back, setting up a potential correction next year and a general decline in home prices of ten to twenty percent by 2028. From there the conversation turns to the return of financial repression — short-end yields pushed down while the long end reacts to deficits and inflation — and why, with debt approaching forty trillion, he considers Fed independence a fiction and the Treasury the dog to the Fed's tail. Chris also unpacks the Bank of Japan's thirty-day repo with the Fed, why it lit a fire under gold and silver, and David Kotok's idea of using euro-denominated US credit default swaps to benchmark gold. He closes on taxing wealth over income, the erosion of fiscal credibility, and his gold book research into thirteen hundred years of Byzantine monetary stability.

Thank you to our sponsor, Monetary Metals. Learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/THEWRAP/

Links:    
The Institutional Risk Analyst: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/ 
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rcwhalen    
Seeing Around Corners book: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/product-page/seeing-around-corners-achieving-success-in-business-and-life-hardcover

Use the code TheWrap2026 for 25% off your first year of The Institutional Risk Analyst https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/plans-pricing

Timestamps:

0:00 — Intro
1:08 — Why Matt Ishbia should resign from UWM
2:30 — The Oak Tree rescue and what it means for shareholders
3:31 — Mortgage earnings: PennyMac, loanDepot, Rocket
4:23 — Is UWM going to be sold?
5:43 — Health of the broader mortgage industry
6:50 — Seven percent rates and where volume is coming from
7:30 — What the Fed does next, and the long end
8:20 — "Misery on the eights" — is the timeline accelerating?
9:20 — Housing correction: 10–20% by 2028
10:40 — The return of financial repression
12:00 — Why the Treasury benefits, and the shift to T-bills
13:06 — "The Treasury is the dog, the Fed is the tail"
13:40 — The dollar, foreign central banks, and gold reserves
14:20 — The Bank of Japan repo transaction explained
15:14 — What Warsh does if the FOMC wants a hike
16:30 — Inflation, diesel exports, and the energy squeeze
17:34 — David Kotok on benchmarking gold with credit default swaps
18:40 — Why fiscal fear flows into gold
19:30 — How far away is a US debt restructuring?
21:04 — Taxing wealth instead of income
22:42 — What cutting the deficit would actually do to rates
25:15 — Back to the BOJ: why it forced gold and silver higher
28:00 — What if Japan doesn't take the bonds back?
28:48 — Foreign central banks are selling Treasuries
29:47 — Does the US care about gold the way the rest of the world does?
32:10 — Bessent and the K-shaped economy
33:12 — Housekeeping: viewer question episode
33:50 — Parting thoughts

Dr. Marc Faber editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, returns to argue that we are witnessing the first phase of the piercing of the greatest global investment mania. He explains why central bank money printing has inflated asset prices far beyond economic reality — enriching asset holders while ordinary people face a cost of living he estimates is rising 7–12% a year, not the official 3–4%. Faber walks through the cracks already visible: collapsing commercial property values, falling home prices, meme stocks and SPACs that never recovered their 2021 peaks, a narrowing market advance, the semiconductor unwind, and the speculative blow-off in Korea. He argues the 10-year Treasury should yield at least 6.5%, that the Fed should have been hiking rather than cutting, and that the US may already be in recession. With interest costs on federal debt above $1 trillion a year, he says more money printing isn't a choice but an inevitability — and warns that bubbles typically end with the revelation of a massive fraud. His advice is blunt: this is not a market for making money, it's a market for losing the least. He makes the case for broad diversification across cash, bonds, precious metals, and real estate, explains why he refuses to own index funds, shares why Thailand is his largest position, and closes on gold, hyperinflation, and why he thinks the price should already be far higher.Thank you to our partners Augusta Precious Metals — To learn more, visit https://juliabuysgold.com/ or text “Julia" to 35052Monetary Metals - learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/julia/Links:The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report: https://www.gloomboomdoom.comTimestamps:00:00 Intro: Marc Faber returns
01:06 The macro picture: money printing and record wealth inequality
03:33 Why capitalism made the world rich, and who got left behind
05:21 The stock market is in the sky, but ordinary life isn't
06:58 First signs the investment mania is being pierced
07:35 Why printed money doesn't lift everything at once
09:55 Commercial and residential property prices roll over
10:45 Meme stocks, SPACs, Mag 7 and the semiconductor unwind
11:30 Korea: the biggest bubble nobody's talking about
12:15 The missing link: a massive fraud is coming
13:48 Nominal vs real: how money printing masks the damage
14:45 Real inflation is 7-12%, not 3-4%
15:49 Where rates should be: 6.5% on the 10-year
16:27 Government debt, $1T interest, and why the deficit can't shrink
17:56 The situation is hopeless
18:39 Where Faber puts his own money
20:20 More money printing is inevitable
21:27 Assessing Kevin Warsh at the Fed
22:33 The Fed should have hiked, and the US is already in recession
23:23 Intervention and the death of free markets
25:52 The contrarian bond call and the case for diversification
28:17 The government has become the mafia
28:42 Why a debt crisis is unavoidable
29:55 Sell early, but where do you hide?
31:34 Thin ice: why ordinary people are forced to speculate
31:59 Affordability at the worst level ever
32:25 The passive investing problem
35:10 Index concentration vs the other 493 stocks
36:13 Lessons from 1987: down 21% in a single day
37:26 One year from now: a lot of people will lose a lot of money
38:35 Hong Kong war stories: the traders who lost everything
40:11 The contrarian buy: Thailand, the failed state
41:30 Food self-sufficiency, safety, and life in Asia
43:56 Where to find his work
45:11 Gold, and why he says it should already be $100,000
46:07 Hyperinflation, Zimbabwe, and central bank role models

Mickey Maini, founder of Solstice Laboratory, makes his debut on The Julia La Roche Show. In this episode, he lays out the thesis behind his new book The Entropy Trap: financial systems, like all systems, require energy to hold their shape, and as complexity rises and trust decays, the energy needed to maintain order climbs until the system transitions into something new. He argues we're between two systems now, sitting in the third of five stages — control — one policy misstep away from fracture. Maini explains why the Fed's real job this decade is defending collateral rather than setting rates, why three stresses (geopolitics, debt, and innovation) are compounding rather than merely adding for the first time in decades, and why the honest tell on AI is the credit market rather than the equity market. Along the way: what central bank gold buying is actually signaling, his scenario range for gold, the US-China choke point war that will determine who writes the next system, and why the trader who made $100 million in 1929 lost it all while the one who ignored prices did fine.
Maini began in investment banking, then scaled an emerging-markets conglomerate from $100 million to over $5 billion as its CEO, then taught at one of Asia's leading public policy schools. Today he runs his family office and Solstice Laboratory (solsticelabs.com) - an independent research lab in Dubai that applies physics to markets and geopolitics, studying the moments when systems stop moving in cycles and change state.

Thank you to our sponsors:
Kalshi - download the Kalshi app and use code JULIA to get $10 when you trade $10. http://kalshi.com/r/JULIA

Monetary Metals - learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/julia/

Links:
The Entropy Trap book: https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-Trap-Physics-Knows-Markets/dp/B0H1ZP7NZX/ref=sr_1_1
Substack: https://solsticelaboratory.substack.com/
Website: https://solsticelabs.com/

Timestamps:
0:00 — Intro and welcome: Mickey Maini, The Entropy Trap
1:58 — Order is rented, and the rent just went up
2:40 — The five stages: print, spend, control, fracture, force
4:24 — 1973 economically, 1938 militarily, 1978 for the Fed
6:24 — What tips us from control into fracture
9:02 — Why every Fed intervention buys less time than the last
13:00 — The Fed's next decade: defending collateral, not setting rates
15:42 — Indonesia 1998, and why the models stopped working
17:10 — Indonesia had surgery. The US took morphine.
20:44 — Three stresses that compound: geopolitics, debt, innovation
25:00 — Gold as money's ground state, and what central banks are signaling
27:10 — The scenarios: $8K–25K, base case $10–15K
30:31 — Livermore, Baruch, Kennedy — who lost it all and who won
34:30 — The tell on AI isn't equity. Watch the Oracle CDS.
36:00 — 75% of US growth is one trade
38:03 — Five to seven years to a new system, the next two the toughest
39:04 — China settles in gold. The US builds stablecoins.
41:35 — Velocity of stress: the master signal, and why it hasn't turned
50:42 — What the dashboard is flashing right now
53:04 — Don't own long bonds. Invest in yourself.

In this episode of The Wrap with Chris Whalen, Chris joins Julia La Roche to argue that Kevin Warsh has a credibility problem: he's holding rates, avoiding confrontation with a divided board, and saying almost nothing, while the bond market does the tightening for him with the ten-year near 4.7% and mortgages headed toward seven-plus. Whalen's prescription is blunt — take back last year's cuts with two quarter-point hikes, consider a surprise August move, raise margin requirements, and keep shrinking the balance sheet, because Treasury is the dog and the Fed is barely the tail. From there the conversation ranges across a coming diesel and fertilizer shortage nobody in Washington will discuss, gold's role as real money in Asia versus a paper price in the West, and Whalen's own portfolio, from Annaly and Rhythm Capital to Flagstar and roughly a fifth in precious metals. The back half turns spicy with Tom Gober's new guest post on life insurers: private-credit-controlled annuity writers reinsuring liabilities offshore without posting enough assets behind them, hidden by state secrecy laws and rubber-stamped by ratings agencies that were never working for you. Plus PennyMac's bad quarter, George Gleason's construction-lending model at Bank OZK, and mailbag questions on SpaceX and mining stocks.

Thank you to our sponsor, Monetary Metals. Learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/THEWRAP/

Links:    
The Institutional Risk Analyst: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/ 
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rcwhalen    
Thomas Gober guest article: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/post/theira874
Seeing Around Corners book: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/product-page/seeing-around-corners-achieving-success-in-business-and-life-hardcover

Use the code TheWrap2026 for 25% off your first year of The Institutional Risk Analyst https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/plans-pricing

Timestamps:
0:00 — Intro: no, the show isn't being cancelled
1:52 — Warsh's first pressers: three dissenters and a chairman who says nothing
5:42 — How Warsh gets credibility: take back last year's cuts
7:20 — Trump stays quiet on Warsh — plus a coming diesel and fertilizer squeeze
8:46 — Is the economy finally slowing? The fading power of deficits
10:22 — "Treasury is the dog, the Fed is the tail"
11:30 — The case for a surprise August hike and less forward guidance
12:56 — Gold, Keith Weiner, and the permanent backwardation thesis
15:38 — Gold as bank capital: pledging metal as repo collateral
16:37 — Whalen's book: Annaly, Rhythm, miners, energy, Schwab, Flagstar
19:41 — PennyMac's ugly quarter and why it drags the whole mortgage group down
21:23 — Bank OZK vs. the big banks on commercial real estate
23:19 — Tom Gober's guest post: is your life insurer actually solvent?
27:00 — Offshore reinsurance, secrecy states, and why ratings won't save you
29:36 — Mailbag: SpaceX below IPO price — buy more or bail?
31:53 — Mailbag: miners vs. metal, GLD/GDX vs. SLV/SIL
35:13 — What's next: mortgage earnings, the bank 50, and the gold book