Crypto, media and first impressions
Plus: credibility, swap lines, what’s ahead this week and more
“Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.” – Richard Perle ||
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend – glorious spring weather where I am, the flowers are starting to bloom and the air smells amazing.
PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨
Event: BCG x Allium Webinar - The Truth About Stablecoin Payments
Date/Time: Tuesday, April 21 at 6pm EST
Speakers: Inderpreet Batra (BCG Global Head of Fintech & Payments), Ethan Chan (CEO, Allium), Max Zevin (BCG MD & Partner)
Topics:
What’s driving institutional interest right now, and how regulation (GENIUS Act, MiCA) is shaping the conversation
What Allium’s stablecoin data reveals: use case breakdown (B2B, C2C, cross-border), blockchain distribution, and why volume estimates vary so widely across reports
Implications for different players: banks, fintechs, PSPs, and where to focus
Where the market goes over the next 12–24 months
Register: https://bcg.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gm6eFezTSQC6gaNw5aLamQ
IN THIS NEWSLETTER
Coming up this week: PMIs, retail sales and Warsh’s confirmation hearing
Monday mood: crypto, media and first impressions
Term of the day: Swap lines
Market: fooled again?
Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.
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✨Press Publish with Irina Slav✨
Come join me for a Substack Live next Friday, April 24th, at 7am EST / 1pm CEST when I talk to energy expert Irina Slav.
One thing you need to know about Irina, other than her charm and depth: she writes. A lot. With punch and humour and flow. There’s her Irina Slav on Energy newsletter, which is how I discovered her work (and was the first Substack I paid for). Then I found out she also writes for OilPrice.com, several articles a day. And she has two other newsletters, both enchanting and on wildly different topics.
So, come and join us for a chat about why she does what she does, how she manages to juggle so much, what advice she’d give anyone starting out or struggling to grow in Substack, and more.
🎥
And if you missed my Substack Live “Press Publish” session with Brady Dale yesterday, where we talked about media, newslettering, Substack, platforms in general, and a whole lot more, you can catch the replay here.
(And, yes, I said “Crypto is Macro Now podcast” in the intro, I meant newsletter – it had been a long week!)
WHAT I’M WATCHING:
Coming up this week:
Aside from geopolitics, diplomatic drama and the drumbeat of Q1 earnings, we have a relatively thin week coming up for market news.
On Tuesday, Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh will appear before the Senate Banking committee for his initial confirmation hearing. It’s still unclear whether Senator Tillis will keep his promise to delay the confirmation until Chair Powell’s DOJ investigation is wound up. Meanwhile, attention will be on how Warsh answers the inevitable questions on central bank independence, the inflation outlook, stablecoins and more.
Also on Tuesday, we get US retail sales for March, expected to surge to 1.3% month-on-month (vs 0.6% in February), largely due to higher expenditure on gasoline.
On Thursday, we get a wave of purchasing manager indices (PMIs) that will give more insight into how the Iran War is impacting the global economy. Forecasts are for dips across the board.
Monday mood: crypto, media and first impressions
(what’s on my mind as we head into the week)
Like many of you, I often wonder why smart economists and other academics insist crypto is exclusively for speculation and crime.
Over the weekend, I listened to a podcast (link further down) in which two storied and insightful economists discussed dollar dominance and how that could play out in coming years. (TLDR; slow erosion, potentially accelerated by poor policy decisions.)
One of them had some intriguing things to say about stablecoins and how expectations of high demand would most likely be disappointed; the other dismissed them as a conduit to the crypto market, which is about “criminality, money laundering”.
Regular readers will know by now that what people think about crypto markets is much less interesting to me than why they think it. I’m fascinated by intellectual biases and instinctive blocks, as well as what it would take to break through them.
When I hear highly intelligent people outright reject crypto, I’ve tended to assume that many – especially those in traditional finance – are afraid of a systemic change to the system that pays them, and that the economist profession (and academia more broadly) tends to encourage “safe” views. In other words, many have implicit incentives to not dig deeper into what can often be a distasteful sector.
But after chatting to experienced journalist Brady Dale on Friday about media and crypto (you can see the playback here), something else clicked: it’s not just the traditional finance culture that puts up cognitive walls. It’s also mainstream media, which has a stronger inherent and subliminal bias than it would like us to believe.
First, we have to remember that modern media business models depend on clicks for their ad revenue. And that shock and gossip get many, many more clicks than warm stories about people being lifted out of poverty, dissidents being able to transact after debanking, refugees fleeing with their savings on a pendrive, and so on.
So, mainstream headlines about crypto tend to focus on scams and scandals. Back in 2022-23, when people I’d meet people at social occasions found out I worked in crypto, they always only wanted to hear more about Sam Bankman-Fried. Today, many of my media interviews include at least one question about the unfortunately obvious grift.
Every now and then we do see solid reporting from mainstream outlets on how Bitcoin mining finances a wildlife park, or how a small nation is harnessing its natural resources to boost its Treasury. But, while good journalism is supposed to dig deeper and uncover overlooked narratives, we all know that those stories don’t “perform” as well as the more salacious tales.
Oh, and there’s the price headlines highlighting moves to the upside (often with the tone “gamblers are doing quite well this week”) or downside (with a whiff of vindication).
It’s understandable, then, that the impression most mainstream observers have is that of scandal and speculation.
But the issue goes much deeper than the quest for clicks. Even among subscription sources, coverage is usually limited. After all, media has strong incentives to NOT write about the disruption of the system that maintains it. Individual cases of manipulation are fair (and profitable) game; but highlighting the corrupting creep of centralization and the widening gulf in inequality perpetuated by market structures could upset advertisers as well as readers. This goes a long way towards explaining the consistently snide crypto content from the Financial Times and others (although I do think Bloomberg does a good job).
There’s more. In our chat, Brady made the interesting and overlooked point that most of mainstream media is left-leaning. Most of the crypto industry isn’t. Of course, crypto has plenty of left-leaning advocates who eloquently highlight the need for a systemic re-think of financial rails. But the libertarian origins and the “hands off my money” ethos of the early crypto culture gave the sector a right-leaning tint that many journalists instinctively react to. Or if not the journalists, their editors.
