Alt Lendink Week Ended 22nd. July 2022
Do VC know what they are doing?
For VC’s substitute lenders. A Chicago Business School analysed some 16000 VC investments and came up with some startling conclusions like they (VC’s) were making some “predictably bad investments” and “ They keep making mistake after mistake and were not able to learn even the simplest mistake from their failures”. For VC substitute lenders. By and large the investors and lenders feed from the same gene pool which is well schooled in technology but knows less about human behaviour and frailty. If you want evidence most European countries have it in spades through their flawed COVID support schemes which have produced a Tsunami of bad debt that nobody wants to talk about.
Undoubtedly Stuart Kirk has been treated appallingly by HSBC. He has resigned but I am sure that he will be exonerated by future successes. When I read what he said I couldn’t disagree with him. Perhaps his language was intemperate “ nut Jobs” is not the normal parlance to describe the peripheral crowd on virtue signalers who have infiltrated the upper echelons of all large business having gained been previously indoctrinated by the politically correct yet surprisingly ignorant crew that have permeated major seats of leaning. In his resignation letter he says he has formed “ a crack group of like-minded individuals together to deliver what is arguably the greatest sustainable investment idea ever conceived”. I wish him luck. Group think and intellectual laziness has permeated the financial sector for decades and was one of the principal reasons why I decided that the Banking business was not for me.
Why does the UK treasury still promote the NFT bubble
Rishi Sunak might be the UK’s next Prime Minister but he has still made some surprisingly odd decisions. I am not talking about the counterintuitive raising of taxes while facing a recession. Rishi has gone, however the treasury has remained wedded to the strange idea that NFT exchanges should still be promoted lives on in the wake of a total collapse of values. I am not saying that NFTs will not recover, but if they do nobody is going to be able to tell you why? In fact digital tokens could play a large part in providing funding for projects if they were exchange traded instruments which provided up to date and meaningful information on how those projects were panning out and investors and traders could access the project plans and react accordingly. Structuring debt packages to accurately reflect progress in the early stages of new developments when the risk is highest has always been lacking. Companies with big balance sheets do not innovate. They don’t need to! However we need innovation now more than ever and providing digital transparency around traded assets would add a serious and needed dimension to debt markets.
Howard Tolman is a well-known banker, technologist and entrepreneur in London, We have a self imposed constraint of 3 news stories per week because we serve busy senior Fintech leaders who just want succinct and important information. For context on Alt Lending please read the Interview with Howard Tolman about the future of Alt Lending and read articles tagged Alt Lending in our archives. Daily Fintech’s original insight is made available to you for US$143 a year (which equates to $2.75 per week). $2.75 buys you a coffee (maybe), or the cost of a week’s subscription to the global Fintech blog – caffeine for the mind that could be worth $ millions.