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Billionaire Howard Marks says investors have ‘gone from the low-return world of 2009-21 to a full-return world,’ and it’s a ‘sea change’ from the last 40 years
BYALENA BOTROS December 14, 2022, 7:31 PM GMT Photo of Howard Marks. Howard Marks, co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Group. LAUREN JUSTICE/BLOOMBERG—GETTY IMAGES
In his 53 years in the investment world, Howard Marks—the billionaire and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management—said he’s only seen two real transformations in investing, until now.
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“I’ve seen a number of economic cycles, pendulum swings, manias and panics, bubbles and crashes, but I remember only two real sea changes,” Marks wrote in a memo published Tuesday. “I think we may be in the midst of a third one today.”
The first shift, in the 1970s, was the “adoption of a new investor mentality,” as he put it, to embrace risk. Marks said the shift led to new kinds of investments like distressed debt, mortgage backed securities, structured credit, and private lending.
Marks recognized that sea change as it was happening, and he chose to invest in bonds of “America’s riskiest companies,” and made money “steadily and safely.”
“It’s no exaggeration to say today’s investment world bears almost no resemblance to that of 50 years ago,” Marks wrote. “Young people joining the industry today would likely be shocked to learn that, back then, investors didn’t think in risk/return terms. Now that’s all we do. Ergo, a sea change.”
The second transformation came in the 1980s. The Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volcker, raised the federal funds lending rate to 20% to lower inflation that had soared to 13.5% because of a spike in oil prices that pushed the cost of goods up and “ignited rapid inflation,” he said. Three years later inflation had dropped to 3.2%. With that success, the Fed gradually reduced the federal funds rate—prompting a “declining-interest-rate environment that prevailed for four decades.”
Investor success over the last 40 years is largely due to those low interest rates, Marks said, because they fueled an era of cheap and easy money. Bank of America described that environment as an “aberration,” rather than labeling it a new normal.
“The past two decades of ‘2%’ inflation, growth, and wages have ended with a reversion to the long-term historical mean,” BofA’s analysts previously wrote in a research note.
Interest rates hit an all-time low in 2008 after the Fed cut the federal funds rate to zero in an attempt to rescue the economy from the Great Financial Crisis. From 2009 to 2020, when the pandemic began, the “U.S. enjoyed its longest economic recovery in history,” Marks said.
During the Great Financial Crisis, Oaktree raised billions of dollars in debt to purchase distressed assets—and his investors benefited from the firm’s recognizing the opportunity as debt boomed.
But that era ended this year, with high inflation and higher interest rates. Year-over-year U.S. inflation reached a four-decade high at 9.1% in June before slowing to 7.1% in November. It drove the Fed to hike interest rates seven times this year, pushing the federal funds rate to a range of 4.25% to 4.5%.
Pessimism took over optimism, Marks said, and inflation and interest rates are “highly likely to remain the dominant considerations influencing the investment environment for the next several years.”
“We’ve gone from the low-return world of 2009-21 to a full-return world, and it may become more so in the near term,” Marks wrote.
And that means investors can get “solid returns” without having to rely so heavily on riskier investments, which in turn could mean better opportunities for lenders and bargain hunters. But investment strategies that worked best over the last 40 years might not perform well in the years to come—“that’s the sea change I’m talking about,” Marks wrote.
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TECH Elon Musk’s buddies in Silicon Valley are predicting he will emerge laughing from his year
Some parents believe in being strict, while others are lenient. Many wonder how to find the right balance.
For my book, “Raising an Entrepreneur,” I interviewed 70 parents who raised highly successful adults about how they helped their kids achieve their dreams.
It was an extremely diverse group — of different races, religions, income, family structure and education. But as I talked to each, I discovered a common theme: “respectful parenting.”
Respectful parenting, sometimes called “wise parenting,” involves setting standards and strict rules (e.g., only spending money you earn) while also being respectful of kids’ choices (e.g., letting them choose their own after school activities).
What is respectful parenting?
When I tell people about the benefits of respectful parenting, they find it surprising and counterintuitive.
Why would any parent let a young child make their own choices? It’s much easier to step in before your kid does something that sounds like a bad idea, like wearing a Halloween costume to school in January or taking apart a radio.
But respectful parents value individuality and don’t try to dictate what their kids are curious about or how they express themselves.
Unlike popular parenting styles such as “permissive,” which overindulges children to avoid conflict, or “authoritarian,” where communication is one-way with little consideration of a child’s emotional needs, respectful parenting is about seeing children as independent, rational beings.
In her book “Grit,” renowned psychologist Angela Duckworth agrees that this is the best way to raise kids.
″[Respectful parents] are accurate judges children’s psychological needs. They appreciate that children need love, limits and latitude to reach their full potential,” she writes. “Their authority is based on knowledge and wisdom, rather than power.”
The 3 pillars of respectful parenting
Let kids make their own choices, as long as expectations are met. Guide them through how things can be done better. Expect them to do things, even when it’s hard. Thomas Vu grew up with strict rules and lots of structure, but his parents gave him complete freedom to pursue his goals.
“I was expected to get straight A’s. It wasn’t easy, but as long as I did, my mom let me play all the video games I wanted. In my book, that was a fair trade,” he told me.
Vu was one quarter from graduating from college with a degree in bioengineering when he got an opportunity to intern at Electronic Arts, a leading video game maker.
His parents weren’t thrilled, but they let him drop out and pursue his dream of creating video games. He later became the lead producer at Riot Games for League of Legends, which today has 180 million players.
Give kids the right to their own point of view. Respect their privacy. Don’t make constant corrections in their actions or speech. D.A. Wallach is a successful tech investor. One of his early investments was Spotify, where he was Artist-in-Residence.
When Wallach was eight years old, he became interested in investing, so his mom gave him some money and opened an account for him. He spent hours researching companies. His mom gave her opinions, but he got to decide where to invest.
Wallach lost most of the money within six years, but his mom told him that losing was part of the learning process.
Not everyone can afford to give their kid money to learn about investing. But Wallach’s mom nurtured his talents in other ways that didn’t cost money: analyzing, discussing and debating choices with him, treating him like a grown-up, and not agonizing over failure.
Let kids know they can turn to you for help. Spend quality time with them. Engage in compassionate activities together. Breegan Jane is an interior designer and host on HGTV’s “Extreme Makeover.” She’s also a philanthropist and serves on the board of Single Moms Planet.
Her parents taught her about compassion and showed her how to handle adversity with resilience and creativity.
“I was 11 years old when we first went to help others with mission work. We gave clothing to people in a Mexico town where clean water wasn’t abundant,” she told me. “I was shocked by the poverty.”
Now that Breegan is a mom, she appreciates the importance of teaching kids to give back. She and her two sons volunteer frequently together at food assistance programs.
“I realize now that most parents don’t expose their kids to sad truths, but mine did it by surrounding the pain in so much hope,” she said. “They always focused on all the good we could do and bring to others.”
Margot Machol Bisnow is a writer, mom and parenting expert. She spent 20 years in government, including as an FTC Commissioner and Chief of Staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and is the author of “Raising an Entrepreneur: How to Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams.” Follow her on Instagram @margotbisnow.
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Boring Unlocking creativity
Economist (Asia Pacific) 2023/1/14
Academics do not contend to write the most entertaining research paper of the year. But Yu Tse Heng, now at the University of Virginia, Christopher Barnes of the University of Washington and Kai Chi Yam of the National University of Singapore should take a bow nonetheless. In a study published in 2022, the trio tested the widespread notion that cannabis increases creativity.
The researchers recruited a bunch of Americans who take the drug recreationally, and asked them to take some standardised tests of creativity (from thinking of novel uses for a brick to coming up with money-spinning ideas for a music band). Some participants underwent the test immediately after taking cannabis; a control group only did so if 12 hours had elapsed since they last indulged. Independent evaluators assessed the innovativeness of their ideas.
The researchers found that cannabis increased users’ joviality, which is thought to encourage lateral thinking. Drug use also led people to rate their own creativity, and that of other participants, more highly. The problem is that the independent assessors could discern no effect on the actual quality of people’s thoughts. Cannabis users got high and duly found everything mind-blowing, regardless of whether it was or not. “Leaders may want employees to be sober, especially while evaluating ideas” is one of the paper’s dry conclusions.
You might think that doesn’t need saying. But the search for ways to unleash creativity seems to scramble executives’ brains. There is rising interest in the use of psychedelics in the workplace, not simply as a health-care perk but also as a way of stimulating innovative thinking. But before you submit your book pitch for “The Smartest Guys on the Mushroom”, take a minute. A study published last year in Nature, a scientific journal, tested the effects of taking low doses of psilocybin and reached a similar conclusion to the cannabis paper: participants may have gone on a trip but there wasn’t much evidence to suggest it ended in a creative destination.
Drug use is at the extreme end of a range of techniques whose purpose is to jolt people into a more innovative mindset. There are specific exercises designed to encourage “divergent thinking”, such as sketching the person next to you or designing a unique sandwich (how about tripe and a dash of sour grapes?). There are team-building activities, from platespinning and karaoke to escape rooms and fire-walking (safety warning: if you have a brainwave during this exercise, never stop to write it down).
And there is a near-universal obsession with turning bits of offices into playrooms: brightly coloured furniture, hammocks, blackboards, chairs that are far too low to the ground for adults. The idea is that using an unconventional space can help stimulate innovative thoughts. But much depends on the task at hand.
In an experiment conducted by Manuel Sosa of INSEAD business school and Sunkee Lee of Carnegie Mellon University, participants were given a sheet of paper with 40 circles on it and asked to draw real-world objects that contained that shape. People who had been put in an unconventional workspace performed worse than those in a bog-standard office because they became fixated on the circular objects in their vicinity (they did better than cubicle-dwellers on tests that could not be influenced by their surroundings in this way).
Group activities undoubtedly have their place: it’s called hell. But desperate efforts to induce creativity can be selfdefeating, in the same way that telling yourself that you must get to sleep is bound to keep you awake. Plenty of evidence suggests that doing absolutely nothing is a better option. Allowing the mind to wander is a good way to unlock bright ideas. Aaron Sorkin, a celebrated screenplay writer, showered multiple times a day as a way of getting around writer’s block.
Tedium itself can be a useful spur to inspiration. In a study presented in 2013 researchers found that people who had copied telephone numbers out—or, even better, just read them—before taking a creative test outperformed those who had not. Boredom, reckoned Friedrich Nietzsche, is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful breeze. There is nothing like boredom to make you write, agreed a young Agatha Christie. Maybe she could have achieved much more if she had a beanbag, some Lego and a zoot. Or maybe creativity is just a bit less formulaic than that.
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<英國生活之日常 - 又係時候要報稅啦💸>
大家都知係英國處理文件乜嘢都可以出錯，就算HMRC都唔例外！話說之前無厘頭收到HMRC寄黎嘅£100罸款單，話我過咗deadline都未交2019/20年度的self assessment form，我即刻打電話去了解下發生咩事，我明明當時仲未搬黎英國，又冇英國收入要報稅，好彩HMRC確認攪錯咗，取消咗個penalty!
以為件事告一段落，點知半個月後，我又收到HMRC寄信黎話我要提交2020/21的報稅表🤯🤯🤯，大佬，咪同你講咗我21年尾先符合報self assessment 要求，真係o 哂嘴，結果又要再打電話去解釋一次。。係呢度d嘢都係睇緊啲好😑
💡提提大家，如果你係2021/22稅務年度符合HMRC 網站內列出的報稅條件（https://www.gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns/who-must-send-a-tax-return），你必須於2023年1月31號之前提交報稅表 - self assessment tax return(HMRC要係1月31號前收到），逾期會有罰款唷！
如果你不太確定自己是否需要提交self assessment, 可以利用政府網站內的test check下⬇️⬇️
https://www.gov.uk/check-if-you-need-tax-return
*2021/22稅務年度是指2021年4月6號 至2022年4月5號
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Generative AI exploded into the mainstream last year. Led by the Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI — the creator of both DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generator, and ChatGPT, an impressive text-generating system — the industry has absolutely exploded, as these generative tools and others, notably the image-generating systems Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, have dazzled investment firms and the broader public alike. "Generative AI is well on the way to becoming not just faster and cheaper, but better in some cases than what humans create by hand," reads a blog post by top investment firm Sequoia Capital, published September 2022. "If we allow ourselves to dream multiple decades out, then it's easy to imagine a future where Generative AI is deeply embedded in how we work, create and play."
Top Stories by Futurism The Best Electric Toothbrushes of 2023Computer Glitch Forced FAA to Ground All Flights Across the USNASA Unveils Plan for Giant Telescope to Spot Life on Alien PlanetsStartup Says It's Started Releasing Chemical Into Atmosphere to Dim SunProfessor Insists That We Actually DON'T Live in a Simulation CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI Professor Insists That We Actually DON'T Live in a Simulation But despite the hefty amount of investment cash — an estimated $1.37 billion across 78 deals in 2022 alone, according to The New York Times — that VCs are throwing at generative AI companies, not everyone in the field is convinced that these generative machines are really the Earth-shifting force that both creators and investors believe them to be. "The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 web3 it's making me uncomfortable," François Chollet, an influential deep learning researcher at Google and the creator of the deep learning system Keras, wrote in a blistering Twitter threat. "Narratives based on zero data are accepted as self-evident."
In other words, Chollet is arguing that in eerily similar fashion to the blockchain bubble, hype — as opposed to firm data and proven results — is in the industry driving seat. And considering the current state of affairs over in Web3land, if Chollet's right? A failure for VC-predicted returns to materialize could spell some grim consequences for the broader AI industry. "Everyone is expecting as a sure thing 'civilization-altering' impact (and 100x returns on investment) in the next 2-3 years," he continued. "Personally I think there's a bull case and bear case. The bull case is way way more conservative than what the median person on my TL considers as completely self-evident." The bull case, he believes, is that "generative AI becomes a widespread [user experience] paradigm for interacting with most tech products." But Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — AI that operated at the level of a human or above — remains a "pipe dream." So, startups based on OpenAI tech might not be rendering us humans obsolete quite yet, but they could well find a long-term role within specific niches. The bear case, meanwhile, would be a scenario in which large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 would find "limited commercial success in SEO, marketing, and copywriting niches" and ultimately prove to be a "complete bubble." (He does offer that image generation would be far more successful LLMs, but would peak "as an XB/y industry" around 2024.)
That all said, Chollet believes the most likely case is somewhere in between. But even so, even Chollet's best case prediction is still way out of alignment with VC enthusiasm, where acolytes are writing checks sized to match their optimism for the tech — OpenAI, for example, is in talks to close an investment deal that would bring the company's value to nearly $30 billion. "It's the new 'mobile' kind of paradigm shift that we've been all waiting for," Niko Bonatsos, an investor at the venture capital firm General Catalyst, told the NYT. "Maybe bigger, too." To investors' credit, the algorithms are cool. Text-to-image-generators are genuinely impressive, and open up broad new creative frontiers for people without Photoshop chops. GPT systems, at the very least, are lots of fun to play around with.
That said, they also have a lot of problems. ChatGPT, for example, isn't always right about the very confident statements it provides, and experts fear that the tech may make it very simple to easily and efficiently generate misinformation. And though industry CEOs are open about the fact that these programs are still in relative infancy, the very real potential for destruction and blurred creative lines that they present is tough to ignore, even when backdropped against a bright — if still mostly imagined — future. And to Chollet's point, it takes more than a product being cool and fun, or even very useful for niche things, to really be a "paradigm shift." VCs may well be taking a much bigger risk than they think they are, both fueling and feeding off of a hype cycle of half-baked products, rather than making measured calls about a situationally promising, though still quite limited, burgeoning market. "The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis," Chollet's thread concluded. "The circularity of it all — hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment... narratives backed by nothing somehow end up enshrined as self-evident, common wisdom simply because they get repeated enough times by enough people." "Everyone starts believing the same canon (especially those who bill themselves as contrarians)," he said. More on ChatGPT: There's a Problem With That App That Detects GPT-Written Text: It's Not Very Accurate
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Washington Post 09/1/2023
With upgraded weaponry on the way, Western resolve holding firm, and the Ukrainian army continuing to outmaneuver and outwit Russia’s flailing military, Ukraine’s promised “year of victory” is off to a good start.
If 2023 continues as it began, there is a good chance Ukraine will be able to fulfill President Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year’s pledge to retake all of Ukraine by the end of the year — or at least enough territory to definitively end Russia’s threat, Western officials and analysts say.
But while Zelensky was rallying Ukrainians to expect victory this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin used his New Year’s speeches to prepare Russians for a drawn-out fight. Russian troops are digging into fortified defensive positions reinforced by at least 100,000 newly mobilized soldiers, and though it seems unlikely that Russia can seize more territory anytime soon, it will also be tougher for Ukraine to make advances in 2023 than it was last year, despite momentum from recent victories, military experts say.
If Kyiv cannot achieve significant breakthroughs against this entrenched, growing Russian force, there is a risk that the war will become a protracted conflict favoring Putin, said Elizabeth
Shackelford of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. A $45 billion aid package approved by Congress will tide Ukraine over for the year, she said, but with U.S. presidential elections in 2024, the longer-term outlook is harder to predict.
“2023 is really the year,” Shackelford said. “If it doesn’t wrap in 2023, Putin will have a very big upper hand. As it is, Zelensky still has a shot because he still has very strong support.”
“After that,” she added, “all bets are off.”
Developments in the first week of the year suggest the prospects for Ukraine are bright, said Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe. He ticked off the advantages Ukraine will be able to exploit, from high morale among an army defending its homeland to superior leadership, cohesion and seemingly unwavering Western support.
The widespread rejection by the United States and Europe of Putin’s call for a temporary ceasefire over the Orthodox Christmas holiday delivered a clear, early reminder that Ukraine is not yet under pressure to enter into negotiations that Western officials say would probably be exploited by Moscow as an opportunity to rearm and regroup for further offensives, while tightening its grip on occupied territories.
A New Year’s Day attack deep behind Russian lines on a makeshift Russian barracks in the occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Makiivka killed at least 89 Russian soldiers, according to Moscow — and maybe many more, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.
The strike demonstrated not only Ukraine’s superior weaponry, intelligence and surveillance capabilities but also Russia’s persistent tactical missteps. Moscow blamed the attack on newly arrived recruits using cellphones, which gave away their location. U.S. officials, however, said there was some evidence that Russia had also stored ammunition in the barracks, compounding the number of casualties at the site.
The same day, Ukraine said it had shot down all 45 of the Iranian-made drones launched to tarnish its New Year’s festivities, a sign that Ukrainian air defenses are growing more adept at thwarting Russia’s onslaught against the country’s infrastructure.
Announcements by France, the United States and Germany that they would provide Ukraine with combat vehicles for the first time came as a significant boost to Ukraine offensive capabilities.
Even the weather has been kind to Ukraine, with recordbreaking warm winter temperatures in Europe crashing energy prices and sparing citizens the pain that many analysts had predicted would erode European support for the Ukraine war effort.
In his announcement of the donation of light tanks, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been widely criticized in Ukraine for seemingly seeking to appease Putin, pledged to back Ukraine “until victory,” his most unequivocal statement of support so far.
As long as Western support remains strong, Hodges said he is confident that Ukraine can retake all or most Russian-occupied territory this year — including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia occupied and annexed in 2014.
The peninsula’s supply routes are potentially vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks using U.s.-supplied HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) precision weapons, and Ukraine may be able to force Russia to withdraw from Crimea even before it is able to retake all of the eastern Donbas region where most fighting is now focused, he said.
“I do believe Ukraine has achieved irreversible momentum and basically there is nothing the Russians can do to change that, unless they figure out a way to persuade the West to lose interest,” said Hodges, who is now a senior adviser to the Washington-based Human Rights First group.
“I see a lot of positives and I don’t see any weakening of resolve of the West,” he added.
But the onus is now on Ukraine to remain on the offensive, which is more difficult than defending terrain, said Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine now with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Ukraine’s successes in 2022 were facilitated by Russian mistakes that are less likely to be repeated now that Russian troops are digging in for the long haul, he said. “It’s easier to defend than it is to attack, and the Russians have already set up long defensive positions,” Lee said.
In some ways, Lee said, Ukraine has already won, not only by holding off the initial Russian onslaught but taking back almost half the territory that was snatched by Russia in the first weeks of the war.
“After the first two weeks of the war, it was clear that Russia had failed to achieve its goals,” he said. “Russia’s aims were so ambitious that Ukraine has won just by remaining a sovereign country. But the question now is, can Ukraine achieve what it wants, which is to return at least to the February 24 borders, if not to retake more territory than that.”
“Whether it can do that,” Lee added, “is what is not so clear.”
Much may come down to which side runs out of ammunition first. Western officials have been predicting for months that Russia is at risk of running out of ammunition, and although that hasn’t happened yet, there is continuing evidence that Russian supplies are low.
Ukrainian officials said late last year that the rate of Russian artillery fire along the eastern front is now only one-third of what it was during the summer, when Russian troops were on the offensive. And although Russia has ordered ramped-up manufacturing, it is clear Russian production will not be able to match consumption, said a Western official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.
The depletion of Russian ammunition supplies, especially for artillery, makes it unlikely Russia will be able to mount any kind of successful offensive operation for some time, despite predictions by the Ukrainian military that Moscow is preparing a major offensive, according to an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War.
But it is also far from clear that the West will be able to keep up with Ukraine’s ammunition needs, especially as offensive operations require greater quantities of materiel, said Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington-based think tank.
Alperovitch predicted that Ukraine will be able to retake some territory this year but not enough to secure a definitive victory. Putin appears only to be doubling down on his determination to subjugate Ukraine, and although Russia currently lacks the capacity to launch successful offensives, the injection of freshly mobilized manpower strengthens its ability to hold back Ukrainian advances.
“I don’t think this will be the year of the end of the war, unfortunately,” Alperovitch said.
If the front lines do not shift significantly in the coming year, the path ahead becomes murkier.
The Russian and the Ukrainian economies both will be hardpressed to sustain a long war. And it is unclear whether each country can generate enough manpower for a prolonged fight. Ukraine has the advantage for now, with a reserve of millions of military-aged men despite its smaller size, while Russia hauls convicts out of prisons to sustain its presence on the front lines, Hodges said.
No one is predicting that Ukraine will give up or lose outright to Russia, he said. The Ukrainians remain committed to fighting and the troops remain far more motivated than their reluctant Russian adversaries.
But a long war would defer indefinitely Ukraine’s recovery, reconstruction and the return of refugees. The government would have to maintain hundreds of thousands of troops along the estimated 600-mile front line while its economy continues to collapse, going some way toward achieving Putin’s goal of denying Ukraine success as an independent country.
Over time, Ukraine’s offensive capabilities will be drained by the attrition of experienced and well-trained soldiers, potentially eroding the manpower advantage it has enjoyed, Lee said. And Russia would have a chance to rebuild its economy, supply lines and combat capabilities to potentially launch future offensives, as it did after the front lines froze after the separatist war in Donbas in 2014 to 2015.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s fortunes will become ever more dependent on variables outside its control, such as Western resolve, the availability of Western ammunition — and events in Russia.
“What we don’t know is what will be happening in Moscow by the end of the year. There are some serious power struggles,” Hodges said. Although there is no immediate evidence of any challenge to Putin’s grip, the emergence of significant dissent in Moscow or a mutiny among disgruntled Russian troops could prove decisive, Alperovitch said.
Events in the United States could prove just as significant, Shackelford said. Although Europe’s support is politically important, its military contributions are dwarfed by the vast quantities of arms supplied by Washington, whose future commitment could be in question if Republicans win the White House in 2024.
“If Putin can turn this into a multiyear war of attrition, he will probably be able to wait Ukraine out,” Shackelford said. “It might still drag on for a while, but Ukraine’s shot will really be diminished by that point.”
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The Washington Post 09/1/2023 Crypto exchange facing probe over violation of money-laundering rules
Federal prosecutors are examining American hedge funds’ dealings with cryptocurrency exchange Binance as part of a longrunning investigation into potential violations of moneylaundering rules at one of the world’s leading crypto companies.
In subpoenas sent in recent months, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Washington in Seattle directed investment firms to hand over records of their communications with Binance, according to two people, each of whom reviewed one of the subpoenas and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential matter.
The subpoenas, which have not been previously reported, do not necessarily mean authorities are likely to bring charges, legal experts said. Prosecutors are discussing a possible settlement with Binance, and they are weighing whether they have enough evidence to bring indictments against the company, Reuters reported this past month.
In an interview, Binance chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann said the company is talking to “virtually every regulator across the globe on a daily basis,” but he declined to comment on the status of any U.S. investigation. Joshua Stueve, a Justice Department spokesman, also declined to comment.
The federal probe into Binance is unfolding at a time of deep uncertainty for the crypto industry. The implosion of FTX, a popular trading platform that authorities say was a years-long scheme to defraud investors, has fueled concerns about the freewheeling, largely unregulated online marketplaces where digital assets are bought and sold.
Crypto company failures are becoming more common and interconnected. Celsius, a cryptocurrency platform that collapsed in July, lent heavily to FTX affiliate Alameda Research, which went bankrupt five months later. Binance’s founder and chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, was an early FTX backer, and his decision to sell off a large chunk of the company’s digital tokens helped spark a customer panic and run on bank deposits that FTX could not meet.
As attention turns to Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, Zhao is piling on to the criticism of FTX and casting himself as a champion of stricter industry oversight. “Regulators rightfully will scrutinize this industry much, much harder, which is probably a good thing,” Zhao said at a conference in Indonesia in November.
Binance, however, has long frustrated financial regulators and law enforcement agencies, legal experts said. For years, Binance let users buy and sell cryptocurrency on the platform without identifying themselves, making it an easy way for people to launder ill-gotten money, said John Ghose, a former Justice Department prosecutor who specialized in cryptocurrency cases before leaving to join the private sector in 2021.
During his time as a prosecutor, Ghose said, “Binance did not have a reputation of being a responsible exchange.”
Binance’s Hillmann acknowledged that the company had shortcomings in its approach to regulatory compliance in the first few years of its rapid expansion. But more recently, he said, Binance has heavily invested in compliance programs, worked closely with law enforcement and developed new technology for catching criminals on its platform.
“Over the last two years, the company has completely changed its posture,” Hillmann said. “Now that we have those resources, we are easily one of the most proactive parties to identify, freeze and get back funds” that were laundered, he said, adding that he believes overall incidents of criminal activity in crypto are going down.
A report last year by data provider Chainalysis showed that cryptocurrency crime hit an alltime high in 2021, with illicit addresses receiving $14 billion, up from $4.6 billion in 2017, the year Binance was founded. Over the same time period, as crypto adoption boomed, the portion of overall transactions that were illicit shrank considerably, Chainalysis found.
Based on his experience with these types of cases, Ghose said he believes that prosecutors are examining whether Binance violated the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires financial institutions to verify the identities of their customers and report suspicious activity that might be a sign of money laundering, other crimes.
The recent subpoenas could mean prosecutors are scrutinizing Binance’s relationships with U.S. investors, said Ghose, who cautioned that he does not have firsthand knowledge of the Binance investigation.
“The basis of those charges is whether there are U.S. customers,” he said. “If there are U.S. customers, there are charges for avoiding the money laundering requirements.”
‘ Trying to do the right thing’
As part of its response to growing regulatory interest, Binance has embarked on a Washington charm offensive. The company this past fall formed a global advisory board chaired by Max Baucus, the former Democratic senator from Montana and Obama administration ambassador to China; the board also includes former top Obama adviser David Plouffe. Last month, the company joined the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a Washington-based crypto lobbying association.
Baucus and Plouffe did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Binance.us, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based trading platform owned by Zhao, hired two outside lobbying firms and launched a political action committee, allowing it to raise funds from its own ranks and distribute the proceeds as campaign contributions, federal records show. It also hired former FBI agent BJ Kang, who directed high-profile probes of insider trading on Wall Street, as its first head of investigations.
A Binance.us spokeswoman said the company has no current plans to make any PAC donations.
Zhao “is trying to do the right thing” by meeting with government leaders, advocating for regulation and offering to bail out other crypto firms facing hardship, said Carlos Gomez, chief investment officer at Belobaba Crypto Asset Fund, which invests on the Binance platform. “He is trying to position himself as a trustworthy person.”
But there are signs that Zhao, a crypto superstar with 8 million Twitter followers, is losing the trust of some customers. Over one 24-hour period in December, investors withdrew $3 billion more from Binance than they deposited, the most net withdrawals in a single day from the exchange since June, according to crypto analytics firm Nansen.
“People are getting scared,” said Carol Alexander, a crypto expert and finance professor at the University of Sussex. “The whales,” or professional traders, “are starting to move out of Binance as regulatory pressure mounts,” she said.
Zhao has said Binance has more than enough reserves to back all user deposits, a fact he said was substantiated by an independent auditor’s review this past month. “Every user could withdraw their assets from Binance and the company will continue to function as normal,” a Binance spokesman said in an email.
Nine days after releasing its assessment, however, Paris-based auditing firm Mazars said in a statement that it was suspending work with crypto companies “due to concerns regarding the way these reports are understood by the public.” Although Binance had referred to its work with Mazars as a “third-party audit,” the auditor said its assessment does not constitute a legally binding assurance or audit opinion.
“Providing an audit opinion or assurance on its review of Binance reserves would significantly increase Mazars’ risk of being sued if it later turns out that Binance doesn’t have enough money to cover customer assets,” said Vivian Fang, an accounting professor at the University of Minnesota.
Regulatory difficulties
One challenge facing U.S. prosecutors will be proving that Binance is even subject to American laws.
Zhao founded Binance in China, but he later moved the company to Japan and then Malta. Since 2020, he has claimed the business has no singular headquarters. Binance Holding Ltd., a shell company that operates several Binance subsidiaries, is based in the Cayman Islands, but Zhao is also connected to dozens of business units around the world, including in the British Virgin Islands, Singapore, Ireland, Liechtenstein and the Seychelles, according to Reuters.
Industry experts attribute part of Binance’s success to its marketing of risky financial products, such as crypto derivatives, which let users place high-leverage bets on speculative digital tokens such as dogecoin. Such products are generally prohibited in the United States, and since 2019, Binance has barred Americans from accessing its main offshore exchange where derivatives can be bought and sold. (Binance.us, the American exchange owned by Zhao, offers a more limited menu of investment options to U.S. residents and says it operates independently from the main Binance exchange.)
Binance’s website lists the United States as one of its “restricted jurisdictions,” along with Cuba, Crimea, Iran, Syria and North Korea.
Some Americans claim they can bypass Binance’s restrictions. In Reddit discussion threads and Youtube videos, crypto traders have shared tips for how to access the site from the United States. One content creator known as Full Value Dan posted a tutorial on “How I Beat Binance KYC” — shorthand for “know your customer” verification laws — which included setting up a shell business in Taiwan and obtaining residency documents from that country.
On the video, Full Value Dan said he used those documents to get approved for trading on Binance despite being a U.S. citizen. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Hillmann, the Binance executive, said the company has tested this and other supposed loopholes for accessing its trading platform and found that they do not work. “There is no ability for any user today in the U.S. to be able to access Binance.com” without committing fraud, Hillmann said.
In interviews with The Washington Post, several large cryptofocused hedge funds in the United States said they either do not use Binance or only have accounts on the more limited Binance.us trading platform. Some said they preferred Coinbase, a publicly traded crypto exchange that provides quarterly financial statements to investors.
The CEO of one New York investment firm, which manages $2.5 billion in assets, said his company trades on the Binance offshore exchange through corporate entities it owns outside the United States. While Binance strictly prohibits U.S. citizens from trading, “corporations and citizens are very different,” said this executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he worried about raising the profile of his firm with regulators.
Binance has said it complies with all U.S. laws and assists law enforcement agencies with their investigations. But it has not registered Binance.com, its primary offshore exchange, with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN, a baseline requirement for complying with the Bank Secrecy Act, records show.
Because Binance.com does not operate in the United States, the company does not believe it needs to register with the Treasury Department, Hillmann said. A spokesperson for FINCEN declined to comment.
That defense has not worked for others. Last year, three cofounders of BITMEX, another offshore crypto exchange, pleaded guilty to “willful” failure to verify the identities of its customers. According to the indictment, BitMEX had courted thousands of American investors, despite billing itself as a Seychelles-based exchange with no American users.
BITMEX agreed to pay as much as $100 million to settle the charges, and the co-founders were ordered to pay $10 million each. Arthur Hayes, who stepped down from his role as chief executive after the charges were filed, was sentenced to six months of house arrest and two years of probation.
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09/1/2023
Adopting a plant-based diet is one of the best things we can do to champion British farmers and our countryside, while also meeting our emission reduction commitments and supporting public health. LAND USE AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS William Blake famously wrote of England’s green and pleasant land. However, according to the researchers at the Natural History Museum, the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, going so far as to say that due to the expansion of agriculture, ‘the UK has led the world in degrading the natural environment’.1 Agriculture is the primary land user in the UK, covering 71% of total UK land area,2 around 17.5 million hectares,3 and animal agriculture accounts for up to 85% of this land, yet provides only 32% of our calories and less than half of our protein.4 To feed the same number of people on a plant-based diet would require just one-sixth of the land, leaving 14.5 million hectares available for alternative uses,5 such as nature restoration and rewilding of habitats as part of carbon sequestration initiatives. A PLANT-BASED UK SUPPORTS OUR FARMERS The science is clear on the environmental impacts of animal agriculture, including its outsized climate impact, and the farming sector is also the most vulnerable to changes in weather systems resulting from climate breakdown. Raised public awareness of these impacts has led to a growing shift in consumer habits towards more plant-based diets. Many farmers are already moving away from rearing animals in favour of growing plants for human consumption to capitalise on this growing demand. A recent farmers’ survey found that 64% of respondents would consider transitioning out of animal agriculture entirely provided financial support was in place.6 As custodians of the countryside, farmers must be supported to adapt and diversify their production to meet these changing demands and better protect our planet. UK’S LEADING ROLE IN PROTECTING OUR PLANET The World Health Organization has called climate change the ‘greatest threat to global health in the 21st century’. The UK must deliver on its commitment to meet the world’s most ambitious climate targets by addressing animal agriculture, which is responsible for at least 16.5% of all man-made GHG emissions,7 and urge other developed economies to follow suit. By continuing with business as usual, this sector alone would account for 49% of the 1.5°C emissions budget by 2030.8 Research indicates that if we all ate plantbased, our food-related GHG emissions would drop by 70%.9 We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act decisively and comprehensively to halt climate breakdown now. SUPPORT BRITISH INNOVATION The UK is well positioned to pioneer the innovation of sustainable alternative protein production. Moving away from the EU’s regulatory framework provides an important opportunity to become a global leader in the development of plant -, cell-and fermentation based proteins. A recent report by UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), estimates a £1bn UK market for plant-based alternatives, with predicted yearly growth for meat alternatives of 30%, dairy-free milk of 48%, and cheese alternatives of 38%, driven mainly by the expansion of start-ups .10 The government commissioned National Food Strategy recently called on the UK government to invest £125 min sustainable protein start-ups.11 A THRIVING UK POPULATION Noncommunicable diseases (NCD) are a significant burden to the NHS and the leading cause of premature mortality in the UK, accounting for around 89% of all deaths.12 NCDs are also largely preventable. Research shows that adopting a plant-based diet is significantly associated with decreased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality and lower risk of CVD incidence,13 which is the leading cause of death in the UK. Researchers have concluded that plant-based diets are also “especially potent” in preventing type 2 diabetes and have been associated with much lower rates of hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and cancer.14 An EPIC-Oxford study of 65,411 men and women found that non-meat eaters were 37% less likely to develop diabetes compared with the regular meat eaters.15 A new study by researchers from Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit that analysed data from over 472,000 participants found that, when compared with regular meat-eaters, plantbased diets reduced the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer by 18%, prostate cancer by 31%, colorectal cancer in men by 43%, and of developing any type of cancer by 14%.16 BE COMPASSIONATE In the UK’s meat, dairy and egg industries we needlessly kill around 1.2 billion land animals for food each year. For example, in the dairy industry, 2.6 million cows go through unimaginable cruelty all their lives and are eventually killed for meat.17 EU research suggests that between 10% and 20% of dairy cows are pregnant when they are slaughtered.18 Tens of thousands of male calves19 and 29 million male chicks,20 unwanted by the industries they’re born into, are killed each year within days or hours of being born. Adopting a plant-based diet prioritises compassion and prevents this unnecessary suffering. We hope you’ll consider our sincere offer and lead the UK towards a more sustainable and promising future. We look forward to hearing back from you with your response by January 31st.
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