Remember 2008, when the housing market crashed? If you thought that was fun, you’re going to love the Trump administration’s latest move.
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte just ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to treat cryptocurrency—a volatile and largely unregulated mess—as an asset when evaluating whether to purchase mortgages from banks.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae support about 70% of the mortgages in the country. They don’t issue loans but instead buy up home loans and package them into mortgage-backed securities, which are then sold to private investors. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae then guarantee payments to those investors if the mortgage holder defaults.
You can see where this is going.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are likely going to have to issue loans to people partly based on their cryptocurrency holdings. So when the cryptocurrency market collapses and homebuyers default on loans, Freddie and Fannie will have to cover the resulting losses.
President Donald Trump is deep in so many crypto grifts, and he’s making sure that the federal government doesn’t get in the way. He’s already announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission won’t regulate meme coins as securities, depriving buyers of any protections when they collapse. Why? Well, because Trump has his own meme coin that inflated his net worth by billions and then basically collapsed.
And who could forget Trump’s grifty crypto dinner, which required attendees to buy his meme coin? Justin Sun, a big-time crypto guy, paid $40 million to attend. Sun had already purchased $30 million of crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, the Trump family grift machine, putting money directly into Trump’s pocket. And voila! The SEC dropped its investigation into Sun.
The SEC also withdrew a lawsuit against crypto exchange Binance, but only after it started working with World Liberty Financial. Meanwhile, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to violating money-laundering laws and served four months in prison, is trying to get a pardon from Trump.
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And why not? Trump already pardoned cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, which had pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to have an anti-money laundering program.
The SEC also dismissed more than a dozen crypto cases that it had opened during the Biden Administration. Oh, and there’s one more thing: According to Trump, the SEC isn’t an independent body, so it’s subject to his authority.
World Liberty Financial keeps chugging along because it’s a terrific way to bribe the president. MGX, a firm established by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, is using $2 billion worth of World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin for its investment in Binance.
On Thursday, a United Arab Emirates-based fund, Aqua 1, announced that it purchased $100 million worth of crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial. Somehow, this is not a conflict of interest, because no one’s stopping Trump from using the presidency for his personal profit.
Additionally, no one’s stopping Trump from eliminating SEC oversight of crypto or shuttering the Department of Justice’s crypto enforcement team.
It’s a trifecta of deregulation, the government letting crypto run wild, and Trump getting richer every day.