Raoul Pal, the CEO of Real Vision and one of crypto’s most prominent macro voices, said that he believes recessions are no longer structurally possible.

“I don’t think recessions are possible anymore,” Pal said on Forward Guidance. “We’d have a huge slowdown, but they don’t allow that to happen.”

Prediction market bettors disagree. Polymarket’s U.S. recession contract is trading at 36% for a downturn by year-end, up from a low of 21% in January. Mounting concerns over private credit and the ongoing war in Iran have driven this steady climb.

Why Pal Says It Can’t Happen

His argument centers on what he calls the post-2008 playbook. Central banks discovered that injecting liquidity raises collateral values, and they will never allow that process to reverse. If the S&P 500 falls by more than 25%, liquidity returns. The cost, Pal says, is roughly 8% annual currency debasement — “a put option we all pay for the system not to implode.”

Pal acknowledged that oil is the biggest threat to his framework. He said $100 crude creates inflationary headwinds, but $150 a barrel would be “the end of the cycle.” WTI is trading around $98 today after Iran rejected direct peace talks with the U.S., and Brent is above $110.

The Escape Valve

Rather than the Fed balance sheet, Pal expects the banking system to provide the next round of liquidity. He pointed to proposed changes to the Supplementary Leverage Ratio (ESLR) that would let banks buy Treasuries without capital constraints, effectively rerunning the late-1990s Greenspan playbook where banks levered up and productivity kept inflation low.

“They’ve told you what they’re going to do,” Pal said. He compared the approach to Japan’s recent shift toward steeper yield curves and bank lending after 30 years of stagnation.

The Crypto Angle

Pal also argued the total addressable market for crypto is “wildly wrong” by “orders of magnitude” because AI agents will need sub-cent payment rails, run treasuries across multiple chains, and use DeFi protocols for capital allocation.

“The TAM of everything has gone to infinity,” he said.

Agents executing microtransactions on Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), and other networks would dwarf any previous crypto adoption thesis.

Photo: Bukhta Yurii from Shutterstock