Contributing editor @sidetracked. Travel Writer’s Field Guide.
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Articles by Daniel Neilson
At Showbiz Summit, stakeholders urged to focus on intellectual property, business sustainability ideas
As Africa’s creative economy continues to expand, industry stakeholders are shifting attention from talent discovery to structures that guarantee long-term success. This is the fulcrum of the conversation at the ongoing Showbiz101 2026 Conference and Music Creation Camp in Lagos. The conference, which began on Tuesday, June 23, and is expected to climax on Tuesday, June 30, is currently holding at the Alliance Française (Mike Adenuga Centre), Ikoyi.
Stories Behind the Gear: Exped Lightning
Written by Daniel Neilson // Photography by John Summerton Produced in partnership with Exped Chances are, the geographical features that make for a good camping spot are also suitable for a witch’s coven. Protection from the wind… and witch hunters. A sheltered spot to make a coffee… or to fire burn and caldron bubble. Where better to appreciate the freedom of backpacking? The devil, who was attending such a coven in the Kilpatrick Hills north of Glasgow (as you do), was late on one occasion.
The Alps without glaciers? Why experts say this future is now unavoidable
The glaciers of the Alps are receding, retreating, even collapsing. Why is it happening? What is the impact on those who love the mountains? And can it be stopped? On 14 May 2025, a large rockfall from Kleines Nesthorn, near the 3934m summit of the Bietschhorn in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland, fell onto the Birch Glacier. It triggered a flow of debris into the Birchbach valley, stopping about 500m above the village of Blatten.
10 best pilgrimage trails around the world
We’re following in the footsteps of pilgrims. Pilgrims from Peru and Japan, Norway and the UK. Here are ten peregrinations that have inspired millions of people, from all faiths and beliefs, for their character, history, and challenging nature. Everyone you meet on these trails has their own story. These are trails for introspection, for calm, for bonding, and, in nearly every case, awe-inspiring beauty.
A New Direction for Orienteering
Written by Daniel Neilson // Photography by Nathan Phua Produced in partnership with SportsShoes For years, orienteering has suffered from misconceptions: a sport of compasses, careful pacing, and quiet corners of countryside. But this is changing. At Kendal Mountain Festival, SportsShoes and British Orienteering put on a very different kind of event – one full of surprises and fun. We spoke to Ben Mounsey and Kay Hawke about changing the perception of the sport.
LBHF Governor’s Belt: Agege Stadium wears a new look as boxers battle for slots
The race for qualification for the 2025 Lagos Boxing Hall of Fame (LBHF) Governor’s Belt will continue this weekend at the Agege Stadium, venue of the November Monthly Championships. The competition begins on Saturday at the refurbished arena with boxers battling for coveted slots in the end-of-year Governor’s Belt bouts.
TFAA in threads of legacy as Ruggedman, Faze Serenade Guests with 2000s Classics
The Future Awards Africa (TFAA) 2025 lived up to its theme, “Threads of Legacy,” as music legends and new-generation acts made the event a night of rhythm, nostalgia, and soulful celebration.
All the Senses – Going Light with NEMO
Written by: Daniel Neilson // Photography by John Summerton Produced in partnership with NEMO In the ancient forests of the Highlands, we experience the landscape with all the senses, treading lightly with a pack full of lightweight NEMO backpacking gear. The fingers of the fern were curled up like the hand of a newborn baby. It was June, but standing on the shores of Loch an Eilein, we could feel the chilly air on our faces and taste it fresh in our mouths. Overhead, the sky provided the drama.
Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures
Tweet Facebook LinkedIn Save this article Send to Print this page We put forward an analogy between stablecoins and offshore dollars: on-chain is like offshore. The primitive character of existing on-chain liquidity mechanisms to support stablecoins’ promise is revealed. Liquidity, not solvency, is the issue confronting par settlement.
Bouncer kills man at Lagos lub
Lagos State Police Command has apprehended Kingsley Otti, a club bouncer, following allegations that he fatally stabbed a suspected hoodlum during an altercation at a lounge on Ago Palace Way, Okota. In a statement on Wednesday, command spokesperson, Benjamin Hundeyin, disclosed that the incident occurred around 3:30 am on Monday.
Edo REC denies BVAS allegation, invites PDP for inspection
The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) of the Edo State Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Anubgum Onuoha, has vehemently denied the allegations levelled against him by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP accused him of obstructing access to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) before the recent gubernatorial elections in the state.
Italian prosecutors jailed for withholding evidence in Eni-Shell Nigeria case
Two Milan prosecutors, Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro, have been sentenced to eight months in prison by an Italian court for failing to file critical documents in a corruption trial involving the $1.3 billion acquisition of a Nigerian oilfield by Eni and Shell. The court found that the prosecutors withheld key evidence, including a video from a former Eni external lawyer that could have supported Eni’s defense. The verdict came from a court in Brescia, which has jurisdiction over Milan.
Two doctors on trial in Lagos for patient's death
The Lagos State High Court in Ikeja has commenced the trial of two doctors, Dr. Michael Atiba and Dr. Michael Ugbeye, over the death of a patient, Ejiro Ugorobi. Presided over by Justice Oyindamola Ogala, the doctors are charged with involuntary manslaughter. Both defendants have pleaded not guilty.
APC releases timetable for Rivers congresses
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has officially released the timetable for the 2024 Rivers State Elective Congresses, set to commence on November 2. he APC National Organising Secretary, Malam Suleiman Argungu, who gave the announcement in a statement in Abuja on Friday, added that aspirants for the chairmanship and vice chairmanship positions will be required to pay N3 million and N2.5 million, respectively, for the Nomination and Expression of Interest forms.
Falana writes police over security concerns for Rivers LG election
Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Femi Falana, on Friday wrote a letter to the police authorities regarding the upcoming local government election scheduled for Saturday, October 5, 2024, in Rivers State. The letter comes amid ongoing tensions between the Rivers State Government and the police, with the latter indicating it would not provide security for the electoral exercise.
FBI seeks EFCC's assistance to arrest two Nigerians for $13m healthcare fraud
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has formally requested the assistance of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in tracking down and arresting two Nigerian nationals, Babatunde Shodiya (43) and Yinka Jamiu (31). The duo are wanted in the United States for allegedly defrauding American healthcare providers of $13 million through a business email compromise scheme.
Ezekwesili seeks policies to strengthen democracy in Africa
Dr. Oby Ezekwesili PHOTO:Getty Images Former Vice President, World Bank’s Africa Region, Dr Oby Ezekwesili has called for more policies and programmes that would strengthen democracy in the continent. READ ALSO:Oby Ezekwesili’s drive for fruitful democracy Ezekwesili made the call in Abuja on Thursday at the African Conference organised by the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG).
IPMAN assures lower petrol prices with direct Dangote Refinery lifting
Oil marketers have assured Nigerians that the price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), commonly known as petrol, will decrease once the direct lifting of the product begins from the Dangote Refinery. This assurance follows a recent rise in fuel prices after the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) started lifting products from the Dangote Refinery. Prices of petrol surged to ₦950 per litre in Lagos and ₦1,000 per litre in northern states.
Top places to travel solo
There are countless reasons why people choose to travel on their own. It can be a delight, a richer, more freeing experience. DANIEL NEILSON looks at some of the best places for solo adventures. Travelling alone can mean two things. Either you’re joining a wider group with other like-minded individuals, or you can strike out alone, meeting people as you go. Solo travel on its own is an experience that lingers in the memory, giving you freedom like no other; the next move is your decision alone.
The rediscovery of Ben Enwonwu
They hadn’t set out to find the star of the auction. In fact, they hadn’t visited the house looking for a lost Ben Enwonwu piece. But as the owners pulled back the curtains in a dusty upstairs bedroom, light fell across a dirty painting hanging above the bed. Even though it was covered in 40 years of grime, Neil Coventry of Bonhams immediately recognised that the painting was by Ben Enwonwu and that it was worth an awful lot of money.
Madueke’s hat-trick silences boos as Chelsea rout Wolves
• Newcastle hold Bournemouth to 1-1 draw After being constantly booed by the home crowd for a disparaging social media post about Wolverhampton, Noni Madueke responded with a second-half hat-trick to give Chelsea their first Premier League win under manager Enzo Maresca, reports dailymail.co.uk.
Literary wanderlust: Holiday destinations inspired by works of fiction
We may travel with a book in hand, but how often are we inspired to visit a country because of a piece of literature? Literary wanderlust: Holiday destinations inspired by works of fiction is what we will explore here. Literary wanderlust: Holiday destinations inspired by fiction have become famous simply because an author was inspired. Sometimes, the writer places the protagonist directly in a town or a city.
The Guardian Life Guide to Yosemite
Two climbing teams were scaling El Captain the day we arrived. Or at least, I was told they were. I couldn’t see anyone at all with the naked eye. We were standing underneath the seemingly glass-smooth granite, 900-metre monolith. The scale is unimaginable. El Captian in Yosemite Valley is the spiritual home of big wall climbing. For merely world-class climbers, it can take up to a week to climb from the valley floor to the top.
Salta the Beautiful
The northern Argentinian city of Salta is one of the most beautiful places in the country. Daniel Neilson picks his highlights for a couple of days in the city. Salta La Linda, ‘the beautiful’, is the charming and entirely accurate sobriquet given to this charismatic city in north-western Argentina. The colonial buildings around its sizable central plaza set the scene for one of the most interesting and, yes, the most beautiful cities in Argentina.
Kyoto’s Nakasendo Trail: In The Footsteps Of The Samurai
A bell marks the beginning of the Nakasendo Trail, a 540-kilometre route through the central mountains between Kyoto and Tokyo. But it’s not a ceremonial bell. It is there for one purpose: to scare away bears. And so, with a pleasingly loud clang and a photo of a sign that we presume reads “Beware of the bear”, we begin our trek into the misty hills of Japan. Our aim is to walk the most beautiful section of the trail from Magome and Tsumago. That’s if a bear doesn’t scupper the plans.
The Fed’s debt ceiling memo
It’s not debt ceiling season, thankfully: last June’s agreement suspends the ceiling until January of 2025. But there is a genuinely new data point about the issue, and I think it’s worth taking a look. The core of the issue, in case you have forgotten, is that the US Treasury is subject to a borrowing limit imposed by the US legislature. Once total Treasury debt outstanding reaches that amount, the US may not legally continue to borrow.
WSOP | Tournaments | Event Updates
Auto Refresh Rate: 3 min | 5 min | None Competition: Saturday, December 09, 2023 to Tuesday, December 12, 2023 EVENT IN PROGRESS:Level: 36 | Blinds: 400,000/800,000 | Ante: 800,000 Buy-in: $5,000 Prizepool: $15,050,000 Entries: 3,010 Remaining: 4 RESULTSCHIP COUNTSUPDATESSTRUCTUREPRIZE POOLPHOTOS
On par: A Money View of stablecoins
Focus The rapid growth in stablecoin issuance, and the recent testing of stablecoins' par settlement promises, has provoked a flurry of papers proposing various forms of regulation and alternatives, from various vantage points. Our vantage point is the money view, which focuses attention on the mechanism of settlement, and the role of forward markets in absorbing price pressure in times of adverse settlement flows.
Bank refinance after the SVB panic
In this respite from the rush of bank failures, let’s take a moment to understand the financial shifts that took place over the last month. Today, three key visualizations of the SVB panic so far, using balance sheet data from the US commercial banks and from the Fed. I must ask for your forgiveness—I got a bit lost in the data these last few days, so this piece has ended up being something of a data dump.
Why 2023 is the year to visit Leeds, Yorkshire's culture capital
Though sometimes overshadowed by Manchester and Liverpool, Leeds is a city that will challenge and wow those who make the effort to get to know it. “There’s a vibration about it,” says local musician Jonny Firth, singer and songwriter for the band Knuckle, which formed in Leeds in 2013, and founder of Wild West Yorkshire Co clothing. “Back when I started, I felt like I was in the New York punk scene or London in the 1960s.
Automated liquidity for FX?
This post is informed by discussion with Larissa De Lima, Raphaele Chappe and Sébastien Derivaux. I am solely responsible for the views represented here. These days, it is the regulators who are deciding the course of decentralized finance, a big change from the heady days of 2020 and 2021. Those DeFi institutions that have survived are re-working their pitches for a tougher political-economic climate.
Negative space
It’s been hard to look away from the spectacular collapse of FTX: illiquidity delivers swift justice. I hope the film version is as good as Margin Call. Still, it should come as no surprise: SBF laid it all out back in April, on Odd Lots. (Starting at 21:17: transcript, video.) He was describing the business behind yield farming (with refreshingly frank cynicism), but we now know he might as well have been describing FTX itself.
FTX
No one, I think, could spend a year of their life with Minsky and not develop a fondness for finance’s most dramatic trope—the liquidity event. Liquidity is the ability to make payment, immediately and in size; providing liquidity is the business of financial intermediaries. Though the idea of liquidity is everywhere in finance, and the word itself gets thrown around quite a lot, it is tricky to master. Like the white noise of a ventilation system, liquidity fades unnoticed into the background.
The SNB taps its swap line
The most dedicated of Fed-watchers will already be aware that the Swiss National Bank has in the last few weeks activated its dollar swap line at the US Federal Reserve. Below, a quick look at the mechanics of the central bank FX swap lines and a little bit of perspective. The global financial system is strongly hierarchical, with the US Fed and the dollar in the dominant position.
The liquidity Nobel
The discipline of economics has chosen its voices on the subject of liquidity: this week the field’s Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to former Fed chair Ben Bernanke and professors Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, for work on banks and financial crises. This entire newsletter, and frankly everything that I think about economics, begin from the failures, limitations and omissions of the viewpoints represented by this year’s winners.
China’s difficult choices
Michael Pettis, a widely respected observer of the Chinese macroeconomy, writes inthe Financial Times and in Foreign Affairsthis week of “China’s difficult choices.” The argument, simply put, is that a US recession will surely reduce China’s exports, threatening the livelihoods of the people whose incomes are paid by Chinese exporters.
A void at the center
A lot of ink has already been spilled parsing Jerome Powell’s speech at last month’s conference of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The US Fed chair’s remarks at the annual event are always the subject of close attention from Fed-watchers. This year, with the course of monetary policy very much up for discussion, the FOMC felt the need to communicate its resolve to tighten monetary conditions, even if that tightening incurs a political cost (“some pain”).
Tornado Cash
Earlier this month, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced that it had sanctioned the crypto payment anonymization service Tornado Cash. All sides are playing to form: the Treasury’s statement claims, not implausibly, that Tornado Cash has been used by organized crime and terrorists to launder money and that the service cannot comply with anti-money laundering obligations.
A bridge too far
At this point in the crypto deflation, an apparent attack on the Solana blockchain does little more than add insult to the financial injuries of the last few months. Solana has styled itself as a contender to unseat Ethereum among public distributed ledgers—it boasts a high transaction throughput, low transaction costs, and a lively development ecosystem.
From leaks to flood
Monetary tightening comes in two forms—either central bankers can let rising rates go, or they can push up against falling rates. These days, tightening is of the second type: the Fed is raising the floor, which by the beginning of June had started to leak. These leaks—overnight rates printing below ON RRP—grew during June, but rather frustratingly, I can’t come up with a clear story for why. In this post, I try to put the facts in order in the hopes that readers will point me to the explanation.
Stablecoins are banks
In recent days, stablecoins issued by Tether, Inc. have been caught up in a flight to cash across many markets. The company is the most prominent among issuers of moneylike assets on public distributed ledgers, which have come to serve an infrastructural role in crypto finance transactions. Tether manages its tokens so as to keeps their price fixed at one dollar.
Flattening the monetary hierarchy
Last weekend I was fortunate to have the opportunity to chat with Izabella Kaminska and Ásgeir Brynjar Torfason about central bank digital currencies. Izabella was until recently editor of the Alphaville blog of the Financial Times, and has just begun her own financial media venture The Blindspot. Ásgeir is a member of the Icelandic Fiscal Council and a fellow at Gothenburg Research Institute, and was also the very first subscriber to Soon Parted.
Repo Man
This post is for Phil. When talking about the financial system with more casual observers, I have more than once been backed into a particular conversational corner: I am invited to comment on the connection between securities repo, an important part of the global dollar-based monetary system, and the 1984 film Repo Man, Alex Cox's dark satire of American culture.
JPM Coin
These days it seems like every financial company has a crypto team trying to figure out how to offer a blockchain product. This week software developer Steve Moser uncovered code and a logo image for PayPal Coin buried in the company's iPhone app. PayPal confirmed that they are thinking about offering their own stablecoin, but it is still just an idea, and the leak was unintentional. Some of these experiments are likely to be more consequential than others.
The Copper Market Is A Mess
Figure 8: July 2020 – LME Grade A Copper Cathode from Pinto Vall Tight inventories at the LME make it hard to make a market. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments Related Articles
Copper points
I will not be the first to observe that those who know how to think about flows of funds through the monetary system are in a good position to think about flows of commodities through supply chains. Copper, in particular, has become very expensive in recent weeks. The high price can be rationalized in a number of ways. High recent demand for the metal has much to do with its use in electronic components.
Stablecoins and DeFi
Last week the Bank for International Settlements and the International Organization of Securities Commissions proposed a regulatory approach for stablecoins. Their report starts from the perspective that stablecoins are financial market infrastructure, and so should be regulated like payment systems and clearinghouses. Stablecoins are hard to categorize. As with many crypto innovations, they combine technological features with monetary features, and so may appear different to different observers.
Stablecoins and DeFi
Last week the Bank for International Settlements and the International Organization of Securities Commissions proposed a regulatory approach for stablecoins. Their report starts from the perspective that stablecoins are financial market infrastructure, and so should be regulated like payment systems and clearinghouses. Stablecoins are hard to categorize. As with many crypto innovations, they combine technological features with monetary features, and so may appear different to different observers.
The debt ceiling
It seems that a deal has been reached to give the US Treasury a reprieve, for now at least. The Republican minority in the US Senate has consented to an increase of $480 billion for the so-called debt ceiling, a deal which allows the Treasury to raise enough cash to get it to December, at which time, presumably, the exercise will be repeated. This graph shows the new debt ceiling: The pressure is off for the moment, but it will be back.
The debt ceiling
It seems that a deal has been reached to give the US Treasury a reprieve, for now at least. The Republican minority in the US Senate has consented to an increase of $480 billion for the so-called debt ceiling, a deal which allows the Treasury to raise enough cash to get it to December, at which time, presumably, the exercise will be repeated. This graph shows the new debt ceiling: The pressure is off for the moment, but it will be back.
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