With no access to crypto, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is now trading fish to pay for services in prison::Sam Bankman-Fried is now using mackerel fish as a means of exchange with other prisoners.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It didn’t take long for former crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried to learn the economic system of New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that SBF paid for a haircut with packaged mackerel, a type of pelagic fish that is a choice of currency among inmates.
In 2013, he got his first intern gig at Jane Street Capital, swapping exchange-traded funds before co-founding his crypto trading firm Alameda Research in 2017.
The fish, popularly referred to as “macks” among inmates, has been the choice of currency in federal prisons since 2004, after cigarettes were banned, the Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Formerly incarcerated attorney Larry Levin accepted it as a form of payment from fellow prisoners he represented while serving his own sentence at the Lompoc correctional institution in California.
The trend became so popular that Global Source Marketing, a supplier of the fish, felt the increased demand, according to a 2008 story from the Journal.
The original article contains 387 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Anything but fiat, eh Sam?
There is a book about extreme economies. The author discusses it here: https://www.econtalk.org/richard-davies-on-extreme-economies/
They go through how the mackerel as money came about. Also, that expired mackerel, i.e. fiat, have their own lower exchange rate.
Would instant noodle/ramen be accepted there in his prison? He might need some. 🤭
Bernie Madoff cornered the market for Swiss Miss hot chocolate while in prison.
How does this work? The article mentioned the there is a limit of 8 per prisoner yet he was able to stockpile the whole supply. And they write articles about which implies the whole prison knows.
Why is this still ongoing, how is it allowed? This mofo still able to be a currupt capitalist even in hell.
Prison workers are not paid enough to care. If Bernie Madoff says “I’ll give you $20 to not stop me from monopolizing the hot chocolate powder”, well, $20 is $20.
It’s the same quote in all the stories on this. The key being “at some point”, meaning that he probably just noticed that the stock was running low one week and bought the remaining 8 to resell.
However if it really was an ongoing scheme, he could also have bought them from other prisoners and resold at a higher price than he offered them. Basically asking someone who doesn’t buy their own quota of chocolate to buy it for him. If chocolate cost 10$ and he’s offering 11$ to someone getting it for him they’ll gladly carry the entire stock to him, so that the people actually needing chocolate would have to buy it from him for 12$.
The prison could easily stop this by increasing the stock if they knew it was going on at all.
Anyway it’s not ongoing. He died some years ago.
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Mackerel? Is the prison cooking scene in Goodfellas just the norm?
