Crypto has always been scam territory-- highway robbery or, at best just a garden variety high stakes Ponzi scheme. Anyone who thought it was an investment— rather than just gambling— was grievously ignorant or just misled. The banks that have gone belly-up in recent days were captained by crooked executives who sold millions of dollars in stocks before their ships hit the shoals and granted themselves big fat performance bonuses. They belong in prison and should have all their assets seized. If they don’t go to prison, this sordid cycle will be repeated over and over.
How does anyone think they can get away with this kind of thing. Just look at the pattern of political contributions to both corrupt political parties. That’s how they think they get away with it. Before Mark Warner— the richest Democrat in the Senate— voted to gut Dodd-Frank, the president of Silicon Valley Bank threw him a fundraiser in his mansion and got all his friends, employees and cronies to contribute to Warner’s campaign. That’s how it works. Yesterday, even Biden was urging Congress to get tough on crooked bank executives like the ones at Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature. Biden: “I’m firmly committed to accountability for those responsible for this mess. No one is above the law– and strengthening accountability is an important deterrent to prevent mismanagement in the future. The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible. When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again. Congress must act to impose tougher penalties for senior bank executives whose mismanagement contributed to their institutions failing.” Nice window dressing, isn’t it?
This week we saw how the top executives at FTX walked away with 3 billion stolen dollars. 3 BILLION. Bankman-Fried, his mother, his brother and his associates bribed politicians with over $100 million in stolen FTX loot. That sounds like a lot of money— but it’s just a decimal point compared to $3 billion. Bankman-Fried isn’t in prison now— he’s sitting in his parents’ home— because a corrupt federal judge, Ronnie Abrams, didn’t recuse herself until after she ruled out prison.
Back to the stolen money. Here’s who got what has been identified so far. There will probably be more and it excludes “over $240 million spent to purchase luxury property in the Bahamas, political and charitable donations made directly by the FTX Debtors, and substantial transfers to non-Debtor subsidiaries in the Bahamas and other jurisdictions.”
~$2.2 billion to Sam Bankman-Fried
~$587 million to Nishad Singh
~$246 million to Zixiao "Gary" Wang
~$87 million to Ryan Salame
~$25 million to John Samuel Trabucco
~$6 million to Caroline Ellison
The Financial Times reported that “Bankman-Fried and five members of his inner circle transferred $3.2 billion in total to their personal accounts in the form of 'payments and loans,' the funds primarily coming from Alameda Research, a crypto trading hedge fund affiliated with FTX. John Ray, the new CEO leading FTX through bankruptcy proceedings, ‘has been seeking to identify the location of cryptocurrency and other assets that can be eventually returned to the millions of FTX customers whose accounts have been frozen since its collapse.”’
Bankman-Fried was arrested in December and so far none of the members of Congress he bribed have been indicted. It’s likely that none will, since the criminality didn’t just involve everyday criminals and scam artists like George Santos, Ritchie Torres and Josh Gottheimer but all the congressional leaders-- from Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and Tom Emmer to Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, Pete Aguilar and Chuck Schumer. There is no impetus to investigate because both parties are completely culpable. But never forget, there can’t be a briber without a bribee.
It's worth noting that over half the new members of Congress were elected because of stolen FTX money. Some, like Alabama Senator Katie Britt, who was showered with hundreds of thousands of stolen FTX dollars and is one of the most blatantly corrupt of any Senate freshman, has already come out screeching against crypto regulation... just as she was paid to do. This crook's campaign got a million:
