Dem 47
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GOP 53
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Trump Made $27 Billion on Saturday

Let's continue with the theme of money. One of Donald Trump's great interests is scamming his own supporters. Whether it is gold sneakers or made-in-China Bibles, if there is money in it for him, he's game. His first venture into the world of intangibles was the $99 Trump Digital Trading Cards. That didn't go big time.

Next up was the DJT stock, but that is slightly different. It is a normal stock and buying a share gives you the rights of any shareholder. Most financial experts think the company is grossly overvalued at $40.03/share, but at least theoretically, it could eventually turn into Trump TV or another potentially profitable enterprise. It could also buy some actual right-wing media company, like NewsMax or Breitbart, and make it profitable.

The ultimate scam is a crypto coin. It has no intrinsic value, but people buy it under the "greater fool theory." As long as people think that there are other people willing to pay more for a coin than they did, it keeps going up. Until it doesn't. The classic example is the 17th century Dutch tulip mania, in which greedy people paid more for a single tulip bulb than a skilled workman could earn in a year. Until the market suddenly collapsed.

Trump decided that there was money to be made in crypto (even though he once called it a "scam"), so he launched a crypto coin, $TRUMP, late Friday. By Saturday afternoon, its fully diluted value (the value it would have if all the coins not yet released were out there) was $27 billion. Not bad for a day's work (or nonwork, since obviously Trump knows nothing about crypto, blockchain, servers, etc.). A new Trump-owned company, CIC Digital LLC, owns 80% of the coins, but converting the coins into dollars won't be so easy because as soon as he starts to sell, people will lose faith and the bottom will drop out. At the very least, he has to wait a couple of years and sell them quietly and gradually.

Trump's suddenly multiplying his (paper) wealth by 5x or 10x, depending on whether you count the DJT stock as actual money, has real policy implications. In particular, his pick for chairman of the SEC is Paul Atkins. It is known that Atkins' top priority is making sure corporations' only goal is maximizing shareholder value. To him, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concerns are a distraction that CEOs must ignore. But the SEC can also play a role in the crypto world, by letting banks, mutual funds, and other companies sell coins or crypto funds or ETFs to the public, buy them for their own accounts, and more. Banks, for example, have to meet various financial stress tests. Do crypto coins count as assets? It is very much in Trump's personal interest that coins are treated as valuable as stocks. Except that stocks rarely go from $27 billion to $0 billion in 20 minutes, something potentially possible with a crypto coin. In other words, the new SEC chairman could treat an incredibly volatile asset as a solid asset, putting a lot of people at risk. That is not the SEC's job. In fact, its job is the exact opposite: Making markets function properly so investors are clearly aware of the risks they are taking.

Jordan Libowitz of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said: "It is absolutely wild. After decades of seeing presidents-elect spend the time leading up to inauguration separating themselves from their finances to show that they don't have any conflicts of interest, we now have a president-elect who, the weekend before inauguration, is launching new businesses along with promises to deregulate... those sectors in a way to just blatantly profit off his own presidency." Even Anthony Scaramucci, now a crypto evangelist but previously Trump's communications director for 1.00 Scaramuccis, said: "Don't delude yourself. It's Idi Amin-level corruption," referring to the notoriously corrupt former Ugandan dictator. When the Mooch, whose job is to promote crypto, thinks $TRUMP is bad for an industry with an already sketchy basis, that says something.

Oh, and Melania is clearly already thinking about her post-presidency life. She just issued her own crypto coin, $MELANIA. Now people can buy a matched set. How romantic! (V)



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