Start Here: What Is Mens Mercatus?
Welcome. You’ve found Mens Mercatus. Latin for “Mind on the Market.”
This is a newsletter for people who believe:
Credit markets shape our world more than stock markets affect us
The mainstream financial media’s treatment of important news and topics in financial markets demands more context, detail, critical analysis and importantly, explanation than is normally available
Financial history is highly informative. It doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
We write for professionals, students, curious investors and market skeptics who want to understand how money and markets actually work. And what happens when they don’t.
What makes us think that we’re on the right track? Well we don’t have many data points yet. Our feedback on Twitter is not that promising so far:
You have your head up your *ss. [Expletive deleted].
So we have that going for us, which is nice.
Making us feel a little better about ourselves are re-tweets from
and some love from :Great writeup on sovereign CDS. He explains things so even a caveman like me can understand.
Also, love the title of a new piece: “We’d love to buy Treasuries, but we’re not insane”
Who’s behind this?
I’m Rasheed Saleuddin, a former hedge fund manager turned financial historian and digital asset researcher and investor. I’ve traded Treasuries, options, credit default swaps and distressed debt, earned a Cambridge PhD on the history of financial markets, taught finance and economics as a Cambridge finance post-doc, and spent too many years thinking about how regulation, repo, securitization, and leverage shape modern finance.
I even wrote a book about financial regulation. I currently work on digital assets at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, where I’m co-authoring a study on money for us, rather than for just the elites. Oh and I run a small seed/pre-seed “Web 3” venture fund. Classic “portfolio career”.
I’m joined by Jeffrey Sandler, a long-time investment pro with a front-row seat to many of the most spectacular bubbles and busts in Canadian financial history.
Jeff and I met decades ago while working for the Toronto headquarters of a large US investment firm. He was a capital markets analyst at the time and went on to senior positions at two Canadian bank-owned dealers and completed his career as a portfolio manager.
We team up on topics that will include grift, gaming the markets, market structure, and .the many severely flawed narratives that dominate headlines.
If you like your market commentary with footnotes, real-life war stories, and references to 18th-century token money or the 1929 Federal Reserve, you’re in the right place.
Not sure where to start?
Here are three posts that capture the spirit of Mens Mercatus:
🧟♂️ The Ghosts of Bond Vigilantes Past
A sharp take on the myth of bond market discipline, with some historical perspective.
https://boringbonds.substack.com/p/the-ghosts-of-bond-vigilantes-past
🪙 Grift 2.1: The Great Bitcoin Copy Machine
How SPACs and shell companies are trying to inflate Bitcoin into narrative market cap — and why it echoes past speculative manias.
https://boringbonds.substack.com/p/bitcoin-treasury-company-mania
🔥 Up in Smoke: The Canadian Cannabis Collapse
A crash course in bubbles, hype, and the financialization of weed.
Jeff breaks down how a $4 billion investment from a U.S. liquor giant went up in smoke — and what it tells us about narrative-driven investing in Canada and beyond.
https://boringbonds.substack.com/p/up-in-smoke
If you’re still reading…
Subscribe. Forward this. Argue with me. Or just lurk.
Mens Mercatus publishes weekly-ish, covering:
Debt and foreign exchange markets and the weird, leveraged plumbing behind the global economy
Derivatives and the devil in the details
Private assets (sunlight is the best disinfectant)
Financial history as a guide to modern dysfunction
Story-driven analysis that connects past and present, without preaching or pandering
You can also find Rasheed on X at @r_sale, and Jeff training his dogs.