New York
CNN Business
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In the span of just three years, Sam Bankman-Fried built FTX into a massive crypto exchange backed by marquee investors and valued at $32 billion. It took mere days for all of that to implode in a sprawling bankruptcy filing.
Sheila Bair, a top regulator during the 2008 financial crisis, told CNN there are eerie similarities between the dramatic rise and fall of Bankman-Fried and FTX and that of infamous Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernie Madoff.
Bair notes that 30-year-old Bankman-Fried, like Madoff, proved adept at using his pedigree and connections to seduce sophisticated investors and regulators into missing “red flags” hiding in plain sight.
“Charming regulators and investors can distract [them] from digging in and seeing what’s really going on,” Bair, who chaired the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 2006 to 2011, said in a phone interview on Monday. “It felt very Bernie Madoff-like in that way.”
FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday, throwing the cryptocurrency industry into chaos and raising the specter of vast losses for customers of the crypto exchange.
Long before his Ponzi scheme collapsed, Madoff was known as a wizard on Wall Street. He was the former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, served on Securities and Exchange Commission advisory panels and managed money for the rich and the…
