Hunter Baker: A cryptic attack on justice

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: WORLD Opinions Commentator Hunter Baker on what he calls one of the greatest financial crimes of all time.

HUNTER BAKER, COMMENTATOR: Early this month, co-founder and CEO of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange, FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of fraud by a jury in New York. That makes his financial crime one of the largest of all-time.

In the United States, we often speak of people working in the blue-collar or white-collar sectors of the economy. Sam Bankman-Fried or SBF occupied a higher echelon than mere white collar. His category was no-collar. From the start, he attended work wearing oversized t-shirts and baggy shorts. His hair was uncombed. After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he went to Wall Street and later created a financial empire in the Bahamas.

Bankman-Fried was not only supposed to be a quantitative genius, but perhaps a moral genius, as well. In college, he gravitated toward a movement called Effective Altruism. Rather than going to work for non-profits advancing various causes, these students would go into the market, make huge salaries (or profits), and then donate large sums where the money could do the most good. When he began to accumulate galactic levels of wealth as a player in the crypto-world, Sam Bankman-Fried became one of the most high- profile individuals in the world. It didn’t hurt that he was a major donor mostly to Democratic politicians and causes adored by the cultural vanguard. So great was his cache, he even gave major interviews via Zoom while simultaneously playing video games. It didn’t matter. He was a new kind of superstar.

The end of the story is not as hopeful as the beginning. Although the one-time crypto-billionaire argued in hearings that the unraveling of his company FTX was merely a matter of bad management, jurors in New York concluded that Bankman-Fried committed an elaborate fraud. To make matters worse, at one point he seemed to concede that some of his moral posturing had been a kind of cynical public relations.

It is important that Sam Bankman-Fried not be treated in such a way as to add to the impression of class bias in our justice system. Often, it seems the person who steals an enormous amount via sophisticated schemes receives a lesser kind of reckoning than the street-wise crook. According to reports about this case, Bankman-Fried and his associates created a back door in their systems to access investors’ money without their knowledge. The money could then be invested in a parallel hedge fund–a scheme that violated every rule of financial propriety. While Bankman-Fried possesses a degree of star power and commands public interest, his crimes need to be treated as serious attacks on justice–not confused errors of a boy genius.

Christians are commanded to forgive injuries, even great ones. But God has given us the law and rulers to punish evil and therefore to protect us from some of the worst impacts of sin. Sam Bankman-Fried created confidence in his work that was unwarranted. He even enticed investors to keep their money in his networks and to add more when the reckoning was unfolding. This is the kind of injury the law must recognize and visibly punish.

I’m Hunter Baker.

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