Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

The degree to which cryptocurrency and related endeavors (NFTs, etc.) it is clear that this entire financial ecosystem is a profoundly criminogenic enterprise.

I have never been able to come up with the words to say this succinctly, but private equity maven Orlando Bravo did when he said that the, "Crypto industry is not as ethical as private equity."

Mr. Bravo is a founder and managing partner for the PE firm Thoma Bravo, and is big into crypto, and even he sees this as a morass of fraud:

Orlando Bravo, the billionaire co-founder of Thoma Bravo and a bitcoin enthusiast, has said he was disappointed to find that ethical standards in parts of the crypto industry are not as high as in private equity.

Bravo, whose buyout group invested about $150mn in Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX last year and has stakes in four other businesses in the sector, said in an interview with the Financial Times that his firm is pausing investments in other crypto companies.

The private equity executive said he was happy with the deals Thoma Bravo had done so far but he had come across problems in the wider industry.

“I’ve gotten to know that world a little bit more, and some of the business practices don’t rise to the level of ethics that we’re all used to in private equity with your investors and your customers and your community, and that has been a bit disappointing,” he said. 

Bravo, who has said he personally owns bitcoin, criticised the crypto market for what he called a “disturbing” lack of transparency. But he stressed that he was still bullish about bitcoin and believed the industry was “just young” and ethical problems would “get fixed over time”.

………

Bravo, whose firm rushed into the booming market for special purpose acquisition companies, or Spacs, said the model should be made more like private equity. Spacs have been criticised for enriching the so-called “sponsors” who set up the cash shells, even if the target company loses value after going public.

The idea that the level of ethics in crypto would be unacceptable for a private equity firm is mind buggering.

PE is, after an industry that refuses to allow its contracts with public pensions to be made available to the public, and obscures its fees and actual returns.

The segment that deals with SPACs, as Mr. Bravo's does, is even dodgier than your run of the mill PE firm.

If crypto is too corrupt for this guy………