Wall Street is crypto crazed this week, and no wonder. Coinbase’s $76bn direct listing is a coming-of-age moment for digital money. It has also unleashed a flood of emails in my inbox predicting that fintech will challenge fiat money and legacy financial groups, such as Wall Street banks.
Maybe so. Yet even as the crypto kids are strutting tall, their financial grandpas — those big US banks — look increasingly powerful too.
That is not what anyone expected a year ago, when Wall Street was melting down in a pandemic-inspired panic. Since then, the rebound has been so steep that future historians may look back and conclude that one unexpected consequence of Covid-19 was that it consolidated Wall Street’s pre-eminence, at least over European rivals.