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by SeanAnderson 1178 days ago
It seems like a pretty wild time to be on the offensive against American fintech companies. No real comment on the merits of their research (yet), just a little shocked at the timing.
7 comments

When is the right time to go against predatory and corrupt companies?

Yesterday. But today is a good second choice.

FYI: Hindenburg Research on Block (Square) has been going on for last 2 years. Not saying the release of the report is strangely coinciding with all the bad news we are having about Finance/Banking industries but wanted to add this info.
As a German, I used to think the same back when Wirecard was first attacked - and look where that ended.

Right now, the financial system is extremely unstable - bad actors with an awful lot of exposure have been exposed, and a lot of people are like sharks in the water, smelling blood. It looks like we're due for another come-to-Jesus moment in the banking scene, they haven't learned enough from 2008.

> they haven't learned enough from 2008.

I think it looks like they learned a lot! I.e. make sure you get too big to fail.

That one is on the regulatory agencies as well - they looked on silently as larger banks gobbled up smaller ones, or in the case of UBS/CS, actually forced them to merge.
Credit Suisse was too big to fail just a month ago
And indeed the government forced a merger with UBS, reaffirming that they were too big to fail.
"Too big to fail" means the regulators tell you what to do /all the time/, not just after you've failed.

You don't want to be too big to fail! There's a lot of businesses only small banks can do, like backing sweep accounts and neobanks like Simple/Aspiration.

“You’d shoot a man in the back?”

“Well, it’s the safest way, isn’t it?”

Always has been...
To shoot someone in the back, first you have to get behind them.
Well, it's easy when they blindly rush forward without checking for a looney-tunes looking cliff...

See [1] for example, where Hindenburg was able to acquire a debit card for "Donald Trump" with a fake ID.

[1] https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/

Doesn't look like Block's collapse would cause any issues with the financial system
Why do you say that?

"apps" that do nothing more than transfer money two parties, representing 0 innovation and doing nothing new are valued in the 10's - 100's billions.

Why?