Lyn Alden just dropped a 2-hour masterclass with Tom Bilyeu to his 4.5M+ subscribers.
If you don’t understand what’s happening to money right now, you’ll wake up on the wrong side of history.
Here are 10 insights on where the system is breaking—and what comes next. 🧵👇
1. Fiscal Dominance: The Train With No Brakes
The Fed once cooled inflation by hiking rates. That era is over.
Deficits now dwarf private credit creation, so higher rates blow out interest costs.
This is fiscal dominance—no brakes, and debasement becomes policy.
2. The Hollowing of the Middle Class
Inflation isn’t natural—it’s engineered. To survive, you must own assets.
Half climb, half sink. Housing once protected the middle class, but prices and rates now lock them out.
The fiat boil is here.
3. When Debt Tops Defense, Empires Wobble
U.S. interest expense just surpassed military spending.
At ~122% debt-to-GDP and drifting toward the 130% “red line,” the spiral accelerates.
History says when debt service outruns defense, decline has begun.
4. Weak Money Breeds Unrest
When money breaks, nations don’t just go broke—they turn on themselves.
Inequality breeds rage: some get grapes, others cucumbers for the same effort.
The bigger risk isn’t invasion; it’s internal revolt.
5. Trade Deficits Hollow Nations
Reserve-currency privilege forces persistent U.S. trade deficits.
Dollars flow out, then flood back to buy stocks and real estate.
Coastal hubs boom; the heartland hollows. Capital concentrates while workers are left behind.
6. Entitlements = The Fiscal Time Bomb
The real deficit isn’t “waste.” It’s Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare.
By the 2030s, the trust fund runs dry—implying ~25% cuts without reform.
Reform is untouchable; math wins. Inflation fills the gap.
7. Nothing Stops This Train
Default rarely arrives in one crash. It’s rolling mini-crises, soft defaults, and a historic bond drawdown.
Expect years of debasement that eats savings and fuels populism.
Empires unravel slowly—until suddenly they don’t.
8. Neutral Assets Are the Escape Valve
The world is diversifying out of Treasuries.
Central banks add gold; some sovereigns test Bitcoin.
The next reserve regime won’t crown a new fiat—it shifts toward neutral assets. Gold is the old rail; Bitcoin is the new standard.
9. Bitcoin Is a Protocol, Not Just an Asset
Bitcoin solved a 150-year problem: fast settlement.
Value can move globally without trusting a central ledger.
Not just digital gold—it’s a base layer like TCP/IP. Protocols become foundations.
10. Zero Is the Wrong Allocation
Lyn’s advice is blunt: zero Bitcoin is the wrong number.
Even a small allocation gives skin in the game, protection from dilution, and exposure to the hardest money we’ve ever seen.
Owning none is the bigger risk.
Closer
That’s 10 takeaways from Lyn Alden on Impact Theory.
A 2-hour macro deep dive, compressed for signal.
Which insight hit hardest for you?
Watch the full conversation here:
If you’re a high-net-worth family, individual, or business looking to build a serious Bitcoin position, Swan Private is the concierge service trusted by the world’s leading allocators.
🧵 Housing Hyper-Speculation & the Bitcoin Savings Standard
An expanded analysis of housing market dysfunction and a Bitcoin-based alternative strategy 👇
The Diagnostic Snapshot: Understanding the Affordability Crisis
The current state of American housing reveals a profound market distortion that has priced out an entire generation. The median U.S. home resale price has reached $𝟰𝟮𝟮,𝟰𝟬𝟬, while the typical American household earns just $𝟴𝟬,𝟲𝟭𝟬 annually according to Census data and the National Association of REALTORS®.
This creates a price-to-income ratio of approximately 5.2×, meaning the average home costs more than five times what the average family makes in a year. To put this in perspective, economists and housing policy experts have long considered a ratio above 3.5× to be fundamentally unaffordable for most families.
What does this mean practically? A family earning the median income would need to dedicate an unsustainable portion of their earnings to housing costs, even with traditional financing. This ratio suggests that housing has become disconnected from the underlying economic reality of what Americans actually earn, indicating that prices are being driven by factors other than local wage growth and genuine housing demand.
This imbalance represents the foundational problem underlying all other housing market dysfunctions we'll explore in this thread.
Cheap-Credit Mutation: How Federal Reserve Policy Distorted Housing
The Federal Reserve's monetary policy created a perfect storm in the housing market through dramatic interest rate manipulation. Thirty-year mortgage rates plummeted to historic lows below 3% during 2021, then whipsawed upward to 6.56% by August 28, 2025, according to Fox Business reporting.
The Low-Rate Period (2020-2022): Ultra-low interest rates essentially subsidized borrowing, allowing buyers to afford much higher purchase prices with the same monthly payment. This created a bidding war dynamic where families competed not based on their actual income and savings, but on how much debt they could service at artificially low rates.
Example: A family that could afford a $2,000 monthly payment could borrow:
- At 3% rate: ~$475,000
- At 6.56% rate: ~$315,000
This $160,000 difference in borrowing power explains much of the price inflation during the low-rate period.
The Current High-Rate Reality: Now that rates have normalized upward, existing homeowners with 3% mortgages are essentially "rate prisoners" - they cannot afford to sell and buy elsewhere without dramatically increasing their monthly payments. This artificial constraint on housing supply keeps inventory tight and prices elevated, even as affordability has collapsed for new buyers.
The result is a frozen market where mobility is artificially constrained by monetary policy rather than economic fundamentals.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) = investing a fixed amount at regular intervals, no matter the price.
It smooths volatility.
It captures long-term growth.
We backtested from Jan 1, 2015 → Aug 28, 2025.
Spoiler: the results are mind-blowing.👇
Why DCA into Bitcoin?
BTC isn’t just digital gold.
It’s inflation hedge.
It’s store of value.
It’s the best-performing asset of the decade.
Consistent buys = no timing stress.
No FOMO.
No panic selling.
Just steady wealth building.
The Backtest Setup
• Daily purchases using actual BTC prices over ~3,892 days
• Current BTC price (Aug 28, 2025): ~$111,788
• Tested $5, $10, $20 per day — amounts anyone can start with
• Total period: 10 yrs, 8 months
🧵The Sovereign Debt Maturity Wall and the Bitcoin Escape Valve
Trillions in government debt must be refinanced at higher rates. The math does not close.
Bitcoin is the market’s pressure release. 👇
1/12 — The Maturity Wall
Government debt issued in the zero-rate era is coming due while rates are still high. The OECD estimates about one-third of fixed-rate sovereign debt in the OECD will mature by 2027, much of it originally issued below 2 percent and likely to be refinanced closer to ~3.5 to 4 percent. That is a structural jump in interest costs.
2/12 — What that means in practice
Redemption schedules look “smooth,” yet the refinancing math is not. Roughly USD 9T of OECD fixed-rate debt maturing by 2027 was issued 2021 or earlier, at coupons below today’s market rates. The OECD names the U.S., U.K., France, and Spain as especially exposed on interest-cost increases by 2027.
When money lost its anchor, everything sped up and got worse.
You feel it in your bones and in your budget.
Shorter horizons. More debt. Less real saving.
We traded patience for velocity and called it progress.
Here is what changed, how it shows up in daily life, and why Bitcoin gives you a way to opt out and rebuild long term thinking.
Austrian econ 101. Your time preference is how much you discount the future relative to today. Hard money that holds value rewards patience, planning, and craftsmanship. Soft money that erodes nudges people to spend first, borrow often, and hope policy bails out the gap. Change the money, change behavior, change families, change feedback loops across the whole culture.
On August 15, 1971, the U.S. closed the gold window. The dollar stopped being redeemable for gold, and an external check on expansion disappeared. Without that restraint, credit and money creation moved to a political and institutional schedule. Prices, contracts, and savings began to drift because the unit you measure with no longer had a fixed reference outside human discretion.