George Packer

speaker

697 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 6 May

George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · How Silicon Valley has profited by aligning with MAGA · 6 May 2026 podcast

And this was the first and really –

The only piece of legislation that Trump passed, major legislation on technology, because as you say, the rest of it was keeping the government's hands off.

In this case, the Genius Act required these private issuers, these crypto firms, to have

One-to-one backing for their currency called stablecoin, which has different names.

There's different varieties, but it is a coin whose value is supposed to remain constant.

It required them to have –

or short-term treasuries or some other reliable backing for the stablecoin currency that they issued.

And so that seemed like a good way to make sure that the industry didn't have sudden collapses, bankruptcies, et cetera, because it turned out there was nothing behind these digital assets.

Critics say that the danger of the Genius Act is that it ties the federal government to crypto in a way it was not tied before.

And so if crypto turns out to have major failings…

it could pull down parts of the regular banking industry and it would require the federal government to intervene.

And they also accuse it of not providing enough guardrails to prevent crypto from being used for fraud and other illegal purposes.

It is.

That's why they wanted it.

I have to say it was a bipartisan bill.

There were a lot of Democrats who voted for it as well.

And then there were some Democrats who were vocal critics like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who considered it a gift to the crypto industry and a potential abettor of fraud by the crypto industry.

So this

This digital currency, this digital asset that has become the main tool of enrichment for the people pushing these policies is now going to have the backing of U.S.

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