All excerpts are humorous and insightful blurbs taken from Matt Levine’s excellent daily lunchtime newsletter. I highly recommend signing up for the free email list.
“A major problem in finance is that a lot of lawyers became lawyers because they did not like math, while a lot of bankers and traders became bankers and traders because they did not like to read. So lots of financial contracts will consist of 10 or 50 or 200 pages of text, which a lawyer will cheerfully write (or sullenly copy and paste, fine) but which her client will not read, and buried within those pages there will be like three formulas, which the lawyer will write and which might be wrong. The lawyer, who fears math, will write the formula wrong, and her client, who knows math but fears words, will not read it, and so the wrong formula will be enshrined in the contract. (It does not help that the formula will generally be written in words — it will look like a very long sentence rather than a formula — due mostly to typographical limitations. So it won’t look appealing to anybody.) “
See the product worked fine, it’s just that the users were irresponsible. Really it’s your fault that you put money into a dollar-pegged stablecoin and expected to be able to get back a dollar whenever you wanted. You need to HODL your stablecoin!