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38 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby 6h \ parent \ on: FTX, Mr. Sam, and Effective Altruism (Money Stuff/Bloomberg, Matt Levine) econ

Isn't this some of what came out in the class action lawsuit?

  • Defendant Deltec, of which Defendant Chalopin is a controlling owner, individually identified incoming FTX customer deposits and manually transferred those deposits into Alameda’s Deltec bank account daily and by way of texting one another on the Telegram messaging platform;
  • Deltec knew those incoming deposits belonged to FTX customers, but transferred them into Alameda’s Deltec bank account anyway;
  • To be sure, Deltec specifically inquired as to the nature and purpose of North Dimension, the sham electronics dealer that FTX Group installed as a front to suck in FTX customer deposits, and through which FTX customer funds were wired into Alameda accounts at Deltec;
  • Deltec manually, and knowingly, processed wires totaling billions of FTX
    customer funds out of Alameda’s Deltec bank account and beyond the
    customers’ reach—including after Deltec learned of Alameda’s looming
    insolvency and FTX’s inevitable collapse;

This is from a civil suit, so I don't know that these allegations have been proven. However, if you read the evidence that is produced in this suit (largely from Caroline Ellison) it's hard to see how this wasn't happening.

Maybe Lewis didn't know about any of this though. Going Infinite was published in October 2023, and this stuff from the lawsuit came out in Feb 2024.

Also, I may be somewhat naive, but if I was to go to an exchange's website and set up an account and then wire them a deposit, and then some other entity used that money to trade and lost it all, I don't think I would be cool with it if they told me "Look, you weren't actually wiring money to us, you were wiring it to this other entity which could do whatever it wanted with it."

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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @denlillaapan OP 3h

Ok the deltec involvement is later and I don't know much about that

Plus, as came out here they didn't really "lose" it all. Lewis does a back-of-envelope calc at the end, too, and even disregarding value of serum and Solana etc, there's plenty left over.

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38 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 2h

I still really disagree with statements Lewis's conclusion that "It's hard to say what SBF's real crime was."

Even if we say it wasn't a crime to give customer funds to Alameda when customers expected them to be deposited at FTX, and even if we say Alameda never actually lost any funds, there's still stuff like using customer funds to give personal loans to FTX executives.

The FTX funds transferred to Alameda were used not only for Alameda’s proprietary trading, but also to fund loans to FTX executives, including Bankman-Fried himself, and to fund personal real estate purchases.

Between March 2020 and September 2022, Bankman-Fried executed promissory notes for loans from Alameda totaling more than $1.338 billion, including two instances in which Bankman-Fried was both the borrower in his individual capacity and the lender in his capacity as CEO of Alameda

This is from an SEC complaint against SBF, so again, not necessarily proven. Although, if you read it, I think the SEC did their homework and isn't just making stuff up.

I think SBF committed fraud. I don't like that Michael Lewis went all-in on wishy-washy trying to say nothing really bad happened.

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