Why was so much money sitting in FTX?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When the former cryptocurrency exchange FTX went under, billions of dollars in investments seemingly vanished. A listener asked us why FTX customers didn’t move money to a wallet. We’ll get into it and answer more of your questions about what happens when your company goes public and who benefits when you make a charitable donation at the grocery store checkout lane. Also, where do political campaign signs end up when the election’s over?
Here’s everything we talked about today:
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- “What Are The Risks Of Crypto Savings Accounts?” from Forbes
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- “The Ups and Downs of Initial Public Offerings” from Investopedia
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- “How to recycle political campaign signs” from Today
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- “Who Gets the Tax Benefit For Those Checkout Donations?” from the Tax Policy Center
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- “Where do your donations at the checkout register go?” from Marketplace
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- “Meet America’s Charity Checkout Champions 2021” from Engage for Good
If you’ve got a question about the economy, business or technology, let us know. We’re at makemesmart@marketplace.org, or leave us a message at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today |
| 0:10.8 | make sense. |
| 0:11.8 | I'm Kyle Rizdallet, what do you want to know Wednesday? We answer questions that you |
| 0:16.7 | are loyal and faithful listeners want answers to. So if you've got one, question that |
| 0:20.6 | is about the economy or business or technology, send it our way. We are at Make Me Smart |
| 0:25.2 | at Marketplace.org or you can leave us a voicemail 508 UBSMART. So first up, William on Twitter. |
| 0:35.3 | Send us a question about crypto, which is interesting enough because Kimberly and I were talking |
| 0:38.8 | before which are the microphones on about SBF and FTX and all that good stuff. Sand |
| 0:45.0 | Bankman Freed, FTX, crypto. Anyway, here you go. Why do people have large amount of money |
| 0:49.4 | sitting in FTX, which is the cryptocurrency fund that just went under. Thanks to Sand Bankman |
| 0:54.1 | Freed, I may not have a ton of crypto. William went on, but even I know you transferred |
| 0:58.2 | the coins you buy on an exchange to a private wallet so you're not exposed to the risk |
| 1:02.0 | of an exchange failing. Who's doing this one? You were me. |
| 1:06.2 | Me. You know that William, but a lot of the people who got into crypto through this kind |
| 1:15.8 | of conduit, the FTX platform didn't know that. They looked at all these celebrities who |
| 1:21.4 | were like, are you in and it's fine to be joining into this crypto world, even if you don't |
| 1:28.8 | really know what's going on. And people didn't know. And if you looked at the website, it |
| 1:33.7 | looked like a regular trading website. And a lot of people thought that they were protected. |
| 1:40.2 | But that's one level. We asked Matt Levin, who's our sort of resident crypto expert here |
| 1:46.0 | at Marketplace to help us answer this question. And here's what he said. He says many crypto |
| 1:50.7 | investors aren't very technically sophisticated. And it takes at least some technical know-how |
| 1:56.3 | to set up and manage a private wallet, which is what you were asking about in the question |
... |
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