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FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

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Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does this Etherium-meme(?) come from? I’ve seen several people writing Etherium and Monaro instead of Ethereum and Monero on mailing lists, but never understood what it means and where it comes from.

Since when is bad spelling a meme?

This particular misspelling happens often enough (on this forum) that I don't think it's unreasonable to think that some people are doing it intentionally as a form of trolling.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#622
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, when you take a loan out of a bank, the bank doesn't "create deposits" that it loans to you. The bank loans you existing deposits. The method by which banks end up creating money is less dramatic than you think. I wrote a long-form explainer here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/money-out-of-thin-air/

Not at all. When you get a loan, the bank creates a liability and deposit out of thin air. The deposit is a "demand deposit", which is effectively equivalent and fungible to central-bank-backed currency (hence the term "money" usually applies to both, though they are different things). The bank needs no existing customer deposits to create a demand deposit and liability in your account. You should run through your ex…

You claim that the bank needs no existing customer deposits to create a demand deposit and liability in your account. This claim is true only in the pedantic sense: if the bank is otherwise capitalized (e.g. money from investors in the bank), then it could create loans using whatever money it has, as opposed to using money specifically from depositors. However, what you probably meant is that a bank could loan out money even if it has $0 money in the bank. This is not true at all. A bank can not loan out money if it has no money. It has no printing presses that print physical banknotes, and other banks would refuse electronic transfers from a bank which is known to have $0 money.

Furthermore, it's not clear to me how you believe that the BoE article contradicts what I'm saying. I'm under the impression that you (along with most other people) are simply misunderstanding what you are reading here.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it her last name isn't the Ellison right? If so, that could be a hint.

Megan Ellison produces movies

Not the movie producer, but according to this tweet [1] close enough:

> SEC Chair old boss at MIT is the father of Caroline Ellison who is the Co CEO of Alameda research.

Crookedness all around.

[1] https://twitter.com/WhaleChart/status/1590955151472353280

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#624
post #616
post #529

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Always good to find another MMTer out in the wild ;)

This has absolutely nothing to do with MMT.

MMT economists have been instrumental in dispelling many of the popular misunderstandings about how banking works in addition to their work dispelling the many popular misunderstandings about how government finance works.

But also qnt is clearly well versed in MMT which is what I was referring to.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#625
post #597

That's the exact example why cryptos solved no problems at all. Centralized institutions are there for a reason, and obviously cryptos failed to recognize that. And soon exchanges were created which are in the exact role of banks etc. they swore to remove but with almost no regulations. I would be surprised if no such things happen at all.

Decentralized exchanges exist that process about the same volume as centralized exchanges, without centralizing trust to a single entity.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#626
post #512

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That's because it is all built on greed and a lot of lies. The only time you actually are part of the trustless system is when you are sole custodian of any private keys necessary to access the coins. The issue with this is that a whole lot of people have no idea what it is, how it works, how to be part of the system and how to keep keys secure and safe at the same time. And it is fine. People can't know everything.…

What about if you buy something you thought you understood, but that’s only because you were lied to?

There has never been a shortage of liars of every kind that seek to steal your money. Somewhat rarer, incompetents who handle your property stupidly. If you care for your money at all, the only person to fault is you.

I can try to seek "justice", but this rarely happens with cons that really know what they are doing. It is what I call victim thinking. That you do something stupid and then get bailed out by some authority.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#627

From the article: "FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried said in investor meetings this week that Alameda owes FTX about $10 billion, people familiar with the matter said. FTX extended loans to Alameda using money that customers had deposited on the exchange for trading purposes, a decision that Mr. Bankman-Fried described as a poor judgment call, one of the people said." In the FTX International terms of service ( h…

Banks don't actually even 'lend out' customer deposits. That's a very common misconception. In modern bank operations, incoming fund transfers (which involve deposits) do provide liquidity that help allow the bank to be able to lend, but banks are actually levering up capital (paid-up share capital, retained earnings, etc.) to lend. The primary limit on how much they are able to lend (by Basel III regulations) is a m…

>nothing to do with the amount of deposits

  "Assets = Liabilities + Equity" 
The ratio of assets to capital is limited to prevent levering up to infinity, ok.

But if the liabilities are mostly deposits, then it's the deposits that allow it to be a levered business at all.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#628
post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more accurate to say they loan out a multiple of deposits based on the inverse of the fraction (the "money multiplier"). If someone puts 1 million in the bank and the fractional reserve is 20 percent, they can now create loans of up to 4 million. Such that the reserve is 20 percent of their total assets of 5 million (= 4 million loans + 1 million cash).

No, fractional reserve means that they can lend out $800K of the $1M deposited, even though the $1M is still counted as the depositor's money and also $800K is a available to lend. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Can you describe the mechanism by which deposits held by a bank are lent to borrowers under the fractional reserve system described in that Wikipedia article?

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fulminate Hearby nominated as word of the day. Excellent.

Diablo 2 taught me this. Along with my other favourite word: Gargantuan.

From Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the lands of Lilliput and Gargantua. In one, every resident is tiny, Lilliputian, and in the other: huge, ...Gargantuan

Notably, the book reads in a very modern way, it's a bit shocking to know it was written in the 1700s when stylistically, and according to its vocabulary, it feels so very modern.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#630
post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re creating a lot of confusion by ignoring cash accounting (the physical dollar I give a bank is then given to a homeowner as a mortgage) and talking about GAAP accounting, without making it clear that is what you are doing (the jargon only makes things worse). Like sure, it’s loan to capital ratio that matters but as you point out: > Bank runs are a liquidity problem because the bank's assets aren't all liquid e…

But there aren't dollars given to banks mostly. Cash is a tiny fraction of the money banks handle. Most of the payment volume is millions of electronics messages between banks to debit and credit numbers in people's accounts, and only at certain times of the day the net of that (a far, far smaller amount of reserves) are actually moved. It's actually the other way around - trying to follow a physical dollar just make…

You are splitting hairs where it doesn't matter. More alarmingly, by your reasoning the bank is not lending out cash either, so there is no value in considering 'cashflow' at all.

But in practice when people say they 'pay cash' for something large like a house or a car, they are usually effecting a bank transfer (well, in Korea at least). I understand that under the hood in the US this is an IOU between banks, but to the depositor there is no difference whether the money is cash or bits. What matters is whether the bank has the liquidity to provide upon request.

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