Current Affairs

One of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, recently imploded spectacularly. Its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been called "the next Warren Buffett" and was a Democratic megadonor as well as a major funder of the "Effective Altruism" movement. Overnight, Bankman-Fried saw his fortune and his company wiped out, and he is now under criminal investigation. To explain what happened, and why we keep seeing spectacular frauds in the crypto industry, we are joined today by Stephen Diehl, a longtime critic of crypto who has been warning for years that crypto assets can suddenly implode and that unregulated crypto exchanges like FTX are a terrible place to keep your money. Diehl is the co-author of the new book Popping the Crypto Bubble, an accessible explanation of how cryptocurrency works and why it's a terrible idea. He and his co-authors show how the history of financial bubbles and manias helps us understand crypto-hype today. In this episode, Stephen discusses the credulity that allows con artists li