CITY OF LONDON–Since we launched in 2022, our hard-hitting investigations have revealed malfeasance, sanctions violations and fraud, and contributed information in the public sphere that led to tens of millions of dollars in penalties, recoveries and freezing orders being written by Western governments.
We now step up the activity of reporter.london to provide our readers with a point of view as well as a set of facts that help shape their decisions. Between trade embargoes and tariff wars, financial sanctions and monetary muscle flexing, and of course the endless stream of civil and arbitration court actions involving state entities, one trend has crystallised in the last couple of years above all: a sharp increase in events that might be described as financial geopolitics.
Banking, insurance, capital markets and related professional services that are key to global politics and industries have become tools in the arsenal countries are using against each other.
From the West’s collective sanctions packages and trade limits on Russia, to US tariff policies, and Washington’s own sanctions on European officials, to Russia’s cryptocurrency innovations and China’s gold-buying spree, these are reactions and counterreactions determined politically in an increasingly complex and fraught global arena, which reporter.london has decided to cover and break down in a monthly newsletter to be published on the last Friday of each month.
Our investigative core places us well to examine these questions. And it’s important to have fun doing it, which is why we came up with “neon cyberpunk payday chungus.”
Our thinking
We say it’s cyberpunk, because we feel that the world today is high on tech, low on morals, and increasingly resembles a quasi-dystopian vision of the type described in the cult novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. It publishes on payday (every last Friday of the month) and it’s a big, fat chungus of a text analysing the most important news of interest to our community, as comprehensively as possible. The “big chungus” meme has been around a few years and to us has always nodded at a certain patina of degradation in the quality of popular culture, which we believe is relevant to politics and therefore to finance. And neon is just cool.
The product is going to be charged at an initially modest rate via a paywall we have recently installed (feedback is welcome!).
Between the scoops, investigative collaborations and this new regular analytical product, our readers will spend more time with us and eventually coalesce into a reporter.london community of loyal supporters.
It will have mini scoops and exclusives, one big interview per edition, and a review+analysis of the biggest news of the month in terms of how finance, business and capital markets are becoming a tool of statecraft.
A natural question is where we fit in the media industry, already crammed full of newsletters and substacks, takes and posts, etc. We see ourselves as occupying a vacant space. We don’t compete with the likes of Bloomberg or the Economist, the latter of which bills itself as helping people “know which way is up,” rather alarmingly implying their readers don’t already. We feel that the tone and thrust of financial media coverage has in large part become inadequate for the ruthless politics of the age, and we wish to sharpen our perspective, and yours.
By its nature a newsletter is prone to delivering yesterday’s news, tomorrow. But unlike others of our esteemed colleagues in the media, we won’t try to tell you what to think, just what to think about.
The corporate way to say this is that our newsletter will provide strategic insight to aid decision-making for executives whose work is affected by geopolitical risk.
SUBSCRIBE NOW TO THE NEW AND EXCLUSIVE Financial Geopolitics Newsletter: your big payday read to bring you up to speed with how the cornerstone of human civilization that is the financial services sector is being instrumentalized in the growing global geopolitical conflict.
Eyes to the future!