My latest post at Substack examines the state of play in Gaza after six months of war. Fair to say, it is truly horrible. But more importantly, there is now overwhelming evidence that Israel has deliberately and systematically violated international humanitarian law. These violations could amount to genocide. On 28th March, the International Court of Justice decided that the situation in Gaza had significantly worsened since its original order in January imposing six "provisional measures" that Israel must take to prevent the situation worsening. The Court imposed, in additional to t ..read more

“Over one million people in Gaza are starving,” proclaims a dramatic headline in the Wall Street Journal. Citing a new report from the International Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a partnership of 15 international agencies and non-government organisations, the Journal goes on to say:  More than a million people in the Gaza Strip, around half of the enclave’s population, are experiencing famine-like conditions, according to new estimates by food-insecurity experts who found evidence of widespread starvation and a sharp increase in child mortality in the war-ravaged enclave ..read more

My post-Budget article for the Radix thinktank considers the future of the State Pension in the light of the Chancellor's changes to National Insurance.  The headline news in the Budget was a 2p cut in the main rate of National Insurance contributions for employed and self-employed people. This was the second such cut, the first being in the Autumn statement. And the Chancellor expressed an intention to go much further. He trailed the idea of abolishing personal National Insurance completely.  These changes will have far-reaching implications for the state pension...  To read ..read more

Dear friends, I said I wouldn't post any more on this site. But Elon Musk doesn't like me posting Substack links on Twitter. And Substack itself is a mess. The home page looks amateurish, and new posts don't even appear on it until they've amassed enough views to push down previous posts. It's an absurd way of organising a site.  So I have decided in future to post links to my Substack posts here. Hopefully this will mean you can find them more easily, both on Google and Twitter. Some of my Substack posts have paywalls, but you will have the option to subscribe or opt for a free trial.&nb ..read more

Dear friends, this is my last post on this site. Coppola Comment has moved to Substack. You can find the new site here.  Why the move? Well, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to use. The code generator is buggy and I constantly have to mess around with the HTML to make posts look half decent. I don't have the time for this nonsense. I just need a nice straightforward CMS that doesn't make my life difficult.  Also, those of you who subscribed by email will know that for some time now you have not been receiving email notifications. This is because Google turned off Feedburne ..read more

This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023.  The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the last year is a crisis of fractional reserve banking. Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank NY were fractional reserve banks. So too were Celsius Network, Voyager, BlockFi, Babel Finance and FTX. And still standing are the crypto fractional reserve banks Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, Nexo, MakerDAO, Tether, Circle, and, I would argue, every one of the DeFi staking pools. All of these are doing some variety of ..read more

  As the world reeled in shock at the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another bank quietly went under. On Sunday 12th March, the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC announced that all SVB depositors, whether insured or not, would have access to their funds from Monday. And then they added:  We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority. Signature Bank NY's state chartering authority was the New York State Department of Financial Services (NY DFS). It posted this on it ..read more

The last week or so has seen some of the worst bank communications since 2007, when the Bank of England started a bank run by leaking news of Northern Rock's emergency liquidity request to the journalist Robert Peston. Then as now, awful communications have frightened the horses, triggered stampedes and caused banks to fail.  Three banks in particular have shown an extraordinary insensitivity to popular fears: Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, and Wells Fargo. Two of these have paid a heavy price for their management's inept handling of vital communications. But the third seems to ..read more

Silvergate Bank died yesterday. Its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, posted an obituary notice (click for larger image): Silvergate Bank bled to death after announcing significant delay to its 10-K full-year accounts and warning that it might not be able to continue as a going concern. We will never know whether it could have recovered from the bank run after the failure of FTX. The bank run after the announcement was far, far worse. The exit of its major crypto customers sealed Silvergate's fate.  But the agent of death was a government agency. On 7th March, Bloomberg rep ..read more

This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms would be a nice little earner, while completely failing to understand the extraordinary risks involved with such a venture.  On 1st March, Silvergate Capital Corporation announced that filing of its audited full-year accounts would be significantly delayed, and warned that its financial position had materially changed for the worse since the publication of its provisional results on January 17th, whe ..read more