1 big thing: The fastest-growing form of debt

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2. Down and to the right

3. Why BNPL doesn't affect your credit score

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4. The funding conundrum

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5. YOLO now, pay later

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This week, Axios Markets Weekend is devoted to a single subject: BNPL. If you don't know what that is, or even if you do, read on: Thanks to my Axios colleagues, you're certain to learn something interesting in these 1,314 words, a 5-minute read.

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Axios Markets

Inflation, recession, pandemic makes for messy reality

1 big thing: It's stopped making sense

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Regulator sympathy for crypto evaporates

2. Regulator sympathy for crypto evaporates

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How millennials made $5 trillion in 2 years

3. The first $10 trillion is always the hardest

4. Millennial homeownership hits 50%

5. Building of the week: Balfron Tower, London

I hope you won the lottery last night. Failing that, I hope nobody won, so that you get another shot at a billion-dollar jackpot on Tuesday.

In this week's newsletter, I've decided to embrace the weird, while also taking the (rising) temperature of crypto regulation. Plus, millennial wealth, and more. All in 1,285 words, a 5-minute read.

Multilateralism's stress tests

1 big thing: Multilateralism's stress tests

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Young Americans are the winners of wage inflation

2. Wage inflation's winners

Adaptive reuse projects: New art in old buildings

3. New art in old buildings

4. Lies, damn lies, and volume statistics

5. Building of the week: Bombas Gens, Valencia

I hope you managed to stay cool this week; I didn't. 

This week's newsletter covers international cooperation, intergenerational wage compression, adaptive reuse, share-volume mysteries, and more. All in 1,227 words, a 4.5-minute read.

Unprofitable unicorns' public pain

1 big thing: Unprofitable unicorns' public pain 

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2. The Varo Bank case study

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Digital or physical art? Artist Damien Hirst experiments with NFTs

3. Paper? Money?

AMTD Digital isn't a meme stock

4. Don't call it a meme stock

The weekday Markets team has left on vacation, but I'm still here today and next Saturday. Do reply to this email if there's anything you want me to cover next week.

This week, I'm looking at what happens when unicorns go public; a bank that isn't public but might as well be, in terms of the disclosures it needs to make; meme stocks; and the outcome of a high-profile NFT experiment. The whole thing is 1,449 words, a 5.5-minute read.

Effective altruism: From grassroots to Big Philanthropy

1 big thing: Institutionalized altruism

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2. The EA 2.0 media blitz

What We Owe The Future, by Will MacAskill

Taking from Afghanistan's poor

3. Taking from the poor, Afghanistan edition

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The shift from charity to philanthropy

4. Philanthropy eclipses charity

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Philanthropy's post-neoliberal vision for democracy

5. The post-neoliberal vision

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Welcome back to Axios Markets! We're back to six days a week starting Monday, forever, or at least until Labor Day. 

In this week's 1,377-word edition of Markets Weekend, I take a dive into the philanthrosphere. It should take about 5 minutes to read.

Dustin Moskovitz is one of the few EAs who has a well developed sense of humor about EA. Check out his Twitter thread on "How many EAs does it take to change a lightbulb?"

One year after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, the country's economy has — as predicted — imploded, exacerbating an already-existing humanitarian crisis.

Why it matters: Afghanistan entered 2021 as a client state of the U.S., reliant on foreign aid for 75% of public spending. When Joe Biden made the decision to withdraw, that grant funding disappeared, and some $9 billion of Afghan central bank assets were frozen, rendering many normal central bank functions impossible.

On top of that, sanctions on money flows to anybody associated with the Taliban have had a chilling effect more broadly, with many foreign banks being "unwilling to process foreign currency transactions involving Afghan banks," per Human Rights Watch.

By the numbers: The Afghan government's 2022 budget is down more than 60%  from its 2020 level in nominal terms and much more in real terms. Basic household goods inflation is running at 52% year-on-year. Per capita income is now about $375 per year, its lowest level in over a decade. 

The poverty rate is 70%, with more than half the population suffering from acute food insecurity. 

What they're saying: "This is a form of collective punishment," Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, tells Axios. "If there was a war going on, it would be a war crime under the Geneva Conventions."

Article 33 prohibits "collective penalties" in war, saying "no protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed." U.S. actions against the central bank have had punishing effects on all Afghans.

Where it stands: After an initial plunge, Afghanistan's economy and currency seem to have stabilized somewhat at their new lower level. Exports are even rising, thanks to higher energy prices — the country's coal exports are up significantly, partly thanks to child labor. 

The bottom line: There is no evidence that the Taliban regime has the ability or inclination to rule Afghanistan effectively, even without international sanctions. But as the International Rescue Committee says, "Afghanistan’s slide towards catastrophe is primarily driven by the policies of the international community, rather than conflict or natural disaster."  

Go deeper: Taking from Afghanistan's poor

Afghanistan's economic calamity

The U.S. withdrawal exacerbated a humanitarian and economic crisis.

Photo illustration of an Afghan man counting money as a collage. 

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP via Getty Images

Afghanistan

One year after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, the country&#x27;s economy has — as predicted — imploded, exacerbating an already-existing humanitarian crisis.Why it matters: Afghanistan entered 2021 as a client state of the U.S., reliant on foreign aid for 75% of public spending. When Joe Biden made the decision to withdraw, that grant funding disappeared, and some $9 billion of Afghan central bank assets were frozen, rendering many normal central bank functions impossible.

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Effective altruism, or EA, has become an institutionalized arm of Big Philanthropy, complete with billionaire megadonors and six-figure incomes for a slew of Western white-collar professionals. 

Why it matters: That's a big, fast change for a movement that started out about 10 years ago on a much more grassroots level, focused on things like veganism and giving away most of your earnings. 

The big picture: EA in general has come a long way from the early idea that if $4,000 can save a life in Uganda, perhaps by providing a simple tool like mosquito nets, then I have a moral obligation to send that $4,000 to Uganda, rather than, say, spend it on travel or restaurants or art. 

The bed-nets philosophy is exemplified by GiveWell, and is characterized by rigorous quantification of lives saved (or massively improved) per dollar spent.

GiveWell's biggest early donors, Facebook and Asana billionaire Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, have since expanded into much more conventional philanthropy, like giving millions of dollars to a Washington think tank, or funding "a summer boot camp for PhD students on the economics of innovation", all under the increasingly broad umbrella that is EA. 

Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he's universally known, is possibly an even richer EA, depending on how crypto is doing. SBF's conception of EA has expanded to include old-fashioned political donations, or even buying sports arena naming rights for $135 million. 

The idea is that the naming rights will prove profitable for his crypto company, FTX, and thereby generate more money for important causes, even as the naming-rights money is put towards fighting gun violence and poverty in Miami.

Driving the news: EA's leading thinker, Will MacAskill, has been doing a media tour in advance of the publication on Tuesday of his new book, "What We Owe The Future"; he's written a good précis for the BBC, and a slightly longer version for the NYT. Even though MacAskill's "longtermism" is highly controversial within philanthropy circles, nearly all of the coverage has been positive. 

What they're saying: MacAskill's thesis is provocative, builds on centuries of moral philosophy, and is unafraid to come to unintuitive conclusions. "If you could prevent a genocide in a thousand years, the fact that 'those people don't exist yet' would do nothing to justify inaction," he writes. "The future is just as real as the present or the past."

Go deeper: The New Yorker's Gideon Lewis-Kraus has the best profile of MacAskill, including a short history of EA and explanation of where it has ended up. 

Between the lines: As EA moved from late-night Oxford grad student conversations to Silicon Valley billionaire strategy decks, it inevitably grew in ambition, and flipped from one extreme to the other of the charity-philanthropy spectrum.

Simply saving lives of people living today is no longer enough; the new emphasis is on saving or improving the lives of people who might not even be born for hundreds of thousands of years. That project, naturally, involves funding a lot of academics.

Somehow, the result seems to be, in the words of Lewis-Kraus, that "a group of moral philosophers and computer scientists have happened to conclude that the people most likely to safeguard humanity’s future are moral philosophers and computer scientists."

The bottom line: The funding decisions made at the big EA shops — Open Philanthropy and the FTX Future Fund — undoubtedly have internal logic. They can also look quixotic and driven by the founders' personal whims, just like the decisions made at most other large philanthropies. 

The movement behind "maximizing good" and longtermism is evolving.

Philanthropy

Stock market

Effective altruism, or EA, has become an institutionalized arm of Big Philanthropy, complete with billionaire megadonors and six-figure incomes for a slew of Western white-collar professionals. Why it matters: That&#x27;s a big, fast change for a movement that started out about <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="10 years ago" data-vars-click-url="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9a7xMXoSiQs3EYPA2/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism" data-vars-content-id="28d2ce89-0e23-44f6-8a06-3b0b33fecb68" data-vars-headline="Effective altruism: From grassroots to Big Philanthropy" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9a7xMXoSiQs3EYPA2/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism" target="_blank">10 years ago</a> on a much more grassroots level, focused on things like veganism and giving away most of your earnings.

Billions of dollars formerly held by the Afghan central bank could end up turning American families into multi-millionaires. 

What we did: After the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to take over, the Biden Administration froze some $7 billion of central bank funds. President Biden then allowed half of that money to potentially get redirected to rich Americans — including about 150 families who stand to receive eight-figure payouts. 

The intrigue: A group of families of 9/11 victims sued the Taliban after the attack, and won a summary (and seemingly symbolic) judgment when the defendants failed to show up. Now, they claim that Afghanistan's central bank reserves belong to the Taliban, and can therefore be seized in payment of those obligations.

The other side: There's a strong case to be made that the funds belonged to Afghanistan, not to the Taliban, and therefore can't be seized. That might yet be the final verdict in the case. 

Driving the news: A group of 70 international economists, including Joe Stiglitz of Columbia and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, is urging the U.S. government to give the Afghan central bank its money back — but there's no indication that anyone at Treasury is sympathetic. 

What they're saying: "Without access to its foreign reserves, the central bank of Afghanistan cannot carry out its normal, essential functions. Without a functioning central bank, the economy of Afghanistan has, predictably, collapsed. The people of Afghanistan have been made to suffer doubly for a government they did not choose."

The bottom line: At the government level, political considerations often overrule humanitarian ones. 

At the government level, political considerations often overrule humanitarian ones.

Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Gary Hershorn, Javed Tanveer/AFP via Getty Images

Billions of dollars formerly held by the Afghan central bank could end up turning American families into multi-millionaires. What we did: After the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to take over, the Biden Administration froze some $7 billion of central bank funds. President Biden then <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="allowed" data-vars-click-url="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/11/fact-sheet-executive-order-to-preserve-certain-afghanistan-central-bank-assets-for-the-people-of-afghanistan/" data-vars-content-id="402a17fc-c815-4915-8e96-daff105194e0" data-vars-headline="Taking from Afghanistan&#x27;s poor" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/11/fact-sheet-executive-order-to-preserve-certain-afghanistan-central-bank-assets-for-the-people-of-afghanistan/" target="_blank">allowed</a> half of that money to potentially get redirected to rich Americans — including about 150 families who stand to receive <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="eight-figure payouts" data-vars-click-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/us/politics/911-families-taliban-funds.html" data-vars-content-id="402a17fc-c815-4915-8e96-daff105194e0" data-vars-headline="Taking from Afghanistan&#x27;s poor" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/us/politics/911-families-taliban-funds.html" target="_blank">eight-figure payouts</a>.

Pretty much the entire U.S. nonprofit sector is witnessing a move from individually-determined charitable donations to institutionally-determined philanthropic strategies. 

Why it matters: A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies shows megaphilanthropy crowding out individual donations.

By the numbers: 20 years ago, two thirds of American households gave to charity. Today, it's less than half. Meanwhile, households earning more than $1 million per year accounted for 40% of charitable deductions in 2019, up from 10% in 1993.

Some $25 billion was donated by megadonors in 2021. About 80% of that $25 billion went into private foundations and donor-advised funds where the donors retain full control of how (and even whether) the money is spent. 

The bottom line: Charities like to say that "every penny counts." In reality, small-dollar donations have never mattered less. Increasingly, it's a small number of ultra-high net worth individuals, alongside even fewer old money foundations, who determine whether charities thrive or wither away.

20 years ago, two thirds of American households gave to charity. Today, it's less than half.

Pretty much the entire U.S. nonprofit sector is witnessing a move from individually-determined charitable donations to institutionally-determined philanthropic strategies. Why it matters: A <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="new report" data-vars-click-url="https://ips-dc.org/report-gilded-giving-2022/" data-vars-content-id="4494dca4-e065-4340-a1cd-57ea724d028d" data-vars-headline="The shift from charity to philanthropy" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://ips-dc.org/report-gilded-giving-2022/" target="_blank">new report</a> from the Institute for Policy Studies shows megaphilanthropy crowding out individual donations.

Institutional philanthropy, unlike individual charity, tends to focus on influencing governments. One sign of its current importance is the Inflation Reduction Act that is set to get signed into law next week.

Why it matters: Philanthropy is trying to shape the successor to neoliberalism.

The big picture: Neoliberalism, as an intellectual paradigm, replaced Keynesianism in large part thanks to significant philanthropic funding. 

In a 2017 memo, Hewlett Foundation president Larry Kramer identified the William Volker Fund as a key early player, with at least half a dozen later funders, including the Koch family foundations. 

Those foundations helped neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the power of free markets, replace the Keynesian vision of economies controlled by governments.

Where it stands: The Hewlett Foundation and others are now trying to lay the intellectual foundations for whatever comes next — whether it's called productivism, democratic capitalism, supply-side progressivism, or something else. 

The big idea: Something will replace neoliberalism, which is dead. And that something should not be anti-democratic ethno-nationalism. 

What they're saying: "The Inflation Reduction Act is solidly what we’re looking for," says Hewlett president Larry Kramer. "We had nothing directly to do with that bill. But the frameworks that underlie it were all things that were funded directly on the Hewlett side."

Go deeper: Axios' Andrew Freedman unpacks the politics and economics of the act, and explains why it doesn't include neoliberal climate solutions like a carbon tax.

The bottom line: Kramer is fully aware of the irony involved in an unaccountable private foundation trying to save democracy. But, what else can he do?

Philanthropies are laying the intellectual foundation for what comes next.

Institutional philanthropy, unlike individual charity, tends to focus on influencing governments. One sign of its current importance is the Inflation Reduction Act that is set to get signed into law next week.Why it matters: Philanthropy is trying to shape the successor to neoliberalism.

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Felix Salmon

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Afghanistan's economic calamity

Philanthropy's post-neoliberal vision for democracy

The shift from charity to philanthropy

Effective altruism: From grassroots to Big Philanthropy

Taking from Afghanistan's poor

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