Bryan Paris

Trade War & Market Cycle Thesis: Is this the end? This article is will reference the Trump Trade Wars of 2018 - 2020 and Alt impact see in chart below. In mid and late 2018 we had Trump’s tariff announcements and launch of tariffs on China (though that was along side a rate hike environment and spaced out over time. You can see that tariffs led to the actual bear market bottom in December 2018. The launch point of tariffs is a bearish event, but also a catalyst to the bottom. The Fed pausing of rate hikes in January 2019 and China's RRR kicked off the early part of the bull run (which we already experienced this cycle) From July to October 2018, we got 3 rate cuts, BUT the trade war escalated, which outpaced the cuts. Big note there—despite the rate cuts, the trade war getting worse caused a major downtrend until the Phase 1 Agreement, (1st green bar). The Trade War officially ended in early January 2020. The moment that agreement was signed we started ripping and the exponential part of the bull began. On QE: From Jan 2019 to April 2020, China started QE, but it didn’t really impact markets until the the war itself ended. BOTH the U.S. and China kicked off major QE in September 2019 with the U.S. injecting stealth liquidity via the reverse repo. This is EXACTLY when the biggest part of the bull run started. COVID was just a random crash before the market resumed its super up-only trajectory. WIthout covid wed have just gone up sooner. And covid brought more money printer anyway. My take: Looking at historical evidence... The trade war takes precedence over QE for downside. QE is just a tool to keep things afloat while the real driver in the next year will be (resolution of) the trade war. Whenever the trade war ends, all the countries involved go full throttle on stimulus. The difference this time? We’re already in a rate pause/hike scenario, while last time it took longer to play out because rate hikes and tariffs overlapped. As soon as the current trade tensions ease and agreements are signed, expect all countries involved to unleash massive QE. You can see from the chart that the combo of trade war ending + QE is ripe conditions for a giga bull scenario. Bottom line: The faster the trade war wraps up, the quicker we get QE, and the faster we take off. This time around, Trump and China know each other’s moves and will sort things out way way quicker. A bigger concern may be the E.U. and Canada's timeline. One Last Point: altcoin pullbacks have happened during bull runs when there’s dilution in a given meta. August to October 2020 saw a major altcoin pullback caused by two key simultaneous factors: - DeFi farming messed up the market with massive yields, creating inflation and dilution like issues until the bubble popped (similar to meme coin + AI cycle). - Powell signaled concerns about rate cuts. Once that noise settled, the market ripped hard. I also theorize that BTC is afloat BECAUSE its a trade war hedge now. (but im just guessing)