Largest Fraud in History
https://twitter.com/CryptoWhale/status/1446084617669386241
Chinese Commercial Paper
Tether Lending
https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1446100319113338882
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Questionable Monetary Transfer
https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/1446177147719196678
Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
Bloomberg columnist Zeke Faux asks Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
A wild search for the U.S. dollars supposedly backing the stablecoin at the center of the global cryptocurrency trade—and in the crosshairs of U.S. regulators and prosecutors. Exactly how Tether is backed, or if it’s truly backed at all, has always been a mystery.
There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year. That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins—an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company.
As far as the regulators are concerned, the size of Tether’s supposed dollar holdings is so big that it would be dangerous even assuming the dollars are real
The only official willing to talk to Faux was Jean Chalopin, the chairman of Deltec Bank & Trust in the Bahamas.
But when I asked Chalopin if he knew for sure that Tether’s assets were fully secure now, he laughed. It was a difficult question, he said. He only held cash and extremely low-risk bonds for Tether. But recently the company had started using other banks to handle its money. Only a quarter of it—$15 billion or so—is still with Deltec. “I cannot speak about what I cannot know,” he said. “I can only control what’s with us.”
After I returned to the U.S., I obtained a document showing a detailed account of Tether Holdings’ reserves. It said they include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies—something money-market funds avoid. And that was before one of the country’s largest property developers, China Evergrande Group, started to collapse. I also learned that Tether had made loans worth billions of dollars to other crypto companies, with Bitcoin as collateral. One of them is Celsius Network Ltd., a giant quasi-bank for cryptocurrency investors, its founder Alex Mashinsky told me. He said he pays an interest rate of 5% to 6% on loans of about 1 billion Tethers. Tether has denied holding any Evergrande debt, but Hoegner, Tether’s lawyer, declined to say whether Tether had other Chinese commercial paper.
The strange thing is that, at least for now, most participants in the crypto market, including some very large and sophisticated operators, don’t seem to care about any of the risks. Just last month, traders bought $3 billion in new Tethers, presumably sending billions of perfectly good U.S. dollars to the Inspector Gadget co-creator’s Bahamian bank in exchange for digital tokens conjured by the Mighty Ducks guy and run by executives who are targets of a U.S. criminal investigation.
Chalopin’s Two Claims to Fame
- A former child actor who’d missed a penalty shot in The Mighty Ducks.
- Creator of Inspector Gadget
Dismissed as FUD
Every bit of this, including the loans, the Chinese paper, and the fact that an investigation cay only locate $15 billion of an alleged $69 billion in assets is of course dismissed as FUD by crypto enthusiasts.
FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
Fraud, missing money, Chinese paper, criminal investigations, who cares?
Please Subscribe!
Like these reports? If so, please Subscribe to MishTalk Email Alerts.
Subscribers get an email alert of each post as they happen. Read the ones you like and you can unsubscribe at any time.
If you have subscribed and do not get email alerts, please check your spam folder.
Mish
Chalopin’s Two Claims to Fame
A former child actor who’d missed a penalty shot in The Mighty Ducks.
Creator of Inspector Gadget
Something doesn’t square here. The movie debuted in 1992 and the good inspector was created in 1983. If those statements are about the same person, then they had one amazing childhood!
She says in the video that we must make deep background
checks looking into every aspect of the lives of presidential candidates to
eliminate those who are not up to standards that they believe necessary. First
of all I would assume that the FBI and the CIA would be doing the background
checks which would mean that we would only be able to vote for someone on their
approved list. Secondly why stop at presidential candidates if the idea is
good? Should not all candidates for Congress have to come from the approved
list as well? It is a stretch of imagination to believe that given that amount
of power over elections that the FBI and the CIA would not end up abusing it.
There are many people on both sides of Congress that I abhor but they were elected
by their constituencies and you have to respect that because that is the
democratic process and it is by that means that new ideas and solutions get
into the system often by end running the entrenched, sclerotic bureaucracies and
existing power networks. Fiona Hill is an example of the latter and doesn’t see
that what she is proposing is a repudiation of democracy and under guise of
making the system better by having them chose who gets to run for office and
who does not is just a means to eternalize their power.
I haven’t read her book and I had no problem with her till I
ran into that sequence and I didn’t see her saying it was only up to the
parties and not up to a governmental agency to do that. Normally a party should
vet its candidates and they do as a matter of course. After all they do want to
win elections. It is not a revelation and hardly worth a mention because it is
common sense. However I definitely saw that she believes the Republican Party
should have not let Trump into the primary because she feels that he wasn’t president
material and shouldn’t have been allowed to run. One may like or dislike the
primary system but it does have the advantage of allowing new blood to get into
what would otherwise be a closed club open only to insiders whether it be of
the right or the left. It does come up with surprises some of which can be
necessary ones. The “smoke-filled room” method however hardly ever comes up
with surprises and ends up as a closed cabal running the party for their own benefit
and not for the voters. Nevertheless it had its advantages too. Ultimately it
is up to the voters to vet the candidates hopefully informed by the press in
the large sense and they choose.
Maybe I will read her book if I get around to it. For the
moment I am busy reading “Uncontrolled Spread” by Dr. Scott Gottlieb on the
Covid pandemic. I have already learned a lot about what was really going on in
late 2019 and early 2021. He takes pains to be nonpartisan unlike many who
write books these days.
that is important to me also. That’s all.