This week's main blog discussions include ...
Building on Friday’s blog, everyone is asking whether the house of crypto is falling apart like a house of cards. People are saying that Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and faller at FTX, was running a Ponzi scheme. What is the definition of a Ponzi scheme?
You cannot have money without government … the question is: what government?
It amazes me how many people misread, half-read or assume things based on what you say. There were two instances in the last week. The first:
My energy bills have shot up, like most peoples, so I rang the energy firm. I was greeted by you are 193rd in the queue. This didn’t sound good. After two and a half hours the phone was picked up. My bill doesn’t seem right, have you taken a reading? I asked. No, but the…
FinTech began in the 2000’s and was fuelled by new technologies – cloud computing and the smartphone in particular – alongside the failing of traditional finance when the financial crisis hit in 2008. Now that we enter a global recession, FinTech has a new challenge: dealing with no investors in a time when they need…
When a start-up shuts down before it has started
I was intrigued by the news of Glorifi, an anti-woke FinTech start-up that closed before it had really opened. The company, which missed multiple launch deadlines and had its CEO step down due to misconduct, is citing “reputational attacks” and “the failing economy” Rolling Stone, November 2022 The firm was pro-Republican, pro-America, pro-freedom and pro-capitalism,…
In this week's main news headlines, it's all about the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency gorilla that is now bankrupt. If you are interested, the New York Times made their interview with Sam Bankman-Fried accessible for free, along with other featured speakers at the Dealbook Summit.
Sam Bankman-Fried spoke about the collapse of FTX. In his first live interview since FTX filed for bankruptcy, the former C.E.O. of the cryptocurrency exchange repeatedly said he had not known the extent of its financial troubles and had not knowingly committed fraud or commingled funds. Bankman-Fried blamed the collapse on a “massive failure of oversight and said he was “deeply sorry for what happened.” Read the full transcript, and watch the video here.
Janet Yellen called the FTX collapse a “Lehman moment.” The treasury secretary said that even before the debacle, it was clear that the cryptocurrency industry did not have adequate regulation. Watch the video here.
Larry Fink said most crypto start-ups would fail. The BlackRock chief executive, who has long been a skeptic of crypto, placed part of the blame for the FTX failure on the venture capitalists who funded it with little due diligence, a model he said should change. Watch the video here.
Mark Zuckerberg discussed the Metaverse and the Apple app store. The chief executive of Meta responded to criticism over his large investment in the Metaverse, saying that it would pan out in the long term and that augmented reality and virtual reality technology accounted for about 20 percent of Meta’s investment. Zuckerberg also said that the marketplace dominance of the Apple app store was “not good.” Watch the video here.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
