Donald Trump’s eyebrow-raising executive order authorizing the United States to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrency is the “ultimate celebrity endorsement” that sent Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman into a stinging rebuke of the president's "scam."
“It’s truly amazing because, again, nobody has any idea what you do with, you know – a crypto reserve is just strings of ones and zeros on servers somewhere,” Krugman said. “What does that do for the United States?”
Krugman made the comments Friday during an interview on CNN hours after Trump held the White House’s first-ever crypto summit, which Krugman reduced to nothing more than a “giant rug pull scam.”
“A rug pull is actually what just happened with the Trump and Melania coins,” Krugman told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “You introduce a new asset, a lot of with celebrity endorsements, a lot of small investors buy in while the insiders sell out and make a lot of money, and then the little people are left with big losses.”
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The White House’s crypto buying spree “is kind of a variant on that,” he added. “The crypto coins already exist, although nobody knows what you do with them.”
Krugman concluded that Trump’s order “is like a hack pump and dump,” while delivering a warning to the president.
“It's very close, although worse, than what a scandal that may be about to bring down the president of Argentina, which is another rug pull,” he said.
But Krugman wasn’t done attacking Trump’s policies as he turned his attention to Trump’s teetering tariff threats.
“There’s been nothing like that in the history of the world economy,” he said. “This is the most erratic policy.”
Watch the clip below or at this link:
