Financial Nihilism Has a Cure

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Weekly Rant 📣

Financial Nihilism Has a Cure

The median homebuyer in America is 60 years old. The average first-time buyer is 40. We've turned homeownership into a retirement activity.

The problem? The politics of the last decade created a wealth effect by pushing up asset prices. Supply is limited, demand is the same or higher. When you add this to low birth rates and an aging society, the young end up paying the bill. And feeling pretty pissed about it.

The stats make ugly reading.

• In 1960, the US had 5.1 workers per beneficiary. Today it is 2.7. By 2035, it drops to 2.1.

• Since 1985, median household income has grown ~252%, but median home prices have grown ~403%

• The median homebuyer age is 60, and the average first-time home owner is 40.

• Total US student loan debt is nearly $1.8 trillion (2025), with the average borrower owing ~$40,800.

• Unemployed Americans with 4-year college degrees now make up a record 25.3% of total unemployment.

• 10% of young people in the UK and US are not studying, working, or raising kids. They've checked out.

We need financial products that will simultaneously help young people manage the cost of living, encourage long-term savings, and reshape how we pay for everything from education to healthcare.

The 60/40 portfolio was designed for a world that no longer exists. We need products for the world we're building. The only way to stop young people from betting on dog coins is to give them a game they can actually win.

We Created a Generation of Financial Nihilists.

We sent more middle-class kids to college than ever, and instead of giving them an opportunity, we saddled them with debt. While our parents may not have graduated from college in the same numbers, they could afford to buy a home. And owning a home is everything. 

This quote stands out

Frank Rotman coined the term financial nihilism to summarize:

You can see the rise of sports betting, prediction markets, memestocks, and memecoins. They’re an alternative to a broken model. The textbook says work hard, save, invest in a 60/40. But that doesn't work when costs rise faster than wages. And everyone under 40 knows it.

We need to stop putting young people in a position where betting on dog coins feels rational.

The Game Feels Rigged when you have to pay off $100k to buy in. 

The average student owes approximately $40,800, but often business school students can owe $100,000 or more. After working their whole lives to get into a good school and being promised success, they start with a massive financial burden and a weaker job market than their parents had.

The downstream effects are predictable: delayed homeownership, reduced savings, and the behavioral shifts we already covered. When ownership feels impossible, people stop trying.

Nihilism is a diagnosis, not a destiny.

There are two moves here. 

1. Help people survive the game as it exists today. Better mortgages, portable benefits, outcome-based tuition. These are patches for a broken system.

2. Crash the cost of things people need. Increase the supply of housing & energy by making them an investment opportunity for retail. 

We've done this before. In 2003, solar cost $10/watt. We subsidized deployment, drove volume, and scaled manufacturing. Today: $0.10/watt. The subsidy crashed the cost of production. Fintech can do this for atoms, not just bits. Housing. Energy. Education. The same trick applies.

What follows is both products to survive today and investments that make tomorrow cheaper.

New Financial Products for a New Era. 

The financial products of the 1980s are unfit for this era. 60/40 portfolio’s can’t outrun a student debt that is never paid off.  What if we didn’t have to stand by and accept it's too hard to build houses, fix social security, or build large-scale infrastructure? 

1. Underwrite Mortgages with a Graduate Degree as an Asset

Problem: Mortgage underwriters currently look at "Back-End Debt-to-Income (DTI)" ratios (catchy title, I know). Even if a student loan is in deferment, Fannie Mae guidelines often force lenders to count 1% of the total loan or monthly repayments. It’s obviously an “affordability” check, but being so prescriptive can also artificially disqualify high earners, and force them to rent instead.

Meet the Graduate Mortgage: Instead of counting the $400/month student loan as a "risk," the model views the Engineering Degree as an "asset" that lowers default probability. Imagine underwriting that doesn’t count student loans in DTIs for degrees with high employability (Nursing, STEM). (And if you want to get fancy, imagine a "shared equity" model where the lender shares in the home's upside in exchange for the risk).

2. Underwrite Student Loans by Degree Employability

Problem: Universities sell a product (the degree) with zero warranty. If the product fails (no job), the customer (student) still pays full price + interest. This is "Risk Transfer" (to the student/taxpayer) rather than "Risk Sharing."

Outcome-based Tuition: Bill Ackman’s idea is for the university to take a first-loss position (e.g., the first 20% of default). Now imagine a fintech that offers "Outcome-Based Tuition Pricing." The university gets paid slightly less upfront but participates in the upside if the student earns >$60k/year. If the student earns <$30k, the university rebates the debt. This kills "zombie degrees" overnight because the underwriting model wouldn't approve them.

3. The Portable 401 (k) 

Problem: The 401(k) is tethered to a single employer. In a "gig economy" (or PvE world), people change jobs every 2 years or work multiple 1099 gigs. They lose the "employer match" and often cash out early. What if there was an equivalent product to the Australian Superannuation? (Where employers must contribute 12% of gross wages into a portable, private fund owned by the employee, regardless of where they work. It follows them for life.)

The Fintech Product: "The Portable Benefits Wallet." A "middleware" API for the 1099 economy (Uber, Upwork, Deel). It creates a universal benefits account. Every time you get paid, regardless of source, 10% is automatically stripped off the top and sent to a diversified index fund. 

Fund the Future, Crash the Cost of Living

Our economy is crying out for

• More energy

• More housing

• More infrastructure

Government money printing is already overextended. The most interesting move would be to allow consumers to invest in this future infrastructure directly and, by proximity, benefit from its growth.

To fix supply we need a new funding source. One that could also create wealth for a generation stuck without it. What if we could create new asset classes that fix structural economic supply problems? (imagine, "infrastructure bonds" with a Fintech twist). 

What if we make funding the supply side the new economic opportunity? Meet product idea 4.

4. The Retail Endowment Fund

Problem: The "60/40" portfolio (public stocks/bonds) is dead because public valuations are high and yields are low. The "Endowment Model" (Yale/Harvard) makes money on Private Credit, Infrastructure, and PE, but retail is locked out. Instead, they turn to more engaging, dopamine fuelled memestocks and crypto. This is not the way.

The Fintech Product: "The Retail Endowment." This product would directly connect retail savings to essential infrastructure needs (housing, grid), bypassing traditional banking. Instead of high-risk options, investors would access slow, illiquid, high-yield assets. 

The Retail Endowment isn't one product. It's a category. Here's how it applies to the infrastructure supply we desperately need.

1. Home Building (The "ADU" IPO) We don't need more 30-year, 50-year or 100-year mortgages on 150-year-old houses (that just pumps prices). We need financing for new inventory.

• Imagine a Retail Endowment that funds residential developments, or a factory producing modular ADUs that get rented out.

• Investors get a yield from the rental income, but the real economic win is flooding the market with supply, crashing the cost of rent for the next generation.

2. Infrastructure (The "Grid" Bond) We need 3x the electricity for the AI/EV era.

• Instead of waiting for a federal bond, let local communities tokenize the debt for their own micro-nuclear or solar grid, or transmission and battery build out.

• If you live near it, you get cheaper power and a yield. You aren't just a consumer; you're a stakeholder in the abundance you create. Could a state not just do this? (After all, you can just do things)

3. The Education "Equity" Swap: Stop lending money for degrees that don't exist. Start financing the outcome.

• If a nursing school knows its graduates will earn $80k, a fintech should finance the school's expansion in exchange for a share of that future payroll.

• This aligns capital with productive capacity (more nurses), not just financial capacity (more debt).

If we don't fix the supply side, Nihilism is rational. The only way to stop young people from betting on dog coins is to give them a game they can actually win. That means using Fintech not to lever up existing assets, but to finance the construction of a world that is cheap enough to live in.

This is a hundred companies and products waiting to be built. Maybe one of them is yours.

Default to Doing Things

It is easy to get lost in the doom and gloom. When the math looks broken and zero-sum thinking takes over, the rational response is to check out.

But coming off Fintech Nerdcon last week, I was struck by something else: Agency.

There is a generation of founders who are sick of the "can't do" attitude. 

They know that "doing things" in financial services is playing on Hard Mode. It’s regulated, it’s high-stakes, and the cost of failure is real, from regulatory enforcement to the moral weight of managing people's life savings.

But the alternative is worse.

If we don't build the products that fix the supply side, the "Financial Nihilism" wins. If we don't create a path to ownership, the "PvE" economy becomes the only game in town.

We have the capital, we have the technology, and we have the blueprint. The only variable left is the will to execute.

So as you're thinking about your 2026 roadmap: be brave, be bold, think bigger.

The median homebuyer shouldn't be 60. Let's build until it isn't.

ST.

4 Fintech Companies 💸

1. Unyx - The AI Finance Team for Fintech

Unyx builds specialist AI agents to help Fintech companies move money, manage risk, and optimize cash across borders with AI. Hedge funds, remittance companies, and PSPs can automate complex payments flows across multiple providers. There are dedicated agents for use cases like risk limits, orchestration, managing exceptions, liquidity and routing.

🧠Ledgering is hard. Ledgering across borders, linked to other financial products is super hard. People do not appreciate how complex the plumbing of finance is. Consistently, the theme of ledgering and policy around money movement comes up as the best possible bang for buck from AI for Fintech companies. 

2. Sapiom - Spend intelligence for AI Agents (KYA)

Sapiom builds rules and policies for AI agents on how they can spend an assigned budget without giving them a virtual card. They build a “Know Your Agent” or KYA profile for agents, give them a wallet, spend controls, and access to multiple payment rails to make payments. 

🧠Imagine if Ramp, Socure, and Datadog had a baby (and it wasn’t wearing orange). It’s one thing for agents to have the ability to make a payment for things like clothes, groceries, or flights. It’s entirely another to follow a corporate expenses policy.

3. Kaaj - Agentic AI for Loan Origination

Kaaj uses Agentic AI to read bank statements, paper documents, identity forms and financial statements to create an automated credit memo. They overlay this with a workflow solution for customers onboarding in equipment finance or SBA lending. The company has helped lenders originate $5bn to date.

🧠 Every generation has a new lending origination platform. I always wonder about how big these companies can get. Agentic AI performs meaningfully better at OCR, and follows workflows that humans would have historically. So I can see how this platform has a competitive edge. But there are, what, maybe, 20 companies that look like this? It’s hard to sell to big banks. The growth of non-bank fintech lenders probably builds this themselves. That leaves smaller banks and smaller non-bank lenders. This needs to exist, its useful. But how does it scale? Genuine question. 

4. Made Card - Bilt for Homeowners

Made helps consumers turn expenses into savings by giving 1x points on mortgage payments, 2x points on home expenses, 3x on essentials like EV charging or groceries. Users download the app, apply, link their mortgage with Open Finance, and then they begin spending.

🧠 Who’s the bank funding the interchange giveaway for the points system? Credit cards make money from interchange (their swipe fees), and use some of that revenue as an incentive for customers in the form of points. To make this work, Made Card has to partner with a bank. The hullabaloo around Bilt was the sweetheart deal they got from Wells Fargo, where it looked like Wells was losing money. So I’d love to understand the long-term unit economics here.

Things to know 👀

1. Klarna launches KlarnaUSD stablecoin with Bridge on Tempo* the new Payments focussed Blockchain.

“KlarnaUSD is built on Open Issuance by Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure platform owned by Stripe. The stablecoin will launch on the Tempo blockchain mainnet in 2026. Tempo is an independent company, incubated by Stripe, that is working on a payments-oriented L1.”

🧠 The first use case is treasury management. Stablecoins can move and settle, instantly, 24/7 and are programmable. While this is possible without a stablecoin in some markets, or with some banks, the stablecoin is an alternative to building an “in house bank” and far less complex. 

🧠 With 114 million customers, you could imagine Klarna could quickly do more. How many of those customers would want stablecoin yield? To make remittances? And most interestingly, how many merchants would like instant settlement.

🧠 Immediately, some commentators accused Klarna of bandwagon jumping (citing their AI replacing jobs, then hiring people back and forth). But that’s a massive misread. If anything Klarna has been anti crypto. In late 2022 the CEO described Bitcoin as a "decentralized Ponzi scheme."

🧠 Stablecoins have product-market fit for corporate treasury and cross-border. They’re not always cheaper for the biggest banks, or vs FX. But as a non-bank, to move funds instantly, 24/7 and cheaper than you do today is a possibility. 

2. Robinhood acquires MIAXdx to double down on prediction markets. 

Robinhood is introducing a futures and derivatives exchange and clearinghouse through the acquisition of MIAXdx a licenced derivatives exchange (once acquired by, and then divested from FTX).

🧠 Prediction markets are “regulated derivatives.” The category falls under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). To operate these markets, you need an exchange and a clearing house.

🧠 Positioned to compete with Kalshi and Polymarket head on. By acquiring MIAXdx's exchange and its clearing house function (or the technology/licenses for one), Robinhood is effectively acquiring the full, licensed infrastructure necessary to legally operate regulated prediction markets in the US. 

🧠 Robinhood already plays in derivatives markets with existing partners on other asset classes (like options). In its press release it is at pains to say it doesn’t plan to change how those work, but rather, this “enables them to build new products.

🧠 Clearing is a bottleneck to product innovation. If someone can clear it, you can sell and trade it. By owning the regulated clearing function, Robinhood can experiment with hyper-specific, short-dated derivatives that settle on-chain or instantly, potentially creating an "outcome contract" for events far beyond simple 'yes/no' political or sporting outcomes.

Good Reads 📚

1. Why China’s people are on a treadmill

China’s young people are studying hard, getting a college education, and putting in grueling long work hours. And yet youth unemployment rates are rising relentlessly, many college graduates can’t find the kind of white-collar work they trained for, and wage growth is sluggish. To a huge number of Chinese people, the modern Chinese economy is less of a “Chinese Dream” than a Sisyphean nightmare

🧠 Sounds familiar. Ask anyone from Gen Z in the West and they’d tell a similar story. 

🧠 Over investment in infrastructure and manufacturing is as bad as over investment in social security due to aging populations. The math of declining birth rates isn’t math’ing. The economics of having kids for the personal P+L is even worse.

Tweets of the week 🕊

That's all, folks. 👋

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(1) All content and views expressed here are the authors' personal opinions and do not reflect the views of any of their employers or employees.

(2) All companies or assets mentioned by the author in which the author has a personal and/or financial interest are denoted with a *. None of the above constitutes investment advice, and you should seek independent advice before making any investment decisions.

(3) Any companies mentioned are top of mind and used for illustrative purposes only.

(4) A team of researchers has not rigorously fact-checked this. Please don't take it as gospel—strong opinions weakly held

(5) Citations may be missing, and I’ve done my best to cite, but I will always aim to update and correct the live version where possible. If I cited you and got the referencing wrong, please reach out