"The Old 'Rug Pull' Trick"
by Bill Bonner
"There is growing evidence that this project has rugged.
Please do your own due diligence and exercise extreme caution."
– CoinMarketCap website, referring to Squid Coin
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – First, just for our own amusement, let’s look at more of the nuttiness caused by the Federal Reserve’s fake money and fake interest rates. Then, we’ll take up the question posed yesterday: Will the Fed bring an end to the madness? It’s this question that is most important to investors. If the answer is “yes,” then it’s time to go into the safe room, with a stock of food, water, and ammunition. If the answer is “no”… then… well… you can hold out a while longer.
Rug Pull: Last week, another new crypto appeared on the metaverse radar. This was not particularly interesting, in itself; there were more than 13,000 of them already. But this one had a very catchy name – the Squid Coin, which sounded for all the world as though it was related to the Netflix hit, Squid Game. It also suggested some kind of game playing, which sounded as though it might be fun… maybe even profitable. Plus, it advertised a glowing recommendation from Elon Musk, who said – according to the Squid Coin website, at least – that he thought this one was going to the moooon.
One other feature is worth mentioning: Squid Coin welcomed buying with open arms… but it treated selling like a visit from a parole officer. Whoever heard of a currency that you couldn’t freely spend or trade? The whole thing was puzzling… and preposterous. Nevertheless, propelled upwards by these booster rockets, Squid Coin quickly launched into space. It rose from pennies to $2,860 per coin in a matter of days… and made the early adopters millions richer. For a moment. On paper.
Vanishing Wealth: None of this would have been very surprising. The crypto world is lousy with goofy coins… and millionaires. But as we described yesterday, when the money goes… everything goes, including all sense of what anything is really worth. And sometimes, they’re not worth anything at all, which is just what the Squid Coin “investors” found out at the start of this week. According to the press reports, the coin’s anonymous creators had done the old “rug pull” scam on them.
One investor lost his entire life savings in the Squid Coin scam. And some investors are blaming the media for fueling the coin’s meteoric rise. But the Squid Coin had no relationship to the popular Squid Game TV show. It had, therefore, no right to use the name and trade off the popularity of the series. Nor had Elon Musk ever heard of Squid Coin… until it appeared bearing his endorsement like a papal seal.
And then, as quickly as the coin and its creators rocketed up into the thin atmosphere of great wealth – they disappeared, apparently absconding with their ill-gotten gains. The coin then plummeted back to Earth. Pity the poor “investors” who expected to buy new houses in Santa Monica with their Squid Coin winnings.
Wacky World: They should have taken a flier on DWAC, instead. Digital World Acquisition Corp. is a SPAC… a special-purpose acquisition company. In this case, its special purpose was buying Donald Trump’s new company – Trump Media & Technology Group. And when word of the purchase got out, DWAC shot up bigly. Shares rose from $10 to $175.
As a general rule (in our rulebook, at least), all SPAC deals are bad deals. But who knows? There was no trace of it in the documents made available to the public, but DWAC might even eventually come up with a way to make money. And in this wacky world, you don’t need to make money to get money. What money do the cryptos make? What money do the NFTs make? What money has Elon Musk made? What money did Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell make? Between the two of them, they gained $105 million in new wealth since 2004. Where did it come from?
Invisible Debt: You either make it or you take it. And the Fed is helping people take it on a scale never before seen in America. In August 2019, the Fed had total assets (a rough measure of how much money it has “printed”) of $3.7 trillion. Now, it has $8.5 trillion. The difference, nearly $5 trillion, was added in just 25 months.
Not a penny of that money was earned… made… or saved. Instead, it is taken from the public… embezzled, in the form of future inflation. And today, think of all the fortunes that depend on it – all the dopey business models… all the SPACs… all the cryptos… all the debt refinancing… all the federales’ boondoggles.
During that same 25-month period, U.S. debt increased about $6 trillion, too. Putting 2 and 2 together, we see that almost every penny of deficit spending by the U.S. government was financed by the Fed’s money-printing. That is why there is so little opposition to today’s $3 trillion deficit – nobody thinks he has to pay for it.
A Great Scam: What a marvelous flim-flam. The gist of the “rug pull” scam is making people think they have something they don’t really have… wealth that doesn’t exist, for example. It’s the game of choice for today’s crypto-grifters… and for the Fed, too. They “print” money – crypto or paper – and pass it out as though it were the real thing. And then the public gets the rug pulled out from under them."
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