Finance Docket: FTX Trial (Somehow) Takes Backseat
When Sam Bankman-Fried was initially accused of ripping off investors to the tune of billions, it was difficult to imagine any trial overshadowing his.
The word “trial” comes from the Old French trier, meaning “to pick out, cull” — as in separating the good from the bad through careful examination. It is certainly a big week for that general concept.
Almost everyone has heard something of former president Donald Trump’s many legal troubles.
Specifically looking at the financial practices of the sprawling Trump empire, a judge has ruled that Trump committed fraud by repeatedly lying to banks and insurers as well as by habitually undervaluing and overvaluing numerous forms of property.
This ruling allowed the New York Attorney General’s $250 million civil lawsuit against Trump and his various associates and offspring to proceed on the remaining causes of action, and Trump himself appeared in characteristically bombastic form at the first day of trial.
When Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of the once-massive crypto exchange FTX, was initially accused of ripping off investors to the tune of billions, it was difficult to imagine any trial overshadowing his.
That being said, Bankman-Fried’s trial also began this week, and though it may be of less national import than Trump’s, the outcome is sure to cause ripples across the entire cryptocurrency industry.
Bankman-Fried’s trial comes with some literary flare: famed finance industry journalist Michael Lewis wrote a book about Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall, which was timed to come out just as the trial kicked off.
We explore these trials and more in the latest Finance Docket newsletter.
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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
