Klarna and credit
Klarna is a lender after all
Klarna’s listing at a third of its private-market peak shows that buy-now-pay-later is a lender’s business, and its customers and regulators should treat it as one
Section
Leaders
Our view on the week’s biggest argument in technology, in the house voice.
Algorithmic stablecoins
Stablecoins should hold the dollar they promise
Congress should stop letting tokens that promise a dollar without holding one call themselves stable, and write rules by what a coin promises rather than by who issues it.
Rivian’s listing
Rivian’s investors are buying a story
Investors who pay a Detroit-sized price for a firm that has delivered 156 pickups are buying a story, and should demand that the story be audited like a factory.
Archegos and the banks
Margin for error
Archegos shows that only the banks could see a family office’s leveraged swaps, so the law should make them report what they see.
NFTs and ownership
An NFT buys a receipt, not a picture
Beeple’s $69.3m collage buys a novel but overpriced receipt for a picture anyone can still see, and buyers should be told exactly what it covers.
Nexperia and the state
Dutch courage
The Netherlands was right to stop Nexperia moving its crown jewels abroad, but should give the intervention a deadline and a proper legal home instead of a scarcity law.
Intel and the state
Government inside
Washington’s stake in Intel should be a short loan of patience, with a public timetable to sell, not a permanent seat at the chipmaker’s table
Chips and China
Duty free
An export licence is a judgement about security, not a toll, and a government that takes 15% of what it permits has a reason to permit more.
TSMC in Arizona
Count the wafers, not the pledges
Tariff-driven factory pledges buy goodwill and a headline, not wafers, so Washington should demand schedules and count each dollar once.
Stargate and AI spending
Judge Stargate by what gets built
Stargate’s $500bn is a promise, not a budget, and America should judge it by the data centres that get built and keep Washington out of the cheque-writing
AI and electricity
Make data centres buy their own power
Microsoft’s Three Mile Island restart is the right way for a data centre to buy power, and regulators should make it the rule so households stop footing the bill.
America v Google
Spare the Chrome
Judge Mehta was right to leave Google its browser and phone software, and America should now make the data-sharing order work rather than appeal for a break-up.
The CrowdStrike outage
Blue screen of debt
The CrowdStrike outage shows that firms with deep access to everyone’s computers should be regulated as infrastructure, with staged updates and liability, not as vendors who can disclaim everything.
Acqui-hires and merger review
Review acqui-hires as mergers
Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection’s leaders and staff should be reviewed as the merger it resembles, because a deal that moves a company’s people but not its shares is still a deal
OpenAI’s governance
A charity cannot steer OpenAI
OpenAI’s board did what it was built to do and lost within five days, which shows that competition and the law, not a charity, must steer the lab.
Privacy and power
Apple should obey its own privacy rule
Apple’s tracking prompt is good for users and better for Apple, so regulators should insist that the firm lives under the same rule it imposes on everyone else
Australia v Facebook
Copy Australia’s leverage, not its law
Australia was right that platforms hold too much power over news, but pricing links is clumsy, and other countries should copy the leverage, not the mechanism.
Platform power
Deplatforming needs rules and an appeal
Twitter and Facebook were within their rights to cut off Donald Trump, but a power this large needs published rules and an appeal, not a decision made on a Friday evening