Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO

Episode metadata and show notes for “Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO” (All-In Podcast, ~2h06m) show that in the latter part of the same episode, David Sacks joins Jason and then speaks through multiple dedicated segments:

• At 1:37:34, “David Sacks joins Jason to break down the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile,” explicitly focusing on the Bitcoin/crypto reserve policy.
• At 1:48:30, “Sacks addresses clearing all of his crypto-related positions prior to Inauguration Day.”
• At 1:57:23, they continue with “Importance of disclosures and updates on a market structure bill,” still with Sacks participating.

These segments are all in the second half of the episode (after ~1h37m in a ~2h+ show) and involve Sacks commenting at length on exactly the crypto reserve announcement and related topics. This matches Jason’s prediction that Sacks would appear in the second half and “have much to say” about those issues.

Evidence of these segments and timestamps appears consistently across multiple episode listings and summaries for this specific show, all naming David Sacks and the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve / Digital Asset Stockpile discussion in the later part of the same episode. (iheart.com)

Available evidence shows that discussion of replacing the U.S. income‑tax system with a consumption‑tax system (e.g., national sales tax, VAT‑style proposals) remained a recurring but niche theme in 2025, not a clearly more prominent or central topic than in the years immediately before.

Baseline (before 2025):

• In early 2023, the FairTax Act of 2023 (H.R. 25) to replace federal income, payroll, estate, and gift taxes with a national sales tax drew high‑level political fire: President Biden publicly attacked it as a national sales tax that would raise middle‑class costs, and Senate Democrats introduced a resolution condemning it, both widely covered in mainstream outlets. (congress.gov)
• Media and policy analysis in 2023–24 already framed FairTax and related national sales‑tax ideas as significant Republican proposals, with fact‑checking and think‑tank pieces explaining their mechanics and distributional effects. (fairtax.org)
• By 2024, Project 2025 was being heavily covered as a far‑right blueprint, explicitly highlighting its long‑term goal of replacing income and corporate taxes with a national consumption tax (national sales tax, VAT‑type options, flat consumption tax). Major outlets like the Guardian, Forbes, and advocacy groups dissected these consumption‑tax elements as a key part of the plan. (forbes.com)

This means that before 2025 there was already visible, national‑level political and media debate about moving from income to consumption taxation.

During 2025:

• The main enacted tax legislation in 2025—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025—extends and tweaks income‑tax provisions (extending 2017 individual rate cuts, altering SALT caps, creating deductions for overtime, tips, etc.) but does not implement or seriously advance a federal consumption tax. The structure of federal revenue remains income‑tax‑centric. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Project 2025’s consumption‑tax vision continues to be discussed in 2025 analysis pieces (e.g., Forbes Advisor; Center for American Progress), emphasizing that the blueprint envisions eventually moving from an income tax to a consumption tax and modeling how such a shift would affect middle‑class vs. wealthy households. But these are largely continuations of the 2024 debate over Project 2025, not a qualitative step‑change in salience. (forbes.com)
• Congress has ongoing background work and CRS material on consumption taxes and the reintroduced FairTax‑style bill, but these remain at the level of "one option for fundamental tax reform" and "an alternative model" under consideration, with no major new legislative push in 2025 comparable to, say, the 2023 FairTax Act media moment. (congress.gov)

Putting this together:

• The topic exists in 2025 and continues to be discussed, especially in the context of Project 2025 and academic/CRS analyses.
• However, the visibility and intensity of discussion were already high in 2023–24, with presidential speeches, Senate resolutions, and substantial media coverage centered on FairTax and national‑sales‑tax proposals. 2025 coverage largely extends those conversations rather than showing a clearly noticeable increase or making the shift to consumption taxation one of the dominant economic/political topics of the year (especially relative to tariffs, income‑tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, inflation, etc.).

Because the prediction specifically claimed we would "hear about it a lot more this year" and that the shift from income to consumption taxation would become a prominent topic in 2025 U.S. debate, and the evidence instead shows continued but not clearly elevated or central discussion, the prediction is best judged as wrong, not merely undecidable.

The prediction is explicitly about what will become clear over the coming GPU cycle, with a time horizon of “by roughly 2030” for whether CoreWeave’s economics work out given the assumed ~10‑year useful life of its Nvidia GPUs versus a shorter ~5‑year life. As of the current date (November 30, 2025), only about 8–9 months have passed since the podcast on March 8, 2025, and we are still several years away from 2030. There is not yet enough elapsed time or publicly available evidence to determine definitively whether CoreWeave has become a “killer business” or is “deeply underwater” due to GPU useful-life assumptions in its debt models. Therefore, the prediction’s correctness cannot yet be evaluated and remains too early to call.

The prediction was framed over a 1–2 year horizon from March 2025 (i.e., roughly until March 2027), so as of November 30, 2025 the full timeframe has not elapsed.

Evidence so far is mixed:

• Hyperscalers are indeed massively expanding and bundling AI capacity. AWS and Google Cloud have rolled out successive generations of custom AI chips (Trainium / Inferentia, TPU v5e/v5p, v6 Trillium, v7 Ironwood) and large-scale GPU clusters, explicitly marketed as cheaper, integrated options for AI training and inference. (michaelbommarito.com)
• GPU compute prices are already under downward pressure. Analyses of H100 rental markets in 2025 report a substantial increase in supply and intense competition, including a ~44% AWS price cut on H100 instances and broad price reductions across many clouds, with H100 rental rates drifting down across the market. (intuitionlabs.ai)
• However, demand for specialized GPU clouds like CoreWeave has not “significantly reduced” so far; it remains very strong. CoreWeave has continued rapid expansion in 2025: it signed an ~US$12B, five‑year cloud deal with OpenAI, grew to 32 data centers with ~250,000 GPUs, became the first to offer Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (and later Blackwell Ultra) in the cloud, and completed a large IPO despite leverage and governance concerns. (en.wikipedia.org) Analyst commentary in mid‑2025 still highlights strong projected revenue growth into 2026–27 rather than collapsing demand. (barrons.com)
• Other “neo‑cloud” GPU providers also show robust demand. For example, Nebius (another specialized AI cloud) reported several‑hundred‑percent revenue growth in 2025 and signed multi‑billion‑dollar, multi‑year infrastructure deals with major customers including Meta and Microsoft, noting demand was strong enough that one deal had to be capped by available capacity. (reuters.com)

So far, the observable market aligns with the pricing‑pressure part of the thesis (falling GPU rental prices as capacity ramps), and with hyperscalers increasingly bundling AI compute into their platforms. But the “significantly reduced demand for third‑party GPU clouds” component has not materialized yet; if anything, those providers are still rapidly scaling and signing large contracts. Because the prediction’s endpoint is still ~16 months away and current data do not decisively confirm or refute a future demand drop by 2027, the outcome must be judged inconclusive (too early) rather than clearly right or wrong at this time.

Chamath’s prediction is explicitly about a “secular shift” that will play out “over the coming election cycles” in the late 2020s, i.e., well beyond November 2025, so by definition the full forecast horizon has not elapsed. In the short period since the March 2025 podcast, there are some signs in the direction he describes: Trump’s second-term economic agenda has prioritized sweeping protectionist tariffs that contributed to the April 2025 stock market crash, while Trump publicly downplayed near-term market performance, arguing the U.S. cannot operate on a quarter‑to‑quarter perspective. (en.wikipedia.org) There is also rhetoric from Trump‑aligned institutions about crafting “worker‑focused” AI and industrial policies, suggesting at least a messaging shift toward workers and “Main Street.” (washingtonpost.com)

At the same time, core Republican/MAGA economic proposals continue to include extending and expanding the 2017 corporate and high‑income tax cuts, a traditionally Wall Street–friendly priority, and independent analyses argue that Trump’s tariff program in practice raises costs for working‑ and middle‑class households rather than clearly privileging them. (en.wikipedia.org) Because the prediction concerns a durable realignment “over the coming election cycles” into the late 2020s, and we have observed only the first year of a single term with mixed evidence, it is too early to determine whether Republican/MAGA strategists will sustainably de‑emphasize support for Wall Street and the stock market in the way Chamath envisioned. Hence the outcome is currently inconclusive, not yet demonstrably right or wrong.

Key elements of Chamath’s scenario did not play out as described during the roughly nine‑month window after early 2025.

1. Trump administration did trigger a tariff‑driven market break, but it was brief. After Trump’s January 20, 2025 inauguration, his second administration rolled out sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs in late March/early April. This caused the April 2–10, 2025 stock market crash, with the S&P 500 dropping about 10% in two days and global equities shedding trillions in value, explicitly linked to Trump’s tariffs. (en.wikipedia.org) That satisfies the policy that cracks equity markets part of the premise.

2. There was a short‑lived flight to safety that pushed 10‑year yields briefly into his target band, but not in a sustained way. In the panic immediately after the tariff announcement, investors fled to Treasuries and the 10‑year yield fell into the high‑3% range (lows around 3.86–3.95%) for a few days in early April. (en.wikipedia.org) However, yields quickly snapped back: by mid‑April they were around 4.4–4.6%, and subsequent 10‑year auctions in April and July cleared at roughly 4.36–4.44%, not at 3–4%. (cnbc.com) There was no nine‑month window of persistently 3–4% 10‑year yields that Treasury could lean on.

3. The U.S. did not refinance anything close to $10 trillion at 3–4%, and interest costs are rising, not yielding “trillions” in savings. Analyses of the Treasury’s funding needs indicate about $3.1 trillion of debt maturing in 2025, not $10 trillion in the nine months after early 2025, and that refinancing has generally occurred at yields in the mid‑4% range, not locked‑in near 3%. (panewslab.com) Meanwhile, the national debt continued to climb—from around $37 trillion in August 2025 to $38 trillion by October—and interest payments are now over $1 trillion per year and projected around $14 trillion over the next decade, with rating agencies warning about worsening debt affordability. (apnews.com) This is the opposite of a clearly observable multi‑trillion interest‑saving windfall.

4. Consumption did not collapse; it was front‑loaded and then slowed modestly. Retail data show a surge in March 2025 as households accelerated purchases ahead of tariffs, followed by a much weaker but still positive April (+0.1% m/m), with core retail sales slightly down—but industry groups and Census‑based summaries repeatedly describe consumer spending as “steady” and “resilient,” not sharply depressed. (tradingeconomics.com) Later in 2025, retail sales growth cools and sentiment deteriorates, but September retail sales are still rising year‑on‑year and GDP growth remains solid, consistent with a gradual squeeze rather than a deliberate, deep consumption shock. (reuters.com)

5. Inflation eased slightly, but tariffs are seen as adding upward pressure, not as a “deflationary tactic.” By April 2025, PCE inflation had fallen to about 2.1% year‑over‑year from 2.6% at end‑2024, part of an ongoing disinflation trend that began before Trump’s new tariffs. (federalreserve.gov) Federal Reserve and Treasury reports explicitly warn that the new import tariffs are likely to raise goods prices and have already contributed to an upturn in core goods inflation. (federalreserve.gov) By late 2025, CPI inflation is running around 3%, still above the Fed’s 2% target, with tariffs cited as one of the drivers of elevated prices. (theguardian.com) This does not match a “materially reduced inflation via equity‑market rebasing” story.

Taken together: while Trump’s tariff shock did crack equity markets and briefly pull 10‑year yields into the high‑3% range, the core claims—that this would sustainably depress consumption and inflation and allow roughly $10 trillion of debt to be refinanced at 3–4% yields, saving “trillions” in interest—have not occurred and are contradicted by observed borrowing costs, debt dynamics, inflation behavior, and spending data. Therefore this prediction is wrong.

Evidence to date lines up closely with Friedberg’s forecast on both the debt‑refinancing and stock‑market‑tolerance components.

1. Context: Trump 2.0 and Bessent in key roles. Donald Trump began his second, non‑consecutive term as president on January 20, 2025, and Scott Bessent was confirmed as Treasury secretary later that month, matching Friedberg’s assumption that “Bessent and others” would hold key economic posts in a new Trump administration. (en.wikipedia.org)

2. Massive near‑term refinancing need (~$10–11T). Treasury’s Office of Debt Management reported in mid‑2025 that about 31.4% of the roughly $36 trillion federal debt would mature within the following 12 months, meaning about $11 trillion in U.S. debt securities must be refinanced—almost exactly the “$10 trillion coming due in the next 12 months” Friedberg referenced. (foxbusiness.com) This refinancing window overlaps the 12‑month period he was talking about (roughly March 2025–March 2026).

3. Administration actively trying to push rates down around that refinancing. Early in the term, Bessent said the Trump administration’s focus was on keeping longer‑term Treasury yields (especially the 10‑year) low, rather than directly browbeating the Fed, and confirmed that “the president wants lower rates,” aiming to get borrowing costs down via deregulation, spending cuts, and energy policy. (cnbc.com) As the year progressed and the refinancing wave loomed, Trump repeatedly demanded deep Fed cuts, arguing publicly that the policy rate was at least 3 percentage points too high and that each percentage point was costing the government roughly $360 billion per year in refinancing costs—explicitly tying his push for lower rates to the cost of rolling the debt. (reuters.com) Bessent later stated that the Fed’s rate was “significantly higher than necessary” and called for a series of cuts totaling about 150–175 basis points, while also emphasizing that rising tariff revenues should be used to reduce debt and that rate cuts would ease pressure on rate‑sensitive sectors. (upi.com) Together with Treasury’s own acknowledgment that roughly $11T must be refinanced over a one‑year horizon, this amounts to exactly the sort of strategy Friedberg described: using political and policy pressure to push interest rates down during a huge refinancing window.

4. More willingness than in term one to tolerate stock‑market weakness. In his first term, Trump frequently treated record stock prices as a core metric of success and regularly highlighted market gains. (en.wikipedia.org) In 2025, by contrast, he pressed ahead with his sweeping "Liberation Day" tariff program even as it triggered the largest U.S. stock‑market crash since the pandemic and the worst first‑100‑days market performance for any president since Gerald Ford, with the S&P 500 down over 7% and trillions in equity value temporarily wiped out. (en.wikipedia.org) Investment research notes from March 2025 observed that markets were starting to question the old “Trump put,” explicitly commenting that the new administration appeared willing to tolerate a “temporary disturbance” in economic activity and equity prices to pursue its policy agenda. (ubs.com) During sell‑offs, Trump himself said that while he didn’t want stocks down, “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” and he openly acknowledged the risk of a recession, signaling acceptance of short‑term market and economic pain. (reddit.com) This behavior is widely described by market commentators as a shift from his first term, when he was more visibly reactive to market declines.

5. Linking both elements together. Commentary on the 2025 crash and tariff shock notes that some investors even speculated Trump might be willing to endure market turmoil in order to force or justify easier monetary policy, though he denied doing it "on purpose." (reuters.com) At the same time, reputable financial and policy outlets tied Trump’s and Bessent’s aggressive calls for lower rates directly to the government’s need to refinance an ~$11 trillion debt wall and reduce exploding interest costs. (foxbusiness.com) This is closely aligned with Friedberg’s thesis that Trump 2.0 would be more willing than before to look past short‑term stock‑market "rumblings" in order to get rates down and refinance the debt on more favorable terms.

Given the documented combination of (a) an explicit, sustained push from Trump and Bessent to lower interest rates precisely as a massive ~$10–11T refinancing wave hits, and (b) a noticeably greater tolerance for equity‑market drawdowns compared with his first term, Friedberg’s prediction has, by late 2025—well within his 12‑month horizon—substantially come true.

The prediction’s own timeline runs “in the next couple of years” from March 8, 2025 (roughly out to 2027–2028), so as of November 30, 2025, we are far from the end of the forecast window. It is therefore too early to say definitively whether it will prove right or wrong.

Evidence so far is mixed and mostly against the idea that NATO is broadly seen as “not necessary”:

• US and NATO elites are doubling down on the alliance, not deemphasizing it. The 2024 Washington NATO summit and the 2025 The Hague summit reaffirmed NATO as central to Euro‑Atlantic security and produced a high‑profile pledge to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, framed explicitly as a response to enduring Russian and other threats, with an “ironclad” commitment to Article 5. (en.wikipedia.org) Senior US and NATO figures (e.g., Nancy Pelosi, Secretary‑General Mark Rutte) publicly stress that the US “needs NATO too” and that this is “not the time to go it alone,” describing NATO as irreplaceable for collective security. (politico.com)

• US public opinion still broadly sees NATO as beneficial and necessary. An April 2025 Pew survey finds 60% of Americans view NATO favorably and 66% say the US benefits from membership, with particularly strong support among Democrats. (pewresearch.org) A May–June 2025 Chicago Council/Ipsos poll reports that 74% of Americans favor maintaining or increasing the US commitment to NATO and 57% say NATO makes the US safer. (globalaffairs.org) A large YouGov survey likewise finds about 71% of Americans support NATO and 66% back its expansion. (today.yougov.com)

• There is, however, a notable segment moving in the direction Friedberg describes. Pew and Chicago Council data show Republican and especially conservative‑Republican skepticism about NATO has grown: only about half of Republicans say the US benefits from membership, and rising shares say the US does not benefit, while figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk have openly floated reducing or even ending US participation. (en.wikipedia.org) That’s a real elite‑and‑base shift, but it is still counterbalanced by strong overall support and increased alliance investment.

Given that (a) the prediction horizon runs to ~2028 and (b) current evidence shows strong but increasingly polarized support rather than a broad consensus that NATO is “less necessary,” the correct assessment as of late 2025 is that it is too early to determine whether the prediction will ultimately be right or wrong.

The podcast was released 8 March 2025, so 'in the next few weeks' / 'by early April 2025' implies a new FIT21-style digital asset market structure bill would be formally introduced in the House by roughly the first half of April.

In reality, Rep. French Hill and other House leaders released only a discussion draft of a digital asset market structure bill on 5 May 2025, which is already later than early April and was not a formally introduced bill. (jdsupra.com) The actual new FIT21-style market structure bill, H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, was formally introduced by Chairman French Hill on 29 May 2025 as a comprehensive digital asset market structure framework that builds on and refines FIT21. (congress.gov)

Because Hill did introduce a new FIT21-style market structure bill, but not within 'the next few weeks' or by early April 2025 (it came about eleven weeks later), the prediction as normalized — which is explicitly time-bound — did not come true and is therefore classified as wrong.

Legislation piece (successor to FIT21): partly realized, but not yet law.

• The House’s Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (H.R. 3633), explicitly described by press and law firms as a successor building on the prior FIT21 market‑structure effort, was introduced May 29, 2025 and passed the House on July 17, 2025. It is now sitting in the Senate Banking Committee and has not become law as of Nov. 30, 2025.
  • Congress.gov shows H.R. 3633 passed the House (294–134) and was then “Received in the Senate and read twice and referred” on Sept. 18, 2025, with no further action yet. (congress.gov)
• Substantively, the CLARITY Act does contain the kind of disclosure regime Sacks described:
  • It adds a new Securities Act §4B that requires digital commodity issuers relying on an offering exemption to file offering statements with detailed issuer information, business operations, financial condition, distribution plans, and development plans for the blockchain system – effectively covering issuance mechanics. (congress.gov)
  • Later sections and committee materials describe "transaction reporting and beneficial ownership disclosure obligations" for digital commodity related persons and affiliated persons (i.e., founders, executives and other insiders) and impose limits and reporting on their token sales, which tracks the idea of insider token‑holding disclosure. (congress.gov)
  • Earlier FIT21 committee reports (which CLARITY builds on) also spelled out enhanced disclosures specific to digital assets, including the launch and supply process, governance regime, development plan, and material risks of the token – again, issuance mechanics in substance. (congress.gov)
• So on the content dimension, Sacks’s claim that the next market‑structure bill after FIT21 would bake in these disclosure concepts is accurate; on the enactment dimension, that bill exists but has not yet cleared the Senate or been signed, so we cannot say the legislative prediction is fully realized.

SEC framework piece: still in development, not yet established.

• The SEC created a Crypto Task Force in January 2025 to develop a comprehensive framework, and under new Chair Paul Atkins it launched “Project Crypto” in July 2025 to modernize securities rules for digital assets. These initiatives explicitly aim to craft “clear and simple rules of the road for crypto asset distributions, custody, and trading,” including tailored disclosures and safe harbors. (sec.gov)
• However, the SEC’s own regulatory agenda released in September 2025 lists “Crypto Assets” and “Crypto Market Structure Amendments” only at the proposed rule stage with target dates in 2026; market commentary notes that Project Crypto is in Phase 1 and final rules are expected around 2026, not yet adopted. (jdsupra.com)
• Recent speeches by Atkins outline a conceptual token taxonomy and intentions to offer purpose‑built disclosure regimes for ICOs, airdrops, and network rewards, but these remain policy blueprints and draft initiatives rather than completed, binding frameworks. (sec.gov)

Net assessment:

• Sacks predicted (a) that the next FIT21‑style market‑structure legislation would contain robust disclosure terms (including insider and issuance‑mechanics style disclosures), and (b) that the SEC would, in parallel, create its own disclosure/market‑structure frameworks after its rule review.
• As of Nov. 30, 2025: (a) is substantively borne out in the House‑passed CLARITY Act, but that bill is not yet law; (b) is clearly underway via the Crypto Task Force and Project Crypto, but the SEC has not yet finalized the promised frameworks in rule form.

Because the core SEC rulemaking is still in progress and the key market‑structure statute has not yet been enacted, the prediction cannot yet be judged clearly right or wrong. The most accurate rating as of today is "inconclusive (too early)."