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Comment by cboswel1 | Hacker News Reader

VC and private equity vultures have been buying up FTX debt at a loss since the collapse, with this being the singular reason why, to make a huge profit off the Anthropic shares. Any retail investor that sees this as a possibility of getting their money back is about to be disappointed once again.

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I’m a noob.

Question 1: Why would VC and private equity have a stronger claim as compared to a retail investor in this case? My guess is that “retail investor” here means customers of FTX, who were investing in crypto. VC/private equity has a stake in the company itself now after buying shares, so I guess they come first in the chain — is that right?

Question 2: If a “retail investor” somehow obtained shares of FTX, would they have the same strength of claim as VC/private equity?

FTX declared bankruptcy in November '22. At the date they did so, any debts anyone had against them were essentially frozen and converted into dollars at the rate of that day. As FTX converts their assets into money, they will pay back all of their creditors in order of priority, with taxes coming first, then customer deposits, then normal debt, and last what remains goes to holders of the stock (leaving out a lot of nuance here).

Normally when a bank (or whatever FTX was) goes under with customer money missing, people lower in the pecking order don't really expect to see any money back, so they would be looking to offload whatever FTX owes them to anyone dumb enough to buy it, at whatever valuation it would fetch. The play is that if you are a savvy investor who knows that FTX holds an illiquid rapidly appreciating asset that might be valuable enough to pay every creditor, toxic FTX debt sold at pennies for the dollar might suddenly look very enticing.

For the private equity to make bank here, then all retail investors have to first be made whole (to the dollar valuation of whatever they held in November 22 at that time), but they are not going to see any profit. The profit goes to whoever who managed to buy debt at low valuations. If Anthropic shares appreciate enough that FTX makes every creditor whole, the rest goes to the stockholders which are mostly FTX employees and also mostly going to be in prison, which is a weird outcome.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! Just to clarify, I think the parent comment must be incorrect? It says “ Any retail investor that sees this as a possibility of getting their money back is about to be disappointed once again”, but from your explanation it sounds like they should get it back, just without profit.

They get made whole the dollar-valued sum of their accounts valued at the prices of 2022-11-11. Note that this was after a significant fall in crypto asset prices, and before they got back up again.

Anyone who had dollars in their account get those back. Anyone who had any crypto will get back significantly less than it was valued even a week before.

Americans and non Americans alike? I’d be surprised if foreign depositors living in the EU would be made whole; Could this ever happen?

Whether a bank deposit or an unsecured creditor, you don't get screwed if you're a foreigner (unless there's a foreign subsidiary, then figuring out who gets what gets complicated and can drag on for years).

Canada's Nortel went bankrupt in 2009, and they only got a ruling on the apportionments between the creditors of the different subsidiaries in 2015:

https://financialpost.com/legal-post/nortel-bankruptcy-judge...

Along with more fights between them over other funds in 2016 and 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-05/nortel-ba...

https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/firm-assists-nortel-in-se...

The accountants/lawyers end up doing well and can suck a lot dry.

They don't have any stronger claim. I assume all customer claims are being treated equally. They bought the claims because they have access to capital, a longer time horizon, and/or a better understanding of the ultimate payout value.

Correct. Workers will never win at a game designed by capital. The only path forward is exercising labor power by withdrawing it for political ends.

This is a non sequitur. "Investors might buy senior debt in a defunct crypto marketplace" is not actually a problem facing labor as a class.

Even though this has been down voted into oblivion, I’ll bite: to what political ends would you propose the labor class exercise their power?

It's wild to me that tech workers will still downvote stuff like this after the season of layoffs we just had. Google is "trimming the fat" while making 18 billion a quarter. To what end? How about preserving the middle class and ending the monopoly power of these firms?

Because they're temporarily embarrassed founders who could _totally_ see themselves having to make a decision like this.

To the same ends the capitalist class has if they choose. I think the risk is necessary to take, given how the alternative has worked out.

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