The Oval Office Goldfinger last week signed legislation that gave a rubber stamp to companies — including the ones owned by his kids Qusay and Uday — to issue their own digital currencies known as stablecoins. Never before has a president signed a bill that legalized his own stupid hustle. Via Rolling Stone:
Not only does this legislation enrich Trump and his crypto cronies, it will expose cryptocurrency investors and the financial system to tremendous risks — like the 2022 crypto crash that reached its peak with the collapse of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, but on a more massive scale.
The crypto industry poured hundreds of millions of real dollars into politics to get this bill passed and to advance another. After sending the stablecoin bill, known as the GENIUS Act, to the president’s desk, the House of Representatives also sent another dumpster fire of a crypto bill, the CLARITY Act, over to the Senate. This legislation would enact a light-touch regulatory framework for crypto tokens and markets.
[...]You can’t spend stablecoins at the bodega just yet (or maybe ever), but Congress and Trump have made sure that the rules are already rigged for the issuers because the so-called GENIUS Act has almost no meaningful protections for people that hold stablecoins or to prevent criminal money laundering or to safeguard your bank from crypto risks.
Well, yeah. Criminal money laundering is kind of the point. Look at the people pushing for more crypto!
And Trump is appointing industry foxes to oversee the crypto henhouses (in this analogy, we are the chickens destined for the pot). Trump regulators have already dismissed crypto enforcement cases, shut down an anti-crypto fraud unit at the Justice Department, rolled back consumer protections, and cleared the way for the worst crypto actors to fleece unsuspecting customers and bamboozle banks and investment firms. Trump’s regulatory buzzsaw means that new or expanded stablecoin offerings could be on the market in the middle of next year.
Here's Charlie Munger, billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman, speaking on crypto at a shareholder's conference two years ago:
