Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, September 3rd, and today I wanted to do something that I've

been thinking about for a while, and I feel like this is the perfect time.

Labor Day weekend is, at least in the U.S., the historic end of summer.

It's when the last hurrahs, the last barbecues happen, and we transition

into our pumpkin spice latte season, our spooky season, Halloween season, the fall, the holidays,

the leaves, etc. At moments of change, seasonal change, or market change, it's worth asking what

came before and what comes next, to explore

what we learned and to think about what we might come to see or expect to see going forward.

Today, what I want to do is rip through a few different categories in the Bitcoin, Crypto,

and macro space and ask kind of where we are, what we learned over the summer, and what

we might expect, or what the

key questions at least are for the fall to come. Now, on most shows at this point, I work off a

pretty in-depth outline. But for this one, I just had this idea, and I really just wanted to let

it rip. So if it sounds different or more freeform than normal, that's why. I think the right

place to start is the macro. What is the dominant

macro context that's going to shape the fall for the Bitcoin industry in particular? To understand

that, I think we have to first ask what was the story of the summer. And I think the summer

story in macro was in fact a transition. At the beginning of the summer, inflation numbers

were heating up,

...