crypto billionaire w pandemic super PAC buys "progressives"

[Belligerent Savant]

Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA
@GRDecter
·
8. Crypto deposited by customers weren't even recorded on the balance sheet. Presumably, all crypto assets just went into one central slush fund used for whatever.



...

9. The filing makes clear that Sam Bankman-Fried does not speak for the company, and that his erratic and misleading public statements should not be disregarded.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593 ... 80161.html

[Harvey]

https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-c ... x-and-sbf/

Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Ramdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.

[stickdog99]

https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-c ... x-and-sbf/

series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.

As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.

This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?

Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.

Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.

Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Ramdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.



Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be bogus. David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron, and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”

For some reason, SBF just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.

It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”

I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:

The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the public health world, where numerous leaders in pandemic-preparedness had received funds from FTX funders or were seeking donations.

In other words, the “public health world” wanted more chances to say: “Give me money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere 0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.

Among the organizations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advocacy group headed by Gabe that took out millions in ads to back the Biden administration’s push for $30 billion in funding. As Influence Watch notes: “Guarding Against Pandemics is a left-leaning advocacy group created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans.”

Truly it gets worse:

FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.

Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more than $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open letter last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organization are on hold.

The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-generation coronavirus vaccine; $250,000 to a University of Ottawa scientist researching how to eradicate viruses from plastic surfaces; and $175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a force for good,” said Tom Inglesby, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, lamenting the fund’s collapse. “The work they were doing was really trying to get people to think long-term … to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”

Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 million on lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House over the past year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to advocate for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic plan in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that included pandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political action committee backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Democratic candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the group’s webpage.

I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’s announcement of his bid for the presidency, by the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing but a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media, and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent as its books. The first auditor to have a look has written:

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady, Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.



And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close relationship with the World Economic Forum and was the favored crypto exchange of the Ukrainian government. It looks for all the world like the money-laundering operation of the Democratic National Committee and the entire lockdown lobby.



I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated: smeared and displaced.

Brownstone has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less complete with the 8-digit funding regime of the other side.

The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think tank” which supposedly discredited the GBD, even though none of the authors received a dime.

This gibberish and slander has gone on for years – at the urging of government officials! – and Brownstone itself faces much of the same nonsense, with every manner of fantasy about our supposed power, money, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media dudgeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modeling terrified the world into denying human rights to billions of people the world over.

All this time – while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world – the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of “effective altruism” and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.

Then the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.

The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and Covid. But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.

So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.

[Grizzly]

https://archive.ph/2022.11.17-143813/https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit%23overview

[JackRiddler]

And nice work WR, and others who were early (pre-November 2022) posters on this thread, and even calling it on the over-leveraging and likely collpase, and pretty much all the dirt that's coming out only now. Now that kind of advance knowledge is why we're all paying eight bucks a month for the RI Bluecheck subscription, right? Right?!

Start of the OP:

can someone explain to me why crypto billionaire brothers Sam and Gabe Bankman-Fried have a pandemic-associated superPAC and 501c4 dark money group that's buying congressional seats for inexperienced/young/stupid "progressives"?

Also grizzly thanks for finding a non-photoshopped version of the NYT/Accenture "Deal Book" program showing the miscreants in alphabetical order. The one making the rounds as a meme, factually accurate, annoys for having so obviously rearranged the portraits by photoshop, so that you think it's fake. It was to highlight SBF's participation alongside Zelensky, Yellen, and Fine of Blackrock.

Wonder if he'll show?! Heh either way.

By the way, the actual Ponzi scheme lasted like 10 months total.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Meme or not, as you point out the panelist/speaker list for that Deal Book event is legit, not fabricated; it's a challenge for me to identify the most loathsome out of that list, though the fact such an event was conjured in the first instance by the NY Times may be the most (predictable) grotesque aspect of it.

NYTimes is no longer obfuscating its role as propaganda arm for Great Reset/WEF/related and perhaps not necessarily connected agendas. The veil, such as it was, has been removed.

----------------------

Re: FTX --

This is long; won't be pasting all of it here -- follow the link for the full piece.

Sharing it here does not = endorsement of all views expressed, needless to say, but I feel it contains worthwhile considerations for how events may develop in time (both for this FTX scam, and how it may tie to to other active/looming agendas).

Caveat Lector, as always.

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p ... dium=email

Embedded links at source.

A Grand Unified Theory of the FTX Disaster

The Wars of Wars: Where the Wars Intersect

Mathew Crawford
Educator, Entrepreneur, Statistician, Finance Specialist
7 hr ago

"No matter what political reasons are given for the war, the underlying reason is always economic." -A. J. P. Taylor

This is the work of many hundreds of people, distilled and organized in a way that hopefully brings the Bigger Picture to light—at least insofar as we all can research and interpret it better. Apologies to those participating whose work is not included in the scores of links provided.

So far as I can tell, everyone has this story wrong. Many people put together some frame of the puzzle just fine, but this can be a dangerous distraction, so I'd like to take a shot at sorting it out. After all, it's only human extinction on the line.

Follow me on this…

I may edit parts in or out, or write additional articles to clarify related events.

TL;DR - You may want to break this up into two or three reading sessions. This is by far the longest article I've written. It has to be. And it won't be the tightest or best-edited. But it's the most important one to date, so I don't want to hold back. My apologies.

The FTX-Alameda (FTX-A) tale is a prime example of my true motivation for writing at Rounding the Earth, and the reason why I have to fragment the focus: these different threads of war are absolutely necessary for understanding the Bigger Picture. The goal was always to lay out lessons embedded in the articles that might help more people open their eyes to the specifics of what is taking place, and therefore to be able to do something about it. This is the moment when it should become clear why I've been doing what I've been doing.

The stakes are pretty high—this is a historical battle in the larger World War E. There is no simple preview, but here are some of the topics we hit:

- A giant cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, and its companion quant trading/investment firm, Alameda Research, have collapsed in what appears to be a leveraged Ponzi-esque event that poisoned many other businesses in the nascent crypto-finance ecosystem. This isn't exactly the right story, and I am to clarify.

- FTX was likely one of several available attempts by the Globalist Elite to establish the intended new global financial network and currency.

- A second attempt to control digital currencies is likely planned to take place through the regulatory system, using the FTX debacle as the excuse.

- The flood of information about the first point seems meant to obscure the second, third, and other points.

- The pandemic is the fog of war intended to create the opportunity and obscure the activities behind this plan.

- This plan connects a lot of stories, including the activities of Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein. It weaves through MIT Media Labs along the way, but goes to the heart of the powers who ultimately control the military-intelligence-banking complex—and that include the pedophile elite. Whitney Webb has done us great favors tunneling toward much of this, but hasn't yet reached the core (an overly tall task for any one person).

- The endgame is conceived as an intellectually (genetically) superior human race, but that may be merely a conceptual construct of an insane network of situationally brilliant, if overconfident psychopathic elites. The mass gathering of genetic data and gene-drive technology likely play a role.

Much of the next few pages may repeat much of what you've read, but I try to sprinkle the build-up with some important thoughts that may help readers avoid being channeled down the nerfed narrative. After that, things get uglier than you're probably imagining. I'll try to make you laugh once or twice in the meantime. Buckle up.

The Players

Much has already been said and written about the unusually young crowd running both FTX and Alameda—some that is correct, some that is incorrect, and much that is likely to be misunderstood. So, I'd like to proceed carefully, and ground this story with context.

Know that among the crowd we're going to talk about, and their tight peer group, are numerous students in educational programs that I crafted and helped run for many of the world's most "precocious youth". Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) still has a profile there, though others around him were more active members of the community.

The FTX-A story isn't really the SBF story. The pool of players is far larger, and in some cases also murkier. There are hints everywhere about the web of relationships, and it will have to be another article (mine or somebody else's) that fleshes out even a basic skeleton of the grand summary. Perhaps the New York Times can help with that process.




The full cast of characters would be impossible to know and reveal, which is the very reason why a strong centralized government should always have been viewed as an operation anathema to liberty and organic human development. Part of the magic trick of reaching this point in our timeline has been to raise most of the children as lobotomized cattle, branded with virtue-signaling ideologies like "Progressivism" that leap past all logic to a desired utopian result, and resist critique or cognitive correction with a jello-like kung fu. "What is it that you dislike about progress?!"

The cast of characters you might not notice in this film includes a mega-billionaire with enough influence to keep his life entirely off Wikipedia, a curious gathering of researchers at MIT, and also some familiar faces from the pandemic you might not have realized would pop up in the largest ever cryptocurrency catastrophe (though you might should guess). Also Jeffrey Epstein.

Now, let's ground this story with a discussion of SBF. It is worth noting that SBF profiles all seem to include his Stanford Law Professor parents, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman. And perhaps that is appropriate in an age in which successful 30-year-olds often appear as grown-up children—like rejuvenated extensions of parental will, arrested in development, potentially capable of carrying out their parents' whimsical dreams of glory.

Among other things, Joseph and Barbara are known as compliance lawyers who work on tax theory and policy. It is interesting that such work gets signaled as government-friendly given that their son became the largest player in the new currency market largely decoupled from government finance.

If any of this sounds like a scathing rebuke of parenthood among the cognitive elite American Mandarin class, imagine that I toned it down several notches for public consumption. Yes, among my many clients families were plenty of these. And 90% of the headaches came from just 2% of the parents.

What I've gathered talking to people who have been around SBF, superficially or closely (none of whom want to reveal their names) is that he's a spoiled, sadistic, hedonistic, ruthlessly dishonest bully of a manchild. But if you want indisputable facts, he was a high school math camper who graduated from MIT with an undergraduate degree in physics in 2014. After that, he went to work at one of the well-known quant funds, Jane Street Capital, where he had interned the previous Summer. After three years of what I hear was moderately successful trading, SBF left Jane Street and moved back to California.

Back in the Bay Area, SBF attached himself to the Centre for Effective Altruism (EA). If you're not familiar with EA, you can read through the material on the website before realizing that it's just one more Geek Cult that young intellectuals of arrested development and yearn for a return to deep dorm room conversation by providing them with a largely pre-baked socially acceptable set of virtue signals that conveniently span a full narcissistic mask. And, like most cults, it seeks out that for which its target audience aspires while simultaneously demeaning the journey: "Hey, feckless white boy, this is the path to socializing with pretty women."



Is it any wonder that the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) community focuses its sales force on Bay Area nerds?

As these men find refuge and comfort in these underground online forums, the ability to express their problems is unfettered. A desperate cry for help turns into hunger and the want for more. Many go to large extents whereby the detriments are forgotten.

The innate desire to win someone and claim them as a prize has extended itself into a large underground community that has taken wide online presence. Although it has connected many insecure and confused men across the world, it has raised many ethical issues in regards to the men themselves and the treatment of women in the dating scene.

I don't know if I'm fairly painting-by-colors the SBF portrait just yet. After all, what I think he recognized with EA is the psychological tool fit for the Woke era: a pseudophilosophy that absolves the power-hungry of their lack of ability or interest in connecting with a or the human community. All you have to say and do is artfully articulate the Woke Utopia as your core set of values (and promise to give away money), and nobody should bother you about any of your actions. Dispensing with the need for human connection might have been just what he needed to plow forward with the next epoch in his life's story.

SBF quickly quit his brief job at the Centre for EA and established his own (cryptocurrency-focused) quant trading firm, Alameda Research, in late 2017. After some early success with one cool trade, crazy rich people came out of the woodworks to shower him with billions of dollars and stardom, but we'll get to that part of the story later.



The second central player in this story is Caroline Ellison, another former Jane Street trader whom SBF brought in to help run Alameda. She is SBF's ex-girlfriend, though it's oddly difficult to find a picture of the two of them in the same place.

Caroline is another child of ample intellectual opportunity. Her father, Glenn Ellison, is a Professor of Economics and Department Head at MIT, usually ranked as the world's top school for Economics. During my years as an educator I helped author some of the events in which she participated, so I'm aware of her exceptional math abilities. How many high school kids with blushed cheeks know what it means to apply Representation Theory to particular polynomial fields? Three decades ago, you could replace "high school kids" with "undergraduate math majors" and the answer wouldn't be all that different.

What I understand less is how she wound up among the particular corrupt clique of power players. From Forbes,

Before she found herself at the center of crypto’s most massive meltdown, Caroline Ellison was a star student. She was a Harry Potterhead. She was a camp counselor. She was a writer of live action role playing scenes. Ruth Ackerman, a math professor who taught Ellison at Stanford 10 years ago, called her former student “bright, focused, very mathy” — a challenge, she said, to reconcile with Ellison becoming wrapped up in one of the largest alleged frauds of the past decade.

“The first I heard of the current controversy was when people started contacting me on LinkedIn, telling me to withdraw my endorsement of her skill as a computer scientist,” Ackerman told Forbes.

I learn more from this about the society that calls the professor asking for withdrawal of an endorsement of a relatively objective skill than I do about Caroline. But perhaps what there is to know is a product of that environment. Who really remains sane enough to make all the best decisions around such people? No wonder so many of the whiz kids are reaching for the EA cult and calling it a day on the moral growth front.

Others are already writing about drug-fueled orgies among the FTX-A circle. We could skip the examinations of everyone's sex lives, but for the purposes of this story, Caroline's public commentary does uniquely add to the data pool. Through her we hear that the FTX penthouse in the Bahamas was a polyamorous community where she came to believe in the "imperial Chinese harem" model:

None of this non-hierarchical bullshit. Everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.

Really, is this the product of some form of insidious abuse that we haven't yet fully described as a culture? Now, 26 billion points for Slytherin if you can square this circle:


Is this a fully mature CEO of a multi-billion dollar quant something-or-other crypto-Ponzi centerpiece, or the sexualized twelve-year-old daughter of one of the world's most powerful university professors? It really looks like Peter Pan's Lost Boys had a little girl tag along, somewhat heterosexualizing the adventure. What could possibly result in such arrested development along one vector dimension? Is this just a particular case of growing up in a heavily cushioned bubble? Or something else?

I'll leave you to ponder that while we move forward.

There is much about all of this that looks cartoonish on the surface. The phrase, "controlling most major world governments" sounds like quite the hyperbole until you've fully widened your scope of the players in this story.

Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA
@GRDecter

I read the 30 page FTX Bankruptcy court filing.

How bad were FTX's internal controls?

Here are the worst examples ...

10:57 AM · Nov 17, 2022

https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/159 ... rjbg2jRZiw

This all seems sloppy for a circle of young adults with genius IQs, likely backed by a solid cadre of lawyers. Something else explains this. We'll come back to that. We have a few more personalities to cover.

Sam Trabucco, yet another math camper and contest champion, has a reputation as a top notch gambler and game player. He got started trading at the Susquehanna International Group (SIG), the world's largest equity options trading firm (where I also learned the option trading game). Part of the SIG training program includes a lot of hours of no limit hold'em. Perhaps that experience helped him know when to jettison from his position as Co-CEO with Caroline at Alameda back in August. It seems likely that Sam had a solid grasp of the Bigger Picture developing between FTX and Alameda, and recognized troubled waters ahead.

Nishad is a former Facebook engineer who has been described by a peer as having done "bogstandard machine learning" work, which is good enough for most trading teams—particularly the ones that might be faking their trades. He and Gary Wang were described to me as "quiet, deep thinkers" by somebody I talked with who had superficial contact with them at various programs over the years. Nishad and Gary seem unlikely to be among a mastermind inner circle, and one person I talked with wondered if they were prodded down an unstable path after being seduced into the projects: low-confidence followers. Both have already jumped ship, leaving SBF and Caroline likely working with real adults to bail water.

FTX's Chief Regulatory Officer Daniel Friedburg was the lawyer/fixer from the Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker cheating scandals (secret tapes here). This does not allay concerns anyone might have that FTX-A planned an illegal course from early on (h/t 2ndsmarestguyintheworld).https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/sam-bankman-fraud-game-planet-pavlovian

Though I've managed to gather some details about the members of the FTX Penthouse orgy crew, I don't think it's necessary to the story.

There is a strange paradox among the whiz-kids-turned-finance-power-players muddying the story of FTX-A, and it needs to be untangled. Were these kids sloppy-stupid while organizing these Ponzi-like entities that would blow up under such a wide array of circumstances?

Kevin McKernan
@Kevin_McKernan

Putting private keys into a group email is like putting bank passwords on a post card.
This is so unbelievable reckless it makes Ferguson look like an angel.

https://pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.co ... 648197.pdf

I guarantee that these are people who understand public-private key cryptography. In fact, one of them took my course on Number Theory that brings students up through the basics of modular arithmetic and systems of linear congruence when he was 11 years old. It is likely that he knew at least basic cryptography math prior to even arriving at MIT. That something seems incongruous about this story reveals a disturbing reality: the real security behind this whole operation was either a set of completing damning shared secrets, mafia security, or both.

I'm betting on both.

As the prying eyes of the world examine the players and the details around the unique event that is the FTX-A collapse, the players are busy playing geeky misdirection games to cover their tracks. However, this story calls too much attention to so many others that feel more well tied together than ever before.

Now, if you're thinking this is just a story of a bunch of narcissistic brats who lost a bunch of money, I understand your reaction. But know that this misses the larger points. You need to dig deeper. Keep reading…

A Carefully Engineered Public Relations Campaign

The rise of SBF looks plotted out by experienced and expensive PR veterans—assassins of creative image building. From the building blocks of "MIT" (where most everyone is somewhere between "pretty darn smart" and "supergenius"), a stint at a well-known quant trading firm (Jane Street Capital), and one sweet and sexy trade (arbitraging the Japan Bitcoin premium), enough was on the table for the Mad Men Illusionists to go to work with cloth tailored from the silken fabric of effective altruism.



The next Warren Buffett! The next JP Morgan! And an "effective altruist" to boot! He's even the vegan who's going to save the animals as your heart will melt each time he hands you a hundred dollar bill that you're definitely not buying steak with, right?



Surely Sequoia, the mammoth VC fund that projects an image of Neo-Futurist Capital Gods, understood the manufacturing of the SBF brand when they threw money at him and projected that unrealistic image through their cultivated influencer network.

Every startup has a startup story. Apple was two hackers in a Los Altos garage. Google was two grad students in a Stanford dorm room. Alameda Research was just one guy in a Berkeley apartment, making a single cryptocurrency trade. That guy was Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF to his friends. Yet the trade he made, which eventually led to the crypto-trading platform FTX, is far from the standard Silicon Valley creation tale. In 2017, when he was merely 25, SBF collapsed the so-called kimchi premium, an anomalous delta between the price of Bitcoin in much of Asia and its price in the rest of the world. It was a daring feat of arbitrage—SBF is the only trader known to have pulled this off in any meaningful way—one which quickly made him a billionaire and achieved the status of legend.

Never mind that SBF only made $20 million off that trade and then reportedly squandered most of it, and that his billions were entirely due to valuation pumped up from capital infusions.

But if you were paying attention, there were definitely cracks in the facade. Granted, only a portion of the wider world has figured out that Sam Harris is a paper-thin intellectual woo guru, but this must have been a signal of trouble for at least some adroit observers.



OMG, SBF talked about "hierarchies of infinities" and probably understands the Spiritual Singularity to come after the breakdown of…linearity. After heaping effusive unearned praise onto SBF, I'm guessing Harris is going to try to sweep this one under the rug and walk away without drawing attention.



It only gets worse.

Just in case veganism, utopian pseudophilosophies, and Clinton Foundation appearances are boring, SBF spent or committed to $350 million on sports partnerships.



With SBF pumped up so high, crypto news outlets give SBF credit for inserting several-year-old ideas, well-known to the entire ecosystem, you have to know he's getting special treatment. This was just an opportunity to push his name alongside Elon Musk's:



One must wonder whether this was a paid advertisement. One way or another, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, SBF and FTX were everywhere. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody working on the PR campaign.

The Rise and Fall of FTX and Alameda Research

If the finance talk bores you, or you find it incomprehensible (that's understandable if you've never been involved in any of this for a living), scroll down to the next section and beyond. The most interesting stories are beyond that point.
...

More at link.

[JackRiddler]

.
Meme or not, as you point out the panelist/speaker list for that Deal Book event is legit, not fabricated...

Indeed, completely the case. Checked it immediately.

Grizzly posted the portraits from the real online program (alphabetical arrangement), which I prefer. You posted the meme version made by a clumsy photoshop that places SBF next to other invited speakers Zelensky (actual connection), Yellen and Fine. Sorry, I always want the version that can't be impeached. (In info war, I do realize, everything will be impeached anyway; by hook or crook, refutation or defamation. But why make it easy?)

*

[Belligerent Savant]

you're absolutely right, as far as approach, and frankly I wasn't aware it was a meme/modification (though I did confirm the event was real). A bit of a blind spot in my haste to make a talking point here, alas.

We are indeed in the midst of info wars, whether we want to readily admit it or not.

(shame that phrase was long ago appropriated by the PT. Barnum of "CT Theory")


Also: should we rename this thread to "FTX scamdemic" or whatever may be preferred? (you can discard my mediocre attempt at playful title).

I expect this thread will be a 'central repository' of sorts in the weeks to follow, but defer to the mod(s)/OP author.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Ok, one more snippet:

Establishing a New Global Financial Order in One Fell Swoop?

We might as well jump right to it. I submit that it is highly likely that FTX-Alameda's planned best hope was to establish a new Global Central Digital Bank (GCDB). This GCDB would be the ultimate issuer of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs, though eventually the plural would not be needed under the then-inevitable governance structure), such as the one now being pushed on Australia. This is why SBF would be elevated above all other [actually] successful hedge fund managers and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs to share the stage with Bill Clinton, the head of the U.S. Treasury, and the CEO of Blackrock. Many financial engineers had a part in constructing the Death Star.

What is the Death Star, exactly?

Much has been said about the obviously inappropriate relationship between FTX and Alameda. Thankfully, Arnold Kling provides the correct explanation from the chair of an actual Economist:

Let’s retell this story using entities of the U.S. government. The Treasury is like FTX, issuing tokens that it calls bonds. The Fed is like Alameda Research, taking these tokens on its balance sheet to try to support their price.

You’re going to say, “Wait. The Fed is issuing its own tokens, called money. The analogy does not hold.”

But Quantitative Easing did not work by issuing money. Instead, the Fed borrowed from banks, by paying interest on reserves and doing “reverse repos.” Just like Alameda Research, it took a levered position in Treasury tokens. Now the Fed is bankrupt. It has to be bailed out by the Treasury (you and me). Unlike FTX, the Treasury can still get away with issuing tokens.

Who could even think up such a scheme?



Gensler is a journeyman insider. A former whiz kid himself, Gensler made partner at Goldman Sachs at the age of 30 (the youngest in history at the time). He later served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, and Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), all prior to his current position as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a position made possible by Joe Biden's election in 2020. It should not surprise anyone then, as cryptonews reports, "Speculation is mounting in the community that Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler could have worked with FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried to find legal loopholes the exchange could take advantage of."

Tom Emmer
@RepTomEmmer

Interesting.

@GaryGensler runs to the media while reports to my office allege he was helping SBF and FTX work on legal loopholes to obtain a regulatory monopoly. We're looking into this.

@GaryGensler

I’ll be joining @andrewrsorkin on @SquawkCNBC at 8:00am ET to discuss recent developments in the crypto markets.
7:37 AM · Nov 10, 2022

Gensler also served as a Senior Advisor to Hillary Clinton, for whom SBF's mother Barbara Fried worked as an attorney. Barbara Fried is also co-founder of the political fundraising organization Mind the Gap, which pushed $20M into the hands of Democrats running in ("undervalued and underfunded") competitive elections in 2018, then far more during the 2020 election where it helped spearhead mail-based voter registration—a topic we'll come back to later.

Clearly this is not just SBF's story. But does that mean that these globalist power players had the engineering of a GCDB in mind from the start?



This tweet makes no sense at all if they did not have the establishment of a GCDB in mind. There is no reason why the FTT token should have any value at all aside from the expected money saved by token holders trading on FTX (the defining feature of the token) plus the product of the probability and final value of the established GCDB. And this is exactly the reason to usher in regulation: because it cements industry leaders. Just as Amazon rode the tax-free online shopping wave in a way that current competitors cannot, FTX-A would have risen in an unregulated environment where future competitors would be hampered. From the Intercept:

“I think that the CFTC makes a lot of sense, though, as the market’s regulator,” Bankman-Fried told the paper. As the young industry flounders, it resorts to a method tested by its predecessors: funding the lawmakers who might regulate it. “They’re really experienced, competent, and efficient and have a deep knowledge of markets and of crypto markets, and you could do a really good job of that.”

Meanwhile, while the dust is still settling on the FTX-A scandal, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York quietly announced a pilot program for the new digital dollar. Probably means nothing.
https://qpol.substack.com/p/the-fed-imp ... ntral-bank

Satoshi Nakamoto vs. The New World Order

The stakes could not be higher. The Almighty Dollar is likely on its last legs as the vehicle for global financial quasi-slavery. The globalists have been organizing for decades around plans to extend their umbrella as a unified global financial network at the time the status quo reserve currency weakened. Certainly the reigning banking regime recognized the potential for a BRICS currency decades in advance. James Rickard's book Currency Wars demonstrates the Pentagon's knowledge and war games expected at this time. What Rickards doesn't write about is Bitcoin, which was invented only around the time those currency war games were taking place.

The game theory surrounding a three-currency competition gets murkier. We might even wonder if a pandemic was planned and eventually tacitly agreed upon as a new sort of fog of war under which a new financial world order could be established. We'll come back to that point later.

It is important to understand that none of this story relates to fundamental weaknesses in Bitcoin's model. In fact, Bitcoiner's view events like this as tests of the strength of the Bitcoin network, then go back to drawing board to consider whether a rare change in the code might improve the system.

This story also demonstrates that those who don't understand morality cannot fathom Bitcoin.

If you're new to Bitcoin, and have wondered why Satoshi Nakamoto chose to remain anonymous, does that seem a little clearer, now? Keep reading…

Controlling Politics

If you're one of the billions of people whose instincts point toward a world of sophisticated election engineering, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

There is nothing illegal, of course, with spending millions of dollars during an election cycle. Unless that money isn't yours. But let's agree that this "ownership of the money" thing seems like a gray area for a whole lot of people who don't understand Cantillon-fueled currency theft.

Numerous others writing about the FTX scandal have explained what appears to be a money laundering operation through Ukraine. I'll try to repeat it in a simple way, then move on:

- POTUS Biden & Co. sent billions to Ukraine.

- Ukraine put vast sums in the hands of FTX

- SBF & Co. spent tens of millions on primarily Democratic candidates during the Midterm elections.

- It is noteworthy that the "Aid for Ukraine" website apparently set up by SBF and reportedly took in $60 million in donations is last picked up by the Wayback machine ten days prior to the U.S. Midterm elections.
...

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p ... dium=email

[Harvey]

.
Meme or not, as you point out the panelist/speaker list for that Deal Book event is legit, not fabricated...

Indeed, completely the case. Checked it immediately.

Grizzly posted the portraits from the real online program (alphabetical arrangement), which I prefer. You posted the meme version made by a clumsy photoshop that places SBF next to other invited speakers Zelensky (actual connection), Yellen and Fine. Sorry, I always want the version that can't be impeached. (In info war, I do realize, everything will be impeached anyway; by hook or crook, refutation or defamation. But why make it easy?)

*

It's entirely possible, if not probable, that the original poster was the real disinfo and that the altered version is simply some designer making what is happening more immediately legible.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Keen observation, Harvey. Plausible.


Meanwhile, how is this SBF person not only still roaming freely, but publicly announcing his participation in a NY Times hosted event? Such trolling can only be enabled by those above him.

Despicable on several levels.

But also: brazen, overt, and in our faces. Will there be any accountability?

Clearly, this level of brazenness is part of the objective. How can anyone (not so much here, but anywhere) still deny that there are, indeed, nefarious agendas in play far beyond whatever may be reported in any press release?


https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status ... IvDCFM-XmQ

[Belligerent Savant]

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anessaal ... er_android

[Grizzly]

8 Congress Members tried to stop the SEC from inquiring into FTX by questioning the SEC's authority to inquire about Crypto..
https://twitter.com/PelosiTracker_/status/1596167104364847104?s=20&t=yMXgWa4hSG8n8ugpWDuVng

[Belligerent Savant]

Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA
@GRDecter

BREAKING: Sam Bankman-Fried hires the same lawyer as Ghislaine Maxwell (sex trafficking) and El Chapo (drug lord).

Who’s paying for this?

4:17 PM · Dec 6, 2022

[nashvillebrook]

awesome response Stickdog! I had to sit with all of that for a day. I’ve already been working the “unified theory” stuff. A lot of it is a data dump, except when you get to

something that bugs me…well, it all bugs me, but this is weird” ‘ FTX Future Fund’s commitments included…175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.” All of the Future Fund commitments were science-oriented except that one (I found more searching earlier today). the Center for Health Security is the lovely outfit that’s been doing virus doomsday tabletop simulations for decades. This one was just prior to Covid; callled “SPARS.”

https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/Center-projects/completed-projects/spars-pandemic-scenario.html

Why should they need a gift of a law grad? I assume it’s for legal research. Why did they pursue SBF to fund that particular position, I wonder. What might be the legal memo they’d like to prepare vis-a-vis pandemic “security”?

Maybe a bibliography of emerging legal challenges pertaining to “pandemic security.”