[jcranmer]

No, that wasn't it. As Matt Levine put it, if you have $16 billion in liabilities, and you have $16 billion in T-bonds, you're in a good situation. If it's instead $16 billion in Bitcoin, well, you're a crypto bank, so it's probably fit for your purpose. If it's $16 billion in shitcoins, your risk judgement is questionable.

But FTX was none of those, it was $16 billion in assets FTX made up--it cost FTX $0 to acquire those assets and the valuation was arbitrarily inflatable to $16 billion. So the $16 billion in dollars that FTX acquired that caused it to accrue $16 billion in liabilities went... somewhere in return for $0. That's fundamentally stealing.

In the global financial crisis, the banks largely committed the sins in the first paragraph: they had bad risk management, and fundamentally underestimated risk in certain markets. To a large degree, they didn't even hide their risks at all (indeed, a large part of the cascading nature of the crisis was everyone piecing together who was now most in trouble). What FTX did was something completely different, just pissing away the money while pretending it was still in a vault, and hoping nobody would open the vault to find nothing was in there.