Investors lost $20 for every $1 Trump developers gained, but no one will investigate: Financial Fraud Regulatory Agency shuts down
It debuted on financial platforms like Coinbase just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. It started trading at just under $42 and soon attracted billions from around a million investors. It almost immediately peaked at $75 a share and a market cap of over $XNUMX billion. Then it crashed. The name, of course, is $Trump.
Its symbol is the president’s face, the raised fist, the cry “Fight, fight, fight” from the day of his failed attack in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, last July.
It is the cryptocurrency of the President of the United States, issued in competition with the dollar of which he himself is theoretically the maximum institutional guarantor. It was worth $42 at the beginning, $75 a little later, but has now fallen to $16,96 for the same reason that makes all cryptocurrencies unstable and often collapses: it has no intrinsic value, it does not represent any underlying economic reality, it is simply a digital token of the value that the buyer decides for arbitrary reasons to attribute to it. And today this value is 60% below where it debuted a month ago. Normal, for a crypto. How much less normal must it be perceived by those who believed in $Trump because it is associated with the name of the President of the United States of America.
Chainalysis, a New York-based cryptocurrency analysis firm on Blockchain, estimates that 813 “portfolios” have suffered cumulative losses of about $294 billion in that crypto. Most of the gains went to those who made money quickly in real dollars rather than “Trump dollars” faster than they did.
But someone certainly profited from it, and that’s the entity that launched this cryptocurrency: The Trump Organization (owned by the president) and its partners. According to Chainalysis estimates, they earned about $100 million in transaction fees just from buying and selling $Trump traffic. Essentially, the issuer made tens of millions of dollars in a month just by putting this “currency” into circulation while pledging to faithfully serve the interests of the United States. In practice, investors lost $20 for every dollar the developers earned. However, it’s unlikely that this case – investors left with digital notes in hand, an issuer full of rich commissions – will lead to investigations or refunds.
No one can. The Dodd-Frank Act, passed in the United States after the 2008 financial crisis, would have theoretically created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) precisely to protect ordinary people from financial fraud.
But under Trump, the CFPB effectively no longer exists: it fell under the blows of Elon Musk and his spending cuts. Trump fired its director, Rohit Chopra, and appointed an “acting” executive, Russell Vought, who ordered the agency shut down and asked all employees not to come to work. The CFPB was the agency that prevented usurious credit card terms, overdrafts, or mortgages for the most vulnerable people. When asked in Congress who would now exercise this kind of oversight against large-scale financial fraud against consumers, Fed Chairman Jay Powell replied: “No other federal regulator.” Not with malice. But because no one else has the authority, of course. (Corriere della Sera)
