“Only when the tide goes out that do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” - Warren Buffett.
SPACs were the go to option for shady promoters to dump worthless stocks on investors who didn’t care. Now that the cheap money is over and money has a price (high-interest rates), we’ll see all the scams and frauds come out.
Bird said it had recorded revenue on certain trips even when customers lacked sufficient “preloaded ‘wallet’ balances.” The company said it should have reported the unpaid balances on its financial statements as deferred revenue.
The marketcap of the stock is down from a peak of $2.5 billion to ~$80 million
Economist Hyman Minksy in his financial instability theory said that stability breeds complacency, which leads to instability. This theory got the pop culture treatment and came to be known as the Minsky Moment. The phrase became popular during the 2008 crisis.
We’re seeing the exact thing play out. More skeletons will start tumbling from closets.
Crypto
Do crypto investors make money? NOPE! Some data from The Bank Of International Settlements (Central bank for central banks).
We show that, when the price of Bitcoin rises, more people download and actively use crypto exchange apps. These new users are disproportionately younger and male, commonly identified as the most “risk-seeking” segment of the population. We show that, due to price declines, an estimated 73-81% of retail investors have likely lost money on their initial investment.
I know we’ve shared a lot about FTX but it’s really funny.
It’s easy to say it in hindsight but it’s ridiculously easy to fool VCs sometimes. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos used to dress like Steve Jobs and fake her voice. She was hailed as a genius. Now, this SBF character who used to act like a jackass was considered the same. It’s funny that weirdness is equated with genius.
In the last year, Bankman-Fried had soared to buzzy prominence as a paragon of how the ultra-rich, who have seemingly endless wealth, might use it for good. He’s been the subject of countless profiles; he was on the cover of Fortune’s September issue. The media portrayed him as an unassuming, nerdy savant, frequently noting his down-to-earthness, his messy mop of hair, his penchant for wearing T-shirts and shorts, his Toyota Corolla. Investors were enamored of the fact that he wasn’t a buttoned-up entrepreneur; he played computer games during pitch meetings, and like other modern-day founders, his eccentricities were taken as proof of his distinct genius.
Matt Levine, the greatest financial journalist alive today, put it best:
“FTX’s list of investors spans powerful and well-known investment firms: NEA, IVP, Iconiq Capital, Third Point Ventures, Tiger Global, Altimeter Capital Management, Lux Capital, Mayfield, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ribbit Capital, Temasek Holdings, BlackRock and Thoma Bravo.” I suppose FTX is a failure of venture capitalist due diligence, but it’s an odd kind. The usual VC due diligence failure is, like, you back an entrepreneur who promises a futuristic product, and the product doesn’t work. FTX worked fine: People liked its technology, and it seems to have made money. The problem was in its balance sheet, which was full of snakes, and its governance, which put all the snakes there. Ideally the venture capitalists would have spotted that in due diligence, but the typical VC company has a very simple balance sheet and terrible governance, so it is sort of understandable that they sailed right by those problems.
Also, this
FTX’s bankruptcy could involve more than one million creditors, its lawyers said in court filings late Monday.
Also 
China
These two charts perfectly illustrate how bad the situation in China is.
https://twitter.com/Brad_Setser/status/1592534204449173504?t=ZB4aYSW0aoM7RImQFAvmcw&s=19
Charts
Despite this gold has done nothing 
Central banks globally have accumulated gold reserves this year at a pace never seen since 1967, when the US dollar was still backed by the precious metal.
In the quarter ending September, demand for gold was up 28% year-on-year, reaching 1,181 tons, according to a new World Gold Council (WGC) report.
Layoffs
8 billion
That’s the number of people living on earth at this moment.
It took the world just 12 years to go from seven to eight billion in population. The next billion, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency estimates, will take less than 15 years till 2037. While the global population will hit 9.7 billion by 2050, it will reach 10.4 billion by the end of the 21st century, the UN forecasts in its latest World Population Prospects report.
this is nice piece on:
