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Austin Campbell

@CampbellJAustin

Dec 12, 2025

0/ We Need to Fix Our Deal with Banks

Right now, the average American faces a comically unfair deal with banks: deposit your money, get paid nothing, they do hilariously risky stuff, and if it goes well, they pay themselves huge bonuses.

Which somehow isn't even the bad part!

1/ The bad part is that when they don't do well, we don't get a refund. In fact, we have to bail them out. This has been a problem throughout American history, and there is a certain undeniable tension between credit and bailouts. However, in the past, we had this under control.

2/ How? It was called Glass-Steagall, and it meant that while banks could take risk, those risks were largely mainstream lending for the benefit of America, not yeeting as much money as humanly possible to hedge funds so they could lever up their trades.

Read 13 tweets

Austin Campbell

@CampbellJAustin

Nov 1, 2025

0/ I remain convinced that the SEC under Gensler has done lasting damage to the Democratic party, because it built a narrative around crypto and blockchain on completely false premises that continues harming the party to this day.

1/ The first is that everything related to crypto can be handled with securities law. This is false. Blockchains are a ledger, like an excel spreadsheet or a physical notebook. Imagine me holding up a notebook and loudly proclaiming 'EVERYTHING I WRITE IN HERE IS A SECURITY".

2/ That's insane, right? We can easily see that. But this is what the SEC often argued under Gensler to have authority, while waving their hands wildly and using blockchain jargon to obscure the fact that they were calling Pokemon cards securities (ht: @RitchieTorres).

Read 16 tweets

Austin Campbell

@CampbellJAustin

Oct 24, 2025

0/ For all those looking at the CZ pardon, here is a helpful chart for understanding people's views:

1/ The circled blue groups are intellectually consistent. I don't agree with the libertarians, but it's not wrong to say if bank execs don't go to jail for money laundering, neither should CZ, and I get where they are coming from. I disagree, but it's fair.

2/ If you are in the upper left or lower right, however, you are both on the same team. It's just an argument over who is receiving the bribes and if you should have to put a nice coat of paint on the house to disguise the activity.

Read 8 tweets

Austin Campbell

@CampbellJAustin

Aug 13, 2025

https://twitter.com/Cointelegraph/status/1955743735821561897

0/ A serious question for anyone in Congress who cares about financial inclusion:

Why would you want to stop deposit flight by allowing banks to rip off customers?

Do you want your constituents, especially the most vulnerable, getting fucked over by banks?

https://twitter.com/Cointelegraph/status/1955743735821561897

1/ So that's a provocative statement, and you're wondering why I said it. Simply put, here is the commercial deal that most banks are offering to the end user:

1 - Deposit your money here
2 - I will pay you zero
3 - I will do risky things lending out that money (which can be good, in the case of some lending, but also is often just "give great deal terms to my billionaire friends")
4 - If it goes well, I'll pay myself a giant bonus
5 - If it doesn't go well, banking is risky and those depositors are going to lose their money or the government will have to fix it!

This is deranged. It's one thing if banks compete for deposits on an open market and thus pay interest to depositors if they are making money on loans (fair enough, getting paid for risk).

But the current embargo on competition means that banks are screwing anyone using the system for payments to pay themselves huge bonuses, but dump the losses on the taxpayer if it goes wrong.

Note that this is not a refutation of the power of lending, or that there are bad banks. But it is saying that to buy a coffee, you shouldn't have to loan money to a real estate billionaire at below market rates.

How is that fair?

2/ Banks are going to counter this with the talking point that "well, deposit costs going up is going to raise the cost of lending", and to which I say that's mostly wrong, and in the cases where it's not wrong, that's actually a good thing.

Where is it wrong: mostly what stablecoins will do is reverse repo, which means they are providing wholesale funding against treasury collateral to (wait for it) banks. Yes, that's right. We've moved from deposit funding to wholesale funding and the BPI is freaking out. Why? Because those are arms length trades where it's harder to rip everyone off, though if a lot of funding moves there, it means wholesale funding is cheaper and banks will use more of it!

Two, a lot of the lending we care about (small business and housing) is not done by banks that retain the risk. Many of those loans either come through the alt lending complex and are already on private balance sheets (Apollo, LENDX, etc.) or they are securitized and put into the general market in the case of mortgages. Pretty sure you've heard of Fannie and Freddie too! Banks don't retain a ton of this risk on their balance sheet.

What do they retain? Project loans, commercial real estate, and other more esoteric stuff that fundamentally is mostly funding billionaire projects and large scale activity, if you look at aggregate balance sheet composition (btw this data is public - you can totally just go look).

So when they come to you pleading and begging, remember they are fundamentally telling you that it's private wealth clients and commercial real estate mavens who are about to get whacked. The mortgages they don't keep on their balance sheet trade with the risk free rate and a spread, and this is doing very little to that given most of that shoots out into the market anyways.

Read 4 tweets

Austin Campbell

@CampbellJAustin

Mar 12, 2025

https://twitter.com/TFTC21/status/1899517515291824247

0/ One of the first transformative things I learned when I was doing my MBA at @NYUStern was from @AswathDamodaran in his class on valuations.

Namely, when you see multi-decade growth rates at huge CAGRs, you know you are dealing with an idiot or a scammer.

https://twitter.com/TFTC21/status/1899517515291824247

1/ Professor Damodaran is a nice person (much nicer than me, low bar), so I don't think he quite put it in those terms, but that was the message I took away.

Why do I bring this up here? Look at the CAGR that has to be assumed for an asset that already has a trillion dollar market cap to make these scenarios realistic!

2/ Notice that even at the midpoint of this estimate, Bitcoin is growing so fast that it essentially becomes a significant percentage of the total American economy. At the high end, it is larger than the stock market. Think about that for a moment.

Would anyone, outside of one of the Satoshi's Witnesses in the thrall of a cult-like belief, want to own a piece of code that literally does nothing over, oh I don't know, literally the entire US economy and its productive capacity? This becomes deranged at some point to even consider.

Put differently, at no point in history has money been worth more than the total supply of productive assets.

Read 7 tweets

Austin Campbell

@CampbellJAustin

Feb 24, 2025

0/ A while back, I had written a piece on @ethena_labs and USDE asking them to disclose risks clearly and not overpromise stability or call it a stablecoin.

I'm used to people in crypto getting grouchy with me when I point things out, so let me tell everyone now that it was a huge fucking surprise to me when not only did Ethena actually listen, they started doing things based on exactly the discussion we had.

Unusual. In a good way.

Well, now I'm going to write another piece on the @Bybit_Official hack and how it impacted Ethena, and why there are 100% lessons in here for everyone else in crypto.

TL;DR - fucking great work, @ethena_labs team and @leptokurtic_

1/ First of all, when the hack happened, everyone knew @ethena_labs had exposure. Rather than hide the ball, lie about the exposure, or drop some "steady lads deploying capital" bullshit, the team was able to:

Clearly state exactly how much exposure they had (x.com/ethena_labs/st…)

Have one of their partners, given they had also clearly disclosed this and how their custodial arrangements worked in advance - and hint, you have to do this in advance or everyone shits their pants and doesn't believe you in the moment, they need to know you had the bomb shelter before it was a problem - also put out a statement (x.com/CopperHQ/statu…)

They pulled together a war room (I was talking to someone in it) and were able to lead from the front, talking to partners, making sure information was current and accurate, and able to tell people when exposure was closed out (x.com/ethena_labs/st…)

2/ After all of this, the founder did not hide, run away, or dissemble. Guy put out a clear statement on exactly what happened (x.com/leptokurtic_/s…), and makes the key point that people can talk about risk plenty in advance, but what matters is how things operate when the rubber meets the road. As someone who has handled some crisis situations myself, I want to share the following observations on what worked:

1. Ethena understood their risks. They knew what the problems were, and having the 3rd party custodian and proper PNL sweeping timeline matters. They had exposure to @Bybit_Official and they did not lie about it or hide it, but by building for it, they knew what it was.

2. They immediately got into a war room and they immediately started communicating. Accurate. Clear. Blunt. Not sugarcoating but being prepared.

3. They continued to handle redemptions just fine and had a structure that was designed for this. You can't come up with it after the fact. You need to do it in the moment, and you need to have built for that when it happens. While the fiat world is different, I was able to do the same with BUSD and ensured we survived FTX, 3AC, and UST all collapsing with no issues (and that it could later be shut down and return every penny). You have to think about these things in advance, and it's clear the Ethena team did.

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