#casinocapitalism — Public Fediverse posts

A vast casino
Casino capitalism taken further: speculative gambling on war and oil

* “The Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing as much as a vast casino.” >>
Strange, Susan. [1986] 1997. Casino Capitalism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781784997212/9781784997212.xml

* "The proliferation of online betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has allowed bets on virtually any news event, including the Iran war."

“But many of them bear the hallmarks of suspicious trades that would naturally warrant investigation.”

“It’s a wild west phase, when we’re talking about the prediction market industry, and now it’s spilled over into the stock market as well,." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns

#CasinoCapitalism #deregulation #FinancialLandscape #risks #financialisation #UnregulatedExcesses #war #oil #regulation #UnfetteredGreed #WildWest #risks #crime #InsiderKnowledge

A vast casino
Casino capitalism taken further: speculative gambling on war and oil

* “The Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing as much as a vast casino.” >>
Strange, Susan. [1986] 1997. Casino Capitalism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781784997212/9781784997212.xml

* "The proliferation of online betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has allowed bets on virtually any news event, including the Iran war."

“But many of them bear the hallmarks of suspicious trades that would naturally warrant investigation.”

“It’s a wild west phase, when we’re talking about the prediction market industry, and now it’s spilled over into the stock market as well,." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns

#CasinoCapitalism #deregulation #FinancialLandscape #risks #financialisation #UnregulatedExcesses #war #oil #regulation #UnfetteredGreed #WildWest #risks #crime #InsiderKnowledge

A vast casino
Casino capitalism taken further: speculative gambling on war and oil

* “The Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing as much as a vast casino.” >>
Strange, Susan. [1986] 1997. Casino Capitalism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781784997212/9781784997212.xml

* "The proliferation of online betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has allowed bets on virtually any news event, including the Iran war."

“But many of them bear the hallmarks of suspicious trades that would naturally warrant investigation.”

“It’s a wild west phase, when we’re talking about the prediction market industry, and now it’s spilled over into the stock market as well,." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns

#CasinoCapitalism #deregulation #FinancialLandscape #risks #financialisation #UnregulatedExcesses #war #oil #regulation #UnfetteredGreed #WildWest #risks #crime #InsiderKnowledge

A vast casino
Casino capitalism taken further: speculative gambling on war and oil

* “The Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing as much as a vast casino.” >>
Strange, Susan. [1986] 1997. Casino Capitalism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781784997212/9781784997212.xml

* "The proliferation of online betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has allowed bets on virtually any news event, including the Iran war."

“But many of them bear the hallmarks of suspicious trades that would naturally warrant investigation.”

“It’s a wild west phase, when we’re talking about the prediction market industry, and now it’s spilled over into the stock market as well,." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns

#CasinoCapitalism #deregulation #FinancialLandscape #risks #financialisation #UnregulatedExcesses #war #oil #regulation #UnfetteredGreed #WildWest #risks #crime #InsiderKnowledge

A vast casino
Casino capitalism taken further: speculative gambling on war and oil

* “The Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing as much as a vast casino.” >>
Strange, Susan. [1986] 1997. Casino Capitalism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781784997212/9781784997212.xml

* "The proliferation of online betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has allowed bets on virtually any news event, including the Iran war."

“But many of them bear the hallmarks of suspicious trades that would naturally warrant investigation.”

“It’s a wild west phase, when we’re talking about the prediction market industry, and now it’s spilled over into the stock market as well,." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns

#CasinoCapitalism #deregulation #FinancialLandscape #risks #financialisation #UnregulatedExcesses #war #oil #regulation #UnfetteredGreed #WildWest #risks #crime #InsiderKnowledge

"Private equity firms and other alternative asset managers — including Ares Management Corp., Blackstone Inc., Brookfield Corp. and KKR & Co. — are reshaping the once-staid world of life insurance. Over the past decade, they’ve bought, built or partnered with insurers that sell policies and annuities, collectively commanding hundreds of billions of dollars.

In a previous era, life insurers parked their money in the safest corners of the market — mostly high-grade bonds and big-name stocks. But as Wall Street firms expanded into the business, they adopted bolder strategies to boost profits.

Many are shifting liabilities to offshore affiliates subject to less detailed disclosure requirements than in the US. Insurers and those overseas entities are also pursuing higher returns with more sophisticated and potentially less-liquid investments — such as exotic asset-backed securities and other bets tied to private credit or private equity.

Athene has become a trendsetter in other ways. It invests in deals and products from Apollo’s asset management division. It also taps cheap financing from a government-backed system designed to support home loans, which can be reinvested to amplify returns.

Its profits have set off a stampede of imitators, prompting experts — such as researchers at the Bank for International Settlements — to suggest they may be adding risks to the system.""

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-america-insurance-part-1/

#USA #PrivateEquity #CasinoCapitalism #WallStreet #Financialization #Athene #LifeInsurance #Retirement

"Look and you will see gambling throughout the economy — in markets, policy and how we talk about the future:

- The tech giants spending billions on A.I. data centers and the power grid to sustain them.

- A government shutdown over Americans’ ability to keep their health care.

- Tariffs used like poker chips to try to shrink the trade deficit.

- The rise of over 13 million memecoins

- JPMorgan now allowing institutional clients to use Bitcoin and Ether as loan collateral

- Venture capital funding companies that let people “bet against their bills”

- And the recent rumblings of bad loans from regional banks.

Public and private sectors are rolling dice that the foundations of the U.S. economy will hold under the pressure. Meanwhile, the institutions and programs that help cushion risk — like Medicaid and the social safety net, information systems, independent regulators and Federal Reserve independence, even the legal system — have come under attack.

As the public sector steps back from its role as a stabilizer, the private sector has rushed in as a gambler, betting that technology alone can hold the system together. Big Tech companies are wagering trillions on A.I. infrastructure that might revolutionize everything, chasing a jackpot that could reshape the world — or leave a mountain of empty data centers and broken promises.

The A.I. boom has grown into one of the largest speculative waves in market history. The sector value of A.I.-linked companies is 17 times larger than the market capitalization of the dot-com era at its peak and over four times as large as the subprime bubble, according to MarketWatch."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/opinion/trump-economy-casino.html

#USA #Trump #Capitalism #CasinoCapitalism #AI #AIBubble #Speculation #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies

"[I]n the first 8 months of 2025, Trump has allowed America's oligarchs to get $1.1 trillion richer. That's money that you don't have – you won't get the lower prices and higher wages and superior goods that $1.1t would have paid for if companies had spent it on process improvements. It's money they have, which they can spend on things that make you worse off – buying everything from Twitter to the presidency.

There's a lot to be furious about right now, like the masked fascist goons kidnapping our neighbors off the street, and the upside-down health system that is reviving the vaccine-controlled deadly pandemics of yesteryear. But the reason those fascist goons and antivaxers are able to decide how we all live our lives is that a very small number of very rich people converted their stolen wealth to illegitimate power, which they wield over us.

Anyone who lived through the 2008 crisis knows that finance is a deadly weapon. Let the finance sector run your economy and they will steal everything and leave you jobless, homeless and hungry. Trump is a casino guy, and he knows that the only guy making money in a casino is the owner, who gets to set the odds at the machines and tables. By opening the floodgates to trillions in stock buybacks, Trump is turning us all into the suckers at the table, and turning his oligarch investors into little autocrats, with the power to degrade our lives and steal our future."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs

#USA #Trump #StockBuybacks #Finance #Capitalism #CasinoCapitalism

"Prominent crypto firms such as Robinhood, Republic, Coinbase, and Kraken are rapidly moving towards “tokenizing” traditional stocks, and pressuring regulators to allow it. Instead of buying your shares of publicly traded firms via a brokerage account that places orders on the NYSE or Nasdaq, you would use a crypto trading app to purchase a token representing a share. Companies hoping to develop such platforms usually promote the idea by saying that a blockchainified stock market would expand trading hours, and would be more accessible to international investors who didn’t want to go through the somewhat onerous process of opening an American brokerage account.

These companies don’t usually admit that, by encasing stocks in a blockchainy wrapper, they hope to tap into lucrative equities markets while sidestepping the expensive compliance and oversight requirements of traditional American brokerages and exchanges. This fits the long history of companies trying to use blockchains as a magic get-out-of-regulation-free wand, reminiscent of the 2017 bubble when companies used “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) to try to sidestep IPO regulations.d Indeed, Robinhood has been heavily lobbying for “a new regulatory approach [that’s] needed to allow tokenization to flourish” and not “stifle growth and innovation”.1 Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize this language as the standard rhetoric of a crypto company asking for carveouts and exemptions from regulations we collectively learned are necessary, oh, about a century ago — when a speculative bubble emerged around stocks sold to the public based on false or incomplete information and we wound up in the Great Depression."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-88/

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Tokenization #RWAs #StockMarket #CasinoCapitalism #Blockchain

"Prominent crypto firms such as Robinhood, Republic, Coinbase, and Kraken are rapidly moving towards “tokenizing” traditional stocks, and pressuring regulators to allow it. Instead of buying your shares of publicly traded firms via a brokerage account that places orders on the NYSE or Nasdaq, you would use a crypto trading app to purchase a token representing a share. Companies hoping to develop such platforms usually promote the idea by saying that a blockchainified stock market would expand trading hours, and would be more accessible to international investors who didn’t want to go through the somewhat onerous process of opening an American brokerage account.

These companies don’t usually admit that, by encasing stocks in a blockchainy wrapper, they hope to tap into lucrative equities markets while sidestepping the expensive compliance and oversight requirements of traditional American brokerages and exchanges. This fits the long history of companies trying to use blockchains as a magic get-out-of-regulation-free wand, reminiscent of the 2017 bubble when companies used “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) to try to sidestep IPO regulations.d Indeed, Robinhood has been heavily lobbying for “a new regulatory approach [that’s] needed to allow tokenization to flourish” and not “stifle growth and innovation”.1 Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize this language as the standard rhetoric of a crypto company asking for carveouts and exemptions from regulations we collectively learned are necessary, oh, about a century ago — when a speculative bubble emerged around stocks sold to the public based on false or incomplete information and we wound up in the Great Depression."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-88/

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Tokenization #RWAs #StockMarket #CasinoCapitalism #Blockchain

"Prominent crypto firms such as Robinhood, Republic, Coinbase, and Kraken are rapidly moving towards “tokenizing” traditional stocks, and pressuring regulators to allow it. Instead of buying your shares of publicly traded firms via a brokerage account that places orders on the NYSE or Nasdaq, you would use a crypto trading app to purchase a token representing a share. Companies hoping to develop such platforms usually promote the idea by saying that a blockchainified stock market would expand trading hours, and would be more accessible to international investors who didn’t want to go through the somewhat onerous process of opening an American brokerage account.

These companies don’t usually admit that, by encasing stocks in a blockchainy wrapper, they hope to tap into lucrative equities markets while sidestepping the expensive compliance and oversight requirements of traditional American brokerages and exchanges. This fits the long history of companies trying to use blockchains as a magic get-out-of-regulation-free wand, reminiscent of the 2017 bubble when companies used “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) to try to sidestep IPO regulations.d Indeed, Robinhood has been heavily lobbying for “a new regulatory approach [that’s] needed to allow tokenization to flourish” and not “stifle growth and innovation”.1 Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize this language as the standard rhetoric of a crypto company asking for carveouts and exemptions from regulations we collectively learned are necessary, oh, about a century ago — when a speculative bubble emerged around stocks sold to the public based on false or incomplete information and we wound up in the Great Depression."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-88/

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Tokenization #RWAs #StockMarket #CasinoCapitalism #Blockchain

"Prominent crypto firms such as Robinhood, Republic, Coinbase, and Kraken are rapidly moving towards “tokenizing” traditional stocks, and pressuring regulators to allow it. Instead of buying your shares of publicly traded firms via a brokerage account that places orders on the NYSE or Nasdaq, you would use a crypto trading app to purchase a token representing a share. Companies hoping to develop such platforms usually promote the idea by saying that a blockchainified stock market would expand trading hours, and would be more accessible to international investors who didn’t want to go through the somewhat onerous process of opening an American brokerage account.

These companies don’t usually admit that, by encasing stocks in a blockchainy wrapper, they hope to tap into lucrative equities markets while sidestepping the expensive compliance and oversight requirements of traditional American brokerages and exchanges. This fits the long history of companies trying to use blockchains as a magic get-out-of-regulation-free wand, reminiscent of the 2017 bubble when companies used “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) to try to sidestep IPO regulations.d Indeed, Robinhood has been heavily lobbying for “a new regulatory approach [that’s] needed to allow tokenization to flourish” and not “stifle growth and innovation”.1 Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize this language as the standard rhetoric of a crypto company asking for carveouts and exemptions from regulations we collectively learned are necessary, oh, about a century ago — when a speculative bubble emerged around stocks sold to the public based on false or incomplete information and we wound up in the Great Depression."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-88/

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Tokenization #RWAs #StockMarket #CasinoCapitalism #Blockchain

"Prominent crypto firms such as Robinhood, Republic, Coinbase, and Kraken are rapidly moving towards “tokenizing” traditional stocks, and pressuring regulators to allow it. Instead of buying your shares of publicly traded firms via a brokerage account that places orders on the NYSE or Nasdaq, you would use a crypto trading app to purchase a token representing a share. Companies hoping to develop such platforms usually promote the idea by saying that a blockchainified stock market would expand trading hours, and would be more accessible to international investors who didn’t want to go through the somewhat onerous process of opening an American brokerage account.

These companies don’t usually admit that, by encasing stocks in a blockchainy wrapper, they hope to tap into lucrative equities markets while sidestepping the expensive compliance and oversight requirements of traditional American brokerages and exchanges. This fits the long history of companies trying to use blockchains as a magic get-out-of-regulation-free wand, reminiscent of the 2017 bubble when companies used “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) to try to sidestep IPO regulations.d Indeed, Robinhood has been heavily lobbying for “a new regulatory approach [that’s] needed to allow tokenization to flourish” and not “stifle growth and innovation”.1 Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize this language as the standard rhetoric of a crypto company asking for carveouts and exemptions from regulations we collectively learned are necessary, oh, about a century ago — when a speculative bubble emerged around stocks sold to the public based on false or incomplete information and we wound up in the Great Depression."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-88/

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Tokenization #RWAs #StockMarket #CasinoCapitalism #Blockchain

"As more institutions turn their eyes to cryptocurrencies, and as surging prices tempt a wave of retail investors to buy in as they hope for huge returns, the stakes have never been higher. Prices could continue to go up, powered by the sugar high of having believers in power continues. But the industry’s massive influence campaign hasn’t changed the fundamental risks or the widespread fraud. Another washout could be more devastating to even more people. It could threaten retirement savings and pension funds, even the broader banking system and economy.

There’s a chance that when that happens, crypto will have grown so enmeshed with the rest of the financial world that a collapse in once-fringe speculative digital assets must be prevented at any cost. Will the industry’s endemic fraud and risk-taking ultimately be backstopped by government bailouts, funded by taxpayers who may themselves have no exposure to crypto assets? It certainly seems that the believers now descending on Washington are closer than ever to their goal of taking over the financial system. At that point, they may be too big to fail."

#USA #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #CasinoCapitalism #PonziScheme #Trump

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-17/crypto-got-what-it-wanted-in-the-us-election-here-s-what-s-next

Fintan O'Toole on having Bertie Ahern back in politics https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/02/18/fintan-otoole-why-it-is-so-good-to-have-bertie-back-about-the-place/ #cronyism #kleptocracy #casinocapitalism