Matt Levine runs the " Money Stuff " newsletter, one of the most irreverent and informative guides to the absurdities of the financial world. He seasoned his analyses with humor and a nerdy, confident tone. You know Im good for it: If I dont pay you back, you can sell my Bitcoin and pay yourself back from the proceeds.. Also Gemini Earn, index funds and bored traders quitting. I wrote a story about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. Or something; you might set the margin requirements higher or lower, letting customers borrow 25% or 50% or 95% of the value of their FTT token collateral. 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 . Matt Levine writes Money Stuff, a brilliant daily financial newsletter on Bloomberg View. 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. I love the shtick I do, Elon keeps ruining my life. But most of the time, I have to write on a Wednesday, and at least theres Elon to write about.. You have Customer A who has Bitcoin and wants to borrow dollars, and Customer B who has dollars and wants to borrow Bitcoin. Expert Institute Award for Best Legal Tech Blog It seems somewhat unlikely. Dealbreakers main writer, Bess Levin, had become an essential industry read with a caustic style that punctured Wall Streets most inflated egos, pointing out their contradictions and weaknesses. Tiger Global Slashes Value of Private Tech Bets by Billions, Documents Show. Mayor pete may be a dunce, but he knows how to get money; . Archive - Matt Levine. 2. Terrible. His newsletter, Money Stuff, is one of the most popular on Wall Street with over 150k subscribers. I write the Money Stuff newsletter at Bloomberg Opinion. [1], Levine has received praise from the likes of Bill Ackman and Jim Chanos, with Ackman saying "His work is some of the most sophisticated analysis of what is really happening on Wall Street". I'm also on Twitter and LinkedIn. Levine insists the interruptions werent a big deal. If Mr. Levines column requires the use of a technical term, it is typically accompanied by not just a definition but a full-throated explanation, with practical examples, of how it works. They may be the only entertaining words a financial markets professional reads all day. But it sure has been a distraction! And so, at 33, Mr. Levine sat down to write. Despite having made more money at white-shoe law and Wall Street firms than he does as a writer, Mr. Levine says he is happier now. You can subscribe at this link, or read the archive at this link. You can subscribe at. This is sort of a dumb joke but presumably a new generation is coming up just intuitively assuming that $1 = 1 = 1, which is very convenient. Anyone can read what you share. National Park Service Asks Visitors to Please Stop Licking Toads. "I write a lot about people who have gotten in trouble with the SEC or the Justice Department. articles a month for anyone to read, even non-subscribers! Mr. Levine got the job, paying something north of $50,000. Matt Levine is a finance columnist for Bloomberg Opinion . What is he doing with the money? So Levine was back the next day to write about it. ; What Does It Mean?, in which he discusses generalizations of Bitcoin, such as Ethereum. Customer B owes them to you ultimately youre good for it but you dont have them now. [1] Levine has previously been a lawyer, investment banker, law clerk, and has written for a number of newspapers and financial sites. You have loaned 50 of the Customer As Bitcoins to the Customer Bs, and $1 million of the Customer Bs dollars to the Customer As. Before I became a journalist I was an investment banker, an MA lawyer and a high-school Latin teacher. "Elon, Matt Levine really wants you to keep changing your mind on Twitter . Mr. Levines favorite subjects include insider trading statutes, bond-market liquidity and the ubiquity of securities fraud, but his columns are never boring. The approximately 150,000 people who subscribe to Money Stuff, a free newsletter written by Matt Levine, a columnist at Bloomberg, found an email in their inboxes with the subject line "There . As you can review in our publicly filed, audited financial statements, we hold customer assets 1:1. 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. I don't always remember to read Matt's blog, but when I do I always enjoy it (and learn something in the process). It is not a plot-driven novel. Money and stuff. Hovnanian will refinance its Jan 12. Each of them is overcollateralized you only lend Customer A half the value of her Bitcoin, and you only lend Customer B half the value of his dollars so you feel pretty safe. . 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. 4. Bloomberg: Balance of Power focuses on the politics and policiesbeing shaped by the agenda of President Biden's administration. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. (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.) Matts the perfect complement to Bess, Felix Salmon, another financial blogger, wrote in October 2011. By 2011, Mr. Levine had decided to leave Goldman. You have to pay Customer B out of your own capital, and you dont get it back from Customer A. Youve just lost money. 4. The way it makes money is that each time its customers trade stocks (or options, or cryptocurrencies), Robinhood sends their order to a market maker, and the market maker pays Robinhood a tiny fee for the right to execute the order. Similarly, I find a lot of good one-off recommendations on HN; is the hit ratio 100%, or even 50%, goodness no. Sorry, comments are closed for this post. Now, he's accelerating his move from player to team owner. Bloomberg: Balance of Power focuses on the politics and policies being shaped by the agenda of President Biden's administration. 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. Dont go put all your money in Coinbase because I said so or anything! @matt . I write about finance for Bloomberg Opinion. It wasnt the case that the cost of a barrel had fallen to some scary-low number. But where do you get the money that you are lending to the customer? Matt Levine, the author of Money Stuff, is an oddball exception. 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. [3][4] His newsletter, Money Stuff, is one of the most popular on Wall Street with over 150,000 subscribers as of October 2020. A group of fans once made themselves T-shirts bearing the text of one of his tweets about cryptocurrencies. Also a Twitter markdown and a SPAC CFO YOLOs GME. The SEC may have more power over airlines than Secretary Buttigieg.However the SEC has not (yet) gone after Southwest. 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. 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. [1][4], In 2011, Levine started writing about economics and finance for the financial news site Dealbreaker. 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. When I asked him what he would do if the internet went away tomorrow, he responded quickly. Other Stuff. 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. DLA Piper > The Legal 500 Rankings Corporate and commercial > Corporate and commercial: Birmingham Tier 1 Known for its 'excellent transactional capabilities', the Birmingham Today's Master Minds: Mark "The Beast" Labbett, LaKedra Pam, Ryan Chaffee. It is called The Crypto Story. Money and stuff. It makes for a tricky decision for Zhao, known in the crypto world as CZ: Follow through with rescuing his onetime top rival and shoulder the financial and regulatory burdens, or let FTX crumble and sort through the potential wreckage? 2. He left that profession for law school and became a mergers and acquisitions lawyer for the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange in March, as the coronavirus continued to spread. Receive a summary of the day's top tech newsdistilled into one email. You might just say no, thats dumb, Bitcoin is volatile, buying $10,000 of Bitcoin is plenty of excitement. (In fact Coinbase shut down margin trading in 2020.) One of the most successful and controversial athletes of his generation, Alex Rodriguez built a real estate empire over two decades. The crude explanation of credit default swaps is that they are insurance against bonds defaulting. [1], Levine has also written for The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Billfold, and the Planet Money blog. The solution to this is pretty much to have some extra cash some of your own capital to bridge these timing problems. By on December 16, 2021, 10:24 am. FTX issues a token called FTT. Hes a very smart guy who is very much not a lawyer, and that is very fruitful.. The worst outcome is that you dont have enough capital, you go bankrupt, and Customer B does not get his money back. Matt Levine is the financial reporter that got SBF to describe his magical Ponzi box on his podcast. the SEC doesn't do that stuff. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk sold at least $3.95 billion of the electric-vehicle makers shares just days after closing his buyout of Twitter Inc. Musk unloaded 19.5 million shares, according to regulatory filings on Tuesday in New York, his first disposals since August. He delights in Musk, actually! A bond plus CDS should be a (credit-)risk-free combination. Coinbase says: Your funds are your funds, and your crypto is your crypto: Coinbase maintains internal systems, like a bank or a broker. We will never repurpose your funds: We do not lend or take any action with your assets, unless you specifically instruct us to. Are all those debts coming due? By this standard, the last week of January 2021 was incredibly, incredibly good for Robinhood, an amazingly perfect week. bloomberg.com. Also GTX claims trading, Goldman golfing and Razzlekhan. 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. 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. My life has not been ruined by having to write about Elon Musk on Saturdays, the former mergers and acquisitions lawyer told me. Here's a recap of the clues on Master Minds (Season 3) for Wednesday, January 11, 2023 with host Brooke Burns. 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. I dont want to sell my Bitcoin, because I am a true believer and also do not want to realize gains for tax purposes. The more people who sign up for accounts, and the more they trade, the happier Robinhood is. It read like a bedtime story about West Texas Intermediate Crude. In 2007, he took a position at Goldman Sachs, applying his knowledge of corporate law to the financial markets. He is doing exactly what he has long wanted to do. If it's a $100 bond, you should get $100 back, no matter what. 2: Dont borrow if you run a crypto business. But then if the value of FTT drops to zero, you have nothing. Lets start with Coinbase. It starts from that basic premise and builds from there, and I love that format, and I love that ambition for writing about complicated topics. Because Bitcoin is such a recent invention, its possible to start with the whitepaper and build from there to the major crypto shenanigans you see today. Your accounts show that you owe clients 100 Bitcoins and $2 million and 150,000 FTT, and they owe you back 100 Bitcoins and $2 million, and you have 150,000 FTT of collateral, so everything balances. Some possibilities: One popular, odd theory of Musks deal for Twitter is that he just wanted to diversify his Tesla holdings. Then he starts to write. Also SBF's Substack and premium bond taxation. 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. Part of the problem was that he couldnt really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. One is that FTX is an exchange for levered traders, offering products like perpetual futures and leveraged tokens that build in margin lending. Never use a token you created as collateral suggests, to me, that FTX accepted its FTT token as collateral, probably from Alameda, probably in exchange for borrowing assets that it owes to customers. 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.. If youre worried about that, you should take your money out of FTX before the crash. But Mr. Levine was never a high roller. 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.. 16. It was like this long, Matt-type silence, and then kind of a sigh, and then: OK, Mr. Shipley recalled. Levine is known for his humorous, witty, deadpan writing style. I just hope he doesnt get poached by some deep-pocketed mainstream news organization which will end up stifling the very thing hes best at.. Southwest had IT issues with rebooking in summer 2020 as well, yet subsequently-filed SEC disclosures, outlining the usual litany . This sounds like a bad business model: The bank needs to pay for real estate and tellers and vaults, and it is not doing anything with your money. The other is that FTX is closely associated with a hedge fund called Alameda Research. 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 novelist Gary Shteyngart describes him as the least offensive person in finance.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times. In general it should not be possible to bankrupt an investment bank by shorting its stock. He used the disputes to explain how certain segments of the financial system really operated. ext. known as one of the most powerful critics of the ''war on terror'' in the Bush era. Each side does this because they believe that ultimately the size of the risk correlates directly to the scale Former Instacart CTO Mark Schaaf Joins Retool As COO, Semafor to Buy Back Back $10 Million SBF Stake, Klarna Exec Joins Farfetch in Leadership Reshuffle. Thanks! On April 20, something occurred that was unprecedented in the history of financial markets: The price of oil went negative. My goal is to give you the knowledge and the tools that will empower you to be a better investor. Also gambling on redemption and customer shrugs. Coinbase always holds customer assets 1:1. Robinhood both increased its future value by signing up a lot of customers, and increased its present profits by extracting a lot of money from them each day. It might be a reason for the price of FTT to go down, if you think that Alameda has too much of it and might need to sell it. 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