Elizabeth Warren is out swinging in the Wall Street Journal this week.
She doesn't have the best of reputation among Bitcoiners. Heck, even the progressive Bitcoiners (Jason Maier, Troy Cross, Trey Walsh, Margot Paez, etc) hate her.
To everyone's astonishment, in this op-ed she’s uncharacteristically lucid…. Her problem description all sort of scream bitcoin. She publicly agrees to “work with” Trump and the incoming admin, whatever that means:
I’m ready to work with Chairman Tim Scott, Donald Trump and business leaders whenever they support policies that rebuild the middle class, advance our economic and national security, and fight the corruption of those who seek to use government to enrich themselves. And she proposes four fronts on which to do that:
- “we must lower costs and improve access to financial services.” —Bitcoin.
- “we must advance economic and national security.” —yeah, probably bitcoin, but possibly also a dig at bitcoin (see below)
- “we must ensure that our financial system serves families and the real economy.” —definitely Bitcoin.
- “we must be vigilant against so-called reforms that make it easier for Wall Street to rip off consumers or crash the financial system.” OK, probably Bitcoin, but who knows
What does she mean?
In order, it’s pretty remarkable that she accepts that conservatives are right about something (anything), and in this case nothing less than thinking housing market has a supply problem. Of course, she sneaks in the liberal windmill fighting of “price fixing and corporate landlords,” but whatever—I’ll take it: Incentives for home construction, reduced red tape (which her people put there, no?!). There’s some subtle bullying of the Fed to lower rates (Trump can’t have all the glory, eh?). She even favors the land issue:
The Trump administration can help by transferring or selling unused federal property to local actors to increase supply..
I'm sure she didn't mean the national parks and empty Nevada/Oregon land, but whatever; that's my preferred interpretation—hashtag I win(#851956) or, well, Thomas Sowell.
Next, national security. This one is weird. In the Trumpian, rah-rah camp that probably means Strategic Reserve and tariff-for-political-gains on other countries that don’t play ball, and "all the bitcoin mined in the U.S." In the Warren reading, “preventing terrorists from exploiting our financial system” probably means not letting Americans use bitcoin to send funds to Hamas/Israel/Talibans/Russians/[insert current bad guy], and is the closest to the anti-crypto crusade Warren has become known for. She doesn't say that, so maybe I'm being uncharitable.
Also, the “share our values” shit I don’t have much patience for.
Third, real economy. Now this one is good. It’s mostly political/left-leaning boilerplates that mean nothing: What, the real economy as opposed to the fake one the financial system is currently engaged in?
If/to the extent she means we shouldn’t fiddle with the money and that the financial system ought to support the real economy rather than engaging in financial engineering she’s spot on. But she misunderstands that the reason the financial system financially engineers everything (#743123) is because we can’t simply hold money. If we had bitcoin instead, we’d get less bloated financial system and less reason for financial engineering.
Fourth, she's very right that we "must be vigilant against so-called reforms that make it easier for Wall Street to rip off consumers or crash the financial system." Again, her regulation-heavy peeps are mostly to blame for that but whatever, it's a new world and she's a reformed woman etc. Also, this account of get-big-or-die-trying is an accurate description of the banking system:
Community lenders provide the majority of loans to the small businesses that power our economy, but these small lenders are getting swallowed by too-big-to-fail banks. This consolidation stifles competition and access to credit.
…while this is pretty pathetic:
Three of the four largest bank failures in our history occurred in 2023. These failures came in the wake of reforms that encouraged regulators to ease up too much.
what, no! It came because the Fed shocked the banks by first obliterating bond yields, incentivizing everyone and their grandmother to take duration risk—and then say, "oops, we didn't realize money printing would unleash greatest inflation in a generation, let's hike rates," at which point the supposedly unregulated banks sat on mark-to-market losses that people ran on. Regulators ease up? uh, go away!
Anyway, I'm not a fan of ms. Warren (see e.g., here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/senator-who-didnt-know-thought-she-did). But this is promising enough.
Bitcoin fixes everything (almost). And most certainly plenty of the (big-)banks-are-bad complaints Warren has about America.
Great to see.
Non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/JDwIS