Typography

Jim Chanos, famous short seller. We are all Jim Chanos. Most people find the idea of short-selling to be incomprehensible. Buy a stock and hold it, that's what one does. To the majority of us it's just down-right odd to do the reverse, borrow stock in order to sell. At the same time, pretty much everyone in the world is a short seller, even if we don't realize it. The credit card debt we wrack up, the lines of credit, the pay day loans, the mortgages—they're all examples of us going short. We borrow a certain type of security—dollars or yen or other types of money, either in paper or digital format—and immediately sell it. And then after a little time passes we cover that short, buying the dollars or yen back and repaying the loan. We are all Jim Chanos, the world's most famous short seller, the only difference being we tend to short different instruments than Chanos does. The only time I ever sold a stock short was back in 1999. I was still in university and probab...

50 SEK banknote issued by the Riksbank in 1960 "Do we need an eKrona?" asks Stefan Ingves, the Governor of the Riksbank, Sweden's central bank. The Riksbank is probably the central bank that has advanced the furthest in discussions surrounding the introduction of a central bank-issued digital currency (CBDC)—a new form of risk-free digital money for use by the public. Canada , New Zealand , Australia , the ECB , and China are also dissecting the idea, with more central banks to come in 2018. Sweden is approaching the issue from a unique angle, says Ingves. It is the only country in the world showing a consistent decline in cash and coin usage. I've written about this interesting pattern here , here , and here . Below is a chart: Ingves floats two theories. Either the Swedish public no longer wants central bank money, or alternatively they do want central bank money but not the type that is "made of pieces of paper," preferring instead an as-yet non-existen...

LSD tabs like these ones have an incredibly high value-to-weight ratio When bitcoin first appeared, it was supposed to be used to buy stuff online. In his 2008 whitepaper , Satoshi Nakamoto even referred to his creation as an electronic cash system . But the stuff never caught on as a medium-of-exchange: it was too volatile, fees were too high, and scaling problems resulted in sluggish speeds. Despite losing its motivating purpose, bitcoin's price kept rising. The bitcoin cognoscenti began to cast around for a new raison d'etre. Invoking whatever they must have remembered from their old economics classes, they rechristened bitcoin as the world's best store of value . Store of value is one of the three classic functions of money that we all learn about in Money and Banking 101: money serves a role as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. So presumably if bitcoin wasn't going to be a medium of exchange (and certainly not a unit of account thanks to it...