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With some Democrats deciding to re-commit funds from FTX donations towards charity or other party campaigns after the crypto exchange’s bankruptcy, Rep. Maxine Water, D-Calif., told FOX Business she doesn’t "want to get into that" topic.Waters avoided reporter Hillary Vaughn’s question when asked if Democrats who received campaign cash from FTX should give it back, saying, "Well, I don't want to get into that. As a matter of fact, both sides, Democrats and Republicans, have received donations. So thank you."The Chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, however, did claim that lawmakers will be putting together a hearing to "explore exactly what has taken place" with FTX.Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, was a major contributor to Democratic candidates during the midterm election cycle, funneling most of his donations through a little-known political action committee (PAC).Overall, in 2021 and 2022, Bankman-Fried donated nearly $38 million to various candidates and PACs, mainly giving his cash to Democratic candidates and left-wing groups, according to Federal Election Commission filings (FEC). The majority of his political givings, though, went to the Protect Our Future PAC, a group founded in January that is dedicated to boosting candidates committed to preventing future pandemics.
The economist known as “Dr. Doom” slammed cryptocurrency platform Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao as a “walking time bomb” on Wednesday following the implosion of its rival FTX.Nouriel Roubini, a New York University professor, blasted top figures in the cryptocurrency sector as “con men” just days after leading platform FTX collapsed into bankruptcy.Roubini, who was participating in a panel for Abu Dhabi Finance Week in the United Arab Emirates, was particularly critical of Zhao — arguing regulators should think twice before allowing him to operate.“What are the 7 C’s of crypto? Concealed, corrupt, crooks, criminals, con men, carnival barkers and, finally, CZ,” Roubini said — the latter being a reference to Zhao.
Roubini noted that the United Kingdom banned Binance last year. Separately, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service are reportedly investigating Binance as part of a probe into potential money-laundering and tax-related violations.“I can’t believe CZ and Binance has a license to operate in the UAE. He’s banned in the UK, he’s under investigation by the US Justice Department for money laundering, $8 billion in money from Iran. He’s here on this stage and he has residence in this country.”“This is an ecosystem that’s totally corrupt. Unfortunately, it is, and I think the lesson of the last few weeks is, these people should be out of here.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, which was, until last week, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, is today facing prison time for allegedly defrauding his customers of billions of dollars. Bankman-Fried, 30, donated to many progressive causes allied with the “effective altruism movement,” including pandemic prevention and response. He spoke at, and presumably donated to, the World Economic Forum’s Davos conference last May and the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative in September. Bankman-Fried is similar to Bernie Madoff in that both men used philanthropic giving, and the veneer of humility, to create a positive reputation while running pyramid schemes that should have set off red flags among investors, regulators, and journalists.In truth, the Bankman-Fried scandal shows that all do-gooder capitalism should set off red flags. Bankman-Fried claimed he was only trying to get rich in order to raise money for charity, and investors and journalists overwhelmingly took him at his word, even while visiting him at his $40 million home in the Bahamas. “You were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers,” a Vox reporter said to Bankman-Fried last night, to which he responded, “ya, hehe… I feel bad for those who get ****ed by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us.”Defenders of do-gooder capitalism say that socially-responsible investing, which was rebranded as ESG to refer to investing that takes environmental, social, and governance issues into account, has done a lot of good. They point to ESG investments in things like renewable energy, electric vehicles, and carbon offsets as proof that capitalism and philanthropy can co-exist.But ESG has been rocked by scandal after scandal for greenwashing things that are bad for the environment, people, and democracy. Few carbon offsets actually reduce carbon emissions. Many are scams. Some pay landowners to not cut down trees they were never going to log. Others pay renewable energy developers who were already going to build wind and solar projects. Most solar panels and electric car batteries are made in Xinjiang, China by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims. Solar projects require 300-600 times more land than nuclear or natural gas plants and are devastating fragile desert environments. And there is no waste disposal solution for used solar panels, a hazardous waste, which means they will be sent to landfills or dumped on poor nations. Even Bankman-Fried acknowledges that “ESG has been perverted beyond recognition.”
I had a conversation with my good friend Tom Bodrovics from Palisades Gold Radio earlier this week. Tom is a private investor from western Canada with a background in oil and gas. In 2014 he identified the top of the housing cycle and sold his home to invest in the junior resource sector. He gained a libertarian and contrarian perspective in 2013 when he attended an entrepreneurship course in Europe and has been studying markets of all types ever since. He operates a successful business servicing the oil and gas sector in Alberta and is the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Palisades Gold Radio.We took an hour this week to discuss all things FTX, crypto, the Fed, the economy, monetary policy, some of my recent blog posts and, of course, gold. Our entire conversation was recorded as a podcast and is available to listen to, for free, at the end of this post.The first topic Tom broached with me was the ongoing FTX saga. He asked about what I thought about Sam Bankman-Fried blowing up his firm and I told Tom that I couldn’t believe how quickly it happened and how swift the fall was.“A week ago this guy was the savior. He was just generally being praised,” I told Tom.“Then, what we found out is that it was just another straight up ponzi scheme fraud, which is just incredible,” I said, stunned by how quickly it came crumbling down.
From there, we moved on to the topic of the Fed, monetary policy and interest rates. Tom asked about my contention that I still think equities will move lower, as I wrote about just days ago.I told Tom: “I think that if the Fed even came out tomorrow and cut 100 bps…I think even in a case where the Fed came out and cut rates tomorrow that there would still be a looming blowup. The speed with which we’ve raised rates so far is breakneck and stunning. The reason the market hasn’t reacted yet is there’s a lag."“That’s all playing out now and will continue to play out regardless of what the Fed does in December,” I added.Tom asked about the idea of a soft landing, to which I replied: “Everyone is acting as though Powell has already achieved a soft landing. CPI came in at 7.7% - not exactly where we want to be. If I had told you 2 years ago that’s what CPI would be at you would have had a f*cking heart attack. And now we’re going to celebrate it as a win?”
Disgraced FTX founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried has finally begun detailing his version of the events surrounding the downfall of the cryptocurrency exchange, at one point telling a journalist via Twitter DM’s that his “effective altruism” ethos was largely an act.In a recent report from Vox, journalist Kelsey Piper outlines her recent interactions with FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Breitbart News has previously reported on the downfall of the cryptocurrency exchange and panic from investors. Now Bankman-Fried is facing investigations from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.Despite all this, Bankman-Fried was quick to respond to Piper’s Twitter DM’s about the current situation and what led to the downfall of FTX. Piper writes:Bankman-Fried, though, apparently wanted to talk. About how FTX and his hedge fund Alameda Research had gambled with customer money without, he claims, realizing that’s what they were doing. About who gets lauded as a hero and who’s the fall guy. About regulators. (“**** regulators.”) About what he regrets (“Chapter 11,” the decision to declare bankruptcy) and about what he would have done differently with FTX and Alameda (“more careful accounting + offboard Alameda from FTX once FTX could live on its own”).Piper says she spoke to Bankman-Fried via Twitter DM’s for over an hour and posted screenshots of some of the conversation to Twitter. Piper says that she was attempting to make sense of the Bankman-Fried actually believes and his personal ethics when it comes to business and finance.During the conversation, Bankman-Fried dismissed previous comments he made that some regulation of the crypto market could be good, saying that it was just “PR.”Sam Bankman-Fried is just out here confessing to Vox.This guy is just a total garbage human.#SBF_FTX https://t.co/SMbRAwFIf4 pic.twitter.com/ObiJgHhd1U— Nate Anderson (@ClarityToast) November 16, 2022
New FTX CEO II iJohn J. Ray Issued a scathing assessment of "unprecedented" poor management practices by his predecessor, Sam Bankman-Fried, in a series of filings in a Delaware court.Ray, who has previously supervised financial scandals such as Enron, criticized poor record-keeping and a lack of experience among senior managers, as well as the use of company funds to purchase real estate in the Bahamas."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," Ray said in a court document filed on Thursday. "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."Ray is attempting to unravel a complex mess of dozens of companies which seem to have had scant regard for corporate norms.
Democrat super donor and disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is set to appear as a speaker for a conference held by the New York Times with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.Besides having to apply to the Times’ conference and pay a $2,499 fee to hear what the publication believes are “today’s most vital minds,” some speakers, including these two, have an apparent intertwined history.As Breitbart News noted last week, Bankman-Fried recently had a softball interview with the publication and was also accused of mishandling FTX customer investments on a massive scale. Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. after a week of scandals.The Wall Street Journal reported that Bankman-Fried was the sixth-largest donor in this midterm election cycle after he invested about $40 million, mainly on Democrat candidates and causes, with the bulk of the money on primary elections instead of the general elections.However, this all comes as Fox News and other media outlets have reported that Bankman-Fried’s company reportedly set up a website to help raise funds for Ukrainians during the ongoing attack from Russia, and some have claimed that the funds were subsequently sent to fund the Democrat campaigns Bankman-Fried donated to.
This is just bizarre!KC
Troubled cryptocurrency firm FTX updated its bankruptcy filing in Delaware on Thursday, and the document is chock-full of new insights into the chaotic and questionable business practices that occurred under the leadership of former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.John Ray III, who was appointed as FTX's new CEO a week ago and previously oversaw the bankruptcy of scandal-plagued energy firm Enron following its collapse in 2001, blasted Bankman-Fried's management of the company in the court document."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," Ray wrote.
The lax oversight of FTX's finances and bank accounts resulted in the use of corporate funds for the purchase of homes and other personal property for employees and advisers."In the Bahamas, I understand that corporate funds of the FTX Group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors," wrote Ray. "I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans, and that certain real estate was recorded in the personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas."
Disgraced cryptocurrency exchange FTX founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried lent $1 billion to himself through his hedge fund Alameda Research, which likely sourced the money from FTX customer funds.On Thursday, it was revealed by FTX’s new CEO John Ray, III that the collapsed company’s bankruptcy filing shows it had lent billions of dollars in customer funds to Alameda Research. Among those loans, a staggering $1 billion was made to Bankman-Fried himself.According to Ray, Alameda had made $4.1 billion of related-party loans, which were still outstanding at the end of September.
As most are well aware by now, the disgraced founder of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried was the Democrat party’s second-largest donor just behind George Soros.As reported by The Gateway Pundit, in the 2020 presidential election, Bankman-Fried dished millions to the Biden campaign and followed it up by handing out over $40 million dollars to democrats in the 2022 primaries and midterms.Forbes reported last year that Bankman-Fried also donated to six RINOs who voted to impeach President Trump.
FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed earlier this month and filed for bankruptcy protection, said in a court filing on Saturday that it owes its 50 largest creditors more than $3 billion. The collapsed exchange's top ten creditors are owed about $1.45 billion. The identities of the creditors are redacted. John Ray III, who was appointed CEO of FTX after founder Sam Bankman-Fried resigned, also said Saturday that the company has launched a strategic review of the exchange's assets.
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes more than $3 billion to creditorshttps://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/cryptocurrency-exchange-ftx-owes-more-than-3-billion-creditorsInvestors FRAUD VICTIMS are not likely to see a penny back from FTX.
For all those wondering how it is possible that nobody, not a single regulator acted out on the countless red warning signs (with even CME CEO Terry Duffy issuing an explicit warning to Congress that SBF was a fraud months ago) amid the fawning and fellating media and the countless bribed politicians, we may have an answer: according to Bloomberg, long before Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency empire imploded, "it already was on the radar of federal prosecutors in Manhattan."According to Bloomberg sources "familiar with the investigation", the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, led by Damian Williams, spent several months working on a sweeping examination of crypto currency platforms with US and offshore arms and had started poking into FTX’s massive exchange operations.The focus of the probe was on compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act which requires financial institutions take steps to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing, and which has been used by authorities to go after crypto platforms that allegedly falsely claimed that they don’t serve US customers. The Bahamas-based FTX, which operated one of the world’s largest international crypto exchanges as well as a separate and much more limited venue called FTX US that said it complies with the act.Now just because the NYSD AG was probing FTX doesn't mean they actually found anything - after all, as we all know, the "effective altruist" and generous Democratic donor that is SBF was protected by powerful political interests - and as BBG adds, it’s unclear whether prosecutors in Manhattan reached any conclusion in their probe before FTX collapsed. That put the federal investigation into a new trajectory, the people said.
The collapse of the crypto exchange FTX may prove to be a canary in the coal mine of the easy-money-fueled crypto bubbles. FTX’s collapse has exposed just how little due diligence is actually taking place among investors, who are apparently willing to put large amounts of cash in whatever looks like the hottest new thing and promises—without convincing evidence—big-time returns.Indeed, FTX seems to be a textbook example of how many investors are easily hoodwinked by media narratives about the latest investment genius who has magically discovered some new way of delivering unprecedented returns.The “genius” in this case is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), a thirty-year old MIT grad who ran FTX into the ground and had placed control of his clients’ money in the hands of a small number of friends with virtually no real experience, knowledge, or scruples about how to responsibly manage funds. Financial record keeping and reporting at the company were haphazard at best.The calculations will be murky for a while, but it now looks like FTX has “lost” at least $1 billion to $2 billion of client funds, not to mention billions of dollars in investments in the company that evaporated. Much of it was probably just stolen. But it’s difficult to guess at this point because FTX didn’t bother to put together an accounting department. FTX’s new CEO reports that the state of the company’s financial management is worse than Enron’s.
The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried and his fraudulent cryptocurrency empire at FTX is news at its most entertaining. Who doesn’t love the story of a bigshot billionaire revealed to be an outright fraud? It’s black-and-white. FTX owes billions in debt and doesn’t actually own a dime of the assets it claimed. Game over.At first blush, the story seems simple. A con man cynically convinced a bunch of gullible financiers that he was a an eccentric young visionary and a really great guy, and he ran off with the dough.But take a closer look at the mainstream coverage, and you’ll realize there’s far more to this story than a classic financial fraud. In fact, the puff pieces from mainstream outlets about SBF and the causes he was funding—most notably, the pandemic planning industry—even after his empire was revealed to be an outright fraud, are the clearest instance we’ve seen of the modern political machine in all its cynicism.Both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles portraying SBF as a more-or-less honest businessman with a big heart who got tangled up in a bad situation. This is, of course, wildly inaccurate. From the very beginning, SBF had no intention of engaging in honest business. He never owned a dime of the assets he said he did. And in an incredible interview with Vox, he essentially admitted that there were never any good intentions behind his “philanthropic” contributions.
But it’s the Washington Post article titled “Before FTX collapse, founder poured millions into pandemic prevention” that’s most astonishing. As Jeffrey Tucker has documented, the Washington Post gushes over the tens of millions of dollars that SBF had donated to the pet left-wing cause of “pandemic prevention”: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.…Ok. But all that money was stolen.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.
On the Sunday Special episode of Human Events Daily, host Jack Posobiec spoke with Darren Beattie of Revolver News to discuss collapsing company FTX and how President Trump was early in warning about the dubious nature of the cryptocurrency market."Trump was very explicitly opposed to cryptocurrencies and called it a scam and he may end up very well being vindicated by this," Beattie said. "Actually yes, I remember I remember specifically when he tweeted that out, Posobiec agreed. "I guess it was a couple of years ago now."Trump, who has reinstated to Twitter on Saturday by CEO Elon Musk, tweeted a warning about crypto early in its inception and said, "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior."Posobiec noted how the crypto market boomed in 2020.
Posobiec noted that FTX looked like an "intelligence operation" and a "money laundering operation" that left its customers out to dry."FTX may just be the tip of the iceberg," Beattie said. "And you know, we can look at it and say this is a big scam, which it obviously is," Beattie added."It can be a scam and a money laundering operation at the same time and you really have to look at some of these things and why they're allowed to continue for as long as they are," Beattie said. "And you kind of get to the root of the scam."
Seen in a news article this morning (sorry, no link):Maxine Waters blowing Bankman-Fried a kiss in what looks to be the House chambers.And all of a sudden, Maxine doesn't want to talk about it.
CME Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy has been the talk of social media today, after a podcast appearance with CNBC's Guy Adami and Dan Nathan began making its rounds on Monday morning.Among other topics discussed on the podcast was Duffy recalling his first meeting with Sam Bankman-Fried, which took place in March 2022. Ole' Terry's senses from days of being in the pit are still sharp as can be. He pegged FTX for a fraud before the company blew up - and told Bankman-Fried as much to his face, as he called on the podcast. Duffy says he was approached by SBF at a conference who told him he wanted to compete with CME in crypto. Instead, Duffy says he offered to give SBF his crypto franchises in exchange for working together. "Let me be your risk manager. I'll clear it so that I know it's done properly," Duffy says he told SBF.
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,Looking back, it’s utterly bizarre how the world of science could have gone so silent even as the world locked down and lives were shattered by the billions by governments the world over. The silence was deafening. We went from a March 2, 2020, letter signed by 800 public health experts associated with Yale University—which warned against quarantines and closures—to a strange disappearance of nearly all clear voices a few weeks later. And so things stood for the better part of two years.Governments were allowed to create vast carnage based on a novel experiment with absolutely no precedent in history and no scientific literature that backed it. Even the World Health Organization’s pandemic plan included nothing like lockdowns as a solution to a widespread pathogen. At the time, it was obvious to me and others that the silence was due not to broad agreement with the policies but to something else.That something, sad to say, was money.We are more and more discovering the heightened role that the crypto exchange FTX played in funneling money to major public health outposts and academics at Johns Hopkins and Stanford University, as well as its family connections to the Columbia University department of public health. And before that funding spigot opened up, there was the Gates Foundation which had clearly pivoted from seemingly nonpartisan research to full support for the lockdowns.
In addition to being a major donor to the Democrat Party during the 2021-22 election season, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major donor to several liberal media outlets, including ProPublica, Vox, The Intercept, The Law and Justice Journalism Project, and the recently launched Semafor, leading to speculation about their ability to objectively report on FTX."They all took it," Human Events Daily's Jack Posobiec noted on Twitter, "and none of them broke the story."As Semafor launched in October, Reuters reported that "The platform said it has so far raised $25 million from investors including David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic magazine; Jessica Lessin, founder of technology website Information; and cryptocurrency exchange FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried."That was only a few short weeks before FTX collapsed. Customers made a run on the exchange to withdraw their deposits, only to find that the company did not actually have it. FTX is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the state of Delaware, and Semafor is out a whole bunch of money.After Semafor published an article about disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's relationship with Elon Musk, indicating that despite Musk's claim that his "bullshit meter was redlining," Musk pointed out that their reporting was perhaps not entirely on the up-and-up where FTX was concerned.
REVEALED: FTX crypto bro SHOWERED media orgs Vox, ProPublica, Intercept, Semafor and more with investment moneyhttps://thepostmillennial.com/revealed-ftx-crypto-bro-showered-media-orgs-vox-propublica-intercept-semafor-and-more-with-investment-moneySam Bankman-Fried donated to leftist groups. Among them are ProPublica and The Intercept.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s family extracted at least $300 million from his failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and questions are raging whether there’s still more looting to be uncovered — and whether the ill-gotten gains will ever get paid back.While the 30-year-old Bankman-Fried has cultivated a scruffy, do-gooder image, bankruptcy documents show that FTX raised some $421 million from investors — only to have $300 million siphoned off by him and his family, some of which was used to fund purchases of premier residences.At the time, Bankman-Fried told investors the cashout was a partial reimbursement of money he’d spent to buy out rival Binance’s stake in FTX a few months earlier, according to The Wall Street Journal.Last week, FTX’s new CEO John J. Ray said in a court filing that “only a fraction” of FTX’s digital assets have been located and secured. Ray also has accused Bankman-Fried of working with Bahamian regulators to “undermine” the US bankruptcy case and shift assets overseas.