Not OC, but the thing with most of these international media articles is I want to read an ft.com article maybe once per year. Tomorrow it's another media with another article. Why would I want a subscription to read one single article?
If I could pay 50 cents for an interesting-looking article AND be guaranteed they would not use my email/CC to spam me or add extra charges in the future - I would jump on it.
I'm interested in hearing how this has been explored in the past. People have mentioned Blendle, but it seems to be in Beta hell. The business model strikes me as the issue. I'm curious if one could find success by allowing ads, and cutting the aggregator's cut from 30%...
Media companies themselves prefer traditional subscriptions, so this really didn't work out. I don't exactly understand the business behind it since I am a developer, just that I know about this from people I work with. (EDIT: But I see about Blendle now - I really hope it works for them.)
Pretty sure it has something to do with "recurrent revenue". Having 100 subscriptions means you have a guaranteed that the in the next month you will get 100 * cost in. On the other hand being a pay perview model leaves you to the risk of having high fluctuation of costs. Payperview I see it favored for content providers who provide high cost content once in a while. On the other hand, making a subscription based model works better for content that you put out fast and at a relativelly low cost IMO
I am uncertain I understand it. Did credit Suisse actually ask to delete financial documentation to hide from the public that they have financially backed oligarchs?
What I get from the article:
Some scumbags loaned money from Credit Suisse. As security, they used their big boats and airplanes.
Credit Suisse then themselves loaned money from hedge funds offering a very good return and using the scumbags loans as security. To prove that they had security for those loans they sent pictures of the boats and planes to the hedgefund.
Then someone told a newspaper that Credit Suisse was loaning money to scumbags.
To make this less embarrasing Credit Suisse is now asking the hedgefund to throw away the picures of the boats.
"...One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal..."
Because when you have a lot of money, you can loan money at really low interest rates. Rates that are lower than the rate of return on the investments you'd have to sell to avoid the loan in the first place. If banks are willing to give you really cheap money, you take it.
They also have many many billions sitting in cash accounts with CS earning 0 (and in some account negative rates).
But yes, deals are much easier to structure as 100% debt and the investment, maintains liquidity and limits liability. Set up investment co, borrow with gaurantee from parent etc.
Just wow... A picture??? Wouldn't a serious banking concern ask for titles and formal legal documentation?
And damn, Credit Suisse really is a cesspool. Not that other big banks are any different, say Deutsche, but Credit Suisse seems to be both, stupid enough to be caught and scum bag enough to actually do it.
the "beauty" about Swiss banking is that it's like banking in the rest of (Western) EU in the 70ies. A lot less paper but a lot more personal intuition (personality cults) that make the power decisions. While this is true in all of banking in onshore jurisdictions of Barclays or Deutsche they still need to have some form of paperwork and that backs up decisions and show compliance. Switzerland is still the wild-west. That said Swiss banking is a lot more organized, transparent (to foreign institutions) than other offshore jurisdictions like Nevada, New Mexico, UAE (and the more well known exotic places like Panama).
Sorry, yes. I wrote that mess. I'm swedish, we use the same word for both sides of the transaction. "Låna" - very obviously related to the english "loan". It didn't occur to me that there is a directionality to the English term.
In Haitian creole, if the main object of the verbe “prete” is a person, it means loan, and the second object says what. If it’s only one non person object, it means borrow.
German leihen is loan, while verleihen is lend.
The "ver" is akin to "away", i.e., "loan away" (though this isn't a 1:1 translation and only works for one of the meanings on both sides of the language barrier).
That's what the headline seems to imply. The article isn't that clear. My guess is that what they are doing isn't illegal. Basically Credit Suisse has papers that its customers supplied in confidence to secure loans, and those documents are probably no longer strictly needed, and so it is getting rid of them in case there is another leak of their internal files, like there was recently.
It's Swiss law that records must be kept at least for 10 years. Two months ago I threw away the bookkeeping and the tax declaration of my sole proprietorship of the year 2011.
You should keep in mind it is in the context of a securitisation, i.e. selling public securities. It's unikely that highly confidential information was shared with the investors not the least because it's may not be relevant to their investment. My guess, not knowing anything about the transaction, but from what the articles says, is that they may have shared some financials from the persons the planes were leased to, under NDA. And given data leaks, they probably went to all the investors they shared confidential information with in the past and ask them to delete it unless they still need it.
I worked with CS, and I know people who worked there in various functions.
It is the messiest, least competent, most corrupt entity I've ever worked with or known anyone to work with, ever.
Just to get it right, it's not one entity, either. We were signing documents with them and it turned out they had dozens of entities, just for the little area they were servicing my hedge fund with. A total mess, huge amount of paperwork, nobody knew why you do the shares with this CS and the derivatives with the other CS.
Another story is they literally cannot calculate their risk for several days after trading has happened. My friend told me this, I nearly choked on my food thinking "how can it take several hours". And then he corrected me, he actually meant days, not hours.
Another story is they had a trading desk that was making a lot of money on low risk. Ideal situation. The little boss decided to throw more costs onto the desk, because apparently it can happen that another boss comes and grabs the profitable teams for himself. The big boss looks at the losses, fires the team. Year and a half later my buddy gets a call about coming back.
Add to that the soap opera involving the executive suite wives, money laundering, huge losses from Archegos back to the GFC, and so on. Sounds like a parody of a bank.
It is, but that is why the previous CEO was supposed to change the culture but then turned out to be the worst example himself by violating Swiss Covid quarantine rules on multiple occasions. Now the new guy is supposed to do the same, so far it's not looking good.
Credit Suisse really cannot act worse, it's like looking at Hollywood (Disney Lukas-film etc) and thinking...wow they have a really good PR-Department, we should act like them, being wannabe "diverse" and "inclusive" and act like a a*hole makes things not better, they just look like some lying sacks of *it.
Everyone in Switzerland anchored at their well paid positions have too much to lose. The information will be shredded and turned into dust and nulls. Stuff is expensive in Zurich. All these yachts and real estate looks magnificent along Italian, Spanish, French, and Monaco coasts though... you must admit.
Please don't project Credit Suisse behaviour to the swiss population. The majority of us have nothing to do with this institution and would be really happy see people responsible for criminal activities be judged accordingly. The "Suisse" in their name is mostly for brand purpose, it's in fact a global corporation that has almost nothing to do with the country itself.
The term "Swiss Bank Account" has been a popular culture "thing" for ?50 years? ?more?.
I understand that Switzerland has become a lot more transparent as modern banking, information systems, and US government weight-throwing has increased. So did Credit Suisse become a global entity as Swiss laws became reformed?
But your point stands, it's not like Switzerland is a rogue state full of sociopaths. It's just another european country with a business sector.
Yeah I wonder how many of those investors will be following through with the destruction of said information. (meaning: I won't be surprised if it leaks)
I can only speak about Bitcoin here as I'm not as familiar with how other coins work. Bitcoin is basically designed to make this hard.
In order to spend money you need the private keys. No way around it, even with 51%. What you can do with 51% processing power is rewrite history. You start a parallel chain where the oligarchs never received their money. When your chain accumulates more processing power it will in theory be accepted as the canonical chain. Now there are a few problems here. First the simpler one: If you want to rewrite any significant amount of history, say undo a transaction from a year ago, you will need more than 51% to achieve it in a reasonable time. Think of two runners, one is a few percent faster, the other has a year long headstart. It will take very long to overtake. With 66% of computing power you can do it in a year*. Renting that much power for that long year would be extremely expensive. Second problem. It's highly doubtful that people would just quitely accept such a huge rewrite.
* Assume the rest of the chain has processing speed X. If you have speed 2X then it works out to 66%. One year of 2X power equals two years of X power, catching up with the 1 year headstart.
Sure, just link your bitcoin node to my network and we'll take them down together. I promise I wont use that to steal anything other than Oligarch crypto, which I also promise I can identify 100% accurately. You can trust me.
I do not think you should be using this site to set up conspiracies to steal money from people through computer security holes. Not even if they are rich people and you think they are very bad.
I don't see how that's relevant. Most of the Russia oligarchs aren't either, and blockchains aren't the only computer security mechanisms that can be overcome.
They can undo previous transactions / blocks, but it takes a lot of work (the older the block the more work it takes). For recent transactions (last block) it may be practical, that's why 6 confirmations are advised for high value transfers.
