What rises and falls in status through the FTX story?
More than one MR reader has requested this post, so here goes:
Rises
- Common-sense morality
- Common-sense investing rules
- American corporate governance
- Boards, and nervousness about related-party transactions
- Coinbase
- Seen as stodgy and bloated for much of the past year. But run in the US, listed in the US, and properly segregating customer funds.
- Elon Musk’s ability to judge character
- Vitalik and Ethereum
- Circle, Kraken, and Binance
- Anthony Trollope, Herman Melville, and the 19th century novel. Books more generally.
- U.S. regulation of domestic exchanges – it is one of the things we seem to do best, and they created little trouble during 2008-2009, or for that matter during the pandemic
- CBDC, and sadly so
- Crypto forensics
- Twitter and weird anon accounts
- When would the trouble have been exposed if not for Twitter? And much of the best coverage came from accounts with names like Autism Capital.
- Some critics (like Aaron Levie), too.
- Bitcoin
- After a cataclysm for the crypto sector, it’s down about 15% over the past month. That’s less than the S&P 500 lost during the worst month of the GFC.
Falls
- Effective Altruism
- A totalizing worldview that has enabled some undesirable weirdness in different places.
- Valorizing “scope sensitivity” and expected value leads people violently astray.
- Being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30
- Being on the cover of magazines
- And if you see “the next Buffett”, run.
- Appearing with blonde models
- Buying Super Bowl ads and sponsoring sports and putting your name on arenas
- “Earn to give” as both a concept and a phrase
- Mrs. Jellyby
- The concept of self-custody
- Weird locations for corporate offices
- Venture capital
- Our ability to see crazes for what they are in the moment
- This is not just, or even mainly, about crypto
- Drugs
- Adderall and modafinil, perhaps stronger stuff also played a role.
- The children of influential faculty
- Do they grow up witnessing low-accountability systems and personality behaviors?
What else? I thank several individuals for their assistance with this post.