> again - who is on the CP desk at Tether? Who is their account manager at Goldman Sachs? Who do they talk to at, say, the GE corporate treasury? Commercial paper is a short term money market that has to be managed and rolled - you can't just buy and hold the bonds anonymously.
Dan's argument is that the alleged size of their holding implies doing a lot of business, which should be being done by humans making phone calls to each other, and the gossip network doesn't seem to be able to locate any such people. Given that there are market participants whose job is e.g. "today I need to sell $100m of three month commercial debt to someone, time to start calling", one of them ought to know who's running the Tether business.
That nobody can see them in the market is a red flag.
* He was the Deputy CEO according to the interview and his LinkedIn (though there was all sorts of hilarity there, like claiming he graduated HEC Lausanne at 15, and becoming a Professor of Finance somewhere in Lebanon while running multiple funds all over. But after the disastrous interview, he was quickly deleted from the bank's website. And then re-added when people started questioning that. And then removed again when the bank hurried to "revamp" their website (to a WordPress installation, no less, and gaining 15 years of experience in the process).
Given the space and the degree to which they refuse to reveal normal financial information, I assume they’re either directly involved in fraud/money laundering or are treating other cryptocurrency companies’ debt as far more stable than it actually is. This is such a common criticism and there’s no reason why you’d keep it this secretive if the news was good.
This was the biggest red flag behind Tether to me, where we are talking about not millions but billions of pseudo-dollars.
The risk profile is beyond anything reasonable that a bank could or would accept. Tether minting $2bn in a week means $2bn cash inflows from mostly people that the bank probably doesn't know, all for what can only be a negligible fee.