No. Alameda and FTX were the same company, in the end. Co-mingled, and no separate governance. Legally speaking, all of the inner circle people ran both companies, and they all knew about the crimes.
They = the people? Not precisely. Each of the perpetrators did certain things, agreed to certain things, and knew things at certain times. But I was responding to the notion in the parent that CE was just "running an investment firm" whereas SBF was running a company doing different stuff. It turned out to be all one co-mingled entity, contrary to how it was marketed. One company, and all of the main perpetrators knew things about both sides.
Honestly I wasn't sure what you meant by adding "legally speaking". It seemed to imply there was some legal ruling that both companies were the same. Cause otherwise imho there is no difference "they ran both companies" and "they ran both companies as a matter of law".
The reduced sentences for Ellison, Wang, and Singh make sense in light of their cooperation. This is how plea deals work. The conviction of SBF seems simple in retrospect, but when the SDNY inked these deals, they did not yet know how just easy SBF would make their case for them, with all the tampering and perjury and obstinance.
Nonetheless, we should not be fooled by a sort of "Svengali defense", where Caroline or the others claim that they were beguiled by a dark charismatic genius who forced them into the crimes. The entire inner circle is super guilty of flagrant crimes. The shorter sentences are an artifact of plea bargains, and not a sign of lesser guilt.
The customers were not fully repaid, except in an artificial accounting sense using post-crash marks. Nevertheless, the recovery was far more successful than most people expected at the time.
I think we're talking less about the aspect of Bismarck where he won 3 big wars and lost none, and more about the part where he set up a delicate system that was maybe too complex for his successors to maintain, especially under idiosyncratic leaders. We're not talking about financial crises. Bismarck did not stop the Panic of 1873 (in fact, you could wave your hands and argue he indirectly caused it).
As far as "who set up the US empire, in all its complexity?", I'd argue for the 4 guys I named in my other comment, but your list might differ. And if you're just interested in the dollar system per se, I'd probably go with Harry Dexter White, who strangely enough turned out to be a Soviet spy.
Oh, and if you want a pretty clear analogy from Bismarck's system to earlier US monetary history: Benjamin Strong got the Federal Reserve System up and running and figured out a bunch of the right tricks, but he died in 1928 without getting his successors up to speed on how to run things. They failed miserably in next couple years. Bad timing!
Your list and the one above (e.g. with General Marshall, etc) are more illustrative & aligned with developing US Hegemony than the 20th Century Presidents. It seems to me the US presidents have been drawing down hegemony assets since JFK.
It's just that the USA was so dominant after WW2 that it took about a century for the structure to collapse.
A better model than seeing Trump as a wrecking ball, is seeing him as a high stakes gambler, with middling skills -- in the same way that George W Bush made a big bet on the middle east and lost the chips.
"when interacting with an LLM in any capacity, remember your own cognitive biases. You often want the response to work, and while generated responses may look good and fit your mental model, it requires increasingly obscene levels of critical evaluation to see through the fluff."
100% this.
Idk about the far-out takes where "AI is an alien lifeform arrived into our present", but the first thing we know about how humans relate to extraterrestrials is: "I want to believe".
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