25 min read

Exchange Invest Weekly (Beta) 005

The investment world, the financial markets, were on the cusp of incredible mega achievement of all time and Charles Schwab was in the vanguard of offering discount brokerage services.

Welcome back for a fifth unscripted review of the week in bourses, the Exchange Invest weekly.

Lots happening in all manner of areas including LNG, IPOs and much much more...as well as a few rants about the EU, some discussion of the new UK government and runners and riders in the race to become the new Governor of the Bank of England and some reflection on Deutsche Bank's launch of a second bad bank in decade and mass retrenchment etc...

Transcript:

Patrick L Young: 00:00 In big world, the Syriza government under Alexis Tsipras once a left wing bastian, but ultimately poodles of the troika were voted out. The Greeks opted for an old old thing and a return to the status quo. Meanwhile, in the United States of America, it was valley to Ross Perot, the last major third party candidate while in the parish, LNG, PNG, OMG, So much data and indeed that too is amongst the stories in this week's exchange, invest weekly. Join me. My name is Patrick L, Young

Theme Tune 00:30

Patrick L Young: 00:51 Let's start in the world of market data. Nasdaq who produced that very interesting white paper, total markets a blueprint for a better tomorrow. They're advocating multiple changes to make markets more equitable and efficient and indeed in their first major policy change. in the wake of launching that campaign, they've called for reforms to the definitions of professional and nonprofessional users of market data in order to modernize them. It's an interesting idea, albeit it's going to be difficult to manifest what the cutoffs actually are. However, if Nasdaq can manage to solve much, much trickier problems than this as they have in the past, their efforts are to be encouraged. It could lead to something that's much more coherent, let's put it that way, in the whole world of market data pricing, something which is incredibly contentious throughout the parish at the moment. Elsewhere in market data, Nasdaq and the LBMA, the London Billion Markets Association, they're the people who are behind essentially. Lots and lots of stuff that makes the gold world go round. They are going to make more precious metals data available on a daily basis via Nasdaq.

Patrick L Young: 01:56 They came, they saw, they conquered the Supreme Court of the European Union. That is the top watchdog which has seen its appeal throw out after it tried to ensure that it was going to be able to find TP ICAP, a 14.9 million euro, $16.7 million fine from the EU. This action from the antitrust regulator is finally dead in the water. It all dates back to 2015 when there was a rigging of the LIBOR benchmark, which was one of the many cases that took place during the course of discrediting our former interest rate regime. ICAP had denied wrongdoing while the banks admitted taking part in the cartels. Throughout, ICAP have protested their innocence and ultimately justice has prevailed at the European supreme court level.

From the European Court of Justice, we moved to, well that ongoing standoff, the Swiss exchange versus the EU, or at least Switzerland versus the EU, which has impacted the Swiss exchange.

Many comments this week, further media coverage and a lot of people seem think that the EU may be overplaying its hand.

Patrick L Young: 03:10 Perhaps the most surprising news of the week to those who still believe that Britain is about to be a sunder by what may happen in the course of Brexit in the near future. The Bank of England has come out and said, essentially, British banks are ready for a no deal Brexit. Not only that, they're actually ready for an overnight trade war. Hardly surprising really, despite the fact that the banks have been broadly Pro remain and want to stay within the European Union. Nonetheless, they've largely given up on effectively relying upon what the politicians can manage to deliver. Not such a bad idea given the fact that the current government under the hapless Mrs. May, which is about to fall apart in a week or so's time when the new leader of the Conservative Party is elected, has in fact been able to deliver precisely nothing. Well actually it's really more than nothing. It's delivered a degree of chaos and a large amount of damage to the British brand that hopefully is going to be overturned in the near future because it looks as if we're going to see the runaway favorite Boris Johnson being elected leader of the Conservative Party in the course of the next three days.

Patrick L Young: 04:06 At the same time looking at Brexit, tectonic plates are moving in Brussels. They're mostly immersed in stitching up the anti-democracy, which is called the European Commission. Opponents of the integration psychosis are being driven by a, well...They're being driven out of any of the possible positions of chairman or deputy chairman of the various different committees and the committees are being stacked by loyalists who believe only in one thing: more Europe! That's causing, well, all sorts of Kerfuffles at the Europe parliament level. The most worrying part though is of course that while we've got the commission presidential and other candidates all around spruiking for their platinum plated pensions by talking to people left, right and center as they try to rally the votes that they need, where they need to be confirmed. That's leaving, well a bit of a void in EU thinking because actually the tectonic plates are moving.


Patrick L Young: 04:56 As I said just a moment ago, even the chief executive of the British car manufacturer, Aston Martin, previously Uber remainers managed during the course of this week to note that a swift no deal is better than the chaos being wrought by the ineptitude of the blobs on both sides of the channel. By the way, both have proven equally inept in this whole process over the past three years. No deal is no more likely than ever. They are readers, they are listeners and therefore we have to be prepared for it. At the same time, some signs of a slightly less dogmatic EU approach may yet give us hope that we can manage to find a useful, beneficial overall agreement that can be brought together between the two. However, more than ever it's looking like a no deal is going to be coming up on October the 31st between Britain and the EU.

Patrick L Young: 05:41 Despite the efforts of some anti-democratic politicians in the true Brussels mode who are still in existence at Westminster who are going to throw everything, including their toys out of the pram, frequently in order to manage to get their way, despite the will of the people ultimately... Ignore 17.4 million voters at your peril. It's good to see overall the city of London and its financial markets and the banks in particular are prepared for no deal because that's where we might be going. It's not the optimal approach for everybody, but at the same time being prepared is going to allow for hopefully a reopening of negotiations and some degree of pragmatism from the EU. Albeit that pragmatism has been of course entirely absent when the EU been dealing with Switzerland just recently. This is developing, even though I have to say the legacy media simply haven't noticed or don't understand the situation of what's going on. We shall see ...

Patrick L Young: 06:36 one of the sadder stories of the week involved Kenya and coffee. The approach of allying direct major buyers into the country, sidestepping the coffee exchange ultimately ended up with, well a shambles. It's a tragic and salutary tale of extreme disintermediation. There are layers of often parasitical middleman who play a marginal at best role of adding value to the producer value chain, but removing the coffee exchange was a foolish move that enabled direct purchase by often rapacious multinationals. Those same hypocritical multinationals who are eager in the high street to be seen as CSR friendly, but in reality are I'd say utterly hypercritical indeed as utterly hypocritical as the governments to who continue to enable their imperial behavior from the European Union and elsewhere.

Patrick L Young: 07:33 on Friday we got some slightly better news on the coffee front, A Brazilian coffee cooperative, which is about to launch a coffee backed cryptocurrency, something that's going to allow a lot more flat payment structure and organization of the way that things are done in terms of the overall organization of the coffee market itself. In other words, it's a cryptocurrency concept, which is entirely sensible. So in other words, it's just like Libra. The Facebook project, except socially useful and coherent

Patrick L Young: 08:02 The parable of Deutsche Bank and investment banking was an excellent piece in Reaction by William Wright during the course of this week. As of course, the German bank finally did something which we all knew was going to be inevitable. Well at least those of us who could manage to use a slide rule and work out just about what was on their balance sheet or what wasn't. They've actually split off their second bad bank in a decade. I think possibly an unparalleled achievement in the world of banking and ultimately their dreams of a global investment bank seem to be finally dead. Of course, there were all sorts of bloody scenes. Personally, I thought it was quite distasteful, but altogether unsurprising that they managed to have a couple of workers - managers no less - who were seeing tailors fitting them up for suits during the course of Monday afternoon when they were busy firing several thousand workers from the London office.

Patrick L Young: 08:52 At the same time, things are all pretty millennial. The 'incredible' nature of the fact that Deutsche Bank could actually go and fire lots of people seem to me to be quite, well, remarkably sensible... Wasn't it clearly obvious to anybody - these people were financial professionals - that their bank was effectively bankrupt. How did they not work it out? I can totally understand and I sympathize with anybody losing their jobs, but at the same time I don't actually have great deal of sympathy with those who think that, wow, this was an incredible shock... If they thought it was an incredible shock, I'm not sure they should be working anywhere near the parish. As a sign of just how desperate the Deutsche bank enterprise was. I note that actually there was a story in the Daily Mail, which pointed out the fact that Deutsche bank had only cut ties with one Jeffrey Epstein several months ago after an extensive relationship and had been lending him money pretty much all the way until the end and providing trading services despite being warned for some years. It was a reputational risk there in lies, well a parable of investment banking. Indeed

Patrick L Young: 09:57 Of course the more crucial part about the aftermath of the Deutsche Bank closure is just how far it's going to impact the parish. We have few enough general clearing members at the moment and we need a lot more. Or at least we need a lot more large balance sheets distributed around the world. If the parish is really going to be able to succeed going further. ...we've seen another new African derivatives market opening up this week. More of that in just a few moments. But if that's going to really succeed, where are we gonna put our clearing funds? That was always the issue I had when I was running, for example, the the SIBEX exchange. I mean, who wanted to actually trust their money with some vaguely unknown and possibly, well, some would have argued precariously financed Romanian broker? The truth is we need more major GCMs and the closure and the cutbacks of Deutsche Bank are going to cause a huge problem for the parish going forward because ultimately there needs to be a way to manage, to improve the intermediation to the clearing houses in the course of the near future...as Deutsche bank begins what was described in Bloomberg as it's exciting new lopping off parts phase

Patrick L Young: 11:06 When it comes to the governance of exchanges, frankly to many of the boards of directors in the parish over the years have resembled the aftereffects of the variation of well that North American dream catcher concept. In this instance, the mechanism catches the fluff of aged middle aged white executive untalent on the breeze of headhunters frenetic bio shuffling and it's been providing a fabulously anti Darwinian characteristic of delivering those with the most corporate titles, the most pomp, the most circumstance, and indeed largely broadly the least extent of corporate curiosity. Thus the Zombie lands of non challenge thunder forth in a dismal fashion and we end up with fiascos like DB1 and LSE trying to merge on various attempts because executives brilliantly captured the NEDs with something not even so elegant as Stockholm Syndrome.

Thus, I have to highlight this week an absolutely truly unprecedented story. It comes from the national business review in New Zealand and it's entitled "New Zealand Exchange shows how to rebuild a board." It's nothing less than two pages of excellence. Explaining how James Miller, the seemingly indefatigable chairman of NZX has, largely against the odds, and certainly in the face of a very, very skeptical media and public in New Zealand done the almost unthinkable... He has to be praised for his ability to craft an elegantly balanced and intelligent, challenging board.

Meanwhile, all the best for Sunday of course final the World Cup cricket, I'll be supporting England, but it's fabulous to see New Zealand or in that too well managed on both fronts: NZX and the cricket team

Patrick L Young: 12:49 In data this week. Smart Karma who operate a global investment research network had a significant investment from SGX. Otherwise it wasn't so much deals as new markets. Treasury Spring made it a public launch. Very interesting business, former Nex executive and fintech entrepreneur, Justin Meadows and team have created the FTF a very, very interesting concept for delivering short term funding. It's a fascinating project. It'll be interesting to see whether this, well mega nut can be cracked by what is a very, very interesting new concept.

Meanwhile, over in India, it was the first budget by Finance Minister Nirmala, Sithoramen and she produced some interesting proposals. It has to be said. One of her proposals raise the ire of Sebi staff. It seeks to transfer surplus funds from the savvy balance sheet into the government. Doesn't sound terribly safe and secure to me, but at the same time her other proposals are quite interesting elsewhere: On one level, she wants to develop a corporate bond market in India and see that become a great deal stronger. Hooray Hooray Hooray is all I can say to that. And then also there's the concept of a social stock exchange trying to improve access to capital for social enterprises. Trying actually to make also a step away from India as being traditionally a charity donor recipient nation and finding a way to fund for profit businesses, which actually improve the social good. Something which of course is being operated from all sorts of markets, including the Scottish Stock Exchange, Project, Heather, which has been developed in Edinburgh. Very interesting concept. The social stock exchange. The one problem I have is why, oh, why have Sebi spent the last number of years endeavoring through effectively a legislative pogrom to push the regional stock exchanges of India out of business?

Patrick L Young: 14:41 Surely, surely, surely the greater advantage to social stock exchanges would be to regionalize those throughout the course of India to which end those stock in the regions which are still in existence ought to be encouraged rather than trying to make some huge totalitarian frankly Marxist centralized entity which is going to reach the 1.3 something billion people across the incredible continental nation of India. The social stock exchange for India is a great initiative. I sincerely hope it succeeds, but at the same time it strikes me a lot more focus on the micro on the regions, on the localities is going to deliver the advantage to social stock exchanges throughout India.

Patrick L Young: 15:23 Perhaps the biggest surprise in new markets of the week was news that reached us that the New York stock exchange is going to be helping the Tel Aviv stock exchange create a secondary tech based exchange. That comes as quite a surprise because of course, traditionally the relationship with Nasdaq has been very strong in that territory and therefore NYSE sweeping in and managing to take this deal suggests that something interesting is afoot perhaps of course with those new 'owners' that are now controlling the Tel Aviv exchange itself.

Over in Africa, we sold the launch of the Kenyan derivatives markets thanks to the excellent work of the NSE they've now launched NEXT, which becomes the second major derivatives market in Africa. We wish it every success. Equally in Africa. Zimbabwe is looking to create another stock exchange. This time it's going to be in Bulawayo. Elsewhere. AIX, the Astana international exchange had a series of major market announcements during the course of this week following on what's been a rather frenetic period of deal-making deal doing and organizing as they really managed to get some steam under their belt as they moving forward.

Patrick L Young: 16:34 Very interesting to see their COO, Oliver. Gueris, a great friend of the parish instigating several major market model enhancements: multicurrency settlements, securities lending and borrowing covered short selling in a new custody model... were just several of the things that came out, along with also, we saw aix signing a deal this week. They've got a memorandum of understanding with Nasdaq Dubai.

Over in the world of Crypto Christian Katz, former president of FESE, the man who was once the boss of the Swiss stock exchange itself, stepped forward as chairman of the Swiss crypto exchange, and announced their very interesting partnership with Dukas Bank

Patrick L Young: 17:18 With a couple of dozen different swap exchange facilities - SEFs - being approved in the United States of America. It was always difficult to see how many of them would ultimately prove economic. Interestingly, Truex is about to become the second such platform to exit its original business plan and it too is going to follow Seed CX shutting down its original platform. Admittedly, seed CX was going to trade cannabis. Truex was looking at trading, well actual proper swaps. It's going to be also moving towards the crypto world. Expect that move in a couple of weeks apparently. Elsewhere at least one exchange die to death this week, the Polish Crypto exchange ebit, the market suddenly shut down citing a loss of liquidity. That said there's more to come. I'm not sure what the Polish is for primary delusion, but it's certainly going to be taking place across a lot more crypto markets in the near future who are simply uneconomic even as bitcoin managers to rocket forth in some form of a recovery rally as it's doing at the present time.

Patrick L Young: 18:20 Perhaps the most interesting product news of the week came from Platts and the InterContinental exchange. They're looking to turbocharge LNG trade through a window: The window system which is currently being used for a lot of cache oil consignments is going to be deployed for the same sort of process across the rapidly growing LNG environment. That is of course also going to be directly linked into and therefore feed volume, which has already been exploding in recent times across the LNG exchange to the derivatives complex on ICE, a splendid virtuous circle in a commodity with explosive growth perhaps particularly in those enlightened regions which are fracking the way to freedom with LNG

Patrick L Young: 19:06 When we think about people at the top of their game in New York this week, it would be easy to think only of the ladies soccer World Cup winning team of the USA as they celebrated wildly following their incredible and enthralling victory in France last Sunday with a ticker tape parade around Manhattan. Actually one of the most epic battles of all time, which has been played out at a very high level at the moment, relates to the IPO business in the United States of America. They're the two titans: New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are really playing an incredibly high level game, seeking to list billions of dollars in capital in the and that frankly embarrasses the rest of the world.. Outside of China and outside of Hong Kong. No one else is playing in the same game.

Patrick L Young: 19:56 Therefore, it was exciting and interesting to read an IPO press release that came out this week from the New York Stock Exchange. They raised 75% of US tech IPO proceeds during the first half of 2019 (I suppose that's one of the sort of things that attracted the Tel Aviv stock exchange to want to deal with them in terms of building a technology Second Board), helping the world's most dynamic companies access billions of dollars in capital. That gave NYC pole position in IPO proceeds so far during the first half of the year. Of course, that's a very fair argument, but then again we have to think about following the listings which offers an incredible amount of Beta and a host of other Greek letter opportunities, which is of course the situation with Nasdaq, which had many more listings overall but didn't raise as much money. The NYSE is obviously stating one simple maxim, follow the money for the rest of the world. We must be following a simple maxim. Why can't our financial centers do the same thing as the USA

Patrick L Young: 21:03 Hyper competition between the two vast bear moths of listings in New York. There was also of course, as ever an echo about LIBOR during the course of the week. risk.net had a very interesting article transitioning to alternative rates. The countdown is on. Also looking for consultation on the issue of a new debt market is PNGX. PNGX?. I hear you ask...well, it used to be known as Pom Sox, the Port Moresby stock exchange; taken over by a group of Australian interests during the course of the last year. It's now going to be renamed to PNGX and they're looking to install an, interesting one might say, channel island style market to some degree in the midst of the Pacific. It'll be very interesting to see how that goes.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Stock Exchange is mulling using blockchain, distributed ledger technology, to raise cap to raise capital. Over at CME they confirmed the launch date for the Shanghai settled gold futures contract which will take place in Q4. And Hong Kong launch on August the fifth their dollar denominated London metal mini futures.

Patrick L Young: 22:09 Meanwhile, back to, well, the response to Libra, it seems to have provided many shocks to the system. CoinTelegraph was suggesting the Chinese central bank is going to be developing its own digital currency in the near future. FTSE Russell - always eager to manage to find another green opportunity, launched the first climate risk government bond index.

Tzero partners, They're now working with Atari movie. Gosh, Atari. There's a brand that takes you back, doesn't it? They're going to try and tokenize the first major motion picture. Very interesting approach to this. I think it's something that's going to be fundamentally interesting in the future of developing all manners of risk-based projects, but particularly movies in the future. Meanwhile, the AIX have approved their mining company rules...and Patty Basmati Puso 1121 is the catchy name of a new NCDEX futures contract, which was launched at the national commodity-driven exchange of India on Wednesday.

Patrick L Young: 23:10 Gold Gram are deploying a native GGC, the gold gram token on R3s blockchain platform they informed us during the week.

Finally on a more sanguine note for those who have transgressed in the world of peer to peer lending. Well, they must be hoping they've done it in Europe rather than China. A Shanghai court dismissed an appeal and sustained the original ruling of a fraud case against one high profile P2P lender, which scammed admittedly more than $6 billion from over 40,000 members of the public! Life in prison, for two senior executives. Even the lowly executives barely escaped with less than 10 years in prison. Hmmm. It's interesting. You know, China gets tough on P2P scams. Meanwhile in Europe, if you get prosecuted for insider dealing, you can still become the EUs high representative for foreign affairs. A curious dichotomy between the growing economic world and its laggards in the west.

Patrick L Young: 24:14 Over in regulation news this week, we had a very, very interesting announcement from the CFTC and the SEC, if you remember all the way back to the commodity futures modernization act. Well, one of the problems with that was that the reactionary forces of the incumbent oligopoly, which was the then existing effective lead four or five different stock options exchanges were led by an extremely valuable bill Brodsky. Then the head of CBOE, he pushed for effectively swimmingly high margins. Finally, we've only had to wait nearly 20 years... We're starting to see a downward path at least being approached through a document for general public comment. It's available to the end of the month. The tragedy is of course, how much risk transfer has been lost because of the shortsightedness of Bill Brodsky and his cohorts who were trying to protect their options turf, when really they should have been looking at the size of growth of the pie.

Patrick L Young: 25:10 Of course, the rich irony is that one of the companies that was really affected was none other than OnChicago, when which Bill Brodsky ultimately became an an eager investor via CBOE when it became inevitable that we were going to get single stock or futures contracts. Having been somebody who was in the vanguard of wanting to see single stock futures way before the CFMA was even a glint in the eyes of the then democratic government or the democratic CFTC commission at the time. I have to say it has been a tragedy that we haven't been able to see a proper dynamic American securities futures market. Moving margins down to perhaps something around 10% certainly going to be an improvement. They're still not going to be competitive with a lot of other contracts that are offered OTC, but at least it's gradually making progress and one hopes that eventually the SEC and the CFTC will actually allow a free market and the free market can make the decision pragmatically and coherently what the level of margin in these products can be.

Patrick L Young: 26:13 I mentioned recently in a previous podcast the issue of the Neil Woodford Saga, something which has been exacerbated by poor creation of rules at the European Union level, which ultimately locked large numbers of people into being unable to get their money out of the funds. Probably because in the first place it had been actually too liquid when it had been in illiquid investments. The Bank of England stepped in on Thursday. It said it will look at whether rules are required to help investment funds cope with multiple requests from customers to get their money back depending on what the type of fund in its investments and its redemption structure actually is. That sounds like a very pragmatic approach and therefore also something well post-Brexit may give the city of London an advantage if the European Union can't manage to clear up its own mess over in Japan with the incredible news that new less than 110 crypto exchanges want to set up shop in the Japanese state.

Patrick L Young: 27:08 ...That sounds absolutely obscene. We will be lucky to see three surviving over the course of the next five years. Equally Canadian crypto currency exchanges are going to fall under the watch of FINTRAC in June, 2020 which is the Canadian anti money laundering body. Singapore's tax body is planning to lift taxation on Crypto, which could cause some very interesting ramifications there and even in Iran the government have been considering the idea of authorizing cryptocurrency mining, which could be very interesting given the fact that a lot of a really an electricity is heavily subsidized and therefore they've a very, very low cost of mining.

Patrick L Young: 27:49 Simply appalling news on the regulatory front this week was the fact that the UK watchdog said all of the top accountants had failed the audit quality test. Good grief! Back to the Drawing Board Repo trade clearly there! Of course, really the audit business, well it's very two dimensional. I've actually been discussing some elements of that triple entry bookkeeping, which is the new new thing in the book DLT Malta, which is now available with a foreword from the prime minister of Malta, the honorable Joseph Muscat and is in bookshops everywhere.

Order it now on Amazon or wherever you buy books. It's published by DV books and it's a very, very approachable compendium to thinking from the blockchain island of Malta. Of course, as you may recall, I chair the Blockchain Malta Association and that's why it was my delight to edit this book

Patrick L Young: 28:43 Over in the Philippines, the Philippines stock exchange. will review its trading system and procedures after a local broker this week had a bit of a whoops nasty plus... placing a wrong sell order, a fat finger error, which propagated all manners of issues which will ultimately cause a bit of a review. Then we had news from Symphony communication services in technology, the Silicon Valley messaging startup, which is used by, well a multiplicity of the world's biggest financial services companies. Now they're expecting wait for it: Robot driven traffic on their platform to surpass human initiated use within the course of the next two years. Of course, some might say bank communication is heading, therefore from La bottom ISED humanity to just pure bots elsewhere. The tech industry bless it, is starting to have doubts that Facebook will be able to launch its Libra currentness cryptocurrency by 2020 those are the dates that the rest of us well in a low lit and see probably around the five second mark here when we first saw the rather ludicrously ill-considered procedure and process, which is leep. Libra, Libra is the ultimate lipstick on a pig designed to Hoover up client data with the paucity of service to a soccer client base. Oh, and it comes from Facebook. Who could have guessed? I'm sure everybody would trust it so much, but given the fact that they're such a reasonable sealiant and sapient judge of our data

Then we had news from Symphony communication services in technology, the Silicon Valley messaging startup, which is used by, well a multiplicity of the world's biggest financial services companies. Now they're expecting wait for it: Robot driven traffic on their platform to surpass human initiated use within the course of the next two years. Of course, some might say bank communication is heading, therefore from La bottom ISED humanity to just pure bots elsewhere. The tech industry bless it, is starting to have doubts that Facebook will be able to launch its Libra currentness cryptocurrency by 2020 those are the dates that the rest of us well in a low lit and see probably around the five second mark here when we first saw the rather ludicrously ill-considered procedure and process, which is Libra, Libra is the ultimate lipstick on a pig designed to Hoover up client data with the paucity of service to a soccer client base. Oh, and it comes from Facebook. Who could have guessed? I'm sure everybody would trust it so much, but given the fact that they're such a reasonable salient and sapient judge of our data

Patrick L Young 30:12 In people news, possibly the most exciting area is actually speculation. At the moment the governor of the Bank of England position is going to be coming up in the near future and as we know that means the resignation or retirement of Mark Carney, one of the people who has managed to make Project Fear a watch word of his regime at the Old Lady of Threadneedle street: interjecting at all points in time to see Brexit as being so absolutely dire that of course the last two years of his chairmanship has been nothing other than recession bleating... except of course for the fact that all of his proposals, all of his suggestions and all of his previous assimilations of what would happen in the wake of the Brexit vote have proven to be utter balderdash. Therefore, he has actually presided over a very relaxed, calm period of stable economic growth despite his efforts to try and tell us that the world is about to end for various reasons.

Patrick L Young 31:03 Meanwhile, that Political charlatan George Osborne is trying to export himself to run the IMF to replace his europhile Buddy Christina Lagarde. This leaves a series of names being mooted and some of them are super exciting. Probably not going to be the people who get the job tragically, but it would be interesting to see a genuine reboot of British government PLC. It could also help return credibility for the old lady, which has been crucially damaged by chief virtue signaller Mr. Carney Therefore even the standard issue, relatively staid establishment candidate Andrew Bailey is not a bad choice. However, there are three incredible topnotch names that are being bandied around. One of them is Chris Giancarlo, the outgoing chairman of the CFTC. The second is a truly brilliant economist, Gerard Lyons, who's been a well household name in the city of London for 30 something years now. We live in hope that it could be possibly Gerard or even someone possibly more stunning still and straight from the parish. Michael Spencer fresh from turning a handy billion or some profit from his sale of next to CME could possibly be tapped on the shoulder as Britain under what looks to be the new conservative government of Boris Johnson could actually have, well actually an outbreak of government for the first time in a couple of decades. Ah, it's difficult to be optimistic though, given the low brow material that's masquerading as a parliament in the UK at the moment.

Patrick L Young 32:29 There was a lovely story in business insider about the billionaire founder of Charles Schwab, the eponymous Charles Schwab was describing the day in 1975 he knew once and for all that he would succeed. The business insider article is a really lovely read. Effectively there we were: Nixonian deregulation was about to take hold. The stock market was about to have an incredible opportunity. The investment world, the financial markets, were on the cusp of incredible mega achievement of all time and Charles Schwab was in the vanguard of offering discount brokerage services. Kudos to him, but at the same time, how utterly stunning that so few of the Wall Street establishment had any idea of the opportunity that was coming ahead of them!

Elsewhere, J P Morgan's asset management arm may be in danger of losing a drug boat. Oops. One of those things that I suppose, you know, it's always in the last place you leave it, but well, they were fine to have 20 tons of physical cocaine on a boat that they happened to own, which was leased to a cargo company.

Patrick L Young 33:36 I suppose. Therefore, there's a huge number of all manner of legal conduits that won't ultimately harm JP Morgan, although hopefully they're insured in some way, shape or form for the boat being lost. And then meanwhile, quite interesting article on Friday, once again about Charles Schwab: subscription pricing has helped bring in $1 billion in added assets to their Robo advice. Thanks to using a Netflix style pricing model of subscription high. Fascinating altogether. On the opposite side of the coin in the course of 2018 Asia Pacific's regional wealthiest lost something in the region of $1 trillion. China accounted for 53% or 530 billion of that decline in one fell swoop.

Patrick L Young 34:27 And then finally, some salutary comments coming out of the UK. Three quarters of UK crypto businesses are forced to bank overseas. Hey, we know the problem Exchange Invest had its bank account closed down simply because we provide a newsletter of exchanges. Ergo exchanges include crypto exchanges, Ergo that means we're dealing in crypto currency! ...a sort of Zany Stalinist logic. What hope is there for entrepreneurship anywhere in the world at the moment? That said, I don't want to leave this section on a pessimistic note. There was a fabulous article this week in city am by the excellent John Hulsman. He has returned to City AM as a columnist, and his latest column was an essential geopolitical macro. Read how the US shale revolution changed the face of geopolitics...which of course brings us all the way back to the side of the section where we were talking about those fascinating new LNG contracts being produced and the opportunity for the trade window with Platts at the InterContinental Exchange

Patrick L Young 35:26 In people news: This week, the Cameroonian native Zhang, Claude and Guam became the first managing director of the newly created Central African unified exchange. He's the former president of Delilah stock exchange and he's going to be the managing director of a unified bore Sporn from the merger of the DSX, the Douala stock exchange in Cameroon and Libreville and the Gabon breast exchange boss' Develare Mobilia de la Freekeh BVM AC. Meanwhile, Kofi a Mower, the managing director of the Ghana Stock Exchange. She's had a 29 year career with the exchange. He's been MD since 2003 has a nice tears retirement at the AGM of that business at the CMA g m Ghana's stock exchange at nine state was going to transfer into becoming a company limited by shares are for profit entity. Another one in the parish. Hooray.

Patrick L Young 36:25 And Ladies and gentlemen here endeth the latest Exchange Invest weekly. This has been presented by myself, Patrick L. Young. If you want to get up to date with the daily path on exchanges, on all of the news about the world of bourses in one single simple read, then subscribe to Exchange Invest and you will receive at least a hundred and something extra stories in addition to those that we cover in the weekly review podcast, in your mailbox every day, Monday through Friday. My name is Patrick L. Young. Thanks for being part of the Exchange Invest Weekly. Have a great week in markets