Sorry Bankman, but you deserve to be fried
It’s bad enough losing a €32bn empire, but disgraced tech ‘bro’ Sam Bankman-Fried has sunk even lower – by blaming his ex-girlfriend for the collapse. Bankman-Fried was previously hailed as a genius and a visionary for building his company FTX into a top platform for buying, selling and holding crypto currencies.
Now, he has reportedly implied that the problems were caused by his former lover Caroline Ellison – known as Queen Caroline by her supporters.
Ellison, 28, ran multibillion dollar investment fund Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried, who owned a majority stake in Alameda, installed Ellison as CEO of the fund in October 2021, despite her limited pro-trading experience.
He appears to accept that
FTX lent Alameda billions of dollars in clients’ money without their knowledge or permission.
The crisis at FTX was triggered when customers rushed to withdraw their funds, but the company couldn’t pay out.
Bankman-Fried, 30, lived in a $40m penthouse in the Bahamas, a tax haven, with Ellison in a 10-person ‘polycule’ made up of his inner circle of FTX and Alameda Research executives.
The disgraced crypto CEO made his latest comments this week in a car crash interview with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper.
He said ‘f*** regulators’ and accused them of making ‘everything worse’.
Authorities in America and the Bahamas are now discussing extraditing Bankman-Fried back to the US.
Most crypto ‘investments’ have tanked on the back of FTX’s woes, with Bitcoin trading at just over $16,500 as we went to press – down from €67,000 only a year ago.
So, an unregulated market backed by few, if any, real assets, that’s hyped sky-high and run by people like Bankman-Fried, has slumped?
Who’d have guessed?
Those sneaky Tories
The Tory party has taken a leaf out of the Irish Government’s book – by clobbering workers with sneaky stealth taxes.
UK workers will pay more tax due to a freeze on the income tax personal allowance as well as the threshold at which people start paying higher rate tax, even as living standards plummet by 7% over there.
At least the UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt is giving pensioners a 10.1% hike in line with inflation.
Our lot screw pensioners with sub-inflation increases, fail to increase tax credits and allowances, and then falsely trumpet ‘giveaway’ budgets – getting away with it year after year.
Our Government is trying the same stunt with pay increases – using inflation to pull the wool over our eyes.
The public sector has received a pay boost of 3% without much fuss, while private sector wages are up 4.7%.
However, with inflation running at 9.2%, that’s really a decrease in our living standards of 6.2% and 4.5%.
Do your books!
The series Black Books has a hilarious episode about filing tax returns that will resonate with many people this week. Grumpy Bernard Black, played by Dylan Moran, will do anything to avoid filling out boring tax returns.
And he’s not alone. Taxback.com says around 8% of people probably missed this week’s deadline. So there are 60,000 Bernards out there, all facing penalties.
Taxback.com says late filers who get their return in by January 16, will keep the maximum surcharge they might face to €12,695 – a fifth of the maximum surcharge of €63,485.