Matt Levine, Columnist

First Brands Did Some Round Trips

Also AI cat bonds, SpaceX IPO plans and finance clubs.

January 29, 2026 at 6:56 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Modern trade finance comes in two basic flavors, accounts receivable financing and accounts payable financing. Accounts receivable financing — “factoring” — is the traditional form:

That is, the company is borrowing money against its accounts receivable, and paying it back within 60 days. Sometimes this form of financing leads to fraud. The two main forms of fraud are: