The largest blind spot in current financial oversight is the belief that financial oversight in the U.S. still exists, writes @angelawalch.substack.com
https://www.notus.org/perspectives/what-is-the-largest-blind-spot-in-current-financial-oversight
🎙️Is this thing on??
I returned to the podcast world to talk power, protocols, & emergencies with the Governance Futures team.
Hope you enjoy as much as I did recording it.
Weaponized incompetence.
Prepping for:
-the SEC Crypto Roundtable tomorrow (1-5:30pm EST!)
-imminent shortages of goods
-collapse of dollar
-new world order
Happy Mother's Day to all who celebrate.
www.sec.gov/newsroom/mee...
Yikes. Going through HS focus groups right now and one group of student's "one word to describe school" are back-to-back: Involved, Stressful, Invasive. 😩
"Stressful because you're measured in grades. And you always have to be here...then you're always thinking about being here."
This is what happens when you ‘win’ favorable legal treatment by buying it.
It lacks legitimacy & therefore longevity.
By the way, this also holds true for any beneficial rules he bestows on favored groups (ahem, crypto).
The administration’s positions can shift with the wind.
If you are relying on them to make big decisions about the future, you are building on shifting sands.
There is NOTHING Trump or his administration can say or do to reduce economic uncertainty.
So yesterday he said he’s not firing Powell. Whoop de do. As if this is a permanent state of affairs that one could base predictions on.
Same with tariffs.
Same with alliances.
Same with everything.
More
I’ve been working on this for a while.
Thank you so much. Well, it feels like the delayed culmination of events.
Anyway, though my thoughts about money, society, & risk have of course shifted as I have learned more over the years, I think my intuitions from way back when were pretty solid, & I hope to make them useful now.
And suddenly, I was a crypto, risk, & governance scholar for a decade.
(Though my crypto work was under the same broad umbrella of money, governance, & risk.)
Here it is:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
The Bitcoin Blockchain as Financial Market Infrastructure: A Consideration of Operational Risk
But now the clock was really ticking & the tenure committee wanted to know what I had to show for myself.
And I also had a 3rd baby.
My paper on Bitcoin, governance, software, & risk was accepted for publication by a law-adjacent journal from NYU in March 2015. Whew.
It turned out that I couldn’t write a straight application of law to Bitcoin either. My brain can’t bear to do straight law.
In spring 2014, I presented a paper on the governance of bitcoin and the function of software developers as fiduciaries. Again, people were like, what is she talking about?
Again, though, what interested me were the people aspects of bitcoin, what people said it did, what it actually did, who the people were who were running it and how they might be accountable if the project harmed others.
And the pressure to publish was on.
Having learned about bitcoin in fall 2011, I was very interested in why people were viewing it as a new form of money. So I dug in, hoping to come up with a paper relating law to bitcoin.
With 2 kids under 3, all new course preps, and there being little to no academic literature on money in the law, I could not pull off the paper conversion.
I developed & taught a seminar on the Law of Money in Spring 2013, including a unit on Bitcoin.
I wrestled with how to make the dollar collapse paper into a *law* paper so that I could publish it in a law journal (which would be the only way for it to ‘count’ for tenure purposes).
So, I put together the above research paper for my job talk to the faculty @StMarys_Law and presented it in January 2012. It was a totally out-there paper, taking seriously the possibility of a US dollar collapse, & really had little to do with law, but I was hired.
I continued to read & learn more about money as a phenomenon, & when I decided to apply for a law professor position in fall 2011, the only area that I was interested in researching was money (from a sociological/philosophical perspective).
When I say it now, it sounds crazy, and when I said it to a few people then, it also sounded crazy. 🤷♀️
What was stressing me out was that, based on my reading & the events unfolding, I saw patterns in the great financial & economic harm of the time period, the potential for great suffering, & the possibility of a new demagogue rising to power.
Being in London during the financial crisis brought an immediacy to the event. I remember the run on Great Northern in September 2007 & the buzz at Sainsbury’s headquarters, where I was an in-house lawyer.
My boss brushed off the run as ridiculous, but I sensed more was coming.
All this reading and pattern matching was scary, and we bought gold and silver in 2007/2008.
I learned about how the suffering and resentment of the German people primed them to follow a man who urged hate and promised a return to greatness.
