What Lyn Alden, Jordi Visser, and Darius Dale agree on about the next 12 months

Three macro analysts your sharpest friends are probably quoting right now: Lyn Alden, Jordi Visser, and Darius Dale.

Most coverage frames them as taking different sides of the 2026 setup. Alden is the fiscal-dominance analyst, the one who's been making the case for years that the current monetary system has structural problems we haven't priced in. Visser is the AI-and-crypto bull, now narrowed in on the physical infrastructure layer of the AI buildout. Dale is the institutional risk manager who called for a turbulent start to 2026 and is now resoundingly bullish through at least the midterms.

The framing oversimplifies what they're actually doing.

You need to read what they're publishing in May 2026, not the headlines, to understand how their frameworks converge on three things while splitting on a fourth.

Here's where they line up, where they split, and the wildcards that could blow up any of the three frameworks.

Who are Lyn Alden, Jordi Visser, and Darius Dale

A quick introduction, if you don't already know who they are.

Lyn Alden founded Lyn Alden Investment Strategy in 2016. She came to macro from electrical engineering, which shows up in how she models things: liquidity, fiscal flows, and energy systems all quantitatively and then translates them into plain English. She publishes a free macro newsletter every six to eight weeks, runs a premium service that institutional investors pay for, and wrote Broken Money, a widely-cited 2023 book on monetary history. The book is a diagnostic project more than a prescription: she walks through what every monetary system in history optimized for and broke at, and argues that the current fiat system has compounding structural problems built into it. That makes her an unusual figure in macro. She's making a systems argument, not an ideological one, which is why she's heavily cited in the Bitcoin community even though she's not a Bitcoin maximalist.

Jordi Visser spent 30+ years on Wall Street, starting at Morgan Stanley, trading emerging-market derivatives, and later running the firm's São Paulo office. He joined Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers in 2005 to build out the macro side, became CIO in 2009, and President in 2015. Weiss filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024 after previously managing several billion dollars in assets, a context worth knowing but not the main story. Visser then founded Visser-Labs, an AI- and digital-assets consultancy, and now leads AI Macro Nexus Research at 22V. What separates Visser from the other two is that he's more willing than Alden or Dale to treat AI, stablecoins, and tokenization as primary macro variables rather than side stories.

Darius Dale is the founder and CEO of 42 Macro, which he started after twelve years on Wall Street, most recently as Managing Director and Partner at Hedgeye Risk Management. 42 Macro says it advises clients representing more than $25 trillion in assets, and Dale's face is everywhere in financial media — Bloomberg, Fox Business, BNN, Forward Guidance, and Macro Voices. Dale's work is distinguished from a typical sell-side strategist's because of explicit, systematic risk-management models with defined rules for changing his mind. Most macro writing is opinion, whereas Dale's framework is a process.

What Alden, Visser, and Dale say about the Fed in 2026

Roughly five months ago, the Fed stopped contracting its balance sheet and started buying Treasury bills again. The end of quantitative tightening was December 1, 2025. Reserve-management purchases began 12 days later at $40 billion per month. Fed officials are careful to say this is plumbing — maintaining ample reserves and short-term funding-market control, not the stimulus-style money-printing of 2008 and 2020. The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee specifically says the purchases "do not significantly affect longer-maturity yields." That framing matters to the Fed because they don't want this called QE. For markets, the distinction is technical. Balance sheets are growing again, unlike six months ago.

Alden calls the new regime the "gradual print" in her February 2026 newsletter. The arithmetic she laid out: the FOMC estimate puts 2026 balance-sheet expansion at roughly $220 billion, with higher run-rate scenarios pushing that to $290 billion or $375 billion. Modest by crisis-QE standards, but the absolute dollar amount is still significant. Alden's March 2026 newsletter puts the size in context: about a 3% to 6% gain relative to the $6.5 trillion starting size, versus QE1's 140%. The framing word "gradual" is doing real work.

Dale describes the same shift through different machinery and reaches a similar conclusion. In his May 2026 Macro Scouting Report, he calls the Fed's new balance-sheet regime effectively QE-like, and frames the bigger story as "regime change at the Fed" — with the new chair as the wildcard worth watching. He's been arguing since early May that the monetary policy cycle has transitioned from a headwind to a tailwind for risk assets, which underpins his current resoundingly bullish near-term stance.

Visser, in his piece on May 6, 2026, barely bothers with monetary policy as a separate variable. His framing brings fiscal, monetary, and AI Capex into the same story. The Fed's balance-sheet expansion is the plumbing required to keep the larger machine running. Whether it's "really" QE misses the point. The point is that liquidity is growing instead of shrinking.

The Fed's move from balance-sheet contraction to balance-sheet growth deserves more attention than it is getting.

Why all three call this a fiscal dominance regime, not a phase

Fiscal dominance sounds like jargon, but it isn't. The condition arises when government debt and deficits become large enough that the central bank can no longer set policy without taking them into account. Once the Fed has to think about how much pain the Treasury can absorb at 4% versus 5% rates, monetary policy stops being independent. Period.

Alden has been making this argument for years and the evidence keeps catching up to her. Her core claim: as the US enters a prolonged period of large fiscal deficits accompanied by a gradually expanding Fed balance sheet to support financial sector liquidity, it serves as a catalyst for emerging market equities to take another sizable leg upward. The portfolio implication is her "three-pillar" allocation — profitable equities, commodities, hard money, and cash equivalents. A traditional 60/40 (sixty percent stocks, forty percent bonds) underweights the commodities pillar and assumes disinflationary conditions. Fiscal dominance undermines both assumptions simultaneously.

Dale lands in the same place through different machinery. His Paradigm model labels policy regimes. Paradigm A was Biden-era excessive government spending producing a K-shaped economy — economist shorthand for a recovery where the top half pulls away from the bottom half rather than rising together. Paradigm B was the feared scenario of tariffs and fiscal austerity. Paradigm C is "Paradigm A plus tax cuts, deregulation, and strategic reshoring". Fiscal largesse continues; the beneficiary mix changes. Dale has publicly described himself as resoundingly bullish on risk assets under his Paradigm C framework, with the setup lasting at least through the November 2026 midterms, possibly longer if the Republicans hold the House. His framing of the regime: "fiscal dominance is here to stay amid demands for populism and increased defense and border spending from Main Street amid demands for debt-financed tax cuts and deregulation".

Visser folds the politics in. His May 6, 2026, piece treats AI Capex itself as the new dominant fiscal-style driver: "The software era taught investors to follow margin capture. The AI era will teach investors to follow capital expenditure. The previous winners made money by using code to compress costs and attack incumbents. The next winners may make money because everyone else must spend capital to survive." Add the federal spending programs — the infrastructure bill, CHIPS Act, IRA, One Big Beautiful Bill — and the result is an economy that runs hot at the top no matter who holds the White House.

The shared diagnosis is uncomfortable. Deficits aren't going down. Debt service costs aren't going down. The politics of meaningfully cutting either is very difficult, regardless of which party is in power. The regime persists, so you build for the regime.

Most macro media still treat fiscal dominance as a question to debate. All three of these writers treat it as the operating environment.

How Alden, Visser, and Dale disagree on the AI capex cycle

Another interesting part of reading the three of them together is what they say about AI. The disagreement is sharp and mostly about time horizon, a framing that financial media usually misses.

Convergence first. AI infrastructure spending has become one of the dominant drivers of U.S. equity performance and market concentration. Goldman Sachs Global Institute's "Tracking Trillions" report estimates roughly $7.6 trillion of cumulative AI capex between 2026 and 2031 across compute, data centers, and power, with annual spending growing from $765 billion in 2026 to $1.6 trillion in 2031. Those are baseline estimates, not forecasts, and extremely sensitive to assumptions about chip obsolescence and data-center construction costs. But even with that caveat, the direction is clear. Alden flagged AI in her December 2025 Kitco interview as one of two engines holding up a "split economy" — fiscal transfers and artificial intelligence investment, with everything else weaker. Visser writes about AI constantly. Dale's "Jobless Recovery" theme from his April 2026 webcast frames it without softening: "the true promise of AI is not mere productivity enhancement for existing workers; it's more profits because of fewer workers." Goldman Sachs + 3

They split on the time horizon.

Visser is the near-term and the long-term bull. His May 6, 2026, piece, "Your CapEx Is My Opportunity," argues that benchmark indexes are now structurally underweight the physical inputs needed to scale AI, including power and electrical infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, chemicals, optical connectivity, semiconductor equipment, etc., and the fragmented industrial supply chains are now sitting directly in the path of the AI spending wave. That's a sharper thesis than his November 2025 work, which was more broadly bullish on risk assets. His May framing is specific: the AI bull case is the layer the indexes haven't repriced yet. "It may take years for the benchmarks to fully reflect the new AI economy." Substack

Dale is A near-term bull and long-term bear. As of his May 2026 work, he's bullish on risk assets through at least November 2026, with the Paradigm C theme intact through the midterms and possibly longer. But his May Macro Scouting Report also laid out the secular bear case after the AI capex bubble peaks, with three specific drivers: capital misallocation as companies build aggressively to meet optimistic ROIC expectations — return on invested capital — and accelerating depreciation schedules, post-IPO lockup selling pressure, and a deteriorating geopolitical and domestic political order that includes wealth taxes, states nullifying federal AI legislation, and rising anxiety regarding employment. Read that last clause again. Dale isn't predicting AI will fail. His bear case is what he thinks happens when AI succeeds — when the technology works well enough to make widespread employment a political crisis. The bull-then-bear sequencing is the entire point. Dale isn't telling you to be cautious now. He's telling you to be bullish through the cycle and have explicit triggers for when the regime changes. LinkedIn

Alden sits between them. She's spent less of her writing on AI Capex specifically and more on the liquidity environment surrounding it. Her March 2026 newsletter took the Iran war as a real-time test of whether the gradual print thesis would hold up, and concluded, for now, that nothing in the pre-war economic data was a high-probability catalyst for the Fed to print a ton of money in 2026. The AI capex story shows up in her analysis as a backdrop, not the lead. Her three-pillar portfolio framework is constructed to survive either the Visser physical-infrastructure bull case or the Dale eventual-secular-bear case without dramatic rebalancing. The framework doesn't need to be right about AI capex specifically because it doesn't depend on a particular AI outcome.

Visser thinks the AI cycle works for years, with the physical-infrastructure layer specifically mispriced. Dale thinks the bull cycle runs through at least the midterms, then the unwind becomes the dominant story. Alden's framework neither requires nor rejects either view.

How the Alden, Visser, and Dale frameworks point to different portfolios

The three of them split most cleanly on portfolio construction.

Visser's framing is the most aggressive on risk assets, with a recently specific tilt toward AI physical infrastructure and crypto. He's been explicit: Bitcoin is a high-beta risk asset, not digital gold, and its outlook is tied to the broader risk-asset outlook. He bought Ethereum publicly on May 11, 2026, citing AI agent payments and the rise of tokenized assets for price discovery. His portfolio framing as of May 2026 includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, gold, and silver, with the equity exposure increasingly tilted toward the physical inputs to the AI buildout rather than the software incumbents. Substack

Alden owns Bitcoin too. She reads it through a different frame. For her, Bitcoin is a hard-money allocation, a hedge against the regime of sustained fiscal expansion and gradual currency debasement. The correlation to risk assets matters less than the long-term setup. Her framework recommends greater commodity and producer exposure than a traditional macro allocation, because she's positioning for a dollar that gradually loses purchasing power against real things over the years. Bitcoin is her expression of digital scarcity within that broader hard-money framework. Gold, silver, energy producers, and emerging-market equities are the others.

Dale's public framework is the most explicitly tactical and risk-managed of the three. The early-2026 call was for a turbulent start to the year, with a high risk of short-term market correction, before transitioning to monetary policy supporting risk assets. That turbulence call was resolved by early May, when Dale shifted to the resoundingly bullish stance he currently holds. Paradigm C remains his base case through at least November 2026. The systematic risk-management approach means he publishes explicit triggers for changing his mind. The other two don't. BitcoinEthereumNews.com

The synthesis reads cleanly: all three are constructive on risk assets near-term. The disagreement is about what happens after. Visser sees the AI infrastructure trade running for years. Dale sees the bull cycle running through the midterms with an explicit plan to flip when his triggers fire. Alden has built a portfolio that doesn't require either view to be right.

What's still uncertain in the 2026 macro setup

Three wildcards genuinely matter across all three frameworks.

The first is Iran. Alden's March 2026 newsletter walked through whether the war and the Strait of Hormuz disruption could push the Fed past its gradual path. Before the strikes, roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption flowed through the Strait. Since the February 28 U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, transit has been severely restricted, though Iran has allowed some Chinese-linked vessels through under new protocols. Alden's read at the time of publication: the situation matters only if the energy shock produces a recession catalyst large enough to force the Fed off the gradual print. As of her last update, no. The answer can change.

Second wildcard: the new Fed chair. Kevin Warsh was confirmed by the Senate on May 13, 2026, and takes over on May 14. He's on record favoring a smaller balance sheet, which would contradict the gradual print thesis if he could move policy on his own. He can't. The chairman is powerful, but he's only one of 12 votes on the Federal Open Market Committee, so he doesn't set policy unilaterally. The Fed also has levers beyond direct balance-sheet decisions — such as bank regulation — to maintain liquidity, even with a more hawkish chair. Alden treats this as a real but manageable risk. Dale treats it as evidence of accelerating regime change at the Fed. Both are watching the same variable. Whether Warsh can persuade the other voting members will tell you which read was right. Lyn Alden

Third wildcard: AI capex itself. The Goldman estimates assume continued buildout at the current pace, which is running at a scale that makes mistakes likely — capital misallocation, infrastructure overbuilding, depreciation surprises. Dale's secular bear case requires the bubble to eventually peak. Visser's case requires it to keep working. Anyone telling you they know which one happens first, or when, is selling you certainty they don't actually have.

Why reading all three Alden, Visser, and Dale matters

The reason this synthesis is worthwhile: when writers framed as opposites in macro media converge on the same operating regime, there is something worth considering. Alden, Visser, and Dale come from different analytical traditions. They write to different audiences. Their temperaments are nothing alike. Their portfolios reflect different risk tolerances. Their frameworks still point to the same regime, the same dominant equity driver, and the same direction the Fed has quietly turned. As of May 2026, all three are also constructive on the near-term setup.

The system is being held together by fiscal spending and AI Capex. Both work until they don't. The writers who understand this best are also the ones who refuse to tell you exactly when the break comes — though Dale's framework, alone of the three, includes explicit triggers for recognizing the break when it starts. That's a different kind of discipline than predicting.

What most people should focus on is building a portfolio that survives both the version where nothing breaks for years and the version where everything breaks next quarter. That's a different question than the one most macro coverage is trying to answer.

Lyn Alden writes at lynalden.com, most recently in her March 2026 newsletter. Jordi Visser publishes at visserlabs.substack.com, most recently on May 6, 2026. Darius Dale's firm 42 Macro publishes at 42macro.com, with extensive free coverage of his core frameworks across Bloomberg, Fox Business, BNN, Macro Voices, Forward Guidance, and LinkedIn. His most recent Macro Voices appearance was in early May 2026.