The FTX Scandal Paves the Way

Buckle in for a Rough Ride [The Daily Reckoning] December 30, 2022 [WEBSITE]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( The FTX Scandal Paves the Way [Regarding Internal Policy Change]( [Click here for more...]( We just ripped up one of our longest standing internal policies – and completely rewrote it. It’s near certain to have a huge impact on your subscription… and how you invest your money in 2023. I explain everything in this video… [Watch It Now Before It's Taken Down At Midnight On December 31st]( West Hartford, Connecticut December 30, 2022 [Brian Maher] BRIAN MAHER Dear Reader , The collapse of the major cryptocurrency exchange FTX is one of the most important stories of the year, and its aftereffects are still just beginning to be felt. Just how big is the scandal surrounding it? Below, Jeffrey Tucker gives you the full scoop on where things are heading next. Read on. Regards, [Brian Maher] Brian Maher Managing Editor, The Daily Reckoning [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) [Attention! Before You Read Any Further…]( Before you read any further in today’s issue, an urgent situation needs your immediate attention. If you don’t plan on claiming this new upgrade to your Strategic Intelligence subscription, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Right now is your chance to grab one of the biggest (and most valuable) upgrades our company has ever made to a newsletter. I’m taking Strategic Intelligence to an entirely new level and I’d hate to see you left behind. [Click Here Now]( The FTX Scandal Paves the Way By Jeffrey Tucker [Jeffrey Tucker] JEFFREY TUCKER For months the warnings have been coming in, mostly anecdotally. Sales are down. Consumers are getting scared. They are cutting their spending. They are having a hard time paying their bills. And interest on credit card debt is out of control. Real income is entering its 20th month of decline. Higher-end spenders are starting to panic. Hence retail sales from November came in at a 0.6% decline. That’s actually a massive move down because it hit venues like Amazon, streaming platforms, and other online shopping more than others. But it is also hurting Main Street too. Profit margins were already thin. The first signs of this came seeral weeks ago when Amazon started cutting workers before the holidays. That’s the first time this has happened, and it suggests that the company had expanded in ways that are completely unsustainable. In that sense, there should have been nothing shocking about this data release. Still, it freaked out the financial markets because the release came the same day that Jerome Powell of the Fed completely rejected (again) the White House’s claims that inflation is cooling and that there’s good news all around. Powell is not having it and for good reason. The Consumer Price Index is still trending toward a 7% per annum increase while federal funds rates are 4.25%, yielding negative rates and discouraging savings, which now stand at an astonishingly low 2.3%. This means that the Fed has a very long way to go. It is likely attempting to hit 7% by the end of 2023. We’ve got an entire year of inflation left to us. And what happens when even the Fed’s extreme actions do not actually fix the problem? That’s when we will deal with the thing to be dreaded the most: the attempt to create a central bank digital currency (or CBDC). FTX and the Plot The more I look at this FTX bit, the more obvious it is that it was a money laundering scheme from the beginning. The purpose was to find a dark-money funding spigot for Democrats and pandemic baloney to drive Trump and the Trumpers out of power. That was the whole goal. Alameda Research was started in 2019, most likely for that purpose. FTX opened a year later and they came up with a great little shell game for getting Democrats money. Venture capitalists would push billions to the disheveled kid in the Bahamas, who would pretend to invest it in his bogus crypto exchange. The money would then move to Alameda. Under the pretext of “effective altruism,” the money would then be shoveled out to various charities to drum up pandemic hysteria and others to feed money back to Democrats running through offices. That’s why both 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s got the money, hundreds of millions or possibly vastly more money. We are still waiting for firm figures. The media said: oh oh look how generous SBF is! Oh, sure; it’s called a protection racket funded by fraud. The next step was simply to create a pandemic with bad testing, death misclassification, and wild media exaggerations. To make sure that all went well on the media side, FTX gave many millions to ProPublica, Vox, Semafor, and others. They then echoed the line that the whole population is threatened by a horrible bioweapon and we needed to lock everything down until Trump is out of office. [Lightning is striking right now… and you still have a chance to save your retirement during this new recession…]( [Click here for more...]( Do you really think the worst of the stock market crash is over? … or is the real plummet still ahead? Whatever happens, there is good news… With an investment that’s different from stocks, bonds, or real estate… You can take advantage of lightning striking… … and you might pocket 8,788% gains… [Click Here To Learn More]( How Else Do You Make Sense of It? Does this sound outlandish to you? I ask because it sounds outlandish to me. However, I cannot otherwise make sense of all the facts I have in front of me. Was it designed to collapse? Of that, I’m not sure, but it’s hard to believe that anyone believed that this Ponzi scheme in 4D chess could last. Clearly it could not. The next step in the coverup is of course to throw Sam Bankman-Fried under the bus. He was kept in the dark most of the time about the crimes being committed precisely so that he would not be able to incriminate anyone else. And of course, before he did so, the Justice Department prosecuted him to give him Fifth Amendment protection. He goes to jail and then everyone is supposed to forget about it. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is now working for the Feds. And there are other players who are on the lam and will likely be left alone, including: Nishad Singh, Sam’s former MIT roommate, is said to have built the FTX platform. He seems to have left the Bahamas for India. Also Zixiao “Gary” Wang, who is cofounder with Sam of FTX and Alameda. He graduated from MIT and worked for Google. Beyond that hardly anything is known about him. He seems to have left the Bahamas and is reported to be in Hong Kong. There are plenty of whispers out there that Wang is actually CCP. Wouldn’t that just complete this crazy insane circle of corruption and conspiracy? Will we ever find out? Doubtful. The Social Credit System The collapse of FTX of course had no impact on Bitcoin or the other strong and decentralized tokens out there. But it is profoundly affecting the stablecoins on the market. For more than a year I’ve been writing that the whole goal of the government is to crush the stablecoins as competitors to the Fed’s money-transfer business operations. As I write now, the rumors about Binance’s supposed troubles are growing. Some powerful players out there are trying to foment a run on the crypto bank. The next step of course will be to save them through nationalization and hence take them over to become the basis of the central bank digital currency. This won’t happen overnight; it will possibly take years. But let there be no doubt about the goal. The Biden administration has already endorsed it. If all of this is true, we are truly dealing with a level of madness that is without precedent. And this is why I’m so worried about Elon Musk. He has taken over a very powerful communication tool and is allowing a resistance to grow. The attacks on him are growing. If the plot is as big as it seems, he could find himself in some grave trouble in the coming months. Consumers are finally getting the right idea. Now is the time to hunker down, find people you can trust, keep your money safe, and hope we all weather this storm. I hate to say it, but this coming year is going to be an absolute beast. Regards, Jeffrey Tucker for The Daily Reckoning [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) Editor’s note: In Jim Rickards’ 2011 book Currency Wars, he warned that the U.S. was engaged in a special type of economic war. He said that these wars would: Degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation and actual violence as the scramble for resources leads to invasion and war. The historical precedents are sobering… Some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable. Now with Putin invading Ukraine, rising tensions with China, inflation, recession, supply chain issues and the potential for greater violence breaking out all over the world… Jim’s afraid his worst fears are coming true. [That’s why he recorded this short video message.]( Jim wants to help you prepare for what he fears is coming next. Because if history is any indicator, there could be real trouble ahead. [Click here to view Jim’s urgent video message.]( Thank you for reading The Daily Reckoning! We greatly value your questions and comments. Please send all feedback to [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) [Jeffrey Tucker] [Jeffrey Tucker]( is an independent editorial consultant who served as Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. [Paradigm]( ☰ ⊗ [ARCHIVE]( [ABOUT]( [Contact Us]( © 2022 Paradigm Press, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press, LLC. delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your The Daily Reckoning e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from The Daily Reckoning, feel free to [click here.]( Please note: the mailbox associated with this email address is not monitored, so do not reply to this message. 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