8 ms·

Rant: I have lost so much faith in our institutions’ (especially every federal org) ability to be objective in fulfilling their mission, that they’ve become so

Rant: I have lost so much faith in our institutions’ (especially every federal org) ability to be objective in fulfilling their mission, that they’ve become so brazenly and unconditionally partisan, that I’ve come to the conclusion that SBF’s cozying up to so many of the right people on the favorable political side means that he’ll never see a day in jail, as unfathomable as that is. He’s embarrassed so many people that the pressure to sweep this whole disgusting mess under the rug will be enormous, and the fact that it’s now three weeks later and he’s still just walking around out in the open is strong evidence of this. You can see it every day in the reporting from the media, who describe this giant con as if it was a legitimate enterprise that just sorta - oopsies!! - went awry through poor judgment and silly hijinx. The whole thing was a fraud and STILL no one with a real voice is saying so. I have no words. This has a high likelihood for marking the time when rules just officially stopped mattering, no sin too large, if you can game the system politically.

gedy 4y ago
Don't worry, politicians will "condemn this in the strongest possible terms", that'll show him.
whatever1 4y ago
Nah, you can mess with anything else in the US and walk away if you have good connections. But not the financial establishment.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  By financial establishment, you mean people playing around with Shiba Inu coin?
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    No these are trash, but my boys gentlemen investors in Safemoon, those are terrifyingly powerful.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I suppose I'm supposed to "both sides" this, but do you remember when we elected a conman to the top of every federal org you're despairing of over now? (He was fresh off a civil loss of what? $20 million dollars he had to pay victims of his scam university.) Do you think that maybe that has consequences?
- realgeniushere 4y ago
  What? Everyone who could investigate and prosecute SBF right now and for the last two years is a Democrat.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    And who appointed the judges those prosecutors will need to prepare cases for and convince? Which party is the party of deregulation (particularly financial deregulation)?
    - realgeniushere 4y ago
      Do you think conservative judges aren’t receptive to fraud cases? Republican appointees regularly give the longest sentences to white collar criminals. Your comment is clearly written about someone who actually knows nothing about law except what the political media prints. And no one has deregulated or legalized outright fraud, which is what happened here.
      - orwin 4y ago
        You mean white collar i suppose? Do you have this stat? conservative-aligned judges do give harsher sentences to white-collar crimes? Because in my country, this is pretty much the opposite. They even bail them out of prison for "medical reasons" and then we can see them on the dancefloor at christmas. Hopefully we'll get US-like gun laws (and US will uban sniper rifles and sniper AP rounds, as their mass killing power is low).
        4y ago
mbreese 4y ago
> The whole thing was a fraud and STILL no one with a real voice is saying so. I have no words. This has a high likelihood for marking the time when rules just officially stopped mattering, no sin too large, if you can game the system politically. There is a difference between knowing and proving. The gears of the legal system can move slowly, but deliberately. With this much money on the line, you don’t want to quickly jump to conclusions. It’s better to figure would what happened first and then determine the best path forward. But I think your main question is actually the point of this page/token/article. What if nothing happens? What if it just gets swept away? The point of the token being - let’s see what happens in a year. Keep pressure and visibility up on this. At the end of 2023, let’s take stock and see what has happened to unravel the what was really done with the money from FTX... and what the consequences are.
rossdavidh 4y ago
Well, perhaps, but he _did_ lose/steal a lot of rich people's money, also. As Bernie Madoff discovered, it's different when you defraud rich people.
2devnull 4y ago
Gary Gensler. The public won’t hear that name on The View or Trevor Noah. Therefore there was no fraud.
anonuser123456 4y ago
>the fact that it’s now three weeks later and he’s still just walking around out in the open It takes time to run an investigation. Since FTX is not a regulated institution, it may in fact not be a fiduciary for its 'customers'. It's not black and white from a legal perspective and will take time to unravel. The fact he's still walking around means the US isn't a banana republic that just locks people up by popular demand.
anonporridge 4y ago
Worse, I've already started seeing whispers and hints around the internet of this event being evidence of conspiracy of a certain ethnic group that both Bankman-Fried and Gensler are a part of. I don't personally put any credence into this very old and ugly conspiracy, but given the recent surge of attention to it by other unhinged actors, if this kid doesn't get thrown under the bus and burn, the meme is only going to grow much stronger legs to run with. This is a dangerous moment, and the elites need to be aware that people are watching to see what they do when it's one of their favorite sons who crosses the line.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  The "meme", as you put it, has been around for centuries. The people who believe it will just blame the Jews for something else. They have never needed evidence before.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    I completely agree. But when there are actual events that look like 'evidence' the meme becomes more easily transmissible, and more difficult to remove from the infected. https://wearehostsformemes.com/ https://wearehostsformemes.com/
- notch656a 4y ago
  Well it's not really a "conspiracy" that Jews are one of if not the richest of the significant religious ideologies in America. Friends/family/mutual aid often goes along religious lines so it wouldn't be surprising to find out some of the investments look like a "jew-fest" as SBF is after all Jewish, and his family probably knows lots of Jewish people who happen to be about the richest families by religion in America on average. If someone is a rich bad person, they are disproportionately likely to be Jewish. If they are a rich good person they are also disproportionately likely to be Jewish.... but some only see the bad. https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2016/10/FT_16.09.29_wealthReligiousGroups-3.png https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2...
  - 4y ago
MattGaiser 4y ago
FTX has been under investigation for months. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/us-prosecutors-opened-probe-of-ftx-months-before-its-collapse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/us-prosec... Investigations take time.
raesene9 4y ago
I don't think the fact he's walking around in necessarily evidence of corruption, so much as it's evidence of governments (and there are multiple jurisdictions here) being slow to act. As to the idea that connections will always get you out of trouble, again I don't think that's universally true. Elizabeth Holmes is extremely well connected as was Bernie Madoff but that didn't stop either of them being prosecuted and convicted. My guess here is that once the dust settles on exactly what's happened with FTX (which is still unclear in a lot of ways) SBF will be charged.
- pjc50 4y ago
  I wonder what the time-to-arrest was on Madoff from his scheme collapsing? Have we just become too accustomed to operating on Internet time when these things always take months?
  - raesene9 4y ago
    I can't remember the timeline too well with Madoff but looking at this timeline of Theranos https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/07/tech/theranos-rise-and-fall/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/07/tech/theranos-rise-and-fa... it was years between the start of problems and her actual arrest.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I wonder what the time-to-arrest was on Madoff from his scheme collapsing? Have we just become too accustomed to operating on Internet time when these things always take months? Ken Lay was Dec 2001 -> July 2004 Madoff was very quick from the collapse to arrest (December 2008 for both), but that’s largely because he confessed to his sons and told them he planned to surrender to authorities, who talked to the FBI, who visited Madoff who then confessed that it was “all one big lie” to them.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      If only SBF had confessed on Twitter about stealing customer deposits...
ShivShankaran 4y ago
He is still on the New York Times list of speakers for their event https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers The event was updated today morning to add two more speakers. You are right and I suspect SBF is going to get sentenced very leniently, probably with bail in a year and home arrest.
colpabar 4y ago
I have completely lost any sense of trust in major media institutions after this. Seemingly every outlet accepted a ton of money from this guy, and in turn wrote very favorable articles about him. To me, there are two possibilities. Either all these outlets didn't do a minute of digging into where all his money came from, or they knew it was all a scam and took it anyway. So it was either a complete and total journalistic failure, or they were complicit in the fraud. The mainstream media does not deserve the benefit of a doubt anymore. From this point forward, I am going to assume that anything published by the NYT, the post, the WSJ, any of them, is either purposefully misleading or just a bold-faced lie. Does anyone have any good reasons why this is illogical? I really do not see a reason why we should think any of these people are trustworthy. I've also seen the argument that this is just "run of the mill journalism", in that it's totally normal for an outlet to run puff pieces if they get paid to do so. But doesn't that completely undermine the integrity and trustworthiness of the outlet writing the pieces? If any rich guy can just buy positive press without any scrutiny, why should we give them our trust? Journalism is supposed to be about digging up dirt on the rich and powerful so that us peons can get mad when they do bad stuff and make sure our government to punish them. This scandal is so massive because it involves journalists and government actors working together to make sure that didn't happen with SBF. How is anyone supposed to trust any of these people ever again?
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  > Journalism is supposed to be about digging up dirt on the rich and powerful so that us peons can get mad when they do bad stuff and make sure our government to punish them. The vast majority of journalism articles have never involved any of that. They are there for informational purposes. You get a few investigative pieces with a much larger helping of lighter fare.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  The people who received money from SBF failed to tag him as a fraud but also the people who gave him money also failed to tag him as a fraud so the parsimonious explanation right now is incompetence, not malice is what's been driving the situation.
cstejerean 4y ago
People were saying the same thing about Holmes and Theranos and yet here we are with her sentenced to 11 years. Sometimes prosecutors move slowly because they need time to build a solid case. Working quietly behind the scenes might look like inaction but I wouldn't be so quick to assume so. Having politicians as friends only helps when one is not radioactive. Pulling strings can sweep minor problems under the rug but this is a giant problem, and I suspect SBF will find that all his donations won't buy him anything given his current predicament.
pen2l 4y ago
It's not so much that he was cozying up with them as it is that they were one of them. I think the reason SBF ultimately succeeded and disarmed investors' critical eyes is two-fold: he had a pedigree of Stanford/MIT and thus isn't a complete idiot so he could spin together a temporarily believable narrative even if they were on shoddy ground; the second and more important reason is that his parents were both Stanford professors and Caroline's dad was an econ professor at MIT, both the parents had a an expanding list of contacts which helped them secure the first critical set of funding rounds and further on had them ably play the dance with political players and regulatory bodies. Anyway, the lesson I got after seeing SBF's philanthropic forays, which were all a ruse, was to never trust a techbro no matter how inspirational outwardly they may be. Ravening wolves they are the lot of them, in sheeps' clothings.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- colpabar 4y ago
  Did you also know that his mother founded a democratic superpac that prides itself on being secretive? It seems like this is a really important detail that everyone is overlooking/ignoring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Early_life_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Fried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Fried https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/6/21046631/mind-the-gap-silicon-valley-democratic-donors-stanford https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/6/21046631/mind-the-gap-si...
  - pjc50 4y ago
    PACs - all of them - are a bizarre, corrupt route round campaign finance limits, but the US is stuck with them after Citizens United. Quite a lot of companies give to both sides. Tech money has been prominent: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/american-billionaires-spent-a-record-880-million-on-the-us-midterm-elections-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/american-billionaires-spent-... There's SBF next to Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> he’ll never see a day in jail […] and the fact that it’s now three weeks later and he’s still just walking around out in the open is strong evidence of this It really only seems that way because people have amnesia about the timelines involved in accountability for similar events; Enron collapsed in December 2001 (well, that’s when the bankruptcy was filed, Ken Lay resigned as CEO in January 2002.) It wasn’t until February that there were hearings in the Senate. The first indictment related to it was in March ’02 – for Arthur Andersen, Enron’s accounting firm, who were convicted in June ’02. Enron’s CFO was indicted in October ’02 and convicted in a plea bargain in January ’04, and Ken Lay wasn’t arrested until July ’04 and was convicted in May ’06. SBF being out free three whole weeks after the SBF collapse is not strong evidence that he will never see a day in jail and other accountability. So far, that have been public, there were separate probes of FTX and/or FTX.US by at least CFTC, SEC, and DOJ in progress before the collapse, and there are more institutions in more countries targeting FTX and its principals now.
- caeril 4y ago
  Interesting analogy. The NYT began publishing legitimately scathing articles about Enron and effectively accusing outright fraud in January 2002 [1]. Contrast to the kid-gloves puff-piece the NYT published about SBF recently. If we take the NYT as a bellwether for what the "elite" and well-connected want known, it's quite clear that the treatment is very, very different between the two collapse stories. My personal feeling is that SBF is not permanently safe. Like Epstein, occasionally you have to sacrifice one of your own to sate the appetite of the masses and to quell the tendency of conspiracy theories to be demonstrated correct. Depending on how uncontrollable narratives evolve on this story, it's possible they'll need to throw him under the bus. For the moment, however, it's clear they're treating this as Not-Enron. He's safe for now. We'll see. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/us/enron-s-many-strands-early-scrutiny-10-months-ago-questions-enron-came-went-with.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/us/enron-s-many-strands-e...
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > If we take the NYT as a bellwether for what the “elite” and well-connected want known We should not, nor should we even take the relation between NYT and elite opinion as relatively consistent over time.
foxyv 4y ago
While it is very likely true that it was fraud, any media company with enough money worth suing will not say so. This is because accusing someone of fraud is a great way to get hit with SLAPP suits. If you want to keep your legal costs down, you just don't do it. They will wait for the FTC to do the accusing and then report on that.

gedy 4y ago

Don't worry, politicians will "condemn this in the strongest possible terms", that'll show him.

whatever1 4y ago

Nah, you can mess with anything else in the US and walk away if you have good connections. But not the financial establishment.

missedthecue 4y ago
By financial establishment, you mean people playing around with Shiba Inu coin?
- xwolfi 4y ago
  No these are trash, but my boys gentlemen investors in Safemoon, those are terrifyingly powerful.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I suppose I'm supposed to "both sides" this, but do you remember when we elected a conman to the top of every federal org you're despairing of over now? (He was fresh off a civil loss of what? $20 million dollars he had to pay victims of his scam university.) Do you think that maybe that has consequences?

realgeniushere 4y ago
What? Everyone who could investigate and prosecute SBF right now and for the last two years is a Democrat.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  And who appointed the judges those prosecutors will need to prepare cases for and convince? Which party is the party of deregulation (particularly financial deregulation)?
  - realgeniushere 4y ago
    Do you think conservative judges aren’t receptive to fraud cases? Republican appointees regularly give the longest sentences to white collar criminals. Your comment is clearly written about someone who actually knows nothing about law except what the political media prints. And no one has deregulated or legalized outright fraud, which is what happened here.
    - orwin 4y ago
      You mean white collar i suppose? Do you have this stat? conservative-aligned judges do give harsher sentences to white-collar crimes? Because in my country, this is pretty much the opposite. They even bail them out of prison for "medical reasons" and then we can see them on the dancefloor at christmas. Hopefully we'll get US-like gun laws (and US will uban sniper rifles and sniper AP rounds, as their mass killing power is low).
      - 4y ago

mbreese 4y ago

> The whole thing was a fraud and STILL no one with a real voice is saying so. I have no words. This has a high likelihood for marking the time when rules just officially stopped mattering, no sin too large, if you can game the system politically. There is a difference between knowing and proving. The gears of the legal system can move slowly, but deliberately. With this much money on the line, you don’t want to quickly jump to conclusions. It’s better to figure would what happened first and then determine the best path forward. But I think your main question is actually the point of this page/token/article. What if nothing happens? What if it just gets swept away? The point of the token being - let’s see what happens in a year. Keep pressure and visibility up on this. At the end of 2023, let’s take stock and see what has happened to unravel the what was really done with the money from FTX... and what the consequences are.

rossdavidh 4y ago

Well, perhaps, but he _did_ lose/steal a lot of rich people's money, also. As Bernie Madoff discovered, it's different when you defraud rich people.

2devnull 4y ago

Gary Gensler. The public won’t hear that name on The View or Trevor Noah. Therefore there was no fraud.

anonuser123456 4y ago

>the fact that it’s now three weeks later and he’s still just walking around out in the open It takes time to run an investigation. Since FTX is not a regulated institution, it may in fact not be a fiduciary for its 'customers'. It's not black and white from a legal perspective and will take time to unravel. The fact he's still walking around means the US isn't a banana republic that just locks people up by popular demand.

anonporridge 4y ago

Worse, I've already started seeing whispers and hints around the internet of this event being evidence of conspiracy of a certain ethnic group that both Bankman-Fried and Gensler are a part of. I don't personally put any credence into this very old and ugly conspiracy, but given the recent surge of attention to it by other unhinged actors, if this kid doesn't get thrown under the bus and burn, the meme is only going to grow much stronger legs to run with. This is a dangerous moment, and the elites need to be aware that people are watching to see what they do when it's one of their favorite sons who crosses the line.

MattGaiser 4y ago
The "meme", as you put it, has been around for centuries. The people who believe it will just blame the Jews for something else. They have never needed evidence before.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  I completely agree. But when there are actual events that look like 'evidence' the meme becomes more easily transmissible, and more difficult to remove from the infected. https://wearehostsformemes.com/ https://wearehostsformemes.com/
notch656a 4y ago
Well it's not really a "conspiracy" that Jews are one of if not the richest of the significant religious ideologies in America. Friends/family/mutual aid often goes along religious lines so it wouldn't be surprising to find out some of the investments look like a "jew-fest" as SBF is after all Jewish, and his family probably knows lots of Jewish people who happen to be about the richest families by religion in America on average. If someone is a rich bad person, they are disproportionately likely to be Jewish. If they are a rich good person they are also disproportionately likely to be Jewish.... but some only see the bad. https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2016/10/FT_16.09.29_wealthReligiousGroups-3.png https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2...
- 4y ago

MattGaiser 4y ago

FTX has been under investigation for months. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/us-prosecutors-opened-probe-of-ftx-months-before-its-collapse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/us-prosec... Investigations take time.

raesene9 4y ago

I don't think the fact he's walking around in necessarily evidence of corruption, so much as it's evidence of governments (and there are multiple jurisdictions here) being slow to act. As to the idea that connections will always get you out of trouble, again I don't think that's universally true. Elizabeth Holmes is extremely well connected as was Bernie Madoff but that didn't stop either of them being prosecuted and convicted. My guess here is that once the dust settles on exactly what's happened with FTX (which is still unclear in a lot of ways) SBF will be charged.

pjc50 4y ago
I wonder what the time-to-arrest was on Madoff from his scheme collapsing? Have we just become too accustomed to operating on Internet time when these things always take months?
- raesene9 4y ago
  I can't remember the timeline too well with Madoff but looking at this timeline of Theranos https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/07/tech/theranos-rise-and-fall/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/07/tech/theranos-rise-and-fa... it was years between the start of problems and her actual arrest.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I wonder what the time-to-arrest was on Madoff from his scheme collapsing? Have we just become too accustomed to operating on Internet time when these things always take months? Ken Lay was Dec 2001 -> July 2004 Madoff was very quick from the collapse to arrest (December 2008 for both), but that’s largely because he confessed to his sons and told them he planned to surrender to authorities, who talked to the FBI, who visited Madoff who then confessed that it was “all one big lie” to them.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    If only SBF had confessed on Twitter about stealing customer deposits...

ShivShankaran 4y ago

He is still on the New York Times list of speakers for their event https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers The event was updated today morning to add two more speakers. You are right and I suspect SBF is going to get sentenced very leniently, probably with bail in a year and home arrest.

colpabar 4y ago

I have completely lost any sense of trust in major media institutions after this. Seemingly every outlet accepted a ton of money from this guy, and in turn wrote very favorable articles about him. To me, there are two possibilities. Either all these outlets didn't do a minute of digging into where all his money came from, or they knew it was all a scam and took it anyway. So it was either a complete and total journalistic failure, or they were complicit in the fraud. The mainstream media does not deserve the benefit of a doubt anymore. From this point forward, I am going to assume that anything published by the NYT, the post, the WSJ, any of them, is either purposefully misleading or just a bold-faced lie. Does anyone have any good reasons why this is illogical? I really do not see a reason why we should think any of these people are trustworthy. I've also seen the argument that this is just "run of the mill journalism", in that it's totally normal for an outlet to run puff pieces if they get paid to do so. But doesn't that completely undermine the integrity and trustworthiness of the outlet writing the pieces? If any rich guy can just buy positive press without any scrutiny, why should we give them our trust? Journalism is supposed to be about digging up dirt on the rich and powerful so that us peons can get mad when they do bad stuff and make sure our government to punish them. This scandal is so massive because it involves journalists and government actors working together to make sure that didn't happen with SBF. How is anyone supposed to trust any of these people ever again?

MattGaiser 4y ago
> Journalism is supposed to be about digging up dirt on the rich and powerful so that us peons can get mad when they do bad stuff and make sure our government to punish them. The vast majority of journalism articles have never involved any of that. They are there for informational purposes. You get a few investigative pieces with a much larger helping of lighter fare.
shalmanese 4y ago
The people who received money from SBF failed to tag him as a fraud but also the people who gave him money also failed to tag him as a fraud so the parsimonious explanation right now is incompetence, not malice is what's been driving the situation.

cstejerean 4y ago

People were saying the same thing about Holmes and Theranos and yet here we are with her sentenced to 11 years. Sometimes prosecutors move slowly because they need time to build a solid case. Working quietly behind the scenes might look like inaction but I wouldn't be so quick to assume so. Having politicians as friends only helps when one is not radioactive. Pulling strings can sweep minor problems under the rug but this is a giant problem, and I suspect SBF will find that all his donations won't buy him anything given his current predicament.

pen2l 4y ago

It's not so much that he was cozying up with them as it is that they were one of them. I think the reason SBF ultimately succeeded and disarmed investors' critical eyes is two-fold: he had a pedigree of Stanford/MIT and thus isn't a complete idiot so he could spin together a temporarily believable narrative even if they were on shoddy ground; the second and more important reason is that his parents were both Stanford professors and Caroline's dad was an econ professor at MIT, both the parents had a an expanding list of contacts which helped them secure the first critical set of funding rounds and further on had them ably play the dance with political players and regulatory bodies. Anyway, the lesson I got after seeing SBF's philanthropic forays, which were all a ruse, was to never trust a techbro no matter how inspirational outwardly they may be. Ravening wolves they are the lot of them, in sheeps' clothings.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colpabar 4y ago
Did you also know that his mother founded a democratic superpac that prides itself on being secretive? It seems like this is a really important detail that everyone is overlooking/ignoring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Early_life_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Fried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Fried https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/6/21046631/mind-the-gap-silicon-valley-democratic-donors-stanford https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/6/21046631/mind-the-gap-si...
- pjc50 4y ago
  PACs - all of them - are a bizarre, corrupt route round campaign finance limits, but the US is stuck with them after Citizens United. Quite a lot of companies give to both sides. Tech money has been prominent: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/american-billionaires-spent-a-record-880-million-on-the-us-midterm-elections-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/american-billionaires-spent-... There's SBF next to Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> he’ll never see a day in jail […] and the fact that it’s now three weeks later and he’s still just walking around out in the open is strong evidence of this It really only seems that way because people have amnesia about the timelines involved in accountability for similar events; Enron collapsed in December 2001 (well, that’s when the bankruptcy was filed, Ken Lay resigned as CEO in January 2002.) It wasn’t until February that there were hearings in the Senate. The first indictment related to it was in March ’02 – for Arthur Andersen, Enron’s accounting firm, who were convicted in June ’02. Enron’s CFO was indicted in October ’02 and convicted in a plea bargain in January ’04, and Ken Lay wasn’t arrested until July ’04 and was convicted in May ’06. SBF being out free three whole weeks after the SBF collapse is not strong evidence that he will never see a day in jail and other accountability. So far, that have been public, there were separate probes of FTX and/or FTX.US by at least CFTC, SEC, and DOJ in progress before the collapse, and there are more institutions in more countries targeting FTX and its principals now.

caeril 4y ago
Interesting analogy. The NYT began publishing legitimately scathing articles about Enron and effectively accusing outright fraud in January 2002 [1]. Contrast to the kid-gloves puff-piece the NYT published about SBF recently. If we take the NYT as a bellwether for what the "elite" and well-connected want known, it's quite clear that the treatment is very, very different between the two collapse stories. My personal feeling is that SBF is not permanently safe. Like Epstein, occasionally you have to sacrifice one of your own to sate the appetite of the masses and to quell the tendency of conspiracy theories to be demonstrated correct. Depending on how uncontrollable narratives evolve on this story, it's possible they'll need to throw him under the bus. For the moment, however, it's clear they're treating this as Not-Enron. He's safe for now. We'll see. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/us/enron-s-many-strands-early-scrutiny-10-months-ago-questions-enron-came-went-with.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/us/enron-s-many-strands-e...
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If we take the NYT as a bellwether for what the “elite” and well-connected want known We should not, nor should we even take the relation between NYT and elite opinion as relatively consistent over time.

foxyv 4y ago

While it is very likely true that it was fraud, any media company with enough money worth suing will not say so. This is because accusing someone of fraud is a great way to get hit with SLAPP suits. If you want to keep your legal costs down, you just don't do it. They will wait for the FTC to do the accusing and then report on that.