The allure of zero percent interest is that it sends a signal to investors that capital magically self-replicates and that no investment decision could ever really be wrong. Of course, the reality of capital markets is much different. The article lists 11 specific problems caused by zero percent interest, but that’s not exhaustive by any means. For starters, here’s some of the more bizarre ones:

Environmental, Social, and Governance. No one actually knows what any of that means, but you can throw that label on your fund, change your website’s color to a shade of light green, and instantly charge 5x higher expense ratios.

Adjusted EBITDA is a fascinating tool that more companies should have utilized. You literally just take your negative EBITDA and subtract expenses until it’s positive, then call it adjusted EBITDA.

White-collar America spent 18 months in a labor market facade, the industrial devolution of remote workers refusing to actually remotely work. It was beautiful, and we called it work-life balance. And now, with companies cutting jobs and demanding that their employees return to the office, that beautiful, wonderful dream is dead.

You’ve got to hand it to Sam on one issue: he knew exactly which political actors and media outlets to curry favor with. At least for a while, they’re going to do their best to draw attention away from his, ahem, more “questionable” schemes.

Harnessing the enormous wealth created by FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that Sam Bankman-Fried had founded, they undertook a project to spend potentially billions of dollars on pandemic prevention, a long-neglected priority on Capitol Hill even amid the coronavirus crisis. The plan, drawn from the brothers’ adherence to a philosophy called effective altruism, sought to maximize philanthropic giving in ways that can have the most impact.

In the months leading up to FTX’s crash, the Bankman-Frieds and their network had rapidly increased their spending on pandemic-prevention initiatives, according to a review of funding announcements, political donations and lobbying disclosures — record-breaking sums and unconventional choices that sometimes astounded political and public health experts.

Worth the read: Market strategist and historian Russell Napier warns of a 15- to 20-year phase of structurally elevated inflation and financial repression.

So your government pension plan just lost a pile of money speculating in crypto? Too bad. Taking losses for the sake of the collective is a feature, not a bug, of centrally planned systems.

As of June 30, the Caisse had net assets of $392 billion, with the $28.2-billion decrease due to investment losses of $33.6 billion offset by $5.4 billion in net deposits. The losses included a full write off of the fund’s US$150 million investment in crypto lender Celsius Network LLC, which is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the United States.