Eye2theLongRun

Matt Levine at Bloomberg is likely one of the best analysts Wall Street has. He is shrewd, unpretentious, on the money and his written output – daily – would easily match Tyler Cowan’s reading speed. He has a great description of El Salvador’s move to adopt bitcoin as its monopoly currency. It is “millennial capture” thumbnailed into a couple of thoughts and expressed succinctly….

“[T]his is an example of market segmentation by standing in front of a PowerPoint presentation at a Bitcoin party wearing a backwards baseball cap. This is market segmentation by slapping a cool name — “Volcano Bond” — on a bond that is strictly worse than a readily available alternative. This is market segmentation by combining a normal thing with (1) crypto and (2) a huge markup, and then marketing it to crypto people who want to pay the huge markup not to buy crypto (they can just buy crypto!) but to buy into a crypto adventure.”

While there is little doubt that digital currency will expand and perhaps clear the stage of other dangerous political instruments while shutting down the “Fed Watcher” industry to all our benefit…. There are likely to be stumbles along the way. Matt’s eyes are a great means for watching this. See Matt Levine – Bloomberg