Exchange Invest Weekend 2886: Boston Tea Party Myths
Lunar telescopes. Key CCP connections. Boston Tea Party? Fake news! — & why the 3rd Reich had worrying precepts for the Ivy League in 2024.
Exchange Invest is a unique information resource combining the day’s stories in a newsletter for investors in exchanges/financial markets infrastructure.
Exchange Invest was founded by former exchange CEO and author of the first bestselling book of fintech (“Capital Market Revolution!” FT 1999) Patrick L Young. Monday through Friday our daily paid subscriber email discusses the business of bourses of all kinds across the world.
On this day in 2004, French prosecutors launched a money-laundering probe into the alleged transfers of $11.5 million dollars to accounts held by the wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
IN BIGWORLD
From Exchange Invest 2822–2824: Tuesday-Thursday, February 6th-8th:
There’s a mega meltdown looming as a post-QE world starts to hit over-extended property developers and related holders, especially of offices. Stories abound of US blocks (especially in NYC) now being repriced at 50% of the original value ascribed to their loans…
Almost $1.5 trillion of US commercial property loans need to be refunded by the end of next year, at an average legacy rate of 3.97% but starting in likely refunding rates nearer 7.5%.
B-grade office blocks in New York and San Francisco are selling at 60–70% discounts to where they were…
It’s worth noting a major culprit for office valuations is the permeating “work from home” (WFH) culture. In Asia, offices are close to 100% full. In the US, barely a third: 34.1%, of workers turn up on Fridays. For offices in Silicon Valley (San Jose), that’s even lower at 28.2% and barely one in four turns up in New York: 27.4%.
Meanwhile in European commercial property, it’s far from easy going. The staggering collapse of Rene Benko’s Signa empire amounts to top-drawer bankruptcy p**n. With the firm reduced to selling off company branded snow globes and doormats, European banks are reckoned to be owed around $10 billion. A looming fire sale may include iconic properties (or significant stakes therein including Berlin’s KaDeWe department store and the stunning Chrysler building in New York. London’s Selfridges has already passed 100% into the hands of a Thai co-investor with Benko himself in personal bankruptcy and out of his company.
…and that’s just one firm. The notion it will be alone in a world which has gone from zero to 500 bps and beyond as QE is finally removed, strikes me as tricky to reconcile.
Meanwhile, the latest casualty of Benko’s binge was the CEO of Bank Julius Baer whose CEO Philipp Rickenbacher quit last week while the bank has written off a half billion due to a single name event (AKA Benko) which provoked the closure of their private debt division to boot.
PS Saturday 10th Feb: Canary Wharf office takes 60% hit in distressed sale — Five Churchill Place, a former Bear Stearns office owned by Chinese investor Cheung Kei Group, was placed in receivership by a lending syndicate and has now been sold for 110 million GBP after being purchased in 2017 for 260 million.
IPO-VID LIVESTREAM
NEXT WEEK TUESDAY: Season 22: Episode 06
IPO-VID Livestream 132
Guest: Rafael Plata
Tuesday, February 13th: 1700 UK, 1800 CET, 1200 EST
“Clearing Europe — with Rafael Plata”
Rafael is the Secretary General of the European Association of CCP Clearing Houses (EACH), the trade body that represents European CCPs. A seasoned professional of capital markets industry for over 20 years, he has in the past represented the interests of regulated market at FESE, contributed to EU policy-making at an MEP office at the EuroParl and advised pension funds as an investment consultant.
He is a member of the ESMA Consultative Working Group for CCP Policy and the ECB’s Market Infrastructures Consultative Group (AMI SeCO). Rafael also acts as an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Securities Operations & Custody and Member of the Board and Chair of Leadership Circle at the European Society for Association Executives. He has lectured on CCP Clearing at the Solvay School of Economics and Management.
Watch the stream on:
NOW ONLINE: Season 22: Episode 05
IPO-VID Livestream 131
Guest: Brad Schaeffer
Tuesday, February 6th: 1700 UK, 1800 CET, 1200 EST
“From the Floor To The Future with Brad Schaeffer”
Polyglot commodities trader, musician, author & widely read columnist on a range of topics everywhere from The Hill to the Wall Street Journal, Brad Schaeffer has just published his third book: “LIFE IN THE PITS: My Time As A Trader On The Rough-And-Tumble Exchange Floors”, recounting Brad’s time as clerk then trader in the mosh pit of the commodities trading floors in Chicago and New York.
Watch the stream on:
IPO-VID LIVESTREAM PODCAST
In the IPO-VID podcast episode #128, Patrick L Young was joined by two of our extraordinary IPO-VID guests, joining us are a seasoned commodities business veteran, financial astrologer & author, Susan Gidel, along with an expert in commodity trading, active macro-global trend trader, and former CME Board Member, Yra Harris.
Make sure to listen to this captivating episode with the experts!
Now available from multiple different podcast sources:
EI Website Spotify Google Podcasts Apple Podcast
EI WEEKLY PODCAST
Nasdaq Outperforms
SiX 36 Months To A Deal?
NYSE Reddit?
And A GPW Management Shake Up as expected…
The Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast 231
VICTORY OR DEATH
20 years on from the first fintech bestseller “Capital Market Revolution!”… “Victory Or Death” is a must-read book for anyone interested in the intersection of Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and FinTech as part of the whole future of finance.
*Paid link, as an Amazon Associate, Exchange Invest earns from qualifying purchases.
FINANCE BOOK OF THE WEEK
In response to reader’s queries, we have added a book of the week column to the EI weekend edition — interesting books pertaining to exchanges and markets, investment et al.
— Anybody can sign up for EI Weekend for free at ExchangeInvest.com incidentally.
This week’s book was written by Fred Schwed.
Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street exposes the folly and hypocrisy of Wall Street and appears as pertinent as ever a century later. This book is full of wise contrarian advice offering a “warts and all” look at the world of investing, in which brokers get rich while their customers go broke.
Get the book here.
*Paid link, as an Amazon Associate, Exchange Invest earns from qualifying purchases.
Suggestions welcome if you would like to nominate a book for us to cover!
Our next Book of the week will be unveiled Saturday in the EI Weekend Edition.
& don’t forget if you want all the news on the bourse business sent daily to your Inbox subscribe to Exchange Invest — via Exchange Invest.com — it’s only $349 per annum to join “The Exchange of Information.”
BITCARNAGE
In Bitcarnage this week, it’s a case of Death But No Transfiguration as FTX is close to a full repayment of creditors but the FTX Exchange — as Exchange Invest / Bitcarnage has always argued — is absolutely dead.
FTX Plans To Fully Repay Customers But Not Restart Exchange, Says Bankruptcy Lawyer
CoinTelegraph
(for those who wonder why they subscribe to Exchange Invest Bitcarnage, we prove our worth once again — having made it clear from the very earliest talk of a resurrection that FTX V2.0 was not a viable entity. It was always a pipedream and I suppose the liquidator can say their conscience is clear as no investor would come forward. However, this process was always a massive hot air waste of time with navel gazing idiocy believing there was a way to bring back a platform which had not merely broken the trust of its user base but in fact amounted to essentially a sleazy casino betting against its perceived “mug punters” AKA anything but a sound exchange model).
Elsewhere the OPNX debt claims platform run by the jailbird Su Zhu and his 3AC co founders has closed down — not before time some may argue.
Binance is struggling with redemption as regulators such as in the UK prove uncomfortable with a convicted criminal enterprise.
Crypto Derivatives Exchange OPNX To Shut Down In February (The Block).
This week in Bitcarnage we also discussed the ongoing institutional failure of crypto and even DLT. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testified to Congress concerns about the crypto economy and specifically “StableCoins” this week for instance.
Then the First US Bank To Let Customers Keep Cryptocurrency In Checking Account Exits Crypto (Cointelegraph). The fabulously named, if not perhaps entirely balance sheet representative, Vast Bank has distributed itself back into fiat only mode.
This all reminds me of the excellent Chris Edmonds’ of ICE’s article from last year: The Failed Promise Of Unregulated Crypto — which I still find true with the exception of some pockets within banks where folks are employed to ‘do’ crypto or DLT and hence are religious zealots for its promotion. Or: talking their own book — distribute your interpretation as you will!
The good folks of GARP (the Global Association of Risk Professionals) publish many excellent pieces and with Is Institutional-Grade Blockchain Ready For Its Great Leap Forward? They raise questions to which the answer appears to be a rather resounding — “no, not really.”
If you enjoyed this excerpt you may be interested to know that you can read Bitcarnage every day in Exchange Invest.
Alternatively, if you want to follow Bitcarnage — the daily update on happenings in the world of crypto and digital assets, then you can find Bitcarnage as a standalone on Substack.
MACRO THOUGHTS
Charted: What’s Driving The U.S. Trade Deficit?.
Visual Capitalist
OF INTEREST
As always, a review of interesting reading to provoke thoughts and consideration… Not sure we agree with much of it….but it’s thought-provoking!
Why Companies Should Ditch Personality Tests
The Spectator
Kinetic Energy Weapon Can Break An American Tank Apart With A Single Shot: Chinese Study
South China Morning Post
The Myth Of The Boston Tea Party
The Spectator.
Niall Ferguson: The Treason Of The Intellectuals
The Free Press
How Xi Jinping And China’s Communist Party’s Inner Circles Are All Connected — 2023 Update
South China Morning Post
LAST WORD
…If you want to stay abreast of the world of exchanges then please Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter — free 30 day trial.
Or Subscribe to our EI Weekend newsletter in Substack — it’s free.
You can also check out the “Reflections From Young’s Pyramid”, it illustrates the relative value of exchanges around the world.
Or the “ICE Cost of Borrowing 2020–2022” An Interest Rate Comparison, which illustrates the end of the funny money era of QE and how interest rates have already had a major lurch up from their previous region of zero to, even negative, levels.
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The future continues in the water cooler of the bourse business…
Gong Xi Fa Chai to all our readers celebrating the Lunar New Year!
- Patrick
