Trump Signs Executive Order Pausing DOJ Enforcement of FCPA

Trump signs order pausing enforcement of foreign bribery ban

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to pause enforcing a nearly half-century-old law that prohibits American companies and foreign firms from bribing officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.

“It sounds good, but it hurts the country,” Trump said of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as he signed the order at the White House.

“Many, many deals are unable to be made because nobody wants to do business, because they don’t want to feel like every time they pick up the phone, they’re going to jail,” Trump said, referring to U.S. anti-corruption efforts.

Trump’s SEC starts shifting agency’s focus as job cut threat spooks staff

A day after the Trump administration sent a missive to all federal employees inviting them to resign, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s acting boss, Mark Uyeda, addressed staff in a packed auditorium at its Washington headquarters.[…]

Details from the town hall meeting on January 29, which are reported here for the first time, provide a window into how the Trump administration’s sweeping attack on the federal bureaucracy has roiled the securities regulator, which underpins investor confidence in the $110 trillion U.S. capital markets.

Man Behind Fake SEC Bitcoin ETF Post Pleads Guilty

An Alabama man has pleaded guilty to hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s official X account last year to manipulate bitcoin prices.

Eric Council Jr., a 25-year-old from Athens, Ala., on Monday pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to one count of conspiring to commit identity theft and access device fraud, according to the Justice Department. Council will be sentenced on May 16 and faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years of supervised release.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Council conspired with others to take control of SEC’s X account and to post a fake message in the name of the former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, falsely announcing that the agency had approved bitcoin exchange-traded funds. For months, investors had been anticipating the SEC’s decision, which had the potential to affect the price of bitcoin.

Crypto’s Connections

Few people own cryptocurrencies. You have to create a digital wallet. Your bank might not offer them as investments. In recent years, the government has treated this new form of money, which can be transferred instantly with little oversight, as a risky asset….

So when crypto crashed three years ago, the fallout didn’t wreck the whole economy. The price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies plummeted. Several companies entered bankruptcy. Top executives went to prison. Analysts called it crypto’s Great Recession. But while crypto traders lost a lot of money, ordinary people barely noticed.

President Trump could change that. He’s a fan of this relatively new form of digital money. He promotes digital coins to his followers (and profits when they purchase them). He promises to create a federal stash of Bitcoin and enable companies to offer more coins to the public. The result is that, in the coming years, many more Americans will likely own crypto, exposing them to its perils.

Next time the industry crashes, analysts fear, the impact could be more severe, rippling across the economy and hurting a wider array of investors….

Memecoin Pumps Are Just for Fun

Everyone sending me this, and tweeting about this, seems to think that this is somehow not allowed. I do not want to give Dave Portnoy, or you, legal advice, but: Seems fine? Here’s his tweet about the Josh Allen memecoin, which says: “I lost 1 million dollars on the Bill Super Bowl. I think I can make a million back on Josh Allen MVP coin. Buy at your own risk. I just bought it. I’m gonna sell it. Don’t buy what ya can’t lose.” The points I want to make here are:

1. He does not say anything false (or true) about the fundamentals of the Josh Allen MVP coin, which are nonexistent.

2. He says that he bought it, and that he’s going to sell it. This was true: He bought before tweeting, and sold after tweeting…. He told you that he was pumping it and that he would dump it. What’s the problem?

3. COME ON, WHY ARE YOU BUYING MEMECOINS? What on earth do you think is happening here? Is Dave Portnoy going to go activist on the Josh Allen MVP coin and turn around its business? Did he talk to the CEO of Josh Allen MVP coin and learn that Josh Allen MVP coin has struck a deal to build artificial intelligence products for Apple? There is nothing here! This is a purely social trading token, a pure game of hot potato; the only thing that could happen with it is pumping and dumping. The point of memecoins is for people to go on social media and say “I’m buying this coin” so it goes up so they can sell it at profit. Portnoy used the memecoins for exactly their intended purpose.

Strategic Insider Trading and Its Consequences for Outsiders: Evidence From the Eighteenth Century

Information asymmetry is inherent to trading and will always remain a threat to the fairness and integrity of financial markets. It is therefore important to understand how informed investors exploit their information advantage and how their strategic trading behavior affects uninformed investors. In our paper Strategic Insider Trading and its Consequences for Outsiders: Evidence from the Eighteenth Century, which is published in the Journal of Financial Economics, we answer these questions using unique hand-collected data from the early eighteenth-century London stock market. Because there were no legal restrictions on insider trading in this era, we can better identify the value of private information and the trading behavior of insiders.