America is running the Russian playbook, and I can show you the receipts from 1995. Here's what happened there, and why it should terrify you. RUSSIA, 1992–1999 Soviet Union collapses. A handful of Western advisers and Yeltsin insiders decide the fix is speed — privatize everything before the communists come back. PHASE 1: WIPE OUT THE PUBLIC. Price liberalization triggers hyperinflation. Household savings — gone. Ordinary Russians now have no capital to buy anything. PHASE 2: VOUCHERS. Every citizen gets a share certificate. Broke, hungry people sell them for the price of a bottle of vodka. The certificates concentrate in a few hands. PHASE 3: LOANS-FOR-SHARES, 1995. Vladimir Potanin pitches the government a deal: we'll lend you money, you post oil and metals companies as collateral. The government defaults — as everyone knew it would. The auctions are run by the banks themselves. Khodorkovsky gets Yukos, Russia's #2 oil producer, for $309 million. Abramovich and Berezovsky get Sibneft for about $100 million; it sells back to the state ten years later for $13 billion. Potanin runs the auction he wins Norilsk Nickel in. PHASE 4: THE BILL COMES DUE. GDP falls 40%. Male life expectancy drops from 64 to 57. And Harvard's own adviser, Andrei Shleifer, is later found liable in U.S. federal court for investing in the markets he was hired to reform. Harvard pays $26.5 million. PHASE 5: PAYMENT FOR SERVICES. 1996 — the same seven bankers finance Yeltsin's reelection. Russians name it semibankirshchina, the rule of the seven bankers. Berezovsky brags to the Financial Times that they control half the economy. Eight years from voucher to Putin. NOW LOOK AT THE MECHANISM, NOT THE SCENERY. None of that required a coup. It required four things: 1. BREAK THE REFEREES. Russia's prosecutors and auditors weren't abolished — they were captured. Here: inspectors general fired en masse, the CFPB hollowed out, foreign-bribery enforcement suspended outright. The cop doesn't leave the beat. He just stops writing tickets. 2. MAKE THE PROCESS TECHNICALLY LEGAL. Loans-for-shares was lawful. That was the point. Here: tariff exemptions granted company by company. That's not trade policy — that's a toll booth with a phone number. 3. MAKE ACCESS TO THE LEADER THE HIGHEST-YIELD ASSET IN THE COUNTRY. In Russia, proximity to Yeltsin beat any oil field. Here: a presidential family crypto venture that takes anonymous foreign money directly, no cap, no disclosure. No law broken — because nobody wrote one. 4. CALL IT REFORM. Every step in Russia was defended by serious men in good suits as painful but necessary modernization. THE PART THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS: Russia's oligarchs never seized power. They were handed it, on paper, with signatures. By the time it was undeniable, the assets were gone and the courts belonged to the buyers. Ask how much runway you think we have.

On Friday afternoon, a regulator Donald Trump appointed approved a bank Donald Trump's family owns, to issue a coin that makes Donald Trump money, under a law Donald Trump signed. First time in American history. Dropped at 4pm on a Friday, because they were counting on you not looking. Here's what they buried: The OCC — run by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould — granted World Liberty Trust Co. a national trust bank charter. World Liberty is 38% owned by "an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members." That's not my framing. That's on their website. "It's just a trust charter, it can't take deposits." Correct. It doesn't need to. That's not the business. The business is USD1, their stablecoin. You hand them a dollar. They park it in Treasuries. They keep the interest. And under the GENIUS Act — signed by Trump in July 2025 — they're legally barred from passing that interest to you. All house money. Friday's charter lets them cut out their middleman and run issuance, custody, and reserves in-house. Fatter margins. Federal seal. Institutional clients. Now ask where the dollars come from. A state-backed Abu Dhabi fund settled a $2 BILLION investment into Binance using USD1. World Liberty told Congress the deal likely would've used foreign currency if USD1 hadn't existed. Meaning: it was routed through the President's balance sheet on purpose. As of February, Binance held 87% of every USD1 in existence. Binance's founder was pardoned. By Donald Trump. Line it up: → He signed the law that built the market → He appointed the regulator → The regulator approved his family's bank → The bank prints the coin that pays him → A foreign government pumped $2B into it → It sits on an exchange whose founder he pardoned → The bank's board is chaired by the son of his Middle East envoy He disclosed $57.4 million from World Liberty on one filing. Elizabeth Warren: the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. CREW: the most egregious example yet of the President's businesses profiting off his government job. Democrats introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act the same day. It bans regulators from chartering banks owned by the president. It will not pass. Watch who votes against it anyway. The OCC says career staff handled the review and everyone met their ethical obligations. Fine. Maybe every signature was clean. That IS the story. Nobody has to break a rule when you own the people who write them. They did it on a Friday because Friday is where things go to die quietly. Don't let it.