Quantitative Easing stopped working its magic back in March 2022 as a mammoth bailout mechanism for the $2 quadrillion global speculative bubble, so Wall Street and the City of London turned for salvation to Quantitative Tightening, with sharply rising interest rates. That too seems to have run its course, and as of Sept. 2024 the Fed has switched to lowering rates again.
But, do what they may, the Everything Bubble threatens to blow out at any number of particular weak spots. What’s an honest predatory speculator to do, to keep his nose above the waterline? The answer may be an incoming tidal wave of cryptocurrency.
The policy-setting City of London outlet, Financial Times, ran a Dec. 30 Opinion on Wall Street column suggestively headlined: “Crypto Boom Draws in Wall Street Banks.” The article reports that “there has been a profound shift in thinking on capital raisings.” It notes that “Bitcoin’s spectacular surge this year has reignited a dilemma on Wall Street: how far should investment banks go in supporting cryptocurrency-related capital raisings? Recent offerings reveal a profound shift in thinking.” It also takes due note of President-elect Donald Trump’s widely noted flip-flop on crypto, which he now enthusiastically endorses.
The writer of the FT piece, Craig Coben, “is a former global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America and is now a managing director at Seda Experts,” which describes itself as “an Elite Expert Witness firm specializing in Financial Services. We support international law firms by combining over 20 years of expert witness and litigation support experience with the highest level of expertise across the financial industry and providing access to the most influential financial services industry leaders.”
The same drivel is coming from the other side of the Atlantic. Former German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told DPA news agency, according to a report in RT, that “the new Trump administration is pursuing an extremely progressive policy when it comes to crypto assets such as Bitcoin.” Lindner also claimed that the U.S. Fed is supposedly considering “adding crypto assets to its reserves alongside currencies and gold.” Lindner insisted that “Germany and Europe must not allow themselves to fall behind again,” and he called for both the ECB and the Bundesbank to “examine whether crypto assets should also become part of the central banks’ reserves.”
