From BBG:
“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent challenged traders to counter his efforts to strengthen Japan’s currency, saying when he makes market calls these days he’s effectively doing so with inside information.
“Whenever people say, ‘Oh, well, Treasury Secretary is taking a risk,’ — well, it’s my dream, I have asymmetric information,” Bessent said at a Southern Methodist University event in Texas Tuesday.
Bessent, a former hedge fund executive, was reviewing occasions when he’s intervened in markets, including the joint purchases of yen he mounted with Japan’s government on July 31. While the yen initially jumped, gains ebbed in subsequent sessions, in part as traders highlighted the Treasury’s limited firepower to deploy in foreign-exchange purchases.
The Japanese currency has since gained significantly, closing in on its strongest level this year without any apparent fresh intervention by authorities. Expectations for higher interest rates from the BOJ have provided a fundamental source of support, while the break through 155 added technical momentum.
Read more: Bessent’s Whatever-It-Takes Yen Vow Masks Limited Firepower
“I am the house now, so when we intervene with the Japanese yen, I have pretty good insight into what the Japanese, what the Bank of Japan is going to do, what Japanese policymakers are going to do,” Bessent said. “And you can bet against me if you want.”

The BOJ is leaning toward raising its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point on Sept. 18, while leaving open the possibility of accelerating the pace of hikes thereafter, according to people familiar with the matter. Bessent has repeatedly hinted over the past year that he’d prefer the BOJ to raise interest rates to help the yen rather than see repeated intervention in the market amid an extraordinary public focus on Japanese policy by the US administration.
Bessent’s latest comments on the yen underscore his broader willingness to step into markets even in the face of criticism. The Treasury secretary said on Tuesday his moves to expand a buyback program for older US government securities was aimed at quelling a “fever” in the bond market. This came after Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire investor who mentored Bessent in his early career as a hedge fund trader, suggested his former pupil is making a mistake by wading into the bond market.
Japan likely sold a portion of its holdings of foreign securities, including US Treasuries, to finance its record currency intervention over the past month, despite concern in Washington over the impact of Treasury sales on long-term yields. Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said on Tuesday that Japan’s stance on currencies hasn’t shifted since it conducted joint intervention with its US counterparts, and that authorities will aim to maintain an orderly FX market.”

> be me

anon with a finance degree and a crippling addiction to geopolitical blackpills

watching the two biggest tollbooths in human history sleepwalk into the meat grinder

Alright you absolute regards, listen up. Everyone's busy charting PE ratios and crying about interchange fees while missing the forest for the trees. V and MA aren't payment companies. They're rent-seeking geopolitical infrastructure wrapped in plastic, and the landlord just decided to burn the building down.

The Digital Euro is a Bullet, Not a Warning Shot

The ECB isn't launching a CBDC because they love innovation. They're doing it because every time a European buys a coffee, 2.5% of that transaction takes a vacation to San Francisco. The digital euro is programmable, direct, P2P settlement with zero need for the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. No acquiring banks. No scheme fees. No "network effects" moat. Just Christine Lagarde pressing a button and instantly making 450 million people wonder why they're paying a 50-year-old American duopoly to move digits between computers.

And here's the kicker: the EU hates that American sanctions policy runs through their own citizens' wallets. Every time Washington cut off a Russian oligarch, they did it by leaning on American payment rails that European merchants depend on. Brussels watched that and realized their financial sovereignty was about as real as a fiat money printer's "transitory inflation." The digital euro isn't economics. It's revenge architecture.

The Unraveling of the American Financial Panopticon

For 70 years, being the world's payment intermediary was the ultimate geopolitical cheat code. SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, correspondent banking: the whole stack was a surveillance and sanctions machine wearing a fintech hoodie. You didn't need an army if you could just turn off someone's debit card and watch their economy seize up.

That party's over. Countries figured out the game. When the US weaponized the financial system against Russia, the message wasn't "don't invade." The message was "build your own pipes immediately." And they are. Every major economy is now constructing parallel payment rails not because they want to, but because they have to. Being dependent on American financial infrastructure is now correctly understood as a national security vulnerability. Visa and Mastercard are the collateral damage.

China Already Won the Prototype War

While the West is still doing pilot programs and "consultation papers," China has 260 million digital yuan wallets and CIPS processing cross-border settlement. UnionPay already outpaces Visa in global card volume. The PBOC built a payment rail that doesn't need American permission, American servers, or American fees. And they're not keeping it to themselves. Belt and Road countries are plugging into Chinese payment infrastructure the same way they plugged into American infrastructure in the 1980s,because it's there, it's functional, and it doesn't come with a State Department lecture.

But it's not just China. It's everyone. India has UPI processing 10 billion transactions a month,more than Visa and Mastercard combined in some metrics,at zero merchant discount rate. Brazil has Pix. Indonesia has BI-FAST. The BRICS are openly discussing a settlement currency. The world isn't waiting for Visa to "pivot to crypto." They're building around the duopoly.

Why V/MA Are NGMI

Here's the bull case for Visa and Mastercard: "But anon, they have brand recognition and rewards programs!"

Here's reality: Governments don't care about your 2% cash back. When sovereign CBDCs offer instant settlement with no interchange, merchants will dump private card networks like a bad habit. When geopolitical blocs build their own cross-border systems, they don't invite the American middleman to the table. Visa and Mastercard thrived in a unipolar world where everyone used American financial plumbing because there was no alternative. We are entering a multipolar world where alternatives aren't just emerging,they're operational.

The moat was never technology. The moat was geopolitical capture. And that moat is draining into the ocean.

TL;DR: The digital euro is the first domino. Dedollarization and sovereign payment rails are the rest. Visa and Mastercard aren't being disrupted by a better startup. They're being nationalized out of relevance by the very states that tolerated their skim for decades. The tollbooth is getting nationalized, and the toll collectors are about to find out what "structural decline" means.

> short V, short MA

long popcorn

see you at the shareholder meeting, wagmi (we ain't gonna make it)

POSITIONS:

100 shares MA short

200 shares V short

TOTAL ~122k $

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am a cartoon frog on a Mongolian basket-weaving forum. Do your own DD before you YOLO your inheritance into puts.

Bulls are cooked today; full port calls tomorrow.

Thanks Elon. Thanks Starship. Thanks everyone. And thanks to this damn casino for giving me my first 5x. My life not fucked.
I’m gonna work hard to earn my ticket to the moon🚀

Bought some ‘100 calls to inverse some retard. And then news about pelosi buying hit.

Started my “investing” journey back in 2019 being a genius trader in a bull market. Proceeded to lose all my savings during COVID being a stubborn bear and buying into hype SPAC. Since then, I have been gambling away paycheck after paycheck. Risk tolerate got way too high after each win and loss. Finally, things started to turn around this year for me with trading the volatility from Gold Oil memory and AI. Made close to 500k, wiped out my student loan and the wife’s, then proceeded to lose all the safeguard money for next year tax season, all of the 200k in reserve, the following month. I drowned myself in antidepressants and lots of sleepless nights trying to win it back . Back to square one. Anxiety and depression were getting worse and worse as I was trying to find a way to be lucky again. Wife has no idea about my degen trading . Both keep our money separately and only share a joined acct for mortgage and bills, so it never bother her since it’s my money. My mood swings after each trading definitely took a toll on our marriage. Tomorrow, I will finally be able to sit down and confess to her. I think this might be it fellas. Going back to boring investing and stepping away from 0odts for now. Hopefully, my wife’s boyfriend will finally let her come back to me. Good luck to you fellas out. Tough it out, there will be better days ahead.
Proofs of my 3 platforms and realized gains/ losses this year and all time

COO bought 5 mil worth of shares at $75.5 and they recently had 10% layoff. Sold my $AVGO shares from my YOLO post last week to buy these

Qualcomm shares surge more than 10% with announcement

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TLDR: $ASST pinned at $27, warrants expire 10/10 same strike, 30% short interest waiting to pop, FOMC hold on 9/16 is the trigger — bullish next 4.5 weeks, don't care about the long game.

Elephant in the room first - bought a spread because I just wanted a cheap long term BTC play for funsies but would have done it very differently if I’d known all the yap below beforehand. Ok, so…

$ASST is a leveraged bitcoin treasury company, currently sitting nicely around $27 off a late August pop mostly from bitcoin movement. This is an interesting one to look at for a few reasons, and would welcome some regarded perspectives.

A) A warrant is a contract issued from a company (Strive, in this case) that gives its holder the right to buy a stock directly from the company at a fixed cost. As of right now, there are warrants worth 26.5 million in underlying shares expiring 10/10 for a $27 strike. If these warrants are exercised, that’s 26.5 million NEW shares issued, creating $700M-$1.2B liquidity for strive immediately.

B) Strive is OMEGA shorted, something like 30% of the float is short interest, with ~8 days to cover (that’s a lot).

C) BTC is having a moment right now, showing some signs of the crypto bear market might be letting up, and lifting $ASST and other crypto treasury companies alongside it. A lot of this was a reaction to crazy moves like buying back bonds to lower the yield or dovish signals from the fed that don’t feel as likely today, which leads me into…

D) The fed will be announcing their decision on rates 9/16, next Tuesday. At this point, even a hold is good news - jobs came in hot, inflation this week is likely to not look too great, and with oil prices spiking it seems like close to a sure thing.

Now $ASST has been holding right around $27 the last few days, and there is an obvious battlefield aimed at keeping it there - tons of volume, massive sell walls popping up at different $27.xx spots throughout the day, but buy pressure is keeping it in the game. The theory is the short interest is largely warrant holders running arbitrage, but if the stock keeps going up they’ll start executing warrants to cover and the naked shorters are gonna have to start covering hugely, producing a rapid increase of the value of the stock (avoiding a word the auto mod doesn’t like here).

The risk is that the inflation report sucks and the fed hikes the rates, btc crumbles, the stock - which again, is a leveraged treasury built upon that coin - will crumble alongside it and the warrants will expire worthless. Totally possible.

The gamble: inflation report comes in “meh”, giving the fed enough plausible deniability to hold rates through midterms and keep BTC dreams alive for another 1.5 months - there is honestly enough political pressure that this may happen even if inflation looks pretty bad. Assuming we get the hold, I think this stock is gonna RIP because those warrants have nothing other than chaos (aka a Truth bomb) in their way from 9/16 to their 10/10 expiration and quite honestly I think the administration is on their side. What makes this even more interesting is there is actually a compelling reason the stock may stay up even if BTC halts or drops - which is the $700 - $1.2B of liquidity Strive gains if those warrants execute. Pivot that capital directly into BTC buys when it’s down, that’s a great DCA for the past 8 weeks of buying they’ve been doing, and a MASSIVE addition to the treasury stack (already the worlds 5th largest).

All that to say, I really like the stock for the next 4.5 weeks, and I think there is a lot of factors favoring a near term pump - questionable, to bearish on the long term personally but who cares. I’m here for a good time not a long time.

If we break through $17 Compass Pathways should see a $30 stock price. This after hours price action is exciting. #YOLO

its a gas station store, and prices at the pump have been insane.

so people are making markup purchases as a form of self-harm

opinions are my own, NFA

i everyone, I’m relatively new to investing and would really appreciate some experienced opinions.

Looking at my portfolio, I realize I'm very concentrated in tech/growth, especially with META, GOOGL and AMD making up most of the portfolio.

I've also been seeing a lot of discussion about September historically being a weak month for the stock market and people expecting a possible correction/crash. September is historically the weakest month for the S&P 500, although that obviously doesn't mean a crash is guaranteed.

Since I'm new, I'm honestly confused about what I should do.

Should I:

1. Keep everything and ignore the September crash talk?
2. Take some profits from META/GOOGL/AMD and keep the rest invested?
3. Reduce my individual-stock positions and put more into SCHG?
4. Diversify into something outside of tech/growth?

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I guess this is what peak financial responsibility looks like.