“The Department of Justice is Not a Digital Assets Regulator”

DOJ Axes Crypto Unit as Trump’s Regulatory Pullback Continues

In his four-page memo to staff titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) — created in 2022 under then-President Joe Biden — would be “disbanded effective immediately.”

“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche wrote in the memo seen by CoinDesk. “However, the prior Administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution, which was ill conceived and poorly executed. The Justice Department will no longer pursue litigation or enforcement actions that have the effect of superimposing regulatory frameworks on digital assets while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”  

The Bad Tweet

… In some ways I am tempted to say “building up credibility for years by accurately posting real all-caps financial news headlines for people who don’t have subscriptions, and then burning all of that credibility at once by posting a single fake headline that moves markets by $2.4 trillion, is honestly pretty good market manipulation” (not legal advice!), but I’m not sure that’s right. If you are doing market manipulation, I think you want depth, not breadth. Moving GameStop by 50% is more valuable to you than moving every financial asset in the world by 5%: Your capital is limited, and causing a $2.4 trillion move isn’t worth $2.4 trillion to you. From a certain (dumb) perspective, that fake headline was briefly one of the most valuable pieces of writing in human history, but the person who tweeted it couldn’t capture most of its value. Source:

Wall Street Bursts With Anger Over Tariff ‘Stupidity’

With the backdrop of rapidly mounting stock market losses, corporate titans have worked every angle — phone calls, social media and even a typically staid shareholder letter — to try to change Mr. Trump’s mind. […]

By Monday, hedge fund billionaires — many of whom had been loud and proud boosters of Mr. Trump’s second term — were going public with their cries.

“The global economy is being taken down because of bad math,” the hedge fund manager William A. Ackman posted Monday morning on X. He added, “The President’s advisors need to acknowledge their error before April 9th and make a course correction before the President makes a big mistake.”

Others chimed in, calling for a stronger fight.

Andrew Hall, a billionaire oil trader who has been critical of Mr. Trump in the past, saluted Mr. Ackman on Instagram for being a Trump supporter who was speaking out about tariffs. “At least he is willing to reverse himself and call out this stupidity,” Mr. Hall said of Mr. Ackman. “Where are the other ‘financial titans’? Why aren’t they speaking up?”

Hackers Spied on US Bank Regulators’ Emails for Over a Year

Hackers intercepted about 103 bank regulators’ emails for more than a year, gaining access to highly sensitive financial information, according to two people familiar with the matter and a draft letter to Congress seen by Bloomberg News.

The attackers were able to monitor employee emails at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency after breaking into an administrator’s account, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. OCC on Feb. 12 confirmed that there had been unauthorized activity on its systems after a Microsoft Corp. security team the day before had notified OCC about unusual network behavior, according to the draft letter. […]

“The analysis concluded that the highly sensitive bank information contained in the emails and attachments is likely to result in demonstrable harm to public confidence,” OCC Chief Information Officer Kristen Baldwin wrote in the draft letter to Congress that was seen by Bloomberg News.