James Walkinshaw and the Great Global Disappointment By our man in the departure lounge, nursing his fourth miniature bottle of airline merlot Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, in the sardine-tin glow of seat 37C, the name James Walkinshaw flickered across the in-flight Wi-Fi like a half-remembered punchline. Passengers from Lagos to Lima glanced up from their…
NEWS FROM THE NUMBERS COALFACE 10-Year Treasury Yield: A Moody Barometer for a World That Can’t Decide If It’s Dying or Just Napping SINGAPORE—Every morning, somewhere between the first espresso and the last muttered curse at Bloomberg, traders around the planet glance at one figure the way medieval sailors once checked the North Star: the…
Global Money Launderettes: How Investment Companies Became the World’s Favorite Laundromat There’s a moment, usually around 3 a.m. in Singapore, when a senior compliance officer at BlackRock—or one of its 73 look-alikes—scrolls through a client’s “Environmental, Social, Governance” questionnaire and discovers the biggest shareholder is a Cayman-registered shell whose only asset is a Panamanian tugboat….
Davante Adams and the Geopolitics of a Mid-Season Trade Request By Diego “Still Jet-Lagged” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Desk Marrakech—If you want to understand the modern world, ignore Davos communiqués and watch an NFL wide receiver’s Instagram story at 3 a.m. local time. That is precisely when Davante Adams—Las Vegas’s highest-paid tourist attraction…
Panama: Where the World Goes to Park Its Dirty Laundry By Santiago “Santi” Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first thing you notice when you land in Panama City is how aggressively new everything looks. Skyscrapers erupt like chrome mushrooms after a rainstorm of offshore cash. The second thing you notice is that half the…
ZURICH—The first time I heard the phrase “GSH bears” I assumed it was either a typo for “gosh, bears” or some obscure crypto-token named after a ursine deity. In fact, it turns out to be the Global Synthetic Hedge—bears, plural, because nothing this catastrophically leveraged ever travels alone. Picture a flock of algorithmic grizzlies unleashed…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between the hygge glow of a Danish bodega and the neon anxiety of a 24-hour Bloomberg terminal, NBIS stock (Nordic Blockchain Infrastructure Services A/S) has become the world’s favorite new punch line about how we never actually learn. The Copenhagen-based firm, whose logo looks suspiciously like a QR code having a mid-life crisis, claims…
PNC FirstBank Holding: When Two American Mid-Tier Banks Decide to Tango, the World Hums Along—Barely By the time the press release landed in inboxes from Singapore to São Paulo, most global investors had already yawned, refilled their cortados, and returned to the far more pressing question of whether China will actually invade Taiwan before lunch….
PNC Bank Gobbles FirstBank, and the World Pretends Not to Yawn By Hugo Valdez-Cortez, International Finance Correspondent on his third espresso and last nerve When PNC Financial Services announced it would inhale FirstBank Holding Co. for an undisclosed-but-whispered-to-be-jaw-dropping sum, the reaction outside North America was the polite shrug usually reserved for a distant cousin’s third…
Solana Sierra: The Blockchain’s Last Resort and the World’s Quiet Panic By Henrietta “Hank” Delacroix, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DUBAI—Somewhere between the 42nd floor of a glass tower that looks like a misplaced USB stick and the 43rd floor that sells NFTs of the 42nd, Solana Sierra was quietly rolled out last Tuesday. In the…
The Great Global Pension Pick-Pocket By Our Man in Geneva, Nursing a Negroni and a Grudge GENEVA — Somewhere between the 12th refill of the UN cafeteria coffee urn and the 17th PowerPoint slide titled “Inter-generational Solidarity,” finance ministers from 40-odd countries reached a quiet consensus this week: retirement accounts are the new cookie jar,…
Metro Bank and the Fine Art of Lending Gravity to the World By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It begins, as all modern tragedies do, with an innocuous push-notification. Somewhere between the canapés in Davos and the humid back-alleys of Manila, Metro Bank—once the plucky British challenger that painted its branches in garish “store”…
