SBF will speak at a New York Times summit next week and that seems a little strange to me. This is a guy accused of perpetrating one of the largest frauds in history — investors and customers must be incensed! Fortunately for SBF, a ticket to attend the event starts at $2,499, so anyone caught up in the FTX collapse will not be able to afford to go anyway. Should make question time a lot nicer.

The lowdown

• 🇹🇷 Turkey cuts rates by 150 basis points as inflation soars to 85.5%.

• 🐭 Disney awarded Bob Iger a $10 million consultancy deal to advise CEO he replaced.

• 💰 Binance CEO CZ vows to set up a billion-dollar fund to provide capital to crypto start-ups facing liquidity woes.

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Bill Ackman bets against the Hong Kong dollar

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman announced on Twitter that his firm Pershing Square has a large notional short position against the Hong Kong dollar – notional as, rather than selling the currency, the firm has replicated a short position using put options.

For the bet to pay off, the Hong Kong dollar will need to fall in value against the US dollar. What makes the trade interesting is that the HKD is pegged against the US dollar and so in theory, it cannot fall in value against the US dollar as the exchange rate is stabilized by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA).

Ackman is therefore betting that the peg will be broken and references a Bloomberg article ($) to make his argument. The article argues that the HKMA is under increasing pressure to break the peg due to the interest rate gap with the US and the billions required to defend the target trading band. This would be a huge deal – the current peg was set in 2005 and has never been broken.

Earlier this month, Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary Paul Chan said in a speech at a global bankers summit “If you bet against the Hong Kong dollar, you are bound to lose.”

In what appeared to be a response, Ackman said, again via Twitter, “Up until moments before a currency peg is lifted, the sovereign always asserts that they will never lift their peg. Peg defense 101.” It will be interesting to see how this plays out. We just need to hope that Twitter doesn’t collapse before the peg or before Ackman updates us.

The content we're consuming today

• The Economist: How to do lay-offs right ($).

• Blockcrunch VIP: The Definitive Post on the FTX Scandal.

Off-balance sheet items

• A mixed bag for Disney at the Thanksgiving holiday box office – ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ dominated but ‘Strange World’ has so far bombed, grossing only $4.2 million against a budget of $135-180 million (depending on where you look).

The bottom line