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”…
Joe Lewis, the tax-haven ghost whose name now circulates through every trading floor from Singapore to São Paulo, is not the boxer who once bruised history—he’s the British-born, Bahamas-domiciled billionaire who allegedly bruised insider-trading statutes instead. Last week the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, that marble-faced temple where financial sins go…
Singapore: The Tiny City-State That Outsmarted the Planet – and Still Worries About Parking Tickets By Our Correspondent with a Sunburn and a Sense of Irony SINGAPORE—Somewhere between the 14th time you’re reminded not to chew gum and the 15th “No Durians” sign on the MRT, it hits you: this whole country is a deliberate…
