The Bitcoin Layer
Best Books On Finance & Global Macroeconomics with Jack Farley
- Discussion of "Lords of Finance" by Liaquat Ahamed, focusing on 1920s central bankers (Benjamin Strong, Montague Norman, and others) and their role in the gold standard's collapse into the Great Depression.
- Exploration of David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," arguing that debt predates barter and that debt itself functions as money across millennia of human commerce.
- Money market hierarchy: how Federal Reserve liabilities (reserves and cash) form different tiers of "moneyness," with shorter-term instruments (overnight repo, T-bills) behaving more like money than longer-dated bonds.
- Repo market mechanics and the dealer system's dependence on $1.8 trillion in overnight treasury repo funding to function daily; the September 2019 crisis and the Fed's standing repo facility.
- Bitcoin's correlation with stocks (S&P 500 / NASDAQ) and price trajectory: Nik's view that Bitcoin will reach six figures and beyond regardless of equity market conditions, despite near-term correlation in risk-off environments.
- Overview of influential finance and macro books: "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator," "When Genius Failed" (LTCM), works by Adam Tooze, Bethany McLean, and Barry Eichengreen on financial crises and economic history.