One has to appreciate Sam Bankman-Fried’s honesty of late. After running FTX, a presumed $32 billion company, to zero in a matter of days, he took to Twitter to reveal what many of us already knew. He said that “woke” is a racket.
“In the future, I’m going to care less about the dumb, contentless, ‘good actor’ framework,” he said. “What matters is what you do—is ‘actually’ doing good or bad, not just ’talking‘ about doing good or ’using ESG language.'”
True enough but perhaps a bit late, since woke ideology was the main product that his short-lived company was selling. He says it was never his intention to rob anyone. And he does feel “bad for those who get” harmed by “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes us.”
What the company’s ideological strutting did provide was access to power. Bankman-Fried made frequent trips to Washington to court regulators he now criticizes as mostly useless, while holding events in his fancy Bahamas home that attracted the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
When the Ukrainian government was looking for a crypto exchange to store and convert its own crypto holdings (where did they get those?), it chose FTX. What’s more, FTX was the only crypto exchange in the world that came recommended by the World Economic Forum, which has since taken the company down from its website.
The unraveling of the company reads like the most implausible fiction story you have ever encountered. The Wall Street Journal has discovered billions in payments to undisclosed parties, the names of which weren’t disclosed in the books. It could take years to sort out the whole sordid tale.
In a too-bizarre-to-be-true twist, the company was heavily involved in the COVID lockdown response, including the funding of studies conducted by scientists connected with vaccine companies to debunk repurposed drugs, studies that received loving media attention even though their flaws were obvious to anyone in the industry.
Shock waves? The “public health world?” What are we talking about here? How many scientists and institutions were involved? How many in this realm had come to depend on this magic bean factor in the Bahamas to make their dreams come true? We can only hope someone cares enough to find out. It’s a pretty good guess that many top dogs in this realm are busy cleaning up their emails and text messages today.
Much of the scam depended on a high valuation for a token called FTT, but once suspicions about the company’s insolvency were rumored on Twitter, depositors engaged in the old-fashioned test: They demanded their money back. It turns out that the company’s high valuation depended heavily on a forever higher price of FTT but went south very rapidly.
At that point, the future looked very obviously bleak. The company declared bankruptcy, which the delusional Bankman-Fried now says was his greatest mistake since he could have easily parlayed all his connections to raise the $8 billion necessary to make good on frozen depositors’ funds that didn’t really exist.
The Washington Post offers further intriguing details that could ultimately discredit high-prestige institutions that played a huge role in pushing lockdowns, including famous scientists who once wrote articles opposing such a brutal pandemic response.
“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.’”
The Gates Foundation also is a huge funding source for the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. What kind of relationship did the Gates Foundation have with FTX? They certainly partnered to fund the Together trial that was widely touted to have debunked ivermectin. One wonders just how deep this relationship was.
The mystery is going to be a bear to unravel simply because the books at FTX were so poor.
Let’s try to think of the bigger picture here. The unraveling of FTX might serve as a metaphor for a larger issue. Over the past decade and a half, beginning with the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, the whole world seems to have gone insane. Loose money was on the hunt for return from anywhere but where it could traditionally be found in the normal process of saving.
As a result, capital flowed to the wackiest-possible sectors. Over the course of these years, cranks and crazies of all sorts have been unleashed on the world, including people who believe that the purpose of business is not to make profits but rather to fund social revolution, oddballs who have convinced the world that fossil fuels need to be eliminated by force, nutty cultural theories that there really is no biological distinction between men and women, and once-thoughtful scientists who imagined that shutting down the world economy was the right way to control a virus.
It’s all been so strange, and it really has culminated in the idea that some 30-year-old kids could load themselves up with amphetamines in the Bahamas and become a major funding spigot for institutions, politicians, and academicians to push for the dystopian worldview of the World Economic Forum.
These days, and with the help of Jerome Powell at the Fed who has reversed the main Fed policy of the past decade and a half, it all seems to be coming apart, piece by piece. If we really are entering into a new age of tight credit and more honest money, FTX could be just the beginning of the companies that will take a deep fall.
We are already seeing tech companies cut down to size, but the data I’m looking at suggests that the Fed has a very long way to go before it can control inflation, which means we are going to see far more of this in the near future and following.
Despite the pain, this is all to the good. We’ve all known in our hearts that something has gone very wrong with the world in recent years. The forces of economics and the reality of the balance sheet are revealing it all right now. The lies have gone on far too long. It’s not the regulators who have exposed it all but rather the forces of the market itself, along with the newly freed Twitter.
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