> It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. I wish I had Matt Levine's eloquence to put this madness into words. Gr

> It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. I wish I had Matt Levine's eloquence to put this madness into words. Great analysis and I just want to add a small thing: while a balance sheet looks like a simple listing of assets and liabilities, that's not how you go about constructing one. Your financial statements are the result of a sequence of double-entry bookeeping statements, and the balance sheet is one particular view on the data processed by this formalism. There is no way assets couldn't add up to liability plus equity, no matter the market fluctuations, valuation uncertainty,... (your numbers might be out of date/incorrect, but they would still be internally consistent). The resulting checksum mechanism is an interesting aspect why double-entry bookeeping was such a useful tool for merchants on busy, dirty, buzzing medieval markets. FTX, on the other hand, looks more like a mechanism for funnelling cash to who knows where - that's the big question that Matt correctly points out: where did all the money go? There's no way you can spend $16bn on meth and yachts and mansions in the Bahamas in the space of a few years.