Grid

I’ve recently written quite a bit about the GENIUS Act, the GRANITE Act and the CLARITY Act in the United States. Well, yesterday was the crucial day as the CLARITY Act moved through the Senate or, rather, it didn’t. The USA has spent years arguing that cryptocurrency needs regulatory clarity and the Digital Asset Market…

Over the past two days, I have looked separately at two uncomfortable developments in banking. The first is that banks are moving more and more of their critical infrastructure onto a handful of global cloud platforms, while the second is that artificial intelligence is moving from helping humans make decisions towards making those decisions itself….

The last global banking crisis was driven by mortgages, leverage and institutions that all believed the same thing at the same time. The next one will be driven by machines doing exactly the same thing, except they will do it in milliseconds. For the last few years, everyone has talked about artificial intelligence (AI) as…

I’ve written a lot about the Crypto President and the friction between the Trump administration’s legislation ranging from the GENIUS Act to GRANITE to CLARITY and you really could not make this stuff up. Will Donald Trump be the Crypto President? America is creating a war with Europe over digital money Donald Trump, the President…

We spent the years after the financial crisis worrying about banks that were too big to fail. We forced them to hold more capital, more liquidity, write living wills, run stress tests and prove that governments would never again have to rescue the financial system because one enormous institution collapsed. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed outside technology…

This week’s main blog discussions include … 25 years after 9/11: An attack on America, capitalism or the world? On Tuesday, 11th September 2001, I was flying back from Nice, France, after a conference. We arrived home and switched on the television. What we saw was horrific. At 8:46 that morning in New York, 13:46…

On Tuesday, 11th September 2001, I was flying back from Nice, France, after a conference. We arrived home and switched on the television. What we saw was horrific. At 8:46 that morning in New York, 13:46 in the UK, the first aircraft crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later,…

There is a problem with the way we talk about cryptocurrency. Every time there is a major fraud, hack, Ponzi scheme or spectacular collapse involving crypto, the headlines quickly become another indictment of cryptocurrency itself: crypto is a scam; bitcoin is for criminals; digital currencies are dangerous … the whole thing should be shut down….

Three months ago, I wrote a short piece about Revolut but, since then, there has been an extraordinary amount of Revolut news: a banking licence in France; full banking status in Britain; conditional approval for a US national bank; a banking licence in Australia; banking operations in Mexico; expansion into Finland; licences in the UAE;…

There is something wonderfully contradictory about the British payments system. Almost nobody outside banking knows who Pay.UK is, and yet almost everybody in Britain depends upon it. Salaries arrive, mortgages disappear from accounts, businesses pay suppliers, consumers transfer money and billions of Direct Debits quietly do their thing every year because an enormous piece of…