Tether did 5BB+ in profit in first half = Greatest biz in history

[johnarb]

And you show us how you don't understand the market and it's mechanics.

If you'd been watching the yield curve, you'd know that to get ~5% on their money, they have to be invested in short term treasuries. That means they need to keep re-buying new treasuries. That means on the order of $100 billion in annual volume not just in static holdings.

Heck if they're holding 1 month bills that could be 1.2 trillion in annual volume.

You're correct, I do not understand the bond market mechanics. I've always been told it's the most liquid, ...

but from what you're saying, it's difficult for a big player to manage large positions, needing a huge team, not enough to rely on a partner even one that is a primary dealer

but I'll concede, thanks for trying to educate me on the subject but I'll never be big enough, happy to buy $BIL and park in money markets for cash positions

 

[engineering]

I'll admit I had to look much of it up. I knew there was an upper limit on purchase size for non auction purchases in a single offering, but I don't have the kind of money to worry about it personally.

At my level, I can just log into treasury direct, not have to be part of the auction directly and then be able to direct 24 months of auto-rollover on one month bills. (Although there are still payments coming in at each rollover.) The rate that I earn is decided based of the auction results of the big boys and their appetite.
They have come into the auction with a price and purchase size in mind and if they buy too much at once they drive the interest rate down. So I would expect that they are participating in every auction for every issue from 1 month to 1 year and maybe a bit beyond, just to keep the purchase prices down for the bonds.

The amounts we're talking about here are staggering. I'm not sure, but I think it could be enough that tether could meet the volume requirements to be a primary dealer in their own right.

100 billion is more than the GDP of all but the top ~60 countries in the world.

For another perspective, the total AUM for SGOV "iShares® 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (SGOV)" is only $20 billion. BIL is 32.5 billion. SHV is 19 billion. CLIP is only 0.5 billion. GBIL is 5.3 billion. CLTL is 1.8 billion.

So adding together the AUM for the various short term treasury ETFs I could find, you still wouldn't match the stated holdings of tether.

I tried to figure out how many people it takes to run SGOV. This is the best I can do from their annual report:
"The amount of the total remuneration awarded to the Company’s staff in respect of the Company’s financial year ending December 31, 2023 was USD 5.43m. This figure is comprised of fixed remuneration of USD 0.74m and variable remuneration of USD 4.68m. There was a total of 8 beneficiaries of the remuneration described above. "
That might just be a count of trustees and execs. The actual employee count could be higher.
I couldn't find similar info in the report for BIL.

 

[punktrader]

I think too much has been made of the head count with Tether. It seems to me it must be some weird way they have structured things so that the employees are under a different entity.

At this point, any argument that has been put forth from the Bitfinexed/Buttcoin/Crypto Critics Corner has to be viewed as suspect. If Tether was a scam it is hard to see how they would have survived to this point. There have been massive market stress tests.

Far too much has been made also of the charts that show Tether and the price of bitcoin going up. I dug pretty deep into this because if it was true I was just going to front run bitcoin myself and trade based off Tether as a signal. I could find nothing. The data suggested to me that when bitcoin goes up more people use Tether not that Tether is causing Bitcoin to go up.

I am rather agnostic on the entire space though other than that BTC is an amazing measure at this point of global liquidity.

 

[GlobalMacro90]

Exactly. Two observations that the tether users have gone up overtime and that bitcoin value has gone up overtime does not mean that one is causing the other at all.

 

[punktrader]

At the same time it is not impossible. You could just lag reporting Tether. The papers I read I suspect had the wrong time stamps on BTC data, so they thought they found causation vs reported Tether data. I don't see the trade either way.

Personally, I think BTC is worth like basically zero long term. There is no good way to short it lol.

The crypto people that don't short BTC at the all time high are just shitty traders.

Exactly. Two observations that the tether users have gone up overtime and that bitcoin value has gone up overtime does not mean that one is causing the other at all.

 

[orbit23]

Let's not forget before tether "switched" to US treasuries, they were allegedly holding majority of their billions in commercial debt.

Commercial debt is apparently a small market(not many dealers of big size) and nobody has ever heard of Tether, ever. If there was such a buyer in the market it would have been known.

Once these news came out, Tether conveniently switched to US treasuries, where due to the size of the market it's impossible to trace them.


Circle publishes CUSIPs of their US treasuries. If Tether had the money, they could EASILY prove it by just publishing the CUSIPs of their treasuries.


You have to be fucking retarded to believe Tether. People only believe because of confirmation bias; they are invested in Bitcoin and if Tether was a fraud their investment would be ruined.


There are NO regulations and NO governing bodies ruling over Tether. CFTC has already fined them for lying, the NYAG banned their activities in New York, Europe has outlawed Tether with new regulations(unable to comply),...

It is PROVEN that they did not have the reserves and they lied about it. And they paid a fine for it! But people are retarded and continue as if everything is normal.

It's the most obvious fraud "hiding" in plain sight.

People will continue to be in state of disbelief until Tether is taken down by the regulators or it goes bust on it's own.

This could happen relatively soon but it could also last for another 1-2 years. The thing is current administration is doing LESS THAN NOTHING on this fraud. Contrary to common belief, if Trump and republicans come into office these fraudsters will be taken down, first thing!

It could also be that now that Trump has aligned himself with crypto, that they take action to take crypto down and make Trump look like a fool.

 

[BuzzTrader]

Let's not forget before tether "switched" to US treasuries, they were allegedly holding majority of their billions in commercial debt.

Commercial debt is apparently a small market(not many dealers of big size) and nobody has ever heard of Tether, ever. If there was such a buyer in the market it would have been known.

Once these news came out, Tether conveniently switched to US treasuries, where due to the size of the market it's impossible to trace them.


Circle publishes CUSIPs of their US treasuries. If Tether had the money, they could EASILY prove it by just publishing the CUSIPs of their treasuries.


You have to be fucking retarded to believe Tether. People only believe because of confirmation bias; they are invested in Bitcoin and if Tether was a fraud their investment would be ruined.


There are NO regulations and NO governing bodies ruling over Tether. CFTC has already fined them for lying, the NYAG banned their activities in New York, Europe has outlawed Tether with new regulations(unable to comply),...

It is PROVEN that they did not have the reserves and they lied about it. And they paid a fine for it! But people are retarded and continue as if everything is normal.

It's the most obvious fraud "hiding" in plain sight.

What if the real ponzi is the banks running operations through centralized legacy Fortran from the 60s ? Remember Crowdstrike a 12 year old company bricking a billion devices ?

 

[orbit23]

What if the real ponzi is the banks running operations through centralized legacy Fortran from the 60s ? Remember Crowdstrike a 12 year old company bricking a billion devices ?

There are some similarities, in a sense that both systems are using fractional reserves.

But the difference is that one has authority to do so by the government, while the other is a criminal organization run from god knows where.

It's a question of IF not WHEN they get shut down. (it seems like a miracle how it has not yet been shut down. Perhaps it's an inside job?)

Because government is so bad at shutting down ponzi schemes (they never do until they collapse on their own), Tether scheme could last until they collapse on their own.

 

[orbit23]

One system tries to create economic growth, the other one is driving up manipulative bubble with no socio-economic benefits.

Bitcoin does or produces NOTHING. It wastes TREMENDOUS amounts of energy only to solve ARBITRARY mathematical equations and contrary to common belief it IS NOT decentralized at all.

 

[engineering]

I think too much has been made of the head count with Tether. It seems to me it must be some weird way they have structured things so that the employees are under a different entity.

Then why is nobody else doing it?

Keep in mind the previous record holder was Bernie Madoff.

Go look at their other claimed holdings besides us treasuries, they claim to have 3+ billion of dollars in precious metals holdings.
5 trillion in secured loans.

The best case scenario is that they own what they claim and are ridiculously irresponsible with the oversight of those assets. As in, Begging to get hit with losses.

Like this
https://news.bitcoin.com/gold-industry-83-tons-fake-gold-bars-secure-2-billion-loans-china/
https://web.archive.org/web/2018072...dicted-in-savings-fraud-and-goes-to-jail.html
When buying and selling things there's a certain amount of basic work you need to do in order the make sure you're buying something worth buying and the you will get paid when you sell. If you outsource every to third parties you run the risk of collusion between buyer and seller to enrich themselves at your expense. Heck, if you only have a single person or a small set of your own employees overseeing something you have a risk that they rob the company from the inside.
There's a reason the military uses at least two people for handling important things.

Being told this time it's different is like being told stocks have reached a permanently higher plateau.

"The four most dangerous words in investing are, it’s different this time." — Sir John Templeton