Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad

The box

There is so much, but I want to start with Serum.

If a troubled company has a few days to beg potential investors for a bailout before it files for bankruptcy, and it sends those investors its balance sheet so they can consider investing, and they all pass, and then the company files for bankruptcy, of course the balance sheet was bad. That is not a state of affairs that is consistent with a pristine fortress balance sheet.

But there is a range of possible badness, even in bankruptcy, and the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed ...