Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:55 and sunset 6:32 PM for 11h 37m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight beginning at 6:30 PM:
On this day in 1952, the United Kingdom successfully tests a nuclear weapon in the Montebello Islands, Western Australia, to become the world’s third nuclear power.
Consider the following account, from Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column, of the allegations against crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried:
The essential charges against Sam Bankman-Fried are:
- Customers deposited billions of dollars at his crypto exchange, FTX, to buy crypto.
- Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, secretly took that money to gamble on crypto tokens and make weird illiquid venture investments.
- Also a lot of the money seems to have been siphoned off to make political donations, buy celebrity endorsements, pay for Bahamas real estate for Bankman-Fried and his family, etc.
- When customers started asking for their money back last November, it wasn’t there.
This is bad! The basic combination of “the customers’ money is gone” and “you lived in a $30 million penthouse” is really killer. That’s the most basic outline of a financial fraud: The customers don’t have the money anymore, and you do.
But Bankman-Fried is going to trial tomorrow [10.3], and here’s Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes being asked “do you think he knowingly stole customers’ money” and answering “put that way, no.” So I suppose there will be a defense.
What is the defense? I think the defense is roughly: “The crypto market crashed, there was a run on the bank, and the run on the bank is what evaporated the customers’ money. It was an accident, perhaps a careless accident, but not theft.”[1] This is a very hard defense to pull off!
The first thing that is hard about it is that it is not at all intuitive that a “run on the bank” should be possible at a crypto exchange like FTX. The intuitive way for a crypto exchange to work is:
I deposit $100.
I buy $100 of Bitcoin on the exchange.
The exchange has $100 of Bitcoin earmarked for me.
When I go to withdraw my $100 of Bitcoin, if it’s not there, that means someone stole it.
Levine goes on in greater detail, but he ably presents the allegations involving a crypto exchange and a trading firm (often abstruse subjects) succinctly and clearly.
In doing so, he does credit to himself and shows respect to his readers.
It should not be hard for small-town politicians in Whitewater, Wisconsin to speak as succinctly and clearly to residents about local topics.
Video captures fireball lighting up Oxford sky: