"Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash" left one honest thread hanging: CME's Bitcoin futures settle against a reference rate built from real spot exchanges, but can those specific exchanges be gamed? I went and found out which six exchanges CME actually uses, what vets them, and what's stil
On September 24 the Federal Reserve proposed its rulebook for the stablecoin issuers it will supervise under the GENIUS Act — Treasury bills of 93 days or less, a two-business-day redemption promise, a capital charge that starts at two percent, and an automatic wind-down for anyone who falls short.
ZeroHedge's tape caught it in real time — US diesel futures down more than 7%, European diesel futures up more than 7%, inside the same hour, on the same headline: a 90-day US diesel export ban the White House is reportedly close to putting forward. The administration's own Energy Secretary says it
Paramount Skydance's roughly $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery cleared its last legal obstacle this week, and the list of what one company now controls is almost absurd to read in one sentence: CBS and CNN, HBO and MTV, SpongeBob and Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Transformers. The feder
Intel jumped in Monday premarket and closed up about 11 percent on reports that it will work with Taiwan's AU Optronics on Micro LED packaging built into glass substrates — embedding chips in glass and wiring them with through-glass vias, aimed at co-packaged optics for AI datacenters. The engineeri
Deutsche Bank announced this week that it plans to custody Bitcoin, Ether and three stablecoins for European institutional clients — pending regulators, aiming to onboard its first customers within the next few months. The custody plan is straightforward. The interesting part is the paperwork: Germa
Warren Buffett, 96, stepped down Friday as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a title he'd held since 1970, handing it to his son Howard while Greg Abel keeps running the company day to day. The job change is mostly a formality eight months after Buffett already gave up the CEO seat. The advice he leav
My friend sent a screenshot of the XRP rich list and a thought: only 8.13 million XRP accounts exist, so "less than 1 percent of 1 percent" of humanity owns any, and yet the coin gets endless attention. Also, Louisville just became the third university to put the logo on its athletes. He's right abo
The same friend who has kept this week's entries honest sent two more texts tonight — three Ripple links, a line about how "AI and crypto will merge," and a theory involving Elon Musk's favorite letter and a 2 percent stake Stripe took in 2014. I read all three announcements. He's right that the pip
A post went around this week saying Zcash at $1,200 is Bitcoin at $1,200 — study 2017. The arithmetic behind it is genuinely correct, which is the most interesting thing about it and the reason it's worth taking apart. Here is what the post is actually claiming, why the supply math works, why the co
Yesterday I wrote that the SEC and CFTC would build crypto rules without Congress. This morning the same friend who started that conversation texted me the SEC's "Innovation Exemption" with two words of commentary — "the genie" — and a five-year number. He's right about the number. Here's what the o
The Fed hiked a quarter point on Wednesday, 12 to 0 — unanimous, from a committee that voted 9 to 3 to hold in July. Four days ago I wrote down four things to check that against once the vote was in. Here is what actually happened to each one.
A friend sent me a screenshot of a "Total RWA Value" chart at $57.4 billion, a stack of ETF-adoption percentages, a rumor about a network called Flare wrapping XRP, and a Hedera conviction call — all in one text thread, no explanation attached. So I went and found out what each piece actually is: wh
A video making the rounds walks through a real trend — stock exchanges tokenizing shares — then pivots to Basel I, II and III, and lands on a specific claim: the newest paper out of Basel mentions XRP dozens of times, therefore the Bank for International Settlements is about to use it. The paper is
On Friday the inflation number came in at 3.4 percent and the futures market moved to better than 85 percent odds that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates next Wednesday. Take energy out of that 3.4 and it reads 2.4 — a whisker from the target. So the Fed is about to raise the price of money i
On Wednesday morning Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP token opened at eight cents and printed $339 two minutes later — a "market cap" bigger than BlackRock — before falling 99 percent in the hour. Biden says the market maker seeded the pool with $5,000. I wanted to understand how five thousand dollars can pri
Since June I have been building automated trading strategies with an AI coding assistant — about forty of them, on one small brokerage account. Twenty-five are switched off, a dozen are still simulating, and three trade real money. Every trading blog publishes its winners; here is the graveyard, wit
The Treasury tripled its next bond buyback to $6 billion, and long-term interest rates rose on the news instead of falling. That reaction looks backwards until you understand what a buyback actually is — not a repayment, but a swap that leaves the debt exactly where it was and moves the due date clo
Three institutions get lumped together in casual conversation, and they have three genuinely different jobs, three different owners, and three different relationships to the United Nations — one of them predates the UN entirely and was never made to join it. Here's what the BIS actually regulates, w