When You Come Upon A Strange Op... SBF and the Crypto's Crisis
Or, how the Bahamas became an American protectorate
Reading over and trying to parse what happened when it concerns FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, I’m left wondering what really happened and why. So I’m turning to thinking and reading, very carefully.
Careful students of international relations noticed something odd a few months ago when Bahamas voted to become a republic. The move happened with little fanfare and even with the tacit support of Prince Williams who supported the decision to ditch the monarchy during his controversial trip to the Caribbean.
There are some 40 million souls living mostly peacefully, albeit somewhat impoverished, in the Caribbean. That’s a lot of people — more than there are Canadians or Texans even!— and many of them have close ties to the United States in one form or another, legally or illegally. (I remember reading at once point that something like one in three Jamaicans have lived in the U.S.) These Caribbean dwellers also belong, in one form or another, to AUKUS — and not to the monarchy! — given that many of them remained British colonies up to living memory. Some of them remain a part of the British Empire, de facto and de jure to this very day. One of the companies I invested in, alongside some British friends, patrols the waters of the Bahamas for government purposes unknown. The Bahamas is only 50 miles from the Florida coast and there are, if demographers can be believed, only 400,000 people or so who live there.
For the American empire, the Caribbean is both remote and close, paradoxically as that sounds. It’s not for nothing that Jeffrey Epstein ran his operations from U.S. Virgin Islands — the paradisiacal hinterlands of the American Empire or that there are seemingly all kinds of strange ops running in Puerto Rico, involving among other people the strange Mr. Brock Pierce of Mighty Duck Fame, who I once had occasion to meet through, of all people, Steve Bannon, who purportedly worked with Pierce in China. What game is he running in boosting crypto in New York State?
In much the same way that Ukraine, Hong Kong, or Taiwan has become a battleground so too have The Bahamas become a sort of land close to but not quite of the American Empire. And who could forget the wanton humiliation by Xi Jinping of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Canada is very Chinese as anyone who has dealt with its property markets knows well. Binance’s Changpeng Zhao was educated at McGill, Canada’s premier university.
Mexico, too, is seemingly increasingly Chinese, with its close ties to “Chinaloa” drug cartels — though it looks as if even President AMLO is rolling back Chinese involvement in the strategic asset of lithium. How will that affect Elon Musk’s very Chinese Tesla? Not well, I’d imagine. Shares are down quite a bit.
Is The Bahamas Chinese too? Not yet. But there are seemingly concerns on the horizon, especially as concerns deepwater ports and high end real estate. Indeed I think short seller Marc Cohodes is right to highlight the weird Chinese intelligence connections to FTX, like his childhood friend Gary Wang who was seemingly the tech brains of the operation. Wang and SBF launched their crypto hedge fund in Hong Kong, a den of criminality that has recently been reabsorbed into the Chinese empire. What else was going on there with all that coding? Bankman-Fried told Insider that he is not a good coder: "I don't code. I'm trash. I have not written any of FTX's code base. That's all a lot of other really impressive people at FTX. That's not me at all."
Lots of people mocked Sequoia’s absurd statements about how they did their due diligence but Sequoia was fawning over Sam Bankman-Fried because they were supposed to.
Sequoia, backed as it is by China, is a front for Chinese interests. We’ve discussed them a lot in the past and spent especially close attention to its new leader, Roelof Botha and his families ties to China through South African politics and his Chinese wife.
My guess is that, SBF, like the Israeli IDF officer-turned-entrepreneur Adam Neumann, won’t serve any time in jail because these Chinese-backed funds don’t want to draw attention to themselves and all the weird financial behavior that they are doing. The immediate focus, largely by those who have their own ties to China, like Marc Andreessen or Elon Musk, on jailing SBF raises the question of whether or not the Silicon Valley powers that be want SBF to be their scapegoat and to continue on with business as usual.
I, for one, want this story to go on and on and on. I want to know everything about everything. And nothing less than the real story will do.
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So knowing that the Bahamas are important to China precisely because they are close to America is the genesis of a great op which just took place. Did SBF just rip off a bunch of Chinese and Chisraeli venture funds? I suspect he did (in fact) and yes, I can’t help but smile, and having pitched a lot of these fronts under the mistaken view that they were venture funds and not venture frauds, I’m almost ready to sing the ballad of SBF who, in this telling, is a sort of millennial Robin hood delivering justice to the Gen Xploiters. It’s also not at all surprising that a Jewish autist from the Bay Area was so expert in playing the overstuffed venture funds. In this, he’s not much different from the Jewish Bay Area criminals Zachary Apte and Jessica Richman behind Ubiome. What, you think, the venture funds are actually interested in new ideas? Ha! No, they back the right entrepreneurs from the right schools with the right pedigrees. In other words: it’s FOMO all the way down.
Alas, no, I don’t think that Sam Bankman-Fried was in on it — an MIT grad with Stanford professors never stood a chance of being anything other than a traitor — but I do think that the cryptocurrency world has all manner of foreign and domestic deep state intrigue. I know more than I care to admit about this subject. The move by Binance’s Changpeng Zhao to move against FTX should be seen as a fight over who gets to launder the cash of these other Asian criminals.
Now a lawyer friend of mine has been tasked with representing the creditors in the FTX bankruptcy and so I’ve been digging into the sorts of people who have been harmed by the FTX folly.
What you’ll notice rather quickly is that relatively few of the people harmed by the FTX implosion are Americans. What’s more those relatively few affected seem not to have lost that much money in the grand scheme of things. That’s not to say that the $800 of some 25-year-old in Nashville isn’t important but it’s probably not the most important thing. I suspect most Americans will be paid off.
Maybe, just maybe, the decision of Binance to take out FTX was an intra-intelligence agency fight over who got to steal the money from Japan, Singapore and Korea. Could it be that, after years of being clowned by the weaponized autists, that America turned to its own domestic supply and ran an op to get all the money from the foreigners which it then turned into expensive, Bahamian real estate? Many of these $300M+ properties are in gated communities — exactly the sort of place you’d store Americans who were a part of the expeditionary force for taking over the Bahamas.
And right on queue, SBF is set to speak at the very insidery DealBrook.
It’s a big club and you’re not in it… to borrow George Carlin’s phrase.
SBF’s comments to that Vox reporter shows the kind of sociopathic Chinese-ness at play.
Asked about his ethical commitments, he said they were “what reputations are made of” and equated them to a “dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Who speaks this way? “We woke Westerners”? Is he referring to Baizuo?
I suspect that SBF tripped a wire and that the wire was moving his firm from Hong Kong to the Bahamas. I suspect that that was when the whole thing began to unravel.
Here’s how The Washington Post describes it:
In October 2021, Bankman-Fried and his crew landed in the Bahamas with the force of a conquering power.
FTX had just been valued at $25 billion after raising $420 million from major investors, including the Ontario teachers’ pension plan, in a move that Bankman-Fried had said cemented FTX as “the world’s most transparent” crypto exchange.
Bitcoin had just reached a record high at $66,000, and FTX had become one of the crypto industry’s biggest names thanks to a gusher of promotional spending: The Miami Heat basketball team played in the FTX Arena, and Major League Baseball umpires wore the crypto exchange’s logo on their arms.
Bankman-Fried that month had just left Hong Kong for the Bahamas, citing the tropical archipelago’s permissive regulations around both crypto trading and pandemic-era travel — important, given Bankman-Fried’s frequent international investor meetings and media tours.
The Bahamas, a former British colony comprising hundreds of islands 45 minutes from the Florida coast, has for decades been a darling of American tourists for its scenic beaches — and of offshore financial engineers and money launderers for its minimal taxes and corporate disclosure rules.
Bankman-Fried’s FTX spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying up top-grade real estate across the Bahamas’ most populous island, New Providence, including offices, apartments and vacation homes used by FTX’s senior executives, according to property records and FTX attorneys.
And once word got out that Bankman-Friedman’s FTX had failed so spectacularly, a number of buyers emerged offering to pay cash.
…some in the Bahamas have seen a positive side. On the day the bankruptcy became public, Philip Hillier, an agent with the Christie’s International Real Estate brokerage in the Bahamas, began fielding calls from buyers wanting to snap up FTX’s vast property holdings before they were liquidated.
“Literally, the day it occurred, they called and said, ‘Let me know. I will pay cash,’” Hillier said. “People see opportunity.”
Nature is healing after crypto. We’re returning to the real world.