![]() He stops by a Philippine town where virtually the entire populace was enticed into playing the online game Axie Infinity to earn crypto tokens, until the edifice crashed, leaving the destitute players holding worthless crypto. He visits a vast metropolis of half-abandoned high-rises outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where human traffickers imprison thousands of people, injecting them with amphetamines or murdering resisters, forcing them to entice credulous victims around the world into fake romantic relationships via video chats, the goal being to steal their money via crypto investments. Notwithstanding Lewis’ churlish dismissal, the truth is that millions of innocent people, many of them small investors gulled by narratives such as Bankman-Fried’s, have lost their life savings in cryptocurrency scams.īusiness Amid crypto crash, trading can be an addiction: It’s ‘taking over my whole life’Īs cryptocurrencies and NFTs gain popularity, addiction specialists are hearing from people whose compulsive trading resembles full-blown dependency. “In this case, what you’re doing is possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas.” Then he caught himself, and added, “On the other hand, this is not to excuse.” Holmes was “supplying phony medical information to people that might kill them,” he said. ![]() Lewis, asked by a smirking, sycophantic interviewer named Jon Wertheim on “60 Minutes” Sunday if the FTX scam wasn’t just like Elizabeth Holmes’ hawking a fraudulent blood testing device under the Theranos name, rejected the thought. ![]() the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen.” Who else suffered? Of the collapse of FTX, the criminal charges against Bankman-Fried and the entire edifice of cryptocurrency, Faux accurately writes: “This is. When it all came crashing down, the investors lost their money, the politicians had to give some of theirs back, the stars stopped returning his phone calls. Lewis doesn’t say who told him so, but the absurd conjecture appeared in a slavish profile written by a freelance author for Sequoia Capital, which invested in FTX the profile has since been scrubbed from the firm’s website, presumably out of mortification. This torrent of nonsense didn’t snow many people who knew anything about finance and weren’t angling for a piece of his action, such as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine.īut it sure seems to have snowed the hell out of Michael Lewis, who wrote about financial schemes in “Liar’s Poker,” “Flash Boys” and “The Big Short.” In this book, he credulously quotes a venture capitalist speculating that Bankman-Fried “had a real shot at being the world’s first trillionaire.” The sports and entertainment stars - Tom Brady, Larry David, Anna Wintour - who swarmed around this shlub in cargo shorts were seduced by their need to be in on a new thing. Government agencies are moving to crush crypto as a hive of ‘fraud and scams.’ Congress should stay out of their way, and investors should take note. Business Column: The government crackdown on crypto is well underway.
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