For years now, too many leaders on Wall Street and Washington either looked the other way or blindly supported the crypto industry as it worked relentlessly to infiltrate our financial system and rewrite the laws and rules to benefit their special interests. This was all greased by tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying, including by too many former public officials selling out their public service and engaging in influence peddling. test
Leaders (including regulators at the CFTC, elected officials in Congress, and blue-chip venture capital firms) who should have known better simply accepted the pixie dust of “innovation,” the fairytale of crypto riches, and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s claimed “vision.” They did so without doing the most basic due diligence or asking the most obvious questions if they thought it would make them rich or were already on FTX’s payroll directly or indirectly. (Better Markets refused FTX’s bribe of “$1 million or more” to support their radical and dangerous efforts to undermine consumer, investor and financial stability protections. Although that would have funded more than 25% of our annual budget, we stayed independent, clearly saw FTX’s troubling business plans and proposals, and aggressively opposed them at the CFTC and across Washington.)
The crypto industry followed the financial industry’s standard playbook of using all the levers of the influence industry to buy access and special treatment for its special interests at the expense of the public interest. One of the most corrupt aspects of that, which FTX used extensively, is a revolving door strategy of hiring former government officials, especially from the CFTC, to buy their unique inside knowledge, special access, and unfair influence at the agencies, in Congress and all across Washington to move FTX’s agenda.
Better Markets has stood against the crypto tidal wave of money, stood up to FTX’s powerful supporters (including at the CFTC and in Congress), asked the tough questions (including of Sam Bankman-Fried directly in our conference room), and aggressively opposed the crypto industry’s radical and dangerous proposals.
‘The S.E.C. failed to live up to its mission to protect investors and the markets,’ Benjamin Schiffrin of Better Markets, a nonprofit that fights for stricter financial regulations, said in a statement.
Dennis Kelleher, CEO of investor advocacy think tank Better Markets, warned that bitcoin was still vulnerable to crypto fraudsters and said approving the ETFs was a “historic mistake.”
“The SEC’s action today has changed nothing about this worthless financial product: bitcoin and crypto still have no legitimate use,” he said.
In Morning Money Dennis Kelleher shares that approval of Bitcoin ETFs will give the crypto a veneer of legitimacy despite its record of criminality & lawlessness.
“The FDIC deposit insurance is the gold standard for trust, confidence, and protection, which is why too many in the crypto industry want to misleadingly if not falsely suggest to crypto investors that their money is protected by the FDIC. That false comfort not only harms investors, but also the insurance program, insured banks, and the broader banking system as people lose faith in the FDIC [and] that’s what today’s rule aims to stop.”
“He and a bunch of others at Binance should have been charged with substantive violations, not what is a minimalist charge almost akin to a record-keeping violation,” said Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, a group that advocates for tougher financial regulation.
“The lawlessness if not criminal activities of crypto will continue and increase until all prosecutors, regulators and elected officials force the industry to act like all other law-abiding people and firms in the financial industry,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that works to “build a more secure financial system for all Americans,” according to its website.
Needless to say, the crypto industry hasn’t left everyone agog with wonder. “It’s a lawless industry with a business model that is basically ‘catch us if you can’ [with lawsuits], and before you can do that we’ll buy enough politicians to get a special law passed that has the appearance of regulation with the reality of deregulation,” Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the financial reform nonprofit Better Markets told The American Prospect back in April; he has also written for the Financial Timesdiscouraging Harris from caving to the industry.
CNBC: Dennis Kelleher joined CNBC’s Crypto World with Brandon Gomez to discuss why Vice President Harris should reject the crypto industry’s massive influence campaign and focus on issues that matter to Main Street.
“The crypto industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to distract policymakers and the public from its long rap sheet of criminal convictions, predatory conduct, illegal behavior, bankruptcies, lawsuits, and scandals,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of consumer advocacy group Better Markets. “These crypto PACs are looking to make the crypto industry’s work in Congress even easier by trying to defeat elected officials who put the public interest first and are not crypto-lackeys.”
“A single relatively small industry is literally trying to buy enough politicians to hijack the public agenda,” said Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a financial reform advocacy group. “It’s pretty breathtaking.”
To Kelleher, at the crypto-critical Better Markets group, there’s another meaningful number of people to consider: All the voters who have been turned off by the long list of crimes and scandals associated with the asset class. ‘It’s hard to believe that there are going to be many people who conclude that voting in favor of a bunch of criminals and predators is somehow in their interest,’ he said.
“And this week Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, another non-profit, and crypto critic, wrote that ‘a crypto industry dark money group . . . with the Orwellian name ‘Fairshake’ raised nearly $80mn in just the last three months of 2023’. Kelleher says this is being used to attack politicians who have expressed reservations about crypto, such as the Democrat senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown. Indeed, the campaign has already helped to knock out one anti-crypto voice, Katie Porter, who recently lost a Californian primary.”
“They know the public views crypto like kryptonite – it turns off more voters than it turns on,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and chief executive officer of Better Markets, a group that pushes for greater market oversight. But “you can bet that wherever crypto spends a penny, they will claim they have influenced the outcome and expect the winners to pay them back.”
“What we’re going to see in 2024 is a massive ramp up in crypto-funded ‘dark’ money campaigns against anybody who isn’t a crypto shill,” Kelleher said. “By the end of the year, when it’s all added up, I think the crypto industry is going to put hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to defeat people who want to actually represent the voters, rather than represent crypto.”
“Perhaps they [tokenization advocates] will harness blockchain for good—notwithstanding its use so far as the foundation for the crypto craze, which has created nothing of real value other than a tool favored by speculators, gamblers and criminals,” Better Markets legal director and securities specialist Stephen Hall said. “But because this application of technology has a limited track record in anything resembling legitimate finance, it needs to be closely monitored and regulated because serious risks to investors and the financial system could well emerge. Time will tell.”
Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, a group that advocates for oversight of the financial sector, said it is no surprise that BlackRock is quickly becoming a market leader in bitcoin. “BlackRock has an unmatched market penetration with a peerless distribution network and a marketing powerhouse,” he said. “All of these attributes provide Main Street investors with false comfort.”
“One of the big issues we have with the approval is that it allows bitcoin to be presented to investors in a better way, even though it has the same risk, just in a different package,” said Ben Schiffrin, director for securities policy at Better Markets.
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Bloomberg TV: Dennis Kelleher Talks SBF, Lawless Crypto Industry, & the 2024 Campaign on Bloomberg Crypto (4/2/24)
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