From the Big Short to the Big Scam

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

prices in the years before the crisis was a bubble, and that many of the seemingly sophisticated financial instruments that helped inflate housing would eventually be revealed as worthless junk. Why were so few willing to bet against the bubble? A large part of the answer, I would suggest, was what we might call the incredulity factor — the sheer scale of the mispricing the skeptics claimed to see. Even though there was clear evidence that housing prices were out of line, it was hard to believe they could be that far out of line — that $6 trillion in real estate wealth would evaporate, that investors in mortgage-backed securities would lose around $1 trillion. It just didn’t seem plausible that markets, and the conventional wisdom saying that markets were OK, could be that wrong. But they were. Which brings us to the current state of crypto.

Did you Know?

Fan tokens or sports crypto are digital assets that enable sports teams, leagues, clubs, associations and players to strengthen fan engagement.

Last week the Federal Trade Commission reported that “cryptocurrency is quickly becoming the payment of choice for many scammers,” accounting for “about one of every four dollars reported lost to fraud.” Given how small a role cryptocurrency plays in ordinary transactions, that is impressive. True, the sum reported by the FTC isn’t that big — around $1 billion since 2021 — but this counts only reported losses to outright fraud, where people were suckered into paying for nonexistent assets. It doesn’t count scams that went unreported, let alone money invested in assets that existed, sort of, but were fundamentally worthless — assets like TerraUSD, a “stablecoin” that was neither stable nor a coin.