Selective Memory Much? The Biden Economists Forgot to Mention FTX Was Happening Right Under Their Noses

Former Biden economic advisers Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein recently argued that bitcoin's price decline from its 2025 peak somehow justifies their administration's approach to cryptocurrency. Their February 26 New York Times opinion piece is a masterclass in creative forgetting—the kind of selective amnesia usually reserved for politicians and NFT floor prices.

The op-ed credits the Biden administration with "increasingly aggressive regulatory efforts to curb scams and fraud." This framing is extraordinary, given what actually happened on their watch. Apparently "curb" was doing some heavy lifting there.

FTX grew to enormous scale during the Biden administration. Sam Bankman-Fried was a top Democratic donor who met with senior administration officials—including then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler—while running what became one of the largest financial frauds in history. It's almost as if "aggressive enforcement" had a blind spot the size of a tropical island headquarters.

The administration's strategy of regulation-by-enforcement, rather than establishing clear rules, had a perverse effect: legitimate, compliance-minded companies were driven offshore or out of business, consumers were harmed, and American innovation was stifled. Meanwhile, bad actors who knew how to play political games thrived in the confusion. Turns out you can't regulate your way out of a problem you refuse to define.

When you refuse to write clear rules, the only people who benefit are those who never intended to follow them.

The authors conveniently ignore one of the most troubling episodes of the Biden era: "Operation Choke Point 2.0." Under pressure from federal regulators, banks systematically debanked lawful crypto businesses, cutting them off from the financial system without due process, formal rulemaking, or legislative authority. The debanking campaign swept up ordinary individuals and small businesses who had turned to crypto because the traditional banking system had long underserved them. Nothing says "consumer protection" like protecting consumers from accessing financial services.

The Biden administration's approach cut consumers off from tools they were using to participate in the financial system, without putting a single policy through the democratic process of notice-and-comment rulemaking. Regulatory creativity at its finest.

The authors dismiss crypto as a "painfully slow and expensive database" with "almost no practical use." They acknowledge in passing that crypto is used to wire money internationally, but wave this away as though enabling fast, low-cost cross-border remittances for millions of people is a trivial achievement. Cool motive. Still wrong.

It is not.

Global remittance fees average nearly 6.5%, costing migrant workers and their families billions of dollars each year. Stablecoins running on blockchain networks can execute the same transfers in minutes for a fraction of the cost. This is an immediate, material financial improvement for families in developing countries. But sure, let's focus on NFT JPEGs.

The Biden economists sat in "dozens of meetings" and apparently came away unimpressed. One wonders whether they spoke to any of the people these tools serve. Probably too busy taking notes on which crypto executives were donating to which campaigns.

Beyond remittances, blockchain technology underpins a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications. Fidelity, JPMorgan, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Mastercard, Meta, Stripe, Block Inc. and Franklin Templeton are actively building on blockchain infrastructure. The Biden economists' claim that no "giant tech firms" are using this technology is flatly wrong. Their research department called. It wants a refund.

The op-ed's news hook is bitcoin's price decline. Using short-term price movements to condemn an entire asset class is analytically unserious. Amazon's stock fell 94% from its peak during the dotcom bust. By the Cummings-Bernstein standard, it should have been written off as "fundamentally worthless." Imagine taking investment advice from people who learned nothing from 2000.

Volatility is a feature of nascent markets, not proof of worthlessness.

Moreover, it labels the Bitcoin network as "slow." What it lacks in speed it makes up for in security—a quality that should be of the utmost importance to regulators. Outsiders or intermediaries cannot veto or reverse transactions between peers, unilaterally confiscate user funds, or tamper with its distributed ledger. That's why it's used worldwide in areas where regular citizens are targeted by their governments. Sometimes "slow" is a feature, not a bug.

Meanwhile, other blockchains enable payments at breakneck speed.

The authors repeatedly invoke the straw man of a taxpayer-funded bailout of the crypto industry. No serious policymaker (or crypto participant) has proposed anything of the sort. The stablecoin legislation Cummings and Bernstein reference creates fully reserved payment instruments that are overcollateralized with the most liquid government bonds on Earth. The Trump administration's bitcoin reserve proposal involves no new taxpayer expenditure. But why let facts interrupt a good strawman argument?

Meanwhile, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, the Biden administration authorized extraordinary measures to guarantee all deposits. Their concern about moral hazard was seemingly highly selective. Apparently some "too big to fail" is more equal than others.

The op-ed devotes considerable space to crypto industry political donations, implying corruption. The suggestion that an industry advocating for favorable regulation through