[☕️ C&C NEWS ☙ Monday, November 14, 2022 ☙ FOXES, HENHOUSES, AND LAUNDERERS 🦠 Be prepared for alligator-eating pythons if you move to Florida; bizarre sexual ethics in Venice -and- FTX.COM; China changes covid zero policies; and lots more. Jeff Childers]
...🔥 The FTX story is not a distraction from the election news. It IS election news. I’ll be covering it going forward until we fully understand the giant Democrat-Ukrainian-Cryptocurrency money washing machine that it sure looks like.
And boy, am I glad I covered the FTX.COM meltdown basics in Sunday’s bonus post yesterday, because it’s going to be FTX updates for a while, and you’ll need the primer to keep up. So if you aren’t up to speed, go read Sunday’s summary and then come back.
First, here’s Sam in his swanky Bahamian penthouse apartment, where he lived with his ten roommates.
Nice! Maybe one day you can also have a Bahamian penthouse apartment if you help launder money for democrats.
• For what is probably a very good reason, the World Economic Forum has deleted its web page promoting FTX. Buh bye!
There’s no apology there, though. Just an error page.
• Next, remember young Caroline Ellison? She’s a Harry Potter fan, Sam Bankman-Fried’s 28-year-old girlfriend, who chatters in interviews about how she’s bad at math (so WHAT qualifies her to run the multi-billion-dollar firm), and whose dad used to supervise Biden’s current SEC director.
Anyway, ‘somehow’ the investment analysts missed plenty of clear warning signs from Ms. Ellison, like this remarkable tweet from May, 2021:
I’m not sure I completely agree with Ms. Ellison. Regular amphetamine use might enhance your smug feelings of élite superiority, but apparently it doesn’t help you succeed in managing other people’s money. Not much, anyways.
Ellison also mused about topics on her public blog that support the rumors of bizarre “uconventional” romantic relationships among the ten roommates in Bankman-Fried’s Bahamian apartment, such as in her blog post below, which I’m including only to make the point there was plenty of material for investment analysts to work with, if they’d been doing any due diligence at all.
Well, problems are bound to pop up when you marry a nonjudgmental socialist sharing ethic with boundless hedonism.
How did the analysts miss the signs? Were they told not to look? We’re talking about some of the most sophisticated analysts in the world, including for Blackrock. Yet, for some reason, they seemed to miss truckloads of red flags. Red flags like drug use, which was apparently part of the day-to-day work lifestyle at FTX, for performance enhancement (stimulants) and limiting down time (sleeping aids).
You’ll notice in the little picture Sam’s Twitter avatar’s t-shirt logo, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post.
It is important to note that Ms. Ellison and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who infamously said books are for losers, are the generational products of our current crop of self-designated élites.
• Next, FTX is leaking like a rusty sieve, and news — both corroborated and uncorroborated — is streaming out. A financial newsletter with 170K Twitter followers just estimated the amount Bankman-Fried may have scampered off with at closer to $1.7B.
Remember, Sam’s “trading firm, Alameda” is the same subsidiary that was until very recently managed by his Harry-Potter loving girlfriend, Ms. Ellison.
• Next, FTX and 134 of its subsidiaries and related companies filed emergency chapter 11 bankruptcy cases on Friday. Oddly, the filing paperwork was incomplete, which is typical for smaller companies filing rushed cases, but is completely NOT typical for large, complex, billion-dollar companies who always have their ducks in a row before filing a chapter 11 case.
The kinds of law firms that represent multi-billion-dollar financial companies like FTX don’t normally file incomplete paperwork. I would have expected, not just completed paperwork, but also a motion to consolidate all the cases for joint administration plus a completed proposed chapter 11 plan. All on day one.
So it’s either incompetence, a VERY last-minute poorly-thought-through decision to legally stop customers from pulling all their funds out, or an intentional bad-faith strategy to drag the case out as long as possible. I’m leaning toward the latter.
In other words, why weren’t they talking about bankruptcy weeks or months ago? Only fraudsters ride it out to the ultimate collapse, because filing bankruptcy stops them from siphoning money out. And, by filing bankruptcy themselves, instead of waiting for someone else to do it for them, they remain (for now) in control of things, including information.
If the large investors are legitimate victims, instead of political pawns, their next move will be to file an emergency motion to appoint a trustee to take control of and supervise the companies’ assets. If they don’t, I will be extremely skeptical.
• Finally, corporate media has not been super helpful keeping up with this story. Maybe it’s moving too fast for them. One question I can’t resolve is, WHERE IS SAM BANKMAN-FRIED? Clearly, he’s out of the country.
On Saturday, MSN ran a story headlined, “Sam Bankman-Fried Claims To Be In Bahamas As Flight Tracker Shows His Private Jet Flying To Argentina.”
Nobody seems to know where Bankman-Fried and Ellison are. There are lots of rumors: still in the Bahamas, Hong Kong (Ellison), Dubai, South America. But so far, no reporter has been able to confirm his location.
To my knowledge, Bankman-Fried has not yet been charged with anything. He’s free to go wherever he wants. Presumably law enforcement is keeping up with him. I mean, I would hope they are. Like, the FBI and stuff.
You trust the FBI to keep track of Sam, don’t you? https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/c-and-c-news-monday-november-14-2022