Tag Archives: Sam Bankman-Fried

FTX on Steroids: Is “Tether” the Biden World’s Crypto BCCI? By 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Posted on November 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

The next crypto domino to fall may well be Tether. From 2nd Smartest Guy in the World at 2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com:

A simple crypto rule to live by: any token or exchange that has a CEO, identifiable individual or development team associated with it is not real crypto; it’s the antithesis of crypto.

This substack has been warning for quite some time that all of these centralized exchanges are nothing more than grifting operations, IRS reporting nodes and CIA black ops money laundering facilitators.

I have been warning since around 2019 that Tether is the single most egregious crypto scam out there. It is far worse than FTX, with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his team of scammers having had direct ties with Tether. The sordid cadre of snake oil salesmen behind Tether makes SBF look like an ethical player.

Tether is made possible by the CIA, and in particular the Democratic party of the illegitimate Federal government that has been laundering money to Ukraine using both FTX and Tether.

This substack has covered the criminal CIA and taxation:

2nd Smartest Guy in the World
Original Social Engineering Sin
“…the socio-psychological foundations of socialism is identical to that of the foundations of a state, if there were no institution enforcing socialistic ideas of property, there would be no room for a state, as a state is nothing else than an institution built on taxation and unsolicited, noncontractual interference with the use that private people c…
Read more
10 months ago · 170 likes · 79 comments · 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Both the CIA and taxation happen to have literally funded the likes of FTX and Tether while protecting these criminal exchanges and centralized “backed” tokens from the very investigations that the unconstitutional three letter agencies are allegedly tasked with enforcing.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Crime, Currencies, Governments, Technology

Tagged , , ,

WTF Happened with FTX (Part 1 of 3), by Scott Hill

Posted on November 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

For those who want to delve more deeply into the sordid tale of FTX. From Scott Hill at bombthrower.com:

(Part 1 of 3 special to Bombthrower by digital asset space analyst Scott Hill)

On November 2nd Coindesk published a leaked balance sheet from FTX affiliated market maker Alameda Research.

Ten days later the third largest Crypto exchange in the world was bankrupt and its founder was under international investigation for fraud.

In this article I’ll go through how Crypto giant FTX fell apart. There is a lot of backstory to this situation which I’ll cover in a following article, discussing the beginnings of Alameda research and the story of how a sketchy hedge fund turned into a major exchange.

As you’ve no doubt heard repeatedly this week, self custody of your Crypto is the safest approach until we know who is insolvent and the extent of the contagion. If you’re not confident with self custody, Coinbase and Kraken seem to be the safest Crypto exchanges, but that is still a counterparty risk that I’m not willing to take personally in these market conditions.

The Balance Sheet Leak

The exclusive scoop from Coindesk looked bad for Alameda Research. The firm, which performed market making on FTX as well as taking directional bets and venture capital investments, seemed insolvent on a realized value basis.

Their balance showed $14.6 billion in assets held against $8 billion in liabilities. On paper solvent on a mark-to-market basis, but digging in there was no way that mark was reasonable.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime, Currencies, Financial markets, Government, Investing, Technology

Tagged ,

The Covid/Crypto Connection: The Grim Saga of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on November 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

Sam Bankman-Fried mouthed all the right pieties and was against all the right things. Whether or not your surprised that he turned out to be a conman is probably a pretty good political litmus test. From Jeffrey Tucker at brownstone.org:

covid connection crypto

Aseries of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.

As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.

This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?

Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Collapse, Crime, Medicine, Politics

Tagged ,

A Smoldering Fuse, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

The FTX affair is a hideous monstrosity, which means Sam Bankman-Fried has to be deeply in bed with multiple governments. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

We have pretty much burned our bridges at this point. Unless you’re prepared to mindfuck yourself, and gaslight yourself, and confess, and convert, there’s no going back to “normal” society (which we couldn’t go back to anyway, on account of how it doesn’t exist anymore) — CJ Hopkins

Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).

It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.

Against this backdrop, the USA enters a holiday season near-death spiral as unspooling scandals battle a collapsing economy for supremacy of the alt news sites. Case-in-point: the aforementioned FTX monkey business, a metastasizing tumor of the body politic. This complex fraud will smolder for a few weeks before it explodes into an extinction-grade event for the Democratic Party. The usual suspects among the mainstream media are trying strenuously to ignore it, but the shreds of this exploding money-borg are already sticking to guilty parties far and wide across the political landscape like so much rotting flesh.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Governments, Politics

Tagged ,

Craig Murray: FTX & the Joke of US Democracy

Posted on November 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

The FTX scandal is rapidly shaping up as one of those many government stories where the regular people will end up knowing about 20 percent of what actually went on. From Craig Murray at consortiumnews.com:

From its founding in 2017, the one-man company rose to a “partner organisation” of the WEF and second largest donor to Biden and the Democrats’ mid-term election. It has now gone bust.

Sam Bankman-Fried during the Bitcoin 2021 conference. (Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The State Belongs to its Citizens,
Not the Citizens to the State

NOTE: This is is what I think of as a signpost article — it points you to something the mainstream media is deliberately not giving the prominence it needs, but I have no personal expertise or inside knowledge to give you. I am just giving you a start to get going. Several readers will have a much better understanding than I, and I encourage you to give your thoughts in comments below.

The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors’ money with it.

That is some trajectory.

The World Economic Forum has deleted its FTX page, but the Wayback machine has it:

I suppose it is inevitable that dodgy chancers would create derivatives markets for gambling on crypto, but I confess I had not given the matter much thought. It goes without saying that in those five years the founder of FTX had managed to take a huge personal fortune out of the company before it went bust.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Collapse, Crime, Governments, Politics, Technology

Tagged ,

FTX: The Dominoes of Financial Fraud Have Yet to Fall, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 16, 2022 | 2 comments

FTX has probably set a record for the most of amount of money vanished in the shortest span of time. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com;

Once assets are revealed as worth far less than claimed, insolvency is the inevitable result.

If you haven’t plowed through dozens of post-collapse commentaries on FTX, I’m saving you the trouble: here’s a distillation of what matters going forward. If you’re seeking a forensic accounting of FTX, others have done this work already. If you’re seeking an ideological diatribe, you won’t find that here, either.

What you will find is insight into the real innovation of FTX: FTX compressed the entire playbook and history of financial fraud into one brief cycle of the credulous bamboozled, Charles Ponzi bested and creative accounting being revealed for what it really is, fraud.

All financial frauds share the same set of tools. The toolbox of financial fraud, whether it is traditional or crypto-based, contains variations of these basic mechanisms:

1. Using clients’ capital (without full disclosure) to increase the private gain of the Owners of the Con (OOTC).

2. Using the clients’ capital to arbitrage yield differentials in duration, risk and other asymmetries to the benefit not of the clients but to the Owners of the Con (OOTC)..

3. Overstate assets by listing illiquid, insider-controlled, non-marked-to-market assets at valuations completely disconnected from reality, i.e. what they would fetch on the open market in size. Rely on assets issued by the firm or its subsidiaries for the bulk of the firm’s assets, i.e. its claim of solvency.

Continue reading→

2 Comments

Posted in Banking, Business, Crime, Government, Politics, Technology

Tagged ,

The FTX-Alameda nexus, by Frances Coppola

Posted on November 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Sam Bankman-Fried-FTX story grows increasingly convoluted. From Frances Coppola at coppolacomment.com:

How did it all go so wrong, so quickly? Less than a month ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was the golden boy of crypto, with a net worth in the $billions, and his exchange FTX was valued at $32bn. Now, FTX has a gaping hole in its balance sheet, thousands of people have lost their money, and Sam is facing personal bankruptcy and, potentially, fraud charges.

The short answer is – it didn’t. The hole in FTX’s balance sheet has existed for a long time. We don’t know exactly how long, but the size of the estimates (ranging from $6-$10 billion) suggests several months if not years. Sam has been trading while insolvent. He’s not the only crypto oligarch to do so: Celsius’s Mashinsky also traded while insolvent for an extended period of time.

Trading while insolvent is illegal, of course. But in cryptoland scant attention is paid to such niceties. It is (or would like to be) a lawless, self-regulating space in which conventional courts and regulators have no place. And anyway, there are plenty of creative ways of hiding a black hole. Issuing your own token, for example. And using your own hedge fund to pump its value.

Here’s how it works. The young, dynamic, ambitious owner of a crypto hedge fund – let’s call him “Joe” – sets up a crypto exchange. To start with, this just enables his hedge fund can trade without having to pay margin or exchange fees. But Joe has larger ambitions. He wants to run the biggest and best exchange in the world. And he wants to make money from it. Lots and lots of money. Trillions of dollars, in fact.

Now, his hedge fund can make money by taking risky leveraged positions, but it has to raise funds, and that’s not cheap. And his exchange can make money by charging fees on transactions, but although that can be a nice slow steady income, it’s not going to make him the trillions of dollars he wants.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies

Tagged ,

Sam Bankman-Fried Bought Into Stakeholder Capitalism And Proved It’s A Disastrous Ideology, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Sam Bankman-Fried, bankrupt former billionaire, was the epitome of woke capitalism. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

While many analysts and economists will be talking for months about the epic downfall of crypto-exchange company FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, their focus will be primarily on the billions lost, the mismanagement of funds, the fraud inherent in yield farming and the alleged betrayal of investor trust.  This is a tale as old as time and not anything surprising.  What many in the mainstream are missing, though, is Fried’s attachments to the World Economic Foundation, various global elitists and his avid sermonizing of the tenets of “effective altruism”, which are nearly identical to the tenets of Klaus Schwab’s Stakeholder Capitalism agenda.

The WEF lists FTX as a corporate “partner” and participant, which means the company must meet the globalist organization’s standards for Stakeholder Capitalism, a socialist economic model which deconstructs the Adam Smith and Milton Friedman free market foundation.

Milton Friedman argued that the only responsibility of business should be growth and profit (within the boundaries of the law) with the shareholders in mind.  The WEF insists that the Friedman philosophy must be abandoned and that the job of wealthy elites and corporations is to use profits as a tool for managing society (the so-called “stakeholders”).  In other words, corporate leaders should become cultural and political leaders fulfilling greater ideological goals, all of them decidedly socialist/Marxist in origin.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Governments, Horseshit, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged , ,

A Rogues’ Gallery, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on November 12, 2022 | 1 comment

FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that just vaporized $32 billion, has Democrats’ fingerprints all over it. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at the automaticearth.com:

Me, personally, I can’t get rid of the notion that all the stablecoins and shitcoins and altcoins that have been initiated and “legalized”, are just a way of “shining” bitcoin in a light of uninvestable darkness. And for that, a bunch of “trading places” (pun intended) were called for. One of the biggest, FTX, just went from $32 billion to $0 in a single day. Not even Enron could beat that.

Dr. D., yes him again, ties together an interesting history behind it. Which in turn ties into the DNC too. And Dr. D. doesn’t even mention yet that just this morning, FDX claimed they were hacked: “FTX Possibly Hacked, $895m Drained From Customer Wallets.” Should I believe that? How do you drain $895m out of $0?

“Early Saturday morning, Mr Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive officer and FTX commenced Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings due to a massive liquidity crunch. A rescue deal with rival exchange Binance fell through earlier this week, precipitating crypto’s highest-profile collapse in recent years. Mr Bankman-Fried’s quant trading business (aka quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm) Alameda Research has also filed for bankruptcy.”

Here’s thinking that the DNC links will sink this as a story. Bankman-Fried will be renditioned to Barbados -or Gitmo-, and we all live happily ever after. Except for those who put their money into FTX. But then, what were they thinking in the first place? Crazy thought: was Hunter Biden a investor? Or The Big Guy?

Dr. D.: We really need to keep a rogue’s gallery. It’s like Dick Tracy and Batman. Bernie Made Off. Mr. Kash-n-Karry. Sam the Bank Man, Fried. You can’t make this up.

Am I hearing this right, FTX was invented 16 days after the Biden Campaign? In a foreign nation not of his birth or residency, the Bahamas? His mother is involved with Vote Blue and other DNC money people? Then within a month or two, Sam has made so many billions he was the single largest donor to Biden? With this A-Mazing multi-billion influx that come out of nowhere? But everybody, all the “good” people instantly and telepathically KNEW they had, HAD to invest there? People like the Teacher’s Union?

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Collapse, Currencies, Financial markets, Politics

Tagged , ,