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

Review of the year It was bad. They I was forced to consider the question this week when I was asked, “who is the eponymous, ‘they’?”. ‘They’ track your data (and then lose it). ‘They’ want to control us. ‘They’ want people to pay more tax. ‘They’ don’t want people to go on strike. To

The state of things On the bench $17k. Behind it lies the separation of money from the state. When asked, most people are quite comfortable that their elected government is in charge of the money supply. They remark, very reasonably, that “who else is going to do it……you?”. It is the right question because whilst

Contagion Next up in the FTX drama is Genesis Trading, perhaps the largest prime broker in the digital asset sector. Genesis is owned by the Digital Currency Group (DCG) who also happen to own the largest bitcoin fund in the world, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). GBTC trades now at a 43% discount to its