And yet bad as all of this is, it can’t prepare you for the balance sheet itself, published by FT Alphaville, which is less a balance sheet and more a list of some tickers interspersed with hasty apologies. If you blithely add up the “liquid,” “less liquid” and “illiquid” assets, at their “deliverable” value as of Thursday, and subtract the liabilities, you do get a positive net equity of about $700 million. (Roughly $9.6 billion of assets versus $8.9 billion of liabilities.) But then there is the “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account,” with a balance of negative $8 billion. I don’t actually think that you’re supposed to subtract that number from net equity — though I do not know how this balance sheet is supposed to work! — but it doesn’t matter. If you try to calculate the equity of a balance sheet with an entry for HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT, Microsoft Clippy will appear before you in the flesh, bloodshot and staggering, with a knife in his little paper-clip hand, saying “just what do you think you’re doing Dave?” You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison.

What Levine is doing is special. Give this man a Pulitzer.

FTX moved users’ funds to offline wallets early Saturday morning after a wave of “unauthorized transactions” drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the beleaguered cryptocurrency exchange. Ryne Miller, the general counsel at FTX US, didn’t confirm a hack, but said on Twitter that the company made the move to “mitigate damage” caused by the potential theft, as transferring funds offline, or to “cold storage,” helps prevents outsiders from gaining access to them.

The millions in funds evaporated from the platform shortly after FTX filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, affecting the domestic FTX US trading platform, the global version of FTX, and Alameda Research. It’s still unclear how much is missing from the exchange, but a report from CoinDesk suggests the amount could total over $600 million, while the blockchain analytics company, Elliptic, puts this number at about $473 million.

One can only hope that the missing funds belonged primarily to Silicon Valley VC tech-bro libertarian clowns and not to the working-class folks that they've been pushing their ponzi scheme onto.

Investors with crypto on the FTX platform — who numbered more than 5 million worldwide at the peak — will be closely watching the bankruptcy proceedings for any hope they might be refunded. However, many are resigning themselves to the fact that their holdings may be gone forever.

“The company and Sam Bankman-Fried seemed trustworthy,” said Justin Zhang, a 34-year-old engineer in Los Angeles. “I thought FTX US was different because of all the regulations put in place, but it’s not.”

Indeed, the sale of FTX to Binance may turn out to be the most gripping crypto narrative of the year — a “Succession”-level drama involving rival billionaires, rumors of sabotage and high-stakes battles over the future of the industry. It’s a stunning, sudden fall from grace for one of the crypto world’s biggest celebrities. And it signals that the industry, already reeling from a brutal year of losses, may be in for even tougher times.

John R. Tyson, Tyson Foods Inc.’s chief financial officer and son of the meat giant’s chairman, was arrested over the weekend after authorities said he fell asleep in the wrong house.

Mr. Tyson, 32 years old, was found asleep in a woman’s bed at her home in Fayetteville, Ark., on Sunday morning, according to a preliminary arrest report filed by the Fayetteville Police Department.

...

Mr. Tyson, the great-grandson of Tyson Foods’s founder, was promoted to the CFO role for the $24 billion meat company in September and took over the job at the start of October. He is the youngest chief financial officer serving at a company in the S&P 500 or Fortune 500, according to Crist Kolder, an executive-search firm.

Before taking over as CFO, he had been serving as Tyson’s executive vice president of strategy and chief sustainability officer, roles he still holds.

Absolutly breathtaking that investors in a public company would put up with this nepotism. No one on that board should have any credibility whatsoever. Just imagine how poorly other parts of this company might be running.

The Fed is expected to raise rates by 75 basis points, extending its most aggressive tightening campaign since the 1980s. The decision will be announced at 2 p.m. in Washington and Powell will hold a press conference 30 minutes later. He may emphasize policymakers remain steadfast in their inflation fight, while leaving options open for their December gathering.

“Markets want clarity on where the Fed will at least pause the current rate hike cycle, but Chair Powell is not really in any position to provide that just yet,” said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research. “For every sign the US economy is slowing (housing, commodity prices, retail sales ex-inflation) there are others that say labor market conditions remain strong.”

Very odd and seemingly counterintuitive that stocks should fall on news that the labor market is doing great. But the market wants some level of confidence on when/where rate hikes will eventually stop, and the continued stregth of the economy despite rate increases to-date makes that a very hard question to answer.

The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that there are two kinds of games in life: finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. The midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference. A bad fight can destroy a marriage. A challenged election can destabilize a democracy. In baseball, winning the World Series is a finite game, while growing the popularity of Major League Baseball is an infinite game. What happened, I think, is that baseball’s finite game was solved so completely in such a way that the infinite game was lost.

Compelling piece about baseball but actually about everything. You get what you measure, and the cloud computing explosion has us measuring more than ever.

Getting potential customers to trade a 3% mortgage for a 6% one is like “pushing rocks up hills,” said Colin Wyzgoski, who quit a job as a banker in August after taking time off because of work stress.

“When the fish are jumping in the boat, the job is one thing,” Rocket Mortgage Chief Executive Bob Walters said. “When you’re competing with a lot of other people, it’s a different thing.”

I'm sure it's unfair and presented out of context, but that's still a hell of a quote from a chief executive.

For the past decade, the spread between a measure of average national mortgage rates and 10-year Treasury yields has averaged 1.8 points, according to figures tracked by Autonomous Research. This year began right around that level. But with Treasurys yielding over 4%, the spread now at roughly 3 points is about as high as it has been this century.

Other times that the spread has seen comparable widening were in late 2008 and March 2020, when the financial crisis and pandemic, respectively, were driving investors to the haven of Treasurys. In both cases, the Federal Reserve stepped up to buy more mortgage bonds, bringing spreads and mortgage rates down, as spreads on mortgage bonds are a key component in the mortgage rates ultimately charged to borrowers.

This time, that isn’t happening.