251–260 of 500 posts
I wish we, as a society, could decide whether M is thousand or million and then only use it to represent that one concept. From the headline I initially assumed his bail was only $250,000 and I don’t think I’m the only one in this thread to have made that mistake.
When does M mean thousand? I've never seen that. K means thousand.
David Gerard has the best summary: ‘He was released on bail for a $250 million bond — “the largest ever pretrial bond,” apparently — secured only on his parents’ home in Palo Alto, where he will be living. ’SBF will surrender his passport and remain in home confinement with electronic monitoring — he’ll wear a bracelet. He will also be required to undergo regular mental health evaluation and treatment. No financial t…
> secured only on his parents’ home in Palo Alto, This part is incorrect - his parents and 2 other individuals with ‘significant assets’ signed on his bond.
1. Pledge the full amount of the bail yourself. You get this back if the accused shows up in court, you lose it of they flee.
2. Pay some percentage (usually X%) to a bail bondsman. You never get that money back, and if the accused flees, the bail bondsman will try to get the money from whomever signed the bond (as the bail bondsman is on the hook). The bail bondsman may also engage a bounty hunter to try to catch the accused.
Obviously, with a bail amount this large, my guess is there is no bail bondsman that has that much to put up. So there should be $250 million that someone pledged for this bail. I'm still confused as to where that amount came from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They will likely not being using a bondsman. They are probably paying the bond (ostensibly) themselves. They are taking a $250m loan using their house as collateral. If SBF does not make it to court on the agreed date, his parents will lose their house and be on the hook for the rest of the loan. If he does, his parents get the $250 million back and can pay off the loan. Until then, they are likely just making intere…
They are making interest payments on 250 million USD? Wow! How much do these people earn?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite. You pay a bondsman 10%. The bondsman turns around and pays the full bail amount to the court. If you show up, the bondsman gets their money back from the court but keeps your 10% as a fee. If you don't show up to court, the bondsman does not get their money back and is left holding the bag for the other 90% of the bail amount.
What professor has $25M lying around to pay the bond? Yes, Palo Alto homes are expensive, but those are not typically the homes professors are living in.
I wonder how he will pay for lawyers, my understanding is that law firms are incredibly meticulous about wanting proof that their fees aren’t being paid using spoils of crime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
M means milli in Latin, as in thousand (kilo comes from Greek). Millennium, millipede (thousand legs), and so on. Million just means a thousand thousands. That is why in most financial institutions, M means thousand, and MM means millions, literally thousand thousands.
Do they use MMM for billions and MMMM for trillions? k, M, B, T, Q seem like easier to read suffixes as opposed to having to count the number of “M”s.
You are correct the others are easier, clearer, etc. But banking goes back centuries, millennia even. When an entire industry uses a certain nomenclature, no individual participant wants to go through the hassle of trying to change everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should be denied access to the internet too, like most internet related criminals are on bond conditions.
That seems needlessly cruel. I'm all for getting to the bottom of what SBF did, but he hasn't been convicted of any crime yet. It's important that we go through the process before applying punishments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bail is virtually always a bond , guaranteed by a bail-bonds agency. The bailee typically puts up 10% of the value of the bail, so here, $25 million.
People with 8 and 9 figure bail don't go to the bondsman on the corner. They usually have their own armed guards from companies like Guidepost Solutions enforce their home detention and it is usually secured by bank accounts or real estate owned by their family or other rich people they know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jeeze, it's not some crazy conspiracy that being the first to rat out your accomplices tends to leave you way better off, it's literally intentional, to encourage turncoats.
You misunderstand. Benefit to Caroline Ellison is self evident. That SFB is the subject of her singing is also obvious. Qs are: - was this too generous? - who else besides Caroline Ellison would benefit here now that she has her deal? (Related to first q ..)
She's pleading to what, seven major felonies as I recall? And there is no agreement on a reduced sentence aside from "the prosecution will ask for lesser sentences" which doesn't mean the judge is going to agree. She didn't get some kind of a sweet deal, she got the "we have enough to put you in jail until you're elderly, but if you make it easy we'll ask the judge to reduce it so middle age" agreement. They clearly have the upper hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> on bail for a $250 million bond — secured only on his parents’ home in Palo Alto Wait what? How does that work? I thought if the bond was $X, that literally means you either (a) give the court $X, cash only or (b) sit in jail until trial. How can his bond be set at $250 million, yet the court somehow isn't just making him sit in jail until and unless he either goes to trial and is found not guilty, or he coughs up…
A financial intermediary trusted by the court pledges to pay the court the 250M if SBF flees and the intermediary cannot find him and take him back into custody. For typical bail amounts i.e., $50k, the intermediary usually demands 10% of the $50k from the defendant (and his friends) as a deposit, but maybe SBF found an intermediary willing to make the pledge to the court for a deposit significantly less than 10% of…
What bondsman has $250M? Even if they did, why would they ever agree to this?
Isn't getting $2M from a defendant on a bail bond less than even the interest you could probably get by just putting your $250M in, say, a Treasury bond over the same timeframe?
For that matter, who's willing to bet $250M at 99-to-1 payout odds that a smart guy like SBF won't be able to disappear and pop up in Dubai or somewhere with no extradition to the US? (Remember SBF probably had the means, motive, opportunity and moral character to siphon a couple hundred million worth of BTC into a wallet there are no records of. And he knew for a long time FTX was going to collapse and he was probably being investigated.)