Jamie’s Bitcoin Call and the New Barbarians at the Gate

Jamie Dimon in 2019
Photo by Misha Friedman/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
October 17, 2021

Since I began writing my column for Puck, I’ve been inundated with feedback about Wall Street’s biggest characters and concerns. I’ll be engaging with some of those questions here—in addition to a few observations of my own.


LinkedIn ceased operation in China this week. You’ve recently written at length about the anxiety over China’s business crackdown. Is LinkedIn’s decision cause for more alarm, or more of the same? 

LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, was among the last social media companies operating in China following President Xi Jinping’s so-called “regulatory crackdown.” But China apparently objected to the actual social-networking aspect of the social network, meaning, I suppose, the ability of one person to send messages and share opinions on the platform. To evade the “crackdown,” Microsoft has decided to keep the resumes and job bulletins, but shutter just about everything else. It seems to me that Microsoft got off kind of easy, anyway, given how annoying LinkedIn’s “social” features can be at times.