Matt Levine’s Money Stuff

Read too many issues and I want to work at a bank now

who is this dude?

A former investment banker (and before that I think an attorney!) who now explains finance (or cryptocurrency or Elon Musk) in a daily newsletter that is very entertaining and educational about finance and also financial crimes and securities fraud

how do I sign up for this entertaining thing!

and it's free. sometimes a bit inside baseball but more often that not it's very educational & more entertaining than it has any right to be

yesterday's discussion of the FTX crypto meltdown was a classic

https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff

xp

I still don't get finance but I would very much like Levine to write a book to explain it to me instead of (I guess along with) dribbing and drabbing bits of it every time someone makes an oopsy. I don't understand how he is literally the only person on earth who can explain this stuff clearly, maybe because he tends to acknowledge how it's all games divorced from any real life value or Adam Smith fanfic.

laudatory nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/business/matt-levine-bloomberg.html

Doctor Frances otm he makes it very clear one bit at a time how “capital flows” and “market formation” are in no small part epiphenomena of traders and salespeople doing their very boring jobs either well or poorly, and either honestly or dishonestly

he also has a great podcast voice (imo)

this is when he went from having my curiosity to having my attention

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds-communist

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

bet he will write about this soon

"FTX's Balance Sheet Was Bad" was incredible but I'm worried that he's not sleeping

Adam Neumann incinerated truly titanic amounts of investor money at WeWork Inc., which was bad, and got him removed as chief executive officer of WeWork. But it was also … impressive? And so if you are an investor, and Adam Neumann calls you and says “hey can you put money into my new thing,” you might think thoughts like:

1. I should take this meeting, it will be funny.
2. Adam Neumann has experience running a very large fast-growing business. Into the ground, yes, but not everyone has that experience.
3. Probably he learned some lessons and won’t incinerate my money.

He was born to write about the FTX / SBF / WTF?! saga.

Let’s send him back in time to cover Enron and Lehman

I particularly enjoyed this digression in his October 31 dispatch:

"In Book XIV of the Tweetiad, a humble newsletter writer comes to Musk’s encampment and kneels before him, beseeching him to stop doing weird stuff every weekend and holiday, so that the newsletter writer may tend to his herds on the foothills of Mount Trollympus. And Elon Musk looks down upon the newsletter writer and says “lol no” and runs him through with a spear."

This whole FTX story just keeps getting more and more incredible.

good save here

is there anyone who has ever described themselves as any harry potter house other than ravenclaw

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 18, 2022

i just want to be clear that this is about ftx, i haven't been hacked or whatever https://t.co/EbCSRzQltV pic.twitter.com/MY8Ek6Gqnf

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 18, 2022

All I am saying is that humans have been offering precious idols to divine powers for thousands more years than they have been building discounted cash flow models in Excel.

The way that the modern US economy works is that if you want to buy a car from me, and I want to sell you the car, then you have to give me money, and I have to give you the car, and also we have to do a mysterious third thing in which we perform a magic ritual to coax my spirit to depart from the car so that your spirit may enter it. That magic ritual requires a bit of shaved unicorn horn, and for supply-chain reasons there is a unicorn-horn shortage, so no one can buy cars

honestly car titles might be a cool thing to put on the blockchain

as long as land title in the US continues to be based on musty old tomes in town hall basements I don't mind

has he sent out any columns in the past 2 weeks? i haven't seen anything.

he has

Thanks, guess I need to resubscribe

The basic situation in the US is that regulators — mainly, the US Securities and Exchange Commission — are pretty hostile to crypto, and if a crypto exchange comes to the regulators and says “how can I set up a full-service, innovative, but regulatorily compliant crypto exchange for US customers” the regulators will say “I’m so glad you came in, welcome,” and then throw them in a dungeon.

thats what i would do tbf

lol

honestly my proudest achievement as a journalist, breaking a bank's machine-learning algorithm for summarizing the news https://t.co/aRhMXbpshp

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) January 9, 2023

this jpmorgan / frank story is probably my fav story from the newsletter in a while

She sent Frank’s Director of Engineering an email with a link to an article entitled “Generating Tabular Synthetic Data Using GANs.” The article notes that “the goal is to generate synthetic data that is similar to the actual data in terms of statistics and demographics.” The article suggests that “it’s fairly simple to use GANs to generate synthetic data where the actual data is sensitive in nature and can’t be shared publicly.”

she couldve just bought a list of real people who might as well have been frank customers and got away with the whole thing ffs! there are companies that exist to do exactly this sort of thing, just obfuscate the payment somehow and youre (maybe) home free

using the company email also obvs not wise

ah ok i see

If the email addresses were all fake, JPMorgan would notice immediately. So Frank allegedly went out and bought an email list:

i’d sell the ilx email list to jpmorgan

$175 million for 4 million email addresses, thats like $40-50 an email. pretty good if you can get it. even her original real list of 300,000 would have been worth like $10 mil. but that’s not generational wealth i assume once you spread it out among the employees

the entire story is very silly on every level

like the machine generated list part doesnt even make sense seems like she got the idea then at some point realized it was not going to work then bought a real list

its sad if they had been more focused on growing the list using fraud or growth hacking quasi fraud they couldve more gradually grown a more convincing less fake but still fake list from the beginning

My understanding of the situation is that JPMorgan likely would have let the entire thing slide under the rug, had Frank founder Charlie Javice not sued first.

incredible

lmao thats wild

Probably worth eating $175M (but apparently not $203M) not to publicize that the country's largest bank can be duped by a dopey millennial.

My understanding of the situation is that JPMorgan likely would have let the entire thing slide under the rug, had Frank founder Charlie Javice not sued first.

axios pro rata newsletter (does not appear to be archived online)

The power of files, everyone pic.twitter.com/idOPlSGqQc

— Aaron Levie (@levie) January 15, 2023

come on

me when i have exactly 2 to the 20th chums

I love the crime dial concept.

It’s a very effective explanation

"Kicking the nickel" should enter the global lexicon as shorthand for checking that digital realm stuff, when it's expected to be actually real, is actually real in the non-digital world. Endless uses...

love matt

hilarious bit today about trump getting involved in crypto

An interesting on article on why there aren't more Matt Levines, in finance or other fields.

https://gwern.net/matt-levine

Ty that was interesting. ML’s newsletter is essentially a proverbial unicorn

he’s nowhere near matt’s level as a writer but brian potter’s newsletter construction physics is maybe the closest thing in a separate field

Cool, I will look into it - one thing that the article largely misses is that Levine is regularly funny, which is both a key to his success and a sign of his familiarity with the field.

An interesting on article on why there aren't more Matt Levines, in finance or other fields.

https://gwern.net/matt-levine

― Andrew Farrell, Sunday, 15 December 2024 11:36 (yesterday) link

Without looking, I’m going to guess the answer is that people with expertise in an area can usually make more money being experts in that area vs explaining it to laymen?

FWIW Bloomberg OddLots is another podcast I enjoy a lot somewhat along the same lines. Slate Money is also not bad.

That's one part, yeah.

lol I assume part of his success is that it's not another fucking podcast!

(I am aware that it is, lately, also another fucking podcast)

i think finance being more of a social construction than many other fields is part of the money stuff formula. the author of that calls derek lowe's blog "inside baseball", but i think they just mean you actually need to know a bit of chemistry and biology to understand many of the posts. and the parts that aren't that tend to be about law and government and business decisions, which bring you back to money stuff territory.

aside from his productivity one of matt’s super powers is getting people to enjoy reading economics without even realizing that’s what they’re doing

FWIW Bloomberg OddLots is another podcast I enjoy a lot somewhat along the same lines. Slate Money is also not bad.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, December 16, 2024 12:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

if you're only listening to the podcast of money stuff you're really missing out imo. joe's newsletter is also good imo

Good short and to the point explanation of The Problem With Crypto today, saving that to send to acquaintances who start talking about blockchains.

I'm waiting for him to write about DOGE but nothing yet

He mentioned it the other day in passing. It was a story about how the SEC dragged their feet on what should have been a routine enforcement action against Musk, and how it’s a bit awkward now seeing as he is kind of their boss.

Yeah, and another in passing (I guess a lot of it isn't really that relevant? There's probably something related to accounting in there - but maybe he's come to the view that none of this is about money it's pure cultural revolution shit)

Look I hate all of this too, but we have to face the fact that Elon Musk is going to go into Fort Knox and take a bunch of pictures of himself clowning around with the stacks of gold, and he’s going to post them on X, and they will be pretty good meme content. It’s gonna be like that time Steven Mnuchin brought his wife to take pictures with the money, but much darker and weirder. Anyway:

President Donald Trump says Elon Musk will be looking at Fort Knox, the legendary depository in Kentucky for American gold reserves, to make sure the gold is still there.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says there is an audit every year and that "all the gold is present and accounted for." ...

"We're going to open up the the doors. We're going to inspect Fort Knox," Trump said in a speech to Republican governors Thursday evening.

"I don't want to open it and the cupboards are bare," he added.

Do you know that Musk, unusually for a government official (maybe?), also owns a company that uses big drills to make tunnels? What if he arrives for his inspection via drill? I do not know what the endgame is for Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of US democracy, and I expect it will be grim, but if the actual answer is “he’s trying to steal all the gold in Fort Knox” then that’s a relatively benign outcome that fits with his movie-supervillain schtick and is also extremely funny. Let’s see where this goes.

(bold just for quoting him quoting someone)

yeah Matt has been on the Elon as a law unto himself beat for a while but i'm holding out hope Matt will get on the resistance train. probably waiting in vain

the resistance train

Gotta switch tracks from the trump/elon train to oblivion

matts blase style prob appropriate for any serious subject

not money stuff but adjacent - just finished skimming the latest bits about money post which is about ascertaining how the person who wrote that "i, as a financial planner was scammed out of $50k in cash" in the cut that we all made fun of a few years ago

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/two-americas-one-bank-branch/

i dunno, felt pretty uncomfortable how much he ended up digging into her life. i mean, i know she opened herself up to all that by going public in the cut with the story. but still has a gross vibe to it

i wouldn't hold my breath w/r/t matt writing about DOGE or fort knox etc - wouldn't surprise me if bloomberg were under a company-wide order to not poke the bear.

per pro rata:

Many of the world's most successful executives and investors are completely cowed by President Trump, even if he hasn't yet paid them specific notice.

Topics that corporate titans once gave speeches or wrote blog posts about are now mentioned only in off-the-record whispers.

i wouldn't hold my breath w/r/t matt writing about DOGE or fort knox etc - wouldn't surprise me if bloomberg were under a company-wide order to not poke the bear

i guess it’s somewhat surprising given that matt has written so much about elon that he’s not covering doge. but he normally covers elon because of legal corporate finance stuff like buying twitter, compensation, moving tesla to texas. not sure what the money staff angle would be on doge. maybe something about cfpb or sec?

bloomberg posts like a dozen trump and doge critical op-eds per week, and they have an entire podcast dedicated to elon called elon inc, most recent episode is about how his own businesses have benefited from his government connections

i think money stuff being relatively orthogonal to the political cycle is one of its selling points though. feels like an oasis

i dunno, felt pretty uncomfortable how much he ended up digging into her life. i mean, i know she opened herself up to all that by going public in the cut with the story. but still has a gross vibe to it

― 龜, Wednesday, March 5, 2025 1:56 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm not reading it all, but is this summary accurate? https://bsky.app/profile/robinsonmeyer.bsky.social/post/3ljnnxwkdsk2q

yeah pretty much

i guess it’s somewhat surprising given that matt has written so much about elon that he’s not covering doge. but he normally covers elon because of legal corporate finance stuff like buying twitter, compensation, moving tesla to texas. not sure what the money staff angle would be on doge. maybe something about cfpb or sec?

― flopson, Wednesday, March 5, 2025 2:15 PM (two hours ago)

yeah honestly that was my initial reaction - dismantling of the cfpb is pretty purely a political thing, not really a quirky finance angle to it. i expect that if/when elon goes after the sec for humiliating him with the consent decree or w/e that mandated elon's tweets be reviewed by a lawyer he'll write about it. i think he's already made the point that elon exists pretty much above the law

as a lawyer the thing that lives in my head rent-free from matt is what he wrote about the day after trump won in 2016 and which he referenced again this past november:

The summer before I started law school, 15 years ago, I read a little book by Karl Llewellyn called "The Bramble Bush." It's basically a "Law School for Dummies" type thing from 1930, full of somewhat outdated advice on how to ace your classes and impress your professors. But Llewellyn was a leading thinker of the school of thought known as "legal realism," and "The Bramble Bush" is also a major statement of that philosophy. In a famous passage, Llewellyn wrote:

This doing of something about disputes, this doing of it reasonably, is the business of the law. And the people who have the doing of it in charge, whether they be judges or sheriffs or clerks or jailers or lawyers, are officials of the law. What these officials do about disputes is, to my mind, the law itself.

He went on:

And rules, in all of this, are important to you so far as they help you see or predict what judges will do or so far as they help you to get judges to do something. That is their importance. That is all their importance, except as pretty playthings.

And then I went to law school. And I took the first-year course in Constitutional Law, and I learned about the fundamental principles that rule the United States. And I learned -- or at least was given the general impression -- that, while the country has not always lived up to those principles, in the long run, the Constitution has served as a wise guide and constraint on the power of our rulers, and the foundation of our system of government.

But in the back of my mind I thought about Llewellyn. I thought about the fact that those principles can't automatically enact themselves, that they only work if the human actors in the system choose to follow them and to demand that others follow them. They persist because the people constrained by them believe themselves to be constrained by them. The Constitution, separation of powers, religious liberty, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, equality of all citizens: There is a complacent sense in America that these things are independent self-operative checks on power. But they aren't. They are checks on power only as far as they command the collective loyalty of those in power; they require a governing class that cares about law and government and American tradition, rather than personal power and revenge. Their magic is fragile, and can disappear if people who don't believe in it gain power.

Anyway this is a financial newsletter, so I'll tell you that S&P 500 futures were limit down at minus 5 percent overnight, before paring losses. The Fed probably won't hike in December now. Foreign markets have had a wild ride. Treasury yields plunged, I guess an indication that default is not too imminent. Bitcoin rallied. The Mexican peso is ... best not to look. Maybe everything will be fine!

law school likes to talk about 'the rule of law' as if that were some inviolable safeguard that will never be breached. think we're well into dismantling that assumption this time through. guess we'll see if the feds make those USAID payments!

The law is a collective delusion that only works as long as the spell remains unbroken. I've felt since 2017 or so that Trump's real legacy is breaking that spell.

The stock market being down 7% has literally radicalized Bloomberg into being the most lib paper rn LOL pic.twitter.com/jaTZLMfa8T

— Basil🧡 (@LinkofSunshine) March 6, 2025

i just learned today that michael bloomberg is estimated to be worth $100 billion. so maybe he really doesn't care about trump!

Programming note: Money Stuff will be off next week for spring break. We’ll be back April 21. In recent years, my vacations have often been occasions for Elon Musk to do weird stuff, and that is certainly a live possibility for next week. Also, though, I once took a vacation during which Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Probably nothing to worry about though.

Basically this dude is like Michael Lewis: the next generation?

no

He kinda is tbh imo

also no

they both write about finance and have initials ML

sarahell say more?

Curiously over here we have Martin Lewis, something about those initials.

Fun fact! In all cases it stands for “Money Laundering.”

They both write about technical finance stuff in a clear and funny way that will point out absurdities. As in, I meant it as a compliment

I feel like Matt is way more nerdy than Michael Lewis. He gets deep into the weeds of financial and legal technicalities. It's kind of what he thrives on.

my immediate reaction is that michael lewis glosses over / hand waves over a lot of the technical elements to focus on the 'human' side of the stories, often to the detriment to everybody involved

matt levine is just full on finance wonk who loves explaining the plumbing and identifying the levers - the human side only comes in if it's funny (like the td bank aml chats)

Ok I can see that .. I think maybe I tend to remember the bits where he talks about the technical stuff like the introduction of mortgage bonds

iirc matt levine is a michael lewis fan and says ‘liars poker’ is one of the books that got him into finance

aside from their interests having different emphases, levine does not do any reporting. he does analysis. but I see the connection.

Xp it’s a good book! I just feel like Lewis is a proto-Gen Xer and Levine is a proto-Millennial… like on the cusp of said generations and the generational difference is also something that is reflected in finance trends in terms of focus

between the unitedhealth ceo killing is securities fraud story and the snail story, today's money stuff was pretty delightful

Loved the snails. He really does have an endless supply of oddities and wonders to comment on

Basically this dude is like Michael Lewis: the next generation?

― sarahell, Thursday, April 10, 2025 11:27 PM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

they do have their similarities, lewis is way broader and more ambitious as far as writing things that can be made into movies tho

Yeah Levine has a sweet gig where people mail him about interesting things, or sometimes there they are the main day's story in an incredibly well-covered topic - he's really good at finding the interesting funny thing about them, but other than maybe that special issue of Bloomberg where he explored crypto just before the big 2022 crash, I don't think he does a lot of ringing people up and writing down what they say.