This is it in a nutshell from an article on CNN:
Officials allege that Bankman-Fried, 30, spent years lying about the financial health of
FTX, a crypto exchange which collapsed in November in one of the most spectacular financial implosions in years. Bankman-Fried is currently in the Bahamas, where FTX operated from, and is awaiting an
extradition hearing.
The entire fiasco is completely unsurprising, and in many ways could have been foreseen — as indeed
some did. After all, this is hardly the first case of alleged fraud we’ve seen from a figure like Bankman-Fried. And, as opposed to what any lawyer would advise, SBF, as he is commonly known, didn’t remain silent. He went on an apology tour, tweeting, speaking to reporters and even virtually participating in the yearly
DealBook Summit in New York last month where he said he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone.”
In some ways, these kinds of cases, many of which resemble traditional Ponzi schemes, are as old as American capitalism itself. They almost always pair a lack of regulation and oversight with promises of easy wealth schemes, all predicated on some kind of proprietary technology that seems to generate returns out of thin air.
Just look through American history, and the same story repeats itself, over and over. In America’s initial “Great Depression,” the
Panic of 1873, speculative investors operating without any oversight in the railroad industry effectively crashed the American economy, leading to spiraling bank failures and widespread destitution.
A half-century later in the late 1920s, the crash of the stock market — which more Americans had poured funds into, without any kind of oversight — propelled a series of bank runs that led to the actual
Great Depression. And in 2008, faulty loans repackaged as unique financial products sparked the Great Recession, with regulators asleep at the wheel along the way — all of which not only crashed the economy, but led to a foreclosure crisis, whose reverberations are still being felt.
Time and again, America’s financial industry has seen the emergence of new, untested financial tools — railroad bonds, stock purchases, mortgage derivatives — emerge without any kind of proper regulation and oversight. Time and again, money has raced in, looking to take advantage of the new industries and financial tools. And time and again, others have taken advantage of the new investors — and looted as much of the wealth as they could.