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True decentralized finance will never reach scale. No serious government – not even the Trump administration – will ever allow full anonymity of monetary and financial transactions, because that would be a boon for criminals, terrorists, rogue states, non-state actors, human traffickers, and assorted crooks and tax dodgers. Moreover, because digital wallets and regulated exchanges must be subjected to standard anti-money laundering and know-your-customer (AML/KYC) rules, it is not even clear that transaction costs through permissioned and private “blockchains” are any lower – especially now that traditional financial ledgers have improved with real-time settlement and various faster clearing tools. The future of money and payments will feature gradual evolution, not the revolution that crypto-grifters promised. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ latest plunge further underscores the highly volatile nature of this pseudo-asset class. As for the GENIUS Act, having set the stage for another destructive experiment in free banking, like the one that ended in tears during the 19th century, it may well be remembered as the Reckless Idiot Act. Under the law, stablecoins are not regulated as narrow banks (meaning deposits and payments are separated from riskier lending and investing), nor do they have access to the lender-of-last-resort or deposit-insurance benefits provided by central banks. Thus, all it would take to incite a panic and trigger a bank run is for a few bad apples in pseudo-libertarian US states to mis-invest their holdings or place their deposits in weak institutions like a Silicon Valley Bank. As in the 19th century, the current US approach – thanks to Trump’s venality and cluelessness, and to the crypto industry’s corrupt influence peddling – is a recipe for financial and economic instability. The recent fight between real banks and the crypto industry over the CLARITY Act is another example of Trump not understanding monetary and financial basics. The issue is not about banks wanting to keep their near-monopoly on monetary transactions. In a fractional reserve banking system, banks are involved in both payments and credit creation via the maturity transformation of short-term deposits into longer-term loans and credit. That means they provide a very valuable semi-public good. Obviously, short-term deposits don’t pay interest because they are nearly equivalent to currency. Yet the crypto industry is pushing to allow interest payments for stablecoins – directly or indirectly via exchanges – which would undermine the foundations of the banking system that we all take for granted. So, we must either radically change our financial system to separate payments from credit creation (via narrow banks for payments and new loanable funds financial institutions for credit), or prohibit stablecoins from paying interest and disintermediating banks. This is a political and financial stability issue, and few are as serious or as sensitive. Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO JP Morgan, is rightly raising the alarm about the changes the crypto industry wants, and Brian Armstrong of Coinbase could not be more wrong in nonchalantly dismissing these concerns. If Trump has any advisers who are not corrupted by crypto cash, one hopes they can teach him how the banking system works before he allows his own personal interests to destroy its foundations. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, are you listening ? Nouriel Roubini is Professor Emeritus at the Stern School of Business, NYU.