Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, December 7th, and today we are talking, of course, about Jamie Diamond's incendiary comments yesterday.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord.

You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, today, like I said, we are talking about some

incendiary comments, and I'll get a little bit more into this at the end, but it very much feels to

me, like as we turn a corner into a different market mindset, where the full realization that

crypto has not died and is in fact

useful and interesting and dynamic and something that's going to be around for a long time to come,

is causing a last gasp reaction from those critics who wanted to see it perish this last cycle.

And so keep that in mind as we go through the episodes recountings of yesterday's events.

So during a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee

on Wednesday, Jamie Diamond suggested the government should shut down the crypto industry. Yes,

the J.B. Morgan Chase CEO has never been shy about dismissing crypto as useless, but this time

around, his comments veered toward calling the financial technology actively harmful. Again,

the key quote was, if I was the government, I'd close it down.

The comments came during an oversight hearing with eight executives of the largest banks and

financial institutions in the U.S. present to give testimony. Senator Elizabeth Warren had set up

the premise by discussing the current protections against illicit finance required by the Bank

Secrecy Act. She asked each of the executives whether

their institutions have systems in place to, quote, catch it, report it, and shut it down.

Diamond had pushed back slightly, noting that although J.P. Morgan has extensive systems in place,

...