Bitcoin under pressure: Virtual currency: It is mathematically elegant, increasingly popular and highly controversial. Bitcoin’s success is putting it under growing strain

Bitcoin under pressure: Virtual currency: It is mathematically elegant, increasingly popular and highly controversial. Bitcoin’s success is putting it under growing strain

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

ALL currencies involve some measure of consensual hallucination, but Bitcoin, a virtual monetary system, involves more than most. It is a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank, based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. Rather than relying on confidence in a central authority, it depends instead on a distributed system of trust, based on a transaction ledger which is cryptographically verified and jointly maintained by the currency’s users. Read more of this post

Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency failures

November 28, 2013 8:45 am

Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency failures

By Stephen Foley

Before Bitcoin, there was e-gold. In 1999, the Financial Times called it “the only electronic currency that has achieved critical mass on the web”. As it kept growing through the next decade, users ultimately opened more than 4m accounts, with more than $60m in deposits, backed by almost 4 metric tonnes of precious metal, and millions of dollars of transactions on a typical day. And then it all stopped. The founder of e-gold, an oncologist and economic history buff in Florida called Douglas Jackson, had hoped his gold-backed electronic currency would become a new base money to rival flawed fiat currencies. Read more of this post

Bank of England cuts mortgage support to avoid housing bubble

Bank of England cuts mortgage support to avoid housing bubble

8:10am EST

By David Milliken and Huw Jones

LONDON (Reuters) – The Bank of England moved to head off the risk of a bubble in house prices on Thursday, making a surprise announcement that it would put the brakes on a scheme launched last year to boost mortgage lending. Shares in British construction firms tumbled after the central bank said it would refocus the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) on helping small firms that find it hard to borrow. Read more of this post

Asset managers told to ‘be more visible’; Backlash feared unless industry presents a more human face

November 28, 2013 11:32 am

Asset managers told to come out of the shadows

By Gillian Tett

Backlash feared unless industry presents a more human face

In recent years Helena Morrissey, head of Newton, the asset management group, has attracted much attention. She is something of a rarity, being a truly senior woman in British finance, and she has used that platform to speak out on many issues including the 30 per cent campaign, which aims to get more women on British boards. But Ms Morrissey is currently promoting another cause: the profile of the British asset management industry. Earlier this month she delivered a speech to the CFA Institute in London, in which she urged fund managers to become far more vocal and visible. Read more of this post

“Quant” hedge funds: Computer says no; Hedge funds looking to spot and ride market trends are hoping for a fresh start

“Quant” hedge funds: Computer says no; Hedge funds looking to spot and ride market trends are hoping for a fresh start

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

IF SOMETHING has not worked for five years, most people would conclude that it was broken. Tell that to the geeks managing “quant” hedge funds, who craft elaborate algorithms to profit from market movements. Once money-spinners, their prized formulae have misfired since 2009, losing money in four of the past five years. Unless their results improve markedly, the giant funds will finish this year as the worst-performing of the most common hedge-fund strategies. Read more of this post