Summary
Trump’s team is considering abolishing key banking regulators, including the FDIC and OCC, with plans to consolidate their functions under the Treasury Department.
Critics warn this could undermine public trust in banking, weaken deposit insurance protections, and risk another financial crisis.
The FDIC, established during the Great Depression, played a crucial role in managing the 2023 banking crisis.
Trump allies, backed by financial industry donors, are also targeting other consumer protections, reflecting sweeping deregulatory ambitions tied to Project 2025’s proposals.
Experts fear these moves could destabilize the economy.
In my home country (we all know the economy is gonna keep getting worse so we bet against it by default) we buy foreign currency (including ironically USD), gold, electronics or other tangible assets that hold their value.
Those hold value?
At least in my country sort of (besides new models of course), because they’re all imported. It might be different in the US.
What country is that? As far as I know, anything electronic here in the U.S. tends to drop like a rock in value pretty much right at purchase time (just like cars - driving it off the lot usually results in a huge depreciation). With maybe a few exceptions, like when people are snapping up a bunch of some new item that is in short supply and reselling it for more than MSRP.
Egypt. Electronics here are tarriffed to high hell if that matters.
Edit: Okay I should probably explain a bit more. In Egypt, because we import a lot of things (you can thank government mismanagement for this), the price of the Egyptian pound against foreign currency in general and the USD specifically controls the price of a lot of goods directly and literally everything indirectly. Therefore it’s usually a good idea to solidify your money in an asset whose price will rise with the USD. Usually you wanna buy USD, but that becomes less available day by day so some people bet on goods whose price will rise with the USD, like electronics (we have no domestic electronics makers) and gold. Rising foreign currency prices (well really falling EGP prices) are the driving force of inflation here so the fact that the USD itself will fall in value because of inflation doesn’t have much effect on the final calculation.
Ah, thanks for explaining more. I’m just so used to things like consumer electronics and cars depreciating in value (with rare exceptions) nearly immediately. In some cases, I hang onto things for a long time and it’s almost like I cannot even give them away if it’s been long enough. For instance, I have some old GPUs that I can still mine (very slowly) with or use for things like Ollama and protein folding, but newer card(s) would probably be both faster and more efficient when it comes to power use. But trying to sell the old ones will probably take a while, even if I try to sell at like half the current going used price…
I used to have lots and lots of towers throughout the house - I’d build computers, then use them to learn things like networking and Linux/BSD. Over time, I would get quite a few of them built up, and in some cases, they might be 5-6 years old. I ended up giving many away on freecycle.org…