How Does Ripple Mark XRP? Brad Garlinghouse Counts the Ways
Brad Garlinghouse, chief XRP promo-man and CEO of “technology company” Ripple Labs, made an unexpected appearance on a Twitter Spaces hosted by Mario Nawfal on Sunday, November 13 – just as the full extent of Sam Bankman Fried’s empire of lies was becoming understood. It was supposed to be a constructive discussion about what the […]
An Operational Update From the Blind Spot
Dear Subscribers, You are what makes the Blind Spot work. We value you immensely. With that in mind, I want to keep you abreast of recent developments and update you on our operational status. Back in February 2022, when I started the Blind Spot, I knew the biggest challenge for an independent operator would be […]
Why Tech Armageddon Leads to Expanding Profit Margins
In case you didn’t know (and I didn’t) – US profit margins have been expanding sharply ever since Covid. Some central bankers, like Fed vice chair Brainard, have suggested this could be having a meaningful impact on inflation, meaning a narrowing in margins should do the opposite. The widening has cooled off a bit recently, […]
How ASX Became the Biggest “Disproof of Concept” in the History of Fintech
I Dreamed a Dream of Instant Settlement We’d all agree that if I bought a pen from you for £10 in a verbal or electronic agreement and an hour later insisted on only paying you £9 because the market had moved lower – this would make me an incredible douchebag. The problem from the seller’s […]
Spotlight on the Mother of all Structural Short-Covering Rallies
What do ETFs, create-to-lend, dark shorts and fails-to-deliver have to do with this week’s mega short covering rally? Potentially everything, or nothing.
The Decline and Fall of the FTX Empire
Some of the smartest bitcoin maxis joined Junseth (orange man) and me (token female) on the Blind Spot podcast last night to discuss the fallout from the SBF FTX collapse. We covered all the major conspiracy theories, including some of the more obscure ones involving Solana coin and Jump Trading. The show featured American Hodl […]
Leaked Lunch with James Aitken
In the latest Leaked Lunch podcast, I am joined by James Aitken, one of the UK’s top experts on financial liquidity and plumbing and the man behind Aitken Advisors — a boutique research advisory that works with some of the world’s most sophisticated investors. James developed his deep understanding of collateral and repo markets at […]
Twitter and the privatisation of the memes of production
For a long time, I’ve viewed the internet data-driven economy as analogous to the communistic Gosplan system under the Soviet Union. I recently applied that thinking in a Twitter thread to Elon’s restructuring of Twitter. I compared his move to charge $8 for verification to a perestroika moment for the social media platform. I’d like to […]
Tom Hayes responds to Matt Levine’s Libor take
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has been thinking this week about the decision by a New York court to drop charges against Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader, who had served more than five years in prison in the UK for Libor manipulation. According to Levine, the defence was a pretty weird one. It rested […]
In the Blind Spot (Robotaxis, Amazon, BoE)
Techno Hubris: Driverless cars may be “the hardest technical problem of our time”, says Doug Field, who left Apple Car to become Ford’s technology head in the FT, as Ford admits self-driving cars are proving impossible to scale at a profit. In 2015, when everyone in the car industry was predicting that driverless autonomy would […]