the reviews of the book from fintwit are so universally blistering and hateful that im actually starting to suspect its an accurate accounting of the situation / person.
the reviews of the book from fintwit are so universally blistering and hateful that im actually starting to suspect its an accurate accounting of the situation / person.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
weird shit going down.
1) book never arrived, amazon just gave me back my money.
2) people mentioned in the book are popping up and saying lewis was just totally fucking wrong about their situations / numbers. like quite a bit honestly.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
he did not, in fact, know how much money he had.
Originally Posted by Sanlmar
pls give us a report so i'll know whether to buy it
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
What prompted this random post on August 14th?
signal to noise on the old twitter machine tine
Michael Lewis is the king of character development. It is his unique spin on finance.
Yet it was exactly 50 pages before Michael Lewis elected to use the word “autism”.
For example, SBF shares with Lewis that he practiced facial expressions in the mirror. Sam realized at some point that other humans expected visual facial feedback from their audience. It was a difficult challenge for him that he chose to attempt.
Lewis’ description of Bankman’s childhood is fascinating and heartbreaking.
Avoiding the far too convenient handle “autist” was deliberate.
I enjoyed Michael Lewis’ sharing his conversation with the random woman who accidentally became his media person and personal scheduler. Funny but real. SBF, above all, was a media creation. She realized SBF treated commitments with little regard. SBF agreeing to a meeting was an exercise in probability for her and a question of shifting expected value in Bankman’s mind.
The description of Janes Street’s bizarre interview process was the nuts. It harkened me back to Lewis describing his interview process at Solomon Brothers.
Loving it.
Listened to podcast San had recommended to him yesterday. Had a SBF episode. Shocking how much they diverted deposits and gambled on crypto. I grasp being a true believer, but cryptos history is one of multiple super volatile periods. This isn’t Madoff needing a worldwide housing crisis and 100 year old banks going belly up to expose. Like what they did, it has a shelf life of maybe 18-36 months before a “crisis” and everyone wanting access to their money. That’s even assuming crypto has a bright future. It still has had multiple huge swings as it’s been a success. This was never going to be a 20 year scam. Just crazy risk taking.
Look forward to the book.
Real niggas will recognize how the following passage rhymes with Lewis in Liars Poker describing the shift on the Solomon trading floor from loud, hairy, Italian high school drop outs to the quants. Lewie Renieri was the jungle guide and inventor of mortgage bonds but he represented a dying breed. That was 1987 ircc.
Jane Street encouraged interns to gamble props between one another. How many jelly beans can I eat in a minute etc. A daily loss was capped at $100. These stories involving Sam were great.
honestly if he could have just kept his dick out of the beehive when he was on parole, most of this would have just been pled out quietly.
but he just had to fuck around and now hes being lined up to become a generational bernie madoff.
Q. How did this special "Allow Negative" privilege come about?
A. Sam had asked Nishad and I to add the ability to——to pay for various FTX-related expenses from Alameda's accounts and from a few other bookkeeping accounts on FTX.
Q. And when was that?
A. This was in July 2019.
Q. How long after starting the exchange was that?
A. This was a few months after starting the exchange.
Q. Was Alameda given this special advantage around when it was introduced?
A. Yes.
Q. What, if anything, did the defendant say about why Alameda needed the ability to have a negative account balance?
A. So we wanted to——so Sam said that he wanted to pay for
some——pay for certain FTT-related expenses from Alameda's
accounts.
Q. Okay. We'll come back to that. Over time, was the use of this ability to have an account balance go negative used only by Alameda for that purpose——that is, the FTT expenses?
A. No.
Q. So was it used for other purposes?
A. Yes.
Q. What else was it used for?
A. It was also used by Alameda for trading.
Q. What do you mean by that?
A. To withdraw from FTX and send it other exchanges to use for their trading activities.
Q. And so did this special advantage——that is, the ability to
have a negative account balance——allow Alameda to make
unlimited withdrawals off of the FTX exchange?
A. Yes.
Q. As a result of that special advantage, could Alameda make unlimited withdrawals from the exchange even when its account balance was below zero?
A. Yes.
Q. And so if Alameda's account balance was zero or negative, for example, in Bitcoin, and it used its special advantage to withdraw Bitcoin, whose Bitcoin would it be withdrawing?
A. From cus——it would be withdrawing customers' Bitcoin.
Q. I'll ask you again: When Alameda withdrew money from the exchange while it had a negative balance, whose money was it withdrawing?
A. So I——either FTX's own money or money from customers——was withdrawing money from customers.
Q. When you said FTX's own money, what are you referring to?
A. The money FTX earned from trading fees from customers.
Q. And you said Alameda withdrew or had a negative balance of $8 billion; is that right?
A. Yes.
Q. Was that more than the amount of money that FTX had in
revenue?
A. Yes.
Q. So then whose money did that $8 billion come from?
A. From customers.
Q. And what about the defendant?
A. He did not look at it, but he was——we told him——he asked us to do it and then we told him we did it.
Q. Now this comment says, "And we set Allow Negative equals true for," and it lists a bunch of accounts. Let me just stop there. When it says "we set Allow Negative equals true," what does that mean?
A. So it means that prior to or as part of making the change, he went into the database and set the "Allow Negative" column to true for a particular——a particular set of accounts.
Q. So for this set of accounts, I want to ask you about a few of them. It lists I think——let's see, one, two, three, four, five——six accounts; is that right?
A. Yes.
Q. So do you see the second account, info@Alameda(9)?
A. Yes.
Q. What is that a reference to?
A. That's the main http://AlamedaResearch.com trading account.
Q. That's Alameda's main account.
A. Yes.
Q. And what is the next account there?
A. The info@Alameda off-market FTT subaccounts is the account that Alameda was using to host some of its FTTs.
Q. These numbers next to the main Alameda account and its subaccount, what are those?
A. Those are the account IDs of those accounts and subaccounts.
Q. The next one here is cottonwoodtrading@gmail off-market FTT subaccount, and has a number. What's that account?
A. That's a——that's another Alameda account.
Q. Okay. So then there are two accounts that I didn't ask you about. Are those customer accounts?
A. No.
Q. Okay. What kind of accounts are they?
A. They're bookkeeping accounts.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Yes, I should do the heavy lifting myself but I will just allow Coffeezilla to review/analyze everything for me by proxy because of time constraints.
And wow. It ain't good...
Plus more Daniel Friedberg/Ultimatebet(s) content.
There was a real business in FTX exchange. It minted fees. Madoff never had a real business.
Ponzi is the wrong term for what occurred. Guy needs to get his fraud categories straight.
I only saw the beginning of the video, I confess. Felt annoyingly click bait-ish
I read that shady lawyer was the first to flip
this is far and away the worst michael lewis book ive ever read.
someone needs to find out if _any_ of the jane st parables are actually true.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
What would be one of your criticisms? It’s not as if you struggle with words. Your lack of specifics causes me to suspect you are just being contrarian and ornery.
Lewis excels with character. Above all that is what I am looking for with respect to the FTX story.
Remember the fabulous Mt. Gox saga? The only interesting thing about that story was trying to cypher out Mark Karpeles as a man and his cat.
I’m following the trial and having some sense of each of the witnesses going in triples my understanding and enjoyment. I would not have that without his Playbill. One example, was Gary Wang. It would appear he found speaking to be physically painful. People who worked with him for years might have never heard his voice. Yet at the trial he was a motor mouth. The judge told him to slow down on multiple occasions when Wang was on the stand. I mean autism combined with coaching by the government made his manner of speaking bizarre. I like this fun inside shit. Where am I gonna get this quality entertainment from - Coffeezilla?
I give almost zero shits about another crypto exchange going belly up. The stories and principals are always god. It will never get crazier, bigger or more fun than SBF. SBF repeated stated he thought he was 5% to become a U.S. President.
The man who was incapable of human empathy by birth thought about being President. Wait, has that already been done? Never mind
I’m struggling to express how much I love this shit.
Speaking of enjoyment. Isn’t it curious that the people most outraged by SBF are Americans. Americans lost less than others worldwide because of regulations. Americans just like being angry, eh? National sport.
What would be one of your criticisms? It’s not as if you struggle with words. Your lack of specifics causes me to suspect you are just being contrarian and ornery.
Lewis excels with character. Above all that is what I am looking for with respect to the FTX story.
Remember the fabulous Mt. Gox saga? The only interesting thing about that story was trying to cypher out Mark Karpeles as a man and his cat.
I’m following the trial and having some sense of each of the witnesses going in triples my understanding and enjoyment. I would not have that without his Playbill. One example, was Gary Wang. It would appear he found speaking to be physically painful. People who worked with him for years might have never heard his voice. Yet at the trial he was a motor mouth. The judge told him to slow down on multiple occasions when Wang was on the stand. I mean autism combined with coaching by the government made his manner of speaking bizarre. I like this fun inside shit. Where am I gonna get this quality entertainment from - Coffeezilla?
I give almost zero shits about another crypto exchange going belly up. The stories and principals are always god. It will never get crazier, bigger or more fun than SBF. SBF repeated stated he thought he was 5% to become a U.S. President.
The man who was incapable of human empathy by birth thought about being President. Wait, has that already been done? Never mind
I’m struggling to express how much I love this shit.
Speaking of enjoyment. Isn’t it curious that the people most outraged by SBF are Americans. Americans lost less than others worldwide because of regulations. Americans just like being angry, eh? National sport.
im happy youre happy.
but lewis is just folding himself in half backwards to describe all of sbfs flaws as merits instead of drawing a line from his defects to their material impact on everyone around him.
we are talking about someone who rode into battle claiming he only cared about leaving humanity in a better place and proceeded to chunk off billions of dollars in investor capital and end user savings.
sbf is worse than madoff and lewis cant stop acting like him being a sociopath is something charming and evidence of a higher order of thinking.
https://www.google.com/search?q=sociopaths+charming
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Can a person on the autism spectrum be deliberately charming?
SBF had a bizarre personal construct for HOW the world worked or should work to be sure
im just not buying the autism pitch yet.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
This is like being confronted with a flat earther. I will enjoy reviewing the puzzle pieces that I have just taken for granted.
Off the cuff, SBF was famous for gaming during interviews. Now that he is custody he fiddles with a substitute, playing cards iirc, when meeting people.
The gaming and cards are his fidget spinners which are famously used by those on the spectrum to help calm anxiety, help stay grounded and stay focused.
Our boy Autism Capital blew up providing insight and humor about prime SBF. Resonance. Glorious times they were. SBF made autism fashionable for a minute
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