The collapse of crypto exchange FTX might not have happened if the firm was under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s watch, the agency’s head argued Thursday.
In a highly anticipated interview at Wednesday’s DealBook Summit, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried expressed regret over his exchange’s collapse, but clung to the narrative that its failure was due to a bet gone wrong. During the interview with the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bankman-Fried didn’t answer many of the questions investors would want answered, nor did he deliver the mea culpa many crypto industry observers have hoped to hear from the 30-year-old former crypto billionaire. “I didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” he said.
U.S. Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s remarks on Wednesday signaled a likely slowing down in interest rate hikes as soon as the central bank’s mid-December meeting, causing mixed results in equity markets. The S&P 500 index and Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 0.09% and 0.56%, respectively, while the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.13%. Nicholas Colas, co-founder of the market analysis firm DataTrek Research, wrote in a note that as much as Powell is “trying to contain investors’ animal spirits by talking about persistently high interest rates, markets are rejecting that message.” Colas added, “Instead, [markets] are looking through his rhetoric and think they see the inflection point for monetary policy.”