On the sidelines of the Hiroshima G7, Joe Biden made some disconcerting comments about cryptocurrencies, creating an amalgam with the US debt. We put this quote in context, and take stock of the tense situation of the US government’s debt.
Joe Biden points the finger at “crypto traders “
During a speech on Sunday on the sidelines of the Hiroshima G7, Joe Biden, the President of the United States, uttered a sentence that questioned the cryptocurrency ecosystem:
“And I’m not going to accept a deal that protects wealthy tax cheats and crypto traders, while putting food aid at risk for nearly a hundred, excuse me, nearly a million Americans. “
Taking this quote out of context, we might think he was referring to regulatory issues, but the subject is actually quite different. In fact, the agreement in question concerns the US debt, and the speech preceded a discussion he was due to have with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy.
For its part, the Republican Party would like to see the US debt ceiling raised. Joe Biden is opposed to this, and has backed up his argument by mixing tax breaks for the oil industry, the excesses of the pharmaceutical industry, job cuts in the civil service and the previous quote.
What do cryptocurrencies have to do with all this?
Amalgamation and sophistry are widespread tools in politics: the speaker exposes a fact or element that has no connection with the subject of his speech, and spins it in such a way as to establish causality.
The fact is that, in this case, crypto-currency traders have absolutely nothing to do with the need of some Americans for food aid, and even less to do with the US debt. Speaking of debt, the latter has been climbing almost exponentially for 40 years now in the country.
Over the last 25 years, the graph below shows an increase of around 40%, just since the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing the current value of the debt to almost 31,458 billion dollars. And with good reason: the unit used here is not the dollar, but the million dollar:
US government debt in millions of dollars
It is therefore appropriate to question the relevance of relating cryptocurrencies to such a subject. This is a testament to the US government’s position on digital assets.
With regard to this debt, if an agreement is not reached by 1 June, the United States could theoretically find itself in default, an eventuality for which Joe Biden sought to be reassuring:
“America has never defaulted, never defaulted on its debt, and it never will. “
In fact, all Congress has to do is raise the debt ceiling year after year, as has become the norm, allowing the government to borrow almost unlimited amounts of money.
