The Saudi and MBS stuff is fascinating, if sometimes horrifying. Israel needs to maneuver the discussion in the direction of Jordanian involvement in any viable future for the Palestinian Arabs. Obviously, nothing serious is going to happen until Iran is removed from the picture. It's the main driver of the larger regional conflict. So maybe start with that.
The Binance thing needs clarification. Customer and company accounts, credits, and debits remain distinct. However, on the blockchain itself (be it BTC or ETH, say), there's nothing in each entry to tell the difference between what's "customer" and what's "company," except for their respective secret crypto keys -- which mean nothing except to those who know those keys. I can't imagine Binance would have mixed up customer and company crypto keys. That would fatally mess up the accounting.
The bank connection is of no significance, in spite of all the hysteria around it. The regional banks involved in crypto have been failing because of a combination of higher interest rates (crashing bond prices) on the asset side and deposit flight on the liability side. The "post-modern" aspect of it is that the run on those banks' *stocks* is what precipitated their collapse, by then triggering a deposit run. This is not the old-fashioned case, where the deposit run comes first and initiates the failure.
The crypto aspect, with respect to the bank failures, is entirely a red herring. Note crypto assets have been mostly rising for six months or more. The selling pressure that came from the collapse of Terra/Luna, FTX, et al., ended late last year. That pressure -- to raise cash in the face of falling crypto prices -- is what caused this round of crypto collapse. The unwind of the fly-by-night non-public exchanges is well over by now.
The Saudi and MBS stuff is fascinating, if sometimes horrifying. Israel needs to maneuver the discussion in the direction of Jordanian involvement in any viable future for the Palestinian Arabs. Obviously, nothing serious is going to happen until Iran is removed from the picture. It's the main driver of the larger regional conflict. So maybe start with that.
The Binance thing needs clarification. Customer and company accounts, credits, and debits remain distinct. However, on the blockchain itself (be it BTC or ETH, say), there's nothing in each entry to tell the difference between what's "customer" and what's "company," except for their respective secret crypto keys -- which mean nothing except to those who know those keys. I can't imagine Binance would have mixed up customer and company crypto keys. That would fatally mess up the accounting.
The bank connection is of no significance, in spite of all the hysteria around it. The regional banks involved in crypto have been failing because of a combination of higher interest rates (crashing bond prices) on the asset side and deposit flight on the liability side. The "post-modern" aspect of it is that the run on those banks' *stocks* is what precipitated their collapse, by then triggering a deposit run. This is not the old-fashioned case, where the deposit run comes first and initiates the failure.
The crypto aspect, with respect to the bank failures, is entirely a red herring. Note crypto assets have been mostly rising for six months or more. The selling pressure that came from the collapse of Terra/Luna, FTX, et al., ended late last year. That pressure -- to raise cash in the face of falling crypto prices -- is what caused this round of crypto collapse. The unwind of the fly-by-night non-public exchanges is well over by now.
The series on Saudi Arabia was fascinating. Hopefully Israel and Saudi Arabia will do what they have to to contain Iran