National Zero skipped this “FTX meltdown” bullshit because we had actual politics and elections to report on this week. Then there’s that crypto is for pseudo-libertarian man-boys playing pretend with digital Monopoly money so we pretty much only cover it when we feel like mocking it.
Anyway, shitty right wing news site The Post Millennial reports Bahamian authorities have detained FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, and his minions Nishad Singh and Gary Wang before they could flee to Dubai. FTX, an exchange for crypto nerds, collapsed spectacularly this week when a report revealed they had leveraged funds in customer accounts for their own trades, causing runaway withdrawals and tanking the price of Bitcoin and other fake digital fiats. Bankman-Fried’s net worth went from tens of billions to relative jack shit overnight and FTX is now being run by a former CEO of Enron as it unwinds. Amazing how the whole crypto thing – which was supposed to be a response to the corruption and incompetence of the real world financial system epitomized by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 – ends up collapsing in a remarkably similar mess of incompetence and corruption. Much faster than Lehman Brothers actually.