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it is incredibly suspicious to me that the US Treasury fund Bessent wants to use to bail out Argentina’s Javier Milei (“Make Argentina Great Again”) with Americans’ taxpayer money is almost exactly the same size as the amount of money Tether is suddenly trying to raise via a “private placement”.
Tether is one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, at least according to their own unaudited / unverified numbers. There should be no reason for them to need to raise capital and no desire on their part to sell off part of their cash cow (and there should also be no one in the world willing to invest $20 billion in a company that refuses to undergo even the most basic kind of audit / asset verification, but that’s a separate issue).
Putting aside for a moment the absurdity of the idea that the central bank of international criminal finance considers itself to be in the same league as companies like Google, Nvidia, and JP Morgan, I can think of 3 possible explanations::
Tether is (somehow) out of cash. This is lent some credence by the fact that they are failing to pay their electricity bill in Uruguay and had their power turned off a few weeks ago.
Tether wants to get some shares into the hands of corrupt government officials (other than Howard “Nutlick” Lutnick, who already has some) for protection.
Now that the fed has pivoted and cut rates Tether’s income is about to start dropping (and the more the fed cuts, the more it will drop) so they are just cashing out the founders at the top. (This is the most charitable interpretation and is certainly highly plausible.)
it’s also worth mentioning that:
Tether’s USDT token is very popular with Argentinians trying to avoid that country’s hyperinflation. While technically illegal because of capital controls, it’s still a “crime”, albeit one I have some sympathy for. But it does mean there’s an important connection between Tether and Argentina. If Tether blew up tomorrow Argentina would be in a world of pain far worse than the one it’s in right now.
Tether is a major shareholder in south american agriculture business Adecoagro which I think does a lot of work or has a lot of land in Argentina (someone correct me if I’m wrong about that second part).
[UPDATE] I also noticed that as of late September 2024 both argentina and Tether were claiming $5.0 billion worth of gold reserves. Argentina’s gold reserves disappeared in late June of last year (Milei admits the gold was shipped somewhere but govt won’t say where it was shipped).
