Vanguard Back in December 2023 we covered that Vanguard was one of the few large fund managers who had not submitted a Bitcoin ETF application. I was rather supportive of their view at the time: “Even so, Vanguard are sticking to their knitting and not pretending to know what they don’t know. In my estimation

Big Beautiful Bill Our investment thesis was and remains that governments will spend money they don’t have at an accelerating rate. Demographics, and therefore politics, point to this. The monetisation of huge state debts is really a universal basic income of sorts. We will continue to pay for everything with money we don’t have. Accordingly,

Abundance The best example of abundance I can find for you this week is this https://chat.minimax.io/, a new Chinese AI model that you haven’t heard of. Minimax is free and works slightly differently from other models, largely because US export restrictions on chips mean it has to. This one is sixteen small models behaving like

Gilded Age All eyes on Italy where inheritance flows have leapt to 20% of GDP.  Good for the beneficiaries perhaps but the overall picture is a bleak one. The population is ageing fast. More than that, it also shows a very low level of growth.  A very wealthy society would ordinarily experience large inheritance transfers

The Australian Way These stats from the UK are normally a good leading indicator. “Money numbers” from the Inland Revenue about what has been paid in payroll tax. Overall it’s a very sharp drop in employment and trending sharply down. One of the major causes has been an increase in what is known as Employers

Not friends That got ugly quickly. Elon actually believed he could cut government spending. He was given carte blanche by his former bestie to do so. He failed.  That is the thing about Elon Musk, he is actually prepared to fail. One of his rockets fell out of the sky too this week, because that

HKMA The stablecoin race gathered a little pace this week. The United States regulatory bill is making its way through the Senate but rather more interesting is the action on the other side of the world. Hong Kong actually passed stablecoin legislation, establishing a licensing regime for fiat-backed stablecoins. It wouldn’t matter so much but

KYC Before we throw eggs at Coinbase for their KYC debacle, let’s take a look closer to home. Right across the board then, public to private, data is stolen all the time. Indeed, there are identity factories in Asia that will sell you any and all the KYC you could wish to buy on pretty

A slow climb The slow price climb continues. I’ve written about the scale of the psychological barrier that is $100k before. Back in February “it will take time” Then we had this in December. It’s now May. We are still where we were. We can make all sorts of excuses about global trade wars and

Aye You Free stuff! I was particularly drawn to Labor’s contribution to men’s health, $32million or $2.30 each. In fairness to Albanese he actually had some policies while it was not absolutely clear that his principal opponent had any at all. What is most striking across all the parties was the complete lack of any