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The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

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Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#421

Post by sn41 »

time_to_smile wrote: post #399
tasuki wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were already quite well off, now their son is in trouble. "My son is going to prison but I have secured my millions so it's fine" is generally not a thing.

I'm glad you have great parents, but I think you vastly underestimate how much many parents do not care about their children, and will sacrifice them for their own well being. Most caring parents would aggressively caution their children from heading down the path SBF went, especially if they're smart, educated parents. There are no "boy geniuses" out there like many lead SBF to believe he was, people from prestigiou…

His parents are Stanford law professors, so they are smart and educated. But doesn't mean that their child has to listen to them or to behave in an ethical manner.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#422

Post by [deleted] »

bigwavedave wrote: post #175
hef19898 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you have to worry about falcons, or Blackadder. Smoke signs, maybe... but then you have to worry about the weather and wild fires... Seems they thought that one through!

What about flag signaling? Asking for a friend.

[deleted]

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#423

Post by phphphphp »

nullc wrote: post #390
phphphphp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be absolutely shocked if more than 25% can be recovered. They spent multi-billions on venture investments that were not just high-risk due to their early stage nature but also inextricably linked to ftx by way of the cryptocurrency market as a whole and thus about as undiversified as humanly possible. There’s a few of their investments that have value and value could be recovered through sales but almost all of t…

If we limit ourselves to depositor funds -- who morally ought to be superior creditors to investors-- I wouldn't be shocked if the recovery percentage was quite a bit larger than that. One thing that made 90% recoveries of Madoff possible were that they first backed out all the fake gains that the customers thought they had but never actually had. This will be harder to do with FTX, but I expect that once all the bog…

I think that might have been true a year ago but at the time of FTX’s collapse, most market participants were underwater, especially the laypeople. The amount of money in the crypto market is definitely not anywhere near the supposed market cap, but if we look at USDC’s 50bn we can say with reasonable confidence that there’s at least 50bn of USD in the crypto market. If FTX was 10% of the market then 5 billion seems very plausible as a lower bound for the amount of real money value on the exchange (before backing out paper gains). That’s 5bn after people have lost >50% in the last year.

There was something like 6bn withdrawn in the days before the collapse and if clawbacks could get most of it, we would at least see 0.40 on the dollar recovered… but I am very very skeptical about that happening, given FTX international was for people outside of US jurisdiction — not impossible to recover but much more difficult.

I hope you’re right that it turns out that there’s only, say, 2bn of real money missing, and most people can be made mostly whole… but given the bloodbath of the last year, I fear that there’s probably more real money gone now, rather than less. A lot of people would be absolutely gleeful if you could somehow rollback the last year of trades on FTX.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#424

Post by jamiek88 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #321
tptacek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud is a 2b1.1 crime, so the sentence scales with the "losses" to the victims; you can get +30 levels off that alone, which catapults the sentence into double digits.

It strikes me as a weakness in our system that this is keyed to the $ amount. You can defraud a person of modest means of $50,000 and wipe them out financially; you could defraud some rich people of $2 billion without it impacting them in the slightest. This strongly incentivizes preying on the weak.

It is considered . The levels take into account financial hardship caused to any victim.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#425

Post by cycrutchfield »

akoncius wrote: post #350
cycrutchfield wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, we can't just convict people because they lost people money. You need to prove criminal intent. Are you aware of any evidence demonstrating intent to commit fraud? Not sure what the size of banks has to do with anything.

I dont have detailed knowledge, but rating agencies clearly violated their duties by providing AAA rating to junk

Any evidence that specific executives at these rating agencies had the intent to defraud people by over-rating mortgage-backed securities? Simply being inept at your job is not necessarily criminal.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#426

Post by tzs »

comte7092 wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How anyone could look at this man's behavior over the last few weeks and not think he was on a fast track to a federal penitentiary is beyond me Seeing how thoroughly he convinced people that he had political influence, and given his general lack of awareness, I’m willing to give merit to his believing he was immune. Similar to how people outside securities think insider trading is more rampant than it is, insider…

>Seeing how thoroughly he convinced people that he had political influence We’ve gotten tot he point where we’ve gone way too far off the deep end when it comes to this narrative around political influence. the collective imagination seems to have risen to comic book level proportions. All people saw was SBF gave a bunch of money and thought, “he must have a ton of influence”. Meanwhile, in my state, he gave $11 mill…

> We’ve gotten tot he point where we’ve gone way too far off the deep end when it comes to this narrative around political influence. the collective imagination seems to have risen to comic book level proportions.

What's particularly stupid is most of the time that people are going off about how some company or person gave a bunch of money and that is obviously why Congress passed the bill that company or person supported, the companies or people that opposed the bill also gave a ton of money to the same members of Congress that the first company or person did.

Also, often those companies on both sides of the bill donated a lot to the members of Congress that supported the bill and those that opposed the bill.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#427

Post by csomar »

anonporridge wrote: post #413
syzarian wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that it is a thing for a shockingly large percent of parents. Historically children were the retirement plan (in addition to labor for the family). That type of thinking is fairly common.

> Historically children were the retirement plan They still are. It's just that the retirement plan has been socialized to the level of the nation state. The labor of the young takes care of the old. This is literally true in the case of social security which is funded by taxing current productive labor. This isn't necessarily bad, because it's the way it's always been. But it is something like a multi-generational p…

> This isn't necessarily bad, because it's the way it's always been.

I'm not sure this sentence make any sense. The same could be said about slavery. Is slavery not necessarily bad because it's the way it's always been?

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#428

Post by cycrutchfield »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #381
cycrutchfield wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect politicians to do with respect to prosecution by the DOJ? Genuinely curious

How does political corruption work? We would need to visit a party in Washington DC to be able to describe it precisely, but it probably can be summarized as “one hand washes the other.”

Very imaginative, but a little short on evidence.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#429

Post by feet »

feet wrote: post #361
darcys22 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my exact thoughts too! surely human beings from the 21st century could have improved on this. However I'm also pretty sure that lawyers have found a loophole to prevent their jobs from being automated, if you just make using technology illegal/"not to standard" then they can keep billing $500 per hour to use a typewriter

You think lawyers personally are the ones writing documents?

FYI whoever down voted this, no they generally don't. They have staff they pay to do that and they look docs over before signing them. That is when they aren't using generic templates that the paralegals just fill out

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#430

Post by andirk »

Y_Y wrote: post #405
AmericanChopper wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my first week in my first programming job I remember overhearing a senior engineer saying “don’t worry, there’s not another leap year for 2 years”. I was still working there on February 29, he wasn’t. It was a stressful day. My condolences go out to the engineers who will be working on January 1st 100000.

Surely by then we'll have had a powerful enough pope to rename the months at least once.

SEPTember = 7

OCTOber = 8

NOVember = 9

DECember = 10

Fixed it!

And do we need the name "JASON" (July to November) first letters? Seems unnecessary.

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