People trust each other either because they have similar backgrounds that are values based or because they have worked together for years. Trust is an end product of a process.
Even so, sometimes trust breaks down. Ralph Northam, former Governor of Virginia, is a VMI grad and I wouldn't trust that SOB to run a bake sale.
You raise an exceedingly good question - should politicians keep the fruits of the poisoned tree when they know Sam Bankman-Fraud was spreading ill gotten wealth?
The obvious answer is NO to Hell NO!
I will not hold my breath.
Happy Thanksgiving, amigo.
BTW, FTX is not the last stop on that line. There will be a lot more of these disasters.
You wonder if there will be outright fraud, or just a failure to execute? For example, Helium.com. Right now, with founders and VCs selling at the top of the market, it looks like a pump and dump. Virtually no VC has been transparent that backed Helium if they own all the tokens they received for investment, or if they sold them to "harvest" profits to return back to their funds.
The more I see things like this the more I am a traditionalist.
I used to believe that there was always a better, newer way to do things if you just searched hard enough. It was the "continuous improvement" mentality. I still think that there's merit to that in small doses, but I now see the value of the past, and the time-tested rites, rituals or processes that have been put in place for our benefit.
It's easy to think that "the way things are done" is because of prejudices or lack of information, but then you realize that we have had thousands of years of trial and error to fine tune things. Many things are done for a reason and for good reasons.
I think we are now finding out that in thinking that our past is deficient, somehow, is hubris. The fact is that our ancestors discovered many of problems in the past, and found good solutions for them.
Things like keeping good books, checks and balances, processes to not allow human nature to destroy the good things. Things like "trust but verify."
there is a difference between "continuous improvement" and "corporate stagnation". I think Elon is uncovering and not compromising on corporate stagnation at Twitter. He is remaking corporate culture-tough stuff which requires exactly what he is doing. Innovation can be truly disruptive and blow up existing verticals in industries. But, when the entire world is touting that they have an innovation and no one is using it, it's probably not innovation.
I also agree strongly with what Terry said and have written it on this blog in the past: Fine to speculate in crypto but NO ONE HAS BUILT ANYTHING OF VALUE THAT PEOPLE USE YET. Until that happens, they are tulip bulbs. Fred Wilson has a post up at AVC.com today about NFT art. That's a nice to have and cool but it's not going to change the world.
I am laughing so hard right now....your quote on "the reason it isn't being used is that it sucks"! I have several students that I advise on trading at University of Idaho. These are young adults taking real risk in futures/equities/debt markets with real money and margin calls. They have been in love with crypto and I have been trying to make them crawl before we walk on trading the product. I have no problem trading bitcoin futures...I know the clearing is safe...but we were two weeks out from opening an account with FTX when we saw the default. Granted we were going to do a cold wallet but still...damn. I absolutely love the description of trading floor talk...I remember it well and I have to tone my talk down at times because it taught me to call a spade a garden tool...which I do way too much.
Dodged a bullet there. Wow. Great learning opportunity for students. Hope they see how to find landmines in the future. To be clear, I never went to FTX to try and set up an account so I don't know what that process looked like. I have wallets at Coinbase and Uphold which I trust, but I am not "trading" crypto so no margin etc.
A couple weeks prior, someone skinned an old lady’s dog. Seems likely these are related. There have been a lot of transients going through Idaho for the past few years since WA legalized marijuana. They’ve been staying around Spokane and the city just cleared out a major encampment. Been seeing sketchy people around north Idaho for a while now (not the usual “Idaho sketchy” types, either). When winter starts they head south. Hard to believe it would have been someone local that did it. But so weird that two others were home at the time and seems they didn’t even know about it.
We are in a new era when young people steal to give to politicians/political parties -- millions upon millions. The motivation to do so must be strong as it's our tendencies to not just toss our dollars away -- even when stealing them.
And just where did such a counter-intuitive idea possibly manifest itself? IF I had to guess, someone was a student of corzine. That, or maybe seeing hunter's laptop disappear was influential.
Dear God, if you let people off for pulling this shit, you open doors for it to happen again.
My understanding is that there is at least a 90 day clawback period for any and all distributions, regardless of purpose. A bankruptcy lawyer on here should be able to opine.
I’m not a attorney but clawbacks can come years later and you will get screwed ask the Madoff investors no question and if fraud is involved you will have to deal with the US MARSHALLS
Note that the SEC's codified "Clawback Rules For Fraud" were put in place just one day before Elon closed on his big buy. I do believe we're going to see this play out in real time. Maybe even for the HOOD IPO.
This is a good recap, not a lot new. But the commentary on the press, Bloomberg specifically, starting at about 14:45, really says something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDqhM7vHR2o
Nailed it on the real world vs. the floors. 25 years on 2 trading floors and I never dealt with the dishonesty in business of the last 8 years in the "real world".
My impression is that FTX was a money laundering operation for Progressives, bankrolled by a Ponzi scheme. I would be most interested, however, to learn if there were connections to the intelligence community.
not out of the question, but it might have just been a bad idea gone worse. suppose he wanted to get into crypto-alameda.....needed to raise money for it but couldn't so....FTX....and when the bear market hit, Alameda loses tons of money....so he takes FTX client money to prop it up and buy whatever he can to try and stop the break in crypto......but you can't catch a falling knife....and at the same time thinks that regulators can somehow save him so he decides to try and bribe congresspeople to get regulations he wants.
Why was FTX funding studies to “debunk” HCL and IVM? Dr. Ralph Baric (instrumental in gain of function) wrote a paper years ago describing how zinc kills viruses but needs ionosphore to get into the cell. (HCL and IVM are ionosphores). So the so called “deep state” has know this for years. Yet now we have Democrat-connected FTX providing funding for these studies? What? Out of the goodness of their hearts? My theory is that SBF was merely a figurehead and not actually in charge of what was happening there. He is not smart enough to pull it off. But he’s dumb enough to be made the fall guy for a massive money laundering scheme ran by the CIA. In case it failed, he was easily controlled. Through the same control techniques that Epstein was using…
I suppose it’s possible that not all of these kinds of things are part of the New World Order conspiracies. If it were, they probably wouldn’t have let it fail!
I just saw that. Foreign RE seems like a good way to launder dirty money too! My working assumption is that FTX was a Deep State/Democrat money laundering operation that, just like a Ponzi scheme, depended on continuing to gain gullible liberal investors indefinitely and then lock in the gains by destroying the competition through buying off politicians and regulators. It’ll be hard to convince me otherwise.
You are precisely correct in your post regarding trading floors. The business world outside of the old floors on the exchanges runs on honesty . . . well, most . . . much . . . some of the businesses do. I guess it depends on what you think you can get away with your customers, suppliers and labor.
I really wish we'd start calling bullshit on politicians "walking things back". They're flat out lying and we ought to call them on it. This ethos of "well if I'm not caught it's OK, hell, maybe it's even true has got to stop.
I'm sure you are aware that most politicians owe their elections to party money and have to repay it by going to party headquarters and spending so many hours a week dialing for dollars. Last I knew, and that's 10 -15 years ago, it cost $5M per cycle of primary and general on average.
I am a Republican and I was pissed at him for not actually doing anything meaningful. Denny was not only what he was prior to being a congresscritter, but he was GOPe.....
The lack of accountability thus far is astounding.
The family connections and financial connections to the Democrat Party is astounding.
The lackadaisical laissez faire attitudes and neglect on behalf of the bureaucrats in positions of authority is utterly astounding when one considers what transpired, or more accurately, did not transpire, prior to the truth coming out.
The Democrats should be ashamed of themselves.
SBF and his family should not only be ashamed of themselves, they should be held criminally and civilly liable and so should the bureaucrats who neglected to do their jobs.
They don't have shame or contrition. Not in their psychological makeup. True story. Blonde Girl gets into an Ivy League school. She has three other roommates and the way their dorm is set up, one single bed. One roommate is lesbian, one is grossly obese, one is a tiny person. Everyone wants the single. Blonde girl says "I am going to sleep with a different man every night so give me the damn single". She winds up sleeping with a couple of professors and follows through on her threat. They find a person's weakest point and exploit it-and figure out ways to justify their actions post ante.
People trust each other either because they have similar backgrounds that are values based or because they have worked together for years. Trust is an end product of a process.
Even so, sometimes trust breaks down. Ralph Northam, former Governor of Virginia, is a VMI grad and I wouldn't trust that SOB to run a bake sale.
You raise an exceedingly good question - should politicians keep the fruits of the poisoned tree when they know Sam Bankman-Fraud was spreading ill gotten wealth?
The obvious answer is NO to Hell NO!
I will not hold my breath.
Happy Thanksgiving, amigo.
BTW, FTX is not the last stop on that line. There will be a lot more of these disasters.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
You wonder if there will be outright fraud, or just a failure to execute? For example, Helium.com. Right now, with founders and VCs selling at the top of the market, it looks like a pump and dump. Virtually no VC has been transparent that backed Helium if they own all the tokens they received for investment, or if they sold them to "harvest" profits to return back to their funds.
The more I see things like this the more I am a traditionalist.
I used to believe that there was always a better, newer way to do things if you just searched hard enough. It was the "continuous improvement" mentality. I still think that there's merit to that in small doses, but I now see the value of the past, and the time-tested rites, rituals or processes that have been put in place for our benefit.
It's easy to think that "the way things are done" is because of prejudices or lack of information, but then you realize that we have had thousands of years of trial and error to fine tune things. Many things are done for a reason and for good reasons.
I think we are now finding out that in thinking that our past is deficient, somehow, is hubris. The fact is that our ancestors discovered many of problems in the past, and found good solutions for them.
Things like keeping good books, checks and balances, processes to not allow human nature to destroy the good things. Things like "trust but verify."
there is a difference between "continuous improvement" and "corporate stagnation". I think Elon is uncovering and not compromising on corporate stagnation at Twitter. He is remaking corporate culture-tough stuff which requires exactly what he is doing. Innovation can be truly disruptive and blow up existing verticals in industries. But, when the entire world is touting that they have an innovation and no one is using it, it's probably not innovation.
I also agree strongly with what Terry said and have written it on this blog in the past: Fine to speculate in crypto but NO ONE HAS BUILT ANYTHING OF VALUE THAT PEOPLE USE YET. Until that happens, they are tulip bulbs. Fred Wilson has a post up at AVC.com today about NFT art. That's a nice to have and cool but it's not going to change the world.
I am laughing so hard right now....your quote on "the reason it isn't being used is that it sucks"! I have several students that I advise on trading at University of Idaho. These are young adults taking real risk in futures/equities/debt markets with real money and margin calls. They have been in love with crypto and I have been trying to make them crawl before we walk on trading the product. I have no problem trading bitcoin futures...I know the clearing is safe...but we were two weeks out from opening an account with FTX when we saw the default. Granted we were going to do a cold wallet but still...damn. I absolutely love the description of trading floor talk...I remember it well and I have to tone my talk down at times because it taught me to call a spade a garden tool...which I do way too much.
Dodged a bullet there. Wow. Great learning opportunity for students. Hope they see how to find landmines in the future. To be clear, I never went to FTX to try and set up an account so I don't know what that process looked like. I have wallets at Coinbase and Uphold which I trust, but I am not "trading" crypto so no margin etc.
Crazy and tragic about those U of I student murders.
Idaho....crazy is right.
A couple weeks prior, someone skinned an old lady’s dog. Seems likely these are related. There have been a lot of transients going through Idaho for the past few years since WA legalized marijuana. They’ve been staying around Spokane and the city just cleared out a major encampment. Been seeing sketchy people around north Idaho for a while now (not the usual “Idaho sketchy” types, either). When winter starts they head south. Hard to believe it would have been someone local that did it. But so weird that two others were home at the time and seems they didn’t even know about it.
If SBF did steal the money that he donated to politicians, doesn't the bankruptcy court have the authority to order return of the money?
We are in a new era when young people steal to give to politicians/political parties -- millions upon millions. The motivation to do so must be strong as it's our tendencies to not just toss our dollars away -- even when stealing them.
And just where did such a counter-intuitive idea possibly manifest itself? IF I had to guess, someone was a student of corzine. That, or maybe seeing hunter's laptop disappear was influential.
Dear God, if you let people off for pulling this shit, you open doors for it to happen again.
Corzine made stealing customer deposits an art form.
Fighting Illini as well.
My understanding is that there is at least a 90 day clawback period for any and all distributions, regardless of purpose. A bankruptcy lawyer on here should be able to opine.
I’m not a attorney but clawbacks can come years later and you will get screwed ask the Madoff investors no question and if fraud is involved you will have to deal with the US MARSHALLS
Yes clawbacks are in order guess tge democrats will have to print it to give back??
Note that the SEC's codified "Clawback Rules For Fraud" were put in place just one day before Elon closed on his big buy. I do believe we're going to see this play out in real time. Maybe even for the HOOD IPO.
I’ve been involved in advising bankruptcy s and have been involved with claw backs for over 17 years what laws are you talking about ?
Not “Law” but an SEC rule covering execs and the board.
good point. I don't know the law, nor do I know the timing of the donations. Might be well out of that 30 day window someone else opined on.
Not bad for a couple of law profs, who, of course, had no idea about any fraud. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-bankman-frieds-ftx-parents-bought-bahamas-property-worth-121-mln-2022-11-22/
This is a good recap, not a lot new. But the commentary on the press, Bloomberg specifically, starting at about 14:45, really says something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDqhM7vHR2o
Link is busted. Can't find the podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cult-of-personality-with-terry-duffy-of-cme-group/id1545205930?i=1000586684190
Nailed it on the real world vs. the floors. 25 years on 2 trading floors and I never dealt with the dishonesty in business of the last 8 years in the "real world".
My impression is that FTX was a money laundering operation for Progressives, bankrolled by a Ponzi scheme. I would be most interested, however, to learn if there were connections to the intelligence community.
not out of the question, but it might have just been a bad idea gone worse. suppose he wanted to get into crypto-alameda.....needed to raise money for it but couldn't so....FTX....and when the bear market hit, Alameda loses tons of money....so he takes FTX client money to prop it up and buy whatever he can to try and stop the break in crypto......but you can't catch a falling knife....and at the same time thinks that regulators can somehow save him so he decides to try and bribe congresspeople to get regulations he wants.
Why was FTX funding studies to “debunk” HCL and IVM? Dr. Ralph Baric (instrumental in gain of function) wrote a paper years ago describing how zinc kills viruses but needs ionosphore to get into the cell. (HCL and IVM are ionosphores). So the so called “deep state” has know this for years. Yet now we have Democrat-connected FTX providing funding for these studies? What? Out of the goodness of their hearts? My theory is that SBF was merely a figurehead and not actually in charge of what was happening there. He is not smart enough to pull it off. But he’s dumb enough to be made the fall guy for a massive money laundering scheme ran by the CIA. In case it failed, he was easily controlled. Through the same control techniques that Epstein was using…
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/11/ftx-funded-18-million-towards-research-claimed-ivermectin-hydroxychloroquine-didnt-work-covid/
I suppose it’s possible that not all of these kinds of things are part of the New World Order conspiracies. If it were, they probably wouldn’t have let it fail!
Turns out, SBFs parents invested in Bahamas real estate too.....is it the new place to fight extradition from the US? I thought it was only Brazil.
I just saw that. Foreign RE seems like a good way to launder dirty money too! My working assumption is that FTX was a Deep State/Democrat money laundering operation that, just like a Ponzi scheme, depended on continuing to gain gullible liberal investors indefinitely and then lock in the gains by destroying the competition through buying off politicians and regulators. It’ll be hard to convince me otherwise.
You are precisely correct in your post regarding trading floors. The business world outside of the old floors on the exchanges runs on honesty . . . well, most . . . much . . . some of the businesses do. I guess it depends on what you think you can get away with your customers, suppliers and labor.
I really wish we'd start calling bullshit on politicians "walking things back". They're flat out lying and we ought to call them on it. This ethos of "well if I'm not caught it's OK, hell, maybe it's even true has got to stop.
I'm sure you are aware that most politicians owe their elections to party money and have to repay it by going to party headquarters and spending so many hours a week dialing for dollars. Last I knew, and that's 10 -15 years ago, it cost $5M per cycle of primary and general on average.
"Blunt" is one floor habit I can't get past.
The other is "Blurting".
Still working on both after 13 years "off the floor".
And your whole post is gold, especially extra for stinging Hastert.
I am a Republican and I was pissed at him for not actually doing anything meaningful. Denny was not only what he was prior to being a congresscritter, but he was GOPe.....
"Sometimes when there is a process or an idea that isn’t being used, the reason it isn’t being used is that it sucks."
Nice that there is an ecosystem of discarded bad ideas that trip up fraudsters and grifters. Well said.
When you wrote this ;
"Sometimes when there is a process or an idea that isn’t being used, the reason it isn’t being used is that it sucks."
It reminded me this, which I think is from Chesterton;
" Don't tear down a wall until you find out why it was built in the first place"
This is the entire hearing back in May 2022 on FTX's clearing proposal https://youtu.be/Uqf7Es5gUAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNLn2xYzvao Terry on Tucker
Jeff Carter and Terry, you are 100% spot on.
The lack of due diligence is astounding.
The lack of accountability thus far is astounding.
The family connections and financial connections to the Democrat Party is astounding.
The lackadaisical laissez faire attitudes and neglect on behalf of the bureaucrats in positions of authority is utterly astounding when one considers what transpired, or more accurately, did not transpire, prior to the truth coming out.
The Democrats should be ashamed of themselves.
SBF and his family should not only be ashamed of themselves, they should be held criminally and civilly liable and so should the bureaucrats who neglected to do their jobs.
They don't have shame or contrition. Not in their psychological makeup. True story. Blonde Girl gets into an Ivy League school. She has three other roommates and the way their dorm is set up, one single bed. One roommate is lesbian, one is grossly obese, one is a tiny person. Everyone wants the single. Blonde girl says "I am going to sleep with a different man every night so give me the damn single". She winds up sleeping with a couple of professors and follows through on her threat. They find a person's weakest point and exploit it-and figure out ways to justify their actions post ante.
OK late again. But only by a couple of years. Bernie Madoff redux. Could have written the same article and just put his name instead of SBF.