Juggling Dynamite

After 26 years with a front-row seat in the revolving door, wild-west finance sector, I am not surprised at the unfolding crypto-doom; neither am I confident that better public protection policies will follow, nor the disgorging of ill-gotten gains from those who promoted and perpetrated the carnage. I have also long noted that people can be hard to help, and many play a leading role in their financial suicide through wilfully blind choices and behaviours. That said, the discussion below is cathartic in its unvarnished assessments–foul language alert.

One month after warning investors about the shady dealings going on at FTX on the Hedgeye Investing Summit, legendary short-seller Marc Cohodes returns to HedgeyeTV to discuss the company’s recent fallout with Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough. Here is a direct video link.

Humans seem to be endlessly vulnerable to the lure of easy money. Harder to accept, however, are those educated and trained to be professional money managers who still throw cash at charlatans and ideas with non-sensical valuations. When elders fail to lead, chaos grows. The segment below highlights the blatantly obvious mania that has piled trillions into vapid concepts in recent years.

Whoops. The magical box was actually a pyramid this whole time. Sam Bankman-Fried recently went on a podcast and tried to explain “yield-farming” to Matt Levine and the OddLots podcast and ended up describing a ponzi scheme. Chaos ensues. Listen to the full podcast (starts around 24:00) https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/92e2…

Media magnifies the danger as it’s mostly paid advertising to celebrate the appearance of money whether leaders and companies are legitimate or not.

In this segment, Danielle DiMartino Booth offers a worthwhile update on where we are in this financial cycle. Here is a direct video link.