As the impact of the FTX collapse continues to unfold, there are several aspects of the event that reach well beyond the cryptocurrency world. And as more information comes out, the more important the situation appears.
A Few Facts and Curious Coincidences
First of all, the massive financial scandal has left investors with billions of dollars in losses. That in itself makes the debacle one of the costliest on record. The speed at which FTX both attracted investors and lost all of its money is also unprecedented. Its CEO, Samuel Bankman-Fried (also known by his initials SBF), went from a net worth of up to $26 billion to essentially broke in a matter of days.
It’s also amazing how Bankman-Fried was able to acquire such a large amount of investor cash so quickly and publicly.
Why didn’t that attract some sort of regulatory inquiry despite warnings from market experts in congressional testimony?
The Madoff of Cryptos
This is a very good question since the dynamics of the collapse involved evident malfeasance on the part of Bankman-Fried. Not only were basic capital protections ignored, but FTX investors’ cash was diverted into Alameda Research, an investment firm owned by SBF. That’s an illegal and unethical conflict of interest that should have already drawn criminal charges against him, especially in light of the scope of the financial losses. He has rightly been described as the Bernie Madoff of cryptocurrency.
Yet somehow, amazingly, SBF has yet to be arrested. What’s more, regulators missed these obvious red flags. Or did they simply ignore them?
And if regulators ignored the FTX transgressions, why would that be?
The simple answer, though certainly not the only or complete one, is that Bankman-Fried and FTX were and remain politically connected to very powerful people. That’s a well-established fact.
Son of Stanford Professors
Another well-established fact is that Bankman-Fried’s parents are both Stanford professors. His mother, Barbara Fried, teaches courses in federal income taxation, legal theory, tax policy, distributive justice, and moral psychology. His father is an expert in taxation policy and has testified before Congress. Both are deeply connected to the Democratic Party establishment, and both profited handsomely from FTX to the tune of some $300 million in properties.
Turning a Blind Eye
But did politicians help protect FTX along the way?
That, too, has yet to be established. It is a fact, however, that the political elite in Washington, our elected representatives, benefitted greatly from FTX. Since 2019, Bankman-Fried has been the second largest donor to the Democratic Party, contributing $38 million of essentially stolen investor funds from FTX to the party.
But it wasn’t just the Democrats that were funded by FTX. In that same period, Bankman-Fried’s co-CEO, Ryan Salame, who ran various parts of FTX, donated about $20 million to the Republican Party. So both parties gained from large financial contributions by FTX.
One can’t help but wonder how many blind eyes and legal protection such contributions may have bought Mr. Bankman-Fried. That is speculative but not unreasonably so.
Tainting the Bitcoin Well
Furthermore, hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen from the exchange and funneled into bitcoin. That dynamic is turning the world’s top cryptocurrency into a haven of thieves and tarnishing its already damaged reputation. Bitcoin is already under duress as energy costs associated with mining have risen while bitcoin’s price and credit sources have contracted.
The timing of the FTX collapse is another coincidence. It certainly helps the anti-cryptocurrency crowd. Critics warn that money, especially cryptocurrency, is just too important to leave to the market and private issuers.
That argument sounds reasonable, but it’s also highly coincidental with the FTX crash occurring in the same period as the Federal Reserve’s public announcement and initial testing of its Central Bank Digital Currency, known as the digital dollar.
Why’s that important? There are at least a few reasons.
A Perfect Crisis for the Digital Dollar
One is that the FTX crash is the perfect crisis to help “demonstrate” to the public that unregulated, decentralized, and anonymous exchanges, and trades and holdings of cryptocurrencies that are beyond the purview of the federal government pose a threat to investors.
That’s true, but the same could be said about unregulated real estate transactions or the buying and selling of used cars. Nonetheless, the cryptocurrency chaos can be used to justify a federal crackdown on the industry.
Another reason is that the American public will not be easily convinced of the need or desirability of the digital dollar. The FTX collapse may be one way to help shatter public confidence in all cryptocurrencies as safe and viable alternative investments in order to persuade the public to accept the issuance of the digital dollar.
The digital dollar will be transparent and programmable to provide the Fed with new levels of control over our spending habits, strip away privacy, and greatly restrict personal autonomy. In short, digital currency is a formula for tyranny that will be presented as needed for currency security.
Who Are the Shadow Players?
There are other curiosities about FTX and its sudden downfall, such as the identity and influence of FTX and Alameda Research co-founder and CTO Garry Wang. He has been silent so far, and not much is known about him.
Finally, it’s certainly coincidental that Bankman-Fried sought a bailout from his industry rival Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, owner of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Some believe that China-born Zhao’s loyalties still lie with Beijing. That is not known at this time.
But as enigmatic as the people surrounding the fall of FTX appear to be is how it was allowed to happen in the first place, which leads to at least one more question …
Was FTX designed to fail?
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
