Alex Johnson
Creator of Fintech Takes; writes sharp analysis on consumer finance, lending/credit, and digital banking strategy.
Ethics Guardrails on Crypto Profits Threaten Market Legislation
Worth taking a step back and remembering how absolutely insane it is that ethics guardrails prohibiting public officials from profiting off of crypto business ties is a controversial point that could sink market structure legislation.
White House Leverages Crypto Threat to Pressure Banks
This strikes me as a little too advanced for this White House to have come up with it on its own, but it would be smart strategy by the crypto lobby. However, I would imagine banks are smart enough to not...
Google's AI Kills Clicks, Threatens Loan Ad Revenue
Google didn't just add AI to search; it changed how borrowers find lenders in the first place. But if no one is clicking on search results anymore, what happens to the ad model that funded your funnel? On a new episode of...
Institutions Enable Cartoonish Fintech Villains, Exposing Market Weakness
When there’s a structural weakness in a market that allows companies to grow by violating the law or taking excessive risks, there’s always at least one cartoonishly-bad example that highlights that weakness in a maximally absurd way. In BaaS, that was...
Prediction Markets: Socially Valuable but Impractical; Sports Betting: Fun, Useless
The irony of prediction markets is that the most socially beneficial use cases (elections, foreign affairs, etc.) are infrequent, not that fun to casually gamble on, difficult to split into binary outcomes, and easy for insiders to manipulate. Sporting events, by...
Coinbase Shifts to Traditional Stocks, Chasing Robinhood
Coinbase launching stock trading ... not tokenized stock trading, just regular old stock trading ... is really surprising to me given how laser focused the company has historically been on crypto. Feels a little desperate, like the company is chasing Robinhood.