Authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Nov. 8 midterm elections were a watershed in modern American history. The implications of choosing a president whom the public strongly disapproves of and is generally a failure, over a controversial but undoubtedly capable and successful ex-president, are very serious.

That the Democrats and their lock-step allies in the national media succeeded in putting across the colossal smear that former President Donald Trump is a supporter of violence and a threat to the constitutional system could be interpreted as a long step toward the national suicide that Abraham Lincoln foresaw is the only way in which the American project could perish.

Former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump a traitor; former National Intelligence Director James Clapper declared as a matter of settled fact that Trump was a Russian intelligence asset. The corruption of the FBI and the intelligence agencies in the dissemination of the infamous Steele dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign as authentic intelligence revealing Trump as completely unsuited to public office and the profound dishonesty of former FBI Director James Comey in white-washing Clinton’s alleged destruction of subpoenaed evidence and his recourse to surveillance granted in response to false affidavits while attempting to destroy the Trump presidency have escaped legal retribution by the somnambulant Durham investigation, and there will be no retribution for any of it.

Yet, Trump is the tainted protagonist. The Russian collusion hoax was the most monstrous defamation ever inflicted on a U.S. president. The spurious impeachment of him, for an innocuous telephone call to the president of Ukraine about the commercial activities of the Biden family in his country—now notorious but probably a matter of political suppression of the normal working of American justice—was in the same category of misuse of the political system for the lowest and most destructive partisan ends.

It’s obvious that the potentially millions of harvested ballots that couldn’t be verified in the 2020 presidential election could easily have provided the 50,000 vote switchover needed in Pennsylvania and two other states to flip that election to Trump in the Electoral College. The dishonesty of the universal media stone wall that 2020 was a pristine presidential election is compounded by the judiciary’s abdication of its coequal role in government and reassertion of its refusal to consider overturning the apparent presidential election result.

Democratic strategists deserve a near-perfect score for tactical judgment: They rounded up a big majority among young voters by hammering the abortion issue, emphasizing the reduction in marijuana penalties, and championing student loan forgiveness. This and the malicious and unctuous pressing of the safety of democracy as a euphemism for the defamatory nonsense that Trump was a menace to the Constitution turned the minds of an adequate number of voters to produce a dangerously perverse result. They have pretty well given up the former slanders that Trump is a racist, homophobe, and misogynist.

Tabulating all of the votes cast for all offices contested last week, the Republicans outpolled the Democrats all over. The Democrats only took what they needed. Politics is a notoriously unjust occupation; Trump is objectively perhaps among the 10 most successful holders of that office. But he did great harm to himself by his lack of public relations judgment, and this fact in the hands of the political and social media monopoly of his enemies working with the strategists and saboteurs in the Democratic leadership have unfortunately won the match.

But even the voters who rendered such an ambiguous result on Nov. 8 have betrayed a concern that the incompetence of the Biden administration, with the duplicity of the Democratic congressional leaders, can’t go on indefinitely. But they’ve demonstrated that Trump isn’t the man to stop them and to tear the government apart and repopulate it with people with clean hands.

There’s still an important place for Trump to complete the task that he commenced of transporting the Republican Party from the country clubs to the championship of the disadvantaged and working and middle class of America, and to cleaning out the bipartisan infestation of placemen and decayed servitors of the federal political and administrative state. But the former president is far from blameless in his own misfortunes. He warned of the dangers of ballot harvesting in 2020 but was completely inadequate in taking preventive measures or even following up efficiently to challenge the vulnerable points. Instead, we had the well-intended but completely ineffectual efforts of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell. In order to make his case plausibly, he absolutely had to avoid precisely the sort of outrage that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021. But the fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser paid no attention to Trump’s warnings that matters could get out of hand and his offer of 20,000 National Guardsmen indicates the Democrats’ role was a good deal less innocent than they pretend.

But Trump knew what desperate and sleazy people he was dealing with, and he doesn’t have a credible excuse for being so reckless. This condemned him to having to continue to emphasize the 2020 election irregularities in order to justify his calling forth such a huge and discontented crowd at the Washington Elipse on Jan. 6, 2021. Of course, he no more sought an insurrection than Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did.

The only way to complete Trump’s work and root out and politically exterminate those who have corrupted the intelligence and justice arms of the federal government and have dragooned the contemptible but still insidiously influential national political media in full metal jacket Trump-hate, is for Trump to identify and support the successor whom he favors as Republican presidential candidate.

He shouldn’t go back to his 2016 playbook and insult all the other prominent Republicans. He has exchanged enough fire with his Republican enemies, contemptible though many of them are, and did well to win the first round and come so close in the second. The third round last week was an acute disappointment, and the Republican Party doesn’t need, and the American public doesn’t wish for, an internecine war on the scale that would rage if Trump sought another presidential nomination. But another candidate plausibly pledged to the enactment of the Trump program and supported by Trump but not stigmatized by him, could lead the desperately needed national political purgation.

Read more here…

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

The increasingly irrelevant G20 Summit concluded with sure signs that BRICS+ will be the way forward for Global South cooperation…

The redeeming quality of a tense G20 held in Bali – otherwise managed by laudable Indonesian graciousness – was to sharply define which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

That was encapsulated in the Summit’s two highlights: the much anticipated China-US presidential meeting – representing the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century – and the final G20 statement.

The 3-hour, 30-minute-long face-to-face meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden – requested by the White House – took place at the Chinese delegation’s residence in Bali, and not at the G20 venue at the luxury Apurva Kempinski in Nusa Dua.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concisely outlined what really mattered. Specifically, Xi told Biden that Taiwan independence is simply out of the question. Xi also expressed hope that NATO, the EU, and the US will engage in “comprehensive dialogue” with Russia. Instead of confrontation, the Chinese president chose to highlight the layers of common interest and cooperation.

Biden, according to the Chinese, made several points. The US does not seek a New Cold War; does not support “Taiwan independence;” does not support “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”; does not seek “decoupling” from China; and does not want to contain Beijing.

However, the recent record shows Xi has few reasons to take Biden at face value.

The final G20 statement was an even fuzzier matter: the result of arduous compromise.

As much as the G20 is self-described as “the premier forum for global economic cooperation,” engaged to “address the world’s major economic challenges,” the G7 inside the G20 in Bali had the summit de facto hijacked by war. “War” gets almost double the number of mentions in the statement compared to “food” after all.

The collective west, including the Japanese vassal state, was bent on including the war in Ukraine and its “economic impacts” – especially the food and energy crisis – in the statement. Yet without offering even a shade of context, related to NATO expansion. What mattered was to blame Russia – for everything.

The Global South effect

It was up to this year’s G20 host Indonesia – and the next host, India – to exercise trademark Asian politeness and consensus building. Jakarta and New Delhi worked extremely hard to find wording that would be acceptable to both Moscow and Beijing. Call it the Global South effect.

Still, China wanted changes in the wording. This was opposed by western states, while Russia did not review the last-minute wording because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already departed.

On point 3 out of 52, the statement “expresses its deepest regret over the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands the complete and unconditional withdrawal of armed forces from the territory of Ukraine.”

“Russian aggression” is the standard NATO mantra – not shared by virtually the whole Global South.

The statement draws a direct correlation between the war and a non-contextualized “aggravation of pressing problems in the global economy – slowing economic growth, rising inflation, disruption of supply chains, worsening energy, and food security, increased risks to financial stability.”

As for this passage, it could not be more self-evident: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible. The peaceful resolution of conflicts, efforts to address crises, as well as diplomacy and dialogue, are vital. Today’s era must not be of war.”

This is ironic given that NATO and its public relations department, the EU, “represented” by the unelected eurocrats of the European Commission, don’t do “diplomacy and dialogue.”

Fixated with war

Instead the US, which controls NATO, has been weaponizing Ukraine, since March, by a whopping $91.3 billion, including the latest presidential request, this month, of $37.7 billion. That happens to be 33 percent more than Russia’s total (italics mine) military spending for 2022.

Extra evidence of the Bali Summit being hijacked by “war” was provided by the emergency meeting, called by the US, to debate what ended up being a Ukrainian S-300 missile falling on a Polish farm, and not the start of WWIII like some tabloids hysterically suggested.

Tellingly, there was absolutely no one from the Global South in the meeting – the sole Asian nation being the Japanese vassal, part of the G7.

Compounding the picture, we had the sinister Davos master Klaus Schwab once again impersonating a Bond villain at the B20 business forum, selling his Great Reset agenda of “rebuilding the world” through pandemics, famines, climate change, cyber attacks, and – of course – wars.

As if this was not ominous enough, Davos and its World Economic Forum are now ordering Africa – completely excluded from the G20 – to pay $2.8 trillion to “meet its obligations” under the Paris Agreement to minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

The demise of the G20 as we know it

The serious fracture between Global North and Global South, so evident in Bali, had already been suggested in Phnom Penh, as Cambodia hosted the East Asia Summit this past weekend.

The 10 members of ASEAN had made it very clear they remain unwilling to follow the US and the G7 in their collective demonization of Russia and in many aspects China.

The Southeast Asians are also not exactly excited by the US-concocted IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), which will be irrelevant in terms of slowing down China’s extensive trade and connectivity across Southeast Asia.

And it gets worse. The self-described “leader of the free world” is shunning the extremely important APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Bangkok at the end of this week.

For very sensitive and sophisticated Asian cultures, this is seen as an affront. APEC, established way back in 1990s to promote trade across the Pacific Rim, is about serious Asia-Pacific business, not Americanized “Indo-Pacific” militarization.

The snub follows Biden’s latest blunder when he erroneously addressed Cambodia’s Hun Sen as “prime minister of Colombia” at the summit in Phnom Penh.

Lining up to join BRICS

It is safe to say that the G20 may have plunged into an irretrievable path toward irrelevancy. Even before the current Southeast Asian summit wave – in Phnom Penh, Bali and Bangkok – Lavrov had already signaled what comes next when he noted that “over a dozen countries” have applied to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Iran, Argentina, and Algeria have formally applied: Iran, alongside Russia, India, and China, is already part of the Eurasian Quad that really matters.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan are extremely interested in becoming members. Indonesia just applied, in Bali. And then there’s the next wave: Kazakhstan, UAE, Thailand (possibly applying this weekend in Bangkok), Nigeria, Senegal, and Nicaragua.

It’s crucial to note that all of the above sent their Finance Ministers to a BRICS Expansion dialogue in May. A short but serious appraisal of the candidates reveals an astonishing unity in diversity.

Lavrov himself noted that it will take time for the current five BRICS to analyze the immense geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of expanding to the point of virtually reaching the size of the G20 – and without the collective west.

What unites the candidates above all is the possession of massive natural resources: oil and gas, precious metals, rare earths, rare minerals, coal, solar power, timber, agricultural land, fisheries, and fresh water. That’s the imperative when it comes to designing a new resource-based reserve currency to bypass the US dollar.

Let’s assume that it may take up to 2025 to have this new BRICS+ configuration up and running. That would represent roughly 45 percent of confirmed global oil reserves and over 60 percent of confirmed global gas reserves (and that will balloon if gas republic Turkmenistan later joins the group).

The combined GDP – in today’s figures – would be roughly $29.35 trillion; much larger than the US ($23 trillion) and at least double the EU ($14.5 trillion, and falling).

As it stands, BRICS account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of GDP. BRICS+ would congregate 4.257 billion people: over 50 percent of the total global population as it stands.

BRI embraces BRICS+

BRICS+ will be striving towards interconnection with a maze of institutions: the most important are the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), itself featuring a list of players itching to become full members; strategic OPEC+, de facto led by Russia and Saudi Arabia; and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s overarching trade and foreign policy framework for the 21st century. It is worth pointing out that early all crucial Asian players have joined the BRI.

Then there are the close links of BRICS with a plethora of regional trade blocs: ASEAN, Mercosur, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Arab Trade Zone, African Continental Free Trade Area, ALBA, SAARC, and last but not least the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest trade deal on the planet, which includes a majority of BRI partners.

BRICS+ and BRI is a match everywhere you look at it – from West Asia and Central Asia to the Southeast Asians (especially Indonesia and Thailand). The multiplier effect will be key – as BRI members will be inevitably attracting more candidates for BRICS+.

This will inevitably lead to a second wave of BRICS+ hopefuls including, most certainly, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, three more Central Asians (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and gas republic Turkmenistan), Pakistan, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, and in Latin America, a hefty contingent featuring Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the role of the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB) as well as the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be enhanced – coordinating infrastructure loans across the spectrum, as BRICS+ will be increasingly shunning dictates imposed by the US-dominated IMF and the World Bank.

All of the above barely sketches the width and depth of the geopolitical and geoeconomic realignments further on down the road – affecting every nook and cranny of global trade and supply chain networks. The G7’s obsession in isolating and/or containing the top Eurasian players is turning on itself in the framework of the G20. In the end, it’s the G7 that may be isolated by the BRICS+ irresistible force.

Leftists are now scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to arguments in favor of reparations for slavery.  This week, Democrat House Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from the 18th Congressional District surrounding Houston, Texas (one of the only blue districts in the entire state), “demanded” that reparations be made. 

Her argument?  Lee presents the usual debunked social justice narratives claiming that the generations of today are somehow responsible for and benefit from the trespasses of a minority of slave owners who lived centuries ago (Only 1.4% of the population of the US were slave owners in 1860 right before the Civil War according to stats derived from the Census Bureau – This is a number the media continually claims is “not a proper metric,” and yet it is a mathematical fact.  Even if one includes the entire extended family of each slave owner in the metric as beneficiaries, the number is still only 7.4% of the population).   

Lee, who has a noted habit of making some of the dumbest comments of any congressional representative, also insists that black Americans would have had a lesser transmission rate and death rate from covid if they had been paid reparations in advance:

Lee does not cite the specific Harvard study she mentions in her speech that supposedly supports her assertion, but with social justice politics invading scientific inquiry the past few years, it is highly likely that said study is biased and holds no basis in fact.  One could say that ANY person might get better medical treatment if they had more money, but that is the extent of the argument and it has nothing to do with race or reparations or covid for that matter. 

As with most things, equity is a fantasy because nature does not operate on fairness.  Covid is not fair, just as life is not fair.  The reparations game has grown tiresome, most of all because every race, every culture and every religion has faced tyranny and slavery in the past.  There are no exceptions.  Trying to maintain a running tally of who wronged who over thousands of years is impossible and pointless. 

The political left prides itself on being “progressive” to the point that they seek to tear down the past and not let history or heritage determine the future.  Yet, they continue to cling like parasites to their own incomplete version of the history of slavery as a means to get free handouts for many years to come.  This is not progressive, this is regressive and holds our society back from true racial equality in which everyone’s future is decided by their effort and their merit, not the color of their skin.     

Authored by Scott Hill via BombThrower.com,

The dust hasn’t settled, but the smoke is beginning to clear, somewhat… Here’s WTF just happened, and what happens next…

On November 2nd Coindesk published a leaked balance sheet from FTX affiliated market maker Alameda Research.

Ten days later the third largest Crypto exchange in the world was bankrupt and its founder was under international investigation for fraud.

In this article I’ll go through how Crypto giant FTX fell apart. There is a lot of backstory to this situation which I’ll cover in a following article, discussing the beginnings of Alameda research and the story of how a sketchy hedge fund turned into a major exchange.

As you’ve no doubt heard repeatedly this week, self custody of your Crypto is the safest approach until we know who is insolvent and the extent of the contagion. If you’re not confident with self custody, Coinbase and Kraken seem to be the safest Crypto exchanges, but that is still a counterparty risk that I’m not willing to take personally in these market conditions.

The Balance Sheet Leak

The exclusive scoop from Coindesk looked bad for Alameda Research. The firm, which performed market making on FTX as well as taking directional bets and venture capital investments, seemed insolvent on a realized value basis.

Their balance showed $14.6 billion in assets held against $8 billion in liabilities. On paper solvent on a mark-to-market basis, but digging in there was no way that mark was reasonable.

The most egregious example was $5.82 billion worth of FTT tokens on the asset side, around a third locked and the rest unlocked and available to trade. FTT is a token created by FTX, a sort of pseudo-equity token which represented some share of the exchange revenues. Kind of.

FTX had been doing periodic buybacks of the token which were supposed to represent a distribution of exchange revenues to holders. Holding the token also entitled traders to a discount on trading fees. The token was at the time worth around $26. At its peak it was worth around $80.

The main thing that FTT was used for though, was pledging as collateral by FTX and Alameda. 

You read that right, a token which the exchange invented a little over 3 years ago was used as collateral for loans. We know for sure that it was acceptable collateral in various Solana DeFi protocols, which FTX had a significant amount of influence over; but reports are also surfacing that it may have been used to purchase real estate in the Bahamas and quite possibly with various institutional Crypto lending like Genesis which is now facing major problems.

The problem with FTT

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using Crypto tokens as collateral if there is a robust and deep market pricing them. If the loan goes bad, lenders can seize the collateral and sell it off, covering some of their loss.

FTT didn’t have a deep and robust market.

The “flywheel” scheme – via Dirty Bubble Media

There was barely any volume. There was barely any liquidity. If a lender had to sell a large volume in a hurry there weren’t any buyers ready to step in.

While Alameda was claiming to have $5.82 billion of its balance sheet held in FTT tokens, the entire available market cap was less than $4 billion.

Read that again, Alameda’s balance sheet held more than the entire market cap of FTT. 

So this wasn’t a situation where a lender might make a loss on selling the collateral, this was a situation where there were potentially billions in loans floating around in the Crypto ecosystem with essentially no collateral that could be liquidated without detonating the market.

Just to top it off, some of this FTT was likely pledged to multiple lenders.

Industry Reaction

The initial reaction was general indifference. Alameda looked like it was playing with fire and had gone all in on the exchange token for its sister company FTX alongside various other FTX supported coins like Solana and Serum. It was an open secret in the industry that Alameda and FTX were more intertwined than they claimed, but if push came to shove it was assumed that Alameda would be allowed to fail and FTX would continue being the highly profitable exchange that everyone assumed it was.

FTX was highly profitable, right?

There were a few that were calling the bluff, but the main gripes were conflict of interest within FTX related companies and unsavory business practices by FTX, trading against customer positions and liquidating accounts improperly. The usual bucket shop tricks. No one seemed to be expecting a total insolvency across the FTX group of companies.

But still something didn’t feel right. Caroline Ellison, the newly appointed CEO of Alameda Research tried to calm fears on Twitter, claiming that the leaked balance sheet was only a partial balance sheet, there were another $10 billion in assets elsewhere within the corporate structure, and they’ve paid down most of their loans.

It was a strange and deeply unsettling response, shrugging the issue off as if the industry should just take her at her word.

Enter the CZ Dragon

Even CZ, the CEO of rival exchange Binance, didn’t seem to be suggesting that FTX was in trouble. Late on Sunday November 6 CZ announced that he would be liquidating the FTT held by Binance.

All $500 million of it.

Binance had been the sole investor in the seed round for FTX.  In 2021 they were bought out for $2.1 billion in cash and FTT tokens. This alone wasn’t enough to push markets into panic. CZ said he would do this over a number of months, carefully and slowly in an attempt to “minimize the market impact”. In a follow up tweet, CZ said that he was doing “post-exit risk management, learning from Luna”

Everyone in Crypto knew what he meant by “learning from Luna”

In May Luna detonated, dropping to zero. The protocol is now seen as a deeply flawed project in the best possible light and a blatant ponzi scheme in the more realistic assessment.

Did CZ, the most powerful man in Crypto just call FTX a ponzi scheme?

Panic

Crypto industry figures were in disbelief. Surely FTX, the darling of the industry, was a highly profitable, solvent and legitimate business. But the reaction was off and deeply troubling. The CEO of Alameda Research quickly asked CZ if she could buy all of the FTT tokens off-market at a price of $22.

The market smelled blood.

Over the course of the next few hours FTT was aggressively shorted, Caroline had put a floor under it at $22 and traders were going to bleed Alameda dry defending that mark. Why did $22 matter? It’s only conjecture, but it seems likely that below $22 Alameda would be liquidated by its lenders and a cascade of FTT tokens would need to be sold into a market unwilling to buy them, flattening the firm.

But traders only thought they were going after Alameda, the predatory market maker.

 In hindsight it’s obvious, you shouldn’t short an exchange token to death on the exchange that issued it, but FTX was the main venue for the fight for $22. A huge amount of volume flowed through the order books and everyone was looking forward to getting paid as the token dropped, first to $18 and later to $6.

While the traders were battling it out, regular users were getting out.

FTX experienced massive outflows and on-chain analysis showed some deeply troubling signs. Alameda was pulling liquidity from everywhere. Every dollar that was deployed in DeFi got pulled. Weird tokens got dumped. But the liquidity wasn’t going into Alameda’s wallet, it was going into FTX wallets to pay customers.

Surely FTX wasn’t funding customer withdrawals from Alameda’s DeFi degen positions?

FTX was supposed to be a full reserve exchange. As an even higher bar, the terms of depositing with FTX were that customers retained title to their assets. Assets were held on trust, they weren’t supposed to be lent out or touched except as directed by the customer.

SBF concedes

On Sunday afternoon, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the CEO of FTX said that the problems with the Alameda balance sheet were just “unfounded rumors”. He explained that FTX had processed billions of dollars in withdrawals and that they would continue to do so. He claimed that they were hitting node capacity, something that I’ve never heard of, and needed to slow down withdrawals.

By Sunday night, withdrawals of some assets had stopped entirely, but there was no announcement from FTX. Radio silence from the team.

We now know that during this period SBF was frantically going to investors to do an emergency fundraise of between $6-10 billion dollars. The terms which later leaked were insane. It was obvious that no lawyer had reviewed these documents.

They seemed to be written by a child, imitating a businessman, who was in way over his head.

Industry insiders at the time thought that FTX had likely lost some amount of user funds, would need to take a loan to cover them and could move on with rebuilding trust. We were shocked to wake up on Tuesday to the news that Binance had made an offer to buy out FTX entirely, subject to due diligence. This isn’t what a rescue package for a competently run business looks like.

This was a fire sale of a dumpster fire.

The previous day SBF had claimed his exchange was fully solvent, just having minor liquidity issues. The next day he was handing the keys to their main rival. Now that balance sheets have been leaked for FTX we know what Binance would have seen as soon as they started their diligence, a balance sheet crammed with dodgy tokens and full of holes, unaudited and put together in excel with no real supporting evidence.

The rumored sale price was one dollar.

CZ quickly walked away from the deal, citing misuse of customer funds and regulatory concerns; leaving SBF to fix his own mess. With the exchange still operational, but withdrawals closed, SBF posted yet another long thread trying to talk his way out of the problem, claiming to be trying to set everything straight and get emergency funding. While he had not yet admitted that it was all over, he did make a bizarre reference to CZ “well played; you won”

As we came to learn later, for this sociopath that’s all it was, just a game to be won or lost.

The Insanity Begins

The rejection of the deal from Binance was the first mention of misuse of customer funds. Until then there was speculation that there was a minor balance sheet hole, remember, no one knew at that time that SBF had been seeking $6-10 billion in emergency funding. The next day the news started pouring in.

Reuters reported that there was a secret back door in the accounting at FTX which allowed customer funds to be moved around without alerting anyone. It also claimed that $10 billion dollars worth of customer funds had been secretly moved to Alameda.

SBF remained silent, but elsewhere there was chaos. Alameda funds were moving around frantically on chain, placing gigantic bets and actively trading.

Was SBF trying to trade out of it?

Tether put a stop to this later in the day, freezing Alameda’s funds on the request of law enforcement.

On the exchange the chaos was even worse. Justin Sun the founder of Tron had shown up to offer to redeem Tron tokens trapped on FTX. Prices spiked as customers flocked to get cents on the dollar via this exit ramp. There was talk of taking complicated cross-platform trades to make a synthetic exit ramp.

The Bahamas Loophole

As the insanity deepened, FTX posted on Twitter that they were processing a small amount of withdrawals to customers in the Bahamas as requested by local authorities. A week later we found out this was a lie, there was no request, but even at the time it seemed likely to be a way for insiders to exit their funds before the inevitable bankruptcy.

Suddenly, traders with stuck funds were desperately trying to obtain a fraudulent Bahamian passport and complete identity checks in the Bahamas. Some even managed to do it apparently and successfully withdrew funds. Black market prices on passports spiked and a secondary market for trapped funds emerged, with accounts trading for 15 cents on the dollar.

NFTs were being traded for entire balances in order to move the funds to an account which could still withdraw.

On the actual exchange things were just as chaotic. Traders with trapped funds were treating their accounts like paper money, trading nonsense on high leverage and dislocating markets. FTX was removed from pricing feeds to restore order elsewhere.

This was the first time in the whole saga that it became clear, it was all over for FTX.

FTX US halts withdrawals

This entire time the story had been that FTX US was a separate entity. Their funds were firewalled off from FTX international. The exchange remained open for withdrawals and appeared to be functioning properly.

This relative calm on the US side of the company instilled some faith. Surely, despite the havoc going on in the Bahamas, the US exchange was well regulated. Surely, the books were audited and no client funds could go missing in the US.

On Thursday afternoon, FTX US halted withdrawals.

Bankruptcy and the Hack

On Friday morning SBF resurfaced and announced that FTX would be put into bankruptcy. The motion was filed in the US and included FTX US. It would later be revealed that SBF had stepped down as CEO and John J Ray III, a lawyer famous for taking over Enron post-collapse, would be similarly guiding FTX through bankruptcy. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, it was finally done.

But the fun and games weren’t over

Shortly after the bankruptcy was announced funds started moving on-chain. A lot of funds. Over $600 million left FTX affiliated wallets, moving to fresh wallets. The speculation was that there was a hack, perhaps by an insider looking to get the last of what they could out of FTX.

It quickly became clear that there were two teams working. One appeared to have simply moved worthless tokens into storage, a plausible move by a “white hat” or good guy team seeking to preserve user funds from a compromised system.

The other team, the “black hat” team, took the vast majority of the $600 million and moved it all into Ethereum DeFi, trading other coins into Ethereum tokens and consolidating them all together. This consolidation took place across multiple blockchains and traded with reckless abandoning, losing gigantic sums on slippage along the way.

Once the dust had settled, the hacker was one of the largest individual holders of Ethereum.

We don’t quite have the full story on what happened here yet. The Bahamian authorities claim that they seized the assets, with many assuming that they are referring to the hacked funds. It seems far more likely that they are referring to the “white hat” funds only, as the “black hat” funds demonstrated much more sophistication in blockchain use that could be expected of a regulator.

The funds have stopped moving for now. Sitting idle with more that 241,000 ETH, a little less than $300 million worth. No one really knows what will happen with these funds.

Where are we now?

After a week of complete mayhem as the exchange fell apart and another week for the adults to take over and begin the clean up we have two competing bankruptcy procedures. One taking place in the US, overseen by the lawyer who cleaned up after Enron collapsed. The other taking place in the Bahamas, overseen by two accountants from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and a senior local lawyer who has a decades long history of high level appearances in the Supreme Court of the island nation.

It’s not entirely clear which action will take precedence, but they are opposed to each other. The US bankruptcy is seeking that all the companies be wound up together and users are compensated with whatever assets are left across the entire conglomerate.

It turns out, FTX was made up of over 100 individual companies.

The organization chart looks like the web a drunk spider would spin. It’s not the sort of corporate structure that would be constructed for anything other than hiding funds and playing shell games.

The Bahamian action appears to be seeking to have the main FTX company dealt with separately, screwing US customers out of funds and leaving the bankruptcy in the hands of the Bahamian government which seems to have taken some pretty significant donations from FTX in the past.

In filings made late this week FTX was referred to as a “disorganized mess”. There was a lack of proper accounting. The auditing was done by “the first accounting firm in the metaverse” that doesn’t appear to have a physical address. There appears to have been loans made to company executives in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. There was no corporate board. There was no human resources department. There was no accounting department. There was no real tracking of customer funds.

The lawyer handling the FTX bankruptcy also conducted the Enron bankruptcy. He says this is far worse.

Enough for now

This is just the walkthrough of how everything fell apart in front of our eyes. The corruption, the lies and the scandal have all been uncovered in the wake of this collapse. In another article coming shortly I will cover the rise and fall of FTX and Alameda Research, delving into the backstory that allowed this fraud to grow under the cover of one of the most well regarded companies in the industry.

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Today’s post is from contributing analyst Scott Hill. To receive further updates of this series and our overall investment thesis for digital assets (even in this climate), subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list. 

NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion capsule is three days into the lunar mission. The uncrewed spacecraft cruises at 1,000 mph and is 215,000 miles from Earth. It’s about 95,000 miles from the Moon and will make a very close powered flyby burn on Monday. 

“Orion’s entry into the lunar sphere of influence will make the Moon, instead of Earth, the main gravitational force acting on the spacecraft,” the space agency wrote in a press release. 

NASA continued: “Flight controllers will conduct an outbound powered flyby burn to harness the force from the Moon’s gravity, accelerate the spacecraft, and direct it toward a distant retrograde orbit beyond the Moon. During the outbound powered flyby, Orion will make its closest approach – approximately 80 miles – above to the lunar surface.” 

Four days later, the second powered flyby burn will “insert Orion into distant retrograde orbit, where it will remain for about a week to test spacecraft systems,” NASA said. 

Additional flyby details will be provided on Saturday following a meeting with NASA officials. 

“Right now, we’re looking good, and we’re ready to go continue executing,” Artemis 1 Flight Director Jeff Radigan said during Friday’s briefing.

NASA has laid out a detailed map of the Artemis 1 mission.

Less than 12 hours into the flight after Orion took off from Launch Pad 39B at the space agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, the first view of Earth from the spacecraft was released to the public. 

As @NASA_Orion begins the #Artemis I mission to the Moon, the spacecraft captured these stunning views of our home planet. pic.twitter.com/Pzk3PDt7sd

— NASA Artemis (@NASAArtemis) November 16, 2022

If Artemis 1 mission is successful, which would end with the Orion capsule splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 11, then Artemis 2 and 3 flights will follow. Artemis 2 is scheduled sometime in 2024. That mission will propel four astronauts around the Moon. Then in 2025, Artemis 3 could include a return of humans back to the lunar surface. 

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News (emphasis ours),

Republican Senators Joh Hawley and Rand Paul took the heads of the FBI and the Department Of Homeland Security to task Thursday, with Hawley at one point directly telling Christopher Wray that he should have been fired a long time ago.

Hawley also targeted Wray for previously leaving a committee hearing early so he could go on a vacation.

“You were at the Senate Judiciary Committee. You remember that I think so. We had to cut that hearing short. We’re supposed to do two rounds of questions. You said you had to be somewhere, so we cut it short. Republicans were not able to ask second round as we had been informed we would,” Hawley noted.

The Senator continued, “The press reported shortly thereafter that the reason that the hearing had to be cut short is because you were flying on a Gulfstream jet for a personal vacation in the Adirondack. Please tell me that’s not accurate.”

It was accurate.

“You left an oversight hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee required by statute so you could vacation with your family,” Hawley declared, adding “I find that absolutely unbelievable and, frankly, indefensible.”

Senator @HawleyMO roasts FBI Director Christopher Wray for leaving a statutorily-required committee hearing to go on vacation.

Hawley: “So you were going on vacation?”

Wray: “I was, yes” pic.twitter.com/RZLlvdoKwN

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 17, 2022

The Senator then provided examples of how the FBI has been overtly politicised and told Wray that he doesn’t believe he is up to the job of FBI Director anymore.

Hawley asserted “frankly, I think you should have been gone a long time ago. And given your behavior recently, I think it only makes it more clear.”

Hawley then twisted the knife by asking “Are there any travel plans today that we should be aware of, that you have? We’re supposed to have a second round. Will you be here for that?”

Sen. Josh Hawley leaves FBI Director Chris Wray in PANICKED silence after EXPOSING woke FBI for 2 straight minutes pic.twitter.com/8BJaOfzNCE

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 17, 2022

Elsewhere during the hearing, Hawley grilled Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas regarding the Biden administration reportedly flagging social media posts it doesn’t like as “disinformation” and “pressuring Big Tech to treat American citizens as if they’re threats to Homeland.”

“A federal judge in a federal lawsuit [has said] you are supervising the nerve center of federally directed censorship… Is that constitutional?” Hawley asked.

Mayorkas repeatedly claimed that the allegation are false. 

“You are leveraging private companies to carry out censorship on your behalf. It is dystopian, but worse than that, it is unconstitutional,” Hawley asserted.

“It is also false,” Mayorkas sardonically replied.

Senator @HawleyMO‘s Full Grilling Of DHS Secretary Mayorkas About The “Disinformation Governance Board” And The Biden Administration’s Coordination With Big Tech Companies To Censor Americans

“You have turned your agency into a censorship machine.” pic.twitter.com/VpvFoHlv9c

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) November 17, 2022

Rand Paul also grilled Wray about reported collusion between the FBI and Facebook, noting “You may think it’s just jolly well to get all this stuff without a warrant that people volunteer to you, but many of us are alarmed that you’re getting this information that are private communications between people, because it is against the law.”

“You work for the government, you should admit to us whether or not you have a program going after our speech,” Paul asserted.

As we highlighted recently, Paul has vowed to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for government agencies and private big tech to secretly collude on such enterprises, noting that “it goes against everything that we all believe in as far as the foundation of our constitutional republic.”

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In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

Update (2010ET): After 15 million people voted, Elon Musk announced on Saturday that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated on Twitter.

The people have spoken.

Trump will be reinstated.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei. https://t.co/jmkhFuyfkv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022

The vote came in at 52% for reinstatement, 48% against.

And here it is:

BOOOOOOOM https://t.co/pYjfwtVopR

— NEWS MAKER (@NEWS_MAKER) November 20, 2022

Trump, meanwhile, says he won’t be back. When asked about the poll, Trump said: “He’s a character. I tend to like characters. But I have something called Truth Social. It’s doing phenomenally well. Engagement is much better. I’ll be staying there. I don’t see it. I don’t see any reason for it.”

Trump was asked today about Elon Musk’s poll to reinstate him: “He’s a character. I tend to like characters. But I have something called Truth Social. It’s doing phenomenally well. Engagement is much better. I’ll be staying there. I don’t see it. I don’t see any reason for it.” pic.twitter.com/TuZDi7aCB3

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) November 19, 2022

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‘Free speech absolutist’ Elon Musk has decided to ask the public whether Donald Trump – a former president and ostensibly Joe Biden’s 2024 GOP challenger – should be allowed to speak freely on Twitter, instead of, you know, just restoring Trump’s account on day one.

The former president was banned from the platform because a group of fed-infiltrated Trump supporters were allowed into the Capitol and wreaked havoc on January 6, 2021, after Trump gave a speech in which he said “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Reinstate former President Trump

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022

Musk’s poll on whether he should reinstate former President Donald Trump to the platform has received more than 11 million votes in less than 24 hours.

While Trump took a large early lead, the vote tightened over Saturday morning, and currently stands at 52.3% ‘yes’ to 47.7% ‘no.’

Dems are going to need to stop the count so they can haul in some mail-in votes pic.twitter.com/MFP9vqid8w

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 19, 2022

“Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted in a follow-up, which means “the voice of the people is the voice of God.’

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022

The poll is set to run for 24 hours.

Musk’s departure from ‘free speech absolutism’ is undoubtedly due to the realities of the advertising market – with major companies having already suspended their campaigns on Twitter over Musk himself taking over the platform. According to Insider, advertising made up 89% of Twitter’s revenues in 2021.

In response, Musk assured advertisers in late October that Twitter “will not become a free-for-all hellscape.”

While Alex Jones won’t be allowed back on the platform, the Babylon Bee is back after their ban over a transgender joke, as is Jorrdan Peterson and Kathy Griffin.

Maybe Elon should do an Alex Jones poll next? The frogs did, after all, turn out to be gay.

Trump, meanwhile, isn’t going anywhere.

I’m sure he’s not watching the poll, or noticing the over 14,000,000 votes to his 170 Truths. 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/ybd3D4ORDK

— Harrison Painter (@HarrisonPainter) November 19, 2022

The official narrative on the Paul Pelosi attack purported by Democrats and the mainstream media makes zero sense.  You don’t have to be a “conspiracy theorist” to recognize there were multiple contradictory accounts from the Department of Justice vs. local police and even some reports from journalists.

In fact, NBC suspended one of its own correspondents, Miguel Almaguer, after he reported that on the night of the supposed attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco that Paul Pelosi actually opened the door when police knocked, seemingly in normal health, and then walked away from the officers to talk to the alleged assailant David Depape, when Depape attacked him.  This report led many to suggest that Pelosi and Depape somehow knew each other. 

A media firestorm ensued along with denials from the DOJ, which detailed a completely different version of events in which the police officers opened the door themselves and found Pelosi struggling with Depape who had injured him with a hammer.  NBC dropped Almaguer after many called his report “bizarre.” 

As it turns out, Miguel Almaguer was right.  NBC now reports that police body cam footage has been made available to some media outlets and the footage clearly shows Paul Pelosi opening the door for police in seemingly perfect health.  This completely contradicts the DOJ report on the attack and suggests a potential cover-up. 

NBC is forced to retract their earlier assertions that the Paul Pelosi open door event was unfounded.  Why?  Because they have to.  Eventually the police body cam footage will make it out into the public sphere for everyone to see, and NBC is front-running their own false reports.  However, they do suggest that “it doesn’t really matter” who opened the door to the Pelosi home, and that Paul Pelosi’s actions don’t support the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the attack.

If that is the case, then why would the DOJ lie?  Surely, they have seen the same body cam footage.  If there is no conspiracy, then why is there an attempted coverup?  

NBC has never had a problem editorializing news stories in the past and presenting biased opinions as evidence, yet suddenly now they pretend as if they have journalistic integrity?  It is incumbent upon journalists to present what they think are the facts to the general public, but they are also required to investigate potential false accounts and false information in order to separate truth from lies.  In the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi, NBC and other outlets clearly do not want to dig deeper. 

Now that the midterm elections are over it would appear that the “MAGA attacker” story no longer serves any purpose.  The Democrats conjured their own conspiracy theory first – The claim that right-wing “extremists” are a threat to “democracy” and that the Pelosi attack proves it.  There is no evidence to support this claim.  There is, though, evidence to support the theory that Pelosi was familiar with Depape and his behavior indicates familiarity. 

No person under threat of being beaten with a hammer by a home intruder is going to move closer to the violent stranger instead of running towards the police.  This does not happen, it’s nonsense.

What is likely to take place as this case develops?  A media blackout on the story, much like we have witnessed with multiple cases in the past few years that make the political left look bad (the Waukesha massacre by BLM suppporter Darrell Brooks comes to mind).  Details will probably emerge which further contradict the official narrative but they will be buried and ignored.  The leftists will continue to label any suspicions as “conspiracy” as they hope and pray the general public completely forgets and moves on to other distractions.   

Authored by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,

We previously discussed the case of two New York attorneys (Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman) who joined in violent protests in New York, including firebombing a police vehicle. The Biden Justice Department later gave the two lawyers an astonishingly generous plea deal that avoided long prison sentences. Now Rahman has been sentenced to 15 months after asking for no jail time for throwing the Molotov cocktail.

Mattis was a member of the Corporate Group at Pryor Cashman when he was arrested. Mattis graduated from New York University School of Law in 2016 and received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. He was also previously employed as an associate at Holland & Knight.

Rahman had just been admitted to the New York bar in June 2019 after graduating from Fordham University School of Law.

The police also had a picture of Rahman with the explosive. The FBI statement included the following description:

“Officers pursued the minivan and arrested Rahman and Mattis, who was the vehicle’s driver.  The NYPD recovered several precursor items used to build Molotov Cocktails, including a lighter, a bottle filled with toilet paper and a liquid suspected to be gasoline in the vicinity of the passenger seat and a gasoline tank in the rear of the vehicle.”

Mattis and Rahman were facing domestic terrorism charges and the possibility of 30 years in jail. The Biden Administration later agreed to a massive reduction of the charges in a plea agreement that would likely result only in a couple years of jail time. What is particularly bizarre is that the plea agreement reduced an earlier plea agreement for a more serious offense. They had agreed to the more serious offense but the Justice Department cut it down further.

The now-disbarred attorney sought no jail time and told the court that “I completely lost my way in the emotion of the night.”

U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan praised Rahman for her commitment to fighting social injustices: “You’re a remarkable person who did a terrible thing on one night.” Cogan, however, also criticized her “arrogance” displayed in such conduct. Firebombing seems a tad more than arrogance when you throw Molotov cocktails at police cars.

Even with the greatly reduced charges, Cogan still elected not to give Rahman the maximum sentence of two years. While Rahman claimed to have been caught up in the moment, her texts and emails established a difficult story. In one message hours before the protest, she told Mattis “I hope they burn everything down. Need to burn all the police stations down… probably all the courts too.”

Mattis is expected to be sentenced in December.