2022's most effective way to steal ordinary people's money for the benefit of liberal elites
The FTX fraud
I wrote for the Acton Institute about a remarkable case that looks like fraud & assorted crimes which led two crypto-currency exchanges, FTX & FTX.US, valued this year at $40 billion, to plummet to, well, nothing & declare bankruptcy. This magical futurism story turns out to be as old as modernity: A bank run caused by revelations of fraud.
Read my essay & you’ll learn about the big political donations, as well as the remarkable post-bankruptcy soft treatment from the NYT (& now the Washington Post, too). The press has mostly ignored a shocking story, again. One important aspect of the matter is that the conman, a Mr. Samuel Bankman-Fried, only went from trading to crypto-currencies in 2018 & then, in 2019, started the business that lifted him to elite liberal glory & plunged him now into trying to run from the authorities. He bragged that he knew nothing of crypto before becoming part of it, & I’m inclined to think he’s telling the truth. I’d add, he didn’t care about crypto-currencies afterward, either. He stole people’s money & put it into every elite liberal concern you can think of from pandemic prevention & all sorts of “philanthropy” to Dem political campaigns to activist journalism to buying celebrity as a cover & boost for his crimes. Remarkably, he managed to sucker not just liberal elites who can barely count, but also very large institutional investors, including the most famous VC firm in Silicon Valley, Sequoia.
The conman was brought down by the crypto-bros, some of whom reported on suspicious business & the others of whom participated in a bank run set off by the man who runs the biggest crypto-currency exchange, Binance, Zhao Chaopeng. That was last weekend.
So I close with some tweets from the truthtellers in this story, revealing more of the institutional corruption: Mr. Bankman-Fried was an MIT student; his business partner & paramour’s father taught there & they seem to have a connection to the guy now running the SEC.
Here’s the love affair of the liberal press with the fake billionaire:
Follow Balaji for more, he’s been righteously angry about this scandal & is trying his best to reveal that it’s a crypto v liberal elites fights; & that the crypto-bros should use every legal remedy available to get their money back from the liberal elites on whose behalf it was stolen.