Media – Page 11

Incredible story of Legoland Korea and financial contagion

In short, a local government built an unprofitable Legoland, said local governor threatened not to repay the loans, and now the entire Korean municipal + corporate bond market is at risk.

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

But the fallout is not limited to local government bonds; it impacts the whole of South Korea’s bond market, worth more than $2 trillion. Corporate bonds are considered less safe than local government bonds. If few buyers are brave enough to buy local government bonds under these conditions, even fewer buyers can muster enough courage to buy corporate bonds. One of the safest corporate bonds in South Korea is issued by Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO). The returns for KEPCO’s three-year bond had climbed from 2.184 percent to 5.825 percent since the beginning of this year. But in its latest issuance, the KEPCO three-year bond worth 200 billion won (about $146 million) could not find a buyer.

And

To prevent the credit market from seizing up completely, the South Korean government stepped in by providing a liquidity facility of more than 50 trillion won (about $35 billion). The Bank of Korea also injected 42.5 trillion won (about $31 billion) to stabilize the short-term bond market, and South Korea’s five largest banks also pledged to provide up to 95 trillion won (about $67 billion) in liquidity. There is an absurdist quality to these measures: On the one hand, the Bank of Korea has been aggressively raising the benchmark interest rate to curb inflation by reducing liquidity, but on the other hand, the South Korean government is injecting liquidity to the market to stave off a total economic collapse.

Some recent reads and my brief commentary (Shein, Areopagus, Do Kwon, Mr Beast)

Great weekly newsletter, a sort of Western cultural history buffet:
https://culturaltutor.com/areopagus

Mr. Beast is the new Disney. Attention = money and Beast is the king of YouTube attention and has proven people will attentively follow him into other products even if it’s as dumb and unrelated as chocolate bars
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/25/mrbeast-youtube-fundraising-merch-restaurants

Surprise — that opaque Chinese company with the insanely cheap clothing is opaque for a reason and pays its workers insanely cheap(ly)
https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-even-worse-than-you-thought.html

I also took notes on this interview and…yes. Impressive levels of self-denial
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/19/do-kwons-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-world
my notes: https://kevinhabits.com/podcast-notes-do-kwon-on-unchained-even-to-this-day-im-proud-of-work-we-didvalues-we-tried-to-defend/

What do words like “capitalism” and “free market” even mean anymore (aware that I sound like a libertarian purist curmudgeon here)
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/one-bank-makes-stunning-discovery-bank-japans-ycc-broken-and-soon-entire-jgb-market-will

AI will take your job — IF you don’t learn how to use it

I think this paper is a great illustration of AI’s power, not to eliminate our jobs, but to augment and enrich them:

Although the danger of AI to radiologists is overblown, the new medical computer vision industry will profoundly change how radiologists practice, most likely in a direction that pleases radiologists. And AI has the potential to democratize radiology by enabling nonradiologists in underserved areas to tap into subspecialty expertise, perhaps on their mobile devices

And:

“Will AI replace radiologists?” is the wrong question. The right answer is: Radiologists who use AI will replace radiologists who don’t.

And another example in a completely different industry:

Bank tellers are often cited as the canonical example of a job replaced by technology. But reliable studies of the industry show no such effect. In 1985, the United States had 60 000 automated teller machines (ATMs) and 485 000 bank tellers. In 2002, there were 352 000 ATMs and 527 000 bank tellers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 600 500 bank tellers in 2008 and projects that this number grew to 638 000 in 2018 (24). Instead, bank tellers’ responsibilities advanced from the drudgery of withdrawals and deposits at the bank window to more interesting and sophisticated transactions.

Source: https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/ryai.2019190058

Chainalysis crypto adoption report – Europe as leading hub + Emerging markets growth

Full report here.

Everything below is copied verbatim with exception of //

// emerging markets 👀

—

Many emerging markets face significant currency devaluation, driving residents to buy cryptocurrency on P2P platforms in order to preserve their savings. Others in these areas use cryptocurrency to carry out international transactions, either for individual remittances or for commercial use cases, such as purchasing goods to import and sell.

—

DeFi adoption, on the other hand, has primarily been powered by experienced cryptocurrency traders and investors looking for new sources of alpha in innovative new platforms.

—

Simply put, more Americans are devoting a higher share of their purchasing power to cryptocurrency than in nearly every other country.

—

DeFi whales turned Central, Northern, and Western Europe into the world’s biggest cryptocurrency economy

// this surprised me – Europe as a major hub for crypto (perhaps due to America’s unclear and changing regulatory environment )

—

“Investing in equities in India is a long, painful process that requires you to sign lots of documents. It takes about three to four days. Investing in crypto takes less than an hour.” John estimates that there are 4x as many cryptocurrency investors in India as there are equity investors. […] But that’s just the high end of the market. On the lower end, John mentioned that many in India’s large freelance economy — mostly those doing technology-related work for employers abroad — have started to request being paid in cryptocurrency, due to both convenience and interest in the asset.

// I notice this in Vietnam as well – though it’s primarily stablecoins

Some excerpts from the new Cosmos ($ATOM) whitepaper

I’m a big supporter of the Cosmos vision and an investor in the ecosystem’s $ATOM token. A new Cosmos whitepaper was recently published [source]. I’m sharing a few excerpts and diagrams below that I find interesting / consequential.

Here are a few tweet threads explaining the upcoming changes

https://twitter.com/delphiintern/status/1574489770776051723/photo/3

https://twitter.com/route2fi/status/1575831540155629568?s=46&t=UfvY0glUmZzrIdz1PMrsDw

And some food for thought from Jae Kwon, one of the Cosmos founders who is no longer actively working on the original Cosmos:

https://twitter.com/jaekwon/status/1576869177796620290

All the excerpts below are copied verbatim.

—

The Cosmos SDK has a history of pioneering governance innovations, such as an advanced delegation system; governance-activated node upgrades; and a gen- eralized message passing system that allows any account, whether individual, group, smart contract, or chain, to execute arbitrary transactions, locally or over IBC.

—

The Cosmos Hub gave rise to the internet of blockchains. Interchain Security and Liquid Staking are the final building blocks required for a secure interchain economy, which in turn, enable the creation of the Hub’s application-specific functionality, the Interchain Allocator and Interchain Scheduler.

—

The transition phase starts the moment that Cosmos shifts to the new monetary policy and ends 36 months later, at which point the steady state phase begins and lasts indefinitely. During the transition phase, issuance temporarily increases for the first nine months as it bootstraps initial funding for a new Cosmos Hub Treasury. Issuance signifi- cantly reduces thereafter. As an additional safety measure, during the transition phase no more than 10% of the Cosmos Hub Treasury can be deployed within a 21 day period.

—

At the beginning of the transition phase 10,000,000 ATOM are issued per month. This issuance decreases at a declining rate until it reaches steady state issuance 36 months later. Steady state issuance will be 300,000 ATOM per month (a nod to the speed of light, 300,000 km per second).

—