It took the jury only four and a half hours to come to a verdict.
Justice. It’s apparently still a thing.
WTH
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How many Target shoplifters does 1 SBF equal?
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Dunno. How many pairs of sweat pants and kitchen pots can you buy with $8 billion in missing customer funds?
Now it’s on to the the father and some of the other “execs” and whiz kids.
WTH
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To be fair, they adjourned and went out to dinner. It was on the taxpayers dime, so no holding back, right? So you start off with a couple drinks, some apps, dinner, desert, a digestif. Plus you have to travel back and forth to the courthouse. There are 12 people so everything takes extra time. You probably have to budget four hours just for that.
So the jury took about 30 minutes to convict him on seven counts. That’s about five-ish minutes per count. Given the evidence I would have expected more like five seconds per count. But it is good they took their time and didn’t rush to a judgement.
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All it proves is that, like Bernie Madoff, Bankman-Fried didn’t have size. When Jamie Dimon goes to the slammer for the stuff that has gone on, during his watch, at JPM, then I’ll believe that Ms Justice is really blind, and those scales aren’t measuring someone’s wallet.
Steve
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I remember someone who was close to being a common bum years ago…and I will quote him, “he was so smart he was stupid”.
Reminds me of someone else on trial.
Sad day when the town derelic is making sense. I think that was his only insight in life.
I’ve a feeling that this suited the government and banks as it discredited crypto
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Didn’t it do just the opposite??? It showed that there is no problem with crypto and that major issues that happen related to crypto are due to criminal malfeasance rather than due to anything inherent to crypto.
Depends on what you mean by “discredited.”
Part of the appeal - and alleged utility - of crypto is that it allows all kinds of financial transactions to take place without having to use banks or other institutions as an intermediary. That it’s a novel solution to the agency, management, and cost problems that underlie traditional financing. Indeed, arguably that was one of the main reasons BTC was launched in response to the 2008 financial crisis.
What all of these collapses show (FTX, Celsius, Genesis/Gemini, etc.) is that the institutions that have grown up around crypto - and which are pretty necessary for crypto to be useful to normies - all suffer from the same issues as traditional financial institutions. Worse, actually, since these new institutions were built mostly by people who didn’t value or appreciate the importance of things like internal controls to ensure compliance, record-keeping, and risk management. Crypto advocates built an entirely new financial system from first principles - and is therefore speed-running all the failures that led to the modern regulatory framework and internal institutional controls that make the existing financial system the way it is.
So, yes - there’s some discrediting going on. Many of the better-than-realistic fun things that crypto promised (super-high low-risk returns! extreme flexibility! virtually no staff and overhead costs!) were just either intentional scams or people who were just ignoring basic financial best practices and regulatory requirements. What you would expect if you let the folks who found tradfi to be boring and stifling run the show without limits or regulatory oversight, sourcing their companies wherever the regulatory framework was lightest.
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Not with me it didn’t, but I see your point. It could be seen in a positive light.
What albaby said, emphatically!
People laugh like I am crazy when I tell them that before all else socialistic David is basically profoundly conservative, suspicious that attempts to use tech to invent a brave new world of money, religion, food, etc., are inherently far more risky than our drunk on “New! improved” shallowly rooted pop and style driven culture readily conceives.
david fb
I’ve not really followed this very much as I’m not into crypto.
Who were the main losers - presumably just millions of individuals?
The unambiguous losers were people who had equity in FTX and Alameda, either directly or by holding FTX tokens (which had a “market cap” of nearly $3 billion at one point, now down to $365 million). Those folks will get close to zeroed out.
The customers, depositors, and other creditors of FTX might actually not lose that much money. It is now looking possible that the the FTX BK estate might have enough assets to make them all nearly whole. Basically, among the many things that FTX did with customer funds is invest them in a whole bunch of risky projects. One of those investments was an early funding round for Anthropic at the beginning of 2022. Anthropic is an AI company, which is the new hotness (blockchain and metaverse is so yesterday) - and they just completed a funding round that puts their theoretical value at $30B+, which would put FTX’s stake at around $4.5B. Which might be enough, along with the potential sale of FTX’s marketplace and other assets, to cover creditors.
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