This week’s main blogs include … Venezuela replaces national currency with bitcoin In a fascinating move Venezuela, which has been a basket-case economy ever since Hugo Chavez died in 2013, has dropped their national currency (the bolivar) and any ties to the US dollar, and decided to link their national currency to bitcoin instead. This…
This week’s main blogs include … How China’s FinTech is changing everything I joined a Clubhouse discussion the other day – Clubhouse? What? – and discussed Chinese FinTech and its impact on the rest of the world. I really enjoyed the conversation and it was nice that my friend Sophie Guibaud summarised it afterwards. I…
The main blogs of this week were: WTF is an NFT? Watching the mainstream news show the other day, it finished with an item about NFTs, non-fungible tokens. It’s not the sort of thing that I would have expected most pensioners sitting having their night-time cup of cocoa watching the news would expect to see…
This week’s main blog notes include … Do we have a work-life balance anymore? What is work-life balance these days? I accidentally on purpose started an interesting debate on LinkedIn. It began because someone posted on LinkedIn how proud they were of celebrating their sixteenth wedding anniversary, with photos of their wedding from 1995, and tagging a…
This week’s main blog notes include … Banks waste billions on digital How much money is wasted by banks on digital? I wonder whether, one day, anyone will work out how much money has been wasted by banks on digital technologies. Various reports reckon that banks spend anything from half a trillion dollars a year…
The main blog discussions this week include … CBDCs, the Digital Euro and how it might work I’m very aware that central banks are investigating the use of digital currencies, particularly as they can now see bitcoin gaining more and more traction (Tesla, Square and more committed – next is Apple?), but had not realised…
The main blog discussions this week include … Singapore-on-the-Thames? Welcome to the new London … [Kalifa Review] In the midst of Brexit plans and a Covid pandemic, the UK Government launched a FinTech review chaired by Ron Kalifa. I’ve met Ron at a few conferences, when he was CEO and then Chairman of WorldPay and…
The main blog discussions this week include … The youngsters bucking up the stock markets (that’s bucking with a ‘b’) I was pretty surprised to find that many of Robinhood’s account holders are very young, with an average age of 31. It is probably why they pile into anti-Wall Street stock movements and they are…
The main blog discussions this week include … Breaking the stranglehold of banking Someone asked me to elaborate on the links between banks, government, the economy and society, and this was well illustrated by the video I shared the other day of James Pierpont Morgan, who founded the JPMorgan empire (see end of this blog…
