While the world is rightly focused on the extreme danger of the Israel-Iran crisis careening towards a nuclear war between superpowers—and the only slightly lesser danger that the same could happen if the Ukraine crisis spins out of control—there is another threatened “nuclear explosion” that is far less noticed, but could ultimately prove nearly as destructive: a nuclear-style chain-reaction blowout of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, triggered by the current explosive growth of cryptocurrency and so-called “stablecoins.”
EIR estimates that total world financial aggregates totalled $2.013 quadrillion at the end of 2024—a 44% increase from the levels of 2016. That total includes EIR’s calculation of $1.575 quadrillion in derivatives (both exchange-traded and the far larger over-the-counter category); $318 trillion in total world debt; and $117 trillion in total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets.
But there is a fourth, broad category of financial aggregates that now has to be included in any scientific estimate of the financial bubble: cryptocurrency, and especially its component category, stablecoins. Today, they are not a quantitatively significant element, but…
After central bank Quantitative Easing ran its course, and could no longer be increased at the exponential rate required to bail out the banking system without blowing out the global speculative bubble, the back-room geniuses in the City of London and Wall Street came up with the idea of further inflating global financial markets with instruments concocted out of thin air by private—i.e., not government—issuers: cryptocurrencies. Presto!
From humble beginnings in the late 2010s, the estimated total world volume of cryptocurrencies has grown from some $212 billion in 2019, to an estimated $3.25 trillion at the end of 2024—a 15-fold increase in six years. In the first six months of 2025, it has reportedly further increased to $3.39 trillion. Note: cryptocurrencies are privately issued financial instruments, and there is fundamentally no entity responsible in any way, or to any degree, for redeeming their value. They are backed by absolutely nothing other than the prospect of further growth of the crypto bubble. They are a classic chain-letter or tulip bubble scam. No amount of oratorical backing from the President of the United States confers on them any real value whatsoever.
And yet, the manic supporters of the crypto craze are now talking about a $200 trillion cryptocurrency market by the year 2030—a further 60-fold increase in these purely speculative assets! That would hypothetically add, on its own, another 10% to the current global financial bubble of $2 quadrillion—a ludicrous proposition, because a chain-reaction financial blowout will occur well before that date rolls around.
The immediate trigger of such an explosion may well be the so-called stablecoins, a crypto variant, which are supposedly linked one-to-one to the dollar, usually with backing of short-term U.S. Treasury bills. They currently total about $250 billion, but they are expected to surge dramatically under the House “STABLE Act” and Senate “GENIUS Act” legislation. This burgeoning arrangement will not confer stability to the stablecoins, as its marketers claim; it will only confer massive instability to the Treasury market. For example, if there is even a modest run on a stablecoin that is purportedly backed by T-bills (it is actually leveraged against T-bills), this can “break the buck” (as has already happened in a number of cases) and threaten the liquidity of the entire T-bill market, which is, after all, the cornerstone of the trans-Atlantic financial system.
Stablecoins are the financial equivalent of placing a large stick of dynamite next to a nuclear reactor, and then lighting the fuse.
Lyndon LaRouche warned against such thinking in an address he delivered to the Seventh Annual Session of the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations on the Island of Rhodes in Greece, on Oct. 10, 2009, titled A Four-Power Agreement Can Create a New World Credit System:
“Now, we’re in a general crisis, which can bring down, chain-reaction style, the entire planet. Because we have outstanding, a mass of debt, based on financial derivatives, and financial derivatives on financial derivatives, which, if the process of collapse occurs, it will bring down the whole planet, but for a very special reason: Formerly, when we had a system of sovereign nation-states, we would have up to 80% of the requirements of survival within the nation, produced within the nation. Under the process of globalization, we no longer have that security.”
