IF DONALD TRUMP’S sweeping global tariffs send household good prices soaring and drive the economy into recession, at least one industry could profit.

The Trump administration is considering using tariff revenues to buy Bitcoin for a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” a top administration crypto official said in an interview last week.

The White House’s proposal is driving interest from crypto industry figures who have made building the reserve one of their top priorities.

It is uniting critics on the right and left, however, who have cast the reserve as a pointless industry giveaway that will come at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. Using tariff money would add insult to injury, they say.

  • Raltoid@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 days ago

    That’s one way to take make money…

    1. Buy a bunch of personal bitcoin

    2. Announce that the government is buying a ton of bitcoin

    3. Wait for the value to surge

    4. Sell your bitcoin at the new inflated value

  • hakase@lemm.eeEnglish
    01·
    11 days ago

    Honestly, using the country’s surplus to fund a sovereign wealth fund like Norway instead of throwing it into the black hole of the military industrial complex seems like it would be a pretty good idea.

    Too bad they’re stealing taxpayer dollars through tariffs to throw into the additional black hole of crypto market manipulation instead.

      • hakase@lemm.eeEnglish
        01·
        11 days ago

        I wasn’t talking about a trade surplus - I was talking about the huge amount of extra money that we throw away every year on wasteful, nepotistic military contracts with little to no return.

    • caffinatedone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      There’s no surplus, even with the extreme tariffs that trump is pushing. Given the economic destruction that they’re likely to cause, they’re probably a net loss for the treasury (and certainly are if one considers the damage that they’re doing to the IRS).

      The reasons that the ‘sovereign wealth fund’ idea keeps coming up are:

      1. All of the cool authoritarians have one
      2. trump really, really, wants a slush fund to grift off of

      That’s it.

      • hakase@lemm.eeEnglish
        01·
        11 days ago

        The country absolutely has an enormous surplus, it’s just that we waste it all on military contracts with little to no return.