FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried Should Serve 40 to 50 Years in Prison, Prosecutors Say | Hacker News Reader

FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried Should Serve 40 to 50 Years in Prison, Prosecutors Say

wsj.com

48 pointstempsy124 comments

Hard to square with the lack of consequences (for those responsible) for the 2009 financial crisis.

Can you be more specific about those responsible?

Jamie Dimon should be in prison right now, for one.

Half of the big bank CEOS, and major wall street players should be in jail... they just have more money then Sam Bankman-Fried had, because he lost it all. If he had substantial resources outside FTC, do you think he would be in jail?

> If he had substantial resources outside FTC, do you think he would be in jail?

Yes. The brazenness of his fraud would land the most powerful Wall Street tycoon in jail.

In case the rose tint is coming on, this was his balance sheet [1][2].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/f05fe9f8-ca0a-48d5-8ef2-7a4d813af...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-14/ftx-s-...

Fair! His major issue was certainly not hiding it very well, if he hid it better that would have helped.

> major issue was certainly not hiding it very well, if he hid it better that would have helped

His major issue was stealing the money. Wall Street has no shortage of high fuckery, but frequency of outright embezzlement is fairly low. Not because the people are better. But because regulations make it hard to hide.

No, that wasn't it. As Matt Levine put it, if you have $16 billion in liabilities, and you have $16 billion in T-bonds, you're in a good situation. If it's instead $16 billion in Bitcoin, well, you're a crypto bank, so it's probably fit for your purpose. If it's $16 billion in shitcoins, your risk judgement is questionable.

But FTX was none of those, it was $16 billion in assets FTX made up--it cost FTX $0 to acquire those assets and the valuation was arbitrarily inflatable to $16 billion. So the $16 billion in dollars that FTX acquired that caused it to accrue $16 billion in liabilities went... somewhere in return for $0. That's fundamentally stealing.

In the global financial crisis, the banks largely committed the sins in the first paragraph: they had bad risk management, and fundamentally underestimated risk in certain markets. To a large degree, they didn't even hide their risks at all (indeed, a large part of the cascading nature of the crisis was everyone piecing together who was now most in trouble). What FTX did was something completely different, just pissing away the money while pretending it was still in a vault, and hoping nobody would open the vault to find nothing was in there.

The problem is proving the culpability of a particular individual, because it is the organizational structure that drives criminal acts. That's why big organizations have lawyers on their payrolls in order to provide policies to shield individuals. The only way to get around that is to use RICO. I don't think any US attorney wants to use RICO against any big business in the states, thanks to the revolving door.

> Jamie Dimon should be in prison right now

Dimon? Why?

Of all of big bank CEOs at the time, this is probably the least arguable case of a CEO that should have been sent to prison. JP Morgan was taking less relative risks than any of the other big banks at the time. It was the only big bank that largely avoided a major credit crunch during the crisis, as they got out of subprime in 2006, before the credit crisis hit. It was also the only bank out of the nine largest in the US at the time that didn't need TARP funds, which allowed them to use the TARP funds that they did receive to buy other banks and businesses.

Are you trolling? You think it happened by accident?

Get them too

It speaks to how outrageous the fraud he committed was. It is a very high bar one must clear.

If anyone attempts to whistleblow on the fraud that the banks have allowed for years as shown in the FinCEN files, then you will find yourself in a prison cell for exposing it. [0]

[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/fincen-file...

She whistleblew on the regulators to the media.

That is even worse that the regulators knew about the fraud that the banks have allowed and by someone reporting about it can land them in a prison cell.

> even worse that the regulators knew about the fraud

What fraud do you think they were covering up?

SARs are filed when money laundering is suspected. To the extent something was being covered up, it was money laundering. Not fraud.

> What fraud do you think they were covering up?

The fact that banks such as HSBC failed to flag and stop transactions to a ponzi scheme that they knew about with their 'AML' systems and processed it anyway. [0] This would never have been known before the leak and even worse that the regulators did nothing until the leak.

> SARs are filed when money laundering is suspected. To the extent something was being covered up, it was money laundering. Not fraud.

So not only just fraud that was covered up but money laundering and processing payments for mobsters and drug cartels which the banks allowed and failed to stop it.

This is getting even worse than imagined.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54225572

Came here to say exactly this. That financial crisis ruined countless lives. The dominos fell all around the world. Across the Atlantic in Ireland I knew of several suicides. Most of my friends were at the age where they had paired off, and got onto the property ladder with tiny, overpriced "starter homes". Why? For one, to get out of the rent trap. But mainly because they wanted to start a family. Most of my college buddies ended up sentenced to 15+ years of negative equity. People blamed them for making unsound investments, but they had already delayed having kids well into their late 30s, and had no choice. I know families with several teenage kids who never recovered financially. The big banks repackaged bullshit subprime mortgages into CDOs that the ratings agencies gave AAA+ ratings to.

Frankly, I think that the perpetrators didn't go to jail for the same reason that a huge number of Nazis avoided consequences after WWII: there were simply too many people complicit in it, but no chief architect. There was a simple choice: prosecute them all and lose the whole banking sector, or bail them out. So the government decided that the taxpayer would bail them out. The same tax players who lost homes and livelihoods. And they weren't just bailed out financially, the slate was scrubbed clean.

What Bankman Fried did was nothing in comparison. I believe should go to jail, but 50 years? That's probably more than first degree murder in most states.

I agree, everyone involved in that should've suffered the same consequences, or worse, but the next best time to start handing out real punishment is right now.

Based on how he was acting during trial, I assume he still thinks he's somehow getting out of this.

I am so confused by his weird persona.

Obviously he has to be smart, you don't make a multi-billion dollar company/fraud without being incredibly smart, but doesn't that generally mean an acceptance of reality?

He seems so disconnected from reality most of the time, like he is mentally ill almost.

That’s his act, so he doesn’t have to serve a full sentence.

"I reject your reality and substitute my own." I think you have to be smart to become truly nuts.

> Obviously he has to be smart, you don't make a multi-billion dollar company/fraud without being incredibly smart

I think we want this to be true. We want a meritocracy based on intelligence. But I’m very skeptical it’s true.

I think he could be a total moron combined with some money, some connections, luck, and the lack of the things that hold many of us back such as self doubt, fear, morals and ethics, and obeyance to the law.

Yeah, I think I agree. Many many examples of people who made it or almost made it, without being smart or lucky (WeWork CEO) or in the right place at the right time or able to deceive people (ie Elizabeth Holmes)

This is much closer to reality.

In my two decades of working Ive only seen people get rich by two things: risk taking and connections. These are real friends and not some media piece.

Risk taking can be bitcoin, deception or leveraged property ownership. Without morals and self doubt you get a way bigger field in the risk taking arena.

Rarely have I seen knowledge as a main factor, because renting knowledge-workers is easy and cheap.

you can't make it through an MIT physics degree while being a total moron. Same with the Jane Street interview process. he was at least a smart guy and probably a good trader.

now in some sense you can still be very smart but "a total moron" meaning you make stupid and bad decisions and ruin your life and cause all kinds of disasters.

my read on him is he was sharp, and able to succeed for a while as long as someone else put up guardrails that would compensate for his terrible judgment and executive functioning -- which you get in school or working for a large firm. when he struck out on his own, he lost all that, but his reputation + connections + stupid risk appetite took him far until he blew up.

> you can't make it through an MIT physics degree while being a total moron

Isn't he a legacy admission (different Ivy League, but the moral equivalent)? Which assistant professor will flunk the son of two tenured professors?

I think that he's just more criminally minded than most. This wasn't an overnight thing and he seemed to do quite a bit of press, lying through his teeth the whole time.

Also, he doesn't read books.

Based on the letter's they've sent his parents also think he is going to walk away from this

What about Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh? This wasn't just Sam Bankman-Fried and the rest should be rounded up for racketeering. Their plea deals were only with the Southern District of New York.

They plead guilty, which would have been the smart thing for SBF to do even if there was no deal on the table. At least he'd have avoided annoying the judge with hours of blatantly dishonest testimony.

Why is it acceptable to let people go so lightly just for snitching? They commited similar crimes.

So lightly as what? They haven't been sentenced yet

Because they collaborated with the prosecution. Without collaboration it's entirely possible that no one would've been found guilty.

It’s makes it harder for organizations like this to exist in the future. If you and your co-conspirators knew you were all getting the same sentence, no matter what, you’re not likely to snitch.

But if the option of plea deals is ever present, you’re more likely to get whistleblowers. Any single whistleblower make the whole thing tumble.

It's hard to tell what deals were cut by the Feds to get Bankman-Fried. Sometimes people get a relative slap on the wrist and it's because they provided a bunch of ammunition the government needed for its case to get the top target/s.

The government's sentencing memorandum and exhibits, including SBF tweets and other statements by the defendant:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

I'm curious if anyone has any idea - how much money is actually unaccounted for? Michael Lewis's book makes it seem like the money existed, but was all over the place, and that by the time all was said and done, they were basically in the black. But that was assuming investments didn't ever grow - they still had to have lost money somehow.

Wasn’t the issue that the “money” that was left was actually in the form of largely worthless cryptocurrency investments, some of which were issued by FTX themselves.

Which seems kinda silly. People willingly traded their USD for garbage that wasn't worth anything, and put their money into accounts any reasonable person would think is worthless.

He was really just serving a market for people trying to put their money into valueless garbage

I dunno, all kinds of fraudsters and scammers are "serving a market" if you think about it like that. I guess it remains to be seen whether what they did was considered legal or not. Very very probably not.

For a multitude of reasons, Lewis is an unreliable narrator...

Yes, leave only an accusation without supporting facts or ideas.

I lost a lot of respect for Lewis over the book. He gave a wildly charitable and apologetic take on SBF's blatant fraud and incompetence. I'd suggest reading it (or watching any related interviews with Lewis) -- but I don't think this is a particularly unpopular take.

Comes up in most (all?) reviews, like this one, where the subtitle reads:

> The Moneyball author develops a misguided soft spot for fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried

It reads like, with full knowledge now of what was really happening, that Lewis ate up all the lies and baloney he was fed the whole time he was interviewing SBF.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/25/going-infinite...

Just the first google result but anyone paying any attention is familiar with how stupid the Lewis story around SBF is: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/how-michael-lewis-go...

There are myriad other extremely easy to find criticisms of this particular Lewis book (and of his other books, too).

I am full aware of what some of the commentary was and have read the book myself. I don’t like SBF and I am not the fan of most of the books written by Lewis. I just expect more quality from a comment here, if you dont want to share the “multitude of reasons”, dont make the comment. Easy.

Sorry, I stopped being a "citations needed" responder a while ago. You can google for it pretty easily. TLDR, Lewis has been very friendly with everyone he writes about. Whether it's SBF or Tuohys from The Blind Side, he's shown a lack of objectivity, to put it mildly.

Sorry I stopped being a low effort comment kind of person. You shared an opinion, it’s not up to me to google it because your perspective is different than what might be found in a google search. If you don’t have interest in sharing your opinion don’t post a low quality comment.

Just ask nicely. "Could you provide a source for that claim?" No one is owed a citation in casual conversation; you're not holding them to an agreed upon standard, you're asking for a favor. So it's better to be polite and not escalate from a conversation to a debate or argument.

Sorry no. If you are going to share an opinion at least share why instead of saying “multitude of reasons”. It’s like any other low effort comment that adds nothing.

Please consider that your comment was also low effort, but turned the conversation in a more argumentative direction. To be frank with you, that's worse than a low effort comment that adds nothing; it detracts. It's better to downvote and/or flag such comments without responding than to respond while raising the temperature of the discussion.

My understanding is that the money is "back", but only because the Crypto holdings were frozen at the point of bankruptcy and the crypto prices have more than doubled since then.

So, account holders might get something approaching the dollar value of what they held two years ago, not what they "should" have got if they still held it today.

Let's see if it goes like MtGox where it takes more than a decade to pay out the money.

The hole is $8bn (that's counting real assets no shit tokens) which is probably going to be covered completely by their 8% stake in Anthropic that FTX bought for $500m. The lawyer fees for the bankruptcy are $1.5m per day.

I believe customers will be made whole but in dollars at time of bankruptcy

so if you had 1 bitcoin on ftx then you’re only going to get $15k or whatever the price was then not $70k

Not trying to defend or anything (what I read in those news on SBF doesn't cause any sympathy for him in me), just wondering - as the crimes committed here were committed in the open over some prolonged time, why those crimes weren't stopped by the law enforcement several years/billions (and decades of prison term) before that pretty late point? Kind of like with Madoff or 2008 - everybody knows that the things aren't kosher (and the professionals and the related law enforcement even know most of the details of how bad the things really are), yet let it go until it crashes - basically it looks like the main crime in such cases is the failure/crash itself not the cheating/scamming/etc. before it.

> it looks like the main crime in such cases is the failure/crash itself not the cheating/scamming/etc. before it

The stealing caused the crash.

The question is why the stealing is allowed to go for that long and massive and pretty much in the open until it results in the crash.

> question is why the stealing is allowed to go for that long and massive and pretty much in the open before the crash

FTX was unregulated. The people giving Bankman-Fried never bothered to ask questions, so there was literally nobody looking over his shoulder. Until the problems became apparent, it wasn’t anyone’s concern.

Madoff is more complicated, but it remains that he ran a lightly-regulated private fund. (And the banks that looked the other way paid dearly for it.)

>FTX was unregulated. The people giving Bankman-Fried

They were giving money either as donation - regulated, or as payment for services and goods - regulated, or as deposits - regulated, or as investment - regulated. Probably the only way it could have been unregulated if it were as gift, which it obviously wasn't.

>he ran a lightly-regulated private fund.

and everybody thought that he is "lightly" (if it can be applied to tens of billions of dollars) cheating like front-running or something like this, and they let him that "light cheating" for years and tens of billions of dollars until the crash.

Works where archive.ph is blocked:

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4350993939384&w=AhmXJ-SVjA...

The Government's Sentencing Memorandum:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

Exhibits:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

Question here: What is the purpose of a sentence this long?

I understand that for this type of crime the goal is deterrence rather than rehabilitation, but let's say we had a habit of locking up corrupt billionaires for 20 years instead of 50. I'd argue that the lost opportunity cost for people that wealthy (or really for anyone) that 20 years is as much a deterrent as 50 years, but at a lower cost to the tax payer.

Don’t forget his Billionaire status came from fraudulent activities (taking other people’s money).

This isn’t punishing entrepreneurs.

>20 years is as much a deterrent as 50 years, but at a lower cost to the tax payer.

The number of wealthy people getting those kinds of sentences is basically 0, so the cost to the taxpayer is a moot point.

but let's say we had a habit of locking up corrupt billionaires for 20 years

There's only about 3000 billionaires in the world. Again, cost is a moot point.

It’s a good question that seems to hit the same chord as the death penalty argument.

I don’t hold this view, but I think the answer is: the goal is punishment, not deterrence, nor rehabilitation. People want “justice” which, in their view, can only be served via harsh punishment.

Readers may be interested in this link, which is to all the SBF sentence-related markets on manifold.

Caveats: just like twitter follower counts, instagram like counts, hn upvotes, this is "play money", the mana amounts the traders bet here are numbers in a database, not real cash. Also the number of traders is fairly small.

The top markets have settled on these values:

  300 traders, The most likely time served is 20-30y

  270 traders, he'll be sentenced to 20y+, 86% 

  135 traders, he'll be sentenced to 50y+, 27%

https://manifold.markets/browse/sbf-trial-sentence?s=most-po...

He will deserve every year of that sentence.

This is predictable; he's been convicted of 2B1.1 crimes, which scale with monetary losses, which top out (in the tables) at, like, 500MM, and put you (by themselves) near the bottom of the sentencing table.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38123281

From the article:

> The federal probation department separately recommended a 100-year sentence for Mr. Bankman-Fried, 32, effectively a life sentence. But prosecutors said in the filing that sending him to prison for the rest of his life was not warranted, despite the severity of his crime, because of his relative youth.

So it looks like the prosecutors are coming in below the sentencing guidelines.

Good

Can’t wait to be 75 and read the newspaper seeing he just got released

He will get out much sooner.

So if he's sentenced to 40 years in federal court ... (this is federal court, right? I forgot)

Fed doesn't do parole. Best you can get typically is time for good behavior for like 15% reduction in length.

But there's a good chance he doesn't get sentenced to 40 years, that's just what the prosecutor asks for. We dunno yet.

The minimum for federal sentences is that you have to serve 2/3.

It’s 85%

Maybe the next president will pardon him for some bitcoin.

You're right, my mistake.

A federal inmate can theoretically get presidential clemency.

Obama granted almost 2000 clemencies. Biden, so far, about a dozen + 6500 for simple possession of MJ. Trump was in between with something over 200.

I guess that's a relevant point. He might be able to buy a pardon or clemency.

Trump had a particular way of picking

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/trump-clemency-recipient-phi...

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/19/ponzi-schemer-granted-clemen...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/us/politics/trump-pardon-...

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/trump-pa...

frauds, cons, ponzi schemes

You really think he will do the whole sentance? I will be shocked if he sees more than 5.

Federal prison sentences don't offer a lot of opportunities for early release--you get to shave of 54 days per year of served time, or in other words, he might be able to get out 7 years early were he sentenced for 50 years.

The only way he'll serve less than 5 years is if Trump is elected president and decides to pardon him because no one should go to prison merely for defrauding people out of billions of dollars.

Do you think he'll get a sentence that short, or that one of the next two presidencies will pardon him?

Seem too lenient

Yeah, like for stealing 11 million it would mean 14 to 18 day sentence... Which seems very very little for the amount.

Justice runs on a log scale, and the base is left for individual jurisdictions or judges to decide.

That’s silly in my opinion. I didn’t see any of the actual big wigs go to prison for 2008 but Sam is an easy target with the dual effect of vilifying cryptocurrencies.

Bigwigs have done many things, but most of them weren’t doing things like offering unregistered securities and lying about how they used customer funds for their own investments. Those are crimes in a way that other 2008-stuff generally wasn’t.

His crimes are closer to those of Bernie Madoff than, say, Jamie Dimon. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years.

That one's silly too. Unless someone is so damaged they're not capable of ever not harming others, (think psychopathic murderers) what's the point of sentences that long? Anything past 15 years or so effectively destroys their existing lives anyway. I think that crosses from punishment to unnecessary cruelty and stuffing prisons.

If you destroy other people’s lives why should yours be intact?

How did you get from "15 years already destroys their current lives" to "intact"?

Yes prisons, notorious for being over populated with those who ruined the lives of hundreds of people through multi billion dollar financial crimes.

That's the point, uniquely unsympathetic people get sentences that are about making us feel good for handing them out.

Add in Madoff's victims being rich and connected and you get 150 years.

Most of Madoff's victims were middle-class. Very few were rich. None were connected.

He was still getting away with the scam for years after the allegations started spreading.

There are no prisons dedicated explicitly to those people, so I'm not sure what are you talking about here.

They were being sarcastic. ;)

> what's the point of sentences that long?

Deterrence and retribution.

On incapacitation, however, can you really not see Bankman-Fried leaving prison in his forties and doing anything but running out to raise new capital? His position throughout the trial seemed to genuinely convey that he didn’t think he did wrong.

> can you really not see Bankman-Fried leaving prison in his forties and doing anything but running out to raise new capital?

Maybe. How about we try though and monitor his activity from time to time. There are other cases where person's ability to work with something is restricted for a limited time.

Otherwise, you can apply "can you not see X leaving prison and doing what they were jailed for" to everyone forever. Over a decade in jail is a long time to change your views. There's that whole thing about rehabilitation as well as punishment in the idea of prisons.

> what's the point of sentences that long?

Because FUCK this guy.

My understanding is that sbf's investors might even come out ahead. Sure that would be a consideration

It is not.

Sentencing takes so long because the judge is allowed to consider basically anything, and there's a whole data-gathering process to facilitate this. It's just not likely to be a major factor.

Right, it's like an entire second trial. But the guidelines give a pretty strong indication where the sentence is going to land. Either way: the nominal losses are what is most likely to control; in particular, if you steal a bunch of money, bet it all at the track, and make enough to pay back your victims, you're not getting credit.

FTX customers will get fairly little; maybe 20-30%. Investors will probably get nothing.

At the current rate the lawyers are burning cash while handling FTX's bankruptcy, it seems like the customers of FTX may owe them money.

Could you give us a name of one or two big wigs that in your opinion should've gotten 40-50 years in prison due to 2008?

All of them would be a good start.

You can't just mass imprison your enemies because they made you upset.

Richard Fuld and Henry Paulson for sure. Kerry Killinger and Christopher Cox for the encouragement of the others.

Because others have not been properly punished that means he doesn't have to be punished as well? Not sure I get your logic.

2008 was caused by the confluence of irresponsible political AND financial decisions. Irresponsible and illegal aren't the same thing.

Legal and right are also not the same thing. I hope laws changed as a result.

Definitely not the same thing, agreed. My only point being this is why the 'big-wigs' aren't in jail.

Agreed, not sure why you’re being downvoted. As if it’s your fault they weren’t jailed.

The mob is fickle :)

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