Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, crypto traders alike. Some quick news just came across the wire about public pension fund and those who don't know what I'm talking about. I wouldn't blame you because pensions died at some point decades ago for the vast majority of positions, whereas they used to be a lot more widespread. But they're still around for certain roles, like telecom, like if you work for at T or if you work for. You're a, you know, certain roles still have pensions, but the regular, know, the grunt level people, the low level folks, we lost the ability to do pensions. I actually talked to a company that used to offer pensions. Up to a point, it was a waste management company used to offer pensions, and they stopped. And then I talked to another company and they still offer, but only in Dublin, Ireland, and it's a joke.
[00:00:50] This company, Pension fund, has invested in Bitcoin. It's the first time that there's been any sort of pension fund that has invested in cryptocurrency. So it's kind of a significant thing.
[00:01:03] We don't know what it means, but the reason we should call it out is because hooking into cryptocurrency, anybody that was around and watched around cryptocurrency in 20 10, 20 11, 20 12, 20 13 will know that at that time, nobody really believed bitcoin was going to do much, and there was not this strong support for it, but there were people that owned thousands of it and sold it for pennies on the dollar because they didn't know it's going to go anywhere. And these people are kicking themselves, obviously, because they would have been multimillionaires had they just held it. Then there's been people that have had thousands stuck in wallets and all these stories you hear about crypto in the early days and kind of an underestimation of its raw potential. So when you see a pension fund, which historically pension funds have struggled to maintain liquidity, they've struggled to maintain the pool of money necessary to pay out for people after they retire.
[00:02:01] And you see them finally buying into this, tHat's a huge deal, because what it potentially means is it's an opportunity for pensions to get smarter about the diversity. I talked about the diversity of the portfolio to stabilize the value that you have in there when all you're doing is so you have all these different ETFs and bonds and whatnot. If all you do is invest in the ones that are constantly tanking or constantly going up or whatnot, you have a volatility that's hard to predict, it's hard to stabilize. And when you need to pay people out, it's hard to get payments into the funds over time. Also, you want to make sure that the investments that you're buying into are going to be ones that give you a gain on your investments as a company. So it's hard to do that now because most of them have capacity. So now you're having to take risks in your portfolio to invest in kind of these young upstarts. Most people don't realize something like at Amazon years ago when all it was doing was selling books, nobody ever thought it was going to hit 3000 a share. And so most weren't smart enough to have hooked into that wagon. A lot of the pensions were already dead by the time Amazon became a thing in the first place, so they could not have hooked into that. Apple has gone up, but it's declined since Steve Jobs died.
[00:03:16] Microsoft has gone up somewhat and it's going up now. That's kind of gone full and throttle into cloud. But you still don't have that sense of the tech bubble breakout again, which I don't think you'll ever have that again. Crypto is kind of that next best thing of an opportunity to have money that's invested that gives a strong reward in return that you can use to stabilize the value of the portfolio. So to see that a pension fund has actually bought into cryptocurrency for the first time opens doors that you could feasibly have other types of crypto that they buy into to support the portfolio. Now, this is not the ETF that we're talking about. They actually bought crypto through a custody service. And then the custody service provides the liquidity by way of the crypto. So they're basically taking a risk. And I think it's a strong good risk in the sense that just bitcoin is expected to skyrocket to at least 100,000 if it hits that point. You can imagine that this could literally revitalize the pension pool of the money that they've lost over years just in the one investment. Well, imagine if they start buying into other investments like Ethereum prior to hitting ETH 20, Cardano whenever they get their act together. Salana is scheduled to hit to 1600. I don't think it'll get that high, but let's say it does. But there's a lot of opportunity. If a lot more companies would get wise to the ideas of crypto and start trusting it instead of distrusting it as they do, we could have a revitalization of pensions in the United States. And that's a good thing for everybody because today everybody's kind of banked on 401 Ks. And the problem with four hundred and one K is, number one, if your company is not doing a partial investment on your behalf, you're doing your own money. That money is money that you need to put food on your table. And so it's hard to do it. Yes, it's tax deductible, but the problem is you can't withdraw it. Most of them don't let you lend it. So it's like locked funds, locked money. That doesn't benefit anybody. Most pension plans, most, not all. Most simply ask for you to have been an employee of the company for a period of time. You're an employee of three years. You've done your three years of five years or ten years of service, whatever it is, and now your pensions after you leave, we're going to take care of you. So if you've been a cop and you went to the military, you probably have a double pension coming your way. That's huge because it helps in this time, especially now that costs are going up and it's harder to accumulate retirement funds. So we don't know if it'll go that way. I'm only throwing out what ifs, but it's a good thing, at least to start and seeing more trust in cryptocurrency. And this is something to be celebrated, even if it doesn't eventually go anywhere. At least there's awareness.
