How S.B.F.’s Alameda Went Bust

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Happy Wednesday from Puck, and thanks for reading Dry Powder, my biweekly email about what’s really happening on Wall Street.

As you know, I’ve spent the past weeks chronicling some of the people in finance and media who first saw the failure of FTX coming. (Part 1, in conversation with Anthony Scaramucci is here; Part 2, featuring former broker Laura Goldman, is here; and Part 3, with short-seller Marc Cohodes, is here.) For tonight’s installment, I sat down with James Block, the amateur financial sleuth who was one of the first to get his hands around Alameda Research’s balance sheet—and helped to bring to light Sam Bankman-Fried’s house of cards.

As always, keep the tips and feedback coming. Your responses to these private emails go directly to my inbox.

Bill

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The S.B.F. Chronicles, Part 4: Alameda, We Have a Problem

Among the first to sniff out the infamous balance sheet of Alameda Research, S.B.F.’s now defunct hedge fund, was a young doctor turned financial sleuth whose analysis helped facilitate FTX’s demise. This is the fourth in a series.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

In many ways, James Block couldn’t be more different from Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old M.I.T. and Jane Street Capital alumnus who nuked FTX in a couple years and ensured that the ashes were spread equally across the hallowed halls of Wall Street, Congress, and Silicon Valley before moping around his family’s home in Palo Alto. Block, who is also 30, is from Michigan. He has a degree in biology from Hillsdale College (in Hillsdale, Michigan) and has a M.D./Ph.D. from Wayne State University School of Medicine (Detroit). He is now a resident at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) with a focus on emergency psychiatry and bipolar disorder. He has a Substack presence and is known on Twitter by the handle @dirtybubblemedia, a play on the villainous Sponge Bob character and the fact, as Block told me in a recent conversation, that crypto is “a dirty bubble; it’s a bubble and it’s filled with fraud and just dirty shit going on.”...

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