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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.

Bankman-Fried was expected to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday. His arrest is the first concrete move by regulators to hold individuals accountable for the multi-billion dollar implosion of FTX last month.

There had been some speculation on when and even whether he would be arrested. Just yesterday someone told me to expect it to take two years. So, why right before tomorrow's hearing? And why not wait for him to give more interviews and provide more evidence?

So, I read a breakdown of the SEC complaint (Original PDF)

Someone was asking if Wang and Singh should go down too...and based on this claim of SBF spreading the money via loans to all of them...yes

67 The FTX funds transferred to Alameda were used not only for Alameda’s proprietary trading, but also to fund loans to FTX executives, including Bankman-Fried himself, and to fund personal real estate purchases. Between March 2020 and September 2022, Bankman-Fried executed promissory notes for loans from Alameda totaling more than $1.338 billion, including two instances in which Bankman-Fried was both the borrower in his individual capacity and the lender in his capacity as CEO of Alameda.

68 Bankman-Fried also used commingled funds from Alameda to make large political donations and to purchase tens of millions of dollars in Bahamian real estate for himself, his parents, and other FTX executives. Singh and Wang also borrowed $554 million and $224.7 million, respectively, by executing promissory notes with Alameda in 2021 and 2022.

Wang, Singh, hell, his parents (who he put in this position. Can't imagine...)

No wonder SBF said Singh felt "ashamed and guilty" (not content to snitch on himself!) in the Vox interview.

Speaking of snitching: his own comments are cited, as everyone thought:

As Bankman-Fried acknowledged in a network television interview on or about December 1, 2022: “I wasn’t even trying, like, I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX.” Bankman-Fried continued: “What happened, happened—and, if I had been spending an hour a day thinking about risk management on FTX, I don’t think that would have happened.”

I kinda wish that Bankman-Fried had been permitted to testify at the House committee today, because the members are not happy and some at least of them are trying to get John J. Ray to say Bankman-Fried is a deliberate criminal. The information coming out is really bad, the $1 billion 'loan' that Bankman-Fried gave himself, he claims he re-invested it into FTX, but Ray says there is no trace of what it was for or where it went.

This is really making crypto sound like the biggest scam ever created, all crypto. Anyone who believes crypto is the future of finance, this is not alone two black eyes for the cause, it's breaking arms and legs as well. Anybody who has fond dreams of decentralised finance, the sheer lack of accountability or accounting around billions is going to break that back too.

EDIT: They are now discussing the correct pronunciation of "dogecoin" 🤣

EDIT EDIT: >Wang, Singh, hell, his parents (who he put in this position. Can't imagine...)

Oh crap, one of the committee members just asked if there is any evidence his parents were involved in operations. Bankman-Fried is bringing everybody down with him.

This is really making crypto sound like the biggest scam ever created, all crypto. Anyone who believes crypto is the future of finance, this is not alone two black eyes for the cause, it's breaking arms and legs as well. Anybody who has fond dreams of decentralised finance, the sheer lack of accountability or accounting around billions is going to break that back too.

I'm so tired of keeping up with the stupid story and people just taking random pot shots at crypto in general. This scam has as much to do with crypto as a concept as 2008 has to do with loans as a concept. Yes, it's a high profile scam, but it's a scam that makes no use of anything crypto related besides the abundance of credulous money. Everything about crypto, besides that it is new and unregulated, makes it harder for this to happen by making wallet balances public.

This scam has as much to do with crypto as a concept as 2008 has to do with loans as a concept.

Which some of the committee members have pointed out. But Bankman-Fried was presenting himself and FTX as the respectable face of crypto, of being regulated, of not being a shady fly-by-night scam scheme. How did that pan out? How is the ordinary person watching the news going to take it? "One more billion dollar scam of this weird dodge".

You can talk about wallets until you are blue in the face, but when people are making and losing fortunes like this, it's not sounding like "this is the future of money", it's sounding like "one more crook fooling people with a get rich quick scheme".

How is the ordinary person watching the news going to take it? "One more billion dollar scam of this weird dodge".

Ordinary people are not watching this at all.

Maybe, maybe not. But it is certainly a news story, and even if people aren't familiar with the ins and outs of it, they will have some idea about "oh another big financial scam in the news".

Wives who are angry that their husbands listened to Tom Brady and put their life savings on FTX might qualify as fairly ordinary.

Depends on how you define “ordinary people” this is huge news in the business press. Enron is certainly a household name because of their much more sophisticated and difficult to understand scandal.

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