can we consider what happened to be price manipulation?
According to this post, someone earned hundreds of millions of dollars from shorting by manipulating UST and it's "backing". I'm not sure if it's true.Who thought this was a good idea?
I honestly did. We have many reserves to “scare” attackers trying to depeg the stable coin.But I underestimated human greed: if there is a profit easy to be made, someone will inevitably try to yield that.
So, this mechanism was challenged and failed miserably.
Say you have $10, and you buy Bitcoin to guarantee your made-up stable coin keeps it's value. If Bitcoin goes to $100, you have $90 to spare (and potential profit), but the moment Bitcoin drops, you're short on money. You could improve this buy buying $20 in Bitcoin to guarantee the stability of $10 in your stable coin, but if Bitcoin drops more than 50%, you're short on money again. You could go further and keep $100 in Bitcoin to guarantee $10 worth of stable coins, so that you can handle a 90% drop in price, but that would mean you'll be forced to sell 90% of your Bitcoin just to keep $10 worth of stable coins alive.
I can't think of any logical way for this to work.
Now if it goes back to $1 levels, this is a $150 profit. 
I hope that happens quickly.
This actually makes me consider shorting it: there's an upper limit to the risk, but it's quite likely to drop to nothing, which would give a decent profit. I hope that happens quickly.