The delicious fall of Sam Bankman-Fried

Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. You may lament this instinct, yet we all harbour it. New Yorkers are especially prone when it comes to property envy. Every couple of years, it feels like, a skyscraper goes up in the city that is significantly taller than the previous very tall new skyscraper. Each time one does, the only thing that goes higher than the tower’s residences is the cost of purchasing them. So with what rapture do New Yorkers read about the misfortunes these buildings go through. Oh, the thrill of learning that they sway in the wind, that people get seasick in the penthouses, that when owners put their garbage in the rubbish chutes the noise on the lower floors is like a tactical nuke.

Reading such stories makes the whole city’s heart lift a little. Everyone gets to think, if not say: ‘Well, I may be down in the dumps, paying through the nose for rent, but at least I didn’t spend 150 million bucks I don’t have buying a penthouse that sways.’ So it is that this snippet of adversity makes everybody’s day that bit happier.

It is the same with the news this week that a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX has collapsed with between $1 billion and $2 billion of customers’ money having vanished.

Why should I take any special pleasure in the collapse of such a company? Not because I have anything against crypto, but solely because of the way the founder of FTX behaved. The firm put a particular emphasis on ESG. Please do not get lost in these acronyms.

As everybody who has brushed against big business in recent years will know, ESG stands for ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ and it rules the corporate world.