There's less pressure for them to do well right out the gate, and instead, you know, things are a little bit more forgiving if they have half a year rather than, uh, you know, a quarter to report.

Yeah, and again, the SEC chair, Paul Atkins, who was nominated by Trump, he's promised to make IPOs great again, his argument being that rigid or, you know, as he would say, burdensome reporting standards have contributed to a shrinking of public markets that we've seen over the last twenty, thirty years.

What he means by that is that the, the sheer number of listed companies has shriveled massively.

A lot of people, um, who agree with Paul Atkins say that, you know, the reason why some companies are staying private for longer is because they're not obliged to do all of this, jump through all of these hoops that public companies have to.

What would need to happen in order to make this a done deal?

So I think there is a sixty-day comment period, so investors, companies, trade associations, and bodies can write into the SEC saying either, "This is a great idea and we're looking forward to it," or, "This is a terrible idea and we think you should change course." Um, so after the sixty days, the SEC staff will review those comments, finalize their recommendations, and then there'll be another vote at the SEC and then a press release after that confirming that either the, uh, that the body will move forward with this decision to slash reporting requirements or that it has opted against doing so.

And actually, we saw that as recently as this week, right?

Well, yeah.

On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the US had held productive talks with Iran.

The Iranians denied that.

But 15 minutes before his post, we noticed an unusual spike in trading activity around oil derivatives.

Investors had placed bets worth about $600 million at six forty-nine in the morning, a usually quite quiet period in the market when nothing else is happening.

That has kind of fueled suspicions that people are making suspiciously well-timed bets ahead of big White House proclamations, especially post a lot of very successful Polymarket bets on when the US might invade Iran and Venezuela.

George, what, what does this tell you about the power of the markets in Trump's second term? It seems like there's this push and pull where the markets clearly have some sway over Trump's behavior, but he also has all the power to make markets swing wildly like they are now.

So, what is going on? You know, what soured sentiment on these digital coins?

So the global cryptocurrency market hit a fresh high on October the 6th, when the total value peaked at around $4.2, $4.3 trillion.

And then it slipped a, a little over the next few days, but the selloff really intensified on October the 10th when Trump came out and threatened massive tariffs on China.

And that was at a point in time when the market had kind of assumed that the worst of the tariff back and forth had passed, so there was a big selloff.

And that selloff's kind of spilled over into the crypto ecosystem and sparked this huge selloff for a lot of the kind of mid-tier and lower-quality coins, some of which shed like half of their value within 24 hours.

And then you add on the fact that the Federal Reserve, at the end of October, said that a December rate cut might not be a foregone conclusion, and you have like all of the ingredients for a kind of profit-taking among some of the more speculative assets that have soared and had soared earlier this year.

George, how are other parts of the market doing, and is this fear that we're seeing in cryptocurrencies bleeding over to equities and bonds?

So the S&P 500 has hit almost 40 record highs this year, so it's not doing badly.

What did they tell you? Is there one, you know, story that sticks out in particular?

Everyone I spoke with had a variation of the same experience.

Um, they all were on Facebook, had seen an advert promoted by someone famous, either a TV anchor, a well-known investor, someone like that, saying, "Hey, look.

Click on this ad.

We promise to give you double digit returns over the next however many months." After clicking on that ad, they're added to WhatsApp groups and they spent often weeks of their time on these groups not, not investing any money at first, but kind of having a dialogue with the people running these group chats.

Um, and then, like, weeks later, once they trusted that they were in something that looked legitimate, they started spending their savings on buying stocks that were supposedly about to go up.

Is there anything being done to crack down on these alleged pump and dump scams and who would that be? Who's supposed to be watching over this sort of stuff?

Well, we, we spoke with Meta, who said that they are doing everything that they can to remove the adverts that people click on.