Posted on 11/14/2022 9:52:11 PM PST by lasereye
“Everyone can understand zero.” That’s likely to be the epitaph of high-flying investor — and Democratic megadonor — Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto business, FTX.
FTX invested a lot of its customers’ money in the Bankman-Fried-founded company Alameda Research. As The Maine Wire explains: “Alameda was one of those operations where you’re told just to trust that really, really smart computer geeks are taking a small amount of money and making it into a big amount of money using computer wizardry you can’t understand. But everyone can understand zero — which is the amount venture cap giant Sequoia Capital is expecting to get back on its mammoth investment in FTX.”
Until its collapse this week, FTX was one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges — and trading platforms — in existence. Not long ago it was worth $32 billion, and Bankman-Fried himself was worth $26 billion. Now it’s more or less worthless, and Bankman-Fried is no longer a billionaire. He might even wind up worth zero or less than that by the time things are settled. Binance, which was the world’s No. 1 platform, mounted an abortive rescue bid but withdrew once it got a look at the books.
As word spread, FTX customers tried to pull their money out, and in what was basically a cryptocurrency version of a bank run, soon FTX was unable to meet the demand for withdrawals. Regulators in the Bahamas, where the company operated, shut it down and launched a criminal investigation. United States regulators are sniffing around too.
He was the second-largest Democratic donor in 2022, after George Soros, and routinely palled around with top Democrats, sharing a stage with Bill Clinton in the Bahamas.
“He spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill,” says Rep. Jim Himes. He had pledged to give $1 billion to Democrats.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The title of this should be “Uncle Sam is playing the same game as broke, disgraced crypto king”.
Thanks.
It would have been mostly Democrats that were burned by this as well. I never heard of FTX until after it was reported that it went bankrupt, so it is likely that it was made of mostly Democrat dollars.
FTX was the 2nd biggest downer to the democrats next to George Soros.
I won’t say what I think needs to happen next…..it’s time. This is way past standard corruption. These people need to pay in a big way…..
Ya gotta LUV the fundamentals of derivatives.
Sorry for all the people that fell for the scam. Happy a RAT BASTARD is going bankrupt and hopefully to jail!
The guy’s name is actually “Bankman-Fried”? Just ironic in this situation...like if it was fiction you would suspect the author of making up a name that fit his fate too well...
“This is actually good news in a way. There’s one less Democrat megadonor.”
Bankman-Fraud won’t be the last democrat donor ending up on the side of the road looking like a “pancake possum.”
Central bankers are raising rates, which will ‘sniff out’ all these ‘cheap money whore’ commercial operations.
Bankman-Fraud won’t be the last, but may actually be the tip of the iceberg.
I agree. This reminds me of the Madoff. Our economy is ripe for a fall.
This used to be called money laundering.
Ahhhh, the good ole days!
Warning signals as recently as July of this year:
Bankrupt crypto firm Celsius’s biggest creditor linked to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried
BYLUCY BREWSTER
July 14, 2022 at 2:27 PM PDT
Portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried
LAM YIK—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
Crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried has had an outsize role as a lender and creditor during the recent crypto crackup. Now, it has emerged that Bankman-Fried has an unexpectedly deep connection to the troubled crypto savings platform Celsius, which filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday.
That connection comes in the form of Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, which is owed $12.7 million as Celsius’s 13th largest creditor. But it emerged on Thursday, he also has ties to a mysterious entity called Pharos USD Fund, which is owed $81.1 million and is Celsius’s largest creditor by far.
As Bloomberg reported Thursday, the only email linked to Pharos on the bankruptcy filing is registered with Lantern Ventures, a British cryptocurrency trading firm—and whose CEO and biggest shareholder is Tara MacAulay, a co-founder of Alameda Research. (An SEC filing confirms that Pharos is an affiliate of Lantern Ventures, holding about $400 million under management). ...
Yes, but what a great example of why there needs to be tighter government
involvement in the crypto area. They won’t stop until they kill it.
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