All the Tough Old Broads Are Dying (but not Blythe Masters)

Dame Mary Barraco died earlier this month. She was the third or fourth notable resistance fighter the Nazis tortured who far outlived their torturers but are now passing from the scene.

Dame Mary was Belgian-American, The Nazi torturers broke her back but she kept fighting and killing them.

September's "Stuff Some Fourteen Year Old Girls Do" about the death of Freddie Oversteegen, teenage seducer and killer of Nazi occupiers in the Netherlands was another one of the stories.

stone killer

She wasn't the one in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize.

That was another gal, this one in Poland who fought the Nazis in a different manner,

This young woman saved 2500 children sometimes hauling one out of the Warsaw ghetto in a suitcase or a couple more under a caterers cart or a dozen in a truck. When the Nazi's caught and tortured her she went back to the saving-kids biz despite two broken legs, broken ankles and broken arms.

In 2007 she was nominated for the Peace Prize.
The betting markets had her as second choice behind Al Gore. There were also some Burmese Buddhist monks and a couple dozen other nominees.

Mr. Gore of course won. Well he and the UN's IPCC who had delivered the AR4 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report in February and who were looking forward to the 13th Conference of the Parties in Bali that December.

The woman in the picture is Irena Sendler and there was no way she was going to win in 2007, no matter how many kids she saved from certain death and no matter how many of her bones the Gestapo broke.
She might have won in 2008 but she died. And the Nobel folks don't award posthumous prizes.

We noted her passing in a May 2008 post: "Irena Sendler, Nobel Peace Prize Candidate, Has Died".

And then there's Ms. Masters.
She's tough in a different way but formidable, formidable, formidable.
There was a time when I would have bet serious money she would end up as CEO of JP Morgan.
Blythe had worked her way through the organization to become JPM's global head of commodities at the time it looked as if the U.S. was going to institute a carbon trading scheme that would have been a trillion dollar playground for Morgan and the other mega-banks.

She was also JPM's head of regulatory affairs, possibly the most important position in a rent-seeking, regulator-capturing organization.

Her combination of experience and know-how was in many ways the female version of Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein who came up through the J. Aron commodity side of that big bank.
The New York Times had an astute piece on Goldman in 2012, "The J. Aron Takeover of Goldman Sachs" which, unfortunately, didn't have one of the best exemplars of the contrast between the white-shoe bankers and the rough-and-tumble traders:

"When Blankfein asked about his title, a boss at J. Aron said, 

'You can call yourself contessa if you want.'"
-Fortune, January, 2006

So Ms. Masters didn't get her back broken but she, of necessity, broke some balls on her way up the ladder.
Here's some catching up on one of Blythe's babies from Jemima Kelly at FT Alphaville:

When is a blockchain startup not a blockchain startup? 

It’s awkward when you set up a business around a technology that you reckon is going to disrupt global finance so you name your business after said technology, send your CEO on speaking tours to evangelise about said technology, but then decide that said technology isn’t going to do anything useful for you, isn’t it?

Digital Asset was one of the pioneers of blockchain-in-finance, with the idea that it could make clearing and trade settlement sexy again (well OK maybe not but at least make it faster and more efficient). Its erstwhile CEO Blythe Masters, a glamorous former JP Executive who was credited with/blamed for pioneering credit-default swaps, trotted around the globe telling people that blockchain was “email for money”.

So significant a role did DA play in the early blockchain mythos that artist Simon Denny immortalised Masters and the firm in a special edition of the board game Risk, as part of a 2016 art exhibition in New York.

And even though Masters stepped down as CEO a year ago, Digital Asset is still seen as a big player -- crypto news site Coindesk last week called the firm a “seminal enterprise blockchain startup”. But one might have thought if the company was so seminal, it might still be actively involved in blockchain.

Not so much.

As Izzy and the FT’s Phil Stafford wrote back in the summer, the firm has been steadily shifting away from the distributed technicolour dream-ledger that is blockchain, and towards DAML, its programming language for creating smart contracts (i.e. contracts that self-execute when certain pre-determined criteria are met)....MUCH MORE

As Jemima notes, Ms. Masters has moved on and I'm curious what she thinks might be the next, next thing.
We have quite a few posts on Blythe in Cryptoland with the headlines alone telling an interesting story.
p.s.
Irena Sendler really should have been awarded that 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.