“I disagree.” SEC’s Hester Peirce Slaughters SEC for Killing Crypto
Wow! Hester Pierce is an SEC Commissioner and in the past she was called “‘Crypto Mom” for her non-hostile position on crypto. She is not a fan of the title and her opinion is that the government is not your mother.
On April 14th, she released a statement that honestly made my eyes fail. In a nutshell, it says, “I disagree.”
The dissent is from the Choke Point 2 policy ongoing directed by the government against crypto. You can read her statement here. The content of this statement is overwhelming.
For the background of what the US regulators are doing, we have to go back to the Obama era and Operation Choke Point. You will see the same game plan being executed for crypto. In summary, cut the weed at the root and it will die, and in the case of businesses you don’t like, just cut them off from banking.
You can clearly understand the strategy and you can see the logic of most of the objectives in the original Choke Point operation. They are mainly polluted companies. But what about fireworks and coin dealers? However you look at it, this initiative was bordering on totalitarian.
Now, however, the game is back on for crypto.
As such, Hester’s position is striking for more than one reason.
1) An insider has been so moved by this economic development that they have put their heads on the block.
2) The statement clearly shows what is either an inadvertent misstep of enormous financial importance or a charted course forward to drown a kitten in a bucket of regulation and enforcement.
It is obvious to me why it would be extremely difficult for any government to support money from the private sector. On the one hand, the state’s finances are so badly managed that any competition poses a threat. It’s a shame the government is so economically ignorant that they haven’t heard of Gresham’s Law (bad money drives out good) because if they understood they could happily let crypto be a giant economic engine flooding their coffers. However, the government is driven by fear.
You can also understand why the government wants to eradicate the shoals of predators that have bubbled up along the sea of new assets. It’s a terrible situation everyone in crypto should and probably detests. Yet it’s only part of the massive online fraud situation we all face every day that seems to remain largely unaddressed, and anyone constantly under attack from fraudsters is right to wonder how much fraud would survive if it were 50% of the police chasing scammers, hackers and fraudsters hiding behind billboards waiting for us to do 5 miles an hour more than the speed limit. As such, singling out crypto as somehow a problem is another example of the self-serving false narratives we’ve come to despise.
To me, this statement tells me that the crypto Choke Point is real, but it also tells me that there is hope, because if any of Hester’s gravitas is prepared to stand up to the Luddites, the gatekeepers, and the vested interests, then all is not over yet.
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