#2008-financial-crisis

#2008-financial-crisis

He notified everybody that he was in hospice, so it was just a matter of time. He was certainly at peace with himself. He certainly left a mark, and he was a leader on on civil rights, on gay rights, on leading other marginalized communities, and then he helped the country get through the 2008 financial crisis, which was the most significant recession, depression, almost since 1930. So, I think he was a very, very important actor in the country during those times.

Asked whether sufficient safeguards exist to prevent those in positions of power from misusing market-sensitive information, Bailey said there was a "very clear" legal framework for dealing with potential breaches and that it was appropriate for the Mandelson allegations to be handled by law enforcement. He also stressed that the focus should remain on Epstein's victims, asking: "How is it that we live in a society that this happened and was allowed to happen?"

Rakoff repeatedly treats "crypto" as a monolith, collapsing decentralized networks, centralized frauds, meme tokens, and algorithmic stablecoins into a single object of derision. This is not analysis; it is rhetorical convenience. The Terraform Labs fraud he describes depended on secrecy, centralization, and false representations - the very features Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Rakoff describes Bitcoin as gambling "untethered to economic reality." But his definition of economic reality is faith-based: central bank discretion, elastic supply, and institutional trust.

"In those years, I stayed in the George V [hotel] in Paris. I went to New York first class. I really had a great time spending that money," he tells Katie Byrne on the latest episode of the Money Talks podcast "I loved it, but I spent it with the faith that there'd be more money. I was never going to sit on a suitcase of money out of fear."