Future

I woke up and, as usual, checked the banking app for any updates or changes. There was a payment received.  Quite a major payment. It came from BIG NUTS ASS*. BIG NUTS ASS*? Who is BIG NUTS ASS*? I have no idea. I rang the bank. That took a long time. Due to coronavirus, we…

UPFRONT STATEMENT: I have crypto, but treat it as an experiment I attended an event in 2016 where Elon Musk was the star speaker. It was a good event, and he made sense. He doesn’t make sense anymore. Back then, I wondered if he was the 21st century’s real-life Tony Stark creating life on Mars…

I’m starting to worry about FinTech as they seem to have fallen foul of regulatory compliance and, as a consequence, customer trust. The biggest challenge for a challenger is to keep customer trust AND regulatory compliance. This is what we are seeing having consequences today. The fact I’m starting to worry about FinTech, as an…

Investment banking, Corporate banking, Commercial banking, Private banking and Retail banking are all very different. Too often, commentators just talk about ‘banking’. It’s not all the same. In fact, an awful lot of retail banking is propped up by investment and commercial banking. That’s where the money is made. Banks don’t make money out of…

I am taken aback by the rise of ETH, BTC, DOGE and other currencies. What’s going on? Well, some of it is related to hype, notably Elon Musk; some to loss of confidence in fiat currencies, as governments failed during the crisis; some is related to the fact that banks are now jumping on the…

I don’t know how your life has changed in the last year, but I realised how much mine had when I woke up this morning and thought must go and buy dog food. A year ago, I didn’t have a dog and my first thought would have been I must get to the airport to…

The climate activists of Extinction Rebellion expanded recently into a Money Rebellion, as I blogged about last Friday. Targetting the banks that pollute the planet – specifically Barclays and HSBC in the UK – they will hold a range of protests today, gluing themselves with locks to the entrance to bank branches and disrupting the…

I wrote two years ago about the BS that Blackrock talk about the climate. I mentioned this issue again in my update on the Money Rebellion last week and what really makes me angry is that  financial firms like Blackrock sign up to global agreements to protect the environment, and create a load of PR…

Money Rebellion I’m finding the world a bit surreal – is it just me? Locked down for a year; totalitarian states; governments attacking people; governments killing people; black lives matter; wars rising; tensions rising; demonstrations on the streets; no concerts, entertainment or hospitality … the list goes on. Meantime, there are basic issues that still…

I found this article from The Asia Times interesting. It discusses the idea that China is trying to displace the US dollar as a reserve currency. Difficult. The US dollar represents over 60 percent of all currency reserves around the world. For more, check Wikipedia The euro is 20 percent and yuan/renminbi doesn’t even register. But…