The Crypto Crash: all Ponzi schemes topple eventually | Robert Reich

We're back to the wild west finances of the 1920s as the crypto industry pours huge money into political campaigns

One week ago, as cryptocurrency prices plummeted, Celsius Network - an experimental cryptocurrency bank with more than one million customers that has emerged as a leader in the murky world of decentralized finance, or DeFi - announced it was freezing withdrawals due to extreme market conditions".

Earlier this past week, Bitcoin dropped 15% over 24 hours to its lowest value since December 2020. Last month, TerraUSD, a stablecoin - a system that was supposed to perform a lot like a conventional bank account but was backed only by a cryptocurrency called Luna - collapsed, losing 97% of its value in just 24 hours, apparently destroying some investors' life savings.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com