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Deflationary Money Hits Different: Losing Half Its Price And Winning Anyway

Authored by Bryan Lutz, Contributor at The Sovereign Capitalist:

The FUD is back, baby.

Bitcoin is down nearly half from its 2025 high. And now, the obituaries are out of cold storage and back in heavy rotation. Sentiment surveys are scraping levels we haven’t seen since the 2022 crypto-winter, and the financial press has rediscovered its favorite genre: the Bitcoin post-mortem.

And this time they’ve got a chart to wave around. The Dow just had its best year against Bitcoin since 2022 – the Dow/BTC ratio has more than doubled off its August 2025 low, from 0.36 to 0.84.

Here it is. We’ll even draw the red line for them:

The Dow’s twelve-month winning streak against Bitcoin. Note what the line still hasn’t touched: 1.0.

Anyone holding through it felt every point. If you wanted to write the “Bitcoin is finished (again)” piece, this is the chart you’d lead with.

Notice what the line still hasn’t done, though.

It hasn’t touched 1.0.

After the worst sentiment stretch in years, after a ~45% drawdown, after twelve months of losing to the most boomer-coded stock index on earth, the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average still cannot buy one Bitcoin.

Against thirty of America’s biggest companies, the coin wins, with change left over.

Flip the fraction.

If that seems impossible, it’s because you’re reading the fraction the way CNBC wants you to read it:

Bitcoin

───────

$$$$$$$

Bitcoin as the numerator, dollars as the denominator, and the numerator just got cut in half. Case closed, right?

Wrong fraction. As Mark Jeftovic laid out in It’s the denominator, stupid, the entire point of Bitcoin is that it isn’t the thing being measured. It’s the thing you measure with. Put the index where it belongs:

  DOW

───────

BITCOIN

Now extend the chart back a decade and hit the log button, which is a one-click jailbreak for fiat-denominated brains:

The Dow, denominated in Bitcoin. A 99% decline that survived every Bitcoin crash along the way, including this one.

In 2014 it took more than 40 Bitcoin to buy the Dow. At the 2015 extreme, 84.

Today: 0.83.

Measured in the new denominator, the Dow has lost roughly 99% of its value in twelve years, and the “comeback” everyone is celebrating shows up on that chart as a wiggle at the bottom of a cliff. Bitcoin just took its worst beating in years and gave back approximately none of a decade of relative gains.

That’s what deflationary money does. It hits different.

It’s about the maths

The Dow is priced in dollars, and dollars multiply, inflate, depreciate, and then die… which is the business model for the whole fiat system. M2 only ever pauses on its way up, every crisis gets solved with more of it, and index earnings get marked up in the same shrinking units.

Bitcoin’s supply schedule, meanwhile, doesn’t attend FOMC meetings. The halvings keep halving. Twenty-one million, take it or leave it.

Run the numbers since January 2000: the Dow is up 361% in dollars. M2 is up 394%. Divide one by the other and the twenty-six-year bull market vanishes: measured in the money itself, the index has gone nowhere. Every point of “Dow 52,000” that isn’t printer output rounds to zero.

The Dow and the money supply, same starting line, 26 years later. The index never got ahead of the printer.

So, the fraction has a numerator inflated by an expanding money supply, sitting on top of a denominator that does not expand. Run that equation for a decade and the line on the chart is the only possible output. The drawdowns – 2018, 2022, this one – are volatility inside the trend. And that trend is division between fiat money and Bitcoin.

A Dow’s comeback measured in a shrinking yardstick must sprint just to stand still. This year, it’s rallied hard in dollars. In Bitcoin terms, it clawed back a rounding error.

Same story, slower clock.

If this framework sounds familiar, it should. Gold holders have been living it since 1971, just at a different tempo.

In 2001 the Dow cost 42 ounces of gold. Today, with the Dow at nominal record highs and the algos doing victory laps, it costs 12.7 ounces. Two-thirds of the index’s gold-denominated value, gone, during a quarter century of “stocks always go up”.

Yes, gold and Bitcoin diverged this cycle. Gold at $4,142 while Bitcoin sits in a drawdown. They have different volatility profiles, and different adoption curves. Yet, they share the same denominator maths. One asset is the incumbent hard money, the other is the challenger still crossing the chasm. The DOW index can’t outrun either of them over any window that matters.

“Stocks at record highs” is mostly the yardstick shrinking. It is always has been.

Deflationary Money Still Undefeated this Decade

Here’s the thing about extreme bearish sentiment: it’s a report on the emotional state of leveraged tourists, not on the asset. Nothing about Bitcoin(or gold) changed this year. The supply schedule didn’t change. The halvings didn’t change. The $300+ trillion in bonds denominated in a melting currency didn’t change, except to get bigger.

The only thing that changed is the price, quoted in the old denominator, and the old denominator’s entire job description is to go down.

So, the mainstream news cycle might be right about one thing:

Deflationary money doesn’t win every year.

However, it does win every decade, and it’s undefeated.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/16/2026 - 13:05

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House Defeats Bid To End Israel Aid While Senate Blocks US-Israel Intel Integration

The U.S. House on Wednesday rejected an amendment by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that would have eliminated $3.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel, voting 314–104 to defeat the proposal.

As Tom Gantert reports for The Epoch Times, the vote exposed divisions within the Democratic Party, with 103 Democrats joining Massie in support of the amendment, while 98 Democrats voted against it and 10 voted present. Massie was the only Republican to vote in favor of the amendment.

“Though my amendment to strike $3.3 billion in aid to Israel from the State Dept Approps bill did not pass, 104 House Members voted in favor of it,” Massie said on X.

“The tide is changing. Americans want their tax dollars to be spent improving things here at home, not waging war and genocide.”

The amendment was considered as the House debated the fiscal 2027 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs appropriations bill.

Before the vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) urged lawmakers to reject the amendment, calling it “overly broad” because he said it could restrict funding for humanitarian aid, refugee resettlement, peace-building efforts, and U.S. Embassy operations.

While criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and calling for a “major reset” in U.S. policy toward Israel, Jeffries said the amendment was not the appropriate way to achieve those goals.

“In addition, the so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations in the region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel,” Jeffries’s letter to his colleagues stated.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) made reference to Massie, who lost his primary election to a President Donald Trump-backed candidate in May.

“Very proud of my @HouseGOP colleagues,” Fine posted on X after the vote.

“Today we unanimously repudiated our soon-departing Jew-hating colleague, making clear that standing with our greatest ally is core to America’s interests.”

Fine continued, “It takes a lot of effort to eradicate the green shoots of Jew Hatred that want to infect our party the way they have Democrats. Folks in Washington are learning I won’t allow it.”

Netanyahu said he wants Israel to phase out its reliance on U.S. military aid over the next decade, saying the country has grown strong enough economically and militarily to become more self-sufficient.

Israel currently receives about $3.8 billion annually under a 10-year, $38 billion U.S. assistance agreement that expires in 2028. Netanyahu said ending the financial component of military assistance would reflect Israel’s increasing independence while preserving a close strategic partnership with the United States.

At the same time, Democrats in the US Senate have blocked debate on an annual defense policy bill, objecting not only to President Trump’s war on Iran but also to provisions that would more closely integrate the United States and Israeli militaries.

The motion to proceed failed 50-46, well short of the 60 needed, with votes on strict party lines, and Thune flipping to "no" procedurally to preserve a revote

The NDAA process is where the integration fight lives: Massie is fighting the House version's Section 219, which he says would begin "co-mingling our military supply chains and technology with Israel's"

Reuters reports that the version of the Bill before the Senate has also triggered backlash over measures that would deepen US military and intelligence ties with Israel.

One key provision would require the Pentagon to appoint an official to coordinate between the US and Israel on defence technology.

That would include joint weapons research, production and the integration of each country’s technologies into the other’s military systems.

The provision also controversially calls for “data fusion”, which Human Rights Watch defined in June as combining feeds from multiple sensors and intelligence sources into a single targeting picture.

The group said the arrangement could see the US absorb Israeli intelligence that may have been collected through what it described as problematic mass surveillance programmes.

A separate measure in the 2027 Intelligence Authorization Act, which is usually considered alongside the NDAA, would expand intelligence sharing with Israel.

Democrats framed the block around the war: Schumer said Republicans want the NDAA passed "as though none of this is happening," and Murphy called it flatly "an authorization for the Iran war, a war that nobody in this country wants."

Senate Democrats’ efforts reflect a broader shift within the Democratic Party, where support for Israel has cratered ahead of the November midterm elections. Israel’s favourability rating among Democrats dropped from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May, according to a June Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/16/2026 - 12:45

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