Platinum Banana: CEO of the Year — It’s around this time every year that the media steps up onto their high horse to tell us, the public, who the best at everything was during the Earth’s last revolution. Well, The Daily Peel is no different. So, please help us up onto our self-aggrandizing pedestal as we present to you: The Platinum Banana.
Today’s Platinum Banana shall be shamelessly bestowed upon the CEO who has led their company the furthest into greatness in 2021. Factors to consider include company valuation growth, user growth, revenue growth, really anything to do with growth and who’s done the most of it. With that said, The Platinum Banana for CEO of the year (besides Elon Musk, because obviously) goes to: Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX.
FTX, for the boomers among us, is a leading U.S.-based digital asset exchange founded way back in May of 2019. CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, aka SBF, began humbly as a cross-asset trader at Jane Street, trading a sh*t ton of products and automating the firm’s OTC desk. Now, SBF is the CEO of a $6bn+ company that also happens to be the third most widely used centralized digital currency exchange in the world, handling roughly half-a-billion dollars in volume on a daily basis as of this September. Given the crypto market moves only up and to the right, I’m sure this figure is now much higher.
But, SBF and FTX aren’t anywhere close to done yet. Founded just 31 months ago, the firm went from $0 to ~$6.5bn today while the firm’s exchange token FTX has exploded 2,486% over the same time period. Still, SBF very famously stated one of his firm’s goals is to eventually buyout the one and only Goldman Sachs. GS, with a market cap of roughyl $130bn is safe for now, but with growth like this at FTX, maybe DJ D-Sol should start getting a little nervous.
With all their success, FTX remains in a violently crowded market segment and will be fighting tooth and nail to maintain their spot going forward. Still, with digital tokens, NFTs, crypto-derivatives, an FTX card, and even tokenized stocks, FTX certainly has a lot going for it. For now, congrats to SBF and the whole FTX team on receiving this massively prestigious award and the first ever Platinum Banana. Stay tuned for the next one tomorrow.
Retail — Stores are bumping. Everywhere from Amazon to your local grandparent-owned knick knack store saw much-welcomed spikes in shopping traffic this holiday season. Mastercard reported an 8.5% increase in consumer spending measured by the firm’s in house consumer retail spending metric, Mastercard SpendingPlus.
Now, you might be thinking “of course it spiked, last year was literally the middle of a pandemic.” If that’s you, recall these factors: 1) the pandemic is still ripping across the country with an upgraded, much more infectious variant and 2) last year’s holiday season was much more proximal to when the federal government slid a quick $1,200 your way, so this 8.5% spike isn’t something to scoff at.
What this 8.5% jump does show however, is the resilience and sheer f*cking wealth of U.S. consumers. Not only does seemingly no one care about getting COVID while out shopping anymore, but Americans across the board are largely wealthier than ever before. Moreover, supply chain issues and drastically inflated year-over-year prices couldn’t stop us from dropping cash like JPow in March of 2020.
So yeah, inflation, supply chain issues, Omicron, and massive crowds of angry shoppers were not match for U.S. materialism. Did Mastercard count NFT gifts in that 8.5%?
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