This is a thread of my thoughts and feelings about the actions that led to FTX’s bankruptcy, and the enormous harm that was caused as a result, involving the likely loss of many thousands of innocent people’s savings.

FTX held less than $1bn in liquid assets against $9bn in liabilities

Vast gap highlights the dire state of Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange before it collapsed into bankruptcy

Transcript of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Interview at the DealBook Summit (Published 2022)

In a discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, Sam Bankman-Fried blamed “huge management failures” and sloppy accounting for the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

Harry Browne’s 17 Golden Rules of Financial Safety

When you read in the news that a person whom you know as rich and wealthy is in financial trouble or has declared bankruptcy, it is easy to feel a sense of futility about managing your own money. Y…

Declaring Systems Bankruptcy

For years and years, I’ve helped teams evaluate their systems, fix their systems, tweak their systems, and evolve their systems. And sometimes it’s even been necessary to help teams declare bankruptcy on their systems, blow them up, and start anew. And now it’s my turn. It started as a slow re

We have killed the technical debt - Alex's Blog

Big day for docs 🙂🙂

How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed (Published 2022)

Mr. Bankman-Fried said in an interview that he had expanded too fast and failed to see warning signs. But he shared few details about his handling of FTX customers’ funds.

'FTX Has Been Hacked': Crypto Disaster Worsens as Exchange Sees Mysterious Outflows Exceeding $600M

FTX officials appeared to confirm rumors of a hack on Telegram, instructing users to delete FTX apps and avoid its website.

Some thoughts on the FTX collapse

New episode of Bad Takes is out, about the temptation to engage in way-too-early 2024 prognostication.

Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis (Published 2014)

The economic catastrophe of 2008 was the largest of its kind since the Depression. Who’s taking the fall?

Beyond Income: Dynamic Consumer Financial Vulnerability

This research challenges the entrenched belief that financial vulnerability affects only low-income consumers. Instead, most consumers across the socioeconomic spectrum experience varying degrees of financial vulnerability at different points during their lives, whether sporadically or chronically; vulnerability is dynamic and heterogeneous. The authors propose a novel, theory-driven definition of consumer financial vulnerability (CFV) as the risk of incurring future harm, given the consumer's current access to various financial resources. A new conceptual framework decouples “vulnerability” from “harm” to distinguish the state of CFV, its determinants (access to various interdependent financial resources), and the constructs it foreshadows (multiple interconnected forms of realized harm). Five research propositions follow: (1) financial resource volatility plays a vital role in CFV, (2) recovering from harm requires more financial resources than preventing harm, (3) a multiperiod lens is needed to assess CFV accurately, (4) greater financial resource access can increase CFV, and (5) generalized financial literacy is not a panacea for mitigating CFV. The propositions and their implications for marketing strategy, public policy, and consumer well-being offer a rich research agenda. The authors propose a measure of CFV—the probability that financial resources are insufficient to meet or exceed a harm threshold—for future empirical investigations.

An Empirical Analysis of Personal Bankruptcy and Delinquency

Abstract. This article uses a new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze credit card delinquency, personal bankruptcy, and the stability of credit risk

Pluralistic: Bankruptcy is very, very good (17 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There's a truly comforting sociopathy snuggled inside capitalism ideology: if markets are systems for identifying and rewarding virtue, ability and value, then anyone who's failing in the system is actually unworthy, not unlucky; and that means the winners are not just lucky (and certainly not merely selfish), but actually the best and they owe nothing to their social inferiors apart from what their own charitable impulses dictate.

A crusade to defeat the legacy of highways rammed through poor neighborhoods

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has a personal story and wants to right the wrongs done 50 years ago.

The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other — Douglas Rushkoff

My last piece, The Intentional Collapse, seems to have agitated a few people. I know it came off a bit dark. I talked about how the Uber wealthy believe the world as we know it is ending and that there won’t be enough essential resources to go around, so they need to take control of as much money and stuff and land as possible in order to position themselves for the end of days.

ICO Ethics, Filecoin, Short-term Fear & Long-term Greed

This is a hybrid post about what I think we need to see in order to avoid a hard landing for the ICO ecosystem (once the market inevitably…