What we’re reading (3/13)
“Behind Greensill’s Collapse: Detour Into Risky Loans” (Wall Street Journal). “A Wall Street Journal review of internal Greensill records, including board minutes and emails, along with interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Greensill’s business, reveals how the company obscured its riskier loans behind a safe but barely profitable supply-chain finance business.”
“Bitcoin Surpasses $60,000 In Record High As Rally Accelerates” (CNBC). “Bitcoin crossed a record high of $60,000 on Saturday morning, continuing its rally as major companies and financial institutions adopt cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, was at $60,415.34 as of 7:25 a.m. ET, according to Coinbase, recovering from a dip at the end of February that followed a previous record high that month.”
“The $69 Million Beeple NFT Was Bought With Cryptocurrency” (New York Times). “An artwork by Beeple which exists only as a digital file and was sold as a “nonfungible token” for a staggering $69.3 million at an online auction handled by Christie’s on Thursday was bought by an investor known only by a pseudonym and who paid for it with cryptocurrency, the auction house said Friday.”
“NFTs & Copyright Law” (David Lizerbram & Associates). “An NFT is a digital certificate of ownership. It’s simply a way of stating, and verifying, who is the owner of any digital asset, such as a piece of art. The reason anyone cares about NFTs is that they make it easy for someone to verify ownership, and therefore they make it easy to buy and sell digital art. You won’t buy something if the seller can’t prove that she owns it or if you can’t prove that you own it when you want to sell it. As of this writing, the market for digital art NFTs is exploding.”
“Neural Mechanisms Of Credit Card Spending” (Scientific Reports). A new study finds credit card spending creates ‘cravings’ for more spending: “Credit cards have often been blamed for consumer overspending and for the growth in household debt. Indeed, laboratory studies of purchase behavior have shown that credit cards can facilitate spending in ways that are difficult to justify on purely financial grounds. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this spending facilitation effect remain conjectural…[i]n an fMRI shopping task…Credit card purchases were associated with strong activation in the striatum, which coincided with onset of the credit card cue and was not related to product price.”
