President Biden’s executive order ‘Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets’ won praise on all sides, an unfamiliar experience for one routinely dismissed these days as lacking the vigour or grip needed for presidential leadership. The order does little more than call for cross-government research into all things crypto. But in doing so it pleased bitcoin fanciers, NFT collectors and their ilk by acknowledging that their $3 trillion market is here to stay – while also giving comfort to sceptics who’d prefer to see crypto dealings brought under regulatory control like any other financial activity, rather than abandoned to the libertarian anarchy favoured by ardent cryptonauts.
But that latter fantasy can’t happen until cryptocurrencies become so universal that they no longer need to interface with dollars and pounds. And the companies that provide that exchange can’t operate outside corporate rules, so we’re seeing the likes of Coinbase, Binance and Kraken falling into line, however reluctantly, by blocking suspect Russian accounts. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs and central banks alike explore the potential uses of the blockchain – the engine-room of the crypto boom which many also see as the global money-transfer system of the future. If crypto criminals can be corralled while leadership of the sector stays in the US, rather than migrating to China, Biden’s order may come to be seen as a milestone.
The slippery slope
Oliver Bullough, author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Oligarchs, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals, is an investigative writer who works fearlessly to expose the London-based nexus of corrupt plutocrats and their professional back-up that I called (in a review of his previous book, Moneyland) ‘a plague on 21st-century civilisation’. But as a City historian myself, I raise an eyebrow at Bullough’s assertion that the rot set in with the invention of the ‘eurobond’ as a means of recycling US dollar deposits held offshore – a market development that has been praised since its inception as an example of City agility in the era when brains and connections counted for more than trading-floor heft.
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