New money, old habits Zero Celcius DeFi lender Celcius stopped customer withdrawals on Sunday. The email to customers was reminiscent of the Lehman Brothers collapse: The carefully chosen wording about honouring withdrawals “over time” caused the Celsius token to fall as low as 14 cents, down more than 95% in a year. It also caused

Little Apple The Big Apple is getting smaller. Once the place we all wanted to go and visit; not any longer. There has been huge net migration out of the state since 2000. One million people have left New York since, for a net loss of 250,000 residents. That ranks the state top in the

New branding! Our weekly newsletter is growing quickly. Previously referred to internally as ‘The Weekly’ we felt that name lacked panache, so now it’s MoneyBits. If you are reading that as MonkeyBits, I assure you that you’re the person with the problem, and not us. Otherwise it’s business as usual. Davos concludes Precocious teenager The

The Prophecy …and it did. It spread all over the globe and now everything you use every day is laced with cryptography. Your phone, messaging apps and email. Much to the frustration of governments around the world. Then it spread to money. Like everything else it touched, it won’t stop. No matter how much wishful

Terra update Many of us are struggling with the complexity of the collapse of the Terra stablecoin. A rather simple explanation was provided in the week clarifying matters: What else could go wrong? Actually, quite a lot. Here are three other things that would be viewed as existential threats to the sector, when in fact

A quiet week I confess it has been rather quiet on the inbound money side this week. It’s no surprise given the brutal plunge with perhaps more volatility to come. All this is nothing new for bitcoin or indeed for us as a fund. This is our fourth meaningful drawdown. Our fundamental thesis remains unchanged

Did Amazon grow? An honest question, if Amazon revenue growth was +7% in the last quarter and inflation in the US was 8%; did Amazon grow at all? In real terms, surely no. Consider then that the US economy actually shrank by 1% in Q1 this year. It is rather odd that this was not

The Ministry of Truth The American government last night announced the formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” which will counter misinformation relating to Homeland Security. I can’t imagine that this could go wrong in any way at all and I’m looking forward to their considered musings. It does focus the mind on what the truth

Web 3.0 A crisis? At no point in the last 60 years have bonds yielded such a negative real return. Perhaps more critical now is the fact that government borrowing has never been at such consistently high levels. So while bonds are an awful investment, never have there been more of them on sale. It’s

Time for a new boyfriend? A quarter to forget for bonds The purchasing power of money invested in bonds is now collapsing at quite a rate. $100 invested in Treasury Bonds in July 2020 is now worth $81.90, concluding with the worst quarter for bonds since, well, forever. I don’t want to say we told