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Jan 19, 2023·edited Jan 19, 2023

My assumption all along has been that the Fed will raise interest rates enough to allow Republicans to campaign against the Recession during 2024.

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Matt Levine´s newsletter: ¨But can you … can you … can you just a little bit go back to Option 2? Not really, of course; not fraud. You have to be open and honest about the hole in the balance sheet, about the backdoors in FTX’s code that allowed Alameda to take all the money. But before they knew about the missing money, a lot of people — retail customers but also institutional crypto traders — seem to have liked trading on FTX, and that is what made FTX valuable, and maintaining and increasing that value seems like the best way to fill the hole in the balance sheet. If FTX could just restart its exchange business, and go back to being popular and making billions of dollars in trading fees, then those billions of dollars could be used to pay back customers. And if that happened then maybe the FTT tokens, the magic beans that right now FTX will have trouble selling, could recover their value, and also be used to pay back customers.

This seems far-fetched and I do not personally have any idea how you could restart trading on FTX, attract new deposits, and get everyone to pretend everything is fine so you can earn back the money that Alameda borrowed/lost/stole. But I guess John Ray does? [...]

I guess? I mean, conceptually, what you have to do here is convince big crypto investors to start trading again on FTX by (1) opening up some new entity where they can deposit money that won’t get thrown into the hole caused by Alameda and (2) convincing those investors that, this time, you won’t steal the money. I suppose installing a new CEO, filing for bankruptcy, and disclosing the hole in the balance sheet and the backdoors in the code is a way to build that sort of trust. Maybe John Ray had to burn FTX down to save it.¨

My original thinking was that Bitcoin (crypto) was so stupid that it would eventually fault and people would run away and that would be the end of it, but I was in error there. I did not count on the sheer number of stupid people with way more money than sense, but also I did not take in to account the sheer number of people with some amount of money and zero sense willing themselves into believing that billions of magic beans (on paper) is somehow going to morph into actual folding green money. (Alternatively: some serious number of people are so infatuated with the idea of being pretend (crypto) bazillionaires that they would do absolutely anything to continue to maintain said belief (´Baby, I´m a crypto billionaire! Dig my crypto yacht!' even if it´s all fake and their money is all gone and they will likely never see it again and they totally know that.)

That said, crypto will die when someone cracks the encryption (and someone will eventually, because there is no form of cryptography that can´t be cracked, eventually) and starts counterfeiting to beat the bad, so there´s a fatal ending to the crypto dreams, but boy, isn´t it great being a magic bean billionaire!

elm

ok man whatever you do you

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Can't resist giving advice. Get yourself checked out by a physician. Have you sa had sabbatical ? Try naps and exercise. Wonder if all the rain has been getting you down. Horrible thought--we're all getting older. Allen Kamp, B.A. Berkeley, 1964.

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Have you considered TenRen green tea? We recommend King's 403 1st Grade. We're not sure of what is in it, possibly freeze dried adrenochrome, but it makes the caffeine in coffee feel like a soporific.

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TIPS! Yikes! I though Jay was just ignoring the TIPS. The TIPS was right ~ 6 months before he started raising FF. Why should he be sure it is wrong now?

I was listening to some Davos tpes speak today and they believe or claim to believe that FF is at its peak or almost.

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You live maybe 5-6 miles away from Peet's Coffee roasters in Alameda and you are going cold turkey on coffee. For shame, you should be helping a local bay area business!!! :-) Just FYI, we are long time Peet's fans and like the medium roast Cafe Domingo. It gets my morning off to a good start!

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What I learn from this is that I am subscribed (by email) to your chat.

That's probably overdoing it, long term, but since this is the very first notification received, let's see where it goes.

Anyway coffee fits generally within my range of interests. Typical of the readership perhaps.

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In the Navy it was "No liberty until your morale improves".

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