Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At the start of 2023, specifically in the January 9th and 10th, I wrote here that there were five major and dramatic trials scheduled for the year. And 2023 was in fact a dramatic reckoning for lovers of litigation.  Let us block this out a bit. 1) I wrote first about the Alex Murdaugh case.  That one took place soon thereafter.  The prominent South Carolina lawyer was convicted of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul.  Alex M. is in prison and the inevitable appeal is underway... 2) I spoke, too, about the forthcoming trial of Robert Telles, a former public official in Nevada suspected of the murder of Jeff German, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Evidentiary disputes have delayed matters on this one, and it is now scheduled for April 2024.  3) Thirdly, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, a colossus in the cryptocurrency world at the time, now (given the guilty verdict in his trial for wire fraud and related matters) just a guy in the Brooklyn ...

Here is another fascinating passage from Lewis' book, GOING INFINITE. In this passage, chapter five, Lewis is telling his story through the eyes of Caroline Ellison. For those of you new to the subject: Ellison was Samuel Bankman-Fried's sort-of love interest, and at this point in our story she had joined his project to create a crypto oriented hedge fund.  (This project evolved into the FTX exchange and an affiliated hedge fund, but we aren't there yet.)  One more preliminary note: an "EA" is an "effective altruist," a member of a group of usually quite bright people committed to a very long-range sort of utilitarianism which produces some counter-intuitive results. We don't need to get further into it than that.   Anyway, the passage: " In late March [2018] she started the job. The situation inside Alameda Research wasn't anything like Sam had led her to expect. He'd recruited twenty or so EAs, most of them in their twenties, all but o...

As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been looking forward to the receipt of Michael Lewis's latest book, on cryptocurrency and the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried. This will be the first in a series of three posts that will discuss passages in the book that stand out for me. None of these posts will constitute a review of the book, nor will they add up to one,  I now have it in my hot little hands. With some synchronicity, SBF took the stand in a courtroom on Thursday, Oct. 26, on his own behalf as a criminal defendant. This already tells you that the trial had not been going his way: defense counsel would have gone to a great deal of trouble to keep him OFF the stand were it not time for a desperate Hail Mary sort of play. But today's task is to quote a passage in the Lewis book about him that stands out. And here is one, from chapter three. Lewis gives an example of what is known in finance as "market making." Market making is not the same as "running an exchang...

Early this month, as Donald Trump made a point of showing up, unnecessarily, for the first three days of his civil trial in Manhattan, and with the press treating it with all the fanfare they have treated his four criminal indictments, Sam Bankman-Fried also went on trial.  The SBF trial is criminal and it is very likely to put SBF in prison, perhaps for a very long time. Furthermore, since SBF was in his heyday, not TOO long ago, a billionaire whiz-kid at the very top of the cryptocurrency food chain, this trial in other circumstances would itself be a top-tier spectacle. At least as spectacular as would be the civil trial of a billionaire old-man in the middle of the reality-television food chain. SBF ran both a crypto exchange (with some bank-like characteristics)  and a hedge fund, known as FTX and as Alameda Research, respectively. I admit having written confused things about this in the recent past. In this very blog, I once referred to Alameda Research as FTX's "data-cr...

  This is turning into a fascinating year for litigation.  Of course there is the former President and his four indictments, as well as his continued civil troubles.  The civil troubles feature an old lawsuit about a videophone he was hawking back in the day -- a marketing scheme that was mostly about selling the right to sell the phones, or selling the right to sell the right, etc, in classic pyramid fashion.  That aside, the year  2023 has seen the trial and conviction of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and son.  The Telles/German case is still hanging fire.   Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News would really have enlivened the year. As it happened, the willingness of the Fox empire to pay three quarters of a billion dollars to avoid a trial was itself remarkable and almost as much fun. Another great upcoming trial expected this year will be that of Sam Bankman-Fried, one time impresario of the great cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. The cas...

The business section of   The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Michael Kines on June 24. "Michael who?"  Indeed. A lot of people will react that way. But attention falls on Michael Kines because of the upcoming trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, which I have discussed here.  High Profile Trials to Watch for in 2023: Part One (jamesian58.blogspot.com)   Bankman-Fried is to FTX what Ken Lay was to Enron and what Bernie Madoff was to Madoff Investment Securities. People, including prosecutors, have unsurprisingly become very curious about Bankman-Fried's social/business networking. This brings us back to Kines.  Kines was a typical southern California schmoozer, show biz adjacent. He parlayed a brief period working for former President Bill Clinton into success as a Hollywood agent (in which capacity he apparently got to know everybody in that world, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Larry David, etc.). From that he moved into another status pos...

I remember doing an interview in September of last year with a lawyer who did a lot of work for the cryptocurrency industry.  It was clear already that there was "trouble in River City."  In July 2022, two important crypto businesses filed for chapter 11 protection: Voyager Digital and Celsius Network. Voyager Digital was a crypto broker. Unfortunately, it extended a large unwise loan to Three Arrows Capital, a crypto fund. Three Arrows defaulted, and Voyager never recovered.  So: why did Celsius Network collapse? You ask. Well ... Celsius Network was a crypto lending company that let users deposit their digital assets into a "Celsius wallet" preliminary to pledging them as security for their borrowing. The cause of its sudden failure is a rabbit hole I don't want to go down with you. But two quick points are observable from the surface: this failure was part of the more general cooling-off of crypto activity, in the manner that "hula-hoop lending" wo...

 The year just begun should be a great one for fans of reality courtroom dramas.  Today and tomorrow I hope to discuss five possible judicial spectacles of 2023, arranged in (increasing) order of political salience.  FIRST: the Murdaugh murder trial. Alex Murdaugh is a prominent member of the tort plaintiffs' bar (and a defense-oriented tort law reform group has called South Carolina a "judicial hellhole for defendants") -- the Murdaugh family has powerfully benefitted from a permissive attitude toward forum shopping by the bench in that state.  In February 2019 one of Alex's sons, Paul Murdaugh, recklessly piloting a boat, caused the death of his friend Mallory Beach. The Beach family, in a civil lawsuit, claimed that Alex and Paul's older brother, Buster, were negligent and responsible for the death of their daughter in providing Paul with alcohol prior to the accident.  Fortunately for the Beach family, the state has lots of other tort lawyers. The litigation...