[jcranmer]

> (Oh, look, Tether's involved again. How much of the $160M in their claimed "shareholder capital" at https://tether.to/en/transparency has evaporated in the last month? They're currently claiming it hasn't changed by more than $50 since a month ago; https://twitter.com/jjjbtc/status/1524819806892982272)

If you need any strong suggestions that Tether's asset statements are a pack of lies, this is it. They claimed to have--before the cryptocurrency collapses started--an equity buffer of around 0.2% of total assets. Now they claim to have unwound ~10% of those positions in a market environment where selling any of those assets (even something like US treasuries!) would realize enough loss to wipe out that buffer. Instead, their equity buffer increased by something like 0.00001%.

[Majromax]

Surprisingly (or suspiciously) steady financial results are also a fair marker of an offering being a scam or fraudulent, particularly when there's no explanation beyond "good management practices."

Since a pure fraud makes up its books, it's easy to declare a steady path of returns. Reality tends to be more complicated, and delivering steady returns in a turbulent market is both hard and expensive (by way of hedging contracts).