The safest asset in the world Let’s be honest. You had never heard of Silicon Valley Bank and neither had I. This week, and for a few more no doubt, they will be one of the best-known banks in the world. The subject of opprobrium because not only did they go bust but their CEO

P Marca From Mr ‘Code will Eat the World’, Marc Andreessen, a take on AI. Everywhere the government is involved gets more expensive. Everything with technology involved gets cheaper. As he puts it: The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are

End of the Empires US government interest payments on debt are now approaching $900 billion annually; they exceed the $722 billion defence budget by about 20% and are growing far more rapidly. Some weeks ago we covered the amount of US government debt that will need to be refinanced in the next 18 months, all

Shadowy coders Back in 2021, an American Senator complained in her submission to Congress that cryptocurrency put the financial system in the hands of ‘shadowy super coders’. In so doing, she coined a phrase that was then adopted by thousands of enthusiasts across the globe, many of whom added ‘shadowy coder’ to their profiles on

Choke Point In 2013, the United States launched ‘Operation Choke Point’. The aim was to restrict access to banking for high risk industries like payday lenders, ATM operators and other industries allegedly linked with money laundering. The unique element of the plan was that it did not involve legislation. Instead, Federal Agencies simply wrote to

The Singularity I confess that the rise of the AI machines has really piqued my interest. Using them personally I can do all sorts of things that I could not do before, even just entertaining doodles. I asked ChatGPT this week to write me a program in C++ that could identify palindromes in prime numbers.

Supercore Excluding food, energy and shelter? Krugman calls it ‘supercore’. I call it the inflation rate for dead people. There are enough signs now that inflation is slowing quite sharply, not least second hand car prices falling off a cliff. We probably don’t need highly manufactured numbers from our least favourite Nobel Laureate. It’s not

Davos Late to the party as usual, this was the only accommodation I could find for the WEF gathering in Davos. A mere 8.6 km hike to the conference and $14,000 per night (including breakfast). Pocket change really because non-politicians (all the major CEO’s) are being charged $250,000 to attend the conference, elected representatives go

Predictions Prediction number one then. Marc Andreessen will still be boring in 2024. Here are some more: The second half of the year will be very different to the first. If you were the White House, the message to the Fed would have to be get this done quickly. We need an economy on the