Back in the olden days of this blog, I wrote about a fairly new financial vehicle called *credit default swaps”, which I pointed out posed a substantial risk to the economy. You can read three salient posts, here, here, and here. Based on the relevant Wikipedia article, I conclude that credit default swaps are still with us, but, as they have not made much news lately, the threat posed to the economy, and the suckers who got caught up in the underlying grift, has been tempered somewhat.
Still, I can understand the underlying premises of credit default swaps and I can even see how some of the investors bought into the grift (the actual grifters excluded, of course).
Fast forward to today. I confess to being unable to understand why anyone would buy an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) and being incapable of understanding precisely what a buyer of said token is buying. There’s a discussion here, in which this capsule description appears to accurately describe what I’ve been able to glean about these things:
First let’s talk about what the NFT market actually is. Unlike buying bonds, equities, real estate, or actual art you’re not buying something with any tangible existence, rights or utility. You’re buying an expensive entry in someone else’s database.
The database entries usually consist of digital “works of art” which are supposedly uniquely accessible to the “owner” though there’s no reason to believe that is true, but apart from that, the “owners” continued ownership is totally dependent on access to the database, something over which they have no control, and due to the way these things work, ultimately in the possession of persons unknown who are immune from suit once they walk away with your money.
Lots of people are dumping lots of money into these things. It sort of boggles the mind. On the other hand, one sort of suspects that if you created a Venn diagram of the people who are talking Ivermectin and those buying NFTs, there’d be a lot of overlap. Still, we’re talking about fairly large amounts of money in each transaction. Where do these griftees get the money, and how have they managed to hang on to it long enough to get conned by these particular grifters. Life is full of mysteries.
Afterword: I suspect, but am not sure, that we can take heart that this particular grift does not pose a threat to the wider economy. The Republican Party has that job well in hand.
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