Summer Miscellany 2: EI Weekend 3344
A summer miscellany of intriguing reading from gun mufflers to rare earths via the art market & obsolete banks?
Read Summer Miscellany Part 1 here.
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 Young. Monday through Friday our daily paid subscriber email discusses the business of bourses of all kinds across the world.
On this day in 1973, the NYSE and the American Stock Exchange announced the introduction of the CENTAUR (Central Exchange Network Trading and Unified Reporting) System, a computer system designed for the processing and clearing of orders.
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J’Accuse!?
AKA
L’Affaire Quintenz
This is a truly intriguing story. The Brian Quintenz nomination hearings have seemingly come to a halt without a vote. ..now we have this, remarkable tale arise via a media source who has been embedded in the gambling business for years: …a Freedom of Information request has been fulfilled, delivering an email via the offices of Brian Quintenz (both Chairman nominee for CFTC and also a director of Kalshi) where apparently Quintenz or somebody close to him may have been asking about the regulation of other folks in the prediction market field, as recently as (about Predictit) on July 15th.
Now, clearly one can construe a conflict of interest issue here as it doesn’t suggest exquisitely defined Chinese walls which does raise cause for a pause of some form BUT…
Whither This Actual Farce? Is the first thing which springs to mind.
WHICH ARM OF ANY GOVERNMENT — ANYWHERE! — CAN REPLY TO AN FOI REQUEST SO RAPIDLY?
…Then again, the point Kalshi are clearly missing out is that they don’t run an FOI latency contract. My chats with former government insiders made me a market — on the extreme wide — of 2–8 months… Food for thought, prediction markets from one of your pioneers.
Back to the CFTC, just what is going on here? It is…remarkable.
(The full story was in Exchange Invest this week and so far as we are aware, nowhere else… not for the first time either, subscribe at Exchangeinvest.com).
MACRO THOUGHTS
The decline of the duopoly is a megatrend gripping many nations where previously dominant parties are seeing their vote share slip… There is an interesting breakdown in a chart here Can The Decline Of Two-Party Politics Be Reversed? (Opposition International) and this article The Decline Of Two Party Politics and some thoughts from Newsweek on Will The Decline Of Mainstream Parties Come To America? | Opinion
IN BIGWORLD
ICYMI, the state of Florida enacted over 120 new laws July 1st. Most interesting from a markets point of view was CS/HB 999 which recognises gold and silver as “proper legal tender.” Well, it’s better than Bitcoin.
BITCARNAGE
Sharks in the Water?
Amongst other anniversaries in 2025, it’s a half century since the CFTC was launched and indeed 50 years since the movie Jaws misrepresented sharks — but incredibly for the highly litigious USA, no sign of a class action suit yet!
Anyway, sensing blood in the water all manner of political types amongst others e.g. Rep. Dina Titus Urges Probe Into CFTC Chair Nominee Brian Quintenz Over Prediction Market Ties (The Block) are circling as CFTC Pressured To Probe Nominee Brian Quintenz Over Ties To Kalshi (Cointelegraph).
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.
PLY: MARKET MOVERS ON FINTECH TV
Catch me on Market Movers On Fintech TV every Monday at 0920 AM for the latest insights in finance, technology, impact investing, and market trends. Fintech TV is on the web (Fintech.TV), in a multitude of airports across the USA and other channels.
EXCHANGE INVEST WEEKLY PODCAST
ICE Up,
ATHEX Powers Ahead As Euronext looks to buy,
CBOE Shines in Results,
NSDL IPO is vastly oversubscribed,
& Sebi Seeks to Write an RIP for Weekly Stock Options,
Quintenzion builds towards fever pitch.
The Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast 307
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!
Gun Owners Deserve Freedom To Enjoy The Sound Of Silencers
Reason
China’s Rare Earths Aren’t As Rare As You Think
DOOMSLAYER
PLY: Tim Worstall made similar points in his excellent IPO-VID 095: Tim Worstall: What Have We Got In Reserve?.
Are Banks Obsolete?
Cato Institute
PLY: You may recall my argument in “Victory or Death” that banks peaked in a 500 year supercycle around the panic of 2008…
How Britain’s New Political Divide Delivers Voters To Reform And The Greens
The Conversation
PLY: British politics are at an incredible crossroads, the Conservative Party may have the most acute crisis right now but the Labour party which has been the other side of a duopoly for a century is also in a very precarious position. That leaves open a huge opportunity for Nigel Farage and his Reform Party to come through with a deft knitting together of key somewhat conservative interest groups who also enjoy pretty broad government largesse…
How Britain can continue to afford the over-sized government sector is a question postponed once again even as the party duopoly looks to be dying.
Are Things Looking Up For London’s Art Market?
Apollo Magazine
PLY: Not a lot else is looking up in London, alas, maybe it will be a better year for art?
Should Economists Rule The World?
The Daily Economy
PLY: The most obvious point to note about this is that comparing Mark Carney and Javier Milei, let alone Yanis Varoufakis or Thomas Piketty with, say, Milton Friedman or Ronald Coase, reveals that uniformity is not becoming of the economics profession.
Wall Street Economist Who Ripped Trump Admits Prez May Have ‘outsmarted All Of Us’ On Tariffs
NY Post
PLY: A fascinating take as somebody who has been Trump sceptical is willing to see that there may be logic in the alternative approach of the President.
BOOKS WORTH READING:
Finance Book Of The Week
“Plumbers and Visionaries: Securities Settlement and Europe’s Financial Market” by Peter Norman takes a look at a critical segment of the global capital markets, from the free-wheeling days of the Eurobond market in the 1960s…
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 $499 per annum to join “The Exchange of Information.
Capital Market Revolution
First published in 1999, “Capital Market Revolution!” offered a clear, concise roadmap for navigating the financial revolution fueled by technology. And 25 years later, as the world of fintech continues to evolve, the core principles laid out in the book remain surprisingly sharp
This new edition was produced to celebrate PLY ringing the NYSE Closing Bell July 5th, 2024. There are several new sections of PLY pith to add 10,000 more words of context and the original book which is remarkably prescient and elegantly dated all at once! It’s only $9.99 on Kindle, a fraction of the original price in 1999 to encourage revolutionaries with any budget!
Get the book here.
*Paid link, as an Amazon Associate, Exchange Invest earns from qualifying purchases.
LAST WORD
The future continues in the water cooler of the bourse business.
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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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