White-collar crime that sucks billions from millions of poor people is exactly the kind of violence that our societies tend to ignore. The guy stealing $40 from a 7--11 is where the focus lies. People are trained to care about the latter---increase the police!---and trained to ignore the former. Crime continues to be a huge concern---and there is crime, don't get me wrong. There were just shots fired in a central parking lot in the small village where my family lives. Weird things are happening. However. The big violence is economic violence, economic class war waged on the poor. That affects so many more people's lives than gunshots. And a lot of that economic activity is white-collar crime that either goes unpunished or is punished with a fine that amounts to 0.01% of the money stolen and an agreement that the accused pays the fine and admits to no wrongdoing. I would imagine that, when all is said and done, Bankman-Fried will also get a slap on the wrist for what looks---at least on the surface---like a tremendously huge fraud. Frankly, Meta has also lost 70% of its value in the last year. Tesla has also lost over 50% of its value in the last year. Lots of people will suffer for how the economy is run. <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/ftx-on-brink-of-collapse-after-binance-abandons-rescue/" author="Joshua Oliver, Richard Waters, Ortenca Aliaj, James Fontanella-Khan, William Langley, And Chan Ho-Him, Ft" source="Ars Technica">FTX on brink of collapse after Binance abandons rescue</a> <bq>The abrupt change in fortune for FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research marks a spectacular fall for Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old trader and entrepreneur who is one of the industry’s most prominent figures. Bankman-Fried was one of the world’s richest people just months ago, but large swaths of his $24 billion fortune will evaporate if FTX and Alameda Research go bust.</bq> What a nonsensical paragraph. It's an interesting philosophical conundrum: If it could fall apart so quickly, then did it ever really exist? It did not. Sam Bankman-Fried was the king of the Golgafrinchans for a little while, with his little tracksuit stuffed full of leaves. I've read that, as little as a couple of months ago, his empire was valued at $32B. Ludicrous. Our economy is run by fatuous idiots, serial fabulists. I have seen nothing but reverential treatment of Bankman-Fried, as if everyone has to cover their egos for ever having thought he was the real deal. FTX's rival Binance, after 48 hours of due diligence, gave up examining FTX's records and called off their potential buyout because there was way too much shady shit and way too little <i>there</i> there. Also, <bq>The US Securities and Exchange Commission has expanded an investigation into FTX, which includes examining the platform’s cryptocurrency lending products and the management of customer funds, according to a person familiar with the matter.</bq> <img attachment="image.jpg" align="right">This one might hit crypto in general pretty hard again (harder than it already has, as Bitcoin and Ethereum already slid 20% over the last couple of days). <bq>“Given the size and interlinkages of both FTX and Alameda Research with other entities of the crypto ecosystem… it looks likely that a new cascade of margin calls, deleveraging and crypto company [and] platform failures is starting similar to what we saw last May [and] June following the collapse of Terra,” JPMorgan analysts wrote.</bq>