[empath75]

The usdt/usd pair on most markets it trades on is heavily manipulated with wash trading. It doesn’t take a big buy order for bitfinex to bounce the price back to $1.

What you really need to watch is the widening spread in price between bitfinex and other exchanges which implies that people are buying crypto at inflated usdt prices because they don’t trust usdt any more.

I think if either that continues or the price of tether continues trading below 1.00, it’ll trigger a panic eventually.

[ericb]

It seems like there's about a $150-$200 difference between the USD/USDT exchanges at the moment. Note that CEX.io has one of the highest, and they are also currently unable to allow USD withdrawls "because of high demand backing up their financial partner."

https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/btc/markets/USD

CEX.io (see middle paragraph for shady explanation) https://blog.cex.io/news/recent_updates-16999

[bfuller]

Reminds me so much of Mt Gox

[SwellJoe]

But, spread across multiple exchanges. I'm tempted to short some things (including Tether on Kraken), but I'm also concerned any exchange that USDT touches will be insolvent after the crash. Kraken seems to have limited exposure, compared to some others, but when the shit really hits the fan, it's unlikely to matter, as it'll take significant chunks of the market with it, maybe including some exchanges that don't touch USDT but that are playing a little loose with their reserves. I would expect a retreat to quality as it starts to unfold, so Coinbase will maybe do OK (though some think GDAX is involved, or at least complicit, in wash trades), but I suspect a lot of folks will just want out of crypto completely. So, USD will increase in value relative to all of the other trading pairs...and some will be left holding the bag, if they're HODL-or-die.