Izabella Kaminska
@izakaminska
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Founder Editor of The Blind Spot @theblindsp0t + Senior Finance Editor POLITICO Europe. Former Editor of FT Alphaville. Fights for the human.
London
Joined March 2009
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A reminder that to contact me anonymously (especially if you don't trust Twitter DM) you can use Haya, the anonymous messaging app. To do so download Haya & scan the below QR code. It will take you directly to me. For more info here:
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Rather than losing their jobs cabin crew at airlines should be immediately redeployed by government to offer Covid response support to the health system. Cabin crew are uniquely well trained to deal with many issues. For example...
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Look, all I’m saying is that a private jet ban is the sort of radical environmental measure that 99.99999% of the world could easily get behind. And brings many unintended benefits: 1) no more davos 2) less contraband smuggling 3) Kardashian immobilisation.
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Liz Truss’ greatest mistake IMHO was mistakingly thinking the office of British PM still held any power whatsoever. It clearly doesn’t. And that to me is a much bigger tragedy than any market wobble. Because it means the British political system has been usurped.
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I hope this is the point people realise that 99.9% of crypto and blockchain are total utter bullshit that do absolutely nothing technologically to reduce the need for trust in financial intermediaries. After all this becomes self-evident the only residue will be a CBDC.
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Unlike the outraged media consensus, I will be buying an $8 verification. I personally don’t believe a free speech public square should be funded by a handful of large corporate advertisers who then get to dictate what is and isn’t permissible to say on the platform.
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Does anyone have any idea what Amazon’s total carbon footprint is? Does it yet consume as much energy as any small country? Seems to me it’s only fair to frame it the way we frame bitcoin energy consumption?
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Bitcoin conference stops accepting bitcoin for tickets because turns out bitcoin is a rubbish payment system.
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**Big** multipolar drop from ECB's Christine Lagarde this afternoon signalling the potential suspension of independent-minded cbanks in favour of aligned interdependence focused on national security objectives (i.e. potential transition to a war economy)
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If there’s one thing you read today it must be
@andyverity
’s sensational account of what really happened with Libor rigging. New evidence reveals coordinated manipulation by international central banks.
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THREAD: I still can’t believe that what has happened to gilts has been framed so brazenly by the mainstream UK press as being a function of Brexit. Whatever your position on Brexit, if you endorse this framing you are an absolute disinfo agent.
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If there was a single company that came to symbolise the collapse of the Soviet Union exposing all its badly incentivised quota-led management practices … it was Aeroflot. Boeing is now our Aeroflot.
NEW - Boeing 757-200 makes emergency landing in the U.S. after one of its wings came apart midair.
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🧵Investors are slowly waking up to the fact that Credit Suisse may have Kobayashi Maru-Ed the market with some of the most ingenious financial engineering seen yet. We’re talking Wall Street Bets level of creativity to save a business they are too attached to let go of.
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Now feels an appropriate time to share some personal news. While I've had an absolutely cracking time at the FT, which I consider one of the best places in the world to do journalism, after 13 years (4 years as editor of FT Alphaville), I am moving on to pastures new.
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SO MUCH "hindsight capital" about on FTX. But the truth is that only a few names relentlessly called this stuff out, despite being endlessly harassed and gaslit on the internet for speaking truth to power. Time to give a shout out to those who deserve it.
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There are 87,146 thought leaders on LinkedIn. Just saying.
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THREAD 🧵 I see CBDCs are trending again, so I thought I would offer some insight and context to the whole story. How did this idea even come about? What are they good for? Are you getting the full picture? (I will probably keep adding to this thread as things evolve.)
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Short thread on the female fragility panic: For decades now women have been conditioned via TV, film, and education, that they are just as strong & powerful as men. It is totally normal to see tiny framed women taking out a slew of male attackers as if they’re nothing.
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🧵In further signs that the West is facing its own USSR collapse moment, locked cabinets and/or counter based product exchange were a defining feature of my shopping experiences in 80s (communist) Poland.
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THREAD: I’ve been reading this 1933 book by the FT’s former Lombard columnist Paul Einzig. While everyone is calling Truss’ economic plan Reaganomics, I have to controversially disagree and call it Mussolini-omics.
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🧵Bloomberg's Matt Levine writes today about the bank deposit franchise, and how the traditional bank model assumes deposits can be treated as long duration liabilities because customers are loyal and deposits sticky...
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It seems to me the market is crying out for a new type of asset. Governments should issue Covid-response bonds. For the redeployment of capital to fighting the disease: emergency infrastructure, ventilator production, healthcare worker training. Etc.
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THREAD explaining why seizing Russia's assets is a crossing the Rubicon moment for the West.
1/ Property Rights.
The principle that forfeiture of property before conviction is illegal is one of the longest and most cherished in the Western capitalist tradition. It underpins…
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By all means blame actual Brexit issues on Brexit. But suggesting the current situation is 1) unique to britain or 2) a function of Brexit is one of the most politicized and disingenuous media disinfo campaigns of all time.
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THREAD🧵Here’s why I believe the market is missing the true significance of
@Elonmusk
reconfiguring Twitter’s funding model into one that isn’t dependent on you being the product. If he succeeds, and I suspect he will, it could upend two-sided pricing in the digital economy.
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THREAD: I have a highly speculative hypothesis that the biggest untold story of modern warfare may be that since WW2, war has been transferred off the sovereign democratic balance sheet much the same way shadow banking transferred financial risk off-balance sheet.
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The relentless "aren't you bitter you didn't invest in bitcoin in 2012"? questioning is beyond illustrative of the mania in hand. No I'm not. I'm also not annoyed I didn't invest in Facebook. Why? Because I chose to be a journalist not an investor.
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Here are some personal rules I have developed to keep grounded in these weird info distorted times. 1) Consider at least 5 times a day your “gut” feeling on most things might be wrong. And that you may be the one that has inadvertently been brainwashed.
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@jemimajoanna
@nic__carter
@1e9petrichor
@GhostofSvetski
@allenf32
@dergigi
@Clubhouse
I am definitely "woke" to the notion that bitcoin is a bit like a monetary right to bear arms. It's a worthwhile mechanism to resist authoritarianism if it ever came to that. But as with the right to bear arms, it's complicated and contentious in peaceful and high trust periods.
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This is simply something nobody ever needed to see. If there was ever a picture to embody the uncomfortable ick feeling of an unwanted approach in a eurotrash nightclub, I daresay it is this.
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They are crisis/disaster trained and know first aid and first response. They are used to working awkward shifts in cohesive systems often with people they have never worked before. They tend to be young and healthy as it’s such a physical job.
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Imagine my surprise when I was told at registration for today's
#IFGS2024
Innovate Finance conf — where I was scheduled to moderate the below panel — that I had been CANCELLED.
Why? Because I declined to pre-submit the exact questions I was going to ask the panelists. This is…
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🧵1/ In his latest piece, Zoltan Pozsar compares the international money system to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s epic split, arguing “The world is splitting in two. So is the monetary system. The dollar is at a crossroads.”
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Whoa. Thought this might be ironic at first. But looks real. We are now at the point of late stage system corruption where outright fraud is being represented as being something supposedly genius. It’s Mavrodi crossed with Robin Hood/Pablo Escobar.
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The Polish central bank has put up a giant banner outside its HQ blaming inflation on Russia and the pandemic. The banner also warns that "anyone blaming the cbank for inflation is pushing the Kremlin propaganda line." Now that's what I call signalling.
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I’m not a political expert. But everyone saying she wasn’t elected by the people seems completely besides the point. We have a process. And if our political processes can be disregarded willy nilly every time the markets don’t like stuff, we are not sovereign anymore.
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In the last 24 hours there seems to have been coordinated push by authoritative voices to assert the idea that the "vaccines are not good enough". Here are just some examples.
1) Australia
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The solution is thus not to emasculate men, repress men or wrap womankind in cotton wool, but to encourage men to embrace chivalry again. And to make it a virtue not a sin.
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And btw all the lefties gleefully relishing in Liz’s destruction - this is an abject admission that you no longer care about political power and are happy to outsource all decision making to the markets.
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With big data, Uber, Tesla and crypto crumbling much the way I warned, I wonder what I should turn my attention to next? Have a few things on my mind. Nothing like an extended break from digital comms to identify dangerous groupthink perspectives.
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I was just using ChatGPT to check if there were any academic papers written about a geeky aspect of cbanking. It came up with a paper that satisfied on all fronts. But when I tried to find the paper, it soon became clear the paper did not exist. It had totally made it up.
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I went through the recently released SAGE minutes so you don’t have to, seeking explanations for some of the odder bits of UK govt that are hard to rationalise
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I start my last day at the FT knowing this is how my
@ftalpha
colleagues see me.😬Thanks guys! It’s been a hoot. Will miss u all immensely. 🥲🥲 and a big thank you to
@jemimajoanna
for finally getting something in on deadline (My leaving page) &
@ajb_powell
for his chart crime.
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Having watched the Netflix documentary on the Flat Earthers (which was only an okay not amazing documentary) I have concluded there are many similarities between the Flat Earth movement and the Cryptocurrency movement.
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Introducing my new media venture: The Blind Spot
@theblindsp0t
, which aims to challenge consensus journalism by rebooting how independent media is configured. More posts and details coming soon. Here's what to expect (for now):
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...Chivalrous masculinity that looks out for women can be pretty darn useful for achieving balance in a world of asymmetric physical power distribution. It sends a message to those men who would use their power wrongfully that there is muscle there that will come for them.
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Amazon says it will be entirely reliant on renewable energy by 2025. For amazon this makes its horrendous carbon footprint deemed ok - but when bitcoiners say the same thing about bitcoin: not okay (as the power could be used for more important things like amazon packages)
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I feel all this focus on Uber's bad corp culture distracts from the inherent non-viability of its biz model.
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I think my biggest epiphany about DeFi is how it is a transparent looking glass of some of the more opaque & questionable practices that go on in tradfi, but which remain poorly understood/ rarely discussed. Especially when it comes to collateralised products and market making.
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ChatGPT is basically a highly convincing liar and disinformation spreader. Fake intelligence for an increasingly fake world. It is a mirage. Like a DisneyLand kingdom. Convincing from far away but when you look closely you realise everything is made of plaster and polystyrene.
I asked ChatGPT a more serious work-related question and then asked for citations to work. As best I can tell so far, the citations are made up. The papers--at least by title, authors, dates and place of publication--just don't seem to exist. Seems to be a known issue.
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I’ve clocked that Amazon warned in its Q3 earnings call that cryptocurrency was one of the industries it was very strong in, and that it was one of those experiencing “lower demand”. Which made me wonder just how much exposure does AWS have to crypto?
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Crypto is just the canary in the coal mine though. There are so many corps/business models out there that have neve been tested in inflationary or high-interest rate environments. It could be a USSR moment for the economy.
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I love how the polls were so crap in this age of "big data" & all knowing algorithms that supposedly have superior credit scoring info
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A lot of the care we need will be very basic like serving the incapacitated with drinks and food. Cabin crew kind of spécialisé in that!!
#redeploycabincrew
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There’s a major crisis brewing in the noble gas markets - specifically in neon and helium - and it will have a meaningful impact on critical industries from semiconductors to defence and aerospace. Here’s my deep dive ($$) into what’s going on:
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This may suit you now because Liz wasn’t your cup of tea. Fine I get it. She wasn’t mine either. But all you have created is a precedent wherein no politician be they left, right, centre or populist will ever be able to wrestle power back from the markets.
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So Facebook is exploring launching its own cryptocurrency for the purpose of platform-based community payments. We shd congratulate Zuck for discovering the art of closed loop settlement 20 yrs after PayPal, 68 yrs after Diners Club did & 600 yrs after the Medici.
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And yes some tiny exceptional portion of women might be capable of these amazing feats. But the reality is this is a fiction. The average woman is and always will be weaker than the average man. But admitting this is verboten because it undermines the grander message.
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👀🧐”What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted” [A lot of this repeats what we already knew back in 2021 when I was researching this for the FT, but there are important new PLA elements]
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I remember that time I used to laugh at bitcoiners for worrying about “state confiscation” of assets. 😵💫
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@jemimajoanna
@nic__carter
@1e9petrichor
@GhostofSvetski
@allenf32
@dergigi
@Clubhouse
However I have been largely convinced that arguing bitcoin facilitates crime is not entirely fair. Bitcoin is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. Much like normal cash. And neutral money is going to be a scarce thing when money turns into identity based CBDCs.
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Women got stressed by the chivalrous signals of chivalry practitioners like opening doors or kissing hands because we felt they belittled us. But perhaps we forgot that these signals were not intended for us as much as 4 other men. “You are in the company of a defender of women”
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Twitter jobs look to have operated like govt and institutional jobs during communism. A lucrative gateway to making a bit on the side. If a black market for verification existed, the tick was entirely meaningless. Reducing its marginal value to $8 on a universal basis makes sense
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Some of my crypto followers are not going to like this comment but … High inflation AND rising rates were always going to be a brutal for the crypto system because it is essentially zero yielding. Now it finally has to compete with positive yielding fiat…
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So what is this "actually the vaccines are a bit crap" rhetoric all about? The conflicting messaging is infuriating. If the vaccines are crap, why does everyone have to take them? If they are crap, why are the related risks worth it? Do they want uptake or not?
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The logic is we got by without bitcoin to this day hence it is unnecessary energy use. But hey, we also got by without having all our shopping delivered to us and information streamed to us - and used to get up off our arses to do such things.
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A reminder that in war the first casualty is often the truth
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From a game theoretical perspective the more the wrong sort of men know that society values chivalrous masculinity, the more likely they are to fear making an attack. So it’s about leaning into the right sort of masculinity not repressing masculinity in and of itself.
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We also used to make far more sensible bundled/scaled shopping plans rather than buying a single item and expending all that energy (packaging and delivery) to have it delivered to us one item at a time.
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Airlines have training facilities in place and could deploy them to help retrain key workers in basic health work.
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Here are a few of the most shocking extracts from the leaked phone calls (now being serialised in The Times) that show traders - some of whom ended up going to jail - were being coerced into misrepresenting rates by the highest authorities.
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🧵In the latest Leaked Lunch podcast I sit down with former UBS Libor trader
@robilypj
to hear his side of the famous interest rate rigging story. We discuss the circumstances leading up to his arrest, the impact the affair had on his well-being and family, what time in prison…
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The problem with writing about crypto as a British journalist on an irreverent blog is that all cultural references, irony, humour and other British-isms are entirely lost on the average crypto reader who is often American, in their 20s and devoid of cultural ref knowledge.
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THREAD: Signs you might be in a cult - and is that a bad thing? Cults by and large are naturally occurring phenomena. Like it or not we are all probably in some kind of cult. But to ensure you are not taken advantage of it’s important to know your cult.
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I can’t believe the term “stablecoin” has now been normalised as a serious financial term. We are reinventing financial terms on an infantile scale. Mortgage backed stablecoins imminent. Or possibly even stablepluscoins for ones that bear interest?
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@jemimajoanna
@nic__carter
@1e9petrichor
@GhostofSvetski
@allenf32
@dergigi
@Clubhouse
So to sum up I think the context is really important. In a high trust world bitcoin is an expensive fail-safe to maintain and fund. And seems like a luxury good. But the thing about fail safes is that you don't appreciate them until you need them.
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The grander message is that in all circumstances women are capable of everything men are. The pressure to live up to this impossible expectation, however, stunts women from being able to verbalize openly that maybe they need the help of chivalrous hero men in some scenarios.
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Since it's my last week at FT Alphaville, I thought I might sign off my time at the FT with a little thread about the Jean-Luc Godard film Alphaville, and its amazing foresight.
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The story here is that the cbanks have a license to print money but also a license to disinform when they believe it’s in the public interest to do so. The latter is to some degree understandable. Like state-led disinformation during a war. But innocent traders should not have…
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People. A Facebook issued “stable coin” is just a Facebook version of PayPal (if it’s collateralized with fiat). If it’s issued at a floating market rate it’s not a stable coin. And if it’s collateralised at 1:1 peg and reinvests its reserves in securities it’s an MMF.
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When the bond vigilantes + a shouty Twitter mob control political decision making (not politicians) we are basically in the hands of mob rule. The result will be the actual destruction of britain.
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And it probably won’t run on a blockchain, because blockchains are mostly pointless unless they actually do gobble up shit loads of energy. Because it is the energy gobbling that makes them secure.
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BBC News right now. “UK economy is on the brink and it all started with the mini budget last week.” No it didn’t. It started with lockdown. And it was exacerbated by sanctions. Truss isn’t optimal but the idea that it’s a singular budget that destroyed all of the UK is stupid.
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To sum up: Terra wasn't backed by an algorithm it was backed by the arbitrage between its debt financing cost and its equity financing cost. The system was always vulnerable to both costs going up simultaneously.
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THREAD: I really think the market's got the whole Gilt panic thing wrong. If you actually read the BoE market notice for this week's gilt purchases you will see this is not a conventional QE-style permanent asset purchase. It's much more akin to an Open Market Op or (OMO).
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Meanwhile, being chivalrous and heroic in the traditional sense of protectionist masculinity is increasingly frowned upon because it reminds women of their weaker state. Overt Masculinity is deemed toxic. And yet...
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Thought experiment: is there any good reason not to ban private jets in European Air space for carbon polluting reasons? The more I think about it I can only see good outcomes from this. What good do private jets do really?
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Note to Extinction Rebellion supporters: the digital economy is just as polluting as air travel. (Yes selfies are carbon intensive!). And the IT sector’s carbon footprint is growing more quickly .
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We have disdain for Putin being under the thumb of the siloviki or Yeltsin the oligarchs, but that is precisely what we have in Jeremy Hunt. A man who will sell out britain to please “the markets”. Great.
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What happened before continuously happens again. This essay by Orwell on what a free press means is essential reading. Some choice pars below:
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Translation (IMHO) "there's a war coming, and you're either with us or against us."
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Translation: We acknowledge that sanctions may have eroded dollar neutrality and undermined confidence in the property rights that back the dollar system.
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Also a reminder that
@ecuarauz
will be joining Alphaville for a chat about all sorts of monetary matters (including US dollar hegemony) at 4pm today. Cc
@jemimajoanna
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And here’s Mark Dearlove, son of former MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove, being used as the messenger to pass on the Libor lowballing diktat from government to traders who didn’t want to do it, and in some cases whistleblew but ended up in jail regardless.
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The Elon buys Bitcoin story is like the convergence of every
@ftalphaville
story of the last two years. You're welcome. (And a small reminder to revisit our "the entire economy is Fyre Festival series).
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I’ll never forget about 10yrs ago having a big fight with my dad (who fled communism) about Facebook. Dad was insistent we were being duped
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Baggage handlers probably also have uniquely useful logistics skills. Check-in desks at airports could be redeployed as covid testing areas? Ground crew as processing and admin support
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Translation: we have one shot not to become the USSR circa 1990, and we need to focus on throwing every remaining bit of capital we have at achieving energy and manufacturing independence.
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And what an extraordinary teaser right at the bottom of the story for the rest of the revelations coming later this week. Were the ultimate orders to manipulate libor coming from the US?
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Send him to Davos.👏
“Let me stop you right there…”
Caribbean nation Guyana is booming after discovering oil. BBC’s Stephen Sackur puts it to President
@presidentaligy
; lobbyists say oil is bad for the climate.
Dude wasn’t having it. Mans was ready!
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