Hello, and welcome back to Dry Powder. 

Thanks as always for your interest in Puck, our new media company covering the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.

In today's column: Jamie Dimon, Jeremy Barnum, Larry Fink, Sam Zell, and Bill Ackman; some praise for Mike Milken, and a few words on John Foley.

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Thanks,

Bill

Jamie vs. the Crypto Bulls

What’s really going on between Wall Street’s blockchain envy, bonus season at Goldman, and Larry Fink’s god complex.

You don’t need to watch that ridiculous Matt Damon commercial on loop to understand that the crypto markets have been on fire. Venture firms, in particular, are placing huge new bets on the crypto market: FTX, the crypto exchange, just launched a $2 billion fund, competing with similarly sized funds from a16z ($2.2 billion) and Paradigm ($2.5 billion) last year. On the other side, however, Jamie Dimon says “cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value” and called bitcoin “worthless.” 

There are a couple of different things going on here. The VCs are focused on the Next Big Thing and believe that the blockchain technologies behind digital currencies, smart contracts, and NFTs will lead to a whole new architecture for the Internet and a wave of important new businesses that could become the next Google, Amazon, or Meta. The VCs are raising these big funds, or have already raised them, with the intention of placing lots of bets on what they hope this future will look like.

The Big Banks, on the other hand, are trying to shore up economic moats that are slowly but surely being eroding. You can see the concern growing at JPMorganChase...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT