Links 7/14/25 - Too good to overlook

First, there's Matt Stoller's analysis of the Trump administration's refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Excerpt: "Over the last twenty years, a larger-than-life myth has floated around the American political scene, that of Jeff Epstein, a wealthy New York City-based sex trafficker with a murky job and deep connections to some of the most powerful men in America, England, and Israel. Continual revelations around Epstein have fueled MAGA suspicion of big media, big tech, and big government, fostering a mini-ecosystem of Donald Trump-supportive podcasters and influencers. Trump would, they posited, finally expose a Deep State conspiracy, the center of which was this man, Epstein.

Epstein with Uber-Neoliberal "Economist" Larry Summers

"Last week, however, Trump did something I thought was impossible - he managed to turn his own core supporters against him. He did so by denying that there is anything conspiratorial or hidden about Epstein’s life or the circumstances of his death. Specifically, Trump said there were no government files worth releasing around Epstein, and the idea of such files was a Democratic party plot. I looked at the replies to his post on Truth Social, as such posts are always full of supporters offering praise. This time, it wasn’t. His most hard-core supporters did not take it well." 

Then, there's actual economist Michael Roberts' evaluation of crypto entitled Crypto corruption and un-Stablecoins.

Excerpts:  

“Bitcoin is a speculation and not an investment. Not regulated, not backed by any asset, only worth what someone is willing to pay.” — Matthew Stephenson

“It’s totally absolutely crazy, stupid gambling” — the late Charlie Munger, speaking in 2023.

“Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and therefore not really useful stores of value and not backed by anything,… It’s more a speculative asset that’s essentially a substitute for gold rather than for the dollar. ” Federal Reserve Bank chair, Jay Powell

“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam…. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” Donald Trump, June 2021.

"It’s crypto week in the US. And the price of the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has hit a record $120,000 as the US Congress prepares to consider bills aimed at creating clearer regulatory frameworks for digital assets. In the next five days, US lawmakers will consider the Genius Act, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act. The aim is to make “America the crypto capital of the world”....

"From the start, cryptocurrency craze has been riddled with fraud, criminality and corruption – the cases of which are too numerous to mention all. In an annual report last September, the FBI revealed that fraud related to crypto businesses soared in 2023 with Americans suffering $5.6bn in losses, a 45% jump from the previous year. Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024 by a New York judge for milking customers out of $8bn. Last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Unicorn, an investment platform that promised cryptocurrencies backed by real estate, with a $100mn fraud that misled more than 5,000 investors.

"The dream of the techno enthusiasts that cryptocurrencies would replace state-issued currencies like the dollar or the euro and so free individuals from the ‘heavy hand of state regulation’ in a new free world of money has never materialised. Instead, what has happened is that the mega financial institutions have taken over control of these currencies and are turning them into what they hope will be a highly profitable set of financial assets to suck in investors."

 

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