U.S. Public Overwhelmingly Disapproves Of Trump's Crypto Investments

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 14th and 17th of a nationwide sample of 1,611 adults (including 1,450 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 4.2 points for registered voters.

 

Trump's Corrupt Crypto "Pump and Dump" Scheme

The following is by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman: 

Donald Trump has distinguished himself in many ways. One of them is that he is our first pump and dump president.

Obviously no president has enriched himself from office the way that Trump has. That’s common knowledge. One of the things that is really amazing about it, however, is the way in which he enriched himself — a lot of which has to do with crypto.

So the New York Times had a report just the other day on Trumpcoin, the memecoin issued on Trump’s behalf which got a lot of buyers, a lot of money came flowing into it.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that the coin was inherently worthless, and at this point it essentially is worthless. It has lost 97 percent of its value. But a lot of people did buy in at the high prices.

What was special about the New York Times story was two things. First, they put a number on how much money naive investors have lost on the coin, which is 3.8 billion dollars. And even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million.

That’s really amazing. I mean, I was completely cynical but I didn’t think there were that many suckers out there. But it turns out there were really a lot. A few people made money off the coin — basically insiders who got to buy it early and then were able to cash in before the broader retail market realized that this was a worthless token. There’s another token, the World Liberty Financial coin — which has also crashed, although the Times had difficulty in tracking down how many people have lost how much money. There’s the Melania coin.

Okay, all of this is amazing. As Trump would say, it’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. I think we should say, however, that this is a bigger story than just the Trump coin, and it’s a bigger story than just Trump himself.

What we’re witnessing is or has been a really enormous pump and dump scheme, I would argue, involving more or less all of crypto.

So if you don’t know the background, Trump used to be highly critical of cryptocurrency, saying it was worthless and a scam, which was true. But then when it became clear that there was money in it for him, he reversed course. And during the 2024 election, crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump. They then after the election poured a lot of money into his own enrichment, into his own projects. And the administration came in with a very pro crypto stance: deregulation encouraging uses of crypto, at least talk about a national bitcoin reserve, all of that. And the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion.

And then starting last fall it all came crashing down. Not all the way to zero — the price of Bitcoin right now as I record this is about what it was on the eve of the 2024 election; it’s about half what it was at its peak. That’s also true, roughly speaking for the market cap. So we’ve seen about two trillion dollars of market valuation wiped out.

Why is this a pump and dump story? Well what is cryptocurrency good for? As you know, I’ve been on this for a long time. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 — this is a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases. Illegitimate use cases, yes. There was also a report in the Wall Street Journal about the extent to which Iran and North Korea have been making use of cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, so there is that. But it’s still not enough to justify a multi-trillion dollar asset.

Anyway, it was trendy, it was exciting, it was fashionable and particularly after November 2024 it was pushed with the encouragement of the Trump Administration. It was just a heavy marketing campaign that had the advantage of also having the authority or whatever, the credibility — such as it was but among some people real —of Donald Trump behind it. They all evaporated.

I think we can say that to some extent what happened was that Trump kind of moved on to other things. There also is some distracted boyfriend meme: the guy looking over his shoulder. A lot of the excitable, fear of missing out, latest thing money has probably moved from crypto to AI. So that might have happened even without Trump. But the basic story is that Trump guided, pushed people into a whole asset class, crypto, of which a large part is Bitcoin, but other stuff as well.

We don’t know how much, or I don’t know, how much crypto was bought during this period, but it has to be substantial. And then it crashed. And at this point, essentially anybody who bought crypto during this era, since the 2024 election, has lost money.

It’s a lot of money; we know that on paper — it’s not really paper, but anyway — in principle two trillion dollars has been lost in crypto. Now a lot of that is probably money just given back, imaginary gains that took place during the run-up. But a substantial amount of additional money was from people who did buy in during this whole episode. So this has to be many times the size of the losses on the Trump coin. And it is, I would say, at a functional level another pump and dump scheme.

In this case the beneficiaries were people who were already in crypto. Clearly some of the crypto interests that bought themselves a president probably stayed fully invested. But others must have cashed out, and a lot of innocents — well a lot of a lot of suckers, let’s not mince words here — a lot of suckers clearly lost a lot of money.

It’s an extraordinary thing. There have been pump and dump schemes forever, probably going back to the Phoenicians or something. But this is on a scale we’ve never seen, and with the president of the United States in the center of it. Which I guess given everything else comes as no surprise.

Many Investors In Trump Social Media And Crypto Lost Money

 From Axios.com.

Trump Has Created The Most Effective "Protection Racket" In U.S. History

In just the first few months of his second term, Donald Trump has attacked almost every aspect of this country. He has attacked the media, law firms, colleges and universities, healthcare, corporations -- the list seems endless. 

What can these entities (and other countries) do to protect themselves?

They can spend millions to file lawsuits that, while may be successful in the lower courts, stand a good chance of losing when they get to the Supreme Court.

Or they can bend the knee and give in to Trump demands - giving him freebies while losing the respect of many Americans.

Or they can take the third option. They can pay for protection.

Donald Trump has created what is the most effective "protection racket" in U.S. history. It's his brand of crypto. Through World Liberty Financial, Trump has created his own crypto currency. And its been very lucrative. He not only holds a substantial amount of the crypto himself, but also benefits with a commission whenever someone else purchases it. So far, in only the first few months of his presidency, he and his family have benefitted by about $12 billion. With more than 3 years left in his term, there is no telling how much more he could benefit.

Do you want access to Trump? Do you want a favor from Trump? Would you like to protect you company, organization, or country from Trump?

Well, Trump has provided an easy way to do that. Just buy a few million dollars of Trump crypto! It is unethical and corrupt, but it's easy and legal. You can just claim you were buying anything - just making an investment.

It's also legal for Trump to get the bribe (or protection payment). The Supreme Court has given him virtual immunity for anything he does while president.

Criminal organizations around the world must be jealous! It makes their "protection racket" schemes look penny-ante.

The only drawback is that you have to be rich to participate. Trump only cares about money, and if you don't have any then he doesn't care about you (as evidenced by his "big beautiful bill" that gave to the rich while punishing everyone else).

Is there any longer any doubt that Trump is the most corrupt president in U.S. history?  

Is Every Memecoin A Scam? - YES!

The following is just part of an excellent article by Matt Shea in The Guardian:

Is every memecoin a scam?

According to David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: “Basically, literally, yes.”

“All of this is like a big game of pretend with made-up financial instruments,” he said. “It’s printing your own made-up money. You print your own Monopoly money and then people buy it from you for real money.”

The best thing you could possibly say about memecoins is that they initially felt like a funny, countercultural way to participate in internet culture. They satirised a financial system that increasingly looked like a silly game to those on the outside. They encapsulated a humorous generational nihilism.

According to Sander Lutz, the nation’s first crypto-focused White House correspondent: “You could consider a memecoin to be a stock in a cultural phenomenon – like Dogecoin and the Doge meme.”

“Another way of defining a memecoin,” Lutz said, “is a cryptocurrency token that has an acknowledged inherent lack of value. The crypto world, outside of memecoins, is full of so many people who are trying to pitch you on tokens that are ‘actually really profound’ or ‘represent a stake’ in some kind of ‘useful network’, but are equally worthless. What makes memecoins different is that there’s none of that noise.”

In other words, all crypto is bullshit, but memecoins are consciously bullshit. . . .

Chase Herro, the co-founder of Trump’s main crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, said about crypto: “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”

Most memecoins end up making money for the person who makes them as a “rug pull” or a “pump and dump”. The term “rug pull” was actually invented by the crypto community, and it works like this:

First, you mint a memecoin, and make sure that you and your mates own most of the liquidity pool (the total number of coins in circulation). The size of the liquidity pool – the amount of that memecoin that “exists” – is, like everything else in memecoins, a totally made-up number.

Second, you generate hype around the coin by convincing people it will “moon” (shoot up in value). This usually involves getting a celebrity, influencer or the president of the US, to promote it. People then buy the coin, thinking it will be a good investment. Law of demand means that as people buy it, the “value” of the coin goes up, and since you and your mates own the lion’s share, you get richer.

Then, at a time known only to you, the creator of the coin, and other insiders, you “pull the rug”, selling off all your stock at the newly high price. You make money, and the value of the coins bought by the masses you manipulated shoots back down to zero. It’s basically a way to just trick people into giving you money, dressed up as an “investment”.

A “pump and dump” is pretty much the same thing, but with the slight caveat that you’re doing it with a coin that already exists, rather than creating your own. You buy a cheap coin, “pump” its value by hyping it so others invest, then “dump” all your stock, selling it off at a huge profit and causing everyone else to lose their money. . . .

Lutz told me: “There are a select number of people who’ve made quite a lot of money on these tokens, but they tend to be the same people. They tend to be people who are very well-connected, who are in specific group chats, and who have a lot of existing capital.”

“You’ll always have more people losing than amounts of winners,” according to Gerard. “And the winners never shut up, so you think it’s a winning environment.”