The S&P 500 dropped 8% over six weeks after the Iran war began. Oil risk, shipping lanes, escalation. The threat to global stability appeared obvious. Within weeks the market had recovered, and now stocks are making new highs almost every day.
Matthew Sigel, portfolio manager of the VanEck Onchain Economy ETF (NODE) believes a large investment cycle is underway in the United States. De-globalization and artificial intelligence are driving enormous amounts of capital into energy, infrastructure, semiconductors, and data centers, creating enough economic momentum to outweigh the drag from regional conflict.
That explanation fits what markets are signaling. Earnings remain strong. Investment continues. The United States also enters this period differently than it would have twenty years ago. The country is now a major energy producer, making oil shocks less economically damaging than they once were. Capital from weaker economies continues flowing into the United States because the alternatives often look less attractive.
At the same time, concerns about the financial system itself have not disappeared. Sovereign debt levels across much of the developed world continue rising. The long-term erosion of fiat currency purchasing power is accepted more broadly than it was a decade ago. Books like Broken Money and The Bitcoin Standard have helped move those conversations into the mainstream investment world.
Bitcoin emerged directly from those concerns. The original idea was simple. A neutral monetary asset with a fixed supply operating outside the control of governments and central banks. Yet the market still does not treat it that way.
Sigel pointed out that Bitcoin’s correlation with the Nasdaq recently reached a five-year high . In practice, Bitcoin continues behaving much more like a technology risk asset than a reserve asset. Liquidity expands and Bitcoin rises. Liquidity contracts and Bitcoin falls. That remains true even after institutional adoption, ETFs, and growing sovereign ownership.
Sovereign activity is becoming harder to dismiss. Fourteen countries now participate in Bitcoin mining at the state level. Kazakhstan recently announced plans to add Bitcoin to its foreign exchange reserves . The Czech National Bank is exploring the idea as well.
Governments generally move slowly around reserve assets and monetary systems. Even limited adoption changes the conversation around Bitcoin because reserve assets derive value partly from collective belief. Gold functions that way. Treasury bonds function that way. Reserve status becomes self-reinforcing once institutions begin treating an asset as strategically important.
A clip from the interview:
The broader crypto ecosystem still contains enormous speculation. Many companies, tokens, and business models surrounding Bitcoin will likely disappear over time. Financial history tends to work that way during periods of rapid innovation. Railroads, automobiles, and the internet all produced waves of excess investment before stronger businesses eventually emerged.
The system still looks strong. Capital continues flowing into US markets. At the same time, long-term questions around debt, currencies, and monetary stability remain unresolved.
Successful investing increasingly depends on sorting through enormous amounts of information, distinguishing temporary narratives from structural shifts, and identifying the investments positioned to benefit from those changes. That combination is rare. It is also where experienced investors can still create enormous value.
The full interview:
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