fka ftc said:

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Don't none of y'all worry your pretty little heads on this, Auntie Maxine going to look into it:

https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=409920

Man, with oversight like this why would anyone question election results?

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"The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year. That's why it is with great urgency that I, along with my colleague Ranking Member McHenry, announce the Committee's intention to hold a hearing to investigate the collapse of FTX," said Chairwoman Waters. "As Chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, I have led the effort in examining and investigating the digital assets marketplace, and know that we need legislative action to ensure that digital assets entities cannot operate in the shadows outside of robust federal oversight and clear rules of the road. I look forward to holding this important hearing, and uncovering all that Congress must do to ensure this never happens again.


"Chairwoman Waters and I are announcing a House Financial Services Committee hearing on the FTX debacle," said Ranking Member McHenry. "Oversight is one of Congress' most critical functions and we must get to the bottom of this for FTX's customers and the American people. It's essential that we hold bad actors accountable so responsible players can harness technology to build a more inclusive financial system. I appreciate Chairwoman Waters' working with Republicans to deliver accountability through a bipartisan process."

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Only in America could this nimrod be chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee. She couldn't get hired in the private sector to do the books for a neighborhood donut shop.

Sims said:

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Yep he scammed a lot of people but he also made a ton of money in legitimate crypto trades.

The US/JAPAN bitcoin arbitrage trade he figured out was legitimate and very lucrative.

Whether it's the central banks as they are or some decentralized digital system of the future - whatever plumbing is put in place for proper reasons will be coopted, or subject to cooption, by nefarious actors.

SBF essentially created his own central bank when he printed FTT tokens, transferred them to Alameda Research, then borrowed legitimate crypto (sounds like money laundering to me) using his own printed tokens as collateral.

The fact that some of the largest money managers in the world didn't see it or didn't care to look is as much of an indictment on their skills as it is an indication that fraud is pretty dang easy in the crypto world right now.

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The thing about arb trades is they are always temporary. Once that ended, he and the Harry Potter traders went back to thinking BTC was undervalued.....they kept averaging down with other people's money because they FELT it would go back up. Once they were way underwater at Almeida, CZ from Binance dumped $500M of their token and house of cards collapsed. No collateral, then no deposits. Just a bunch of bag holding believers, with the ONLY benefactor being dem politicians.

INVENTING THE CRYPTO KING:

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One of the most striking things about the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, once counted among the world's largest, is the extent to which it caught the supposed watchdogs of the tech industry by surprise. How could Sam Bankman-Fried, the brainiac financial visionary, crowned earlier this year the "crypto emperor" by The New York Times, have steered his armada of crypto firms into the rocks so recklessly? With allegations of an enormous, brazen fraud lingering, the first place to look is at the central role of the media in this fiasco. Through an almost endless churn of fawning coverage, the news media turned an inexperiencedand, it seems, ethically derangedtrader into the second coming of Warren Buffett.
Over the past two years, Bankman-Fried cultivated the media lavishly, if not carefully. Drawing on what then seemed like an unlimited pool of cash, SBF (as we'll call the mythologized version of the real person) dispersed investments, advertising dollars, sponsorships, and donations to key news outletsincluding ProPublica, Vox, Semafor, and The Interceptwith extraordinary effectiveness.

Bankman-Fried's head has filled the frame of the most coveted business news covers in the world, including Fortune ("The next Warren Buffett?") and Forbes ("Only Zuck has been as rich (23 billion) this young (29)!"). CNBC star Jim Cramer once compared Bankman-Fried, who has been active in crypto finance for only a handful of years, to John Pierpont Morgan, the giant of industry who worked in banking for nearly four decades before striking out on his own.

Remarkably, some major news outlets have continued to round the edges of the SBF myth, even after the discovery of at least a billion-dollar hole in FTX's books, the assets seeming to vanish into the crypto ether. This week, Twitter erupted in outrage when The New York Times published what many have described as a "puff piece" on Bankman-Fried, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

And yet Forbes had also been pulled into the Bankman-Fried money vortex. In February, Binance, another majorbut even largercrypto exchange, invested $200 million in Integrated Whale Media, the Hong Kong-based company that owns Forbes. Binance was also a major holder of FTX's cryptocurrency, FTT, with at least $580 million worth of the currency banked away.

It was Binance's $580 million holding of FTT that precipitated FTX's fall. But crucially, what triggered that sequence of events was not a monthslong investigation by a mainstream news outlet, like the ones Bankman-Fried had invested in or donated to, which employ dozens or in some cases hundreds of investigative journalists. Rather, it was the work of far smallerand far more diligentnews outlets doing their jobs.

On Nov. 2, CoinDesk broke the news of the connection between FTX and Bankman-Fried's hedge fund, Alameda Research. This quickly led to a Substack called Dirty Bubble Media questioning FTX's solvency. The CoinDesk piece and the Dirty Bubble Media Substack in turn led to Binance's CEO tweeting that the company was dumping its holdings of FTT, triggering a financial domino effect that led to FTX's swift collapse.

In the space of four days, media participants that lie far outside the highly capitalized mainstream did more investigative work than the entire corporate media had done in two years. Once the bubblefinancial and conceptualwas popped, however, the media began whirring into action, manufacturing a new SBF myth, this one as breathless, hyped and sure of itself as the old one, with the Times rushing to tell its readers not about SBF's misdeeds but about his "surprisingly calm" state of mind. "You would've thought that I'd be getting no sleep right now," SBF tells his worried handlers at the Times. "And instead I'm getting some. It could be worse."

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I hadn't followed this guy very closely but it is simply insane that essentially a gang of immature 'kids' living all together in a penthouse in the Bahamas got so much trust, money, and fame - apparently that SBF guy played video games while on investor calls, and they still gave him a bunch of money.

Just ridiculous. Just another bizarre twist on what has been a truly bizarre industry (crypto). Can't say it is boring.

Tom, I thought I'd heard all of the good sayings, but I'll use that one by this weekend.

My dad always went with Admiral Perry's saying when he got to the North Pole: "DAMN! I bet it's cold in Amarillo"!!!

The Ponzi Scheme needs to be renamed the Bankman-Fried Scheme

Will be interesting to see how the class action suits against the celebrity endorsers will pan out.

There was a talking head discussing that their endorsements saying to invest without disclosing how they were compensated for their endorsement can cause all sorts of issues.

Poor Tom Brady just cannot catch a break these days.

Here is a good pre-Netflix rundown

They better be creative when casting the parts about the orgies. They stick true to the characters and I am a hard, or rather flacid, pass.

fka ftc said:

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They better be creative when casting the parts about the orgies. They stick true to the characters and I am a hard, or rather flacid, pass.

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HBO is probably *****ing their pants trying to get the rights to this story.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.news.com.au/finance/money/investing/collapsed-crypto-trading-firm-ceo-was-28yearold-harry-potter-obsessed-polycule-member/news-story/2cd59da72e73216aefdec8a0862254eb%3Famp

Ewwwwwwww

Oh

"by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us" pic.twitter.com/qKSJWILp1N

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 16, 2022

I didn't realize Auntie Maxine is 84 (Pelosi is 82 for reference).

Que Te Gusta Mas said:

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Oh

"by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us" pic.twitter.com/qKSJWILp1N

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 16, 2022

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The fees for his defense attorneys just shot way, way up. My God he's a fidiot.

SECond2noneAgs said:

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You're going to want to sit this one out.

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Ugly people have sex, too. Video proof to corroborate the anecdotal evidence observable at any Walmart in America.

agent-maroon said:

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Ugly people have sex, too. Video proof to corroborate the anecdotal evidence observable at any Walmart in America.

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Your honor, we stipulate that ugly people do indeed fornicate and do not wish to subject the dignity of this court and its jurors and observers with the horror contained within these videos.

Edited to Add: Polycule reluctantly added to my vocabulary today.

His father took his mother's name? And hyphenated his?

Kozmozag said:

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His father took his mother's name? And hyphenated his?

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Nothing good ever came from someone with a hyphenated name.