Month: January 2022

It is a conversation I have had in Washington, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and, on three occasions, in San Francisco. Someone local, surmising that I am not, apologises for the homelessness problem. I mumble that it is tragic indeed, but that I have seen as bad elsewhere. (In OECD countries, I haven’t.)

After a while, it becomes awkwardly evident that we are at cross-purposes. What aggrieves the other person is that the rough-sleepers are here. The city is a soft touch and therefore a beacon to them. With luck, someone will shoo all the tarpaulin villages out of sight.

There are few hedge fund managers who could raise $1bn shortly after losing investors a quarter of their money. But Chris Rokos is one trader whose star appeal still more than makes up for short-term performance losses.

The media-shy billionaire, a former top fund manager at Brevan Howard before launching $13bn-in-assets Rokos Capital Management in 2015, has endured one of his worst periods of performance during a bumpy 2021 for bond markets.

As the highest-profile casualty of a vicious sell-off in short-dated bonds during the autumn, he suffered a bruising October and posted his firm’s biggest annual loss, losing 26

Criminals used a record amount of cryptocurrencies for illicit purposes in 2021 but the overall growth of digital asset markets outstripped the rise in scams.

The amount of crypto sent to addresses with known criminal associations shot to a record $14bn last year, more than doubling from 2020, according to research from data company Chainalysis.

Scams, ransomware and theft rose 79 per cent in dollar terms last year but the overall market expanded by 550 per cent, with $15.8tn worth of cryptocurrencies traded in 2021. That means the relative share of illicit activities has dropped to a record low.

“The