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He Lost $36B in a Week. Now Bill Hwang Is Fighting to Avoid Prison
- luma 2y agohttps://archive.ph/6EkIS https://archive.ph/6EkIS
- metadat 2y agoHave you noticed the new load spinner for archive.today? It seems 10x slower to load, even for the homepage. I'll try contacting the admin. Edit: emailed them- > Hi there, I've contacted you in the past from a different email address and found you were responsive and helpful. > Dear webmaster@archive.is, > Over the past week or few weeks, I've noticed the new loading spinner at archive.is and other associated websites. The time to load even the base index homepage, much less an article, has skyrocketed. > Your resource is so useful and I rely on it so much, I really miss being able to read articles thanks to only you and your special efforts. > Also, wsj articles submitted for scraping no longer compete. > But the big concern is the increase in loading time. > Hope you can get it sorted. > Your loyal fan, > Metadat
- robjan 2y agoNot noticed slow loading myself. Still snappy as always
- Animats 2y agoBut he still has $100 million left.
- mirekrusin 2y agoHe should put it in Swiss bank so they can’t touch it.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> He should put it in Swiss bank so they can’t touch it. That era is long gone.
- rustcleaner 2y agoBetter yet: Monero.
- vkou 2y agoHiding money that a court orders you to turn over in crypto is a great way to be held in prison for context of court until the end of your natural life.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago*contempt of court
- codetrotter 2y agoWouldn’t putting it in a foreign country bank account be similar?
- blackhawkC17 2y agoThanks to US pressure, Swiss banks are no longer as secretive as they used to be. They'll quickly give up information about any American when requested by the government. To add, anyone under indictment and bail is closely monitored. They can't just transfer money to a Swiss Bank without raising an alarm. HNers enjoy cooking up movie-plot schemes that are dumb in reality.
- matheusmoreira 2y agoIn my country, there's a guy who actually did it. An anarchocapitalist named Daniel Fraga. Just a completely surreal guy. Police would show up to his house and he'd film himself calling them parasites of the state to their faces. Used to make videos criticizing the system, the government, the courts, the judges. Eventually tried to expose corruption. Government tried to freeze his accounts and discovered he had $1 in them. He had gone all in on bitcoin. To this day I believe the government has not seen the money. One day he just kinda disappeared. He's either in some paradise enjoying his billions or dead.
- stygiansonic 2y agoReminiscent of a scene from Billions: https://www.reddit.com/r/Billions/comments/czlg4u/need_help_finding_a_scene_bobby_tells_her_wife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Billions/comments/czlg4u/need_help_...
- mhh__ 2y agoI'm not seeing the market manipulation unless it's some quirk of the formal definition rather than the informal meaning of the term? I was under the impression that he had an old fashioned value play, levered up to the moon using total return swap (these do have real uses) which blew up on him. Unless he deliberately mislead his brokers should was it illegal?
- bobthepanda 2y agoThe SEC is alleging that he did mislead his brokers: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-70 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-70 > The complaint also alleges that, as part of the scheme, Archegos repeatedly and deliberately misled many of Archegos’s counterparties about Archegos’s exposure, concentration and liquidity, in order to get increased trading capacity so that Archegos could continue buying swaps in its most concentrated positions, thereby driving up the price of those stocks. Ultimately in March 2021, price declines in Archegos’s most concentrated positions allegedly triggered significant margin calls that Archegos was unable to meet, and Archegos’s subsequent default and collapse resulted in billions of dollars in credit losses among Archegos’s counterparties. > The SEC’s complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, charges Hwang and the other defendants with violating antifraud and other provisions of the federal securities laws. The complaint seeks permanent injunctive relief, return of allegedly ill-gotten gains, and civil penalties. The SEC also seeks to bar individual defendants from serving as a public company officer and director.
- pram 2y agoSupposedly lying about the scale (and risk) of his positions to get more leverage from banks. It’s good old-fashioned fraud.
- psaux 2y agoCorrect, it is underlying assets value and correctness. This fuzzy logic has always confused me
- bobthepanda 2y ago
- dahdum 2y agoHe deserves prison of course, but I’d raise a glass to his legend. At least he fleeced the savvy.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoFor what?
- paulddraper 2y agoFraud
- dahdum 2y agoHe definitely committed fraud, but at least it was against counterparties that were unequivocally aware of the tail risks and capable of managing them. He didn’t directly fleece retail investors like SBF, Madoff, etc..
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoMost fraud ends with getting rich. He lost his shirt. Where’s the fraud?
- pbj1968 2y agoWhich is the only reason he’s being charged with anything
- tim333 2y ago>At least he fleeced the savvy. Yeah but Credit Suisse was a 150 year old public company held in peoples retirement accounts and the like.
- blackhawkC17 2y agoI'd like to meet Bill Hwang and ask, "What the heck were you thinking?" All those paper profits would have to be converted into real money at some point, and the massive sales would have dampened the share prices, negating the point in the first place. He was trading like a WSB subscriber but with actual billions in capital. From what is known publicly, the guy lived frugally and wasn't a status or prestige chaser. He seems more like someone with an excessive risk appetite who got in over his head. I also find it interesting that Bill Hwang amassed over $30 billion, and no one would have known if his family office hadn't fallen apart. This makes me wonder how many Wall Street billionaires are hiding in plain sight, only known by industry peers.
- phkahler 2y ago>> All those paper profits would have to be converted into real money at some point, and the massive sales would have dampened the share prices, negating the point in the first place. Sometimes I fear the 401k plans in the US will collectively do the same. Is there any way to see the net inflow and outflow of these plans?
- underlipton 2y agoGet big enough that your failure represents a systemic risk, allowing you to call on institutional backstops?
- HDThoreaun 2y agoThe problem was that eventually he (through his brokers hedges) owned enough of these equities to cause massive slippage if he cashed out. He knew this, so he couldnt really cash out, even though he was up massively on paper. And then his stocks had a bad couple weeks and he wasnt up massively and the banks tried to unwind and discovered the massive slippage problem he already knew about. I think in basically every case like this it just comes down to getting in too deep and the only way out looking like doubling down. When the options are "5% chance of success if I double down or 0% if I dont" you double down because why would you care if the banks lose more.
- xorvoid 2y agoWhy does the intersection of “being into Jesus” and “being into money” always seem so correlated with “fraudster”?
- pavel_lishin 2y agoBecause Jesus was very clear in his beliefs about money.
- tithos81 2y agoAccording to a book written by flawed bias men. Lol
- pavel_lishin 2y agoSure. But if you claim to follow the man, it means following the book, and the book is - once again - very clear on certain topics, regardless of who put the words down.
- 317070 2y agoRight there in our Lord's prayer is some financial advice: > And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. In the original Greek of Matthew's prayer, the word is "ophelilema", as in financial debt. There are other words for more metaphorical debts like when breaking rules, which were notably not used.
- HideousKojima 2y ago>original Greek Akhshually Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic. So even if Matthew wrote his Gospel in Greek it may not necessarily be the most accurate translation of what Jesus actually said. /end pedantry In any case, the "gospel of prosperity" types in Christianity are second only to the "secretly a sex pest" types in regards to how obnoxious they are and how much of a black eye they give to Christianity's reputation.
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- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoI know it's an irrelevant aside, but can I just say, since the article decides to lead with it, that the painting created from his vision is utterly underwhelming. How you could take such a vision and turn it into something so mundane is beyond me. I almost wonder if it's just the classic money laundering through painting valuatiom shtick.
- nicklecompte 2y agoApparently it's not a painting: > The artwork, commissioned in 2016, is rendered in metal mesh by renowned South Korean artist Seungmo Park. Park also created a larger-than-life depiction of Olympic sprinter Sebastian Coe for Nike’s headquarters in Oregon and the façade of Gucci’s flagship store in Seoul. I noticed the texture looked odd when I zoomed into the photo. I suspect Park did the best he could, but the medium itself seems poorly-suited for the vision.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoAh yeah. That's a little more interesting, but it still leaves me hopelessly underwhelmed. What should be an evocative image is totally banal.
- spxneo 2y agoBill Hwang, Masayoshi Son are all just straight up gamblers.
- H8crilA 2y agoNothing wrong with gambling (i.e. wagering real resources against an uncertain outcome), the entire financial market / all of capitalism is a chaotic orchestra of millions of gambles.
- tim333 2y agoI'd dispute that with Masayoshi Son. I mean all venture investing has an element of gambling to it but he's more an investor.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoText-only version, works where archive.ph is blocked: x=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-05-01/bill-hwang-fights-prison-time-after-hastening-credit-suisse-collapse tnftp -o\|yy089 $x > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm links ./1.htm # then press '\' key yy089: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624621