Will Crypto’s Roaring 20s Lead to a Second Great Depression?

Life in the United States has never been better—if your personal fortune stretches well into the thousands of millions.

Our new year has dawned with 813 Americans cavorting in billionaire land. These deep pockets ended 2024, notes an Institute for Policy Studies analysis, with a combined wealth over $6.7 trillion. They averaged over $8.2 billion each.

Need some perspective on that $8.2 billion? The typical American worker, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor stats, would have to work over 136,000 years to earn that much.

Growing linkages between crypto and the more traditional economy have expanded the economic peril.

Billionaires, of course, don’t have to actually do any labor to collect their billions. They just let their money do the heavy lifting.

That money, if invested in enterprises that provide us with useful goods and services, can add real value to an economy. But these days our billionaires and their billions don’t have to produce anything of value to climb up the wealth ladder. They can make big bucks manufacturing—at a heavy environmental cost—a product that has no real-life value whatsoever.

Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency.

Crypto emerged amid the turmoil of the Great Recession, an economic catastrophe that began late in 2007 with the bursting of a housing bubble that U.S. financial institutions had pumped up with subprime mortgages and assorted other exotic financing schemes.

Crypto’s early aficionados, notes the British economist Michael Roberts, claimed that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin would eliminate “the need for financial intermediaries like banks.” Cryptocurrencies existed only electronically, as elaborate computer code that takes huge amounts of energy to “mine.” No government guarantees backed their value, and no crypto champs sought those guarantees.

Within this frame, crypto values spent a dozen years bouncing mostly upward. By mid-2024, the crypto world had turned into a speculative colossus worth some $2.5 trillion. But crypto’s biggest players were doing little celebrating. The industry seemed to be losing its big-time momentum.

Just two years before, a spectacular crypto crash had cost the sector’s founders and investors a combined $116 billion. By the end of 2023, some 20 nations had banned banks from dealing with crypto exchanges, and critics were blasting the crypto industry for pumping ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere “to solve complex mathematical problems that have no productive purpose.”

Early in 2024, Pew Research polling found the American public exceedingly “skeptical” about cryptocurrency, with almost two-thirds of the nation’s adults having little to no confidence that cryptocurrencies rated as either reliable or safe. Only 19% of Americans who had actually invested in crypto, Pew found, deemed themselves “confident” with the industry’s “reliability and safety.”

Last June, one of the nation’s most influential financial market analysts, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, gave cause for even more public unease. In congressional testimony, Gensler described the crypto market as a “Wild West” that has investors putting “hard-earned assets at risk in a highly speculative asset class.”

“Many of those investments,” Gensler added, “have disappeared after a crypto platform or service went under due to fraud or mismanagement, leaving investors in line at bankruptcy court.”

In the battle for public opinion, crypto kings realized, they were losing. Their response? Crypto’s big guns moved to lock down as much political help they could buy. They spent last year flooding millions upon millions of dollars into primary and general election races against lawmakers who had dared to support meaningful moves to regulate crypto’s digital highways and byways.

“It’s time to take our country back,” roared one deep-pocketed crypto mover-and-shaker, Tyler Winklevoss. “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. That attacking us is political suicide.”

In no time at all, the Lever’s Freddy Brewster notes, this new crypto offensive had lawmakers in Congress, from both sides of the aisle, signaling their openness to minimizing any serious attempts at crypto regulation. The November elections would go on to generate a substantial crypto-friendly majority in the House and a Senate almost as crypto-committed.

Helping to produce this smashing crypto triumph: over $250 million in campaign contributions from the three top cryptocurrency political action committees.

No one would ultimately jump on the 2024 crypto political bandwagon more dramatically than Donald Trump. Up until then, the former president had been a pronounced crypto skeptic.

“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” Trump announced on social media in 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”

But Trump would eventually come to see the potential in crypto campaign dollars and turn himself into the political world’s most visible crypto booster. In May 2024, Trump became the first major presidential candidate to accept donations in cryptocurrency. In July, he gave a fawning keynote address at one of the crypto world’s premiere annual conferences.

Trump saw something else in crypto as well. The industry, he ever so accurately perceived, could turbocharge his own personal wealth, to levels far outpacing his old-school investments in office towers and classic hotels—and all without engaging in any sort of real risk.

So Trump did that crypto engaging. By Inauguration Day, thanks to the release of his own “red-hot” crypto token, Trump had more than 90% of his personal net worth in crypto assets.

To protect that investment, Trump will undoubtedly put his signature on legislation—first introduced by Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis—designed to force the federal government to buy up a national stockpile of cryptocurrency as a reserve just like the gold in Fort Knox. Getting crypto reserve status, cheers billionaire MicroStrategy executive chair Michael Saylor, would rank as a truly noble 21st-century “Louisiana Purchase.”

But independent analysts see “no discernible logic” to any move in that direction.

“I get why the crypto investor would love it,” observes Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Other than the crypto investor, I don’t see the value, particularly if taxpayers have to ante up.”

Turning crypto into a reserve currency, explain other analysts, would “prop up” cryptocurrency prices. Reserve status, noteWall Street on Parade editors Pam and Russ Martens, would enable crypto billionaires to sell their crypto “without driving down” cryptocurrency prices—because these billionaires would have “a perpetual buyer on the other side of their trade.”

Having the government buy up crypto, as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research recently toldThe Nation, has “literally no rationale other than to give money to Trump and Musk and their crypto buddies.”

Not surprisingly, conventional financial institutions—outfits ranging from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to BlackRock and other big asset manager funds—would like to share in that money harvest. They’ve all begun entering the crypto “fray,” points out the economist Ramaa Vasudevan, and institutional investors “are also banging at the door.”

Crypto, adds Vasudevan, is “turning on a spigot of financial fortune-hunting.”

That sort of hunting, historically, has almost always ended in crashes that left average people the hardest hit. In our new crypto age, that could easily happen again.

The various crypto crashes we’ve seen over recent years, as the Lever’s Freddy Brewster noted last month, have “mostly affected” people already invested in cryptocurrencies. But the growing linkages between crypto and the more traditional economy have expanded the economic peril.

“Potential victims of future crashes,” Brewster warns, “could balloon if the nascent industry is allowed to become more entrenched with traditional banks.”

And that entrenching is approaching overdrive.

“Crypto bros are heading into 2025 with great expectations,” notesBloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee.

These “bros” invested big-time in 2024’s presidential and congressional campaigns. Now they want, Mukherjee adds, “unhindered access to the global banking system.”

What could possibly go wrong?