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LOL ! "The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a su

LOL ! "The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a successful electronics business. The only reference to him that turned up in a search of Italian newspapers showed he was once fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software. Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether has the reserves to back its coins, along with a pie chart showing that about $30 billion of its dollar holdings are invested in commercial paper—short-term loans to corporations. That would make Tether the seventh-largest holder of such debt, right up there with Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group. To fact-check this claim, a few colleagues and I canvassed Wall Street traders to see if any had seen Tether buying anything. No one had. “It’s a small market with a lot of people who know each other,” said Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer of global money markets at Federated Hermes, an asset management company in Pittsburgh. “If there were a new entrant, it would be usually very obvious.”" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether?srnd=premium-asia https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adflux 5y ago
Tether most likely holding CHINESE paper. The kind that probably lost a lot of value in the past weeks. Follow BennettTomlin on Twitter, he has been researching tether for years.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Or it could be like so many cryptocurrency adjacent businesses a straight up scam/Ponzi scheme.
- freemint 5y ago
  M Impression was that Tether is holding BitFinex papers. I am not sure though where I read this
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I assumed their "$30B of commercial paper" was just the owners' other company.
- jvilleBrat 5y ago
  Why are they downvoting you? The article mentions that they do claim to own a lot of Chinese paper
  - graeme 5y ago
    Not just that. The reporter saw their statement listing ownership. They value their paper “at redemption value” which is a loophole so big they don’t need to lie. They can hold $10 billion worth of paper and value it at $30 billion.
FireBeyond 5y ago
Well, Bitfinex uses Deltec as their bank. A bank that claimed at the start of this year that they were "55 years old and whose customers were predominantly asset managers and high net worth individuals", until they did a website redesign (more on that below) and overnight were "70 years old". A bank that had a 33 year old "Deputy CEO" who gave interviews from his gaming rig. Who claimed to have graduated from HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Masters in Science when he was 15... and then immediately get a job as Professor of Finance at a Lebanese university... while dividing his time between running funds in Switzerland and oh ... Jacksonville Florida (actually, that last part is the most believable), where he worked for himself, managing a fund that he couldn't even spell correctly on his own LinkedIn profile (Independance[sic] Weath[sic] Management). Of course, the last interview he gave, the bank removed him from their website within hours once the ridicule started piling on. When people started questioning that, they very quickly re-added him. And then removed the site entirely. And put up a WordPress template website with completely non functional links and buttons a few days later. I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision".
- torgoguys 5y ago
  Sounds like a dumpster fire. The 55 years old/70 year old thing could have some legitimacy, kinda. Banks like to be seen as being very old, implying stability. There is a popular regional bank where I live that was established in the 1970s. But this bank says that it is more than 150 years old. Why? It turns out that it bought out a bank that was founded around 1860. Since that bank is now part of them, they reason, they have a history that goes back that far. Sketchy if you ask me, but apparently legal. (?) If Deltec bought an older bank, then maybe they are using the same justification.
- wpietri 5y ago
  > I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision". It reminds me of the initial dot-com bubble, where anybody who asked questions was also painted as not getting it. Ditto the mortgage bubble, come to think of it. Then when the inevitable crash comes, nobody apologizes. It's either "who could have known" or just moving on to the next grift and never saying another word.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
Anybody "fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software" almost certainly ran a whitebox computer shop, and was successful enough to get noticed and charged in a period where almost everybody's home computers ran pirated Windows and you could buy it on any street corner. In Italy to boot.
- scrubs 5y ago
  Bold! Bold pushback! To use a Fawlty Towers Basil line: "Sooo .... that's all sorted out" knowing full-well it isn't. Don't know Fawlty Towers? Let's go the Monthy Python direction: JC: "It's not much of a bank." MP: "Well, it's very clean, sir" JC: "It's certainly uncontaminated by crypto-backed dollars." Now I enjoy American TV too but I can't think of an All-in-the-Family, Nightcourt, or Scubbs scene here. But if you know the "aaaaannnnnnnd it's gone" ... line well you can riff from there.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I was thinking more of the tethered https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/us-the-tethered-explained/ https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/us-the-tethered-explained/
- FormerBandmate 5y ago
  Yeah, it was common, but that doesn’t exactly help his case to regulate a currency taken as an equivalent of the US Dollar
  - dandanua 5y ago
    I think his experience fits nicely the job of running "counterfeit US Dollar"
  - Sophistifunk 5y ago
    Not arguing that, just saying he probably did run a successful electronics business for some time.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Is that crazy that people but this …

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

adflux 5y ago

Tether most likely holding CHINESE paper. The kind that probably lost a lot of value in the past weeks. Follow BennettTomlin on Twitter, he has been researching tether for years.

jandrese 5y ago
Or it could be like so many cryptocurrency adjacent businesses a straight up scam/Ponzi scheme.
freemint 5y ago
M Impression was that Tether is holding BitFinex papers. I am not sure though where I read this
saalweachter 5y ago
I assumed their "$30B of commercial paper" was just the owners' other company.
jvilleBrat 5y ago
Why are they downvoting you? The article mentions that they do claim to own a lot of Chinese paper
- graeme 5y ago
  Not just that. The reporter saw their statement listing ownership. They value their paper “at redemption value” which is a loophole so big they don’t need to lie. They can hold $10 billion worth of paper and value it at $30 billion.

FireBeyond 5y ago

Well, Bitfinex uses Deltec as their bank. A bank that claimed at the start of this year that they were "55 years old and whose customers were predominantly asset managers and high net worth individuals", until they did a website redesign (more on that below) and overnight were "70 years old". A bank that had a 33 year old "Deputy CEO" who gave interviews from his gaming rig. Who claimed to have graduated from HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Masters in Science when he was 15... and then immediately get a job as Professor of Finance at a Lebanese university... while dividing his time between running funds in Switzerland and oh ... Jacksonville Florida (actually, that last part is the most believable), where he worked for himself, managing a fund that he couldn't even spell correctly on his own LinkedIn profile (Independance[sic] Weath[sic] Management). Of course, the last interview he gave, the bank removed him from their website within hours once the ridicule started piling on. When people started questioning that, they very quickly re-added him. And then removed the site entirely. And put up a WordPress template website with completely non functional links and buttons a few days later. I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision".

torgoguys 5y ago
Sounds like a dumpster fire. The 55 years old/70 year old thing could have some legitimacy, kinda. Banks like to be seen as being very old, implying stability. There is a popular regional bank where I live that was established in the 1970s. But this bank says that it is more than 150 years old. Why? It turns out that it bought out a bank that was founded around 1860. Since that bank is now part of them, they reason, they have a history that goes back that far. Sketchy if you ask me, but apparently legal. (?) If Deltec bought an older bank, then maybe they are using the same justification.
wpietri 5y ago
> I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision". It reminds me of the initial dot-com bubble, where anybody who asked questions was also painted as not getting it. Ditto the mortgage bubble, come to think of it. Then when the inevitable crash comes, nobody apologizes. It's either "who could have known" or just moving on to the next grift and never saying another word.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

Anybody "fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software" almost certainly ran a whitebox computer shop, and was successful enough to get noticed and charged in a period where almost everybody's home computers ran pirated Windows and you could buy it on any street corner. In Italy to boot.

scrubs 5y ago
Bold! Bold pushback! To use a Fawlty Towers Basil line: "Sooo .... that's all sorted out" knowing full-well it isn't. Don't know Fawlty Towers? Let's go the Monthy Python direction: JC: "It's not much of a bank." MP: "Well, it's very clean, sir" JC: "It's certainly uncontaminated by crypto-backed dollars." Now I enjoy American TV too but I can't think of an All-in-the-Family, Nightcourt, or Scubbs scene here. But if you know the "aaaaannnnnnnd it's gone" ... line well you can riff from there.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I was thinking more of the tethered https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/us-the-tethered-explained/ https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/us-the-tethered-explained/
FormerBandmate 5y ago
Yeah, it was common, but that doesn’t exactly help his case to regulate a currency taken as an equivalent of the US Dollar
- dandanua 5y ago
  I think his experience fits nicely the job of running "counterfeit US Dollar"
- Sophistifunk 5y ago
  Not arguing that, just saying he probably did run a successful electronics business for some time.

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Is that crazy that people but this …