The Biden Fraud

And other thoughts on the Fed’s stance on monetary policy, comparing stablecoins to 19th century free banking, and triathlon blues

1. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

The Biden Administration will be remembered differently by different people. Before this week, I would have remembered it primarily for its failures in financial regulation, including especially the President’s curious appointments (or non-appointments) at the Fed, OCC, and FDIC. There were so many ways that Democrats could have used the appointment power in financial regulation more effectively, which would have been good for them and good for America. It’s hard to insist on institutional norms across parties when one party seems to understand how to use power consistent with electoral mandates and the other one doesn’t.

But after reading Tapper & Thompson’s book, I will now remember it for the scandalous cover-up of President Biden’s rapid decline and the failure to hold an open Democratic primary. The fact that so many Democrats, even today, still regard questions about Biden’s health deterioration and the Administration’s lies about it all as partisan warfare gives a sense of the state of the party. I am a political independent, so I can’t claim any professional interest in having more honesty within the political party per se. As a citizen, though, I despair at what happened in 2023 and 2024. We are all so much worse off because of their desperate need to hold to power. Because of this scandal, I cannot regard the Biden Administration as anything other than an abject failure.

Here’s why: Joe Biden’s essential offer to the American people in 2020 was the invitation to turn the page on the roiling disaster of Trumpism. Biden and those closest to him then proceeded to lie to the American people over and over again about Biden’s ability to lead, govern, and campaign, thereby paving the way for the restoration of Trumpism. To say that the Biden Administration was a failure does not begin to capture what they did to America, whatever their intentions.

2. Powell Signals Hawkish Fed is Flying Blind, Reuters, June 19, 2025

The Fed has decided, for its fourth straight meeting, to hold interest rates steady, with more cuts to come. Right on cue, President Trump resorts to name calling and hubris while Trumpian sycophants claim that the Fed can’t see that Trump policies mean higher productivity which warrant lower rates.

The headline here in the Reuters article is a bit misleading, though. The Fed is always flying blind. Or, to extend the metaphor, the very fact that we have figured out how to have central bankers fly at all is something of a miracle. That they do so without instruments and must navigate in permanently cloudy skies is a fact of life that cannot be resolved.

Once again these issues cast my mind to what is coming in the months ahead, as President Trump reconvenes his 2017 The Apprentice: Fed edition. There will be leaks — there have already been leaks — about the short list candidates, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh. Others will emerge from Oval Office interviews. It’ll be a cracker-jack time for Fed watchers.

The basic tension is that We, the People need someone in the big chair who can navigate MAGA politics and the Thunderdome of Trump’s Oval Office without being completely co-opted by it.

In this sense, the model I have in mind for the next Fed Chair is not Jerome Powell, who has been marvelous as a monetary policymaker but could not survive round 2. It is not Powell’s hero, Paul Volcker, who was appointed by Jimmy Carter even as he insisted that he would be very hawkish in the role. It is Thomas McCabe, the Fed Chair under Harry Truman appointed initially because he was not Marriner Eccles and could navigate the demands of Missouri politics without losing his head (until he was eventually basically fired by Truman as part of the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951).

3. The Genius Act Will Bring Economic Chaos, Barry Eichengreen, New York Times, June 17, 2025

Comparing the world of stablecoin to the world of 19th century free-banking wildcats is becoming a well-worn tradition.

Consider this historian a skeptic of the genre.

There are so many ways that the comparison fails, not least the heterogeneity of the free-banking experience in the 19th century and the vast existence today of a federal bank supervisory apparatus that did not exist at the time.

That’s why this constant invocation makes me think that we’re seeing more hidebound aversion to change than we are scholarly predictions about the future. The confidence that stablecoins managed through states and the federal government as created by the GENIUS Act will lead to financial cataclysm is too sure-footed, too reflexively antagonistic to change.

I would frankly say the same to all those stablecoin cheerleaders who are sure that they are solving major problems that the much-maligned TradFi world could not solve.

Here are my views on the entire stablecoin debate: I think stablecoin will boom and bust, with cheerleaders making and losing money, and Cassandras moving on to other areas to predict the next once-in-a-century financial crisis.

I do not think that stablecoins will crash the economy.

I do not think that stablecoins will solve problems of financial inclusion that banks could not already solve.

I do not think stablecoins will result in economic chaos.

I do not think stablecoins will result in economic utopia.

What we have in the GENIUS Act, and why I would lend it my least enthusiastic and most tepid support, is an effort to bring some sunlight and supervisory authority into a world that had been thriving like fungus in the banking periphery. In the mean time, we permit experimentation for the sake of experimentation, a necessary condition for innovation whose exact trajectory we cannot predict ex ante.

4. Pat Griskus Triathlon, Jun 14, 2025

My most miserable, difficult race yet, for internal and external reasons. Externally, it was a nasty, wet, rainy, slippery day, weather that was new to me as a triathlete. The race course also featured a longer-than-regulation swim—for reasons best understood by Pat Griskus, whoever that is. And I slept like hot garbage the night before, getting shaken awake by a noisy roommate (vengeance will be mine, you know who you are) and not sleeping again from about 1:30am onward.

But the biggest problems were with my own failure to prepare. I didn’t realize because I didn’t research that the bike course was very hilly. Given that I was trying out a new TT bike, on which I had only trained on the flats, I was completely out of my depth and uncomfortable the entire way through. A TT bike for me is a delta of 4 mph over a road bike—in both directions. When I am comfortable, I am riding a rocket. When I am not, I am stirring cement buckets with my feet. I was uncomfortable for 90% of that race, climbing hills on a bike I didn’t know how to climb with or racing down hills in the rain on a bike I didn’t train to descend. Add to that my total inability to sight in the rain, which added a whopping .4 miles to my swim through tragicomic zigzags, and you have my worst time in an Olympic race to date.

I’ll write more about this later this week but the bottom line is that I have fallen in love with a sport that doesn’t always love me back. The good news is that I cannot wait to test my mettle again with more of the internal and external factors resolved in my favor. My next race is in August, a Gran Fondo cycling race in North Carolina. My next triathlon is the Wisconsin Ironman 70.3, in early September. Stay tuned: I will make you love me, triathlon.