Fallen crypto guru Sam Bankman-Fried is likely to be placed on suicide watch when moved to a tiny cell in his hellhole jail in the Bahamas.
The former CEO of collapsed currency exchange FTX – who takes medication for depression – remains under evaluation in the maximum security sickbay and is expected to be there until the end of next week.
His next move inside notorious His Majesty’s Prison Fox Hill will be decided by the jail’s Classification Board and a medical assessment.
Ordinarily, this would be a post about his impending “suicide” — 
— but this skulduggery is of the Ponzi kind, and nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation, so all we have to think about is this pudgy little asshole doing away with himself out of self-pity.
Frankly, given that he’s a vegan and future inmate, there’s not much reason for him to live, so he might as well.
One of the “side benefits” of being old is that one spends a lot of time in waiting-rooms — in this case, at Discount Tires — where I happened upon the Aug/Sep issue of Forbes magazine which had an interview with the above asshole (long before his financial criminality and -irresponsibility became well known, of course).
I read the interview, which spent a lot of time looking at all FTX’s acquisitions and share purchases, and I thought (not with hindsight, but as a contemporaneous reader):
“Where the hell are you getting all your investment capital from?”
FTX was either leveraged to the hilt — couldn’t be, because he was paying out mouthwatering returns to his investors — or he was playing the old Bernie Maddow game of using fresh investor money to pay out earlier investors. Certainly, he wasn’t getting anything like dividends from flaccid blockchain exchanges or collapsing software companies — his favored purchase targets, so the money had to be coming from new investors.
What suckers. It’s even worse when you learn that some of his new (and earlier) investors were not individuals, but institutional. Don’t these places have any safety controls or risk-assessment checks?
I am not a nihilist by any stretch, but I swear there are times when I want the whole fucking house of cards to collapse, rich people / institutions to be impoverished, and crowds of the now-desperately-poor (that would be people like me) roaming the streets with shotguns and AK-47s, shooting these bastards as they walk out of their office buildings, or using their plummeting bodies as skeet targets as they try to escape the shame and ruin that has ensued from their greed, mendacity and foolishness.
No doubt someone will have a problem with this scenario.
