Free full text of my long essay on “The Age Of Megathreats” summarizing the main themes of my new book “Megathreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How To Survive Them”
Bitcoin now below 19k, a 72% crash from its all time high in November 2021. 1000s of other shitcoins have lost 99% of their value and disappeared. And even the other Top 10 “cryptocurrencies” have lost 80-90% of their value from their ATH. This Ponzi house of cards is collapsing
Bitcoin crashes by 15% in 7 minutes on NO news: a rigged, totally manipulated, whales-controlled market where most transactions (90%) volumes are false as exchanges pretend to have liquidity they don't have. Massive pump & dump, spoofing, front running, wash trading! Total Scam!
In which way has the new alleged JPMorgan crypto coin anything to do with blockchain/crypto? It is private not public, permissioned not permissionless, based on trusted authorities verifying transaction not trustless, centralized not decentralized. Calling it crypto is a joke
Bitcoin drops 25% from 41k to 31K in 2 days. 15% down in 24 hours. Most speculative, risky, scammed & manipulated pseudo-asset in human history. Its true value is still negative, not even 0, given the massive polluting externalities of its mining! A crappy environmental disaster!
Bitcoin has no role in institutional or retail investors portfolios. It is not a currency: not an unit of account, not a scalable means of payment & is a highly volatile store of value. It is heavily manipulated: look at the investigation of Bitfinex by US law enforcement. 1/n
Bitcoin falls more than 40% from its peak in less than one month. Which institutional investors are reckless enough to invest in such a risky and volatile pseudo-asset with no intrinsic value? They should be fired on the spot if undertaking such a reckless speculative gamble!
The demonstrations and even the violence are not just about George Floyd's murder and BLM. There are now 40 million unemployed people in the US who are righly furious mad as hell. As I predicted months ago this crisis will lead to protests, riots & violence. USA is now burning!
All those reckless VCs & tech firms that made fun of government policies as hampering private sector growth are now begging the feds to come & bail them out. During the GFC millions of poor households lost their homes & no one bailed them out. Privatize gains & socialize losses!
With BTC down almost 80% from peak (from 20K to ~4K) & all other cryptocurrencies down 80% to 99% I rest my case that this crypto bubble went bust for good. I feel vindicated. So I will take a break for a few days from this toxic Crypto Twitter. Waste of time to convince zealots
Bitcoin down 25% in last 5 days. Down 78% from all time high. All other top 10 crypto junk down 80-90% from peak. Bitcoin still a way to go down to its fundamental value that is NEGATIVE - not zero - given its toxic environmental externalities . Crypto house of cards in meltdown
There is no diff btw FTX’s FTT & Binance’s BNB: they are both vaporware backed by NOTHING (both “gas” for fees)! As former fell to 0 in days the same should happen to BNB. Like FTT, only 13% of supply is true float: the rest (150 million BNB) in 1 wallet (BSC Token Hub) owned by?
Depositors realizing they can earn 4% on safe short term T-Bills while they get close to 0% on bank deposits. This is a key source of continued bank runs. The free lunch that banks used to get on free deposits is ending. Interest sensitivity of deposits is sharply rising
APOLLO: The spread between Fed Funds and interest rates on checking accounts “is the fundamental reason why money is being moved out of bank deposits .. highly unusual compared to previous banking crises, where the source of instability has typically been credit losses ..” [Slok]
Bitcoin is NOT a currency: it is not a unit of account, it is not a single numeraire, it is not a scalable means of payments, it is not backed by any asset, it is not legal tender, its price is highly manipulated & thus its partial store of value function is based on nothing.
US banks have roughly $620bn of unrealised losses. Their overall equity is $2.2tn. That is 28% of equity & includes banks like JPM or Citi where the ratio is much lower. For many smaller banks the ratio is close to 50%. So if a run were to occur they will be near dead like SVB!
Beating up and using tear gas on peaceful protesters near the White House while calling for the use of the military, based on a 1807 Insurrection Act, to restore "law and order" . Trump is literally staging a military coup against democracy in America. He is literally a Fascist!
Trump now speaks of a $2 trillion fiscal stimulus. But a lot of it is smoke & mirrors that doesn't help the average American. Too much of it is going to the large/middle sized firms, many that are cash rich & used previous bailout for share buybacks. Not enough going to workers!
99% of crypto land is one shitcoin traded for another shitcoin. And the average shitcoin lost 90% or more of its value in the last year. So Crypto Land is Crap Land, a cesspool of lunatics with severe Freudian scatological obsessions that swim 24/7 in their own stinking shit.
What is the logic of protecting the depositors of Signature Bank, a bank that recklessly decided to jump into the crappy crypto cesspool & bet the house on shitcoins biz? Mother of al moral hazards. Rewarding scammers, crooks, human traffickers, criminals & con men. Sickening!
1am last night in my NYC hood. The demonstrations & even the violence are not just about George Floyd's murder. There are now 40 million unemployed people in the US who are rightly furious: white, brown, black. As I predicted months ago this crisis will lead to riots & violence
If, likely, Erdogan wins the presidency, Turkey will experience a full fledged currency & financial crisis. Net CB reserves are already negative to the tune of $60bn, the current account deficit is surging and inflation is runaway. Capital control can only delay this train wreck
I could gloat about Bitcoin collapsing 10% in a day to $5700. But that is still some way to ZERO where Bitcoin belongs. Actually since Bitcoin is The Mother of All Toxic Pollutions & Environmental Disasters its true fair value is highly NEGATIVE with the right externality tax
The fact that Mnuchin issued such a statement via Twitter on a Saturday eve is a signal that he was terrified that reports that Trump may consider firing Powell could crash the markets at the Asia opening on Sunday eve EST. Reckless Trump is a major risk/threat to global markets!
A senior Chinese source: China prefers Trump to be re-elected because he will destroy US soft & hard power in the world & damage its already fraying relations with allies. The decline of the US will accelerate! So Trump is the true Manchurian Candidate: Make China Great Again!
Bitcoin is now at 36K, almost 50% down from its November ATH. So much for those who predicted that by now it would be at 100k, 200k, 400k. And it must be painful to be so rekt for all retail suckers who bought it in the frenzy when it was 69k last fall while whales dumped it!
At a typical Bitcoin exchange BTC is sold at a price 2% higher than market rates; then they charge u another 2.5% as a purchase fee; then they charge u another 5% as a credit card transaction fee. So total fees are 9.5%. So much for cryptos reducing transaction costs to 0%. Scam!
El Salvador's experiment with Bitcoin is an unmitigated disaster: whoever held BTC lost 50%, the country spread is thru the roof and the sovereign is near bankrupt. They should impeach that buffoon
@nayibbukele
, a criminal president who is bankrupting the country!
Bitcoin is down 37% over the last 12 months, over 50% since its ATH. So all the retail suckers who got into Bitcoin - or any other shitcoin - in the last year’s frenzy - ie most investors in this FOMO-driven market - have literally lost their shirt and underwear too..
ADL: Anti-semitic violence fell in the US for 30 years till 2015. In 2016 it went up 37%. In 2017 it spiked by another 57%. In 2018 even higher & now a massacre. What changed? Trump supported & incited racist, anti-semitic, Nazi white supremacists. He has blood all over his hands
El Salvador is bankrupt regardless of whether it had any Bitcoin in FTX. With BTC at these levels they are INSOLVENT. So that criminal Bukele should be in jail for the rest of his life regardless of. He has bankrupted his country in spite of the better advice or IMF & all others
Trump 1st called it a hoax. Now he argues that if the # of dead is only between 100K & 200K he has done a "very good job". What a total criminal reckless clown! He denied the problem till it was too late, then he wanted 2 end early the quarantines. Now 200K dead is "very good"!
Now Bitcoin crashing below 8000, headed towards 7000. Down 60% from the peak, 40% in a month and over 10% today. The Mother Of All Bubbles And Biggest Bubble in Human History Comes Down Crashing.
Soccer will never be popular in the US as: a) Americans love complex statistics in sports while such statistics mean nothing in soccer; b) Americans love high scores while in soccer a 0-0 game can be exciting; c) no easy way to have predictable commercials' breaks in soccer.
Crypto twitter is a cesspool of bots, trolls, shills, scammers, crypto zealots and lunatics. Barking dogs that attack me after losing 90% in last year. None read my paper & none have any substantial critique. This motley crew is a bunch of pathetic lunatics & HODLing losers
UK is starting to be priced like an EM. Back to the 1970s. Stagflation and eventually the need to go and beg for an IMF bailout … Truss and her cabinet are clueless 🤦🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♀️🤦🏻🤦♀️🤷
At the age of 30 I was also wearing a Jewfro like Sam Bankam-Fried; but I was finishing my PhD at Harvard, planning to be an academic scholar, wearing proper clothes and not planning to rip off 1 million investors out of their savings like a sleazy crook..
Binance = FTX. Only much worse and more shady. At least we knew that FTX has HQ in shady Bahamas but shadier
@cz_binance
has been hiding
@binance
HQ for good. Why? BNB = FTT : same scammy vaporware with 87% of its supply off the market & hidden in one wallet controlled by..?
No science or medical expert, no professional economist. Only nepotism and cronysm galore! What are Jared and Ivanka doing on that "Council"? A bunch of white men and a crony nepotist's daughter and son-in-law! A big corrupt self-serving swamp like the rest of Trump's regime!
The blockchain offers nothing new or worthwhile to the universe of technology. It’s a one trick pony whose only application is creating censorship resistant crypto investment schemes, an invention whose negative externalities & capacity for harm vastly outweigh any possible uses
Bitcoin tumbles by over 15% from 34K to 29K in 24 hours on a Sunday without any news. This is a total irrational bubble on a pseudo asset with zero intrinsic or fundamental value that is totally manipulated via fiat Tether daily issuance, massive pump & dump schemes and whales.
In US 13737 confirmed Coronavirus cases, 50% increase today. At this % increase rate (accelerating in last few days) we will have 234K cases in 1 week & 4 million cases in 2 weeks. To reduce sharply daily % increase we need mass tests & China-style full quarantine/lockdowns NOW!
Bitcoin down 14% in last day to below 9.5K! Ouch! It must hurt to get so rekt so fast! Calling bitcoin a currency - let alone 1000s of other shitcoins - is a joke: they are not a unit of account, they are not a means of payments (5tps) and no stable store of value (-14% in a day)
Crypto is the largest transfer of wealth to a group of the dumbest crooks criminals conmen carnival barkers corrupt cheaters fraudsters zealots sleazebags shitcoiners lunatics on this planet that we will ever witness in human history
That idiot Trump called it a "hoax" a week ago; yesterday he called it a problem that "will go away"; & he wasted two months with almost NO testing when other countries like Korea were testing 10K folks a day; now he shuts down all travel from Europe as this disaster is exploding
After worst market crash in years - market down 8% - & after I explained in detail why we headed to a debt crisis & global recession the CNBC anchors, gaping like stunned mullets, had nothing better to say than calling me Dr Doom! "Am rather Dr Realist!"
NO SAFETY IN CRYPTO Imagine your debit card suddenly stopped working because the executives at your bank were making highrisk trades with your money while you were trying to pay for groceries; that’s roughly analogous to what SBF is accused of pulling off
There is no diff btw FTX’s FTT & Binance’s BNB: they are both vaporware scams backed by NOTHING! As the former collapsed to 0 in days the same should happen to the latter. How much of BNB is float vs. held by Binance? How much of
@binance
assets/liabilities are BNB?
No 1 knows!
Crypto was created by a bunch of greedy kids, that make Gordon Gecko look like a saint, pretending to save the world & end poverty. But all they want is to make money literally out of nowhere. Printing shitcoins out of fiat & finding enuf suckers to buy it. Total Hypocrites!
Nouriel Roubini: bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk.
Elon Musk may be buying it but that doesn’t mean everyone else should follow suit
The fundamental value of Bitcoin is negative given its massive environmental cost.
My FT op-ed: via
@financialtimes
Black Swan: Bolsonaro has been tested & waiting for result but Brazilian press reporting he's positive. So quite possible that both Trump & Pence have it too (& Trump looked awful on TV). If both Trump & Pence incapacitated next 1 in line of command 2 become Prez is Nancy Pelosi!
Bitcoin is the biggest bubble & bust in history. Biggest as up 60X from 3 years before peak. Nasdaq was only 4X, so tiny bubble vs BTC. Even bankrupt South Sea was 8X. More similar to Mississippi (35X) that went bankrupt or Tulip-mania. BTC bust biggest/fastest too. Case rested!
Happy to have a live debate with
@VitalikButerin
. We can agree on a fair moderator that we both agree on, not on biased shills pretending to be pseudo-journalists but who are PR folks for the crypto industry. I have no interest to interact with
@laurashin
1000s crypto folks with ZERO knowledge of money, finance, banking - NO financial literacy - pontificate & clog my feed with the most idiotic statements ever. So I will block these pompous arrogant ignoramus who want to teach me money & call me "old man" after 40yrs of my research
🚁💸💸💰💰🌎🌍🌏💰💸🚁Helicopter drop of $1K 4 each US resident helps not only employed but also children, not working spouses (4K 4 family of 4), partially employed, unemployed, undocumented workers, SME biz owners, contractors, gig & hourly workers, retired folks. Every1 in US
Most of those who did jail for their crimes during the GFC were from Iceland, Spain and Ireland. Only one from the US, a minor trader from Credit Suisse. So the Wall Streeters privatized the gains, socialized the losses and avoided jail time. No wonder angry populism is rising
43 bankers were jailed for their role in global financial crisis of 2007-9. More than half were from just one country (Iceland). None were from the UK. via
@FT
Bubble trouble. Housing bubbles also appearing in many other advanced economies and some emerging markets. The boom and bubble will be eventually followed by a bust and a crash.
US home prices rise at fastest pace in more than 30 years via
@financialtimes
Cramer is a total fucking idiot. He fucked up big time before the GFC being the cheerleader-in-chief of that bubble that then blew up on him & made him a totally shitfaced fool to the world. Now he is peddling crappy shitcoins & he will eventually fall into that crappy cesspool
As I pointed out in my Bloomberg TV interview this morning the Credit Suisse crisis is a “Lehman moment” for European and global markets. “Too big to fail and too big to be saved”. It is not even clear what their various unrealized losses on securities and other assets are.
“‘odd’ that Musk, who has spent months complaining about Twitter’s problem with bot accounts, would use a Twitter poll in which bots could be voting to decide the issue & then assume that the result “reflects some kind of legitimate ‘voice of the people.’”
Cryptocurrencies will be as useless in the metaverse as they are now. Both ideas are about making a few people rich, not about building a decentralised paradise where everyone prospers.
A peaceful crowd on my Bowery hood now chanting "Fuck Donald Trump". This revolt is not just about the murder of George Floyd. The young underclass/precariat - actually mostly white, not just black & latinos - is revolting against the systematic looting of America by plutocrats!
Tales From Crypt-Apocalypse: Bitcoin has lost 70% from the peak; Ethereum 85%; other Top 10 crypto-currencies about 90%; the remaining crypto-zombie-currencies between 95% & 99% of their value. It is a bloody massacre that will continue as almost all of them are worth ZERO!
As I poke fun of these crypto crazies and lunatics they all come out of their shitcoin filled cesspools and hurl nasty insults against me 24/7. So I block them all. And 99% of them are angry white males who are totals life losers. Proves my point on crypto as right wing nuttery
Bitcoin is now almost 40% below its November all time peak. Other Shitcoins much worse. And no hedging of Shitcoins against inflation or risky equities...rather hyper positive correlation
So the cost per transaction of bitcoin is literally $60. So if I were to buy a $3 latte at Starbucks I would have to pay $63 to get it! So the myth of a "Brilliant new technology that reduces the vast fees of legacy financial systems"! turns out to be a Big Fat Lie!
@lawmaster
@Nouriel
The network is processing 90K Bitcoins per day (or 170K transactions), for a daily cost of 1,5K Bitcoins.
The fact that you call these 1,5K Bitcoins “block rewards” instead of “fees” doesn’t change what they are: costs that must be paid by users.
1.6% (or $60 / tx) is ridiculous.
Acceleration of the coronavirus contagion spread looks much faster in US than in Italy/Korea. Only difference between US & Italy/Korea is that latter are honest & test 10000s every day while Trump made sure almost no one got tested for over 2 months as he "likes numbers very low"
My Twitter live discussion of the Coronavirus crisis and its impact on economies, policies and especially financial markets. What is the risk of a Greater Depression? Have markets reached a bottom or is this week’s rally a dead cat bounce?
I am "shocked shocked" to hear that after decades of labor being systematically screwed by capital in America - and inequality being higher than almost anywhere in the world - there is looting of stores! Shocked! Anyone with a brain would have seen this coming as I did months ago
Merging CS & UBS will create a too big to fail monster that is 220% of Swiss GDP. Rather split CS into 3: a safe Swiss retail bank, an asset manager/private wealth unit that has still good franchise value & an IB (new CS First Boston) that may or not fly. You reduce systemic risk
No wonder that both Trump and now Musk tried to bully the Fed to cut rates. They are both kings of highly leveraged debt zombie enterprises and talking their own book
@vincent13031925
Trend is concerning. Fed needs to cut interest rates immediately. They are massively amplifying the probability of a severe recession.
Indeed while Trump and Biden didn't shake hands, Trump kept on barking non stop at Biden for 90 minutes like a rabid attack dog. So we now gotta worry about the health of Biden
I was there in the debate hall. The entire Trump entourage came in w masks, took them off as soon as they sat down, refused to put them on when asked by Cleveland Clinic personnel. Flouting defiantly the law & rules. And Trump shouting only 8-10 feet from Biden for 90 mins. Oy
Worst fires in California history; a force 5 Hurricane threatening Louisiana and Texas; ice sheets in Greenland melting at a fast speed. Is anyone still in denial about global climate change?
Calling this crappy garbage of 1000s of alt-coins - that lost 99% of their value since peak - as "shit-coins" is a grave insult to manure that is a most useful, precious and productive good as fertilizer in agriculture. So apologies to manure for this offensive comparison
If a bank like SVB can go bust in 1 day ANY exchange or financial scheme in the crypto space can go bust faster. They are like banks- massive maturity mismatch & shoddy assets- & don’t have the liquidity/capital, deposit insurance & LOLR option of real banks. Extinction ahead!
Bitcoin and Ether fell on Sunday amid a broader retreat by the cryptocurrency complex in the wake of data showing US inflation hitting a fresh 40-year high
Calling cryptocurrencies as “shitcoins” may be an insult to manure/shit. The latter is very valuable as a natural fertilizer while toxic shitcoins are useless & pollute the environment. Thus their true value isn’t 0; it is rather negative given their negative externalities🤮🤑💩
2018 Shitcoin Hall/Pile of Manure Shame:
💩ADA: -93.9%
💩BTG: -93.7%
💩BCH: -92.6%
....
💩LTC: -85.5%
💩ETH: -81.8%
💩XRP: -81.6%
💩BTC: -70.7%
These only the 2018 losses. From the all time high/peak losses are much worse. For Bitcoin it is 82%. For all other 💩Shicoins 95-99%!
There is still NOT a single application of blockchain - defined as a public, decentralized/distributed, permission-less, trustless ledger technology - that works or is widely used in spite of billions spent on it for a decade now. Most useless and over-hyped technology ever!