Are Tariffs bad? At university, tariffs were “bad”. It was pretty simple stuff and simple to calculate. Comparative Advantage, everyone richer for it. Free trade, hooray. Indeed, it is mathematically “proven” they are bad. It plays out here. Australia is comparatively good at mining, agriculture and that’s it. China is comparatively good at manufacturing almost

Free Stuff For those following along closely; this Balaji riff will resonate. A lot of people are asking why the DeepSeek model was just given away and open sourced and Balaji goes to the heart of the answer. It went much further than just the model. Earlier this month they had what they called ‘open

Bits Our contention last year was that in the era of AI digital intelligence would not want to use government currency. This latest software deployment isn’t proof of that but it is a step along the way. To begin with, it uses something called an MCP Server (some good explanations here). My less detailed version

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Perhaps sanity did prevail. As I had hoped last week, the initial holdings in the American Strategic Bitcoin Reserve will indeed be made up of assets already held by the US Government. The majority of those were seized as part of the Silk Road case in 2013.  Government BTC deposited into the

A rough week Some blowback from the ByBit hack. $1.4 billion in Ethereum stolen by North Korea. Overall the response from the impacted exchange has been impressive; fully restoring their 100% reserves within 72 hours. Even so, it left the market rather spooked. The audit report (which is in no way an audit report) on

Fort Knox That is Senator Mike Lee of Utah. The question becomes “is the gold really there?”. The Elon Musk DOGE team seems pretty keen to find out as well. Is it strange though that nobody has ever actually counted the gold? Companies all over the world are required to have audits every year because

$100k is hard The sustainable break beyond $100k was always going to take time. It’s such an important psychological level that once it does fall, it should be far easier to progress. That we are feeling disappointed in the mid-90s (or perhaps bored) is rather encouraging when you look at overall performance versus other asset

One coin to rule them all Not an optimal week then. In fact Monday was the largest leverage wipeout yet beating FTX and Covid. $2 billion of positions were liquidated in 24 hours. However, As the market scales this will necessarily be true and we will always be setting liquidation records. Even so, it was

London The driving force here is the fear that Trump will place tariffs on gold transfers back to the US. It seems unlikely but why run the risk? After all, gold in a vault is gold in a vault. As a result, the stuff is being shipped by boatload to New York. “People can’t get

Something different A short break last week in which I came across this podcast which is both interesting and long. The whole premise is around the idea that school is a nonsense waste of time (90% of it). It necessarily caters to the lowest common denominator because it has no other choice. I must say