March 2023 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

UBS Was Quietly Bailed Out in 2008; Now It’s Getting a $173 Billion Backstop to Buy Credit Suisse at 82 Cents a Share
by Gunnar Larson 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/03/ubs-was-quietly-bailed-out-in-2008-n… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 20, 2023 ~ Credit SuisseYesterday, the Swiss banking giant, UBS, agreed to a shotgun wedding with its collapsing long-time Swiss rival, Credit Suisse. Switzerland has committed $173 billion in loans and guarantees to the combined firm. A key player in this deal was the central bank of Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank. That’s the very same central bank that had quietly bailed out UBS during the financial crisis of 2008 with the assistance of dollar swap lines from the Federal Reserve (the “Fed”) – the central bank of the U.S. Yesterday, the Fed announced the return of those emergency dollar swap lines as the shotgun wedding of UBS and Credit Suisse failed to quell a spreading banking panic. The way this UBS bailout went down in 2008 was illuminated in the audit of the Fed’s emergency bailout facilities from December 2007 to July 2010 that was conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO audit was not released until July of 2011. It reported the following about the UBS bailout: “In October 2008, according to Federal Reserve Board staff, the Federal Reserve Board allowed the Swiss National Bank to use dollars under its swap line agreement to provide special assistance to UBS, a large Swiss banking organization. Specifically, on October 16, 2008, the Swiss National Bank announced that it would use dollars obtained through its swap line with FRBNY [the Federal Reserve Bank of New York] to help fund an SPV [Special Purpose Vehicle] it would create to purchase up to $60 billion of illiquid assets from UBS. According to FRBNY data, from December 11, 2008, through June 2009, Swiss National Bank drew dollar amounts generally not exceeding about $13 billion to help fund this SPV that served a function similar to that of the Maiden Lane SPVs. Federal Reserve Board staff acknowledged that this was an atypical use of swap line dollars as the swap line agreements were initially designed to help foreign central banks provide dollar loans broadly to institutions facing dollar funding strains.” The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is located at the cross street of Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan. It created Maiden Lane SPVs I, II and III in order to create opacity around its bailout of JPMorgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns (Maiden Lane I) and its bailout of the toxic assets Wall Street had created and sold to the giant insurer, AIG, (Maiden Lanes II and III). For a closer look at the crony operations of the New York Fed, see our report: These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button. The GAO audit located $16 trillion in cumulative loans pumped out by the Fed to bail out U.S. and foreign mega banks, many of which were derivative counterparties to banks supervised by the New York Fed. When the dollar swap lines and other Fed bailout facilities are added in, the bailout tab comes to $29 trillion as detailed by the Levy Economics Institute. This morning, the UBS and Credit Suisse deal is looking more like a hit and run than a bank merger. Here’s a sampling of the road kill: Swiss regulators have decided that shareholders will not get to vote on the terms of the merger, which prices Credit Suisse shares at approximately 82 cents, less than half of where Credit Suisse stock closed on Friday. The Financial Times reported yesterday that “Swiss authorities [are] poised to change the country’s laws to bypass a shareholder vote as they rush to announce a deal before Monday.” The Saudi National Bank and the Qatar Investment Authority are the two largest holders of Credit Suisse stock and are nursing deep loses this morning, as are Swiss pension funds. Holders of $17.3 billion of a Credit Suisse convertible bond, known as AT1, will be wiped out completely, according to the Swiss regulator, FINMA. This action flips on its head the century-old concept that bondholders get priority treatment over common stock holders. The AT1s are officially called Contingent Convertible Bonds or CoCos. This is a quarter of a trillion dollar market and these CoCos will assuredly see major upheaval in their trading prices today – delivering more losses and panic to investors. The whole European banking sector is taking a hit in early morning trade in Europe. UBS was down over 16 percent at one point before trimming its losses. Germany’s banking behemoth, Deutsche Bank, was down more than 10 percent while France’s BNP Paribas had tanked over 8 percent. Things aren’t looking too rosy for banks here in the U.S. either. The troubled U.S. regional lender, First Republic Bank, had its credit rating downgraded further into junk status by S&P Global yesterday, despite that wily effort by Wall Street’s thundering herd last week to add $30 billion of their own money to the uninsured deposits at the bank. First Republic’s shares were down over 30 percent in New York premarket trading this morning. Both UBS and Credit Suisse were already, individually, among the 30 Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs), meaning their risk profile required closer regulatory monitoring, annual stress tests, and higher capital buffers. Individually, they posed the potential for spreading contagion. Should markets be expected to cheer that two risk threats have now morphed into one larger risk threat to financial stability? This is akin to U.S. regulators allowing JPMorgan Chase to become riskier and more of a threat to financial stability by bulking up with the purchase of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in 2008. Credit Suisse got into this predicament of a weekend shotgun marriage in no small part because of an endless stream of scandals. In the spring of 2021, Credit Suisse lost $5.5 billion from the highly-leveraged, highly concentrated stock positions it was financing via ginned-up derivatives for the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management. Archegos blew up on March 25, 2021 after it defaulted on margin calls to the banks financing its trades. An internal report for the Board of Directors of Credit Suisse by the outside law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison found that Credit Suisse “was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking.” In October of 2021 Credit Suisse paid $547 million to settle with criminal and civil authorities in the U.S. and U.K. for making an $850 million fraudulent loan in Mozambique where a significant part of the funds went for kickbacks to Credit Suisse employees and Mozambique government officials. Credit Suisse is also embroiled in legal battles over selling billions of dollars of Greensill Capital debt to investors as low risk. Greensill filed for insolvency in March of 2021. In February, FINMA concluded a two-year investigation into the matter with a finding that Credit Suisse’s failures had constituted “a serious breach of Swiss supervisory law.” There was also the spygate scandal. FINMA reported in October of 2021 that Credit Suisse had engaged in seven separate spying operations on its Board members, former employees and third parties. (Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.) Credit Suisse, unfortunately, is also interconnected via derivatives to the mega banks on Wall Street. This is highly likely why this weekend shotgun marriage came together so quickly sans a vote by shareholders. How it plays out in the long run is an entirely different matter.

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DeSantis Jabs Trump Over Potential NY Hush-Money Indictment
by Gunnar Larson 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

DeSantis Jabs Trump Over Potential NY Hush-Money Indictment https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/desantis-takes-dig-at-tr… Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed at Donald Trump over his potential indictment by the Manhattan district attorney, even as he accused prosecutors of political bias.

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karl’s gpt4 wrapper was Re: [ot][spam]gpt-4 completions
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

On 3/19/23, ytooR <Arpspoof(a)proton.me> wrote: > Great work carl! I love you hihi rooty <3 the code for the wrapper (which i’d like to expand to run locally) is at https://codeberg.org/xloem/lm . i was generating git commits with something like the following (after git clone and pip install) (don’t know if this example works, readme has no history for context): echo “added a story to the readme” | quickscripts/append.sh README.md | lm | quickscripts/patchfix.py logging the gpt4 output makes it easier for others to make open models that perform the same behavior. when it’s so normal to train models from data, having data ends up being really helpful. and of course i always value public logging. the code you quoted below has a bug which is repaired in the repository in patchfix.py which is pending simplification. the nice thing about the generation of git commits this way is that the model does not need to be instruct-tuned since the git history provides context. it would work on opt or llama (which are local models that don’t need network access). gpt4 is pushing the context length frontier which makes stuff like this become more feasible because you can shoehorn more git history into a prompt. the repository was entirely made on my mother’s old ipad, which i am often near now when for example having trouble moving my body and standing up. i was thinking of the “hunt and peck” method of software engineering. i briefly visited libreplanet and had a photo taken of me while i was coding this. i am now ill and work may be paused we shall see. > ------- Original Message ------- > On Sunday, March 19th, 2023 at 11:46 AM, Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One > Victim & Survivor of Many <gmkarl(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > >> {"time": "2023-03-19T14:44:38.939857", "lm": "spellbook", "url": >> "https://dashboard.scale.com/spellbook/api/v2/deploy/", "app_id": >> "sm43s5r", "input": "Write a python script to correct the line counts >> in a unified diff that contains corrupt @@ lines.", "output": >> "```python\nimport re\nimport sys\n\ndef >> correct_line_counts(diff_file):\n with open(diff_file, 'r') as >> file:\n lines = file.readlines()\n\n corrected_lines = []\n >> line_index = 0\n\n while line_index < len(lines):\n line = >> lines[line_index]\n\n if line.startswith('@@'):\n # >> Extract the line numbers from the @@ line\n match = >> re.match(r'@@ -(\\d+),(\\d+) \\+(\\d+),(\\d+) @@', line)\n >> if match:\n start_old, count_old, start_new, count_new >> = map(int, match.groups())\n\n # Count the actual >> number of lines added and removed\n actual_count_old = >> 0\n actual_count_new = 0\n line_index += >> 1\n\n while line_index < len(lines) and not >> lines[line_index].startswith('@@'):\n if >> lines[line_index].startswith('-'):\n >> actual_count_old += 1\n elif >> lines[line_index].startswith('+'):\n >> actual_count_new += 1\n else:\n >> actual_count_old += 1\n actual_count_new += >> 1\n line_index += 1\n\n # Correct >> the line counts if necessary\n if count_old != >> actual_count_old or count_new != actual_count_new:\n >> corrected_line = f'@@ -{start_old},{actual_count_old} >> +{start_new},{actual_count_new} @@\\n'\n >> corrected_lines.append(corrected_line)\n else:\n >> corrected_lines.append(line)\n else:\n >> corrected_lines.append(line)\n line_index += 1\n >> else:\n corrected_lines.append(line)\n >> line_index += 1\n\n with open(diff_file, 'w') as file:\n >> file.writelines(corrected_lines)\n\nif name == 'main':\n if >> len(sys.argv) != 2:\n print(f'Usage: {sys.argv[0]} >> <diff_file>')\n sys.exit(1)\n\n diff_file = sys.argv[1]\n >> >> correct_line_counts(diff_file)\n``\\n\\nThis script takes a unified diff >> file as input and corrects the line counts in the @@ lines if they are >> corrupt. To use the script, save it as `correct_diff.py` and run it with >> the diff file as an argument:\\n\\n``\npython >> correct_diff.py diff_file.txt\n```"} >

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FT sounding alarm bells about “ plethora of experiments with decentralised social technologies
by professor rat 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

TOO LATE, LOSERS! The screams of the Conde Nast wounded echoes in my ears - what sweet music they make! https://www.ft.com/content/3e27cfd6-e287-4b6f-a588-29b5b962a534 Reposts not context collapse, devolving to “shouting into the void.” Innovations in the direction of “Disappearing and Deniable Messages” are lauded, not as protecting anything so “imprecise” as a notion of “privacy” that a sender might opt into, but as limits imposed within the public to prevent the possibility of upsetting the contextual applecart. Apparently advancements in common understanding are anathema; any deviation from the enshrined shibboleths risks context collapse

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Regulator, Targeted with $5M Bounty, Removed and Arrested
by professor rat 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

Venezuela today - Ecuador tomorrow amirite! https://decrypt.co/123988/venezuela-crypto-regulator-sunacrip-joselit-ramir… Reposts say goodnight to Josh Gordon

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Julian Assmange, Jeffrey Tucker and James O'Keefe, oh my
by professor rat 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

Julian Assmange, Jeffrey Tucker & James O'Keefe dragged and dropped in here by our internet guy, G >>> US 2024 Election Ticket Trump (Pres) - End Deep State, End War, Older, etc Ramaswamy (VP) - Pro-Crypto, Libertarian Angle, End Woke, Younger, etc The internet has been noting and discussing this combination as a potentially winning partnership ticket. <<< Gramps must be one of those conservatives that like being lied to according to Arnie Coulter GIGO thy name is " Grarpamps "

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Leaks Free Speech: O'Keefe Media Group Launches After Project Veritas, Seeks Sponsors
by grarpamp 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

https://www.okeefemediagroup.com/ https://www.theepochtimes.com/james-okeefe-announces-new-project-after-proj… James O’Keefe Announces New Project After Project Veritas Ouster Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe has announced a new media project. The O’Keefe Media Group was unveiled on March 15, about three weeks after O’Keefe resigned from Project Veritas following a suspension and probe into his spending practices. “We’re going to be sending cameras into the hands of hundreds of people,” O’Keefe said on Real America’s Voice. “We’re going to be creating a citizen army of journalists.” Project Veritas staffers and its board had maintained that O’Keefe could return to the organization, but O’Keefe is instead forging a new path. The Project Veritas founder said that a “small, tight-knit group” of “elite journalists” has remained by his side and is joining in the new venture. “They have awakened a sleeping giant,” O’Keefe said in a promotional video. “I’m back.” The business model is based on donations that will directly sponsor cameras. Tiers run from $19.99 a month to $5,000 a year. “Let’s build this army and keep every statehouse, every city council, every school board and everywhere people are conspiring to keep power, proactive favoritism or line their pockets with tax dollars!” O’Keefe said on Twitter. “Become a founding member today!” Exit O’Keefe exited Project Veritas, which he founded in 2010, on Feb. 20. O’Keefe was suspended by the organization’s board of directors as it investigated allegations of financial malfeasance and abuse. A preliminary probe showed O’Keefe “has spent an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries,” the board said. The board said it did not remove O’Keefe but he said he was forced out because he no longer had any authority. The move divided staffers, some of whom had threated to leave if O’Keefe’s alleged conduct was not addressed. Others supported O’Keefe and have moved to the new group. “We will never replace James O’Keefe. But for now, we see it as our job to hold the torch for him while keeping the door wide open for his return,” staffers said in a statement. Project Veritas, which specializes in undercover recordings, published an expose of a Pfizer executive shortly before O’Keefe’s exit. It has since released several investigations into educators, including a recording showing a New York professor saying he wants to kill Republican leaders. Some supporters had said they would stop following Project Veritas since O’Keefe is no longer there. Eric Spracklen, a Project Veritas employee, highlighted how one clip received 700,000 views over 24 hours on Twitter. “Project Veritas is dead,” he wrote sarcastically. Project Veritas Hires Law Firm The board said it would hire an outside firm to perform an audit of financial practices at Project Veritas. On March 3, the firm was identified as Dorsey & Whitney LLP. “We recognize the need for an investigation that is completely free of any bias or favor. For this reason, we have engaged a leading law firm in these matters to perform this analysis and report their findings to the Board of Directors,” the board said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing findings of this investigation when it is complete,” it added. A timeline for the investigation has not been outlined.

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Cryptocurrency: Finally Enabling Libertarians to Seed the Doers of Freedom
by grarpamp 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

https://dailyreckoning.com/the-eggheads-vs-the-doers/ The Eggheads Vs The Doers Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com, I recently spoke at one of my favorite venues, the Liberty Forum in New Hampshire, which is an annual conference center on the Free State Project. It’s designed to encourage people to pick up and move to the freest state in the country for community and to help protect the state from the fate that befell Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. My first time speaking there was 2012, I believe, and I came away with an interesting revelation, which I can summarize as “Liberty is a hands-on task.” In my career until that time, the problem of economic and political matters were mostly matters of theory and I had spent most of my time reading and distributing high theory, a task I loved and still do. But coming to this event in New Hampshire I found something else entirely; a group of people who were busy doing things in practice to live freer lives. They were small business people, real-estate agents, people with alternative currency systems, people raising and selling food on and from their own farms, organizers of houses of worship and community centers, homeschoolers and school entrepreneurs, and much more besides, including office holders focusing on laws and legislation. It was here, for example, that I acquired my first Bitcoin, which in the early days showed great promise finally to recreate money in a way that government could not ruin. It struck me at the time as among the greatest inventions of the human mind. Tellingly, it did not come from academia (so far as we know) but from tinkerers who wanted to solve the problem of double spending on digital monetary units. It was genius. The economics journals ignored it for many years, of course. Doers At this event were and are the practitioners. There is not one path forward but many, each person creatively implementing their own version of the freedom ideal. I recall being puzzled a bit by this approach but later inspired. I felt like a pianist who had only known scales who finds himself listening to a concerto by Liszt. I came to realize the difference between theory and practice, between the academic class and the people in clinical practice. Theory should never be put down but we make a mistake in thinking that this is the whole of the task. Theory alone introduces its own dangers of following a logic to the point of absurdity that goes unnoticed. Minor mistakes in thinking can metastasize and create models that make no sense in reality. Theory unchecked by practical experience can even be catastrophic. I knew an architect at university who received a large grant to develop a community of residences, which he did according to the highest standards of then-fashionable art and a theoretically informed sense of how people should live. The results were intriguing but the builders fought with the architect the entire time. The roofs had no overhang, the wiring and pipes under the houses on stilts had no covering, and the bathrooms had no doors, to mention just three problems. Sure enough, once houses went on the market and faced the first winter, many design elements had to change. Residents put doors on bathrooms, the roofs were all retrofitted, and the open basements were all closed in and insulated. This was all made necessary once the first rains led to flooding and the first freeze caused all pipes to burst. In essence, the result was a disaster simply because the architect was a designer and not a builder. There is a lesson in this. Theory without a reality check can make the world unlivable. This is because theorists can build beautiful models that hide grave errors, intentionally or not, and there is no means by which their mistakes are revealed until you test them against the real world. You never want them in charge of the whole project. The Theorists Dictated COVID Policy This is essentially what happened in the Covid years. The designers of the response were academics, bureaucrats, modelers, and other highly credentialed experts. Sidelined were medical practitioners, clinical workers, and other people with hands-on experience in dealing with healthcare. As time went on a massive chasm opened between the two camps with the theorists and modelers prevailing with media megaphone. Meanwhile, the doctors, nurses, teachers, parents, elderly in nursing homes, and really the whole of everyone else were left without discretion, their concerns and issues not only ignored but censored and blotted out from public life. To return to the above analogy, the houses were flooding, the pipes were bursting, the residents humiliated, but there was no one to fix the problem because the architect was sure that he was right. The problem is nowhere more clear than on the issue of early treatment. Doctors know how to deal with respiratory infections. Among the products in their toolkit are nasal rinses, zinc and vitamins, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, steroids, and antibiotics. None of this was a focus of the CDC or the NIH. They had their sights on one thing only, the novel gene therapy they would call a vaccine, and they even went further to remove as far as possible repurposed drugs from the market. This was a mind-boggling response because it contradicted all practical and clinical experience. What is the first thing one should do when faced with a new pathogen? Figure out how to make sick people get better. Aside from invasive ventilation, the government and academic theorists had no answers except for everyone to lock down and wait for the shot, which turned out to be a flop. Fantasyland Here is the essence of the scandal without precedent that took place all over the world. The theorists triumphed entirely over the practitioners. The job of the rest of us was to place ourselves into their models. We were supposed to comply in order to “flatten the curve” as if any kind of widespread viral infection could be so easily modeled. We were supposed to watch the databases online to make sure we would all be doing the right thing according to someone else’s plan. Meanwhile, for nearly two years, if you could leave your home and go to the downtown area of anywhere in the US, you saw boarded up businesses, empty streets, and the periodic saddened straggler making his way through alleyways in a mask while the kids and parents sat lonely at home consuming streaming videos and living on social media. The disaster was obvious to everyone but those who created it. As time went on, we came to realize that the experiment was much bigger than we thought. They were not just trying to mitigate a pathogen. They were attempting to rebuild “the infrastructures of human existence.” Here we have a paradigmatic example of theory gone mad, a vision wholly unconstrained from any reality, a cockamamie idea wholly unmoored from practical tangibilities. It’s utter madness. And yet they had the power and the rest still do not. And even today, precious few have admitted that anything went wrong. They are still blocking unvaccinated foreigners from travel, still mandating shots for kids and students, still pushing for human separation with 15-minute cities, and still swearing without a shred of evidence that they saved millions of lives. If you doubt it, they will send you to an academic study hosted on the website of the NIH. What Makes Society Work? It was the triumph of theory over practice and experience. And look what they did to the world! The writings of Friedrich Hayek, building on Adam Smith, take the insight to a deeper level. There are many answers to social problems that are not readily part of human cognition in the present generation, certainly not to the theorists in charge, and not even to any one of us as intellectuals. Rather, the essential knowledge that makes society work properly — in vast amounts of its functioning — and to the advantage of all its members, is dispersed among millions and billions of minds, living tacitly in our mental spaces, and it is often the product of habits and rituals of living that are inherited from long experience deep in history. We take all of this for granted and hardly think about it. Much of it is inaccessible to us and certainly cannot be extracted, modeled, and codified into a grand plan. The great lesson of our time should certainly include grave incredulity toward any philosopher king who comes along to tell us that it is all wrong and must be replaced with a wholly new way, else we will all die from a scary new threat, whether be a new pathogen or a change in the climate or some other invisible enemy. Looked at this way, it’s truly hard to believe that anyone gave the time of day to these people in the first place.

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I was dead wrong about Augur
by professor rat 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

I thought this full-spectrum market was doing everything right dotting every c-punk 'I' and crossing ever crypto-anarchist ' T '. I guess the excellent is the enemy of the good. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. >>> oKaiyo · 4 days ago · edited 4 days ago This forum has been dead for years. And now the coin is too. Delisted from Binance in December, and now Coinbase. There is no coming back from that. Reputation is shot to hell and there is zero interest in this project from users, traders, whales, and institutions. RIP $REP <<< For want of a horses arse a kingdom was lost - SAD!

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Wikileaks: Julian Assange - Journalism, Leaks, Collateral Murder, Censorship
by grarpamp 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVoUPnXqvNE The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange Julian Assange MUST BE FREED. "If wars can be started by lies, then they can be stopped by truth. -- Julian Assange"

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