Commodity futures need to be standardized and tied to a physical delivery point, which in this case was overwhelmed, wrote one publication. About. Welcome to Matt Levine by me, Matt Levine. Its single biggest asset: $3.66 billion of unlocked FTT. The third-largest entry on the assets side of the accounting ledger? He later went on to become an investment banker for Goldman Sachs, where he structured and marketed corporate equity derivatives for four years. For starters, Binance executives quickly found themselves staring into a financial black hole -- a gap between liabilities and assets at FTX thats probably in the billions, and possibly more than $6 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. As you can review in our publicly filed, audited financial statements, we hold customer assets 1:1. Im doing a bit, he says. So you say, sure, fine, Ill take your $10,000 and put $20,000 of Bitcoin in your account. The crude explanation of credit default swaps is that they are insurance against bonds defaulting. Lets accept, for the purposes of this essay, that founders and venture capitalists are engaged in a simple trade. Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance. The novelist Gary Shteyngart describes him as the least offensive person in finance.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times. Matt Levine. Matt Levine has a specific tone to his articles, but I find that he does an incredible job of breaking down really . Elon does some shit every day, and thats how I get the newsletter done, Levine says. Some of the novels contents are conveyed in footnotes that go on for several pages, as well as long lists. It is concerned with western North American region mysteries, but the conference itself travels worldwide, having been held in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as different parts of the United States. Within hours, he was forced to reconsider. Here is the podcast where I said to Sam Bankman-Fried "You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good.". Any institutional lending activity at Coinbase is at the discretion of the customer and backed by collateral. Bloomberg's web site requires a subscription but you can also get the Money Stuff articles as an occasional email.It arrives at most once per day. When he was in high school, he read a book by the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker called The Mezzanine, about a man who leaves a fancy Midtown Manhattan office building during his lunch hour on an errand to buy new shoelaces. The fine is $200 million per bank (SEC and CFTC combined). Matt Levine is a columnist for Bloomberg News covering finance and business. 103 Production . And that that went wrong in roughly the way I have outlined. Each day, Levine publishes Money Stuff, a widely read, free newsletter. His work is some of the most sophisticated analysis of what is really happening on Wall Street, said Bill Ackman, another billionaire fund manager. "[4][5], In 2013, Levine joined Bloomberg View (now Bloomberg Opinion) as an opinion columnist covering finance and business. It seems somewhat unlikely. Mr. Levines favorite subjects include insider trading statutes, bond-market liquidity and the ubiquity of securities fraud, but his columns are never boring. This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. (The best measure of his audiences devotion may not be his 112,000 Twitter followers, but rather the 3,000 that follow @MattLevineBot, a fan account describing itself as a bot that mimics his writing style.) Above the Laws sister blog Dealbreaker, focusing on Wall Street gossip was hiring. This makes them vulnerable to runs, Diamond-Dybvig, Its a Wonderful Life, etc., everyone knows all this. Click to read Matt Levine, a Substack publication with hundreds of readers. Matt Levine: No, I agree. "Elon, Matt Levine really wants you to keep changing your mind on Twitter . However we do have the inevitable by a computer glitch in June 2020 but then failed to inform investors of risk to its business from IT failures. Bloomberg: Balance of Power focuses on the politics and policies being shaped by the agenda of President Biden's administration. So much business is about personal relationships, and texting and WhatsApp can feel more personal than your firm email account. @matt_levine + Get alerts for Matt Levine Robinhood Markets Inc. is in the business of getting people to trade stock (and options, and cryptocurrencies) on their phones. Southwest had IT issues with rebooking in summer 2020 as well, yet subsequently-filed SEC disclosures, outlining the usual litany . He looks at whats going on in the markets, scrolls through emails from readers and plugs into the chatter of early-to-work traders. Lately my favorite read has been Matt Levine's Money Stuff articles from Bloomberg News. Matt Levine runs the " Money Stuff " newsletter, one of the most irreverent and informative guides to the absurdities of the financial world. In 2007, he took a position at Goldman Sachs, applying his knowledge of corporate law to the financial markets. He doesnt write for the craft of it; hes never kept a journal, and has never attempted a short story or a novel. Matt is one of the best writers today chronicling the ironies, paradoxes and absurdities of modern business and finance, wrote one of them, the hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, in an email. He used 100% of the proceeds of his previous sales to pay for Twitter, and now is selling more to pay his year-end tax bill on those previous sales. published Jan 18, 2018 8:39:36 AM, by Matt Levine (Bloomberg View) - Hovnanian. In college, at Harvard, Mr. Levine began writing emails to his friends that were leavened by footnotes. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Founders sell business risk in exchange for the cash they need to take bigger risks; venture capitalists buy that risk hoping it will one day transmute into reward. Conceivably, in theory, the latter price (what youd pay to not have oil now) could exceed the former (what youd pay to have oil eventually), leading to negative spot prices.. It is called The Crypto Story. Matts the perfect complement to Bess, Felix Salmon, another financial blogger, wrote in October 2011. After graduating from Harvard in 2000, with a major in classics, Mr. Levine taught Latin at a high school in a Boston suburb. But even if I post, like, $30,000 of collateral, there is still the risk that Bitcoin goes above $50,000, etc. Money and stuff. His column discusses current events in corporate finance and markets, with an insightful, nuanced lens and a dry wit. If everyone knows that you are in this situation that you have a lot of Bitcoin collateral and Bitcoin prices are falling people will expect you to have to liquidate your Bitcoin collateral, so they will expect Bitcoin prices to fall, so they will sell Bitcoin, which will cause Bitcoin prices to fall, which will cause your long-Bitcoin customers to default, which will cause you to liquidate Bitcoin at lower and lower prices, etc., until you are bankrupt. Christine Weaver . 4. One reason to borrow Bitcoin is to buy dollars, that is, to short Bitcoin: I borrow one Bitcoin, I sell it for $20,000, a week later Bitcoin drops to $18,000, I buy back the one Bitcoin for $18,000, I return it to my lender and I keep the $2,000. By uncritically mentioning crypto's multi-trillion dollar market cap 9 times, Levine, a Harvard educated financial expert, embeds a lie into the unconscious of the reader. There are variations on this trade (I borrow Bitcoin and sell it for Ethereum, betting on the relative value between the tokens, etc.). In August, Musk had said he was done offloading Tesla stock and that it was important to avoid an emergency sale of the shares in case he was forced to close the Twitter acquisition and struggled to bring in additional equity partners. Theyll probably lend you like $100 against $200 of their stock, in an ordinary-course transaction; they just wont do too much of it. Eventually youll get the rest of the Bitcoin back from Customer B, but for now you just pay Customer A out of your own Bitcoin stash. WhatsApp, everyone pay $200 million. Okay. The documents didnt indicate that the transactions were pre-planned. One is that FTX is an exchange for levered traders, offering products like perpetual futures and leveraged tokens that build in margin lending. 5. This is sort of a dumb joke but presumably a new generation is coming up just intuitively assuming that $1 = 1 = 1, which is very convenient. If the tenants pay more in Please, Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and, To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit. I write the Money Stuff newsletter at Bloomberg Opinion. To contact the author of this story: Matt Levine at mlevine51@bloomberg.net. FTX didnt have the money, and Bankman-Fried started calling around asking for a loan or a bailout. Happy Thanksgiving! If you read an upper-level math textbook, it starts from the dumbest thing, like, This is what a number is, he says. As of yesterday's close, it had a stock price of $0.0004 and a market capitalization of about $98,000; it trades an average of about $13.26thirteen dollars and twenty-six centsworth of stock each day, though it had a big day last week when almost $400 worth of stock traded. Each of them is overcollateralized you only lend Customer A half the value of her Bitcoin, and you only lend Customer B half the value of his dollars so you feel pretty safe. There is a timing problem. FTX made up the Serum token on there own. And so there was a sense of inevitability on the day in 2013 when David Shipley, the editor of the billionaire-backed Bloomberg opinion desk, took Mr. Levine to lunch and offered him a job. Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone writer, who was famous for excoriating defenders of neoliberalism and likening Goldman Sachs to a ''great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity . I type really fast! Levine says. It makes for a tricky decision for Zhao, known in the crypto world as CZ: Follow through with rescuing his onetime top rival and shoulder the financial and regulatory burdens, or let FTX crumble and sort through the potential wreckage? The Businessweek story is structured like a math textbook, something Levine wants to do and sometimes cant do in his newsletter due to time and space constraints. The last time Ilooked at Yahoo, in December, I calculated that the after-tax equity value of its actual businesses, outside of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, was about $1.7 billion. ext. . The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - "Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters." (archive; also btw What Is Code? Often, a significant chunk of the newsletter is devoted to a legal battle between sophisticated counterparties, or a complex financial product. If you are a crypto exchange, you might issue your own crypto token. He is doing exactly what he has long wanted to do. Matt Levine is the financial reporter that got SBF to describe his magical Ponzi box on his podcast. But then one day a customer comes to you and says I have $10,000, but I am really bullish on Bitcoin, so I would like to buy $20,000 worth of Bitcoin. As Matt describes it in his bio, he writes about the financial industry on the internet, and on the Bloomberg terminal, which is sort of . It would actually have enough money to give all the customers their money back, because it kept all the customers money in their own envelopes the whole time. But it sure has been a distraction! My life has not been ruined by having to write about Elon Musk on Saturdays, the former mergers and acquisitions lawyer told me. I joke that people want a lock of his hair.. Sorry, comments are closed for this post. Matt Levine Matt Levine Matt Levine. Terrible. but it is a lot like stock in FTX. Everybody used WhatsApp and now everybody writes checks. Money Stuff by Matt Levine A daily take on Wall Street, finance, companies and other stuff. Yet he gives the same impression of personalization to readers who know little about finance. Feb 11, 2021. When we hear on the news "$8 billion collapse!" it's all fake because of crap like the Serum tokens. The lower bound is that they take it and lend it to the Federal Reserve, which is called narrow banking and basically as good as keeping it in envelopes, but which is, I want to be careful to say that I am not an expert on Coinbases business models and do not want to, like, endorse it. If the price of Bitcoin falls by 90%, Customer B will be thrilled. By 2011, Mr. Levine had decided to leave Goldman. But one general point is that while some customers will want to borrow dollars to buy Bitcoin, other customers will want to borrow Bitcoin. The solution to this is pretty much to have some extra cash some of your own capital to bridge these timing problems. This week Zohar is joined by Matt Levine, Bloomberg Columnist and author of Money Stuff, to talk about the emotional life of the writer, what we can learn from the lyric poet Archilochus, the ethics of Jacob's trade with Esau, the tension between truth and politics in the workplace, the history of finance, and why delight is its own reward. Mr. Levine writes about Wall Street in a way that makes its denizens feel as if he is writing for them. You know Im good for it: If I dont pay you back, you can sell my Bitcoin and pay yourself back from the proceeds.. He seasoned his analyses with humor and a nerdy, confident tone. One other point here is that if this is the story, then it is not a liquidity crisis but a solvency one. Have a large reserve. Today's Master Minds: Mark "The Beast" Labbett, LaKedra Pam, Ryan Chaffee. To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com. He just has so much else going on. Stock Sniper Might Have Pumped and Dumped. Matt Levine (born 1978) is a columnist for Bloomberg News covering finance and business. You say sure, sounds good, and hand over all your collateral. If all of the banks customers do this every day, then the bank makes plenty of money to pay for real estate and tellers and vaults and executive bonuses, without doing anything else with your money. the SEC doesn't do that stuff. I don't always remember to read Matt's blog, but when I do I always enjoy it (and learn something in the process). I wrote a story about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. He never joined an elite social club or spent six figures on a Hamptons summer rental. Download. FTX's Balance Sheet Was Bad - by Matt Levine. He knows his stuff, Mr. Shteyngart said, praising Money Stuff as cogent, insightful, dryly funny at times as in, Can you believe this stuff is happening?. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. It was like this long, Matt-type silence, and then kind of a sigh, and then: OK, Mr. Shipley recalled. Futures, risk, fraud, securities fraud and Wirefraud. The Difference Is That Biden Gave the Documents Back, That Giant Sucking Sound Is theExit From US Stocks, Europe Is Winning the Winter War by Sheer Luck, For Ukraine to Win the Maneuver War, Germany Must Move First. Never miss an update. Also a Twitter markdown and a SPAC CFO YOLOs GME. Some of Mr. Levines readers write to him and attempt to mimic his style, as if he were J.D. Now, he's accelerating his move from player to team owner. There are web pages / articles I still read - I'll check out things by Derek Sivers, Patrick McKenzie/Bits About Money, Money Stuff by Matt Levine, all by local HN recommendations. Three Arrows, FTX/Alameda, bribes and bonuses. Are all those debts coming due? Expert Institute Award for Best Legal Tech Blog I mean, theres a little bit of differentiation, but not too much. Thanks! Anyway it is still early and confusing but that seems to be the story of FTX. He clerked for a federal appeals court judge, and put in time as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Today's challengers: Caroline, Matt, Indra. And so, at 33, Mr. Levine sat down to write. But who are the lenders? His newsletter is Money Stuff. Matt Levine is a financial writer I like and he explains (the latest information about) what happened with FTX. [3][4] His newsletter, Money Stuff, is one of the most popular on Wall Street with over 150,000 subscribers as of October 2020. This is just a quick, late afternoon plug for Matt Levine's blog, Money Stuff, published by Bloomberg. But selling billions of dollars of Tesla stock to fund a weird quest to buy Twitter would I mean, be a distraction at least. (Most notably, there *are* loan products. [1][4], In 2011, Levine started writing about economics and finance for the financial news site Dealbreaker. It is a bit complicated to get this . Copyright 2002-2023 BeSpacific LLC. For Mr. Levine, one section of The Mezzanine stood out in particular a two-page, two-column list of things the main character has thought about, organized by frequency. As he ascends, he reflects on the lives of his friends and his own lifes course. But there are risks. Here is a link. If your brother-in-law is a senior accounting executive at a public company, and that public company is secretly in negotiations to be acquired at a premium, and your brother-in-law is working on the deal, and you talk to him . This is the story of his ascension. Now, he's accelerating his move from player to team owner. We will never repurpose your funds: We do not lend or take any action with your assets, unless you specifically instruct us to. The more people who sign up for accounts, and the more they trade, the happier Robinhood is. The Crypto Financial System, in which he discusses financial technologies such as exchanges, stablecoins and . Despite having made more money at white-shoe law and Wall Street firms than he does as a writer, Mr. Levine says he is happier now. But FTX doesnt have their money; it has FTT, and a loan to Alameda. Apollo Global Management Inc., Carlyle Group Inc. and KKR & Co. said in regulatory filings this week that they received letters from the Securities and Exchange Commission on their use of electronic messaging for business. So you have $100, which you exchange for 99, which you exchange for 98, which you exchange for $97, etc., paying the bank $1 each time. There is even an RSS. Actually thats the best outcome. You might just say no, thats dumb, Bitcoin is volatile, buying $10,000 of Bitcoin is plenty of excitement. (In fact Coinbase shut down margin trading in 2020.) FTX issues a token called FTT. Yes. You have Customer A who has Bitcoin and wants to borrow dollars, and Customer B who has dollars and wants to borrow Bitcoin. Levine's coverage and analysis of the 2012 JPMorgan Chase trading loss was featured in the Columbia Journalism Review's anthology "The Best Business Writing 2013. Sure, he was at Sesame Place, the theme park just outside Philadelphia, with his kids when Musk announced his Twitter bid, and then stayed up until midnight that night to get his newsletter, Money Stuff, out. Also WWE governance, VC shame and the origins of the jury. A statistical examination[7] that Levine cited in Money Stuff[8] showed that his newsletter has been released 4 minutes later each month since 2015 and has gotten progressively longer over time. It is not a plot-driven novel. The whole extended . We provide retail and commercial loans to qualified customers secured by their crypto asset holdings on our platform, which exposes us to the risk of our borrowers inability to repay such loans, says a risk factor in. You have to pay Customer B out of your own capital, and you dont get it back from Customer A. Youve just lost money. Mr. Levine tried to write like that, with snarky punch lines, and failed. Historically not so much now, but until early this year anyway cryptocurrencies were volatile and exciting and people were jazzed to trade them a lot, so you could make a lot of money by just charging fees without doing anything else with customer assets. Remarkably, Mr. Levines piece was written more than an hour before the market went haywire. Never miss an update. Most classically, they borrow short to lend long, taking checking deposits that can be withdrawn at any time, and using them to make long-term mortgages. Oliver Keens asks: has our morality changed or are we just too deferential, confused or downright hypocritical to discuss it any more? But the other weird thing about this bank is that, every day, you come in and say hey Id like to exchange my dollars for euros or my euros for pounds or whatever, and each time you do that the bank charges you a dollar. I dont really take vacations. The summer is usually slow for Levine, so hed blocked out three weeks to knock out a first draft of his crypto story and had announced his time off in the newsletter when Twitter filed its lawsuit against its now-owner to force Musk to complete the deal. I dont know, but let me speculate a little bit. "I write a lot about people who have gotten in trouble with the SEC or the Justice Department. It read like a bedtime story about West Texas Intermediate Crude. His answer, at least for now, is that the financial hole appears too deep.