Markets were generally down on November 26th due to fears of a new Covid variant. There was other market news however that was largely ignored by most US media outlets, and it has huge implications for how President Joe Biden can fight inflation in the US economy. The Indian government recently issued a legislative bulletin announcing their intent to strictly regulate crypto-currency usage in India. This comes after the Country of China has already announced that all crypto-currency transactions are illegal in China. The combination of an outright ban, and strict regulation in the world’s two largest countries -as measured by population- is a huge setback for the crypto-currency industry, and values fell sharply on November 26th, including an 8.69% drop in value for bitcoin, and a 10.43% decline for Ethereum.

In the US major market indices were down across the board on November 26th, but there was a huge difference between the size of the decline in equities markets, and the size of the decline in oil futures; the Dow-Jones fell by 2.53%, the Nasdaq fell by 2.23%, and the S&P500 fell by 2.23%, while oil futures fell by 13.04%, a decline that’s more than five times greater than what was seen in any of the equities markets indices. Now this is speculative, but the fact that oil market futures fell so much faster than the other indices suggests that oil futures prices fell partly as a result of concerns over Covid, and partly as a result of concerns over crypto-currencies. Why didn’t all of the markets fall the same amount? To purchase equities shares using Bitcoin you have to find a middle-man who will “tokenize” the transaction for you, effectively taking your bitcoin, converting it to cash, then buying it on your behalf. Oil futures on the other hand may be purchased with crypto-currencies, via exchanges like FTX.

Now, this is admittedly speculative, but there is obvious correlation and it’s worth additional observation to determine whether causation truly exists. If the use of crypto-currency to purchase energy commodity futures is in fact turning out to be a key driver of high-gas prices and therefore inflation throughout the rest of the US economy, then President Joe Biden may be able to beat inflation asking the SEC to impose regulations that ban the use of crypto-currencies for the purchase of food or energy commodity futures. Biden could test out this concept by first making an announcement that he’ll be investigating the matter, to see if that “rattles the markets”, and spurs a sell-off in oil futures that leads to lower gas prices for all Americans, and if that “rattle” proves successful, then he can ask the SEC to go ahead and begin investigating the potential impacts of such a regulation, as a means of helping to stabilize inflation and avoid unnecessary pricing pressure on American consumers.

Biden could also justify limits on use of crypto-currencies to buy energy commodities like oil and natural gas futures as a matter of national security. Several Russian malware groups are suspected of being involved in numerous ransomware attacks on US targets, including the Colonial Oil Pipeline. An unscrupulous Russian oligarch could very easily fund a ransomware operation that asked for ransoms in bitcoin, then turn around and use an investment house that accepted Bitcoin as payment to buy up oil futures, resulting in higher prices being paid for Russian oil; so that in the end he’s funding his operation by holding data of US Organizations hostage, then using the proceeds of that hacking operation to drive up oil prices so the Kremlin is able to enjoy record oil tax revenues. Of course that sounds crazy…I mean that’s as crazy as imagining the the Kremlin would spend years developing Kompromat on a perverted, extremely narcissistic real estate investor in the hope that they could then pull some strings in the entertainment world, so that he gets him his own tv show and eventually leverages that public exposure to mount a successful bid for President of the United States where he basically serves as Vladimir Putin’s loyal puppet.