Those audiences were sympathetic because SBF was part of the club. He was a celebrity Democrat who combined financial alchemy with highly leveraged virtue-signaling. SBF’s connections may have spared him—and the Democrats who took his money—the embarrassment of congressional cross-examination this week. And they certainly insulate him from becoming a symbol of a corrupt system, a poster-boy for a failed philosophy. He’d be treated differently if he hid all that hair under a MAGA hat.
When Enron imploded in 2001, Ken Lay’s connections to the Republican White House were daily news. Columnist Paul Krugman, a former Enron adviser, wrote that the energy firm’s bankruptcy would prove more significant than the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The editors of the American Prospect wrote, “The Enron scandal should ring down the curtain on a whole philosophy of free-market capitalism and a whole style of government-corporate cronyism.” Author Robert Kuttner said, “Enron is the emblem of the Bush administration’s way of life.” And historian Sean Wilentz declared: “Republicans ruled. Ergo, Enron.”
Will any eminence write, in the coming weeks, “Democrats ruled. Ergo, FTX”? Will journalists draw a connection between SBF’s funneling of investor dollars to progressive causes and candidates for office—mostly, but not all, to Democrats—and the sham economics and cynical politics of the Environmental, Social, and Governance movement running rampant through financial markets? As FTX’s current CEO, John J. Ray III, figures out what happened to the exchange, will he realize that SBF’s privileged background and chic politics allowed the young trader to behave in haphazard and unprofessional ways until, finally, he ran out of other people’s money?
Even now, Bankman-Fried is viewed as an object of pity.
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