MoneyWeek 1109

“The celebrity crypto ads remind me a little too much of the sub-prime crisis” If you have lost a lot of money on cryptocurrencies in the last few months, I wonder how you feel about the rich celebrities (mostly in the US) who encouraged you to get in. Reese Witherspoon has marketed crypto. So have Gwyneth Paltrow, Larry David (his ad has the benefit of being a tiny bit funny), Paris Hilton (not funny) Matt Damon (funny but not supposed to be funny) and Kim Kardashian – among many others. But the bit of marketing I have found most irritating so far comes from Gisele and Tom Brady (I’m classifying it as not funny at all on any level). In an ad for FTX, Brady is seen calling a variety of people…

A 314-year-old Spanish galleon known as the “mother of all shipwrecks” has become the “mother of all legal battles”, says Joshua Keating on Grid. The San José sank off the coast of what is now Colombia after a battle with a British fleet, carrying treasure worth as much as $20bn today. Now new footage of the wreck has brought fresh attention to a long-running dispute about who owns it. Colombia says the ship is in its waters. Spain claims it as a former “ship of state” under international law. The Qhara Qhara, a Bolivian indigenous group, say the treasure was stolen from their ancestors. And Sea Search Armada, a salvage company, says it found the wreck 34 years before the discovery was announced in 2015.…

Media rights for the Indian Premier League cricket competition have sold for $6.2bn for five years, says Variety. Disney paid $3.01bn for TV rights, billionaire Mukesh Ambani paid $3.05bn for streaming rights, and rights outside India sold for $135m. The price per match of $15m is second only to the US National Football League ($35m) among major sporting events. The auction of a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov has raised $103.5m for Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, says The Guardian. The proceeds of the auction – which was won by an unidentified phone bidder – will go to help Ukrainian refugees. Muratov, the editor of the now-closed Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was awarded the prize last October.…

Chinese internet firm NetEase saw its shares drop 8% on Monday after one of its social-media accounts made a mocking reference to Chinese president Xi Jinping, says the Financial Times. A post on the Weibo account for the Diablo Immortal game read “Why hasn’t the bear stepped down”. Xi is often parodied as Winnie the Pooh, who is consequently censored from the Chinese internet. A filling station manager in California was fired after costing his employee $16,000 by putting a decimal point in the wrong place, says CBS Sacramento. John Szczecina entered the price of petrol at $0.69 per gallon rather than $6.99. The mistake was not fixed for three hours, during which customers spread the word about ultra-cheap fuel and long queues formed to take advantage.…

“The central-banking playbook of the 2010s is failing,” says The Economist. Policymaking that was designed for an era of low global inflation is leaving central banks “slow on their feet” and behind the curve on inflation. Now they are racing to catch up. Last week, America’s Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.75%, the biggest hike since 1994. The Fed wants investors to believe it will act decisively to tame inflation, “yet it is loath to admit that doing so will probably require a recession”. The historical record is not encouraging, agrees Jon Sindreu in The Wall Street Journal. “‘Soft landings’ are easier to find in the legendarium of central banks than in historical reality.” Of the 12 times since the 1950s that the Fed has embarked on a major tightening…

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) has its printer “on overdrive”, says George Saravelos of Deutsche Bank. While other global central banks tighten policy, Japan is resisting pressure from markets to follow suit. At the current pace, it’s on course to buy ¥10trn in government bonds this month. Relative to GDP, that equates to the US Fed buying $300bn of bonds per month; in reality the Fed bought $120bn per month last year. Is the BOJ so determined to generate inflation that it is “willing to absorb the entirety of the Japanese government bond stock?” The BOJ’s decision to buck the global tightening trend has sent the yen down 16% against the dollar so far in 2022, to its lowest level in 24 years. Investors are sceptical about Japan’s ability to keep…