Expert analysis and trades using Global Liquidity, Bitcoin & Bullion.
Chief Economist and Strategist: The Ainslie Group (Bullion, Crypto, Tokens, Wealth).
The retirees David designs for don't want to move.
The closer to the city, the higher the cost of land, and the more critical it becomes to stack the functions inside a single building. Independent living on one floor. Retirement living on another. Aged care on a third. Allied health, hospitality, community amenity threaded through.
The design challenge is enormous. The buyer brief is simple. Stay in one place. Stay in one community. Move from one mode of care to the next without packing a box.
That is the model the next decade of urban retirement living gets built on. It only works if the architect builds the operational reality into the brief from day one.
We used to slow the economy by raising rates. That worked when growth came from the private sector.
It does not work now. Inflation today is increasingly driven by government deficit spending, not by organic credit growth. Joe walked through the mechanics on the May panel.
Higher rates in a deficit-driven economy mean more interest payments flowing out of the government to bondholders. That cash lands in the hands that already own assets. It does not slow the economy. It redistributes inside it. The bottom of the income distribution gets the rate without the asset offset and wears the worst of both sides.
The traditional toolkit was built for a different system. The system has changed. The toolkit has not.
There is not one answer to the housing crisis. There are seven, and they all have to run at once.
Granny flats in the backyard. Prefab modular. One-block subdivisions into two or three. Townhouse infill. Apartment density near transport hubs. Council density uplifts where the infrastructure can carry it.
The bottleneck on apartments is real. Anything five storeys or higher triggers fire-regulation cost. A basement for cars adds another layer most projects can't carry. That is why townhouses are doing the heavy lifting in the current market. Construction cost vs sale price still works at that scale.
A housing strategy that only picks one of those levers is a housing strategy that fails. All seven, or nothing.
Richard Chai on the practical edges that actually protect yield and capital for Brisbane investors right now.
Responsive management, the real cost of chasing an extra $20 to $30 per week, why company structures can create $300 to $400k problems, and why supply pressure is only going to get tighter with the Olympics.
Full episode below.
Every bear market has rallies. They can run 30 per cent.
That is where the noise gets loudest. "It's over." "We're back." "The bottom is in."
Joe's framing: until liquidity turns, you are looking at a counter-trend. The candles can do anything in the short run. The structure underneath them decides whether the move continues. Right now the structure is still contracting. The rally is real. The regime change is not.
Two different reads. Don't confuse them.
We have not had a real recession in this country in over 30 years.
A whole working population that has never been laid off, never had to sell the house at a loss, never had to negotiate down a mortgage with the bank. The collective muscle memory of what a serious downturn actually looks like is gone.
That memory matters. Without it, the risk gets priced too low. Defensive positioning looks paranoid. Until it doesn't.
Deflation is not pretty. People who lived through one don't forget. Most of the market never has.
Silver is holding structure while gold has broken down, and the next daily cycle low is due early June.
In this setup, silver's relative strength against gold is telling us something important about speculation versus flight-to-safety. @realDhruvSuri breaks down the daily cycle timing (20-28 days average), why GSR over 50 at a cycle low remains a high-conviction DCA entry, and how the same chart can point to silver short-term, gold medium-term, or silver long-term depending on your timeframe.
The cycle approach cuts through the geopolitical noise better than narratives ever will. Oil proved that again recently.
Tens of thousands of tradies short for the Olympics build.
That is the headline number coming out of every infrastructure conference David Pond has been to lately. Not a soft estimate. A baseline.
Interstate tradies are already migrating in. The supply gap will not close in time. The flow-on effect for private-sector construction is unavoidable. Materials demand, labour demand, cost pressure, all flowing into projects that have nothing to do with the Olympics directly.
His read on Brisbane: insulated from any broader slowdown for the next three to five years. The Olympics is doing the work the cycle would otherwise extract.
Bitcoin against gold is the cleaner read.
Bottoming patterns in that ratio do not form in a single week. The 2022-23 base took months of grind. Joe's call: a green candle on Bitcoin-USD with bottoming liquidity would be a rotation trade. A green candle on Bitcoin-USD with contracting liquidity is something else entirely.
If liquidity turned tomorrow, the play is aggressive. Rotate gold into Bitcoin. The setup is not there yet. The chart is showing the early bid. The layer underneath is not.
Aggressive is for confirmation. We are not at confirmation.
Don't make AI proficiency your career strategy.
That's David Pond's line, and it is the most contrarian thing anyone has said on the show in months. His view: AI capability becomes table stakes inside five years. Everyone will have it. The differentiator falls back to the classics. Communication. Trust. Narrative. The ability to read a client and present an idea.
The lawyer he was speaking to said the same thing. AI can search every prior case in seconds. The firm still needs a partner who can win the client. That part does not commoditise.
Apply that to every industry. AI does the work. Humans win the room.
"Sticky inflation." That's the phrase doing the work in every central bank press conference right now.
The macro trend over the last 18 months is disinflationary. Every counter-rally gets called a return of inflation. Every print that ticks up gets framed as the regime change back.
@realDhruvSuri's read: the framing is deliberate. A sticky-inflation narrative justifies a slower easing path and keeps options open for the next major monetary architecture shift. A crisis brings the solution that gets accepted. The story is doing strategy, not analysis.
Worth watching what is actually under the print, not what is said about it.
A 100 per cent strike rate. Every recession of the modern era preceded by it.
A sharp oil spike. Not a slow grind higher. A sudden geopolitical or supply-shock move that pulls prices up faster than CPI can absorb them.
The mechanics: petrol at the pump moves in days. CPI takes months to catch up. Consumer spending power gets taxed in real time before the inflation print even registers. Consumer demand collapses. Recession follows. Deflation follows that.
A gentle oil rise is inflationary. An oil spike is deflationary. The rate of change is the variable that matters.
Chart of the Week
Nominal global liquidity at a new all-time high. The Shadow Monetary Base contracting underneath it.
Last week was the MOVE Index. The week before was the U.S. Dollar Index. Both are inputs into the same machine. This week is the output, and the fault line running through it.
The headline number, the one that crossed a record this week, is what most market commentary fixates on. It is the surface layer. The Shadow Monetary Base, plotted underneath, is the pool that the headline is manufactured from. It is central bank reserves plus eligible bonds. The money market then leverages it through collateral chains into the larger headline figure. The ratio between the two is the collateral multiplier.
For most of the cycle, the two lines moved together. New reserves entered the system, the base lifted, and the headline lifted with it. That is what genuine liquidity creation looks like.
That is no longer what is happening. The Shadow Monetary Base has rolled over and its three-month annualised change is now firmly negative. The headline keeps climbing anyway. The only arithmetic that allows that is an expanding multiplier. The multiplier is expanding because Treasury buybacks and Reserve Management Purchases are actively suppressing the volatility that would otherwise compress it.
A multiplier-led expansion is not the same thing as a reserves-led expansion. The first is fragile by design. It depends on a small number of policy levers continuing to suppress volatility in a system that wants to mean-revert. The second carries its own foundation.
Watch this gap. Headline up, base down. The widening is the read. The moment the multiplier cracks is the moment the surface number goes with it.
@realDhruvSuri was back on Insights to walk through the next leg for silver. The argument has shifted over the last month. Late last year was the vertical move. People bought into the rally. The GSR fell off a cliff. Volumes surged on the way up, dried up on the way back.
We're back in the boring phase now. GSR above 50, daily cycle low, eight-year macro cycle still pointing through to 2030. The classic dollar-cost-average window Dhruv has been calling for years. Not a sales pitch. Not a vertical breakout call. A position-building window.
His framing is the one worth carrying: gold is the final destination, silver is the trade between now and then. There are times to convert silver into gold. There are times to convert dollars into silver. This is the latter.
A load-bearing wall that does not stack up. Plumbing services that do not align floor to floor. Coordination clashes the builder finds on site, not on the drawings.
The builder prices a premium straight away. The owner pays for it. The lazy work upstream gets paid for in cash downstream every single time.
CPO is brought in to take those projects over. Same look. Same feel. Simpler construction. Lower build cost. Same visual result, achieved by stripping out the chaos in the layers nobody sees.
The aesthetic is not the problem. The drawings underneath it are.
Most architects market their design. The good ones design to market.
David Pond is a Director at CPO Architects. Two decades of multi-residential, retirement, childcare and commercial work across Australia. He came on QBS this week, and the framing he runs through every project is the part worth carrying.
Start with the development strategy. The target market. The price point. The funding model. Then design the building backwards from that brief. A townhouse in Logan Central should look nothing like a townhouse in Ascot. Most projects fail because that distinction gets ignored.
He has a view on the next 24 months in Brisbane that anyone in property or construction needs to hear. Olympics infrastructure pulling thousands of trades, demand the private sector is then going to wear, and a regional economy he sees as insulated from any broader slowdown.
Macro & Global Liquidity, May 2026
A green candle on the Bitcoin chart. Liquidity still contracting underneath it.
@Packin_Sats and @pmengeman on the May Macro & Global Liquidity panel. Bitcoin posted its first weekly close of strength in a while. The technicals lit up. The liquidity layer didn't.
Joe's read: every bear market has bear rallies. 10, 15, 20, sometimes 30 per cent. They look like the turn. Without the liquidity tailwind behind them, they aren't.
Layer 1 is the foundation. Layer 3 confirms, not leads. When the candle is up and the plumbing is down, the candle is the trap.
The thing most people are scared of is the wrong thing.
Inflation ticked up last print. Headlines lit up. "Sticky inflation," "stalled progress," the usual run. The actual macro trend underneath the noise has been disinflationary for almost two years.
@realDhruvSuri came on Insights this week to pull apart the three terms most people use interchangeably and most people get wrong. Inflation. Disinflation. Deflation. Each one demands a different response from a portfolio. Each one means something very different is happening inside the economy.
The argument we ended up at: the genuine tail risk isn't another inflation surprise. It's a deflationary bust. And the loudest deflationary indicator we have right now isn't a CPI print at all. It's the oil chart.
Global liquidity hit another record high this week. The base underneath it shrank again.
That gap is the story of the moment. The Shadow Monetary Base is the pool of central bank reserves and eligible bonds that gets leveraged into the headline number. Its three-month annualised change is now firmly negative. The base is contracting while the headline keeps climbing. The two have decoupled.
The headline is being lifted by an expanding collateral multiplier rather than by genuine new liquidity creation. The supports that have been engineering that surface number are visibly working harder for less. The dollar has reversed against every major currency bar the yuan. Bond volatility has ticked up off four-year lows. China has withdrawn for a fifth consecutive week, with PBoC liquidity back to pre-Chinese-New-Year levels and the renminbi at a three-year high. Each of these levers used to lift the headline. Each is now pulling against it.
This week's letter unpacks the layers. Why the multiplier is the most fragile part of the configuration. Where the rotation into Developed Market exposure is heading next. What a bear-flattening curve and a 5 per cent long end are actually telling us. And the moment the support package stops working.
https://t.co/IcG7ogXodc
$400K home. Sold for $900K. $500K gain.
Old rules: 50% CGT discount, $112,500 tax at the top marginal rate.
New rules: inflation indexation only, $171,000 on the same transaction.
$58,500 extra on a property sale that hasn't changed. Same house. Same buyer. Same Australia. Just a different government deciding what your gain is.