Okay, this guy was supposedly worth $16 billion on Monday and now he's worth less than zero dollars. All of the explanations make it seem complicated but basically, he loaned a lot of money to himself, money that was not his, and claimed it as an asset. Simplest and oldest kind of fraud since the invention of money. That's not hard to understand.
But what is hard to understand is why "investors," Wall Street Masters of the Universe, gave him billions of dollars, which is also gone, without asking him what he was planning to do with it.
In meetings to raise money for his cryptocurrency exchange FTX over the last year, the entrepreneur left little room for negotiation, two investors said. FTX was his company, Mr. Bankman-Fried told them, and he planned to run it with little oversight. Interested investors should “support him and observe,” one investor who heard the pitch said. . . .
Now investors are under scrutiny, too, for enabling Mr. Bankman-Fried with so little oversight. It was the most dramatic example in recent history of what happens when so-called visionary founders are given lots of money with few strings attached.
I obviously don't give a FFOARD about the Masters of the Universe who flushed their billions, but a lot of small investors put their money into his fake "investment" vehicle and nobody was looking out for them. I'm talking retirement savings, down payment for a house, kids' college .. . . Congress has been "debating" regulating cryptocurrency but you know, we wouldn't want to restrain Free Enterprise™ , except of course it isn't enterprise at all.
Don't count on anything happening in the next session either.
No comments:
Post a Comment