The boot is on the other foot

Over the last week, shares in GameStop (GME on the NYSE) rocketed up in a bull run somewhat engineered by amateur investors on Reddit. Users on r/WallStreetBets initially saw the stock as undervalued, and looked to make a quick buck. The tip spread like wildfire, and as demand for shares shot up, so did the price.

It then became apparent that the stock had been bet against by several large hedge funds. …

Janet Yellen has received millions of dollars in speaking fees since her time at the Fed. “Speaking fees”. Conflict of interest or not, this is the latest example of the rampant nepotism and technocracy that govern the world economy. Too many unelected officials have far too much power over our economic lives, and we need to take back our economic sovereignty.

Bitcoin offers a way out. I’m going to discuss three aspects of the global financial hegemony that are being challenged by cryptocurrency, and how we can (and perhaps should) modernise our entire financial system accordingly.

1. Credit: no banks = everyone’s a winner

Innovative financing solutions are…

As Bitcoin approaches $40k for the second time this month, we’re continuing to see huge institutional resistance.

This week the IMF’s Christine Lagarde said Bitcoin was conducting “funny business”, alluding in particular to money laundering. This is the kind of hypocrisy that underlines exactly why people are moving away from the entrenched financial establishment and towards crypto.

Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and HSBC, stalwarts of the same banking mafia Lagarde represents, were implicated last September in $2 trillion’s worth of money laundering, stretching from 1999 to 2017. $2 trillion! Whatever money does happen to be laundered through cryptocurrencies (an estimated…

With the recent closure of Debenhams and Topshop, brick and mortar retail seems to be in the death throes of its current iteration. This century we’ve seen substantial declines across Britain’s high streets, due to pressures initially from shopping centres and then from online retail. Now it appears that some of the stalwarts of the old guard have been beaten out of the picture. Could this pave the way for a return to a more communitarian high street?

My hope is that big-biz online retail proliferates so much that smallish brick and mortar stores become untenable for large conglomerates. We’re…

Cryptocurrency is this generation’s dot com bubble, and so far this year we’ve seen some crazy market movements, the most recent trend being steeply downward from the $40k+ all-time-high. But I don’t mean bubble entirely in the pejorative.

We are seeing a huge explosion in adoption of an extraordinary disruptive technology. This presents us with the potential to be involved in a global financial revolution, and to reap the rewards as well.

But as the Financial Conduct Authority has said this week, investors should be prepared for losses as well as profits if they want to enter into this brave…

I love buying stuff made in Britain. For many reasons.

We make some cool stuff — think Bentley, Burberry, Bovril — and I like the idea of continuing the legacy of heritage brands that mean a lot, or have meant a lot to this country at some point.

But we don’t really make anything here anymore. This creates a twofold problem, whereby a) we have a bloated management and bureaucratic sector and b) we don’t actually generate much stuff of actual value. …

I’m not going to stop using Amazon tomorrow. If I did, my girlfriend wouldn’t be getting much for Christmas, and life would be a lot less convenient for me. I am, however, trying to be more mindful of my economic life. Not in the gloomy sense of “oh Christ, I bought an HDMI cable off Amazon, I’ve killed a baby” — instead, I see in front of me an opportunity to express my support and excitement for things and people that I like and care about.

I’m trying more and more to give my money to people with half-decent ethics…

I want to reframe how we think about the economy.

We think of the economy as an abstract mess of numbers, equations, graphs, and constants. But what is it really?

The economy, plain and simple, is how we gather and distribute resources. It’s how we provide for ourselves as a society. If we scale things back to the level of the village (a very useful tool for testing ideas), the economy refers to the production of food, water, shelter, etc., and then the allocation of those resources amongst the villagers.

That is a far cry from what most people think…