I'm picturing Matt Levine being carted away by nice men in white coats after finishing this paragraph
How in the world is a balance sheet not a report that is generated by a system, viewable by any executive? Did they not have a CFO or any finance people or accountants?
Depending on your line of business, this is actually not a simple thing when you're trying to mark assets to market in a meaningful way. When everything you own is liquid, it's one thing. When things are less liquid, it's another. This is true even of completely legitimate businesses.
Typically there’s a 3rd party fund administrator whose core responsibilities include calculating the value (NAV) of the fund.
Sometimes funds have Level 2 or Level 3 assets, which may require management effort to value and may not have real-time pricing available.
Perhaps not?
"If you take a look at the about FTX page, it shows six senior team members: the CEO, the COO, two leaders on tech and two on compliance and legal. Something is missing. For a company managing billions of client funds, $16 billion according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), is it not odd that there is no Chief Financial Officer (CFO)?"
Of course, it also happens sometimes that they are cooked in some specific way, and that is used to hide that fact.
The fact that a company managing billions of dollars couldn't even do this much is very, very telling.
I can wholeheartedly recommend his Newsletter. Not the first one being so funny.
(see https://lithub.com/crypto-nerd-sam-bankman-fried-who-just-lo...)
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Like, I’m literate and basically read stuff all day. And I can get through a textbook as a part of a course, but force me to read a novel and by page 7 I’m falling asleep and losing track of the characters.
I’m on the fence about borrowing/buying a book that was based on a podcast series because I fear 90% of what it covered was in the podcast.
His books are a mess because he had no idea of how to organize them.
The scam clearly worked without all the effort.
If he didn’t want to be doing criminal things, he has plenty of means and opportunity to do them non-criminally.