Bitcoin investor Max Keiser: America is 'ruled by a kleptocracy'
Max Keiser speaks with Fox Nation's 'Tucker Carlson Today' on Sam-Bankman Fried's cryptocurrency scandal.
Bitcoin investor and co-host of the "Orange Pill Podcast" Max Keiser unfolded the steps that alleged big crypto frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried take in cryptocurrency scams and how these scandals negatively impact the economy on Fox Nation’s "Tucker Carlson Today."
The key to Sam Bankman-Fried’s "empire of fraud is that he created his own play money token called FTT, and he was able to create that without any oversight or any tie to anything underlying giving it value whatsoever," Keiser said.
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of FTX, grew up in California. After attending college, he began his career in the crypto market. The 30-year-old founded the company in 2019 in Hong Kong and then relocated the company’s headquarters to the Bahamas in 2021. Prior to its collapse, the cryptocurrency company was worth $32 billion and according to reports from Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, Bankman-Fried’s net worth, at one point, reached $26 billion.
Many individuals invested in the failed crypto company, including big names such as, NFL legend Tom Brady, NBA star Stephen Curry, NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, MLB Hall of Famer David Ortiz, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, comedian Larry David and more. The celebrities are now faced with a lawsuit for endorsing FTX before the company went bankrupt, costing individuals billions.
FTX CEO SAM BANKMAN-FRIED DENIES HE WAS TRYING TO BUY INFLUENCE WITH DONATIONS TO NEWS OUTLETS
Keiser labeled Bankman-Fried’s FTT (FTX tokens) as a "Ponzi scheme," detailing that the FTX founder and others such as Ethereum, Cardano and XRP have taken part in what he described as "crypto-graphic scams."
"There are many people that create these – what are called ‘alt coins’ or ‘scam coins,’" he explained to Tucker Carlson.
"These are all coins that are just created, and then they list these coins on each other’s exchange, and then they buy them from each other to create a price. Then they used the enhanced price which is now a collateral value to go buy something like -- Sam Bankman-Fried did—real estate in the Bahamas."
Keiser then went on to call out Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for his ties to the former FTX executive. He asserted that Gensler "should’ve been calling time on this, long ago, but we find out he’s actually involved and there’s some — what I would call — collusion."
After the ignominious fall of FTX, the SEC chair has been hit since then with criticism for meeting with Bankman-Fried and IEX to discuss matters of a new trading platform and for not catching red flags with the former executive’s beforehand, leaving investors of the company with huge losses in the world of digital currency.
Sam Bankman-Fried promised big-dollar grants to, or invested in, The Intercept, Vox, ProPublica and Semafor before FTX's collapse. (Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Keiser reveals how these "financialized" institutions use "cheap money" and "cross-collateralize" with one another in order to buy "real assets" which fundamentally "undermines" the American economy.
According to Keiser, these actions that are taken by these establishments contribute to issues such as inflation and unemployment even within places like the medical field.
"It all goes back to essentially the deregulations that happened 40 years ago which led to the financialization and the over indebtedness, the overleveraging of the economy. Now in 2022, since interest rates are going up… that’s the end of the mirage, that the bubble has been popped," he said.
"The FTX scandal and the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal was like, the last drags of a 40-year bacchanal in cheap money, no regulation and crooked bankers."
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