Originally published in Venturebeat. U.S. stocks and bonds are at all time highs in a relentless ‘melt-up’ that seems to ignore anything you can throw at it: Iran, Hong Kong or the Trump’s war on China mean nothing. It’s the longest bull run in history, surpassing its 10th year in…

General objection to the rise of crypto skepticism. Tether — is the other shoe still to drop? — Boy, are we suckers for sensation. During Railway Mania in 1840s, one of the more interesting from a long list of times when men succumbed to madness and greed, more than 6,000 miles* of railroads were built in the space of 2 years, with tracks furiously criss-crossing England, as people…

But are they really? The indispensability of debt in human condition. — The popular opinion of the post-GFC world is that of a world controlled by a convoluted web of opaque financial connections assisted by a few central bankers on top. In this world, money is an illusion freely manipulated by the central banks in ways that benefit the wealthy, but harm…

Where has all the money gone? The function of quantitative tightening in narrative economy. — OK, the basic narrative of the abysmal, appalling market of 2022 is something like: ‘This time round, the money printing has gone too far. The FED, ECB and other central banks printed trillions, then bought the markets and subsidized people. This put a floor under the markets when it was…

Navigating social cues vs. tackling black boxes — When SADE scraped together the last 5 cents to record their first 2-track demo, which consisted of the now well known Smooth Operator and Your Love is King, the record labels hated it. ‘Too long, too jazzy.’ …

Debt cycles are bad. What is the alternative. — The 2020s is a decade of many strange things in the realm of finance from million dollar auctions of links-to-pics (NFTs) to magic boxes and meme stock trading. …

Magic boxes don’t have fundamentals. — There is this comical contrast between the pinkish toy-pet esthetics of (most) DeFi projects and the clear focus of their users on short-term speculation. You would think that the gamified esthetics has its purpose, that is, to draw in public. …

Can DeFi survive the downturn? — There are two ways in which you can view decentralized finance (DeFi) depending (mostly) on your level of cynicism. One is that DeFi is taking the concept of artificial scarcity successfully created by bitcoin to the next level on a mission to recreate human socio-economic structures on blockchain. That is…