Cryptocurrency hunting season is open, and problems for European banks only deepen
IIS-3: For optimists with a planning horizon of 10+ years
In Russia, it is now possible to open an IIA (individual investment account) and receive two types of tax benefits on it: either a return of personal income tax of 13-15% from a contribution of no more than 400 thousand rubles. per year, or the exemption of all earned profits from taxes.
And from 2024 they also want to introduce IIS type 3: both benefits will be sewn inside it, as it were, at the same time, and the account itself will require freezing of funds for an even longer period (now 3 years, it will be either 5 or 10 years).
By the way, they promise to allow using previously opened IISs on the old terms: so, perhaps, if you don’t have one yet, it makes sense now to open a rare “old school” IIS in reserve. Check it out and it will come in handy in the future!
In general, of course, one gets the feeling that IIS-3 is like a sequel to a movie about long-term investments in the MCU, where no one knows exactly what will happen to their money even in a week.
Career path sucker: from the victim to the drop
Phone scammers have reached a new level of boundless cynicism: They saythey now call citizens who have already been “undressed” once by the fake security service of the bank, and make them an offer that cannot be refused.
Namely, they introduce themselves as a conditional senior detective Perdyshchenko, and recruit poor people into the organs of combating organized crime. Well, like, their task is to prevent the theft of funds from other citizens for a salary, intercepting the stolen funds on their card, and transferring them further to special FSB accounts for returning to their rightful owners.
To put it bluntly, overly gullible suckers are turned into so-called “drops” – that is, people who drive stolen money through their accounts and help to confuse their trail. So, if any of your friends or relatives have already been deceived by telephone scammers, warn them just in case about a new venture. And then after all, the drops may end up unillusoryly behind bars under a criminal article as accomplices in a crime.
The Laws of Capitalism in the Banking Industry Don’t Work the Way You Expect
How capitalism works: if your competitor has major problems of any kind, then you need to urgently call all his clients and persuade them to go to you. Well, that is, spoiling a competitor and stealing all his clientele – this is directly the highest degree of virtue!
But not in the banking industry, oddly enough. Here everything works exactly the opposite: if the neighboring bank began to stagger and its customers are about to panic, then in no case should you additionally throw at the fan and offer them to transfer their money to your bank. After all, if a neighboring bank grunts, it will not be “hurray, one less competitor!”, But rather “now the entire banking system is in a skiff, because a general panic has begun.”
This is what I mean: last week, journalists wrotethat the largest US banks (JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America) are in the midst of sad events with Silicon Valley Bank sent out internal instructions to their managers: “don’t even think about poaching customers from SVB, you fools!!”. In a sense, even if all around the banks openly stagger, game theory tells us that it will be beneficial for the conditional JPMorgan in the public field to continue to make statements like “yes, everything will work out for them, nothing, everyday business!”
The US Department of Justice charges UBS and Credit Suisse with sanctions circumvention
Why do you think Credit Suisse sold to UBS for such a tiny amount of money (far less than even the book value of the bank’s net worth)? Yes, for example, that’s why: not even a week has passed since became knownthat the US is already preparing to “hard” check Credit Suisse & UBS on suspicion of helping to circumvent sanctions.
The fines for this could be hefty sums – it is quite possible that they will exceed the $ 10 billion guarantee that the Swiss Central Bank promised UBS for the purchase of Credit Suisse as compensation for possible losses.
Eh, UBS taught nothing history of misadventures JPMorgan after buying Bear Sterns…
Deutsche Bank shareholders panic
Meanwhile, on the European horizon, an even more impressive financial institution has already staggered – the largest bank in Germany, Deutsche Bank. Bank shares dive down, and the cost of insurance against default on its obligations, on the contrary, soared vertically upwards.
The piquancy is added by the fact that in terms of the number of hellish scandals in which Deutsche Bank managed to light up, it can compete for the palm even with Credit Suisse: there is participation in the laundering of hundreds of billions of dollars of dirty money, and assistance to a Malaysian corruption fund, and bankers holding business meetings in a strip club … In general, at least write a new article right away!
In general, judging by everything, panic moods will now hover around all banks that have managed to accumulate some kind of baggage of doubts about their stability over the past years.
Nickel cosplay at LSE
On the London Stock Exchange (LSE) a lot of derivatives are traded on various metals, including nickel. Of course, all your deliverable futures-shmuers are clearly backed by real piles of metal – so you can trade “paper metal” as safely as if it were voiced ingots. Well, at least the exchange itself told all its customers that.
True, last week It revealedthat in the corresponding warehouse in Rotterdam for years there were security bags with ordinary stones instead of nickel. (Spoiler: stones are much cheaper than nickel!) The amount seems to be small (just over a million dollars), but the sediment still remains unpleasant.
What’s next – well, how do we know that GLDRUB_TOM contracts (“paper gold” on the Moscow Exchange) are actually backed by boxes labeled “sand”??
Mind hare at GPT-4
The guys from Microsoft released a hefty scientific paper called “Sparks of AGI” (i.e., general artificial intelligence) – in which they describe a huge number of different GPT-4 sanity checks. The general conclusion is that this is definitely not yet a smart robot with universal AI, but some glimmers of opportunities to turn into one in the future are already visible. You can already start to hope for it (well, or be afraid – depending on how you look at a glass of half-water).
Meanwhile, to ChatGPT rolled out the first set of plugins – there are only 11 of them so far, but obviously over time there will be more. Soon it will be possible to connect the long-awaited ability to search for information on the Internet (so far this feature is only in the version from Bing), the powerful Wolfram mathematical calculator, the Slack messenger, and much more.
Do Kwon caught in Montenegro
Do Kwon (this one who wrecked the Terra/Luna crypto prodigy, beautifully crashed by ~$50 billion last year) told everyone on Twitter that he was not running from anyone – despite the fact that he was immediately put on the wanted list in both the United States and South Korea.
But last week, the “running nowhere” Kwon suddenly arrested in Montenegro with a fake passport in hand. Apparently, this particular kriptan will go to serve his sentence first of all in his native Korea.
SEC Attacks Justin Sun (Creator of Tron)
United States Securities Commission (SEC) accused in the fraud of Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain (TRX coin) and the chief manager of the Huobi crypto exchange. As usual with the SEC, apparently, the main charge is the issuance of “securities” in the form of crypto without proper registration. Well, the guys from the SEC, to be honest, have everything around a security – these people are only interested in one topic in life.
In addition to Justin himself, almost a dozen different celebrities were sent fraud charges: from actress Lindsay Lohan to YouTube fighter Jake Paul. All of these guys were rampaging Justin’s TRX on Twitter and other social media without telling their diehard fans that they were doing it for the money. Almost all of the defendants immediately hastened to admit their guilt and chipped in almost half a million dollars in fines.
SEC attacks Coinbase
On Justin, the US Securities Commission decided not to stop, and at the same time sent official notice of possible legal action against Coinbase. Spoiler: the crypto exchange is going to be convicted of violating securities laws (well, what else could the guys from the SEC give birth to?).
The guys from Coinbase, apparently, were very offended by all this: as they say in their press release, “Dear Commission, we have met three dozen times over the past 9 months, and honestly tried to understand – what exactly do you need from us? but it makes no sense!!” Well, that is, it seems that for the SEC, any cryptan is now to blame for at least the fact that he is a cryptan – so the industry needs to be not so much regulated as extinguished with a big knotty stick.
If the selection of news seemed interesting to you, I will be grateful for subscribing to my TG channel RationalAnswerwhere I try to find smart approaches to personal finance and investment.
