MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In the U.S., some of the country's most powerful CEOs gathered at President Trump's private Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida on Wednesday. They were there to discuss the future of finance and technology. The event was hosted by the president's sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. We've called Michelle Conlin for more on this. She covers crypto and the Trump administration for Reuters. Good morning, Michelle.
MICHELLE CONLIN: Good morning.
MARTIN: So this event was called the World Liberty Forum. It was organized by a crypto business backed by the Trump family, World Liberty Policy Financial. So tell us who was there.
CONLIN: Sure. So you have, you know, crypto conferences happen all the time. And leaders from Wall Street show up and powerful people. What makes this conference different is the - and the unprecedented nature of this conference is you have a crypto exchange founded by the president which is throwing a promotional event at the president's club, while at the same time, the president is overseeing regulatory overhaul of the industry.
You had people such as the head of Goldman Sachs, the head of Franklin Templeton from Wall Street. And then at the same time, you had federal regulators and federal lawmakers there. So it was this convergence of the Trump's family business interests along with the attendance of these regulators and political appointees and lawmakers allied to the president, along with financial executives, that made this a sort of unprecedented tableau.
MARTIN: And you can't remember the last time something like this happened?
CONLIN: No. And we spoke with experts, government ethics experts to, you know, ask, is there a corollary in modern presidential history for something like this? And they characterized this as a break from what we've seen in the past in terms of past presidencies.
MARTIN: So say more about what World Liberty Financial does.
CONLIN: When the company first launched shortly before Trump won his second term, they said it was going to be a crypto exchange and that their aim was to really bring crypto into the hands of just regular people - firemen and nurses and policemen - so that the everyday person could have access to crypto. What we've seen over time since then is the company has evolved now to launch its own stable coin, which the company is billing as a way to upgrade American finance and take the dollar into the digital age.
MARTIN: So - but say more about that. Like, and so are these stable coins, in fact, available to, you know, policemen and firemen and nurses and - which is what the stated purpose of it is?
CONLIN: Sure. So they recently launched a stable coin. It's called USD1. And that stable coin has now grown to more than 5 billion in circulation. And, you know, they're hoping that it will grow even more and that instead of having, you know, the paper dollar or having to, you know, send money over Venmo or something, you know, the world will be using these stable coins to kind of be able to zap money around the world instantly and seamlessly and quickly.
MARTIN: Well, you can already zap money around the world seamlessly. And there's many, many payment platforms here. So I guess the question here is, is this basically a rival currency? It's basically a financial instrument that rivals that of national governments being run by the president's sons.
CONLIN: That's a great point. I mean, critics of this will raise that very issue that you just raised, that isn't this a threat to the dollar and dollar hegemony? I think, you know, what the Trumps have said is they want to upgrade the dollar. They want to take the dollar into the crypto digital age and that American finance can't fall behind on that path.
MARTIN: Has the White House said anything specific about this?
CONLIN: What the White House has repeatedly told us when we've asked them about this crypto exchange is they have maintained that there is absolutely no conflict of interest because the president's assets are in a trust. And that trust is managed by his children. However, you know, those assets and the more than billion dollars that we tallied last year that went into the Trump family's pockets, that will all become available to the president once he leaves office. And, of course, the meta of this, of course, is that this is all occurring against the backdrop of regulatory overhaul in Washington to ease crypto into the American finance system.
MARTIN: That's Michelle Conlin. She covers crypto and the Trump administration for Reuters. Michelle, thanks so much for sharing this reporting with us.
CONLIN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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