Nauru: where history meets technology
plus: wholesale inflation, persistent optimism, and more
“In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.” – Neil Postman ||
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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
Term of the day: Producer Price Index
Nauru: where history meets technology
Markets: war over?
Macro: US PPI
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Come join me on Friday, April 17th, at 11am ET when I talk to Brady Dale, who recently left a high-profile newsletter writing gig at Axios to branch out on his own – we’ll dive into why, how self-production is different, what advice he’d give anyone thinking of doing the same, where media is going, and more.
(Some of you may have gotten an invite when I scheduled the session earlier today, and I got the date wrong, sorry – still getting the hang of this – 🎥 it’s on the 17th 🎥, not the 18th.)
Term of the day: Producer Price Index
The Producer Price Index (PPI) is actually not one index but rather a family of over 10,000 indices that track the change in prices received by domestic producers for the sale of goods and services. The data is provided by around 16,000 establishments selected via sampling that provide the data on the Tuesday of the week containing the 13th of each month.
The composite measure is a useful complement to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in that it paints a picture of wholesale rather than consumer inflation – the CPI tracks what consumers pay, while the PPI tracks what sellers receive, for both intermediate and finished goods. In between the two indices are distribution costs, corporate margins, taxes, government subsidies and more.
Another key difference is that the PPI only covers domestic production, while the CPI also includes imports. The CPI aims to measure the cost of living, while the PPI measures prices received by businesses. It’s more a leading indicator than the CPI in that it reveals cost changes at the production level rather than at the final-purchase stage. For that reason, it’s also more sensitive to changes in commodity prices.
Nauru: where history meets technology
A curious news item caught my eye yesterday: Nauru has appointed a long-time Bitcoiner from Switzerland as International Trade Commissioner.
Some background is needed here. Nauru is the world’s third smallest country, a tiny island (population ~12,000) in Micronesia, in the Pacific Ocean north of Australia.
Once upon a time, it was known for its phosphate mines which brought considerable wealth to the island in the 1960s-70s but which eventually stripped the atoll of its key resource. So, it turned to offshore banking, licensing around 400 foreign banks by the early 1990s, with little oversight or record keeping. You can imagine what most of these banks were up to.
In 2000, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklisted Nauru as one of 15 “non-cooperative countries and territories” in the fight against money laundering, which had the immediate effect of greater scrutiny, longer transaction delays and a reluctance from global banks to handle Nauru-related business.
