There’s a Big Winner in the Recent Bank Failures
Andy Snyder|March 16, 2023
We know it’s a good time on Wall Street when ol’ Barney Frank is in the news.
The Massachusetts Democrat was a household name in 2009 when he was hashing out the powerful banking regulations that bear his name.
He’s now long retired from Congress. He’s been out of Washington for a decade.
But proving the irony, hypocrisy and often flat-out criminality that come with a career inside the Beltway, the 83-year-old is back in the headlines. This time, he’s not writing the heavy-handed laws that are supposed to keep banks out of trouble.
Nope.
He’s helping to run a bank that was just taken over by the FDIC… despite the oh-so-heavy-handed regulations he wrote.
That’s right… the former lip-quivering industry watchdog is now on the board of Signature Bank – the third-biggest bank failure in U.S. history.
Kind of ironic.
Of course, the former politician says it’s not the bank’s fault. It’s pure politics.
He says that the bank didn’t need to shut down… that it could have solved its own problems.
Frank blamed the company’s open-arm policy toward crypto. “I think part of what happened,” he said, “was that regulators wanted to send a very strong anti-crypto message.”
Signature – which also lent money to many in Trump’s inner circle – opened its doors to crypto in 2018.
It was a move regulators didn’t like.
Rising rates have caused crypto to falter in recent months. It gave regulators with an itchy trigger finger a solid excuse to make a move and send a message.
But it appears an important part of the message was lost in translation.
Bitcoin’s price has risen nearly 20% this week.
There’s a lot going on here. All of it is important for investors to understand. There’s certainly too much to cover in this short, early morning column.
But we want you to understand two key things.
Crypto Moves
First, the crypto market is responding primarily to just one thing. It’s not regulations. And it’s not the health of the economy or the rate of inflation.
It’s what we’ve been saying for many moons now.
Interest rates drive crypto.
When rates are rising, the speculative, “greater fool” dollars pushing Bitcoin and its brethren higher dry up. When rates fall, that money pours back in.
Money goes where money is treated best.
After a handful of rate-induced bank failures, Wall Street has done a quick about-face on rates. Some folks are now betting on a full 100-basis-point reduction in rates by the end of the year (assuming there are any banks left to actually lend money).
That’s extremely bullish for crypto.
It’ll drive regulators nuts.
And second, Barney was right. The feds are going after crypto. And they’re going about it like a pussyfooted backyard bully. They’re too scared to go after the market head-on and take it down in one fell swoop, so they’re sneaking around, slapping the weak and timid in the back of the head.
The long-term effect will be the same. All legit crypto will someday (probably soon) be regulated.
It should be.
The short-term effect of regulators’ actions, though, will be a scattered and volatile market. A schoolyard bully never wants the rest of the playground on its toes.
There’s a solution to this problem, though… one that you should take advantage of.
It’s a tiny sliver of the market that virtually nobody is talking about. It’s brand-new. It already has the blessing of the SEC. And it offers profit opportunities that are just as good as – if not better than – those in the “traditional” crypto space.
Again, it’s too much to cover in this column.
But you can get all the details in this fast-moving video we just released. It explains it all… and gives away one of our top ways to play this new, game-changing sector.
