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According to information I received via twitter last week, the chatter coming out of the Delta Sigma Pie Fraternity at Boston Uni is that senior Frat colleagues have been expressing serious concern about the progressively erratic behavior of Prof. Mark Williams.

Several students have over-heard snippets in the GSU Academy room where Mark Williams recent obsession with bitcoin , or rather his increasing frantic activity in the media to talk it down at every opportunity has upset a lot of the fraternity, who see Williams increasingly erratic and out-spoken behavior as a threat to their “Chapter of Excellence” reputation.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Mark Williams once had a good reputation himself. He wrote an excellent book detailing the reasons for the collapse of Lehman Bros and why proper management control was essential to avoid similar fraud and criminal behavior occurring again. “Too Big To Fail” Williams said should be addressed urgently.

Mark Williams has been running a blog posting column on the Boston University website since January 2012. Throughout 2012 and 2013 he wrote mainly about big banks in general, and regulations issues over “Too Big To Fail” In all , there are around 100 posting between January 2012 and December 2013 – on average 5 or 6 a month.



until 5th December 2013 Mark Williams had not written anything at all about Bitcoin. His first posting is here

He started his blog on 10th January 2012 with this posting –

Bernanke Pursuing Anti-Greenspan Strategy: Transparency

Over 100 well reasoned postings followed on Risk issues, especially as it affected the big banks and accounting firms. A lot of the posting were critical of JPMorgan including this one on May 11th

Bear in mind that , until December 5th 2013, Mark Williams had never mentioned Bitcoin at all. But since December 2013 he has written over 50 postings on Bitcoin , in a little over two months, with only a handful of his normal type of postings about banking risks – Thats an average of now around of 25 postings a month – all critical of Bitcoin. Not the normal 5 or 6 … but 25 postings a month. That’s definitely odd behavior for Mr Williams.

Sudden changes of behavioral patterns are ‘signals’ that something quite significant has occurred. Why did Mark Williams decide to risk all his reputation – on a gamble – that he could derail Bitcoin ?

What exactly happened to cause this sudden change in the pattern of his behavior – and lead to serious concern among his colleagues at Boston University.

Here’s my view – and one which many of those near to him also appear to share.

Until late September 2013, although he had written in a critical manner about JPMorgan, he hadn’t specifically criticised Jamie Dimon directly. .. until this one

It would certainly “fit the pattern’ to believe that Mark Williams made a “career decision” to stop talking about Jamie Dimon – and start attacking Bitcoin almost every day. Why would he do that ?



Was Mark Williams ‘leaned on” ( ie did he get a visit from some large men in Black Overcoats ) or was he promised a sweetener or two ? Maybe a nice fat job at JPM ?

Whatever did cause this totally out-of-character change in the pattern of his postings behavior – Bitcoin is not destroyed. But I fear that Mark Williams reputation is – and it will only be a matter of months before he outlives his ‘usefulness’ … as he will have “failed” to destroy bitcoin .. and his professional and academic career will be in deep jeopardy.

Attacking Bitcoin, and deciding to stop attacking Jamie Dimon, may well be Mark Williams’ worst career decision …ever !

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