Trump’s SEC pick would blow up Biden’s lawless financial agenda



The media’s narrative has done its job. Many Americans now see Donald J. Trump not as a reformer but as a symbol of corruption. That perception is both dishonest and deeply misleading.

The reality? The first 100 days of Trump’s second term leave no doubt about his goal: to reform and remake the federal government.

Reform should mean growing the economy, not growing the bureaucracy.

It’s about time. Too many unelected bureaucrats accountable to no one infest the federal government like roaches, wielding unchecked power over our lives, liberty, and happiness. They treat the mandate for reform as a nuisance. Their mission: obstruct Trump’s appointees and protect the status quo.

Organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Voice of America have deservedly drawn the president’s attention. But many others deserve the same scrutiny. One that stands out is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which repeatedly overstepped its authority during the Biden years, using vague regulatory powers to impose sweeping social mandates under the guise of financial oversight.

Trump tapped former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to fix it. As chairman, Atkins can be counted on to take a best-practices approach to administrative responsibilities and to ensure that the SEC conducts its mission as described by the law: “facilitate capital formation; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and protect investors.”

That’s a welcome clarification of responsibility. Gary Gensler, who ran the SEC for Joe Biden, was often accused of having a reach that exceeded legitimate bounds, as when, for example, he tried to regulate the market for precious metals.

Gold and silver are not securities. Neither are individual retirement accounts. Yet the Gensler-era SEC attempted to assert authority over companies offering precious-metals IRAs to individuals and families who wish to own gold and silver.

As the Heritage Foundation’s David Burton told the House Financial Services Committee in March 2024, “The commission is statutorily required to promote efficiency, competition, and capital formation by responsible participants in the capital markets.” Still, under the Biden administration, “it increasingly does the opposite.”

John Gulliver of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation told the same committee that Gensler’s SEC had “an unprecedented rulemaking agenda that will radically redesign the regulation of our securities markets and will have a major impact on the cost of being a public company and investing in our markets.”

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Photo by Tom Brenner for the Washington Post via Getty Images

Atkins can and must guide the SEC away from such nonsense. As CEO of Patomak Global Partners, Atkins oversaw the development of best practices for managing digital assets. Congress should follow his lead wherever it may go, solidifying his reforms into law and preventing the agency from trying to regulate financial instruments that are not securities.

The overreach matters. The United States is in a race with China for cryptocurrency dominance. The winner gets to establish the terms under which everyone else must live. It’s no surprise that the SEC’s failure to establish what Burton called “basic rules for responsible actors to follow” undermines America’s ability to take the lead.

“I am not entirely sure whether this irresponsible failure to provide basic rules is a function of the limited understanding of those charged with regulating in this area or their desire to simply have no rules so that the commission can engage in regulation by enforcement,” Burton told the committee.

Regulation by enforcement doesn’t just stifle innovation — it cripples the economy. It may also violate new limits the U.S. Supreme Court just imposed on federal agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended the Chevron deference doctrine.

But Atkins can’t fix the SEC alone. Congress must step in and rewrite the law to bar the commission from using backdoor tactics to seize authority over emerging markets and financial technologies.

If lawmakers fail, they’ll guarantee a future where financial technology innovation gets strangled in red tape while real fraudsters skate by untouched. That’s bad news not just for entrepreneurs, but for America’s investors — roughly half the population — who rely on strong markets to secure their retirements.

Reform should mean growing the economy, not growing the bureaucracy. With Atkins at the helm, the SEC finally has a chance to get back to doing what it was meant to do.

Prepper Bar: Spendable precious metals you can fit in your wallet



I recently misplaced my wallet. Reasonably certain it was in the house somewhere and would turn up, I didn't bother canceling my cards.

Other than the nagging worry that I was wrong, I was surprised at how little this inconvenienced me. Not only do most of my day-to-day transactions not require cash, plastic cards are also rarely needed. Just a wave of my phone suffices.

I suppose some 'junk silver' (US coins from 1964 or earlier, when they contained 90% silver) would come in handy, but everything in my loose change jar is of a newer vintage.

What will they think of next? Some kind of mark on your right hand or forehead?

'World Made by Hand'

At any rate, at the time I happened to be reading James Howard Kunstler's excellent postapocalyptic novel, "World Made by Hand." What makes the novel so compelling (along with its three excellent sequels) is its thought-provoking focus on the more mundane struggles of post-collapse life.

While the chain of events leading up to collapse are kept vague (a combination of peak oil, war in Israel, nuclear terror bombings, and the split of the USA into warring territories), its consequences are clear: mainly, no more electricity. (Yes, one character has some generators, but these break down, and once they do, parts are hard to come by.)

The series focuses on the residents of a fictional small town in upstate New York called Union Grove. The town has reverted to an 18th-century agrarian life, and one of the pleasures of the series is watching the residents' detailed attempts to rebuild civilization on this more modest scale. These scenes have the added benefit of giving Kunstler the opportunity to criticize the inefficiencies and waste of contemporary consumerism.

That is not to say there are no roving bands of marauders or some of the other excitements we expect from dystopian literature; its just that the books are honest that the most pressing dangers would be the more pedestrian ones: lack of food, medical care, and adequate shelter, to name a few.

Also plain old despair. Some of the characters just can't seem to adjust to the drastic lack of conveniences they grew accustomed to in the before times; it's all too easy to give up.

Paper dollars or real money?

One thing that's become rather harder is paying for things. There is still paper currency, but it is largely worthless.

Consider the scene in which some Union Grove townsfolk travel to Albany by boat in order to engage in trade. Once there, their first order of business is to secure lodgings from an innkeeper named Slavin.

“Now, how do you boys propose to pay for your rooms and meals? Paper dollars or real money?”

“Silver coin good enough?” Joseph said.

"We take that here. Two bits each, bed and a meal. One dollar for the horses. Drinks are extra, of course.”

Joseph took out a leather drawstring purse and dropped a handful of old quarters and half-dollars on the wooden bar, where they rang musically. Slavin looked impressed. Whatever the other failures of the U.S. government were, it had managed to print an excess of dollars which, combined with the collapse of trade and communication, had severely eroded the currency’s value. People always liked silver better, if it was offered. Gold, on the other hand, was rarely seen. People tended to hoard it.

This made me think of my missing wallet, and it did give me pause. What use will my iPhone's digital wallet be when SHTF? What would I use instead? Like Joseph, I suppose some "junk silver" (U.S. coins from 1964 or earlier, when they contained 90% silver) would come in handy, but everything in my loose change jar is of a newer vintage.

As for actual gold or silver ... am I supposed to carry around bars of the stuff?

Bite-sized bullion

Prepper Bar

The American company Prepper Bar has come up with a solution to make life in post-fiat-currency world a little less cumbersome. It sells slim, credit-card-sized bars of silver and gold that can fit in your wallet.

Minted in Nevada, each bar is 66.2 grams and can be broken up like a candy bar into smaller units.

Unlike Swiss competitor Valcambi, which also offers divisible silver and gold bars, Prepper Bar allows for division into different units: 7.776 grams (roughly 1/4 troy oz), 3.11 (1/10 troy oz), or 1.555 grams (1/20 troy oz).

Prepper Bars are IRA-approved, but keep in mind that you do pay a premium for the convenience Prepper Bars offer, making them better as a supplement to your precious metal stores rather than the main source.

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Ethereum's founder is worried about its future, says he wants blockchain to serve as a 'counterweight to authoritarian governments'



Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum Network, which houses the world’s second most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is unfathomably wealthy and successful.

Despite his unprecedented success, the 28-year-old financial tech guru is not exactly optimistic about the future of cryptocurrency.

He told Time Magazine that “Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong.”

Time reported that the Buterin’s creation, the Ethereum Network, is a trillion-dollar financial “ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves” and that “Ethereum has brought thousands of unbanked people around the world into financial systems, allowed capital to flow unencumbered across borders, and provided the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products.”

Buterin is worried that people who are overeager to invest their money in cryptocurrency underestimate the risks associated with doing so and expressed a general distaste for people who treat cryptocurrency as a sort of get-rich-quick scheme.

Referencing the infamous line of Bored Ape NFTs he said, “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling.”

Buterin also dislikes the glitz and glamor that often accompanies the newfound wealth by people who invest in cryptocurrency; he said, “There definitely are lots of people that are just buying yachts and Lambos.”

The encrypted blockchain technology that Ethereum runs on, like Bitcoin, gives Buterin hope that his creation will eventually become more than a financial asset.

Reportedly, Buterin hopes that “Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects” and more.

Most important to him however is a desire for Ethereum to serve as a “counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives.”

Put simply, Buterin hopes to see his creation be used for more than financial investing.

He said, “If we don’t exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable and those are often far from what’s actually the best for the world.”

Buterin’s vision, however, may not come to pass as he is far from the formal leader of the Ethereum Network.

In fact, the network was created so that there could be no central figure that directs its trajectory. It is a decentralized platform that is responsive to the whims of whoever is using it the most effectively.

This decentralization leaves Buterin trying to guide Ethereum’s legion of devotees by writing blog posts, giving interviews and speaking at conventions, and conducting independent research on blockchain technology.

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