The Commoner

Monday, October 5, 2026

Sup, freaks.

John Arnold and I recorded this morning and the episode went out this afternoon. We got into oil, interest rates and Trump's comments about using inflation to deal with the debt. Bitcoin breaking higher against gold made for a pretty good way to wrap up the conversation.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Trump's inflation comments, the Treasury market and bitcoin's breakout against gold.
• Treasury backs away from proposed surveillance of self-custody wallets and mixing.
• Apple's agent permissions, rising electricity costs and Europe's lost refining capacity.
• A narrower week of bitcoin ETF buying, weak hiring and Latin America's political shift.
• An important security update for operators building with Lightning Development Kit.

Marty's Bent

Trump Is Telling You to Own Bitcoin

Trump is doing a pretty good job of explaining why you should own bitcoin. In his interview with TIME published last week, he said, "Certain levels of inflation will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly."

Very rapidly! I'm sure the people trying to save enough money to buy a house or start a family will be thrilled to hear this. They've spent years trying to get ahead of rising prices and the president is talking about how useful more inflation could be. Useful for the government that owes the money, at least.

John Arnold and I recorded this morning and spent a lot of time trying to work through where all of this is heading. I think Trump would much rather inflate his way out of the debt problem than go through a default. He's now saying as much.

The oil situation has improved considerably for the Gulf producers that aren't Iran. Kpler has their crude exports back around prewar levels, with oil moving through Hormuz and alternative routes. Iran is getting squeezed while the countries around it are finding ways to get their oil to buyers. I think this gives Trump more room to maneuver. John pointed out that we still have a problem with refined products, though, and the cost of moving all this oil around hasn't magically gone away. Getting crude onto a ship is good. Getting affordable diesel into the trucks moving materials to the factories you want built is another part of the equation.

Building those factories gets a lot more expensive if borrowing costs stay elevated. Trump wants lower rates. He made that very clear in the same TIME interview, arguing that high interest rates are doing more damage than inflation. This is where John and I kept coming back to the bond market. You can yell about interest rates all you want, but somebody still has to buy the debt. If they think you're going to pay them back in dollars that buy considerably less, why would they settle for a lower yield?

One answer seems to be finding more buyers. We got into stablecoins because they give the government a way to reach people who may never open a U.S. brokerage account or buy a Treasury bill themselves. Someone wants digital dollars. An issuer supplies them and holds reserves behind those tokens. Some of those reserves go into government debt. The San Francisco Fed wrote last week about stablecoin issuers' growing appetite for Treasury securities. You can see why an administration that needs to keep financing itself would find this appealing.

I can understand the appeal to someone who needs access to dollars, too. But I have no desire to mistake easier access to dollars for an escape from what is being done to them. The president just told us he sees inflation as a way to deal with the debt. I would prefer to hold something he can't create more of.

Take a look at Nik Bhatia's bitcoin/gold chart. Bitcoin has broken above the resistance marked around 18 ounces of gold per bitcoin and continued higher in the October 2 snapshot. We talked about this toward the end of the show. An ounce of gold buys less bitcoin after that move.

Put it all together and it looks like bitcoin is ready to rip. We'll see how it plays out, but I'm certainly not looking at what Trump is saying and thinking I need to hold more dollars.

SIGNAL

Good riddance to these surveillance proposals

Some good news for those of us who would prefer to use bitcoin without having every transaction treated as suspicious. FinCEN has filed notices withdrawing its 2020 proposal targeting transfers involving self-custody wallets and its 2023 proposal targeting international mixing. The withdrawals take effect upon publication, scheduled for tomorrow. The wallet proposal would have required banks and money services businesses to keep transaction and counterparty records and verify customers' identities for covered transfers above $3,000, with reporting above $10,000, including transactions aggregated over 24 hours. The mixing proposal would have added reporting requirements for certain transactions involving mixing within or involving a foreign jurisdiction. Neither became final. FinCEN is also withdrawing its finding against international mixing.

We pushed back on this in January 2024. Wanting to hold your own money and wanting some privacy are perfectly normal things. I'm glad these particular attempts to make them a bigger pain in the ass are being abandoned.

Apple, let people use their computers

Apple is planning more explicit permission checks before apps can receive Full Disk Access, pointing to the risks posed by autonomous AI agents. There's no launch date yet. I get it. Handing an agent access to your files, messages and browsing history is a decision you should understand before making it. But once you understand what you're doing, you should be able to do it. These are our computers. Let us use them.

Apple says people who genuinely want to grant that access will still be able to. Good. I hope that means a clear explanation and a choice, rather than a maze of warnings designed to make the choice for you. People are figuring out how to make these tools useful. I'd rather see Apple help them do that.

Your electricity bill would like a word

The chart ZeroHedge shared on electricity bills will probably feel familiar to anyone who has opened one recently. The EIA puts July's average residential electricity price at 18.31 cents per kilowatt-hour, up 4.9% from a year earlier. That's the rate you're paying before you even get to how much power you used. We need to build more generation. Everyone seems happy to acknowledge this until it's time to decide who is going to pay for it. FERC accepted but suspended PJM's proposed backstop procurement mechanism and ordered a hearing that includes questions about how costs would be allocated.

If you want to bring a massive new load onto the grid, helping bring new supply online seems like a reasonable expectation. Sending the bill to households that are already getting squeezed seems like a great way to make people hate the whole project.

Turns out Europe still needs refineries

Lomborg highlighted Europe's loss of refining capacity. FuelsEurope counts 30 refineries closed or converted since 2009, including sites converted to biorefineries. That's a considerable amount of conventional capacity to lose when you still need the fuels those refineries produce. Now Europe wants to build up its defence industry and make sure it has reliable fuel supplies. VAROPreem's chief executive told Reuters that politicians have become more interested in keeping refineries running. Imagine that.

This is part of what John and I were getting at this morning. Crude oil still has to be turned into something you can put in a truck, plane or piece of military equipment. You can't announce your way around that requirement.

BlackRock did the heavy lifting

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $241.1 million in the week ending October 2, according to our flow tracker. A much quieter week than the roughly $2.386 billion that came in the week before. What jumped out at me was how much of the buying came through BlackRock. IBIT brought in $450.2 million while the other funds, taken together, lost $209.1 million. Without IBIT's inflows, we'd be talking about a week of net selling.

It is good to see buyers continuing to show up, but I'd like to see that buying spread out across the funds again. For now, BlackRock's customers are doing a lot of the work.

A rough time to be looking for work

The September jobs report came in at just 29,000 additional nonfarm payroll jobs and 4.2% unemployment. July and August were revised down by a combined 60,000 jobs. So the previous two months were weaker than we had been told, too.

Imagine sending out applications into a market that barely added any jobs, opening a more expensive electricity bill and listening to the president talk about the benefits of inflation. I don't think people in that position are going to be particularly comforted by the prospect of making the government's debt easier to manage.

Latin America is moving right

The rightward trend in Latin America is clear. Chile elected José Antonio Kast, and Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead of Lula yesterday. Brazil still has a runoff to come, but a Lula defeat would be a significant continuation of that trend. The USAID question raised here shouldn't be waved away. You can go back well before DOGE and read the agency's own descriptions of its work. In 2014, USAID's LGBT coordinator described its Colombian partners as "developing advocacy and policy strategies." Astraea described a USAID partnership in Bogotá that brought Latin American activists together to develop media strategies and digital advocacy tools.

Why are American taxpayers paying to export this agenda? This is the sort of globalist project I've been talking about. Washington deciding which activists to support and which social policies to promote in someone else's country, all under the banner of foreign aid. I'm glad that apparatus is being dismantled, and I'm glad to see voters in Latin America moving to the right. They should get to decide the direction of their countries without us subsidizing a preferred outcome.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Spot price and block height: October 5, 2026, 9:36 a.m. ET. Bitcoin Lab daily series: October 4, 2026. U.S. spot ETF flows: October 2, 2026.

Sources: Kraken spot quote, mempool.space block height, Bitcoin Lab daily metrics, and TFTC ETF flows. Daily metrics use the provider’s October 4 observation, not live intraday estimates.

If you missed it, give today's conversation with John a listen. We spent a good chunk of the morning on this and there's plenty more in the episode.

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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