Archegos Capital Management founder Bill Hwang has been charged with securities fraud and racketeering charges in a fraud and manipulation scheme so spectacular the Wall Street Journal reports it jeopardized the entire U.S. economy. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says Hwang and his co-conspirators inflated the stock price of publicly traded companies via billions of dollars in deceitfully obtained bank loans.
“The lies fed the inflation, and the inflation fed more lies,” Williams said at a news conference. “Last year, the music stopped. The bubble burst. The prices dropped. And when they did, billions of dollars evaporated overnight.”
Christians may be familiar with Hwang through his connections to Ravi Zacharias, the late evangelist who was posthumously exposed as a serial sexual predator. Hwang was a board member of RZIM, the outreach organization founded by Zacharias. News reports describe the two as being “close.”
Hwang co-founded the Grace and Mercy Foundation, one of America’s largest charitable Christian organizations, which has donated millions to organizations like the Museum of the Bible, Cru, Prison Fellowship, Young Life and the Navigators. “I cannot think of another foundation or individual that has given significant donations to as many Christian organizations as he has,” Warren Cole Smith, who leads Christian financial watchdog group MinistryWatch, told the Washington Post.
