Good morning everybody.
It’s Monday, September 14th, 2026, and I’m recording this before the stock market opens.
Right now, we’re pointing toward a risk-off opening. Nasdaq 100 futures are down roughly 1.7%, the S&P 500 is down around 0.7%, and much of the selling is concentrated in the AI trade. Nvidia is down more than 2% pre-market, while Intel, AMD and Marvell are getting hit harder.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, is still sitting around $78,000.
And I’m going to keep saying this until something changes: we’re basically still at $80,000.
We haven’t decisively broken above the low $80Ks and started using $80K as support. We haven’t collapsed out of the range either. We’re going sideways.
The problem is that the headwinds are getting stronger. Oil is back above $100. The 10-year Treasury is flirting with 5%. Inflation remains a problem. The Fed meets this week. And now you’ve got some of the biggest names in AI talking about slowing development.
I don’t see a lot of reasons for Bitcoin to suddenly rip higher right now.
Oil, Treasury Yields and the Fed Are All Working Against Risk Assets
Oil is back above $108, up around 3% this morning following additional disruption in the Middle East.
We’ve been talking about this for weeks. The problem isn’t simply that oil gets expensive. Higher energy prices eventually work their way through transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and basically everything else that requires moving physical goods.
Here in Ohio, I’m seeing diesel around $6.15 a gallon.
Think about what that means for a trucker moving your food and consumer goods across the country. If fuel costs rise dramatically, somebody eventually pays for it. Usually, that’s you.
Then we have Treasury yields.
The 10-year was trading around 4.95% to 4.97% this morning after briefly touching roughly 4.99%. I’ve been watching 5% as an important psychological and financial threshold, and we’re basically there.
Friday’s CPI report didn’t help.
Headline CPI increased 0.4% in August, putting year-over-year inflation around 3.4%, while core CPI increased 0.3%.
That brings us directly into Wednesday’s Fed decision.
Markets are heavily leaning toward another rate hike. A 25-basis-point increase itself may not be the biggest surprise if that’s what investors already expect. The more important question could be what Kevin Warsh says afterward.
If he presents a hike as a limited move intended to keep inflation under control, oil settles down and the Middle East situation improves, there’s a path toward markets calming down.
The cautious scenario is much uglier.
If Warsh suggests this is the beginning of several hikes, oil stays above $100 and the 10-year decisively breaks 5%, that’s a much harder environment for risk assets.
For Bitcoin, I’m still looking at the same range. Until we get decisively through roughly $82K and start establishing $80K as support, we’re sideways.
And with the current macro headwinds, I’m not expecting $100,000 Bitcoin by the end of the year.
Could it happen?
Of course. It’s Bitcoin.
But that’s not the direction I’m leaning right now.
CLARITY Gets Its Test, and Stablecoin Yield Is Becoming a Major Fight
Tomorrow is also an important day for crypto regulation.
The CLARITY Act gets its procedural test, and the latest draft includes a large number of substantive changes requested by Democrats. Among the issues being negotiated are stronger ethics provisions, protections for genuinely decentralized software developers and a distinction between truly decentralized DeFi and platforms that call themselves decentralized while somebody still exercises meaningful control.
I think that distinction matters.
If nobody actually controls the software, that’s one thing.
If there’s a company or individual sitting behind the curtain with meaningful control, calling it “DeFi” shouldn’t automatically exempt it from regulation.
But the issue I’m really watching is stablecoin yield.
The GENIUS Act already restricts payment-stablecoin issuers themselves from directly paying interest or yield to holders. The remaining fight is over the workaround: can exchanges, wallets, affiliates or other intermediaries reward you for holding idle stablecoins?
Banks obviously don’t love that idea.
Why would they?
If I can move dollars into USDC, put that USDC on a crypto platform and earn an attractive return, that’s direct competition for deposits sitting inside traditional banks.
And this is where I have a problem.
If the government’s answer to new financial competition is simply to prevent the competitor from offering a better product, don’t lecture me about free markets.
That’s not competition.
That’s regulatory capture.
There are still distinctions that need to be worked out. Using stablecoins for payments and earning cashback or rewards may be treated differently from simply collecting yield for holding them. DeFi lending is another category. Staking or lending non-stablecoin crypto assets creates still more questions.
That’s what makes these laws so complicated.
You write a rule covering one activity, the market develops another structure, lawyers argue about whether the new product fits the definition, somebody eventually gets sued, and the courts start defining the boundaries.
But I don’t want the basic principle lost in all of that complexity.
Banks shouldn’t get to eliminate competitors because they’re better at lobbying Congress.
AI Executives Want Guardrails, and I Don’t Trust Their Motives
Now we get to the rant.
Some of the biggest names in AI are again warning about the pace of AI development and calling for stronger guardrails.
And I think there’s a regulatory-capture problem here.
My concern isn’t whether AI can be dangerous. Of course there are legitimate cybersecurity, biological and autonomous-system risks worth discussing.
My concern is who gets to write the rules.
If the largest AI companies convince Congress that advanced AI is too dangerous for everybody else to develop while their own companies retain the resources, compute, data and regulatory approval necessary to continue, you’ve created a walled garden.
And open source gets crushed.
I’ve experienced some of this frustration personally. I use ChatGPT constantly for research, testing arguments and helping organize things I’ve already written. As campaign season approaches, I’ve found some political tasks increasingly restricted, including situations where I’m asking it to examine the logic of my own argument rather than write political persuasion from scratch.
That’s exactly why I think open-source models matter.
A handful of corporations shouldn’t control the entire information layer.
My argument about the CEOs themselves is speculation. I don’t have evidence of some secret agreement between Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to kill open source, and I’m not presenting that as fact.
What I’m saying is that their economic incentives matter.
The companies already sitting at the top have much more ability to comply with expensive regulation than a startup, university researcher or open-source developer.
That’s why I’m skeptical when the people building increasingly powerful models simultaneously tell Congress that increasingly powerful models need to be tightly controlled.
If you genuinely think your next model has a substantial chance of destroying humanity, you have an option available right now:
Don’t build it.
That’s what makes the argument strange to me.
The Infrastructure Around AI May Be the Bigger Prize
There’s another part of this that I think people overlook.
The winner of AI doesn’t necessarily have to build the smartest model.
It might own the infrastructure everyone else needs.
That’s why I keep looking at what Elon Musk is building differently. Whether it’s Starlink, rockets, data centers, AI compute, autonomous vehicles or communications infrastructure, there’s a common theme.
Own the rails.
You don’t necessarily have to know what people are doing on top of the infrastructure if you’re getting paid every time they use it.
The same idea applies to AI companies.
If a handful of companies eventually control the models people use for search, work, research, agents and information, that’s enormous economic power.
That’s why the open-source debate isn’t some nerdy side argument.
It’s about who controls the infrastructure underneath an increasingly large portion of the economy.
And investors are beginning to ask another question: if AI companies actually slow model development, what happens to the enormous infrastructure buildout that has been priced into semiconductor companies, data centers and power demand?
That’s one reason today’s weakness in AI-related stocks is worth watching.
Security Still Doesn’t Require Breaking the Cryptography
There’s also another security story that reinforces something I’ve said repeatedly.
According to the transcript, Revolut disclosed that some customer KYC and Bitcoin transaction information was exposed after an attacker submitted requests that appeared to come from legitimate government authorities.
That’s a completely different security problem from quantum computing.
You don’t need to crack encryption if you can fool the human or institution sitting next to it.
It’s the same reason phishing continues working.
Someone sends you a text claiming you owe a toll. Someone sends an email saying your Google account has been compromised. Now somebody impersonates a government agency.
The cryptography can work perfectly.
The process around it fails.
Symbiosis also reported recovering 15 Bitcoin following a bridge exploit and offered the attacker a 20% bounty for returning the remainder.
Bridges remain one of crypto’s persistent attack surfaces because they have to coordinate assets and transactions across different networks.
Again, the weakness isn’t necessarily the underlying Bitcoin network.
It’s everything we build around it.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $77,900, up approximately 1.4% over 24 hours.
Ethereum is approximately $2,513, up around 1.3%.
BNB is around $722, up approximately 0.8%.
XRP is approximately $1.39, up around 4%.
Solana is around $101, up approximately 1.8%.
TRON is approximately $0.34, down around 0.2%.
Hyperliquid is around $80.42, up approximately 3.7%.
Zcash is approximately $1,132, up around 3.7%.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.66 trillion, up around 1.25%.
Fear & Greed: 68, Greed.
My Take
I’m cautious this week.
Bitcoin is still basically sitting around $80,000, and I don’t see a strong catalyst right now that gets us decisively through the low $80Ks and establishes $80K as the new floor.
Instead, we’ve got $100-plus oil, Treasury yields flirting with 5%, another Fed decision coming Wednesday and renewed weakness in the AI trade.
Then you’ve got CLARITY.
I want the United States to finally establish workable crypto rules. But I don’t want “clarity” to become another word for protecting incumbent banks from stablecoin competition.
And the same principle applies to AI.
Regulation can be necessary without allowing the largest existing companies to write rules that protect themselves and lock everybody else out.
That’s what I’m watching.
Not simply whether Congress regulates crypto or AI, but who benefits from the way they regulate it.