There was another bank employee who was also named Matt Levine, a lawyer who sometimes worked on the same deals. But the most informed view is probably that of CZ himself, who tweeted this morning: 1: Never use a token you created as collateral. You can subscribe at this link, or read the archive at this link. In 2007, he took a position at Goldman Sachs, applying his knowledge of corporate law to the financial markets. Mr. Levine wasnt always a darling of business media and finance Twitter. Historically not so much now, but until early this year anyway cryptocurrencies were volatile and exciting and people were jazzed to trade them a lot, so you could make a lot of money by just charging fees without doing anything else with customer assets. Binance is unlikely to follow through on its takeover of FTX, according to the person familiar, who wasnt authorized to publicly discuss the matter. Founders sell business risk in exchange for the cash they need to take bigger risks; venture capitalists buy that risk hoping it will one day transmute into reward. Log in to access all of your BLAW products. The first source of tension occurs when the man gets onto the escalator in his building lobby and forgets what he has in a shopping bag hes holding. Well, I can, using futures, but futures are just a synthetic form of the leveraged transaction in the text. He left that profession for law school and became a mergers and acquisitions lawyer for the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. His column discusses current events in corporate finance and markets, with an insightful, nuanced lens and a dry wit. Having closed the deal for Twitter and spent a few days wreaking havoc, Musk has gotten bored and moved on to some other expensive hobby, which we will hear about in due time. 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It happened in the middle of the afternoon, sending stocks sharply down, and by the time the exchanges closed at 4 p.m., many financial news outlets were still struggling to explain why. Oil is voluminous and oozy and poisonous and flammable and smelly, Mr. Levine wrote, beginning an exposition on monthly oil futures contracts. Three Arrows, FTX/Alameda, bribes and bonuses. tt , , , ' , J with the who s who of the sailing scene? Welcome to Matt Levine by me, Matt Levine. Matt Levine is a finance columnist for Bloomberg News. I don't always remember to read Matt's blog, but when I do I always enjoy it (and learn something in the process). Hovnanian will refinance its Feb 11, 2021. I type really fast! Levine says. But sometimes market moves are catastrophic, and in particular, sometimes securities broker-dealers and crypto exchanges will have run on the bank risks. Its neurotic, commenting on the nature of modernity itself. As Matt describes it in his bio, he writes about the financial industry on the internet, an Bloomberg's web site requires a subscription but you can also get the Money Stuff articles as an occasional email.It arrives at most once per day. The last time Ilooked at Yahoo, in December, I calculated that the after-tax equity value of its actual businesses, outside of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, was about $1.7 billion. Addded Sep 28, 2018. Sure, he was at Sesame Place, the theme park just outside Philadelphia, with his kids when Musk announced his Twitter bid, and then stayed up until midnight that night to get his newsletter, Money Stuff, out. But in theory a cryptocurrency exchange could work that way, and at a high level of generality Coinbase sort of does. If one of the banks main assets is its own stock is a leveraged bet on its own stock then it is easy to bankrupt it by shorting its stock. Everyone knows this, which is why crypto exchanges and securities broker-dealers, who have the same basic business model spend most of their time thinking about risk management. To contact the editor responsible for this story: If you read an upper-level math textbook, it starts from the dumbest thing, like, This is what a number is, he says. (The best measure of his audiences devotion may not be his 112,000 Twitter followers, but rather the 3,000 that follow @MattLevineBot, a fan account describing itself as a bot that mimics his writing style.) articles a month for anyone to read, even non-subscribers! but it is a lot like stock in FTX. EDF Employees Challenge Chairmans Role in $10 Billion Buyout. And since you were not visiting clients in person during the pandemic, or sitting in your office, you might have been a bit more inclined to use your personal cell phone to communicate. Matt is one of the best writers today chronicling the ironies, paradoxes and absurdities of modern business and finance, wrote one of them, the hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, in an email. Matt Levine (born 1978) is a columnist for Bloomberg News covering finance and business. ext. Matt Levine. Has it been borrowing elsewhere against FTT? It is just a weird sort of one-off tax on big banks, like a backdoor windfall profits tax. Matt Levine Matt Levine Matt Levine. His work is some of the most sophisticated analysis of what is really happening on Wall Street, said Bill Ackman, another billionaire fund manager. Mr. Levine writes about Wall Street in a way that makes its denizens feel as if he is writing for them. And in fact Coinbase does have other revenue models besides charging trading fees, some of which are more run-vulnerable than what I say in the text. You have 100 Customer Bs who are short Bitcoin on margin: They each have $20,000 in their account and owe you 0.5 Bitcoin. Christine Weaver . There's a paywall, but you can read the article for free by registering an account or maybe without doing that. The tone, though, is anything but pedantic. I mean, theres a little bit of differentiation, but not too much. "[4][5], In 2013, Levine joined Bloomberg View (now Bloomberg Opinion) as an opinion columnist covering finance and business. FTX's Balance Sheet Was Bad - by Matt Levine. Elon does some shit every day, and thats how I get the newsletter done, Levine says. Mr. Levine was born in 1978 and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. . In the olden days the values were all different! His column discusses current events in corporate finance and market. If you are a crypto exchange, this is a nice opportunity. But the timing problem is also connected to a real economic risk. ChatGPT Sounds Exactly Like Us. National Park Service Asks Visitors to Please Stop Licking Toads. Deep-dive into topics like startups and autonomous vehicles with our top reporters and other executives. Now lets add a few more FTX-specific elements. You come to the bank with $100 in paper bills, and you deposit it in the bank, and the bank takes your paper bills and sticks them in an envelope with your name on it. The essential tech news of the moment. Bloomberg: Balance of Power focuses on the politics and policies being shaped by the agenda of President Biden's administration. And often I will have made fun of them, and they'll be like, 'That was p If you own a bond, and you buy CDS, and the bond defaults, you should be made whole. The footnotes, he said, are the only way Mr. Levine can convey so much to his readers in a space as small as an email. Also Gemini Earn, index funds and bored traders quitting. A coverage banker an investment banker whose job was to know companies and advise them on financial topics would bring me to a meeting with the chief financial officer of one of her companies to talk about convertible bonds. 2. Microsoft is preparing to lay off thousands of staff in multiple divisions starting as soon as Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. 102 Production . Coinbase always holds customer assets 1:1. Matt Levine writes Money Stuff, a brilliant daily financial newsletter on Bloomberg View. Receive a summary of the day's top tech newsdistilled into one email. And in M&A, everything happens on the weekend. Within hours, he was forced to reconsider. The first part of my discussion of Matt Levine's The Crypto Story covered the first two of its four chapters:. Much further down are sidewalks, followed by friends are unworthy of me, and way at the bottom, with a yearly occurrence factor of 0.5, birds regurgitate food and feed young with it and Kant, Immanuel.. Money and stuff. This makes them vulnerable to runs, Diamond-Dybvig, Its a Wonderful Life, etc., everyone knows all this. Please, Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and, To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit. It would actually have enough money to give all the customers their money back, because it kept all the customers money in their own envelopes the whole time. His newsletter, Money Stuff, is one of the most popular on Wall Street with over 150,000 subscribers as of October 2020. 3. Some of Mr. Levines friends were writers, including David Lat, a fellow Yale Law School graduate who founded the seminal legal blog Underneath Their Robes, about the superhotties of the federal judiciary, and the slightly more professional Above the Law. He clerked for a federal appeals court judge, and put in time as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. His newsletter, Money Stuff, is one of the most popular on Wall Street with over 150k subscribers. Similarly, I find a lot of good one-off recommendations on HN; is the hit ratio 100%, or even 50%, goodness no. The popular messaging app Telegram has brought in so much money from a small group of private investors that it is calling off a planned sale of cryptocurrency to the wider investing public, according to a person familiar with the matter. Archive. Telegram Group Inc. has pulled in $1.7 billion by selling newly created cryptocurrency to fewer than 200 . The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - "Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters." (archive; also btw What Is Code? Red Flags Are (Mostly) in the Eye of the Beholder, By Aaron Harris · Jan. 18, 2023 9:00 AM PST. Also a Twitter markdown and a SPAC CFO YOLOs GME. He just has so much else going on. Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance. [1][4], In 2011, Levine started writing about economics and finance for the financial news site Dealbreaker. You Are Here:Home Economy, Financial System, Knowledge Management, Legal Research Money Stuff by Matt Levine, Bloomberg, Money Stuff: Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance. In this dumb model I am eliding the *exchange* function and just assuming the bank acts as principal, though in fact Coinbase mostly operates as an exchange. Well, you have to borrow it too. [1], Levine has also written for The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Billfold, and the Planet Money blog. We will never repurpose your funds: We do not lend or take any action with your assets, unless you specifically instruct us to. He fetched his copy of The Histories and read it to me.). Clients of WPP-owned GroupM, the worlds largest ad-buying firm, have cut their spending on Twitter by between 40% and 50% since Elon Musk took control of the company in late October, according to people familiar with the matter. The problem is that FTX took its customers money and traded it for a pile of magic beans, and now the beans are worthless and theres a huge hole in the balance sheet. Futures, risk, fraud, securities fraud and Wirefraud. Yet he gives the same impression of personalization to readers who know little about finance. Copyright 2002-2023 BeSpacific LLC. Technology's news site of record. Also SBFs Substack and premium bond taxation. But that was kind of fun! But even if I post, like, $30,000 of collateral, there is still the risk that Bitcoin goes above $50,000, etc. You won't have to worry about missing anything. It was like this long, Matt-type silence, and then kind of a sigh, and then: OK, Mr. Shipley recalled. The way it works is roughly that you open an account and send dollars to Coinbase, and then you tell Coinbase Id like to buy some Bitcoin with those dollars, and Coinbase buys Bitcoin and holds on to it for you and charges you a fee for that transaction. Then he went to Yale Law. Here is my author page, possibly. Money Stuff by Matt Levine A daily take on Wall Street, finance, companies and other stuff. Here is a link. Then it sticks the envelope in a vault, and if at any point you ask for your money back, it opens the vault and hands you your envelope. Matt Levine in Prospect Park in August. Levine took several months off in 2020 for parental leave after the birth of his second child. Bloomberg offered Mr. Levine stability and a larger platform. Also WWE governance, VC shame and the origins of the jury. This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. If all of the banks customers do this every day, then the bank makes plenty of money to pay for real estate and tellers and vaults and executive bonuses, without doing anything else with your money. 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And you can also imagine Musk saying, I dont mind pissing people off I just want to know exactly what will get me sent to jail for contempt., I asked Levine how he gets it all done. I wrote a story about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. Money and stuff. I'm hoping to rely on loyal readers rather than erratic ads. Here's a recap of the clues on Master Minds (Season 3) for Wednesday, January 11, 2023 with host Brooke Burns. The reason for a run on FTX is that you think that Alameda is, in my terminology, Customer C. The reason for a run on FTX is if you think that FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange. . . But then one day a customer comes to you and says I have $10,000, but I am really bullish on Bitcoin, so I would like to buy $20,000 worth of Bitcoin. The US Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have concluded that thats illegal, and fined all the banks for doing it, because they all did it. It is a death spiral. Used with permission. ext. Never miss an update. Each weekday, Mr. Levine, 42, wakes up at 5 in the morning. One day Customer A might come in, pay off her dollar loan, and ask to take her Bitcoin back. I wrote a story about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. Coindesk reported on Alamedas FTT exposure, and then Changpeng CZ Zhao, the founder of Binance Holdings Ltd., the largest crypto exchange, raised eyebrows by tweeting that Binance would sell its FTT holdings due to recent revelations. People worried that this would tank the price of FTT and put pressure on FTX, so they started withdrawing money from FTX. Twitters ad business is not recovering. Also gambling on redemption and customer shrugs. Today's Master Minds: Mark "The Beast" Labbett, LaKedra Pam, Ryan Chaffee. But where do you get the money that you are lending to the customer? Mr. Levine deconstructs the topics in a way that is less like a conventional business column and more like he is providing an introductory course on the subject. "I write a lot about people who have gotten in trouble with the SEC or the Justice Department. Also the fact that Customer C had all that FTT in the first place is not a great sign. That 0.5 Bitcoin is, in the general case, held by Coinbase; it has possession of the Bitcoin. Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone writer, who was famous for excoriating defenders of neoliberalism and likening Goldman Sachs to a ''great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity . It wasnt the case that the cost of a barrel had fallen to some scary-low number. Before long, Mr. Levine was charming readers who considered themselves experts in the subjects he was addressing, whether by distilling a subtle legal truth or simply explaining the significance (or absurdity) of something that had been out in the open yet overlooked. Ordinarily the way that you will borrow it is by putting up the customers Bitcoin as collateral to your lender, just as the customer puts up its Bitcoin as collateral to you. I write the Money Stuff newsletter at Bloomberg Opinion. There, he wrote about the "deals, scandals, complexities and personalities of the financial services industry." I'm also on Twitter and LinkedIn. My goal is to give you the knowledge and the tools that will empower you to be a better investor. Martin Shkreli tells Do Kwon Jail is not that bad.. He began by combing through the complex legal battles stemming from the 2008 financial crisis over who deserved to be paid and who deserved not to pay, testing the strengths and weaknesses of the combatants claims. He is an experienced journalist covering Wall Street, and is also one of the few people in the press who can both understand and explain complicated economic issues! Yes. Many banks and financial institutions use customer funds for commercial purposes including lending and trading, meaning that they often hold only a fraction of their customer assets at any given time. One other point here is that if this is the story, then it is not a liquidity crisis but a solvency one. This makes FTT kind of like stock in FTX: The higher FTXs profits are, the higher the price of FTT will be. Zhao himself admits there was no master plan to take over FTX. Happy Thanksgiving! Also the Celsius bankruptcy estate and the FTX risk engine. I was writing more about the gossipy side of Wall Street and more the culture of it, and I thought it was a great opportunity for him to use his incredible knowledge of how the business works. Mr. Levine regrouped. In general it should not be possible to bankrupt an investment bank by shorting its stock. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. It was a cleareyed, colorful distillation of something almost no one had contemplated. His answer, at least for now, is that the financial hole appears too deep. Stock Sniper Might Have Pumped and Dumped. Jun 23, 2021. Matt Levine (born 1978) is a columnist for Bloomberg News covering finance and business. BeSpacific - 3rd Place. Matt Levine. It read like a bedtime story about West Texas Intermediate Crude. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. All of the knowledge that Matt has is available to him at all times, Mr. Mystal said. There is even an RSS. [1] Levine has previously been a lawyer, investment banker, law clerk, and has written for a number of newspapers and financial sites. Each day, Levine publishes Money Stuff, a widely read, free newsletter. The mysterious outage of Tweetbot and other third-party Twitter clients that began Thursday night was an intentional suspension, according to internal messages viewed by The Information. The idea of leaving Wall Street for a precariously capitalized blog would probably strike a lot of financiers as romantic, quaint, even idiotic. Real banks take deposits but dont keep the money in envelopes; they lend it out. So the more people who sign up for Robinhoods service, and the more they trade, and the more volatile the stocks that they trade are, the more money Robinhood makes. If you are a Tesla shareholder, or anyone else really, it is hard to care that much about Elon Musk dumping $4 billion of Tesla stock in November 2022. Anyone can read what you share. Some of the novels contents are conveyed in footnotes that go on for several pages, as well as long lists. Jan 12. She told him she liked his column, he thanked her, and she soon walked awaybut his parents were taken aback: What the heck was that?, Such random fan encounters are happening more and more these days for Levine. You wont have to worry about missing anything. Finance journalism isnt known for its writerly voices. Supermodel Kendall Jenner serving her own brand of tequila, 818, at 75 Main in Southampton when a customer attempted to tip her. Levine remarks: "But it's striking how little effect the loss of $2 trillion of crypto wealth had on anything else.". No actual bank works that way. 2016, 2017 and 2018 6. On April 20, something occurred that was unprecedented in the history of financial markets: The price of oil went negative. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. Matt Levine, the author of Money Stuff, is an oddball exception. Twitter says user growth has picked up since Elon Musk took over. Play in New Window. They may be the only entertaining words a financial markets professional reads all day. I dont know, but let me speculate a little bit. The attributes of this token are, like, it entitles you to some discounts and stuff, but the main attribute is that FTX periodically uses a portion of its profits to buy back FTT tokens. His newsletter is Money Stuff. Matt Levine's Money Stuff: Crypto Banks Owe Themselves Money Deglobalization Drives 2023 Dealmaking: Chris Hughes This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial . Levine seems fond of Musk. To contact the author of this story:Matt Levine at mlevine51@bloomberg.net, To contact the editor responsible for this story:Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net. Now, he's accelerating his move from player to team owner. Also FTX accounting and perks, hung debt and enterprise blockchain. Matt Levine is a columnist for Bloomberg News covering finance and business. I encouraged him to use his own voice, Ms. Levin said. The whole extended . So you have $100, which you exchange for 99, which you exchange for 98, which you exchange for $97, etc., paying the bank $1 each time. If you are a crypto exchange, you might issue your own crypto token. We have no gating for client loan recalls or withdrawals. ; What Does It Mean?, in which he discusses generalizations of Bitcoin, such as Ethereum. 00:00. But it would not go out of business that minute. The other is that FTX is closely associated with a hedge fund called Alameda Research. . Here is the podcast where I said to Sam Bankman-Fried "You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good.". And then if one day every single customer walked into the bank at the same time and said we would like our money back, the bank would just hand them all their envelopes. For starters, Binance executives quickly found themselves staring into a financial black hole -- a gap between liabilities and assets at FTX thats probably in the billions, and possibly more than $6 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. And that is a run-proof business. So how could this happen? Your accounts show that you owe clients 100 Bitcoins and $2 million, and that they owe you back 50 Bitcoins and $1 million, and you have 50 Bitcoins and $1 million on hand, so everything balances. If the price of Bitcoin falls by 90%, Customer B will be thrilled. It was like a combination of everything Mr. Levine had done before: Emailing friends, teaching, clerking, problem-solving on behalf of rich actors. He began his post-collegiate career as a Latin teacher, then worked as a lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz before advancing to Goldman. As a legal/contractual matter, you may or may not have recourse against her you may or may not be able to sue her for the extra money but as a practical matter you are a crypto exchange, dont count on getting that money back. the SEC doesn't do that stuff. Apple announces updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M2 Pro or M2 Max, Wi-Fi 6E, 8K HDMI, up to 96GB of RAM, and more, starting at $1,999 and $2,499 Apple today announced the next-generation 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with faster 5nm-based M2 Pro and M2 Max chips 7. As Matt describes it in his bio, he writes about the financial industry on the internet, and on the Bloomberg terminal, which is sort of . Any institutional lending activity at Coinbase is at the discretion of the customer and backed by collateral. You have Customer A who has Bitcoin and wants to borrow dollars, and Customer B who has dollars and wants to borrow Bitcoin. Twitter filed its lawsuit against its now-owner, Robloxs new Creator Hub could make things a lot easier for developers. It would go out of business in fairly short order. Microsofts expected investment in OpenAI, destined to be one of the biggest startup stories of the year, comes with a whole lot of strings attached. Levine's coverage and analysis of the 2012 JPMorgan Chase trading loss was featured in the Columbia Journalism Review's anthology "The Best Business Writing 2013. Also Elon Musk theories and insurance underwriting. (By dollars, for a crypto exchange, I mostly mean dollar-denominated stablecoins, though potentially also dollars.) If everyone is worried about that, they will all take their money out of FTX. You just have to call up Customer C and say hey we need all those dollars and Bitcoins back. But Customer C will not want to give you back all those valuable dollars and Bitcoins in exchange for now-worthless FTT. After graduating from Harvard in 2000, with a major in classics, Mr. Levine taught Latin at a high school in a Boston suburb. Twitter Manager: Daily Revenue Has Dropped 40%, 500 Top Advertisers Have LeftRead Now. Levine was also a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Depends how you define "Blog Post". And so, at 33, Mr. Levine sat down to write. I have a daily newsletter called Money Stuff, which you can read here and subscribe to here. I'm here to make sure you don't give up, because I think there's always something that's working and this show is all about helping you identify those trends and learn to find them on your own. It is not actually stock in FTX in fact FTX is a company and has stock and venture capitalists bought it, etc. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. chris@latitude38.com . Never miss an update. Money and stuff. He wants things to work in an engineer-y way, and he butts up against things that run in a lawyer-y way. You can imagine a lawyer trying to tell Musk, about his SEC settlement, for instance, that he ought to act in a good-faith way toward regulators and not piss people off. An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. @matt . All Rights Reserved, By submitting your email, you agree to our. Or equivalently a customer comes to you and says I have $20,000 of Bitcoin in my account, and I need some cash this month. Matt Levine would like you to know that Elon Musk does not actually ruin all of his vacations. So much business is about personal relationships, and texting and WhatsApp can feel more personal than your firm email account. Hes the least offensive person in finance, said Gary Shteyngart, the author of Super Sad True Love Story. When Mr. Shteyngart was working on his latest book, Lake Success, a darkly comic novel about a hedge funder spiraling out of control, he asked Mr. Levine to review a draft for accuracy. If you go to an investment bank and say lend me $1 billion, and I will post $2 billion of your stock as collateral, you are messing with very dark magic and they will say no. Nobody cares very much about how culpable each bank is, or how many bad messages it sent. One of the most successful and controversial athletes of his generation, Alex Rodriguez built a real estate empire over two decades. Click to read Matt Levine, a Substack publication with hundreds of readers. I dont really take vacations. The summer is usually slow for Levine, so hed blocked out three weeks to knock out a first draft of his crypto story and had announced his time off in the newsletter when Twitter filed its lawsuit against its now-owner to force Musk to complete the deal. He structured derivatives agreements that let companies and other Goldman clients buy and sell stocks using a variety of methods meant to help them reduce their taxes or get a better price. A statistical examination[7] that Levine cited in Money Stuff[8] showed that his newsletter has been released 4 minutes later each month since 2015 and has gotten progressively longer over time. @matt_levine + Get alerts for Matt Levine Robinhood Markets Inc. is in the business of getting people to trade stock (and options, and cryptocurrencies) on their phones. By 2011, Mr. Levine had decided to leave Goldman. The business model of real-estate companies is pretty much, you borrow a lot of money, you use it to buy buildings, and you rent out space in the buildings to tenants. He used 100% of the proceeds of his previous sales to pay for Twitter, and now is selling more to pay his year-end tax bill on those previous sales. A Columnist Makes Sense of Wall Street Like None Other (See Footnote), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/business/matt-levine-bloomberg.html, Matt Levine in Prospect Park in August. In modern US stock markets, buybacks are the principal way of returning profits to shareholders, meaning that the connection between stock prices and corporate profits is in practice when there are profits the company buys back stock just like with FTT. S&P. When I was an investment banker, one thing that I did was pitch convertible bond offerings to companies. Mr. Levine tried to write like that, with snarky punch lines, and failed. It actually went below zero, meaning there were traders out there who would pay you to own oil. If, say, the operator of the biggest crypto exchange gently raises one eyebrow and says FTT, eh? that can be enough to topple FTX. colleen@latitude38.com. JPMorgan Says Frank Was Fraud. Google Clouds Top U.S. You keep the other 50 Bitcoins and $1 million as collateral. I felt both that the job was bad and that I was bad at it, he said. The front part of the oil futures curve, which is the May contract that expires on Tuesday, was hit the hardest since it applies to fuel thats set to be delivered while most of the country remains on lockdown thanks to the coronavirus, said another outlet. In college, at Harvard, Mr. Levine began writing emails to his friends that were leavened by footnotes. You take some of Customer As Bitcoin and lend it to Customer B, and you take some of Customer Bs dollars and lend them to Customer A. Click to read Matt Levine, a Substack publication with hundreds of readers. It took Mr. Levine exactly one week to find his voice. Before the price of Bitcoin drops too far, you will be calling up Customer A for more margin, and if she doesnt answer the phone you will liquidate her position to pay back the loan you made. Matt Levine is a finance columnist for Bloomberg Opinion . Learn more about a Bloomberg Law subscription. There has been a blow-up this week on the internet about Facebook's apps. Thank you! High up is brushing tongue, a thought that occurred 150.0 times per year, and earplugs, at 100.0 times per year. Remarkably, Mr. Levines piece was written more than an hour before the market went haywire. Everybody used WhatsApp and now everybody writes checks. But then if the value of FTT drops to zero, you have nothing. Coinbase Global Inc. runs a cryptocurrency exchange. Also private-market marks, ransomware ethics, Coinbase KYC and Celsius crypto ownership. Billionaires read Money Stuff. Hes a very smart guy who is very much not a lawyer, and that is very fruitful.. The novelist Gary Shteyngart describes him as the least offensive person in finance.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times. But selling billions of dollars of Tesla stock to fund a weird quest to buy Twitter would I mean, be a distraction at least. The show's format pits 3 contestants against . I used to write at Dealbreaker. Archive - Matt Levine. It is called The Crypto Story. Bloomberg: Balance of Power focuses on the politics and policiesbeing shaped by the agenda of President Biden's administration. Levine has previously been a lawyer, investment banker, law clerk, and has written for a number of newspapers and financial sites. By on December 16, 2021, 10:24 am. Conceivably, in theory, the latter price (what youd pay to not have oil now) could exceed the former (what youd pay to have oil eventually), leading to negative spot prices.. It is an FTT whale, and FTT is now worthless. I write the Money Stuff newsletter at Bloomberg Opinion. Download. You have one Customer C who says hi I would like to borrow 50 Bitcoins and $1 million, I will secure that loan with 150,000 FTT, each of which is worth $20.. Also profitable nonprofits, FTX assets and WWE governance. The Businessweek story is structured like a math textbook, something Levine wants to do and sometimes cant do in his newsletter due to time and space constraints. Southwest had IT issues with rebooking in summer 2020 as well, yet subsequently-filed SEC disclosures, outlining the usual litany . One is that FTX is an exchange for levered traders, offering products like perpetual futures and leveraged tokens that build in margin lending. And all of this is self-fulfilling: If you are worried about FTXs business, then the price of FTT should go down. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange in March, as the coronavirus continued to spread. Tyson Foods CFO Arrest Adds to Governance Challenges for Board. Eventually he called CZ himself, and they announced a non-binding letter of intent for Binance to acquire FTX and make customers whole. How Is That a Good Thing? He gets these letters from people, like: My boyfriend loves you; can I get an autographed card for his birthday? said his friend, the journalist Mary Childs. GSO had bought CDS protection that would pay off if Hovnanian defaulted. Stay up-to-date. He was of the place, and he found its workings genuinely interesting. Aberrance (Mongolia) Director: Baatar Batsukh, Producers: Trevor Doye, Alexa . 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