Key Takeaways:
Arthur Hayes of Maelstrom targets bitcoin at $125,000 by year-end, citing wartime spending and rising bank lending. The Enhanced Supplemental Leverage Ratio, live April 1, could generate $1.3 trillion in new loans per S&P Global. Hayes says artificial intelligence (AI) job losses created a credit deflationary event, but U.S. defense spending of $1.5 trillion offsets the drag. Arthur Hayes at Bitcoin Vegas 2026: BitMEX Co-Founder Flips Bullish on Bitcoin as U.S.-Iran War Shifts Credit Narrative“Front entries are tending toward the back end, which says that, yeah, sh**’s fu**ed up, but it’s not super-duper fu**ed up, so I can ignore it and continue thinking about other things,” Hayes remarked.
He described AI as the “new subprime,” arguing that knowledge workers who hold high-salary jobs supported by commercial bank loans represent a multi-hundred-billion-dollar credit exposure that has not been priced into bank balance sheets. “I want to fire all of my human accountants and lawyers,” Hayes told the Vegas crowd. He added:
“I can’t wait for Claude to take over. And that is going to have a very bad impact on anyone who has loans out to these folks who earn very, very good salaries.”
“Warsh is not going to get into a fight with Bessent,” Hayes said. “At the end of the day, we’ve issued $38 trillion of debt, and you need to fund the government. The Federal Reserve will do what it’s asked to do, which is make sure the market is orderly so that people can buy this debt.”
“He could get up and tell people that he has engineered a smaller Fed balance sheet,” Hayes said of Warsh. “But in reality, for us as investors, all we care about is the net effect, and the net effect is nothing.”
S&P Global estimates the change will produce $1.3 trillion in new lending. Hayes applied a banking multiplier of roughly three times to project approximately $4 trillion in total credit creation, a figure he argues exceeds the credit destruction caused by AI job losses.
“The great thing about bank lending is it has a higher multiplier than central bank lending, about three times,” Hayes explained. The BitMEX co-founder added:
