Matt Levine’s Money Stuff

Read too many issues and I want to work at a bank now

who is this dude?

A former investment banker (and before that I think an attorney!) who now explains finance (or cryptocurrency or Elon Musk) in a daily newsletter that is very entertaining and educational about finance and also financial crimes and securities fraud

how do I sign up for this entertaining thing!

and it's free. sometimes a bit inside baseball but more often that not it's very educational & more entertaining than it has any right to be

yesterday's discussion of the FTX crypto meltdown was a classic

https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff

xp

I still don't get finance but I would very much like Levine to write a book to explain it to me instead of (I guess along with) dribbing and drabbing bits of it every time someone makes an oopsy. I don't understand how he is literally the only person on earth who can explain this stuff clearly, maybe because he tends to acknowledge how it's all games divorced from any real life value or Adam Smith fanfic.

laudatory nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/business/matt-levine-bloomberg.html

Doctor Frances otm he makes it very clear one bit at a time how “capital flows” and “market formation” are in no small part epiphenomena of traders and salespeople doing their very boring jobs either well or poorly, and either honestly or dishonestly

he also has a great podcast voice (imo)

this is when he went from having my curiosity to having my attention

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds-communist

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/10/legoland-south-korea-bond-market-crisis/

bet he will write about this soon

"FTX's Balance Sheet Was Bad" was incredible but I'm worried that he's not sleeping

Adam Neumann incinerated truly titanic amounts of investor money at WeWork Inc., which was bad, and got him removed as chief executive officer of WeWork. But it was also … impressive? And so if you are an investor, and Adam Neumann calls you and says “hey can you put money into my new thing,” you might think thoughts like:

1. I should take this meeting, it will be funny.
2. Adam Neumann has experience running a very large fast-growing business. Into the ground, yes, but not everyone has that experience.
3. Probably he learned some lessons and won’t incinerate my money.

He was born to write about the FTX / SBF / WTF?! saga.

Let’s send him back in time to cover Enron and Lehman

I particularly enjoyed this digression in his October 31 dispatch:

"In Book XIV of the Tweetiad, a humble newsletter writer comes to Musk’s encampment and kneels before him, beseeching him to stop doing weird stuff every weekend and holiday, so that the newsletter writer may tend to his herds on the foothills of Mount Trollympus. And Elon Musk looks down upon the newsletter writer and says “lol no” and runs him through with a spear."

This whole FTX story just keeps getting more and more incredible.

good save here

is there anyone who has ever described themselves as any harry potter house other than ravenclaw

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 18, 2022

i just want to be clear that this is about ftx, i haven't been hacked or whatever https://t.co/EbCSRzQltV pic.twitter.com/MY8Ek6Gqnf

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 18, 2022

All I am saying is that humans have been offering precious idols to divine powers for thousands more years than they have been building discounted cash flow models in Excel.

The way that the modern US economy works is that if you want to buy a car from me, and I want to sell you the car, then you have to give me money, and I have to give you the car, and also we have to do a mysterious third thing in which we perform a magic ritual to coax my spirit to depart from the car so that your spirit may enter it. That magic ritual requires a bit of shaved unicorn horn, and for supply-chain reasons there is a unicorn-horn shortage, so no one can buy cars

honestly car titles might be a cool thing to put on the blockchain

as long as land title in the US continues to be based on musty old tomes in town hall basements I don't mind

has he sent out any columns in the past 2 weeks? i haven't seen anything.

he has

Thanks, guess I need to resubscribe

The basic situation in the US is that regulators — mainly, the US Securities and Exchange Commission — are pretty hostile to crypto, and if a crypto exchange comes to the regulators and says “how can I set up a full-service, innovative, but regulatorily compliant crypto exchange for US customers” the regulators will say “I’m so glad you came in, welcome,” and then throw them in a dungeon.

thats what i would do tbf

lol

honestly my proudest achievement as a journalist, breaking a bank's machine-learning algorithm for summarizing the news https://t.co/aRhMXbpshp

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) January 9, 2023

this jpmorgan / frank story is probably my fav story from the newsletter in a while

She sent Frank’s Director of Engineering an email with a link to an article entitled “Generating Tabular Synthetic Data Using GANs.” The article notes that “the goal is to generate synthetic data that is similar to the actual data in terms of statistics and demographics.” The article suggests that “it’s fairly simple to use GANs to generate synthetic data where the actual data is sensitive in nature and can’t be shared publicly.”

she couldve just bought a list of real people who might as well have been frank customers and got away with the whole thing ffs! there are companies that exist to do exactly this sort of thing, just obfuscate the payment somehow and youre (maybe) home free

using the company email also obvs not wise

ah ok i see

If the email addresses were all fake, JPMorgan would notice immediately. So Frank allegedly went out and bought an email list:

i’d sell the ilx email list to jpmorgan

$175 million for 4 million email addresses, thats like $40-50 an email. pretty good if you can get it. even her original real list of 300,000 would have been worth like $10 mil. but that’s not generational wealth i assume once you spread it out among the employees

the entire story is very silly on every level

like the machine generated list part doesnt even make sense seems like she got the idea then at some point realized it was not going to work then bought a real list

its sad if they had been more focused on growing the list using fraud or growth hacking quasi fraud they couldve more gradually grown a more convincing less fake but still fake list from the beginning

My understanding of the situation is that JPMorgan likely would have let the entire thing slide under the rug, had Frank founder Charlie Javice not sued first.

incredible

lmao thats wild

Probably worth eating $175M (but apparently not $203M) not to publicize that the country's largest bank can be duped by a dopey millennial.

My understanding of the situation is that JPMorgan likely would have let the entire thing slide under the rug, had Frank founder Charlie Javice not sued first.

axios pro rata newsletter (does not appear to be archived online)

The power of files, everyone pic.twitter.com/idOPlSGqQc

— Aaron Levie (@levie) January 15, 2023

come on

me when i have exactly 2 to the 20th chums

I love the crime dial concept.

It’s a very effective explanation

"Kicking the nickel" should enter the global lexicon as shorthand for checking that digital realm stuff, when it's expected to be actually real, is actually real in the non-digital world. Endless uses...

love matt

I still don't get finance but I would very much like Levine to write a book to explain it to me instead of (I guess along with) dribbing and drabbing bits of it every time someone makes an oopsy.

idk i hope he never writes a book and just does the newsletter forever. i would buy a huge collect money stuff multi-volume set tho

also... dribs and drabs? it's a firehose to the face

i wanna take this yale MBA course where every lecture is paired with a money stuff column

Here is my first draft of one (or more) Matt Levine newsletter articles that I will ask my MBA students to read before each class. I'll list the associated topic + class goal along with it.

If you don't know who @matt_levine is: https://t.co/JHBf4cygzc https://t.co/7UtyJQL086

— Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (@paulgp) October 13, 2022

It's happening! https://t.co/7UtyJR39me pic.twitter.com/yGvrPr3nhC

— Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (@paulgp) October 13, 2022

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/04/sec-charges-founder-of-financial-aid-startup-frank-with-defrauding-jpmorgan/

a continuing own goal, really incredible

irl lol at 'The very most important thing to understand in finance and economics is that when a person says “either the bank is lying or I am lying,” you must not give him your money!'

Lol I sent that section to my kids

reasonable point

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-11/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-elon-musk-blames-the-lawyers

good stuff!

good (money) stuff

that piece about the M&A lawyers was hilarious. he should get a Pulitzer or something for his non-fiction humor / explainer columns

Yeah, okay, raising the cost of capital for public oil companies, causing them to exit some wells, does open up possibilities for private companies, sure. But you've still raised the overall cost of capital for oil companies. That's good! Fewer investments will occur!

It was incredibly easy to beat Musk in court, says Musk, in court.

This is beautiful.

this guys quibbling over $90m now, sad

i emailed matt a link to a story and it was in today's linkdump! very happy

youre famous now

whats the article

lol was it the story about Ray Dalio’s apartment

is the link dump a newsletter only feature i just read on the web because i dont like emails

yeah it's the article about the illegal ray dalio pergola

the linkdump is just the 'things happen' section at the end

ah

The illegal penthouse added 200,000 pounds of weight to the rooftop — the equivalent of 36 SUV’s.

this is helpful for me a common man of no exceptional schooling to have weight expressed in a unit i am familiar with, the famous suv

https://thevillagesun.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/468-W.-Bway-6.jpg

lmao this honestly doesnt look that bad to me, 200k lbs sounds worse

the condo building across from me has upstairs parking. as in, it's on the roof of the building, totally exposed, although this part of the roof was only a few stories above ground (the parking part surrounded the rest of the condo floors which extended up a few more stories). one day someone drove a car off the roof parking lot, i dunno how, maybe hit the gas pedal when they should have braked. the car fell a couple of stories to the basement parking lot next door! the driver walked away with only a few scratches. they were able to drive the car away and onto a tow truck even though it was all smashed!

anyway now imagine that was 36 SUVs and it was 10 stories up in the west village

no wait, soho

cant really relate to that since i have a car elevator like mitt romney

got an email about a potential future Money Stuff podcast the other day

excited about the podcast! he's got a very relaxing voice

voice for radio def, rare in the pod era of nasally guys laughing

one of my big youtube discoveries of the pandemic was a watch repair guy and at least 80% of the reason i watch his videos is he has a nice voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xasm3GFL7mM

ha used to watch that guy

feel like half of lockpickinglawyer's success is due to his voice

Tension on one, anyway folks that’s all I have for you

haha i heard that in his voice :/

Huh, I wasn't crazy about the Money Stuff trailer, he laughs at his own jokes a little too much (but then I suppose that's podcasts, and why I don't listen to 'em)

thought the pod was pretty good. it’s nice to hear matt’s voice. i’m not crazy about the co-host so far

she gives me "grew up in stamford" vibes