“Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it.”
— Al Pacino
“Clearly I made a lot of mistakes,” Sam Bankman-Fried said in a virtual appearance at the New York Times summit in New York. “There are things I would do anything to do over again. I was shocked by what happened this month.”
Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the unfortunately named founder and CEO of FTX oversaw the collapse of the fastest growing crypto exchange. Some $35 Billion in assets evaporated. Many of those billions are unaccounted for.
Yesterday, he was slotted in to speak along with these other famous luminaries.
The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly. Who’s who? Write to me here. Also, where’s Elon?
(Source: Garrett Baldwin’s LinkedIn)
Apparently, if you’re under extreme scrutiny for the very public choices you’ve made, the New York Times wants to honor you with a seat at the table.
Let’s see what we have here: the meltdown of FTX and billion of dollars mysteriously missing; the president of a country under siege who keeps asking for more and more money (and weapons) from the West; the CEO of potentially the most colossal business strategy mistake in history; and, well, Janet Yellen, heiress to the Greenspan-Bernanke “spend all you want, we’ll print more” strategy of monetary policy.
Oy. A whopper of a conference.
“Is it possible that ‘Wall Street’,” writes reader Deanna L, “can and will purposely manipulate the market in such a way as to protect ‘end of year bonuses’ despite the current state of the economy?”
In light of our conversation with Codie Sanchez this week, we’ve been pondering the disconnect between investing, politics and getting your hands grubby. Wait, we mean literally getting your hands grubby, not the first two.
“I find it suspicious,” Deanna continues “that each year the end of the year market valuations ensure performance bonuses and coincidentally IRA increases in value that insure higher Minimum Required Distributions for the coming year, and then magically fall in January.”
Things that make you go, “hmn”.
So it goes,
P.S. Speaking of a seat at the table, I would be remiss if, in light of Deanna’s comment above, I didn’t sandbag this detail a little. From Bloomberg:
What’s for dinner? At the White House, which is hosting its first state dinner since 2019, Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron will be having butter-poached Maine lobster, caviar and an Oregon cheese named best in the world. They’ll listen to music from Grammy-winner Jon Batiste and for dessert, guests will nosh on orange chiffon cake, roasted pears and crème fraîche ice cream.
“Bon appetit! Les biatches.” It’s nice to be the king.
(Source for the photos via Bloomberg: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty)
P.P.S. We also note this morning that New York and Singapore are currently the most expensive cities in the world to live in. That’s hard to believe if you’ve been to London or Paris recently, but does reflect recent dollar strength in the international markets. And that a bevy of overseas Chinese live in Singapore.
