The first indication that a financial crisis was brewing, more than 15 years ago, was not the collapse of Lehman Brothers but the one in June 2007 of two hedge funds sponsored by now-defunct Bear Stearns, an investment bank founded in 1923. Their troubles went unnoticed for quite a while, and it wasn’t until more […]

Not everyone has heard of SHA-256, but I believe it to be one of the greatest American inventions of the 21st century. Developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2001, SHA-256 is a secure hashing algorithm that, among many other things, is used by your iPhone to encrypt data, including the unique facial characteristics […]

The second and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history rattled investors’ confidence in bank stocks to the tune of tens of billions of dollars Monday, as the contagion fears from Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank’s weekend collapses spread across the industry—hitting regional banks particularly hard. The 10 largest bank stocks in the U.S. lost […]

Philosophers amongst you will be familiar with the work of Rene Descartes – a mathematician, epistemologist, and rationalist – much of his work laid the ground for modern philosophy and in particular the strand that has grown out of Hobbes and Locke that informs a lot of the 17th century and the formation of states […]