Maybe we should be like Larry

The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been all over the news.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for US bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.

FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.

What seems to have happened is a lot like an old-fashioned bank run where too many depositors wanted their money back at the same time, exhausting the cash reserves of the company. But in the case of actual banks, they are regulated by the government and there are systems in place to assist individual banks weather such runs and protect depositors. In the unregulated crypto-world where they prided themselves on being independent of government entanglements, there are no such safeguards

The company has filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has ben pushed out of the company and is now in the Bahamas.

The collapse of FTX has given a new lease of life for the ad the company aired during the last Super Bowl featuring Larry David.

Great moments in NFT investing

I have expressed my puzzlement with the idea of buying so-called NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and have made several posts about the whole concept. And yet people are spending huge amounts of money on them. NFTs seem like collectibles except that while most collectibles are tangible objects with limited numbers of them, NFTs are digital constructs that can be easily reproduced by pretty much anyone. The value of an NFT seemed (to me at least) far more speculative than other forms of collectibles and thus liable to wild price fluctuations.

So it did not surprise me to read about someone who bought an NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021 but when he tried to resell it for $48 million yesterday, the highest offer he got was $6,800.
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Why catalytic converters are being increasingly stolen

It is increasingly common for the catalytic converters on cars to be stolen. This is because the precious metal that forms a key element of the converters has become more expensive. That element is a rare one called rhodium which is, by weight, reportedly the most expensive element on the planet, beating out gold and silver and other precious metals. It is one of the rarest, just one part in a billion, compared with 5% for iron.

The converter on regular fuel vehicles is simple: a stainless steel shell surrounds a ceramic honeycomb monolith— that monolith is coated with three important precious metals: platinum, palladium, and rhodium. 

As the car’s exhaust passes through this honeycomb the metals heat up and act as catalysts: turning carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, unburned hydrocarbons to H20 and C02, and nitrous oxides into nitrogen and Carbon-dioxide.  

Because these metals, and especially rhodium are so stable and durable they can perform this function over an extremely long lifetime of the car part—suffering very little loss in performance.

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What NFTs are and how they work

I have been casually following the story about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but had little idea what they were other than that an NFT was some form of digital work that one could own. The radio program On the Media had an entire show where they talked about it and that rekindled my interest and gave me some idea about this new world of speculation.

Host Brooke Gladstone discussed NFTs with Anil Dash, one of the people who in 2014 developed the idea that led to NFTs. Dash says that he and an artist friend Kevin McCoy did this as a blockchain-backed means for artists to assert ownership over their digital work. Dash now says that that initial goal of creating ownership rights for artists seems to be in danger of falling by the wayside, to be replaced by the kinds of speculative behavior that we have seen before with bubbles.
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A transnational kleptocratic class

Thanks to whistleblowers who released a trove of documents, a team of journalists led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has released the first reports of what it calls the Pandora Papers. (Readers may recall an earlier expose called the Panama Papers.)

It reveals how vast sums of money are spirited away by politicians and wealthy people all over the world into tax-havens. Over 330 politicians from 90 countries are named. The US has become one of the biggest locations for tax dodging because of its laws involving the use of trusts. (This may be why the Panama Papers revealed few US names as using off-shore tax havens. It is not that they are more scrupulous but that they don’t have to. All the tax dodges they need are within the US.) News reports are careful to point out that these transactions may not be illegal but that is not the point. The global oligarchy makes the laws and we should not be surprised that they then use those laws to benefit themselves. But key questions that can and should be raised is how they amassed such wealth in the first place and why governments are allowed to connive in these schemes.
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This debt ceiling charade has to stop

The US Congress routinely goes through an exercise that to me perfectly captures its lack of maturity. It is the periodic votes on raising the debt ceiling. Doing so enables the Treasury to borrow or print more money so that the government can meet the obligations it has already incurred by past appropriations. Failing to do so will mean that the government will shut down and go into default and not be able to pay, among other things, the interest on the Treasury bills that were issued in the past, and thus would trigger a slide in the country’s credit rating. A default would be so bad that it is expected that the ceiling will be raised, as it always has in the past.
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How the sharing economy became professionalized (and hence more expensive)

I have never actually used Vrbo, Airbnb, and similar businesses that offer accommodation. I had been vaguely under the impression that they offered cheap, short-term, accommodations because people were renting out spaces in their homes that were under-utilized, often because their children had left home. They provided basic things like a bed and bathroom access and enabled the renter to make a little extra money and for the budget-conscious traveler to avoid expensive hotels.

But recently I was planning a trip where there was no hotel near the place I wanted to be in. So I looked up Airbnb. I was surprised at how expensive the accommodations were, close to and even more than hotels. It seems like this so-called sharing economy has gone from providing cheap accommodation to being expensive ‘experiences’. I decided that I might as well stay a little distance away in a hotel where at least you have some idea of what you are getting.
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How billionaires use their sports teams to avoid taxes

The invaluable investigative site ProPublica has been mining its trove of confidential tax documents that were released to it to expose the many ways that the wealthy members of the oligarchy exploit the system to make even more money and avoid paying taxes. I posted recently about how they revealed how wealthy people in the US abuse the Roth IRA provision that was designed to help ordinary people save for their retirement. Their latest report shows what is going on with sports teams.

Wealthy individuals buy sports teams (or a share of them) and it is assumed that they do so at least partly because they like the glamor associated with hobnobbing with elite athletes and hosting dignitaries in their luxury boxes. But those are not the only perks. ProPublica shows that these teams are also a tax dodge that enable owners to pay taxes at a lower rate than even the highest paid athletes.
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How billionaires abuse Roth IRAs

The Individual Retirement Account is a financial device in the US that was supposedly meant to encourage ordinary people to save for their old age. You could put up to a certain amount each year into the account and that amount could be deducted from your income, thus reducing your taxes. The money in the account would then grow tax-free as long as you did not take it out until the age of 59 ½. The idea was that you would let it grow until you needed it in your retirement. When you withdrew it then as needed, you would likely be in a lower tax bracket since you were not earning income.

That was the basic idea of the IRA. But then another wrinkle was introduced in 1997 and that was the so-called Roth IRA that was like the regular IRA except that the initial deposit into the account was not tax-deductible. But the offsetting benefit was that the money in the account was not taxable when you withdrew it at age 59 ½. Because these plans were supposedly meant for ordinary people, there was a limit to how much you could put into the account each year, with the original cap being S2,000, though that limit increased with time. If you started contributing early in life, the tax free growth could provide you with a little nest egg. In 2018, the average amount in a Roth IRA was $39,000.
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If you pay people more, they will come

The latest jobs report showed healthy growth in hiring. But more importantly, it also showed a rise in wages.

In an encouraging burst of hiring, America’s employers added 850,000 jobs in June, well above the average of the previous three months and a sign that companies may be having an easier time finding enough workers to fill open jobs.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department was the latest evidence that the reopening of the economy is propelling a powerful rebound from the pandemic recession. Restaurant traffic across the country is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, and more people are shopping, traveling and attending sports and entertainment events. The number of people flying each day has regained about 80% of its pre-COVID-19 levels. And Americans’ confidence in the economic outlook has nearly fully recovered.
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