Pages

Showing posts with label crypto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crypto. Show all posts

Friday, November 28, 2025

28: Crypto

Getting Ready to Party Like It’s 2008 Trump’s cronies are undermining financial stability ......... On Sept. 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers failed. Within weeks the whole U.S. financial system was caught in the downward spiral of a massive bank run, on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Yet there was an important difference from the 1930s bank runs: in 2008, the panic mainly resulted in flight from “shadow banks,” nonbank institutions that performed bank-like functions. Conventional banks were largely immune from the 2008 panic because deposit insurance and federal regulations – a consequence of the 1930s bank runs – protected them. .......... The clear lesson of 2008 is that effective financial regulation is essential. For three generations after the great bank runs of 1930-31, America avoided “systemic” banking crises — crises that threaten the whole financial system, as opposed to individual institutions. This era, which Yale’s Gary Gorton calls the Quiet Period, was the result of New-Deal-era protections — especially deposit insurance — and regulations that limited banks’ risk-taking. ............ But here we are in 2025, and 2008 wasn’t that long ago. Many of us still have vivid memories of the gut-wrenching panic that gripped the world when Lehman fell. Yet Donald Trump’s allies and cronies are now moving rapidly to dismantle the precautionary regulations introduced after 2008 to reduce the risk of future financial crises. I say “allies and cronies” advisedly. There’s no indication that Trump himself has any idea what’s happening on his watch. But key players in Congress, within the administration, and, alas, at the Federal Reserve, are apparently determined to make a 2008 rerun possible. ......... The Fed is supposed to be quasi-independent, and so far it has preserved its interest-rate-setting independence in the face of intense pressure by Trump to cut rates. Yet a Trumpian agenda is attempting to overtake the Fed’s bank supervision operations. In June, Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee, became the Fed’s vice-chair of supervision. She is in the process of reducing staffing at the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory unit by 30 percent, while hiring new staffers drawn from the banking industry. ...............

stablecoins are effectively an alternative, weakly regulated and poorly supervised form of banking.

........... What are stablecoins? They’re privately issued tokens supposedly fixed in value at one dollar. They are, in effect, sort of a digital version of the bank notes that circulated during America’s private banking era in the 19thcentury — an era in which gold coins were the only official U.S. currency, with paper money consisting of notes issued by private banks that promised to redeem these notes for gold or silver on demand. The most famous of these bank notes was the $10 “Dix” note issued by the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana, which may have given the South its nickname .......... Private banking had many serious problems: private banks frequently collapsed, thereby losing depositors’ money. Without effective government supervision, private banks could issue notes without the resources to honor their promise to redeem those notes on demand. Indeed, there was a proliferation of “wildcat banking” — establishing banks in remote locations “where the wildcats roamed,” thus making it difficult for noteholders to present their notes for redemption. .............. Tether has attracted the most scrutiny, in large part because it has, as The Economist puts it, become “money launderers’ dream currency.” ............. Tether isn’t a U.S. company. It’s headquartered in and overseen by El Salvador, whose authoritarian ruler Nayib Bukele is best known in financial circles for his expensive, failing attempt to force Salvadorans to use Bitcoin as currency. ............. Tether is a 21st century version of a wildcat bank, issuing tokens while deliberately making it hard for anyone to know whether it has the resources to honor them. And it’s not an outlier — it’s most of the industry. ............. Why are Trump and his allies undermining financial stability? There may be an element of free-market dogma. But as always with this administration, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of simple corruption. Tether is closely connected with the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly run by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce. On joining the government, Lutnick left his role at Cantor Fitzgerald — and handed it over to his sons. .........

Along with its many other sins, the Trump administration is doing its best to make a future financial crisis more likely.

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

The Great Subcontinent Uprising (novel)
The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

at No comments:
Labels:

Monday, March 03, 2025

3: Crypto

at No comments:
Labels:

3: Crypto

at No comments:
Labels:

Monday, May 23, 2022

News: May 23

at No comments:
Labels: ,

Thursday, January 27, 2022

January 27: Russia, Crypto

Biden Promised a Black Woman on the Supreme Court . The perception of Biden as a disappointment has been hardening among Black voters, the voters he needed to win in 2020 and the ones he would need again in 2024.

Our Tribalism Will Be the Death of Us . while a virus isn’t partisan, many Americans’ responses to this one have been emphatically so. ......... One of this tribalism’s obvious drivers is many Americans’ substitution of investment and involvement in physical communities with investment and involvement in online ones that more efficiently sort them into cliques of the rigidly like-minded.

Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal A significantly upgraded military has emerged as a key tool of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, as he flexes his might around the globe and, most ominously, on the Ukraine border. ......... It is Mr. Putin’s highest-stakes use of the military to muscle Russia back into the global relevance it lost with the ending of the Cold War. Mr. Putin laid out that doctrine in 2018, when he used his annual state-of-the-nation speech to unveil new nuclear weapons that could fly 20 times the speed of sound. ......... The T-72B3 tanks amassed on Ukraine’s border have a new thermal optics system for nighttime fighting as well as guided missiles with twice the range of other tanks ........ Kalibr cruise missiles deployed on ships and submarines in the Black Sea and Iskander-M rockets arrayed along the border can hit targets just about anywhere inside Ukraine ......... The military relies less on a dwindling number of conscripts and more on a slimmed-down, well-trained core of roughly 400,000 contract soldiers. .........

“cross-domain coercion” — blending the real or threatened use of force with diplomacy, cyberattacks and propaganda to achieve political aims.

........ For all its strides in recent years, Russia’s military retains a critical weakness of its Soviet predecessor: the civilian side of the country’s economy, nearly devoid of high-tech manufacturing and corporate investment in research and development. Army expenditures amount to a far higher percentage of the gross domestic product than in most European countries, starving other sectors.



Russia Isn’t a Dead Petrostate, and Putin Isn’t Going Anywhere . The European Union typically relies on Russia for about 40 percent of its natural gas, making it by far the continent’s largest supplier. With an estimated 127,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, Europe seems torn between responding to what would be an egregious upset of its security and safeguarding its own energy requirements. ........... Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Russia’s Rosneft are all investing large sums to increase future oil production. ...... If the world reaches its climate goals of net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Energy Agency and others predict it will still be using roughly one-quarter as much oil and one-half as much natural gas as it does today. ....... From France’s “yellow vest” protests to Kazakhstan’s recent unrest over fuel price hikes, it is increasingly clear that if climate ambition comes into tension with energy reliability or affordability or the security of energy supplies, climate ambition will lose.

How Crypto Became the New Subprime . If the stock market isn’t the economy — which it isn’t — then cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin really, really aren’t the economy. Still, crypto has become a pretty big asset class (and yielded huge capital gains to many buyers); by last fall the combined market value of cryptocurrencies had reached almost $3 trillion. ............... So crypto has become a large asset class even though nobody can clearly explain what legitimate purpose it’s for. ............ 44 percent of crypto investors are nonwhite, and 55 percent don’t have a college degree. This matches up with anecdotal evidence that crypto investing has become remarkably popular among minority groups and the working class. .......... “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers?” He then declared, “The question answers itself.” Homeownership dropped sharply once the bubble burst. ......... regulators have made the same mistake they made on subprime: They failed to protect the public against financial products nobody understood, and many vulnerable families may end up paying the price.

It’s Hard to Tell When the Crypto Bubble Will Burst, or If There Is One Crypto prices are highly volatile, as this week’s sell-off showed. But die-hard enthusiasts believe prices will keep soaring in a world where traditional notions of value don’t apply.......... Traditional financial analysis doesn’t apply here. A stock analyst, for instance, determines whether a company’s shares are expensive or cheap by assessing its business model, future prospects and leadership. But few, if any, of those metrics translate to cryptocurrency valuation. Belief alone can drive value. ........

at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)