Warnings Signs Multiply Ahead of Pivotal Fed Interest Rates Meeting

But while many news publishers are struggling, VandeHei notes that older (including The Times and The Wall Street Journal) and newer media companies (like The Information, Punchbowl and the upcoming Semafor) are poised to do well by marrying good journalism with things readers want. “If you can build a relationship with an audience and be sane with business economics, you can succeed,” he said.

New cops on the crypto beat

The Justice Department just turned 150 federal prosecutors nationwide into crypto cops. This network — announced Friday along with a report mandated by an executive order from President Biden in March — includes fraud, tax, environment and other specialists, along with the obvious tech types, said the director of crypto enforcement, Eun Young Choi. “One thing that really stood out to us about digital asset crime is that, unlike other cases, these are really multidisciplinary and international,” she told DealBook.

The Darknet and other gray areas are in focus. Illegal markets for drugs, child sexual abuse material, firearms, fake and stolen information, and hacking are “a significant focus” of the department’s efforts. Crypto use has grown to billions annually on the Darknet, Choi says. And new unregulated markets, like decentralized finance, or DeFi, platforms, have popped up in more accessible areas of the internet that also pose investor risks and consumer protection issues.

“DeFi is an area of particular concern,” Choi said. Potentially complicating the department’s efforts is the fact that DeFi is still loosely defined, particularly as it pertains to what makes these platforms or products decentralized. DeFi champions often say that code, and not humans, are in control of these platforms, and therefore developers should be mostly out of police reach. Choi disagrees. “Code is like any other tool. There is a person behind it.”

The issue has sparked a feud among crypto insiders. “Decentralization is a spectrum, and where the line is drawn between centralized and decentralized is a policy choice that Congress will eventually have to make,” said Miller Whitehouse-Levine of the DeFi Education Fund lobbying association.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/dealbook/federal-reserve-interest-rates-powell-recession.html