New Money Review podcast

Cryptocurrency billionaires are gaining a political foothold in countries rich and poor. Their influence now extends into governments, legislatures, charities and educational establishments around the world. In the US, cryptocurrency businesses’ lobbying power now exceeds that of the big tech, pharma and defence sectors , traditionally among the biggest contributors to politicians and their partie...

There’s a rising superpower in the world of money—a country that’s cut off from the global financial network, but which is playing an increasingly prominent and disruptive role within it. Though the country denies it, researchers are almost certain that over the last three decades, North Korea has been behind some of the most audacious and brazen frauds in history. These have involved counterfeiti...

Record temperatures, droughts, war, COVID, bans on movement and meeting…it’s been a witches’ brew of events. Is nature telling us that humans have overburdened the planet? Not yet, says Amlan Roy, author of “ Demographics Unravelled ” and our guest on the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast. The global population can still grow further without triggering more damage, says Roy: technolog...

Whoever dominates the world’s energy markets rules global politics. Coal fuelled the expansion of the British empire. Control over oil flows helped the US dictate the settlement after World War 2. Now we’re entering a more turbulent period. The climate crisis is upon us, meaning we have to slow—even cut—greenhouse gas emissions. This year, Vladimir Putin’s weaponisation of energy supplies has rais...

Take any story in the daily business news and there’s likely to be a securities finance angle to it, says Roy Zimmerhansl, my guest in the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast. Under his original plan to buy Twitter, Elon Musk, for example, was supposed to pledge Tesla shares worth $62.5bn as part of a margin loan . The debt was to be secured by that Tesla stock, which could be seized by...

In 2008, a few obscure three-letter financial products—MBS, ABS, CDOs and SIVs—set off the biggest financial crisis in history. Now, could a new alphabet soup of DAOs, NFTs, Dapps, DMMs and DEXes pose similar risks to financial stability? Yes, says Hilary Allen, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast. Allen is a professor at the American University Washington College of Law, where she te...

On 28 February the US, EU and UK froze most of the Russian central bank’s $630bn foreign currency reserves, responding to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. In the words of the UK government , the freeze aimed “to prevent the central bank of Russia from deploying its foreign reserves in ways that undermine the impact of sanctions imposed by us and our allies”. But around 20 percent of the CBR’s re...

“In the case of Putin we are in this very dangerous place. We have reacted so aggressively and moved so far, so fast that he is personally humiliated under anything other than absolute victory in Ukraine. That makes it impossible for him to back down. It’s a very dangerous negotiating position to have put yourself into.” In the latest New Money Review podcast, Mike Green, chief strategist at Simpl...

Over the last decade India has undertaken arguably the most ambitious digitisation programme of any country in the world. Its so-called ‘India stack’—a public digital infrastructure that allows governments, businesses, start-ups and developers to interact—is the largest open software platform of its kind. Nearly all of India’s 1.4bn citizens are now included in a biometric digital identity system,...

In the last decade we’ve seen four massive leaks of data from offshore financial centres: the Panama, Paradise and Pandora papers and the FinCEN files. No-one knows who leaked this information. But the data made one thing crystal-clear: the world’s rich and powerful, including its wealthiest criminals, love using shell companies to hide their assets. And it’s not just a few small, sunny Caribbean...

In the latest New Money Review podcast, technologist Martin Walker tells Paul Amery how the cryptocurrency bubble has wasted huge amounts of capital and is only one of several interconnected manias. By contrast with the dot.com bubble of 1999/2000, says Walker, little of use may be left behind from the current irrational exuberance. Here are some excerpts from the podcast: ‘Decentralisation’ in bl...

In the latest New Money Review podcast, psychotherapist Tony Marini talks about the growing problem of addiction to cryptocurrency. Marini, a specialist in gambling addiction, works at the Castle Craig hospital in Scotland. In the podcast, he says he’s seen a sharp rise in cryptocurrency-related self-destructive behaviour since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic—a period during which many of...

A central bank policy mistake is likely to cause the next financial crisis, says Dan Awrey, my guest on the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast. “The combination of near-zero interest rates and the restructuring of the financial system around near-zero rates means that central bank policy surprises are likely to be the match that lights the fire,” says Awrey, a professor of law at Corne...

Cryptocurrency is an experimental technology . But it’s also now a $2.5trn market with growing and increasingly complex linkages to the traditional financial system—whether through ETFs, the futures market , central clearing, repo or prime brokerage. So who’s in charge if things go wrong, as they inevitably will at some point? To answer that question, I invited Angela Walch , a professor of law at...

Stablecoins—digital currencies pegged to existing money, like the dollar, euro, pound or gold—are the hottest topic in finance. From crypto-market dollars like Tether and Circle to Facebook’s Diem project and tomorrow’s central bank digital currencies (CBDC), many stablecoins are staking a claim to be the payments medium of the future. But stablecoins are not a new idea, says Peter Wierts, a senio...

“We’ve never been so busy,” says Nick Furneaux, a digital forensic investigator who specialises in cryptocurrency crime. Furneaux, our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast, works with law enforcement bodies and large corporates around the world, focusing on ‘the challenge of investigating crimes involving cryptocurrency’. Listen to the podcast to hear Nick and New Money Review editor Paul...

The combination of finance and technology is driving us towards the biggest change in human history in 500 years, says Viktor Shvets, my guest on this week’s podcast. Shvets, a Hong Kong-based investment banker with Macquarie and a widely followed markets analyst, specialises in the intersection between finance, technology, politics and history.  Viktor’s background—he grew up in the former U...

The climate crisis demands a complete rethink of what money is and how we use it

The public needs protection from the Wild West land grab that’s now going on in money, says Rohan Grey, our guest on the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast. Grey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University in the US, was one of the authors of a controversial bill brought before the US Congress late last year, called the ‘Stable Act’. The Stable Act’s objective—it is due to ret...

In our slippery world of risk, uncertainty, change and complexity, hard and fast rules can be rare. Sometimes those rules can even be a trap, says Gerald Ashley , our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast. Ashley, a former banker, is now an author, financial historian, public speaker and consultant, specialising in risk and decision making. In his podcast discussion with New Money Review ed...

We should all pay attention to what’s going on in payments, because changes in the technology of money transfers are going to affect all our lives. In the latest New Money Review podcast, Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran discuss their new book, ‘the Pay Off’ . Leibbrandt is the former chief executive at SWIFT, the messaging network that supports trillions of dollars a day in global money...

In the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast, I interview an old friend and former colleague, Paul Craven. After working for nearly thirty years as an asset manager, Paul is now a consultant, public speaker, coach and author. He works with a range of clients, from investors to doctors to lawyers and entrepreneurs. His specialist topic is behavioural economics, which Paul describes as “how...

The race to develop a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is often portrayed as one of polar opposites: the Chinese hare against the US tortoise . But we should keep a close eye on a third contestant in the race, the eurozone, says Jonas Gross, our guest in the latest New Money Review podcast. The new digital euro project is part of a package of measures undertaken by the European Union (EU) to e...

Belief in a new era, rampant speculation, insider dealing, market manipulation, fortunes being won and lost… The cryptocurrency boom of 2020/21? Sounds like it. But it’s also an accurate description of the US stock market before the great Wall Street crash of 1929. “It was the Wild West,” says Kathleen Moriarty, a securities lawyer and our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast, describing t...

  In the latest New Money Review podcast, talk about the behaviours, attitudes and financial resilience of self-directed investors in the UK. Britain Thinks recently conducted and published research on self-directed investing on behalf of the UK’s financial services regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority. One of the consultancy's key findings is that self-directed investors—those making invest...