The Ontario teacher’s pension fund had something like a $95M investment in FTX. It manages $241.6BN CDN in assets, making the FTX investment about 0.04% of the total assets. Pension funds normally put some percentage of their assets in risky investments, this is normal and good—and they will, therefore, invest in whatever new scam people come up with ten or twenty years from now. If not crypto, it will be something else.
Yes, they probably didn’t do the due diligence that they should have done. But that is a different kind of mistake than the mistake of investing in something risky when they thought they were investing in something safe. The pension fund likely knew it was risky, they just didn’t figure out that the inmates were running the asylum, so to speak.
Or in short, yes, this was a mistake, but pension funds invest, on purpose, in things that can balloon and burst on a whim anyway.
(I'm not implying any moral judgment here. Personally, I think it's actually a net positive given the amount of harmful regulation, both in national laws and in international sanctions. But that's precisely why it would be silly to expect it to not be driven underground by the governments in the long term.)
I rejoice in that I would hope it deters future pension funds from investing in crypto. It’s a downright idiotic decision given the current sphere of hype-inflation that can balloon and burst on a whim.
Just look at the effect a single tweet from musk had on Doge.