The Privatized Dollar
How the Currency, Settlement System, Military, Energy, and Banking Are All Being Handed to the Same Seven Players — and Why the War Is Not a Mistake Arn Menconi | March 30, 2026
Start with the dead.
In Gaza, more than 72,000 people have been killed since October 2023. The Lancet put the figure higher — 75,000 by early 2025, and that estimate accounted for indirect deaths: disease, starvation, the collapse of medical infrastructure under siege. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice ruled there is a plausible case for genocide. Senator Bernie Sanders said the word out loud on the Senate floor. The United States continues to provide the munitions.
In Lebanon, at least 1,029 people have been killed since March 2. More than 1.2 million have been displaced — one in every five Lebanese citizens, gone from their homes.
In Iran, at least 1,937 people are dead and more than three million have been displaced since the strikes began February 28. Across all theaters of this expanding war — Iran, Lebanon, the Gulf states absorbing Iranian retaliation — more than 1,100 children have been killed or wounded. Thirteen U.S. service members are dead. Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who knows how these wars are managed, has gone on record: “probably not” accurate on the casualty figures.
This is the human accounting before we get to the financial one. Because too often the financial analysis comes first, and the dead become a footnote. Not here. The dead are why this matters.
The Question Nobody Is Answering
Here is what we know. The war that began February 28 has no declared purpose. I mean that literally. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, attended a classified briefing and came out saying: “We want to know more about what’s going on and we just aren’t getting answers.” Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked what he thought of that. His answer: “Let me put it this way. I can see why he said that.”
The men in charge of overseeing the U.S. military cannot explain the war. Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapprove of the initial strikes. On Fox News — Fox News — 45% say we’re losing and only 25% say we’re winning. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 56% of Americans think Trump is too willing to use force, including 23% of his own party. The War Powers Resolution was invoked. Congress voted. The constitutional mechanism for stopping an unauthorized war existed, was used, and failed 53-47 in the Senate and 212-219 in the House.
So the public opposes the war. The oversight committees can’t explain it. The constitution was tried and lost. Gas is above $4. The S&P 500 has erased $2 trillion in market cap. Goldman Sachs puts the recession probability at 25%.
If this war isn’t serving the American public, isn’t serving the troops, isn’t serving our economic interests — whose interests is it serving?
I spent a month following the money. What I found is the most comprehensive privatization scheme in American history. Not just of one institution. Of five simultaneously: the currency, the settlement system, the military, the energy infrastructure, and the banking system. The war isn’t a policy failure. It is the business model.
AIPAC and the Lock on the Machine
Before we get to the financial architecture, there is a political fact that cannot be treated as a sidebar. Joe Kent — Trump’s own director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a former Green Beret, not a Democrat — resigned on March 17 and told the president in writing to “reverse course.” He wrote that Trump “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
AIPAC spent more than $100 million on federal elections in the 2024 cycle. That money didn’t buy a party. It bought the consensus across both parties. When the War Powers Resolution died in the House, three Democrats who crossed over to kill it — Representatives Jared Moskowitz (FL), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), and Ritchie Torres (NY) — had received a combined $1.7 million from AIPAC-affiliated donors.
One hundred million dollars from AIPAC for the 2026 elections. Two hundred dollars — the STOCK Act fine for congressional insider trading. That ratio tells you who owns the system and what the system costs to maintain.
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid in history — $310 billion since 1946, currently $3.8 billion annually plus emergency supplementals. It is conducting simultaneous military operations in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen. The United States is providing the munitions, the intelligence, and the diplomatic cover. The U.S. has provided that cover at the ICC, at the ICJ, at the UN Security Council.
I need to say something about this directly. I lobbied for the Iran Nuclear Deal with both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and CodePink. I ran for Senate against Michael Bennet in 2016 partly over this issue. I’ve watched AIPAC’s influence up close, in committee rooms and campaign offices, for twenty years. The stranglehold is not incidental to the financial architecture I’m about to describe. It is what protects the architecture from political disruption. The same money that bought the war votes is the money that shaped the financial legislation. These are not separate systems. And until Americans are willing to say that out loud, nothing in this article will change.
The Law They Wrote
Last July, Congress passed the GENIUS Act — signed July 18, 2025, Senate 68-30, House 308-122. Most people have never heard of it. It is the most important financial legislation of this decade.
Here is what it does. It requires every regulated stablecoin — that’s a digital dollar, a crypto token pegged to the U.S. dollar — to hold its reserves one-to-one in short-term U.S. Treasury bills. For every digital dollar created, a Treasury bill must be purchased.
Then it says this, verbatim, in Section 4(a)(11): “No permitted payment stablecoin issuer shall pay the holder of any payment stablecoin any form of interest or yield.”
Read that again. The law forces you to buy government debt. The law lets you keep 100% of the interest. The holders — the people whose money backs the system — get zero.
The White House fact sheet stated plainly that the GENIUS Act “will generate increased demand for U.S. debt.” That is a bureaucratic way of saying: we wrote a law that requires private companies to buy our bonds, indefinitely, at scale, and they get to keep the profit from doing it.
Who shaped this law? A man named Bo Hines — Executive Director of the White House Presidential Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. He told the Consensus conference on May 14, 2025, that the White House expected the bill on the president’s desk before August recess. It was signed July 18. Bo Hines left the White House on August 9 — 22 days after the signing. Tether hired him on August 19 — ten days after that. By September 12, he was CEO of Tether U.S. — the American subsidiary built specifically to comply with the GENIUS Act he helped write. Paolo Ardoino remains CEO of Tether globally.
Twenty-two days. Ten days.
The man who wrote the rule that says stablecoin holders get zero percent is now running the U.S. arm of the company that keeps 100%.
Tether: The Shadow Sovereign Wealth Fund
Tether is not a stablecoin company. That’s how they’re classified, and that classification obscures what they actually are.
Look at Tether’s BDO-attested reserves from Q4 2025: $141 billion in total U.S. Treasury exposure — direct T-bills, reverse repos, money market funds. Approximately $23 billion in gold across its combined holdings — roughly 148 metric tons stored in Swiss vaults, ranking among the top 30 global gold holders, above Australia, the UAE, and Qatar. They added 27 metric tons in Q4 2025 alone, accumulating at central bank rates — trailing only Poland and Brazil. $9.9 billion in Bitcoin. A segregated $20 billion proprietary investment portfolio spanning AI, energy, media, fintech, agriculture, and land.
Total assets: $193 billion. Annual profit: $10 billion. Margins approaching 99%. Tether has 530 million users globally — more people than the entire European Union — all earning zero percent while the company earns $10 billion a year on their deposits.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has been publicly warning of imminent economic collapse — while building the gold and Treasury position to profit from it. Here is the sequence that tells you everything: The Trump administration dropped a DOJ criminal investigationinto Tether for potential sanctions and anti-money-laundering violations. Then the GENIUS Act legitimized Tether’s operations. Then the war created the demand. In that order.
Now who custodies Tether’s $141 billion in Treasuries? A Wall Street firm called Cantor Fitzgerald — one of only 26 primary dealers authorized to trade directly with the Federal Reserve. Cantor holds 5% equity in Tether through a $600 million convertible bond potentially worth $25 billion.
The CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald was Howard Lutnick. He is now the Commerce Secretary of the United States.
Before taking office, Lutnick transferred Cantor’s ownership to trusts controlled by his four children. Bloomberg reported on March 18 that Tether loaned the Lutnick children’s trust the money to buy Cantor. So Tether funds Cantor. Cantor custodies Tether’s Treasuries. The Commerce Secretary regulates the industry his family profits from. His 28-year-old son Brandon is now chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald.
A Southern District of New York filing alleged that Lutnick was “working full time for Tether” before taking office. The Office of Government Ethics has no enforcement power to address it.
How the War Makes the Architecture Profitable
This is where it locks together. The war that began February 28 didn’t happen to this financial system. It feeds it.
Two mechanisms. Both provable.
First: demand. When bombs fall on Tehran, when missiles hit the Gulf, when the Strait of Hormuz closes and oil spikes to $99 a barrel — what do ordinary people in Iran, Lebanon, and across the Middle East do? They panic. Their currencies collapse. They can’t access banks. But they can buy USDT on their phones. Elliptic tracked a 700% withdrawal surge on Iran’s Nobitex exchange within hours of the first strikes. Forbes reported $10.3 million left Iranian exchanges in 72 hours. Stablecoin market cap hit a record $316 billion. Every person in the Middle East who buys a stablecoin to protect their savings is, by law, forcing the purchase of a U.S. Treasury bill. War creates the demand. The GENIUS Act converts that demand into government debt. Tether keeps the yield.
Second: yield. War pushes interest rates up. According to U.S. Treasury and Trading Economics data, in the first 27 days of the war the 3-month T-bill rate went from roughly 3.24% to 3.71% — a 47 basis point increase. On $122 billion in short-term Treasuries, that adds approximately $573 million per year in additional profit. For Tether. The 2-year moved 61 basis points — the steepest on the curve. Every basis point on $122 billion is $1.22 billion a year.
The war makes the architecture more profitable on both sides simultaneously: more customers panicking into stablecoins, and higher yield on the Treasuries those stablecoins are required by law to hold.
I managed a $100 million county government budget in Colorado. I ran a national nonprofit budget covering eight states. When I see $573 million in additional annual profit generated by a 27-day war, I know that is not a coincidence. That is a revenue projection. I’ve been watching these patterns since the S&L crisis in the late ‘80s. The architecture changes. The playbook doesn’t. Captured regulators, self-dealing insiders, a legal framework designed to benefit the people who wrote it, and ordinary people left holding the bag. The difference is scale. The S&L crisis cost taxpayers $130 billion. This one is measured in trillions.
The Families
The Trump family is not adjacent to this system. They are inside it.
World Liberty Financial — the Trump family’s stablecoin company — has issued USD1, now holding $5 billion in reserves. The UAE Royal Family owns 49% of it. The CEO is Zach Witkoff — son of Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy who is supposedly negotiating the end of the war whose profits his company collects. USD1 was used to settle a $2 billion deal between Binance and Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund — Senator Elizabeth Warren called it a possible quid pro quo. World Liberty Financial filed January 7 for a federal bank charter with the OCC — the agency whose head the president can fire at will. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition called it an impossible conflict of interest. If approved, the president’s family would own a federally chartered bank issuing stablecoins, regulated by their father’s appointee. The OCC is still reviewing.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. co-founded American Bitcoin Corp, a mining company with three facilities in New York, Texas, and Alberta. Trump’s executive order states that all remaining Bitcoin should be mined in America. His son’s company is positioned to do it. Trump Media holds $1 billion in Bitcoin. The administration created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve seeded with ~$17 billion in seized assets. When the government holds Bitcoin, crashing Bitcoin becomes a policy failure — an implicit backstop for every holder, including the president’s family.
Jared Kushner runs Affinity Partners, a private equity fund with $6.2 billion under management, 99% from foreign investors. He is currently raising $5 billion more from Saudi Arabia’s PIF, the UAE, and Qatar — according to the New York Times — the same governments he is supposedly negotiating with as a peace envoy. The Saudi PIF has contractual “first look” rights on Affinity’s deals. He broke a December 2024 pledge not to fundraise during Trump’s term. Senators Wyden and Garcia opened a congressional investigation. Wyden called it “not only criminal but endangering the lives of Americans.”
The Betting Parlor and the Trades
This is the part that should be on every front page.
Polymarket — the prediction market platform — currently hosts 355 active war-related markets. It was funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund in a $70 million Series B that valued the company at $1 billion. CEO Shayne Coplan told Axios that insider trading on Polymarket was “super cool” — a “financial incentive for people to go and get information to the market.”
CNN documented a single trader who made nearly $1 million betting on Iran military strikes, with a 93% success rate, placing wagers hours before undisclosed strikes. The New York Post identified another suspected insider with $2.14 million in war profits. Two Israelis, including a military reservist, were charged with using classified information to place Polymarket bets.
Then there were the futures markets. Sixteen minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social on March 23 that he was postponing strikes on Iran’s power plants, $580 million in oil futures hit the market. $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures. $192 million in oil shorts. Orders four to six times normal volume. No news trigger. No economic data release. Someone knew the answer before the public did, and they traded on it. Paul Krugman called it treason if national security information was involved. Senator Chris Murphy introduced the BETS Act. The White House called the allegations “unfounded” and declined to name who placed the orders.
The Thiel network connects the pieces: Founders Fund owns Polymarket. Palantir — co-founded by Thiel — is building Polymarket’s market surveillance system. Thiel funded JD Vance’s Senate campaign. David Sacks — Thiel’s PayPal co-founder — was crypto czar. The man who funds the betting platform is the same man whose network shapes the decisions those bets are placed on.
The Pentagon’s Private Equity Executive
Steve Feinberg was sworn in as Deputy Secretary of Defense — the number two at the Pentagon — on March 17, 2025. He co-founded Cerberus Capital Management, which manages more than $60 billion in assets. From 2010 to 2020, Cerberus owned DynCorp — the largest private military contractor in the world. He chaired Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2018 to 2021. He donated more than $1.5 million to pro-Trump PACs. Elizabeth Warren flagged his conflicts of interest during his confirmation hearing. He filed divestment paperwork from Cerberus but retained a financial relationship with the firm.
A private equity billionaire whose firm owned the world’s largest military contractor is now running the day-to-day operations of an eleven-country war. That is not an abstraction. That is the privatization of the military function.
The Board of the New Economy
David Sacks served as White House AI and Crypto Czar for 130 days as a special government employee. His term ended March 26, 2026. He did not leave the administration. He moved to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) alongside Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Lisa Su, Sergey Brin, Fred Ehrsam (Coinbase co-founder), Marc Andreessen (a16z — the largest crypto venture fund in the world), Michael Dell, Safra Catz, and Jacob DeWitte, whose nuclear startup Oklo is funded by Sam Altman and is building small modular reactors for AI data centers.
He retained 20 crypto investments and 449 AI investments through Craft Ventures. TechCrunch reported that the crypto czar role wasn’t vacated — it was rendered unnecessary. The policy is already law. PCAST is where the energy and compute infrastructure gets built to run it at scale.
Look at that PCAST roster again. Nvidia makes every GPU that powers AI and Bitcoin mining. Meta, Oracle, Coinbase — these are the infrastructure of the digital financial system. And Jacob DeWitte’s Oklo is building the nuclear reactors that will power the data centers that run the settlement ledger. The war knocked out Qatar’s LNG facility — the world’s largest — for three to five years. It destroyed the energy infrastructure that competitors depend on. The United States has its own natural gas. It has the PCAST board building nuclear plants on American soil. The war concentrates the new energy infrastructure at home while destroying the old energy infrastructure abroad. Different fuel, same chokepoint logic. Except now the chokepoint is privately owned.
The Tokenization Endgame
This is where it goes from stablecoins to everything.
BlackRock’s BUIDL fund is a $2.2 billion tokenized Treasury product — the largest on-chain Treasury instrument in existence — now trading into USDC via Uniswap. Larry Fink wrote in The Economist: “In the future, people won’t keep stocks and bonds in one portfolio and crypto in another. Assets of all kinds could one day be bought, sold and held through a single digital wallet.”
Tether’s proprietary platform, Hadron, is designed to tokenize any asset under the GENIUS/CLARITY framework. If Hadron becomes the standard, Tether doesn’t just issue the stablecoin — it owns the technology layer that tokenizes everything else.
In December 2024, a consortium including Citi, JPMorgan, Mastercard, Wells Fargo, Visa, Swift, and DTCC — with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as technical observer — completed a proof-of-concept for the Regulated Settlement Network (RSN). They successfully demonstrated tokenized settlement of U.S. Treasuries, investment-grade bonds, and central and commercial bank deposits on a single shared ledger.
The Bank for International Settlements — the central bank of central banks — called this “the next-generation monetary and financial system” in its June 2025 Annual Economic Report and stated that tokenization “could replace the complex chain of intermediaries” in cross-border payments with “a single, integrated process” — not just for crypto, but for “claims on financial and real assets” across all markets. Project Agorá, led by seven central banks and 43 private financial institutions, is building the prototype right now.
The question is no longer which nation controls the reserve currency. It’s which institutions control the reserve ledger.
When Treasury Secretary Bessent projects $3 trillion in stablecoins and Fink says tokenize everything, they’re describing a future where real estate, corporate debt, commodities, equities, and government bonds all trade on digital rails controlled by the same players who control the stablecoin layer today. The U.S. Treasury’s own Borrowing Advisory Committee has acknowledged stablecoins as an emerging source of structural demand for government debt — filling the gap left by the Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening. Stablecoin issuers are replacing the Fed as buyers of U.S. debt. The GENIUS Act guarantees they will keep buying, by law, as long as stablecoins exist.
Who Pays for It
The architecture doesn’t just enrich seven players. It structurally defunds the system that lends to ordinary Americans.
The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that stablecoins could displace up to $6.6 trillion in bank deposits — roughly one-third of all commercial bank deposits in America. The American Bankers Association, in a joint letter signed by more than 3,200 bankers, warned: “Policies that undermine bank and credit union deposits destroy local lending. Every deposit represents a home loan, a small business loan, or an agricultural loan.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Staff Report 1185, published February 2026, confirmed the threat with transaction-level data: stablecoins “not only erode banks’ deposit franchises but also transmit liquidity stress to the banking system.” Even banks that partner with stablecoin issuers see their loan share of assets contract.
The asymmetry is by design. The GENIUS Act prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying yield, but wallets and exchanges — Coinbase, etc. — remain free to offer yield on stablecoin balances. Community banks get “little more than float income.” Large platforms capture customer loyalty by offering returns that the law prohibits issuers from paying directly. Deposits drain from community banks into nonbank issuers “who face no duty to serve the communities from which those deposits originate.”
The CLARITY Act — which passed the House 294-134 on July 17, 2025 and is pending in the Senate — would complete the regulatory moat. Its latest draft, released March 25, 2026, bans passive yield. The winners from that ban aren’t community banks. They are the large stablecoin issuers who keep the yield and the custody-and-exchange layer that collects the fees. The architecture is designed to extract capital from community banking and concentrate it in seven institutions.
The Guardrails That Failed
Kevin Warsh is Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair — Powell’s term expires May 15. Warsh was introduced to crypto by Marc Andreessen, who now sits on PCAST. His confirmation is being held up by Senator Thom Tillis — the same senator co-authoring the CLARITY Act’s yield compromise. One senator controls both the Fed appointment and the stablecoin legislation simultaneously. That is not a coincidence. It is a design.
The STOCK Act — the law designed to prevent congressional insider trading — carries a fine of $200 for failing to disclose a trade. One hundred million dollars from AIPAC. Two hundred dollars for trading on the information those elections purchase.
The DOJ dropped its criminal investigation of Tether. The Office of Government Ethics has no enforcement power over a Commerce Secretary whose children’s trust borrowed from the company he regulates. The OCC is reviewing a bank charter application from the president’s own family, and its head serves at the president’s pleasure. The SEC fined Cantor Fitzgerald $3.2 million for providing incomplete trading data to regulators — the very data needed to detect insider trading — and $6.75 million for misleading SPAC investors. Neither fine produced structural reform.
Starting in June, every new U.S. dollar bill will bear Trump’s signature. Treasury Secretary Bessent announced it March 26: “There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S. dollar bills bearing his name.”
His name on the law. His name on the currency. His family’s name on the stablecoin. His son-in-law raising billions from the governments he’s negotiating a war with. His former crypto advisor running the largest stablecoin company. His Commerce Secretary’s family custodying the reserves. His signature — literally — on the Treasuries that back it all.
What This Actually Is
In May of 2015, I spent 10 days at Daniel Ellsberg’s home and interviewed him for 40 hours. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 pages proving four consecutive presidents had systematically lied about Vietnam. Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America.” The Supreme Court ruled in his favor.
Dan told me something I’ve been thinking about ever since. He said the danger isn’t the lie. It’s the system that makes the lie unnecessary.
A system that generates its own justifications. A system that generates its own funding. A system that generates its own enforcement. That is what we now have.
Here’s what this month of work produced. The old petrodollar rested on three sovereign pillars: oil priced in dollars (controlled by nations through OPEC), transactions settled through banks (regulated by governments through the Fed and SWIFT), and the U.S. military backing it all up. Each pillar was, in principle, subject to democratic accountability.
The new system privatizes all three — and adds two more that didn’t exist before in this form.
The currency is being privatized through stablecoins — 530 million users, $275 billion in mandatory Treasury reserves, yield to holders prohibited by law, profit captured entirely by a handful of companies connected to the sitting president.
The settlement system is being privatized through the Regulated Settlement Network and the BIS unified ledger — designed to settle not just crypto but all asset classes on programmable platforms controlled by the same institutions.
The military is being privatized — a Deputy Secretary of War from Cerberus Capital, AI targeting by Palantir (Thiel’s company), prediction markets funded by the same network that shapes the policy, and a former defense contractor owner running the day-to-day operations of an eleven-country war.
The energy is being privatized — the PCAST roster (Nvidia, Meta, Oracle, Oklo) building nuclear reactors and gas turbines on American soil while the war destroys the old energy infrastructure abroad, concentrating the compute capacity that runs the settlement ledger.
The banking system is being privatized — $6.6 trillion in community bank deposits at risk, the Fed being replaced as a structural buyer of government debt by stablecoin issuers who are required by law to keep buying, and the president’s family pursuing a federal bank charter.
The Ukraine funding — $175 billion and counting since February 2022 — runs through the same loop. Every theater of instability drives capital flight. Every dollar of capital flight flows into stablecoins. Every stablecoin purchases Treasuries. Every Treasury funds the Pentagon. The loop is not limited to one conflict. It is fed by all of them simultaneously.
The holders — 530 million people whose savings fund the system — earn nothing, know nothing, and cannot opt out. The chairmen of both Armed Services Committees cannot explain the war’s purpose. The purpose is in the architecture. It always was.
The petrodollar didn’t die. It was privatized. And the new owners signed their names on every layer.
What You Can Do
I don’t say this lightly: this is the most important story I have ever worked on. Bigger than anything I covered as a county commissioner. Bigger than anything I documented running a national nonprofit across eight states. When I sit with what these numbers actually mean — $6.6 trillion in community bank deposits, $573 million in additional annual war profit, 530 million people earning zero on their own money — I feel the weight of it the way I felt it sitting across from Ellsberg in 2015. He told me: the hardest thing isn’t finding out. It’s believing your own eyes when you do.
I believe my eyes. And I believe yours.
Share this with one person who cares about our taxpayer dollars killing innocent people. And if this work matters to you, make a donation so I can continue keeping up this fight to expose the lies. I don’t work for a network. I don’t have sponsors. I do this because somebody has to follow the money, count the dead, and say the number out loud.
Thank you. — Arn
Arn Menconi is a former county commissioner, Eagle County, Colorado. MBA, University of Denver. He began his career in banking during the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 1980s — an experience that shaped his approach to following money through institutional capture. He managed a $100 million government budget in Colorado and a national nonprofit budget covering 8 states. In May of 2015, he spent 10 days at Daniel Ellsberg’s home and interviewed him for 40 hours. He ran for U.S. Senate against Michael Bennet in Colorado in 2016 and is the author of the forthcoming Lied to Death: How We Drifted Toward Extinction. Contact: arn@arnmenconi.com | arnmenconi.net | arnmenconi.substack.com | @LiedtoDeath
PayPal & Venmo: @arnmenconi
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Cerberus Capital, Feinberg Confirmation: cerberus.com/media/cerberus-co-founder-steve-feinberg-confirmed-as-u-s-deputy-secretary-of-defense
CryptoSlate, BlackRock BUIDL / Uniswap: cryptoslate.com/uniswap-is-bringing-blackrocks-2-2-billion-buidl-to-defi-but-the-trade-access-comes-with-a-catch
BlackRock / The Economist, Tokenization:blackrock.com/corporate/literature/article-reprint/larry-fink-rob-goldstein-economist-op-ed-tokenization.pdf
SIFMA, RSN Proof of Concept: sifma.org/news/press-releases/members-of-the-u-s-financial-sector-demonstrate-feasibility-of-multi-asset-and-cross-network-settlement-using-shared-ledger-technology
BIS Annual Economic Report 2025, Chapter III: bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm
Forbes, Stablecoins and Community Banks:forbes.com/sites/ronshevlin/2026/03/16/stablecoins-what-community-banks-need-to-know-and-do-now
American Bankers Association, Joint Letter: aba.com/advocacy/policy-analysis/joint-trade-association-letter-on-stablecoin-loophole
NY Fed Staff Report 1185: newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1185
New York Times, Trump Signature on Dollar Bills:nytimes.com/2026/03/26/us/politics/trump-signature-us-dollars.html
NBC News, Trump Signature on Currency: nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/signature-appear-paper-currency-dollar-bills-first-sitting-president-rcna265389
Bitcoin Magazine, Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: bitcoinmagazine.com/news/the-united-states-is-going-to-buy-bitcoin
FinTech Weekly, CLARITY Act Yield Compromise:fintechweekly.com/news/clarity-act-banks-winning-stablecoin-yield-2026
PREVIOUS PIECES: “The Shadow Petrodollar” | “Lied to Death” | arnmenconi.substack.com


Thanks for writing this, Arn, and for tracing all these connections. It's a very depressing and scary scenario, no doubt, but it certainly aligns with how this administration operates. I appreciate your substack and have linked to a couple of your posts in my own.
So the conclusion I draw is that the Fed becomes obsolete, except to perpetuate the illusion needed for the market and for the average consumer. Does the Fed possess any power over Tether or the RSN? And if the PCAST players accrue the 20% benefits automatically, this is virtually a closed club and no counterweight exists.
Would a class action suit by account holders at banks or shareholders of stocks have any power to resist? Could a "run on the banks" to withdraw cash or convert to gold holdings disarm this ploy?