Crypto Has the Potential to Wreck the Financial System

Crypto Has the Potential to Wreck the Financial System

South of Safe Heaven

One comfort of our ridiculous investing age is that all the gambling on GameStonk or Dogecoin or whatever feels like it's being played with Monopoly money. Yes, people are taking losses and getting ripped off, such as the poor saps in this must-read Bloomberg News story on crypto "rug-pulling" schemes.

But the sums are mostly small. And if you're monkeying around in an asset class calling itself "S*** Coin" "” and specifically a s*** coin going by the not-at-all-trying-too-hard name of "Safe Heaven" "” then buddy, you might just have it coming. A lot of these diamond-hands types are happy to lose money anyway, just for the Reddit upvotes.

Still, these things can metastasize. Pets.com was all fun and games until the whole stock market crashed and took the economy with it. Decentralized finance, the blockchain and human ingenuity have infinite capacity to spawn infinite Safe Heavens, including some that may be sophisticated enough to draw in real cash, warns Bloomberg's editorial board. And once big players start dropping, they can drag bigger markets down with them. Lawmakers and regulators can't sleep on the systemic risks here, no matter how marginal or hilarious they might seem right now. Sometimes