Category: A little less dumb
Broken news
“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender. What a crazy decade the 2010s were! The tide of cheap money deluded an entire generation into thinking they were geniuses. Everything worked until 2022. You could raise $130 million for a $400 juicer (Juicero), $1.75 billion for…
It’s your grandfather’s banking crisis
In the previous post, I wrote about a few underappreciated aspects of banking panics in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Since publishing the post, the not-so-serious banking crisis seems to be getting serious. First Republic Bank, which was experiencing a bank jog, found its white knight in Jamie Dimon. After frantic attempts, banking…
No, it isn’t
Bill Burr is one of my favourite stand-up comedians and also someone you can easily relate to. At the 2014 all-star tribute to Don Rickles—another one of my favourite comedians—Jerry Seinfeld who was hosting, started the night by saying: On the Mount Rushmore of stand up comedy there are four faces in my opinion: Richard…
Revolution in a box: The extraordinary story of the ordinary shipping container
Can you think of some of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history? 90% I’m sure you thought about things like the printing press, steam engine, and electricity. Sure, these innovations permanently altered the course of human progress. But what if I told a simple box was just as consequential in tilting the arc…
Dear fintechs, please stop hurting India
Sometime in the last decade, software is eating the world became fintech is eating the world. The term “fintech” is a portmanteau of “finance” and “technology” and was coined in the 1990s but became popular after 2010. It’s a catchall term for companies that use technology to deliver better financial service experiences. In popular discourse, the…
So long, and thanks for all the fish
The relative calm of 2021 feels like yesterday to me. Sure, we had a virus that was hellbent on killing us, but most of us had made peace with our impending deaths. After a while, the biggest worry for most people was getting caught on a video call wearing a suit without pants. Good times.…
The boy who cried wolf about an emerging markets sovereign and corporate debt crisis
These are good times for all those who’ve been crying wolf about market crashes and economic crises for the past couple of decades. It just took two decades, but it seems like most of those apocalyptic predictions are partially starting to come true. The Weimar Republic people had been crying wolf about inflation since 2008.…
Making sense of the Russia-Ukraine conflict
If you had the power to bring back someone from the dead, who would it be? I’m guessing a dear one, favorite actor, musician? Not me. I’d bring back that Chinese guy who cast this curse: May you live in interesting times! Not because I like the dude. No! It’s because I want the pleasure,…
There’s too much of everything
The amount of new content created every day on the internet is astounding. It goes without saying that a lot of it’s nonsense, but there’s plenty of good stuff. It probably takes a few months to consume what you liked and saved just today. It’s either that or I’m bloody lazy 😅 This has become…