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Comment by awrence | Hacker News Reader

Very simply? If the conspiracy theories about their scamminess were wrong and they did what they said which was hold dollars without duration exposure (mostly cash and tbills). Then once rates got hiked they were basically the only bank equivalent in the world with captive depositors that couldn’t just take their money to competitors and they were able to keep all the interest (4-5 bn per year currently). Which incidentally they’re now using in part to load up (substantially) on btc with house money.

I don’t know what the truth is obviously for sure but this story is extremely possible and plausible. It doesn’t mean they were particularly good traders. It means if true basically they were disciplined and didn’t trade at all and are now benefitting from massive upside on their set up resulting from monetary policy and regulatory conditions driving their popularity.

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> It means if true basically they were disciplined and didn’t trade at all

That is, excuse the phrasing, a metric fuckton of discipline that most people on the planet would find hard to exercise. At one point, their minting of Tether implied they were banking half a billion dollars a day.

They sat on that from $6B 2 years ago to a claimed $80B now?

Still no audit, though. Just "attestations". The difference is the attestation just says "at one moment in time, this much money was in accounts". You could get a short term loan (remember how Bitfinex and Tether used to pretend that they were independent, until people asked why parties A, B, C were the same parties A, B, C on each side of their loan contracts when they borrowed?).

You and I can't buy a house on a mere attestation of accounts - funnily enough, lenders want to see how we acquired that money. But these clowns can stand on stage at Davos and say "Yeah, we've banked a billion a week for the last two years, trust us, you don't need an audit". I know that comparing investment to revenue is not apples-to-apples, but to get an idea of what that incoming cash looks like? You're on the scale of Saudi Aramco. Samsung. Alphabet.

Hmmm can’t speak to the likelihood of their actual inflows but tens of billions of usd from global participants that are functionally shut out from usd pipes is really very reasonable. It’s 0.25% of M2.

What amuses me a bit is how shocked it can seem to people for them to “sit” on 80 bn dollars. It’s literally what they’re supposed to be doing! And no one can imagine they’re actually doing it. I don’t know. I like to think that’s what I’d do if I said that’s what I was doing… I feel like I would. But apparently we now think when someone is entrusted with a pile of money to keep as such they’d be irrational not to risk their customer funds and yolo into mismatching risk to try and pick up some yield… when did that become the expected norm?

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