sutton038

I published an epic 4200 word article on alternative currency in Aeon magazine. Take a read if you're having a lazy weekend afternoon and wish to casually reflect on the nature of economic reality. I believe that coming to basic grips with money itself is a good foundation for making further explorations into the financial system, and economic systems more generally. As I say in the article: "The financial system exists, above all, to mediate flows of money, not to question what money is. Investment banks create financial instruments that steer money from one place to another, with built-in sub-conduits to siphon it back... To draw an analogy with computer coding, we might say that financial instruments are analogous to ‘high-level’ programming languages such as Java or Ruby: they let you string commands together in order to perform certain actions. You want to get resources from A to B over time? Well, we can program a financial instrument to do that for you...  By contrast,...

PICK A CARD A few months ago I ran a campaign to seedfund a  London School of Financial Activism on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. That was a great success (here's a post I wrote about some crowdfunding tips I learned from the campaign). Then my book got released, which has since swallowed up much of my time, but now I've hired some interns  (that I'm paying in alternative currencies like bitcoin, barter and Brixton Pounds), so I've now got more space to refocus back on developing the School. I've met some awesome people over the last few months, exchanging ideas over Skype with campaigners, entrepreneurs and academics in Oz, Hong Kong, China, USA, Germany, South Africa and various other places, all informing my designs for finance campaigning courses. In the mean time though, I wanted to share some photos of the crowdfunding rewards that came with the Indiegogo campaign, and one short video which shows one of the reward's magical secret. (More photos can b...

WANTED: UNDERDOGS WITH ATTITUDE I've got some alternative currency, and I'm willing to give it to interns who can do part-time work for me to help me with publicity for my new book on global finance . I'm going to be resuming work on the London School of Financial Activism soon too, so there are possibilities to get involved there as well. Up for grabs: Alternative currency for alternative work I'd like open-minded people who are keen to learn more about alternative finance. I'll be straight up with you though: Some of it is total drudge work, like trawling through a list of 100 institutions and finding email addresses for them. I have a series of discreet tasks y ou can volunteer for in exchange for  a bounty in certain esoteric currencies I've got from selling my book. Choices include: Bitcoin:  Not only is this an interesting experience to use in itself, but you get to tell people at parties that you're paid in cryptocurrency Brixton Pounds:  I'd lik...

My new book, The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money,  is now officially out, published by the superb Pluto Press. Boom! I've set up a  dedicated page for it here , and a Facebook page for it here . 3 THINGS YOU WILL LEARN FROM THIS BOOK After reading this book, you will be an ass-kicking financial fighting monk on a mission to hack the future of money. The book uses a unique three part structure to achieve this: Part 1: Exploring This is where you learn the wiring under the bonnet of the global financial system. You'll see the circuitry of investment banks, commercial banks, institutional investors, hedge funds, and private equity funds, and explore investment processes, trading culture, and much much more as well. Part 2: Jamming: This is the part where we learn how to bend the circuits of global finance. I cover how to destabilise investment cases in damaging projects, how to uncover information in opaque corporate structures, and how to design...

As anyone who doesn't have a degree in advanced computer science knows, Bitcoin is conceptually tricky. Thus, when your grandmother is wanting to buy marijuana off the  Silk Road  and begins asking you to explain Bitcoin to her, what do you do? Ever since early 2012, when I asked the question ' what the hell is Bitcoin? ', I've been trying to find ways to explain it to myself. Initially I used the example of the Borg from Star Trek, but more recently I've come to believe that one key to describing it is to start from normal currency, and to then describe Bitcoin in relation to that, rather than trying to describe it as a standalone phenomenon. I'm no Bitcoin expert, so this is still a work-in-progress (Warning!), but next time granny asks you, here's a rough-and-ready way you might lay down the foundations (I've deliberately included a lot of repetition, because that's important when learning). 1) Start from physical cash We all have a basic understa...

WELCOME TO OUR TREASURY: HERE BE DRAGONS The global commodity trading giant Glencore once had an internal hedge fund that made proprietary bets on global markets. It was called Asteri Capital . What do you think it bet on? Most people would probably make an educated guess and say commodities, but   they'd be wrong. It bet on global credit markets, bonds, structured credit products and credit derivatives that have nothing to do with commodities. Weirdness level 1: Why did Glencore have a credit hedge fund? Ok, that's pretty weird. Why would a commodity company like Glencore have a bond-trading hedge fund? Asteri Capital actually started life as something called Glencore Finance AG, and was, for all intents and purposes, just a proprietary trading desk within Glencore, based out of its 50 Berkeley Street office in London. It furthermore appears that it was originally just part of Glencore's treasury , the part of the firm that deals with things like borrowing money for the da...

KICKSTART IT BABY My Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for a finance activism school was a great success. I managed to raise double my initial target, which is a good sign. I also learned a few useful things about the process along the way, which I thought I'd share with people who're thinking about running their own crowdfunding campaigns. Here they are: Choosing a platform There are plenty of articles on what crowdfunding platform to choose , so I won't repeat those here in any detail. I used Indiegogo because it offered the flexible funding campaign - which means you get to keep whatever money you receive even if you don't hit your target. That was appropriate for me because the perks I was offering were limited edition copies of my forthcoming book ( The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance ) and in a sense I was pre-selling them at a premium to fund the School. Thus, even in the event of the campaign failing to hit its target, people still would have ended up with...