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The main blog headlines are … How the world has changed with technology I was introduced to a lunch meeting by the Chairman of the Bank. As he made the introduction, he gave a personal account of how technology had changed the world during his lifetime. This is not his speech, but my version of…

I was introduced to a lunch meeting by the Chairman of the Bank. As he made the introduction, he gave a personal account of how technology had changed the world during his lifetime. This is not his speech, but my version of his speech. I trust you like it. So, I grew up in a…

I recently blogged about JP Morgan Chase spending $10 billion a year on technology of which $3 billion goes into new projects. There were then several other announcements that caught my attention about Citibank and Bank of America investing similar amounts in digital. The question it prompted is: why are you spending $3,000,000,000 on new…

I sometimes find it hard to deal with our world of money these days. Everyone keeps asking should I buy bitcoin and my answer is always it’s your choice. I don’t believe in bitcoin, but I’m not one of those doom mongers who say it’s going to die. It won’t die. It’s pout there in…

I was reading The Guardian’s John Quiggin’s article yesterday, about banking being geared towards the 1% and a major crash being needed to fix it. John Quiggin is an economist at the University of Queensland and the thrust of his article is that “financialised capitalism has failed, and cannot be fixed by more and better…

There’s been an interesting but hidden trend taking place. It started in China with Tencent and Alipay and has now gone global. The phenomenon is called QR codes. QR, or Quick Response if you prefer the longer form, is a code that originated in Japan in the 1990s, and has gradually grown from a system…

The main blog headlines this week are … Every $1 in $50 in the banks is laundered money (and maybe more) I’ve made the comment many times that it is astounding that around $2 trillion is laundered through the banks of the world each year, up from $1.6 trillion in 2009. It’s about 2.7% of global…

I wasn’t going to post this blog but the more it sits in my head, the more I felt I had to write it. Like everyone I expect, I was really shocked by the Genoa Morandi bridge collapse that killed 43 people this month. The idea of driving happily along a major road and then…

I got into an argument after a presentation where I said that active fund management is dead. It wasn’t the best thing to say in front of a group of active fund managers, but I can’t help myself. It’s my background in dealing with program trading in the 1990s; then algorithmic trading in the 2000s;…

I just caught a clip from the BBC about Decentraland, a virtual world where you can buy plots of land and next year become part of a virtual world. This world will be owned by its community, has no central authority, is completely decentralised and will flourish in the net. So far it’s users to…