There’s a decent amount of denial about how much worse urban crime was in late-20th century America. If you don’t remember stuff like The Club, removable car stereos, or subway graffiti ask your parents or local LLM.

Yesterday we closed the book on XBTUSD — the contract that started it all. Launched on 13 May 2016, it was the longest-running perpetual swap contract in crypto. And until we are told otherwise, the longest running derivatives contract of any kind, given TradFi still trades on contracts that expire. Let's take a trip down memory lane one last time 💔

Watch a Japanese train driver for one minute and you'll see something strange. He points at the signal. Out loud, he calls its color. He points at the speedometer. He calls the number. He points at an empty platform. He announces it's clear. Alone in the cab. No one is checking on him. It's called shisa kanko. Pointing and calling. Japanese railways discovered something about the human brain a century ago: your eyes will lie to you. Your finger won't. Seeing a signal is passive. Your mind can drift. Pointing at it, naming it, hearing your own voice — that forces the brain to actually process what's in front of it. Studies found it cuts human error by about 85 percent. New York's subway quietly copied part of it. Their conductors now point at a marker at every single stop. Japan looked at the most boring moment of a workday — the ten-thousandth time you check the same signal — and decided even that moment deserves full attention. It looks ridiculous. It has helped make Japanese trains among the safest machines on Earth. Sometimes greatness is just refusing to do anything halfway.

This used to be a great restaurant. Has anyone ever been excited to see a new bank branch coming to their neighborhood?

Citigroup Capital XIII (NYSE: C-N, CPRN) is a fixed/floating-rate trust preferred security (TruPS) with a coupon that resets to three-month SOFR plus 663 basis points. The security currently yields approximately 10.3% and trades at a material premium to par. Although callable at par since 2015, the probability of a call has increased in 2026 due to Citigroup’s strong profitability, ongoing liability management, and management’s demonstrated willingness to accept near-term earnings impacts for long-term funding improvements. Given the heightened probability of redemption at par, purchasing this TruPS at a significant premium to par is inadvisable. Open to the Public $C Assessing Call Risk in Citigroup GFC-era Trust Preferred fixedincomebeacon.substack.c…

A random thought inversion for the bank people. Low COF banks almost always carry huge AOCI via long bonds (i.e. SVB or BAC) almost as if one causes the other. Has there been a low COF bank that DIDN'T also carry a top-quartile AOCI mark through a rate rise (besides BUTK)?

If you looked at the Pfizer building at any point in the past five years you wouldn’t be surprised by the news today

When you’re John Maxfield, you receive mail from anonymous people trying to intimidate you by sending your family pictures of burning bank branches.