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by divbzero
1304 days ago
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Long Term Capital Management [1] is a good example of a company with “good, but illiquid investments” that failed because they made trades that went the wrong way temporarily, ran out of margin, and had to be rescued with a bailout before the trades recovered. Market prices stabilized after the bailout and the rescuers eventually exited the trades with a small profit. I agree with your assessment that Alameda / FTX put customer deposits into “completely inappropriate investments” but there is a bit of a judgment call involved. Crypto fanatics could argue that the market will bounce back and those investments will be successful in the end. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management |
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And what about customers deposits that ended up in $300m+ real-estate in the Bahamas (including some for SBF's parents, which they now said they'd be giving back to FTX: how generous once caught with the hand in the cookie jar)?
And what about the $100m or maybe more in political donation? ($40m from SBF to dems, now he says he gave the same account to reps but kept it shadow for it'd ruin his woke image and there's one of his accomplice who gave at least $12m to reps too)
That's already $400m right there that haven't been wiped out due to a market downturn.
And then the naming rights, insane ads, etc.
"Oops sorry we fucked up, we used your funds to gamble with 100x leverage like degens and lost it all (but don't pay too much attention to all the money we actually siphoned out of the system)".
I don't think you can compare LTCM to FTX/Alameda (I'm not saying you explicitely did but it's dubious). We're talking about SBF guy describing his magic ponzi box and Matt Levine answering him (april 2022 I think):
"I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would've described farming. You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good.".
FTX/Alameda is more Enron than LTCM.