The Economist’s Prideaux: Crypto Has Become the ‘Ultimate Swamp Asset’

PHILLIP: “The meme coin thing is a big deal because, as someone put it today, there‘s no upper limit on meme coins because they — they inherently have no value. You can basically say whatever you want about them and pour as much money as you want into them, and in the meantime, it makes Trump and his family wealthy. And by the way, part of this is not just Trump and his family. Steve Witkoff’s son is involved in this. So there are a lot of people with official ties tied up in this effort to juice the Trump family pockets with money. I mean, this — we‘ve never seen anything like this before.”
PRIDEAUX: “I think that‘s right. I mean, the majority of the Trump family‘s wealth now is tied up in crypto rather than real estate. There‘s the company, World Financial Liberty, Donald Trump Jr.. Steve Witkoff’s son have been, you know, zooming around, drumming up investment for that. I‘m actually less worried by the plane. I understand the concerns about that. To me, the kind of pay-to-play issues are far bigger with with crypto. I mean, crypto, it‘s amazing what‘s happened to this industry. It was started by people with libertarian ideas that you could create a new asset class that would be independent of government and divorced from politics, and it has become the ultimate swamp asset. If you look at the way in which people are using crypto to do influence peddling in Washington, it‘s pretty alarming.”