Hello hello, Happy Tuesday! Jim here with this week’s Monday starter pack of money posts.
There’s been a lot of financial turmoil lately. The stock market is down 20%, inflation is up a lot (Series I bonds are offering a yield of nearly 10%), and crypto is doing crypto things.
One of the fascinating parts about crypto is how much attention it gets but how much wackiness is involved too. During the dot com boom, you had craziness too but since the tech stocks were publicly traded, you had some assurance that it wasn’t an outright scam. No such protections with crypto (it’s a feature not a bug!). So I’m gobbling up the Terra Luna stuff:
How the Anchor protocol helped sink Terra [The Verge] – “As of this writing, Luna is worth less than a cent, and its sister token Terra, which was meant to be pegged to a dollar as a stablecoin, is worth 6 cents. An investor, who told reporters from Yonhap News Agency he’d lost 2 to 3 billion won (about $2.3 million), was arrested for trespassing after he entered Kwon’s apartment complex, looking for the master of stablecoin. Kwon’s wife requested police protection after the incident.”
Set in Canada but applicable to the US too, as their two big credit bureaus (TransUnion and Equifax) and two of the big three in the US (they are missing Experian!). How Credit Scores Can Run—and Ruin—Our Lives [The Walrus] – “It was the summer of 2019, and her husband, Dave, had died two years earlier after a long battle with cancer. Somehow, TransUnion had mixed up husband and wife, marking Monaghan as dead. Luckily, she is nothing if not meticulous. She had kept careful records of everything that could establish her existence—purchases, appointments, calls. She set to work fixing the mistake. How hard could it be? she thought.” Turns out, *surprise*, very hard. Two flippin’ years.
From Corey Booker: Don’t get too high on your highs and too low on your lows – https://twitter.com/CoryBooker/status/1528151010685992962
Great little video and a good reminder, no matter your politics.