191–200 of 451 posts
To be honest: I'm just happy I get to experience another Enron, but this time I can watch it in real time on Twitter!
The Enron scandal would have been much more interesting if their CEO had tweeted through it.
How can anybody be surprised ? The 2 biggest players - Tether and Binance are much worse and still very well alive. Both are several times bigger (on paper) than FTX. Binance is already banned in most countries and without headquarters. Do anybody believes they have a proper gouvernance ? Tether was proved to lie about it réserves several times, recently started publishing attestations about reserves - attestations t…
What's interesting is how little scrutiny was applied to FTX and they're the one who lost people's money. Tether has been under intense scrutiny for years and is still working just fine. No one has lost their money in Tether despite huge outflow events. There's a lesson in here.
- they lied about the reserves and weren't backed at 100%
- they did fraudulent attestations wiring money for the 'snapshot' of accounts for the attestation then moving it back to owners (from Bitfinex exchange if I remember - which is the same people - see a pattern here ?)
- held money in their personal accounts
the above were proven without doubt by the NY AG.
- promised an audit for several years (it's always just a few months away)
- publish attestations that are obviously false. some red flags - in the first one, they claimed to have so much money in commercial paper that would put them in top 10 players - yet, among desks trading those papers, nobody ever heard of them ! In the last 2, if what they published was true, they would already be under water, given the decline of all coins - yet, somehow they are all okay.
- each time an exchange / scam goes down - they publish those papers saying they have 0 exposure to them (recently FTX, Genesis) - this despite findings that Alameda (FTX affiliated hedge found) was on the recepient of >30% of all Tethers
- last I checked, their CEO wasn't seen publicly for several years. Most of their financial 'communication' is done by their AG and 'the IT guy'
There are many more. In case of doubt, watch this interview and judge yourself if this feels like guys legitimately managing 70B real dollars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBEqyiO35cQ
It's all scam - it's so obvious that it's amazing. It will collapse - we just don't know when.
In a separate article Ray also said: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” And this is the same man who oversaw the liquidation of Enron. "Ray said he had found at FTX international, FTX US and Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research trading company “compromised systems integrity”, “faulty regulatory o…
The guy who says regulations are dumb has no idea what he spent his money on or even how many employees he has. This guy is almost worse than Elizabeth Holmes.
how did ftx successfully raise so much vc money recently? do these top vc firms do no due diligence?
That's one theory. Of course, given the depth of financial depravity on display here and the incredible thinness of the financial defense, one must also entertain the theory that they did do the due diligence, they were aware of how dangerous this was, and they invested anyhow for other reasons. And that those reasons are probably not good. There have been many cases where companies go to great lengths to do accounti…
I'm not convinced that the issues that caused Binance to back out even existed the last time FTX raised outside capital (March 2022 according to Crunchbase). My understanding is that in March, FTX had a basically normal balance sheet for a crypto exchange, with roughly enough non-FTT assets to balance against its liabilities.
Alameda was an over-leveraged crypto hedge fund, which in hindsight wasn't great news for Alameda's investors or creditors. But there's a world where Alameda goes to zero but FTX is mostly fine. After all, FTX would automatically recalculate margin levels and liquidate assets as needed every 30 seconds. If they did that with Alameda like they would have for an arms length counterparty....I'm not going to say that FTX would have been unscathed - a lot of those loans seem to have been secured by FTT, plus Alameda seems to have made up a lot of FTX's trading volume - but the end result of incinerating billions of dollars' worth of customer deposits wasn't inevitable. IMO, FTX's fate wasn't sealed until its management team built a backdoor into its systems to siphon customers' assets to Alameda. And that probably didn't happen til summer, months after its last funding round.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re not impossible any more and with this getting so much press and the US government likely looking to make an example of SBF, look to get a very detailed trail of where all the $ went. I mean, do you really think, factoring in that he had no accountants and no compliance at all, that he somehow had some of the best money launderers and embezzlers in the world? I highly doubt it, it was probably as amateur as th…
> the US government likely looking to make an example of SBF. Considering the silence from top officials, I don't think this is going to be true. Don't forget he donated ~$50M to the democrats for the mid-terms and was the second biggest dem donor.
In a separate article Ray also said: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” And this is the same man who oversaw the liquidation of Enron. "Ray said he had found at FTX international, FTX US and Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research trading company “compromised systems integrity”, “faulty regulatory o…
The filing is amazing: https://pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/33/188450/042020648... Don't forget to read this with the "diplomatic/legal/lawyer" mindset. These are not internet comments, these are legal filings. Sentences like "Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems inte…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here it is! https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/7ab64a3b-6c...
"Poorly labeled account"? Like, he claims he forgot some liabilities existed? With about the same size as their customers' founds?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Enron scandal would have been much more interesting if their CEO had tweeted through it.
same creative use of mark to market accounting but compared to FTX, Enron was fraud on difficult mode. They had to (attempt to) actually build things like power plants in India. FTX just yeeted tokens to bag holders based on fancy darkmode graphic design and a screwball haircut.
I understand the words in this sentence individually, but not the sentence in its entirety. Can anyone translate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re not impossible any more and with this getting so much press and the US government likely looking to make an example of SBF, look to get a very detailed trail of where all the $ went. I mean, do you really think, factoring in that he had no accountants and no compliance at all, that he somehow had some of the best money launderers and embezzlers in the world? I highly doubt it, it was probably as amateur as th…
> the US government likely looking to make an example of SBF. Considering the silence from top officials, I don't think this is going to be true. Don't forget he donated ~$50M to the democrats for the mid-terms and was the second biggest dem donor.