Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and chief investment officer of Maelstrom, published on February 17 a quantitative macro framework showing that a 20% reduction in US white-collar jobs, equivalent to approximately 14 million knowledge workers out of a total working population of 164.5 million, would generate 557 billion dollars in credit losses (330 billion in consumer credit and 227 billion in mortgage losses), representing a 13% write-down of US commercial bank equity. Hayes argues that smaller regional banks, unlike the eight too big to fail institutions, lack sufficient reserves to absorb this shock, replicating at a larger scale the regional bank failures of early 2023. The Federal Reserve would wait for a visible crisis before launching a large-scale expansionary monetary policy, pushing bitcoin as the asset most sensitive to fiat liquidity toward a new all-time high, with a potential target of 1 million dollars. Upon a confirmed Fed pivot, Maelstrom plans to invest in Zcash and Hyperliquid.
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