Just to clarify, for anyone who’s been paying attention to the matter, it’s clear that the true reason for that Section 301 investigation is not due to Pix stealing market share of MC/Visa. In fact, if you check Brazil’s central bank own data, Credit Card usage has not gone down since Pix came in. What Pix really replaced was physical cash.

The fact is that Brazil’s (current) government has been publicly on the other side of Americans interests for a long time, even before Trump’s term. e.g. blatantly ignoring Iran sanctions https://www.cruz.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sen-cruz...

“We will defend PIX from any attempt at privatization. PIX belongs to Brazil, it's public, free, and will remain so.”

Lula has been historically hostile to the US for ideological reasons.

He’s done plenty to undermine that relation, stemming from attacking the dollar dominance, ignoring Iran sanctions, to indirectly financing the Ukraine war by becoming the largest buyer of cheap Russian oil — and that’s why we have those investigations going on

> What went down were apps

Plus, this is an oversimplification.

Transaction authorization, Fraud/AML screening, account validation are not just part of an “app”, they are core functionality of private banks operations, and they are made scalable by big cloud providers.

The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB

This quote is literally from the linked article — he is mentioned there

> Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure?

I don’t understand the question, I think it’d be great to have an European AWS equivalent just for the sake of competition, but as far as I know, we are very far from that

American companies are great to do business with.

Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure

Brazilian institutions are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to US cloud providers, specially AWS, to be able to process that many transactions.

Earlier this year, when sa-east-1 was down, major banks were forced to suspend Pix payments for nearly 3 hours. When this happens, some people are literally not able to buy anything because that’s their only payment method. So much for “President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva proclaiming a nationwide campaign: “Pix is ours, my friend”.”

Don’t get me wrong, Pix has been a great success and a major achievement, but all this adversarial political talk between the US and Brazil administrations is really cringe, both countries are better doing business together.

[1]https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2026/02/07/falh...

In fact, the BRL amount settled via TED is still higher than Pix, although the gap seems to be closing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_General_Account

> The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced.

Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation.

The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy

Fair, by “perfectly implements” I meant to say that it correctly implemented the core invariant of a double entry ledger (debits = credits), not that it was 100% bug free

a) a pristine, good codebase that follows the best coding practices, but it is built on top of bad specs, wrong data/domain model

b) a bad codebase but it correctly models and nails the domain model for your business case

Real life example, a fintech with:

a) a great codebase but stuck with a single-entry ledger

b) a bad codebase that perfectly implements a double-entry ledger

Owning offshore assets also doesn’t automatically exempt you from paying taxes, since your tax liability is mostly determined by your tax residency.

  Just a fraction of that money could end extreme hunger and provide clean water to everyone on Earth.

  Why build each new airplane with the care and precision of a Rolls-Royce? In the early 1970s, Kelly Johnson and I [Ben Rich] had dinner in Los Angeles with the great Soviet aerodynamicist Alexander Tupolev, designer of their backfire Bear bomber. 'You Americans build airplanes like a Rolex watch,' he told us. 'Knock it off the night table and it stops ticking. We build airplanes like a cheap alarm clock. But knock it off the table and still it wakes you up.'...The Soviets, he explained, built brute-force machines that could withstand awful weather and primitive landing fields. Everything was ruthlessly sacrificed to cut costs, including pilot safety.
  We don't need to be ruthless to save costs, but why build the luxury model when the Chevy would do just as well? Build it right the first time, but don't build it to last forever. - Ben Rich in Skunk Works

What could threaten US carries are China’s DF-21D/26D – anti-ship ballistic missiles with reported ranges of > 2000km – and Iran is not getting them

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-carrier-killer...

If you intend to hold to maturity then you should accrue the bond coupons over time, that’s the modal case

If part of your bond portfolio is available for sale, then you should use mark-to-market accounting, which prices in the present value of future coupons and the discount rate as well.

IIRC this was one of the issues with the failure of SVB, they were forced to sell their bonds and realize a huge MtM loss

IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …

Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in

  “Air conditioning. … It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
  Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/express-one-zone/

In less formal or collapsed systems, wealth and resources are often controlled by a ruling oligarchy or individuals whose hard power acts as a de facto property right.

For example, many argue that Vladimir Putin is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, despite lacking formal ownership on paper — his political and military power effectively grants him control over immense resources. Wealth inequality ultimately stems from control over resources, whether legitimized by law or enforced through power.

The author is the co-founder of Oaktree Capital, which has been raising capital for one of the largest private credit funds ever[0]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-10/oaktree-t...

  "Moving on to the real world, I note that following a sea change in interest rates, non-investment grade public and private debt now offer prospective returns that are competitive to those historically seen on equities. I believe investors should consider shifting capital to this area if they are (a) attracted by returns of 7 to 10 per cent or so, (b) desirous of limiting uncertainty and volatility, and (c) willing to forgo upside potential beyond today’s yields to do so. For me, that should include a lot of investors, even if not everyone."