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Daily Missive

The true story of how Joe Biden tried to ruin your Christmas holiday (and is still trying)

Loading ...James Hickman

January 6, 2025 • 6 minute, 31 second read


AML lawsBiden

The true story of how Joe Biden tried to ruin your Christmas holiday (and is still trying)
January 6, 2025

If you’re looking for an easy example of almost everything wrong with this government, let me introduce Exhibit A:

It started almost exactly a year ago. It was January 2, 2024, and we wrote to you about a new law that had just taken effect called the Corporate Transparency Act, or the CTA.

The CTA was easily one of the dumbest laws I had seen in years… and that’s really saying something.

Don’t forget– Section 311.2 of Title 9 of the Code of Federal Regulations makes it illegal to sell “carcasses of swine which give off a pronounced sexual odor”… but if the swine gives off a “less than pronounced sexual odor”, it can be used in a meat product.

Yeah. Well, the CTA is more ridiculous than that.

Certain politicians believe that US LLCs and corporations are being used in illegal money laundering activities. Therefore, they came up with the CTA– which requires business owners to submit a special report to the government that identifies company shareholders.

There are so many reasons why the CTA is idiotic.

First, there are already dozens and dozens of “anti-money laundering” (AML) laws, rules, and regulations on the books. Seriously, it’s an absurd amount. Banks have entire offices full of people who do nothing all day but comply with the countless AML rules.

AML rules are why it feels like getting a colonoscopy just to open up a savings account. Or why it’s so difficult to withdraw a few thousand dollars in cash from the bank.

Even crypto brokerages like Coinbase force their customers to jump through ridiculous hoops– like sending them a selfie-photo of you holding up your driver’s license– all in the name of AML compliance.

Well apparently, the existing laws haven’t done a bit of good… because, at least according to the federal government, money laundering is still a huge problem.

So rather than repeal the old, outdated, ineffective AML laws that are already on the books, they added yet another law (the CTA) to the already gargantuan pile.

What makes the CTA especially irritating is that the government already has most of this data. If, for example, you own an LLC registered in one of the fifty states, you likely report that to the IRS on either Schedule C or Form 1065.

So, the government already has the bulk of the information. Yet the CTA demands that law-abiding business owners report nearly the same information, but in a different format, to a separate agency within the Treasury Department.

This is a classic example of what’s wrong with the government: they don’t give a shit about you. They don’t care if they waste your time. They don’t even bother to think through the consequences, the economic impact, the blatant inefficiencies.

And they clearly didn’t spend any time contemplating whether the CTA would solve the money laundering problem.

I mean, seriously, does anyone honestly think that some hardened criminal who is washing illicit funds through a Delaware LLC is going to bother filing a stupid report… or if they do, that the report would genuinely reflect the company’s true beneficial owner?

Were these politicians born yesterday?!?! Talk about a bunch of naive babies. My two-year old would have known better.

The only data the CTA will collect is from honest, hard-working citizens who already provide this information to the IRS. But no one in Congress bothered to think about that… which is pretty much a reflection of how these people do business.

What’s really ironic is that the CTA only hits small and medium sized businesses. Big businesses like Apple, Google, and Bank of America are exempt. So, the same people who claim to be defenders of the little guy passed a law that specifically penalizes small business.

Bizarrely, the government itself claims that “the CTA levels the playing field for tens of millions of law-abiding small businesses across the United States.”

Come again? “Levels the playing field”?? Exactly what sport are these people playing!?! They’re actually trying to sell the CTA as some sort of benefit to small business owners. “Gee aren’t you lucky that you get to file yet another report to the federal government!!!”

The fine print, of course, is that failure to comply with the CTA can result in up to two years in prison.

Now, if you’re going to pass a law that affects “tens of millions of people” and threaten noncompliance with prison time, any decent representative government would at least make efforts to inform people about the law.

Somehow, they came up with a billion dollars for Kamala Harris campaign ads. But where was the nationwide marketing campaign about the CTA? Where was the Super Bowl commercial to ‘raise awareness’ about the compliance requirements?

Didn’t happen. And that is another example of what’s wrong with government: pass an obscure law. Don’t tell anyone about it. Expect people will just find out about it on their own. Threaten them with fines and imprisonment for violating a law that they’ve never heard of.

It’s utterly disgusting. But it reinforces the central theme– they don’t care about you. They believe that citizens exist to support the government, not the other way around.

Fortunately, a handful of Americans didn’t take the assault lying down… and they filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration.

And on December 3rd, a federal judge in Texas issued a temporary injunction, essentially suspending (for now) the compliance requirement to file the report. Victory for the little guy.

Well Joe Biden wasn’t happy with the outcome. And he couldn’t just leave it alone. So, his administration appealed the injunction to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and his team was able to get the injunction overturned.

This took place on December 23rd. Given that the original filing deadline was December 31st, Joe Biden apparently had no problem forcing US business owners to spend their holidays filing pointless reports to the federal government.

Fortunately, three days later, a different group of judges within the Fifth Circuit reinstated the injunction, i.e. suspended the filing requirement once again.

But Joe Biden still couldn’t leave it alone. So– on New Year’s Eve– Biden’s Solicitor General filed another appeal to the US Supreme Court. What a way to bring in 2025!

So basically, Joe Biden’s team spent the holidays trying to make Americans spend their holidays filling out useless compliance forms.

What an asshole.

Fortunately, as of right now, the injunction is still valid, i.e. there is no requirement to file… and the Supreme Court may simply ignore Joe Biden’s request altogether.

But the whole saga represents another key problem with government: the rules are always changing.

They passed the CTA. They didn’t tell anyone. But there was a requirement to comply. Then the requirement was suspended. Then reinstated. Then suspended again. And now Joe Biden is trying to reinstate it again before he gets flushed down the toilet bowl of history.

How is anyone supposed to keep up with the rules (including the ones which carry fines and imprisonment) if they’re always changing!?

America is full of enormous challenges. But as we have been discussing for quite some time, it’s not hard to understand how to fix them. For starters, stop doing idiotic, destructive things.

And this whole CTA affair is a perfect example of what NOT to do to make the country a much more prosperous place.

It really shouldn’t be hard to move the needle in the right direction. Time will tell… and while optimism is in order, it still absolutely makes sense to have a Plan B.

To your freedom,

 

James Hickman
Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC

Beware: The Permanent Underclass

October 3, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

Back in the Global Financial Crisis (2008), we recall mass layoffs were driving desperation.

Today, unemployment is relatively low, if climbing.

Affordability is much more of an issue. Food, rent, healthcare, and childcare are all rising faster than wages. Households aren’t jobless; they’re stretched. Job “quits” are at crisis-level lows.

In addition to the top 10% of earners, consumer spending is still strong. Not necessarily because of prosperity, but because households are taking extra shifts, hustling gigs, working late into the night, and using credit cards. The trends hold up demand but hollow out savings.

It’s the quiet form of financial repression. In an era of fiscal dominance, savers see easy returns clipped, workers stretch hours just to stay even, and wealth slips upward into assets while daily life grows harder to afford.

Beware: The Permanent Underclass
Is Tokenization Inevitable?

October 3, 2025 • Ian King

Last month, Nasdaq asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for approval to let tokenized stocks and ETFs trade on its main exchange.

If approved, these digital shares would sit side-by-side with traditional equities. Meaning, they would fall under the same U.S. securities laws that govern $50 trillion in annual equity trades.

And this rollout could begin as early as 2026, once the Depository Trust Company — the clearinghouse that settles every U.S. stock trade — updates its systems to handle digital tokens.

If it happens, this won’t be a small tweak to the machinery of finance. It’ll represent the first major step toward moving Wall Street onto blockchain infrastructure.

And we don’t have to imagine what it might look like…

Because it’s already happening.

Is Tokenization Inevitable?
The Myth of Productivity, Again

October 3, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

The launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 ended the pandemic-era bear market in stocks. The AI story has been the predominant narrative for three years now. The indexes on Wall Street are at historic highs, surpassing 2000, 1968, 1929… the last three tech-inspired bubbles.

But ChatGPT did something else. It brought the idea of “productivity gains” back into the economic conversation.

The Myth of Productivity, Again
The Stablecoin Standard

October 2, 2025 • Mark Jeftovic

Stablecoins have proceeded rapidly from being a grey zone through which capital would traverse as it moved into or out of the crypto-economy, to becoming an extension, if not a nascent pillar, of the fiat money system itself.

Coinbase Head of Institutional Research David Duong sees the market cap for stables hitting $1/2 trillion by 2028 (which would be somewhere between a 4X and 5X from where we are now).

Demetri Kofinas recently interviewed Charles Calomiris, former Chief Economist at the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and it was eye-opening to hear someone of his stature speak so matter-of-factly about how the structure of the banking system is evolving in realtime.

The Stablecoin Standard