"In the sixteen months since the Financial Accounting Standards Board's new crypto asset standard took effect, a new species of public company has emerged. It does not manufacture anything material to its valuation. Its operating business is, in many cases, an afterthought. What it does is issue equity and debt at a premium to the underlying value of its balance sheet, use the proceeds to buy a single volatile asset, and then mark that asset to fair value through earnings every quarter. The reported earnings—when the asset rises—are then offered as evidence that the model is working, justifying the next issuance at a higher premium. The cycle has produced billions of dollars in shareholder value and, more recently, billions of dollars in shareholder losses, an emerging body of securities litigation, and a class of structures that institutional capital is now being asked to underwrite on terms that did not exist before fiscal year 2025."

"On February 24, 2023, KPMG LLP signed an unqualified audit opinion on the financial statements of SVB Financial Group, the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank.¹ The opinion contained no reference to substantial doubt about the entity's ability to continue as a going concern. KPMG had served as the company's auditor since 1994.¹ Fourteen days later, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed after customers attempted to withdraw approximately $140 billion in deposits over the course of two days, in what became the second-largest bank failure in United States history.² A subsequent congressional review found that KPMG had considered 64 risks that could indicate SVB was in jeopardy and concluded that none applied.³ Litigation followed.⁴"

"More than ninety million Americans participate in employer-sponsored defined contribution retirement plans, in which transactions are processed each business day at a single end-of-day net asset value. The asset classes now arriving in those accounts operate on no such schedule."