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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34442 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Highly recommend Matt Levine's article on FTX's balance sheet. There is no way to read this balance sheet and come away thinking that Bankman-Fried, FTX, and Alameda were merely incompetent.

In round numbers, FTX’s Thursday desperation balance sheet shows about $8.9 billion of customer liabilities against assets with a value of roughly $19.6 billion before last week’s crash, and roughly $9.6 billion after the crash (as of Thursday, per FTX’s numbers). Of that $19.6 billion of assets back in the good times, some $14.4 billion was in more-or-less FTX-associated tokens (FTT, SRM, SOL, MAPS). Only about $5.2 billion of assets — against $8.9 billion of customer liabilities — was in more-or-less normal financial stuff. (And even that was mostly in illiquid venture investments; only about $1 billion was in liquid cash, stock and cryptocurrencies — and half of that was Robinhood stock.) After the run on FTX, the FTX-associated stuff, predictably, crashed. The Thursday balance sheet valued the FTT, SRM, SOL and MAPS holdings at a combined $4.3 billion, and that number is still way too high.

I am not saying that all of FTX’s assets were made up. That desperation balance sheet lists dollar and yen accounts, stablecoins, unaffiliated cryptocurrencies, equities, venture investments, etc., all things that were not created or controlled by FTX. 5 And that desperation balance sheet reflects FTX’s position after $5 billion of customer outflows last weekend; presumably FTX burned through its more liquid normal stuff (Bitcoin, dollars, etc.) to meet those withdrawals, so what was left was the weirdo cats and dogs. 6 Still it is striking that the balance sheet that FTX circulated to potential rescuers consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Its balance sheet consisted mostly of stuff it made up! Stuff it made up! You can’t do that! That’s not how balance sheets work! That’s not how anything works!

"It was obviously in good faith that we exchanged customer funds in actual things (dollars, bitcoins, whatever) with coins that we made up and whose supply we control and that could not be sold for even a fraction of their claimed value." Or having an account labelled "Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account."

At best they had "good faith' in the same way that Theranos did: telling themselves -delusionally- that they'd make it all right eventually and make all the lying worth it.

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