Veteran Wall Street investor Jordi Visser warns via X that market-moving headlines about tariffs are masking a deeper secular turn—one that, in his view, is already accelerating the re-pricing of every long-duration asset and handing Bitcoin an historic tail-wind.
Visser, whose three-decade résumé spans trading desks from Salomon Brothers to the $25 billion multi-strategy fund he now helps steer, opened his thread with a provocation: “Everyone’s talking about tariffs. But what if I told you they’re just noise—and the real economic shift is already underway?”
The ‘Quiet Rise’ Of Bitcoin
The investor’s argument begins with the composition of the US economy. “Most people still believe tariffs will trigger a recession. But the US is a service-based economy—$14-plus trillion in services versus $2.3 trillion in goods. Jobs in goods production? Flat since 1965, despite 150 million more people,” he wrote. In other words, Visser contends, the traditional tariff-recession playbook fails to capture where modern economic sensitivity actually resides.
Instead, he points overseas, singling out the recent volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. “The real canary in the coal mine? The Taiwan dollar. It just made its fastest move in decades. This signals a massive shift: Asia may be unwinding $2.5 trillion in dollar reserves. The era of dollar privilege is ending.” For Visser, that prospective draw-down in foreign-held Treasuries is not an abstract worry but a mechanical source of upward pressure on interest rates. “Losing reserve currency status = rising interest rates. Why? No more artificial demand for Treasuries. Rates are rising despite Fed cuts,” he noted.
Higher borrowing costs, he argues, land hardest on assets whose cash-flow realisation lies furthest in the future. Artificial-intelligence breakthroughs compound the challenge, making it harder for long-duration business models to justify lofty multiples while simultaneously accelerating competitive disruption. “Any asset priced based on a valuation on the hope of the future is now hurt by rising rates and exponential AI,” Visser said, adding that venture capital, private equity and large-cap tech—“once winners in a low-rate world—are now vulnerable.”
Against that backdrop, Bitcoin emerges as the surprise beneficiary. Visser highlighted “19 straight days of ETF inflows,” growing institutional allocations and even “state-level reserves forming” as evidence that the digital asset is maturing into a macro-hedging instrument just as the legacy rate regime pivots. He summarised the divergence bluntly: “While the legacy system shakes, Bitcoin is surging… Yet nobody’s watching. That’s your signal.”
The thread’s final message fuses the two technological vectors Visser believes matter most right now. “AI is scaling faster than Moore’s Law. Bitcoin is quietly becoming a global reserve asset. And the financial system is being rebuilt in real time. Stop looking at 1900s tariffs—start looking at what’s next.”
Visser stops short of forecasting a specific price for Bitcoin or a target level for US yields, but his framework implies that a world of structurally higher real rates and rapidly advancing AI capabilities tilts the risk–reward balance toward scarce, non-sovereign collateral.
At press time, BTC traded at $104,718.