In Episode 290 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Edwin Dorsey. Edwin is the author of “The Bear Cave,” a financial newsletter focused on exposing corporate misconduct that regularly moves markets and is cited frequently in Bloomberg terminal breaking news alerts. Edwin was recently profiled in Institutional Investor and is part of a wave of new authors on Substack who are changing the landscape of financial journalism.
Today’s conversation focuses on Silvergate, a little-known but very important bank that recently found itself under investigation by US Senators Elizabeth Warren, Roger Marshall, and John Kennedy for its role in facilitating the movement of funds critical to the operations of Sam Bankman-Fried's failed crypto Exchange, FTX. Silvergate describes itself as the "leading bank for innovative businesses in FinTech and cryptocurrency," but its main business appears to have been facilitating payments between crypto hedge funds like Alameda and crypto exchanges like FTX. It already faces at least one class action lawsuit, alleging that the company aided and abetted FTX's fraudulent activities and breaches of the exchange's fiduciary duty through improper transfers, and through the lending and commingling of user funds. This evolving story extends well beyond Silvergate and helps you piece together some of the larger story that we have been trying to tell on this podcast in the last few months.
If you want to listen to it, you can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 12/21/2022
In Episode 289 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jeff Snider. Jeff is Chief Strategist for Atlas Financial and co-host of the Eurodollar University podcast where he untangles the inner workings of the global monetary and Eurodollar reserve currency system with implications for policymakers and investors.
The public often takes for granted the Federal Reserve’s ability to end economic recessions by engaging in what is popularly referred to as “money printing.” Unfortunately, the reality is much more complicated and Jeff and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation explaining what makes it so and why it matters. They spend the second hour of their conversation discussing what a recession will look like in 2023-2024, how bad it could get, and why it could lead to a monetary breakdown as we transition from a world of perpetual QE to one of permanent fiscal stimulus. What this means for investors and the value of our money is a critical part of their discussion and one you do not want to miss.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and takeaway’s at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 12/22/2022
In Episode 288 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Renee DiResta about the recent revelations stemming from the Twitter Files, why we should care about them, and what we can do to fix the problems of unaccountable censorship and misinformation on social media.
Renée is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she investigates the spread of narratives across social media and how actors leverage these networks to exert influence. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare, which makes her the perfect person to speak to about this incredibly important and timely topic.
For those who are unfamiliar with this story, Elon Musk, who recently purchased Twitter for 44 billion dollars invited Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and several other journalists to look into the Twitter archives. What they found has confirmed many of the pre-existing beliefs of the American right, who see the published internal Twitter communications as evidence that partisan executives took deliberate actions to limit access to information and voices that could damage Democrats. The most salient argument here is that Twitter put its thumb on the scale by removing certain prominent accounts from trending, through suppression of both search and amplification. Even if the intent wasn't partisan, the impact was. At least, that’s the way the right sees it. On the left, the Twitter Files are being dismissed as a “nothing burger,” or at least as not revealing anything that we didn’t already know about for years. Defenders note that Twitter's terms of service say that the company limits the reach of certain posts in select cases and that Musk himself advocates for a similar policy. Indeed, Musk recently suspended the accounts of several journalists on the platform, including Lenett Lopez, whose social media account he raided four years ago. These defenders add further that Weiss provided anecdotes, rather than a comprehensive investigation, so it's impossible to conclude that such limitations were slanted in one direction or another.
Demetri wanted to use this opportunity to shift the conversation away from politics and towards something more constructive by speaking to both sides of the political spectrum. In their conversation, Kofinas and DiResta discuss a wide range of social, philosophical, and policy issues related to social media, including ways of bringing more transparency and accountability to these technology platforms.
If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation, you can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of our Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can do that through our subscriber page as well. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 12/15/2022
In Episode 287 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with James Block. James is the author of Dirty Bubble Media, a popular substack account that publishes critical thought pieces about the crypto industry and which was recently featured in an Atlantic magazine article titled, “Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors.”
In this conversation, Demetri and James discuss what they believe is a multi-billion dollar criminal conspiracy that involves money laundering, tax evasion, sanctions evasion, and other forms of illicit activity that sits at the very heart of the crypto ecosystem.
One of the challenges that comes with trying to cover the seedy underbelly of crypto is that you are forced to wade through an almost infinite amount of evidence, much of which is circumstantial. The bankruptcy of FTX however, has produced new, critical pieces of information that investigators are using to sketch out the contours of this organization, the players involved, and the extent of conspiracy in ways that had previously proven difficult or impossible.
It is a story that we have not heard discussed anywhere else, at least not in the framework that you are going to learn about today. It is precisely this framework that Demetri believes will help you better understand what is actually going on here.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want access to our Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 12/14/2022
In Episode 286 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Diana Choyleva and Dinny McMahon, the co-authors of a comprehensive new report that examines China’s plans to decouple from the dollar-based global trading and financial system.
In this conversation, Choyleva and McMahon discuss Beijing’s rationale for wanting to transform the renminbi into an international currency, how the Chinese communist party is striving to make that transformation, why it might prove unattainable, and what progress we can expect them to make over the coming decade. Regardless of whether the yuan proves capable of challenging US Dollar hegemony, the changes that Beijing is pursuing will have a profound impact on the functioning of trade and financial markets around the world. These changes will create new challenges for governments, businesses, and investors. Understanding what these challenges are, the steps that Beijing will take to overcome them, and how policymakers in the US and Europe will respond is crucial to making any reliable forecast about the future of the international political economy.
If you want to listen to the second part of this conversation, which includes a discussion about the digital renminbi, how Beijing is trying to institutionalize yuan outflows and increase international demand for the yuan, and policy prescriptions for Western governments you can do that by becoming a subscriber to one of our three content tiers at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. All subscribers get access to our premium feed which you can listen to on your phone using your favorite podcast app just like you are listening to this episode right now.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of our Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 12/01/2022