"Monday 28th November 2022 - LIVE" and "The TRUTH About Life In Ukraine And Donbass From A REAL Journalist." (iEarlGrey). I miss the daily review of news.
"EU upset with US, all about money. NYT, NATO weapons running low. Bakhmut fall inevitable. U/1" (Christoforou).
"Russia Uses Electronic Warfare Jamming To bring Down Ukraine Drone Warfare" (Lancaster). Drone gun.
"Bakhmut Front Update | Russia Advances with Force" (Weeb Union Web Updates).
"FTX Post Mortem Part 2 Of 3: How Did We Get Here?" (Hill):
"The biggest question mark is the identity of FTX CTO and co-founder Garry Wang. The man is a ghost with very little online presence and only a handful of photos. Famed short seller Marc Cohodes is under the impression that Wang is a state actor for the CCP."
and (my emphasis in red):
"A big reason that firms began to feel comfortable with FTX was the splashy fundraising FTX was able to pull off. Market participants assumed that among the billions of dollars of venture capital money that had been invested in FTX, someone had done basic due diligence on the firm. We now know that during these heady days of free money SBF was demanding investment commitments quickly from VCs or he would move on to the next phone call.
There was a giant line of VCs desperate to get into an FTX round.
The July fundraising list was a who’s who of Silicon Valley VC. Led by Sequoia, the round included Softbank, Temasek and VanEck. Apparently none of these firms insisted on even the most basic corporate controls, like installing a board of directors. A later round included a strategic investment from Blackrock. FTX was a blue ribbon investment."
and:
"What if Alameda’s goal wasn’t to make money, but to lose money to other traders in a perverse growth hack used to attract the next round of “smart money” investors?
After all, at best Alameda had been making a few hundred million from trading over the course of its existence and likely much less than that. As spreads closed with more market makers flooding into the asset class it’s much easier to take money from Sequoia and Softbank than it is to make money trading.
Running an unprofitable casino is a terrible business, but selling an unprofitable casino that looks extremely busy to a private investor is a fantastic business.
This part of the story seems like the inevitable end state of the 2010s dominance of Venture Capital and private investing. After a decade of easy money, low interest loans and an insatiable appetite for tech investments we were bound to see someone game the system. In 2021 VCs were not doing diligence, they were shoving newly raised funds into startups as fast as possible. Venture capital firms invested $643 billion in 2021. Almost double the pace of 2020 and five times as much as was committed in 2012.
For context, noted scam company Theranos raised $1.4 billion over 13 years. FTX raised $1.8 billion in only 3 years."
"EU Gets Tough on China as US Steals European Industry" (Gallagher). You could look at this as insanity, or as the inevitable results of Americans holding a lot of videotapes featuring Euro-trash. Again, I keep asking, where are the guillotines?
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