Thanks to
g5000 for clearly separating out the ACTUAL scandal and some of the known crimes of the FTX CEO from the FAKE scandal and hoax pushed by many angry Republicans in regard to Ukraine. Having two separate OPs makes matters much clearer.
FTX’s collapse is a good thing! It was only one of many similar firms, and its ponzy scheme character will bring more scrutiny from the SEC and other regulators to this whole b.s. “industry,” which is built upon investor ignorance, greed and libertarian-techno dreams of establishing a currency independent of all government.
There are other useful aspects of the FTX collapse:
a) It has accelerated and probably made more permanent the MUCH GREATER collapse of all crypto stock valuations. They have now lost approximately 1.75 TRILLION dollars of their stock valuation in total. I fully expect (and hope) to see Bitcoin and others fall much further.
Crypto currencies and all their supporting institutions were always a mania drawing idiots, speculators and fraudsters. It is healthy and inevitable that this bubble has burst. CEOs or CFOs who can be proven to have committed actual theft or fraud should of course be locked up.
b) The real scandal also shows the way “business as usual” works in D.C., especially when
new financial instruments or technologies (and securities based on them) are introduced: New companies of this sort usually try to and often succeed in remaining virtually unregulated for years. In these conditions corruption (and ponzy schemes) easily take root.
I think this is partly why there were relatively large contributions coming from FTX and this whole unregulated industry. The money went to Republicans as well as Democrats, but since Democrats were the party that controlled Congress and the Presidency in the last two years, they probably got a bit more overall. Like with the “derivatives” trading you mentioned, or Hedge Funds, all this is actually quite normal. Politicians in swing districts especially, whether Democratic or Republican, require huge amounts of money to win elections. They generally take all money offered to their campaigns. BOTH parties are identical in this respect.
C) Lastly the scandal showed the baleful consequences of the Republican-supported Supreme Court “Citizen’s United” decision and other efforts to end limits on corporations, executives and the extremely rich, whose huge campaign contributions constitute a new threat to our republican institutions and to democracy itself.
