Business & Finance

Essays on money that crosses borders, and on who gets to decide whether it may. Why well over a billion adults have no bank account. Why you cannot buy your sister a pair of shoes on the other side of the planet without three companies agreeing to it. Why a name is an address, not a brand. Why the price of a coin should come from a crate of milk rather than a trading floor.

One subscription opens every essay in the collection for 3 months (90 days), including whatever I add while your window is live. New pieces arrive as they are finished.

Internet connections were once too slow for people to stream movies from Netflix. Instead, they borrowed videotapes from Blockbuster to watch at home. In September 2000, after months of trying to set up a meeting, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and CFO Barry McCarthy finally got together with Blockbuster CEO John Antioco. Netflix was in trouble. It was on track to lose $50 million that year while tens of other internet-based companies just went bust in the dot-com crash.

Here is the deal on offer. You write something. Someone reads it. They pay you — not a platform, not an advertiser, you — and the money lands in your wallet before they have finished the first paragraph. Nobody in the middle. Nobody holding it. Nobody taking a share on the way through.

That deal has never really been available to a writer, and it is the whole reason Creations exists.