My latest post at Substack examines the state of play in Gaza after six months of war. Fair to say, it is truly horrible. But more importantly, there is now overwhelming evidence that Is...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2024/04/the-west-must-no-longer-tolerate.html
“Over one million people in Gaza are starving,” proclaims a dramatic headline in the Wall Street Journal. Citing a new report from the International Food Security Phase Classification (IP...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2024/03/is-gaza-starving.html
My post-Budget article for the Radix thinktank considers the future of the State Pension in the light of the Chancellor's changes to National Insurance. The headline news in the Budget wa...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2024/03/we-need-to-talk-about-state-pension.html
Dear friends, I said I wouldn't post any more on this site. But Elon Musk doesn't like me posting Substack links on Twitter. And Substack itself is a mess. The home page looks amateurish, and ne...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2024/02/the-tragedy-of-gaza.html
Dear friends, this is my last post on this site. Coppola Comment has moved to Substack. You can find the new site here . Why the move? Well, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to use...
This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023. The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the la...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/04/a-fractional-reserve-crisis.html
As the world reeled in shock at the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another bank quietly went under. On Sunday 12th March, the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC announ...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/03/what-really-happened-to-signature-bank.html
The last week or so has seen some of the worst bank communications since 2007, when the Bank of England started a bank run by leaking news of Northern Rock's emergency liquidity request to th...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/03/the-peston-effect.html
Silvergate Bank died yesterday. Its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, posted an obituary notice (click for larger image): Silvergate Bank bled to death after announcing significant...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/03/silvergate-bank-post-mortem.html
This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms wou...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/03/lessons-from-disaster-engulfing.html
I haven't written a post about WASPI for a very long time. I felt I had said everything I wanted to say, and it had become evident that the WASPI campaign and its offshoots had neither the wi...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/02/waspi-campaigns-legal-action-is-morally.html
Proof of reserves is all the rage on crypto platforms. The idea is that if the platform can prove to its customers' satisfaction that their deposits are fully matched by equivalent assets on ...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/02/proof-of-reserves-is-proof-of-nothing.html
Yesterday, the SEC issued a Wells notice to the stablecoin issuer Paxos , warning it that the SEC intended to take legal action against it for issuing an unregistered security. The security i...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/02/binance-and-its-stablecoins.html
Celsius Network was never a real business. It did not have a viable business model. Really, it was a momentum trading scheme that relied on the premise that crypto prices would always rise. A...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2023/02/the-fatal-flaws-of-celsius-network.html
Today, I bring you the sad tale of a crypto lender that promised safety and high returns to its depositors, but whose promises have proved to be as hollow as its name. Donut Inc., a self-pr...
It's been evident for some years now that those selling risky crypto products to risk-averse investors like to have federal branding on their snake oil. Tether claimed to have 100% actual...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/12/snake-oil-in-stablecoin-world.html
The crypto ecosystem has grown massively in the last three years. Many of those participating in it have made life-changing amounts of money - on paper, or perhaps more accurately on co...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/11/the-entire-crypto-ecosystem-is-ponzi.html
How did it all go so wrong, so quickly? Less than a month ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was the golden boy of crypto, with a net worth in the $billions, and his exchange FTX was valued at $32bn. Now, FT...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/11/the-ftx-alameda-nexus.html
At the Battle of Ideas last Saturday, a panel on "populism" spent an hour and a half discussing everything except economics. Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph called for the Tory party to repla...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/10/when-populism-fails.html
Why did the Bank of England intervene in the gilt market this week? The answer that has been doing the rounds is that it was protecting the solvency of pension funds. But this doesn't make se...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/09/what-was-real-reason-for-bank-of.html
Yesterday, the failed crypto lender Celsius filed a monthy cash flow forecast and a statement of its assets and liabilities held in the form of cryptocurrency and stablecoins. They showed th...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/08/celsius-is-heading-for-absolute-zero.html
Coinbase recently filed its interim financial report. It makes pretty grim reading. A quarterly net loss of over $1bn, net cash drain of £4.6bn in 6 months, fair value losses of over 600k... To ...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/08/why-coinbases-balance-sheet-has.html
Ursula Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas " contains a terrible moral conundrum. Many people have agonised over it: to my knowledge, no-one has solved it. Attempts tha...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/08/the-ones-who-stay-in-omelas.html
The collapse of Terra in May sent shock waves round the crypto world, triggering domino-like collapses of crypto companies. One of those companies was the investment fund Three Arrows Capital...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/07/where-has-all-money-gone.html
The crypto lender Celsius has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This should come as a surprise to absolutely no-one, though the grief and pain on Twitter and Reddit suggests that quite a few "...
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/07/celsiuss-failure-shows-importantce-of.html