from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

Tether is, and this is an arcane finance concept which only true financial elites can understand, making shit up. t.co/Mf98rWk2zr

Their daily-updated transparency page was just updated manually to reflect their purported capital cushion *as of a snapshot of their books more than six weeks ago.*

Lying consistently is really hard because you have to track the lies, and the epiphenomena to the lies, and tell an internally consistent story! Tether is not that good at lying! They are extremely bad at it, in fact! They have been obviously lying! For years!

"Forensic investigation" sounds like some sort of elite specialty. It is a process of a) asking for books b) asking other people for externally maintained information and c) asking whether the books and the external trustworthy epiphenomena are consistent.

Some people believe that Clearly Someone Is In Charge Of Doing This Right and I understand that mental model of the world, but it is a false one. You can be at the absolute frontier of human understanding in forensic investigation with minutes of work, 4th grade math, etc.

There are a lot of people who have something like an efficient markets hypothesis constantly running for the operation of sophisticated financial elites and regulators.

A counterproposal: if you do not know who is doing the work, what their institution is, and what their job title is, consider that there may be a possibility that *no one anywhere* is doing the work. This seems extremely unlikely and yet is repeatedly exploitable.