21st Financial @21st_Financial

If your advisor holds even one piece of the key to your Bitcoin, the SEC's new proposal says your advisor is holding your Bitcoin. The SEC proposed the rules on October 1st. They cover how SEC-registered advisers could hold client crypto. Under the proposal, an adviser could hold the keys itself only if no qualified custodian will take the asset. Cost isn't a good enough reason. When an adviser does hold them, at least two people at the firm would have to sign off on every transfer, and one of them has to be in management. Each client's coins would sit at their own addresses, never pooled with anyone else's. It's a proposal, not a rule yet. Public comments are due December 7th. Try asking your advisor where the keys to your Bitcoin are right now.

Washington borrowed about $63,000 a second this past year. Treasury's final numbers for the 2026 budget year, which ended September 30th: $5.40T came in and $7.40T went out. That's a $1.99T deficit, in a year with no war and no recession. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that makes it the biggest deficit in U.S. history outside of one. You'd guess tax money dried up. It didn't. Revenue rose $169B from the year before. Spending rose $386B. The election is in 12 days. Whoever wins, I think savers end up covering this the same way they did after World War II: with savings that earn less than prices rise.

October's 'As of the 21st' is out. After World War II, savers quietly paid for nearly 40% of the drop in America's debt, an IMF study found. This month's letter covers why I think it's happening again, Strategy's vote on daily dividends, and Strive's $630M preferred. The full letter is below on various platforms. On Substack: 21stfinancial.substack.com/p/as-of-the-21… On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pulse/21st-oct… On X: x.com/AndrysCharlie/… Accounts I manage hold positions in securities mentioned in the letter.

Charlie Andrys | 21st Financial @AndrysCharlie

a day ago

After World War II, savers quietly paid for nearly 40% of the drop in America's debt, an IMF study found. October's 'As of the 21st' covers why I think it's happening again. x.com/i/article/2112…

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No matter who wins in two weeks, I don't think either party pays this debt down. History says savers do. After World War II, America's debt shrank fast compared to the size of the economy. An IMF study published in July found that nearly 40% of that drop came from savers. Banks were pushed to hold government bonds that paid less than the going rate, and that works like a hidden tax on everyone with savings. The study covers 17 countries going back to 1920, and it finds this hidden tax has been growing again since the 2008 financial crisis. I think the same playbook is running now. If your savings earn less than inflation, you're helping pay the bill whether you voted for it or not.

Sources for the October 20th update: __________ Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, September 2026: bls.gov/news.release/c…

Consumer prices were 3.7% higher in September than a year earlier, the BLS reported October 14th, up from 3.4% in August. Gasoline alone was up 34.2%. Core CPI, which leaves out food and energy, rose 2.6%. Educational content. Not investment advice.

I don't think it matters who you vote for in two weeks. In my view, neither party gets us out of this debt. By the Treasury's own count, Congress has raised, extended, or redefined the debt limit 78 times since 1960, 49 of them under Republican presidents and 29 under Democratic ones. That count doesn't include the 2023 or 2025 actions: the limit was suspended under Biden and raised $5T under Trump. Total debt hit $40.39T on October 16th. The limit Congress set in 2025 is $41.1T. I think the real issue is fiat currency. Fix the incentives of the broken system, and everything else falls into place.

Government regulation and micromanagement of the economy go against the forces of nature. France's public spending equals 57% of its GDP, more than every EU country but one. Last year French governments at every level spent €771 billion on payouts like pensions, health care, unemployment, and family aid, plus €65 billion in interest on their debt. Public investment, everything from roads and schools to military equipment, came to €132 billion. Payouts and interest were more than six times that. The debt reached about €3.6 trillion by the end of June, and the government projects €91 billion in interest next year. On Saturday, French authorities counted more than half a million marchers. You can't really shift the budget anyway, because the incentives are misaligned. Payouts win votes now, and fiat currency lets governments borrow the difference and push the cost into the future. To me, the root problem is fiat currency. No fiat currency has ever succeeded. It is a failed experiment. I think the U.S. is headed down the same path, and I think savers end up paying for it through a weaker currency.

Mark Moss @1MarkMoss

3 days ago

Around the world the protests are said to be triggered by “higher prices and less access to services”, and while those symptoms are real, the cause is hidden from the uneducated masses. A look at this chart reveals the root cause: The State Anything the state touches gets more

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Last Friday we put Bitcoin in the @21st_Financial logo. The middle bar is orange now because there's Bitcoin in how I think about money, and client accounts I manage have Bitcoin exposure. The money supply is the reason. M2 was $8.3T in January 2009, the month of Bitcoin's first block. This August it was $23.3T, about 2.8x. Bitcoin's limit was just under 21M on day one and it still is. I was involved in traditional finance and obsessed with markets for years before I discovered Bitcoin in 2022, so I know both industries in and out and how they're going to connect. I talk to advisors who've done this for forty years, and most of them can't tell me why Bitcoin belongs in the conversation at all. It's also fallen more than 70% before and it can again. Every plan I build has to survive a drop like that, not predict it.

On January 3rd, 2009, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of Bitcoin. Inside it, they left the front-page headline from that morning's Times of London: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." Since then, we've watched more bailouts, more debt, and more money created by a small group of people making decisions for the entire world. New money reaches assets first, so stocks, real estate, and businesses climb in price, and the people who already own them get richer. Wage earners fall further behind as the same inflation pushes up their groceries, rent, and every other bill. We believe that widening gap is behind so many of the problems families face today. Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million. Nobody can print more of it, and anyone can use it, regardless of race, religion, or beliefs. We believe that can be a force for positive change in a world that feels less certain every year. That's why the middle bar in our logo is now orange. It's our commitment to build plans for everyday families around money nobody can print. Bitcoin has fallen more than 70% before, and it can again, so we plan for the drops too. Client accounts we manage have Bitcoin exposure. Educational content. Not investment advice. 21st Financial LLC is a state-registered investment advisor in North Dakota.

Sources: bls.gov/schedule/news_… bls.gov/news.release/c…

September's CPI comes out Wednesday, October 14th, at 8:30 AM Eastern. In the August report, prices were up 3.4% over 12 months and energy was up 16.3%. Educational content. Not investment advice. 21st Financial LLC is a state-registered investment advisor in North Dakota.

I highly doubt either party fixes Social Security before it has to. The last big fix came in 1983, when estimates said the retirement fund could run out of money as early as that August. The trustees' 2026 report has that fund, which pays retirement and survivor benefits, running out in late 2032. After that, the taxes coming in cover about 78% of scheduled benefits at first, and less later, unless Congress changes the law. On a $2,000 monthly check, that's $1,560, or $5,280 less a year. The 1983 fix raised the full retirement age to 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later. People born in 1960 were 22 or 23 when it passed, and the first people the higher age touched didn't turn 62 until 2000. If a retirement plan only works at 100% of the estimate, I'd want to know that now.

Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926. It follows a group of expats drinking their way from the cafés of Paris to the fiesta in Pamplona. One of them, Mike Campbell, is a Scot engaged to Brett Ashley, and he's broke. When Bill Gorton asked him how he went bankrupt, Mike didn't blame one bad night. ⠀ "Two ways," Mike said. ⠀ "Gradually and then suddenly." ⠀ Washington has been on Mike's kind of bender for decades. It hasn't balanced a budget since 2001, and the tab grows every year. The consensus always says there's no crisis, right up until it's obvious and everyone swears they saw it coming. I believe we're living through the gradually part right now. ⠀ Washington pays about $36,000 in interest every second. That's $3.15B a day. From October through August it came to $1.05T, more than it spent on Medicare ($976B) or the military ($833B). ⠀ Not one dollar of it builds a road, pays a soldier, or covers a doctor's visit. It's the bill for money already spent. ⠀ That bill gets paid whoever wins. ⠀ Shrink it to a household and it sounds a lot like Mike. A family earns about $48,000, spends about $68,000 and puts the other $20,000 on a credit card. More than $10,000 of that spending is interest on old debt. Add eight zeros and that's Washington. To break even, it would need a 40% raise or have to cut a third of everything else it buys. Social Security, Medicare and interest already take more than half the budget. I highly doubt either party will take that pain. ⠀ So the bill gets paid another way. You feel it at the checkout counter long before anyone calls it a crisis. As of August, $100 buys what about $77 bought in January 2020. ⠀ I believe almost every voter issue traces back to that broken money. When people can't save in their own currency, they pile into assets just to keep up. A house stops being a place to live and becomes a savings account. That's how you get the sixth vacation rental nobody lives in. New money lifts the people who already own assets first, and the family that just needs a home gets priced out. ⠀ The rich get richer and everyone else gets a smaller slice, thanks to fiat. By mid-2026, the top 1% held 50.9% of the stocks and mutual funds American households own, up from 42.7% in 1989. ⠀ That's why Bitcoin matters to me. I don't want to work for what another man can print. Its supply is capped at 21 million, and no government can issue more to cover a deficit. That rule says nothing about its price. Bitcoin has fallen more than 70% before, and it can again. ⠀ You can't control Washington. But you can control what you spend, what you owe, what you save and what you own. ⠀ In the two minutes it took you to read this, Washington paid about $4.4M in interest. ⠀ That's what gradually looks like. ⠀ Suddenly doesn't send a warning. ⠀ Educational content. Not investment advice. 21st Financial LLC is a state-registered investment adviser in North Dakota.

Sources for the October 2nd update: __________ U.S. Treasury daily par yield curve, September 2026: home.treasury.gov/resource-cente… 20-year yield history, FRED: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS20

The 20-year Treasury yield closed at 5.68% on September 30th, its highest close since June 2002. Educational content. Not investment advice. 21st Financial LLC is a state-registered investment adviser in North Dakota.

I think the 60/40 broke in 2020, and it's still broken. End of 2019 through August: M2 money supply +52.1%, prices +30.4%, the S&P U.S. Aggregate Bond Index +7.4%. After inflation, the real return on bonds is −17.6%. Bonds pay you back in dollars. The dollars are the problem.

The 10-year Treasury is near 5.3% today, a level it hasn't closed at since May 2002, and the 20-year and 30-year are both above 5.6%. These numbers scare me. I think the bond market is saying it needs a higher interest rate for the risk of lending to the government for decades. Mortgage rates usually move with the 10-year. Freddie Mac's 30-year average was 7.03% last week. On a $400,000 loan that's about $2,669 a month in principal and interest, against about $1,612 at the record low of 2.65% in January 2021. The market isn't pricing in more inflation than it was on September 1st. The 10-year breakeven rate, a market gauge of expected inflation, was 2.35% then and 2.35% yesterday. All of the rise since then came in the real yield, the rate on inflation-protected Treasuries above inflation, and on the 10-year it reached 2.91% yesterday, the highest since 2008. I think the Fed is part of it. It raised rates on September 16th for the first time since 2023. The extra pay lenders want for tying money up for 10 years has climbed too, and a Fed Board staff model put it at 1.02% last Friday, the highest since 2010 and about double a year ago. That part looks like trust to me, and I don't expect the borrowing to slow.

Bitcoin doesn't pay a dividend. Some companies that own Bitcoin issue shares that do. Strategy has a range of preferred shares: STRF, STRC, STRK and STRD. Strive has SATA. They come with different dividend rules and rights, so the rate alone tells you very little about whether one fits your plan. A stated dividend rate isn't your total return. Share-price losses can outweigh the income. Accounts I manage hold positions in securities mentioned here. Dividends require board approval. These preferred shares aren't secured by the companies' Bitcoin. Educational content. Not investment advice. 21st Financial LLC is a state-registered investment adviser in North Dakota.