Aug 10 08:07:58 you deem yourself able to repay your depositors in the event bs&t goes bankrupt, and nothing is recovered ?
Aug 10 08:08:00 back in a couple of minutes - grabbing a glass of wine - friday evening here
Aug 10 08:09:57 back
Aug 10 08:10:17 in the event BS&T goes bust, I have more than enough assets to cover that
That turns out to have been a lie, and hardly an innocent one.
It wasn't a lie. It was a mistake. It was a mistake made by
both participants in this deal. Each side had substantially the same information and made substantially the same mistake.
Patrick made a genuine attempt to vet those who borrowed from him to ensure they weren't just borrowing from him to invest in Pirate. Unfortunately, they lied to him. In retrospect, this is 100% predictable.
But if you think for just a second, it's quite clear that if Patrick had any suspicion that this would have happened, he wouldn't have lent money to them. Think about it, it would have made no sense. Patrick would have just lent to Pirate himself and would have made a greater interest rate. (And, in fact, I was arguing with Patrick
and those who lent money to him at the time that it made no sense.)
This was a common mistake underlying the contract, made with equal fault on both sides, and it makes it inequitable to enforce it as agreed.
Aug 10 08:07:58 you deem yourself able to repay your depositors in the event bs&t goes bankrupt, and nothing is recovered ?
Aug 10 08:08:00 back in a couple of minutes - grabbing a glass of wine - friday evening here
Aug 10 08:09:57 back
Aug 10 08:10:17 in the event BS&T goes bust, I have more than enough assets to cover that
That turns out to have been a lie, and hardly an innocent one.
I believe after reading what he has said after the Pirate default, is that he under-estimated the exposure people who were his borrowers, to Pirate, but that he did not have prior knowledge.
If he didnt know, he shouldnt have said it categorically like that and mislead potential investors.
He thought he did know, as did the people who lent money to him. This wasn't a mistake that he alone made. This was a mistake made equally by both him and those who lent money to him.
As for him paying back slowly; so are a few other labeled scammers. Im all for removing the tags once they paid everything back.
The difference is that the others paying back slowly and labeled scammers, like Hashking, are in default. Patrick is not. He would only be in default if it was equitable to enforce his contracts as agreed. It is equitable to enforce Hashking's contract as agreed because his deliberately misrepresented his Pirate exposure. There is no evidence Patrick did so.
In any event, if we were to try to do that, we'd have to figure out how much of the loss equitably belongs to Patrick and how much belongs to the lenders, so we can decide when he has paid back everything he is responsible for. That's a remarkably subtle judgment for the community to make and would take effort collecting evidence and making subjective judgment calls. A scammer tag is way too coarse a mechanism for such a subtle process. It's for fraud, theft, lies, and stealing -- not for complex deals gone bad due to outside facts with all sides acting in good faith to make good.
Those who loaned money to Patrick at usurious interest rates are just as responsible for this collapse as Patrick is. There is nothing more foreseeable than the inability for a business to consistently produce outrageously unrealistic profits. Yes, Patrick was an idiot. But so were the people who loaned money to him. I have yet to see a single such person take even one shred of responsibility.