I feel like he is 100% in real trouble. But it’s mostly been admission of being dumb and not of guilt. The full on admission of guilt is why they could easily pick up madoff. They just got to connect the dots before they can tighten the rope.
I think there is a misunderstanding of how his blabbing is hurting his future defences.
It is not about admitting or not admitting to crimes. When you say that he did not admit to being guilty it sounds like you expect him to say “yes I SBF have done wire fraud using interstate communications”. He certainly did not do that. That is not what anyone says when they say he is admitting crimes.
The way criminal law works is that the crimes have elements. To be able to say that you have commited X a prosecutor has to show A and B and (C or D). What he is doing is not admitting X, but providing the As, or Bs or Cs on a silver platter for a prosecutor.
For example maybe for some crime they have to show that when you made a statement you did know that it is false. That is really hard to show. Unless you help them out by going on the record about what did you know and when. (Which many of his statements seems to be doing.) That is one element I have heard about, but there are many different crimes he can be in trouble for and many different elements. Also the interpretation of many of these elements is arcane to say the least. You really need to be an expert on law to be able to tell what the terms means. Which means that it is very easy for him to fall into a trap where he is saying something which to my untrained ears sounds fine, perhaps even exculpatory, but for a lawyer’s ears provides the last element to prove something.
The other way his blabbing is hurting him is that it locks him into a specific story. Years from now, when prosecutors get a case together they will have to share all their evidence with his legal team. Then his legal team would have the option to find the most defensible, legally best narrative for all of it. But they can’t do that if he already locked himself into some narative. Every time he opens his mouth he is removing freedom to maneuver from his future defense team.
The third way he is hurting his case is that if there is anything he says which later turns out to be false, or can be depicted as false, that can be used to paint him as a liar. And that can be used to undermine other things he might say. This might not be a crime in itself, but can be used to convince perhaps a jury to disregard his statements.
IANAL but since it's not under oath does it really matter what he's saying?
Statements by another person generally cannot be used against him unless that person is brought into court, put under oath, and his lawyers get a chance to cross-examine the person.
That is called the hearsay rule. That rule does not apply to statements made by the defendant.
7 bill sent to Binance and random VC is plausible at least, but it sounds like the money vanished (it doesn't vanish, someone somewhere took out large sums of money).
7 bill sent to crypto is hard to believe, and sounds more like laundering, but the cash reserves should nonetheless have a paper trail.
4 bill will not vanish, or it may have never existed, or he's lying and it was moved to a Cayman acct(s) somewhere.
If it never existed, then FTX was operating more like a bank - dollars only work because they have a paper trail and we can keep printing new ones. Try cashing out your savings, you might be able to. Now try everyone cashing out - there is no money for it.
With a real bank OFC there is a lot of scrutiny and supposedly you have to keep track of assets and liabilities but there is a large degree of fudging it, plus they can always get loans from the unlimited central supply if they have an immediate shortfall...
Which might be what he's looking for i.e. a bailout via printed money, which would allow investors to withdraw funds and OFC send inflation sky high...
Of course there is money in a bank run on an otherwise solvent bank. The Fed steps in and either lends the money in exchange for its pound of flesh, or takes over and makes depositors whole, up to the FDIC limits.
The fact that the Fed CAN do this, combined with bank regulations such as reserve requirements, is why it doesn’t need to do this very often.
Banks are explicit that they borrow short and lend long. It’s not that the money isn’t there, it’s just a mismatch in liquidity/duration. For FTX, the assets themselves were bad, never mind the liquidity.
They tried to do the equivalent by minting more of their in-house coin "FTT", right? Both after the bankruptcy filing, but I saw one analysis posted on HN suggest they had been doing that on an ongoing basis as part of their operations too, trying to cover shortfalls by simply minting FTT and calling that collateral for loans or what you have.
It just... didn't work.