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Macro analyst · Founder of Forest for the Trees (FFTT)
Luke Gromen is a macro analyst and the founder of Forest for the Trees (FFTT), the research firm he started in 2014 after eighteen years in institutional equity research. He is best known for arguing that the post-1971 dollar system is ending and that gold has already replaced the Treasury bond as the world's primary reserve asset. He has appeared on TFTC since 2020.
Gromen's argument has a single spine: the United States runs a deficit it cannot cut, funded by a bond market that foreign central banks stopped buying on net a decade ago, and every apparent crisis since — the 2023 bank failures, the 2025 rare-earth standoff, the AI capex boom — is the same fiscal arithmetic surfacing somewhere new. He founded FFTT without outside investors so that he could write that argument without softening it, and he writes it from Cleveland, where he watched the industrial base leave before the coasts noticed.
The TFTC conversations track the argument as events catch up with it. In June 2023 he was calling Treasury duration risk the most mispriced narrative on Wall Street; by October 2025 he was describing gold's overtaking of Treasuries in central-bank reserves in the past tense; by June 2026 the question had narrowed to when the Fed caps yields and how much inflation it tolerates first. He has been on the show seven times since 2020; the three most recent conversations are written up below.
Latest
Luke Gromen returns to lay out the trap: the deficit can't be cut without triggering a depression, so the Fed will end up capping bond yields by printing into an inflation spike. Plus the Hormuz supply shock, AI eroding the tax base, and why gold is leading the exit with Bitcoin behind it.
Macro analyst Luke Gromen on why China's rare-earth leverage quietly removed the military deterrent behind the dollar order, why he thinks gold has overtaken the Treasury bond as the primary reserve asset, and why reshoring means devaluing the dollar.
The CPI has been coming in lower and lower month-on-month as the Fed has embarked on an aggressive rate hike campaign over the last one-and-a-half years.
Positions drawn from Luke’s TFTC appearances, grouped by theme. Quotes are from TFTC’s own recordings and are dated.
Gromen's core position has not changed across three years of TFTC conversations; the numbers under it have. Interest plus entitlements now exceed federal receipts, and the only line items large enough to cut are defense and the entitlements themselves, which no Congress will touch. He read the 2023 bank failures as a symptom of that arithmetic rather than a banking problem, and by 2026 he had stopped asking whether the Fed would cap bond yields and started asking when — and how far inflation would be allowed to run before it did.
“This banking crisis has always been not a banking crisis. It's been a symptom, the latest symptom, of a US fiscal crisis.”
“The fact that we are running an 8% of GDP deficit with 3.6% unemployment tells you the system is structurally broken.”
“There's nothing more inflationary than an insolvent sovereign that is printing money to keep the nominal value of its sovereign debt high.”
“That really is the economic question of the moment: when are they going to start printing money into an inflation spike to cap bond yields? They're going to have to.”
“You can't cut interest without cutting rates, which will make inflation worse. So the only things big enough to cut are defense and entitlements.”
“I don't think they would ever want to do explicit yield curve control. They may not ultimately have a choice. But that's the Hotel California: once you check in, you can't check out.”
The claim he is most identified with, and the one he is most careful to state precisely: not the end of the dollar as reserve currency, but the end of the post-1971 structure in which the Treasury bond was the reserve asset. In June 2023 he called Treasury duration risk the most mispriced narrative on the street. By October 2025, with gold overtaking Treasuries in central-bank reserves, he was describing the transition in the past tense.
“The most mispriced narrative on the street today, by far — it's not even close, in my view — is U.S. Treasury bonds. For the first time, they have risk.”
“When you don't trust anybody, you go to gold, and you'll settle in gold.”
“I have never said end of dollar reserve status. It's the end of the post-'71 structure of reserve status — the dollar as primary reserve currency, the Treasury bond as primary reserve asset. It happened.”
“There's now more gold in global central bank reserves than there are US Treasuries. How do you sit there and argue that it's not overtaking the dollar in the system?”
“Trust is breaking down, and if you don't hold it, you don't own it.”
“There's nothing more bullish for a neutral reserve asset than sovereign insolvency.”
Gromen has argued for a decade that the United States de-industrialized its own defense base, and he treats China's 2025 rare-earth restrictions as the moment that argument stopped being deniable. His framing is relative fragility rather than GDP: the Treasury market breaks in days, China's economy bends over months, and a few hundred million dollars of critical minerals sit underneath a trillion-dollar military.
“We have de-industrialized the US defense industrial base. And that's a problem as a national security imperative.”
“China has a lot more leverage than a lot of the Western commentators are admitting.”
“We know the Treasury market will blow up in five to seven trading days if there's a hard divorce, whereas China probably would be able to hunker down and be all right for five to seven months.”
“Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. We've been more focused on tactics, and they've been arguably more focused on logistics.”
“If we have all the cards, why are we going there?”
He is for re-industrialization and blunt about its price. The dollar system was built to export manufacturing and import capital; reversing that, in his account, means a weaker dollar, a Fed that ends up owning the bond market, and a skilled-labor shortage that no policy fixes on the required timeline. Having watched Cleveland hollow out first-hand, he has little patience for anyone who expects the factories back without the currency paying for them.
“The Rust Belt is America's emerging market.”
“When you chronically manage short term on borrowed money over and over and over, a reckoning comes at some point, and the reckoning's here.”
“To get the labor, the bond market has to die on a real basis.”
“We offshored this stuff to support the dollar. Why do people think that bringing it back can be done without waylaying the dollar?”
“Everybody else makes stuff and then they send the money here and we move the money around. That system is well beyond the end of its useful life.”
Gromen reads the 2025 stablecoin legislation as fiscal policy in a technology costume: a way to refinance the deficit in near-cash markets once the long end of the curve could no longer absorb the issuance. He thinks it can work for a while, notes that it needs a far higher Bitcoin price to work at scale, and by mid-2026 was pointing out that bank deregulation and the stablecoin push were competing for the same T-bill buyers.
“Let's call the stablecoin gambit for what it is. They should have called it: we can't issue bonds at the long end of the curve in sufficient amounts at prices that don't blow up our debt anymore, so we are refinancing all of our debt in near-cash markets.”
“Stablecoins to finance large amounts of the deficit is just the kissing cousin of printing cash to pay for the deficit. Why is it happening? Because it has to.”
“The Treasury seems to be standing up Bitcoin de facto as a competing reserve asset to gold.”
“Do you want stablecoins to buy Treasuries and T-bills, or do you want banks to buy Treasuries and T-bills? Because right now two different hands in the same administration are working at cross purposes.”
His objection to the AI build-out is not the valuations, which he concedes are defensible in isolation, but the funding: hyperscalers borrowing to build something that replaces the six-figure salaries the Treasury depends on, at the moment the Treasury can least afford to lose them. He expects the strain to show up in sovereign yields before it shows up in the stocks.
“Deflation is the midwife of hyperinflation in highly leveraged societies.”
“These tech companies are actively borrowing money on net, and they're borrowing money to undermine the tax base of the United States government.”
“You're talking about taking jobs that are paying multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and replacing them with something you can subscribe to for 20 bucks a month.”
“It was one thing when Luke Gromen said it — oh, Luke's just a doomer. Well, is Ken Griffin a doomer too?”
Gromen came to Bitcoin through gold and still ranks them in that order: gold first, because central banks can settle in it now; Bitcoin next, adopted from the bottom up. He has argued since 2023 that each cycle trades less like a tech stock and more like a neutral reserve asset, warned in 2026 that it still trades like a tech stock when rates are rising, and keeps returning to one instruction — buy a little regularly and hold your own keys.
“With each successive cycle, in my view, we've seen it act more like gold, as a counterparty-risk-free asset, and less like a high-beta tech stock.”
“If the US wanted to leapfrog what Russia, China and Iran are doing with gold, they would go to Bitcoin. They would say, we're going to settle US deficits in Bitcoin instantaneously at a market rate. Game, set, match.”
“The only way it narrows wealth inequality is if people start buying some every week and self-custody it. Because otherwise they're just going to rug-pull you.”
“I'm a tech moron, and so if I can do it, anybody can do it.”
“Bitcoin, I think, is ultimately going to serve that role, starting with the people rather than the officialdom. But in the short run it trades as sort of high-beta tech.”
Notable appearances on other shows, newest first.
Money, Markets & More with Dominic Frisby · Jul 2026Why Gold Is About to Matter More Than EverA UK audience gets the reserve-asset argument a month after the June TFTC conversation.
Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · Feb 2026All Roads Lead To GoldJapan's bond market, the commodity scramble and AI's effect on tax receipts, in a long-form sit-down.
Palisades Gold Radio · May 2025Gold Can Be Used to Rebalance the Global Economy Without a World WarThe case that a higher gold price is the least destructive way to reset the system, put to a gold-native audience.
Bitcoin Fundamentals with Preston Pysh · May 2024Macro Outlook Q2 2024 w/ Luke Gromen (BTC184)One of his recurring quarterly macro reviews with Pysh; TFTC wrote it up at the time.A fictional dialogue with a US sovereign creditor about the dollar's place in the world.
The sequel, written into the 2020 crisis.
FFTT's research subscription; the weekly “View from the Treetops” is the public-facing letter.
The research firm he founded in 2014 and wholly owns.