Federal law enforcement agencies clearly reaped tremendous value from their cooperative relationship with FTX. This likely hobbled investigations into FTX itself, and it may still continue to.

FTX was a clearly a hive of activity for criminals of all stripes and thus it made much more sense to work with them to collect evidence, as opposed to shutting them down.

That’s just the world of FBI, DEA, DHS-HSI, IRS-CID, etc. I imagine there must have also been major cooperation with CIA, NSA and DoD on the intel side, both witting and unwitting.

This is almost at the same level as Sean Hannity wearing a CIA lapel pin on his show every night.

There are a number of people hitching themselves to the Ye wagon. Some are doing it in earnest to further agendas that will help the country (brand anchoring). Others are simply there to quickly cash in.

You can tell pretty well who falls into each category by looking at their history of getting involved with similar situations.

But let me clear: Ye is not a victim. He’s an adult and he should take responsibility for the people he deals with and the consequences of dealing with them.

Why do the Jews make so much money in rap music? Kanye West inadvertently explains it pretty well here.

🇺🇦⚡️Zelensky said that more than $1 trillion is needed to restore Ukraine.

A trade war with China that escalates endlessly is not going to be good for Americans.

What does the Biden administration see as the end-game for this?

This is what stopped the nuclear energy revolution.

“Here, over one million real-time reports of experienced well-being from a large US sample show evidence that experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it.”


https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118

Joe Biden has once again extended the moratorium on student loan repayments. This time until June of 2023.

More Republicans Died Than Democrats after COVID-19 Vaccines Came Out

https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2022/11/more-republicans-died-democrats-after-covid-19-vaccines-came-out/380279/

Would it be such a terrible thing if a handful of Republicans broke ranks and made Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House?

Sam Bankman-Fried says that incompetence created the situation at FTX.

There is a great deal of reporting that says that events took place that make SBF’s claims seem unlikely to be true.

I will say: The reporting makes a lot of claims which aren’t backed up by any evidence besides the testimony of anonymous sources.

For example, the claim that SBF bought $121M in real estate for his parents with costumer funds. Okay, but where are the documents that show that? I haven’t seen them. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. But I have not seen them.

Is there a small possibility that Sam Bankman-Fried and his confederates just had zero clue how to run an exchange?

I think there is.

Does that obviate criminal liability? Almost certainly not.

There is absolutely no way to operate an exchange the way that FTX claimed it was operating. You cannot facilitate huge, enormously concentrated positions with tremendous leverage in extremely illiquid assets and do so without risking a huge blow up.

It would be like setting up a pure penny stock exchange, offering OTC derivatives, massive leverage, lending, etc. to accounts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

It just DOES NOT work.

You can never possibly ever take the positions necessary to hedge certain risks. You can never liquidate customer positions that go bad, because the markets are too illiquid. And there are many other problems.