President Donald Trump named Mark Uyeda, a Republican member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as acting chairman of the SEC, while confirmation hearings await for Trump’s official pick as chairman, Paul Atkins.

Uyeda has been an SEC commissioner since 2022 and a member of the staff since 2006. Last month, he discussed at an AICPA & CIMA conference in Washington how the SEC is likely to pursue a more deregulatory approach during the Trump administration. The previous SEC chair, Gary Gensler, has pursued an active approach to enforcement and rulemaking, provoking opposition and a wave of lawsuits from the financial industry. A few weeks after the election, Gensler announced plans to step down on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. 

“I am honored to serve in this capacity after serving as a Commissioner since 2022, and a member of the staff since 2006,” Uyeda said in a statement Monday. “I have great respect for the knowledge, expertise and experience of the agency and its people. The SEC has a vital mission—protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation—that plays a key role in promoting innovation, jobs creation, and the American Dream.”

Last month, Trump named Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner, as a replacement for Gensler. Atkins has been a proponent of cryptocurrency, while Gensler had imposed steep penalties on companies in the crypto industry. Confirmation hearings have not yet begun for Atkinds, but he has been meeting with lawmakers privately and is expected to be confirmed.

As acting chairman, Uyeda announced Monday that he would be launching a crypto task force dedicated to developing a comprehensive and clear regulatory framework for crypto assets. The task force will be led by another Republican commissioner, Hester Peirce. 

The task force plans to collaborate with SEC staff and the public to set the SEC on a regulatory path as opposed to pursuing enforcement actions to regulate crypto “retroactively and reactively,” according to a news release.

“This undertaking will take time, patience and much hard work,” Peirce said in a statement. “It will succeed only if the Task Force has input from a wide range of investors, industry participants, academics and other interested parties. We look forward to working hand-in-hand with the public to foster a regulatory environment that protects investors, facilitates capital formation, fosters market integrity, and supports innovation.”

The task force plans to hold roundtables in the future, but in the meantime is asking for public input at [email protected].  

Accountants and other financial professionals in the U.S. are showing more signs of confidence in the economy, according to a new survey, but optimism is waning in other parts of the world.

The quarterly Global Economic Conditions Survey, released Tuesday by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and the Institute of Management Accountants, polled a group of more than 1,800 finance professionals and found a large decline in confidence in the fourth quarter of 2024 across the globe. However, economic confidence increased for the second consecutive quarter in the U.S., while plunging in Canada, the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

Confidence in Western Europe is at its weakest level since the third quarter of 2022, while U.K. confidence is at a record low, perhaps due to recent announcements of large tax increases ahead for employers in the U.K. budget. 

The report also found significant declines in confidence in the Asia Pacific region and North America, amid concerns about the Chinese economy and threatened increases in U.S. tariffs. 

Globally, there was a sharp deterioration in the Employment Index part of the survey, while, on the positive side, there were small gains in the forward-looking New Orders Index and the Capital Expenditure Index. Cost pressures no longer appear to be elevated by historical standards in most parts of the world, although Western Europe appears to be an outlier, with nearly three-fourths of respondents reporting increased costs last quarter. 

“The global economy proved quite resilient in 2024, aided by the strength of the U.S. economy,” said ACCA chief economist Jonathan Ashworth in a statement. “The greater resilience of the Global New Orders and Capital Expenditure indices would suggest that the global economy is not set to lurch downwards imminently. Nevertheless, while the Global Confidence Index can at times be volatile, its sharp decline attests to the significant nervousness among companies, given the enormous uncertainty at the current juncture. Against such a backdrop, there are significant downside risks to global growth over the coming year.”

Accountants listed their top three risk priorities at the end of 2024. Economic risks remained the highest priority for the second year in a row,, while talent scarcity, regulatory change and cybersecurity ranked much closer to the top than in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Responses in Q4 2024 showed noteworthy regional and sectoral nuances. For example, Central and Eastern Europe was the only region to rank cybersecurity as its highest risk priority, while talent scarcity was seen as the most important in the Asia Pacific region and Western Europe. South Asia and North America also stood out for keeping geopolitics among their top three risk priorities.

“Confidence in the U.S. registered a reasonable gain after a large increase previously and is now slightly above its historical average,” said Alain Mulder, senior director of Europe operations and global special projects at IMA, in a statement. “There were also improvements in the other key indicators by varying degrees. This is clearly an encouraging sign, because the U.S. is the only major engine of the global economy where activity is showing significant resilience at the present time.”

One of the proposals President Trump is considering now that he has taken office is the establishment of a U.S. government strategic Bitcoin reserve. This would seemingly function in the same way the U.S. reserves of gold and foreign currency (almost exclusively the euro and yen) do. Those reserves allow the U.S. government to hedge against exchange range risk and other global risks and to support international trade. The goal of maintaining reserves is to protect the government and U.S. citizens from global risks and high-scale volatility. A strategic Bitcoin reserve would accomplish none of those goals. It would exasperate the very things, instability and risk, that other reserves exist to protect against.

Wealth transfer from taxpayers to crypto investors

By opening a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the U.S. government would be taking risks from current cryptocurrency holders and transferring those risks to the entirety of the U.S. population while enriching those very same holders in the process. As the U.S. government purchased Bitcoin, its price would rise as the quantity demanded would be increasing while the supply of Bitcoin would remain constant. Current holders would be rewarded with increasing value. Plus, the U.S. would be buying Bitcoin at record high prices, which is the exact opposite approach any reasonable actor should take when purchasing investments. It is not even a logical decision on its face. If you are buying Bitcoin now, you have already missed the largest gains. 

That is why the crypto industry is pushing for the establishment of the reserve. They have run out of or are seeing a decline in “dumb money” and are trying to find a new way to prop up their asset class that still has zero intrinsic value and is in constant need of hype and new fads to keep or increase its value. 

The proposal is not an altruistic proposal — it is a purely self-serving one in which the industry wants to enrich itself at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer and force the U.S. government to invest in an asset at an all-time high so they can win. 

The false credibility trap

This brings us to the second reason a strategic Bitcoin reserve should be opposed — it would lend false credibility to the industry. The industry wants the U.S. government to invest in Bitcoin because it would lend credibility to an industry that has struggled to remain credible from its inception and lacks a legitimate use case outside of speculation and illicit activity. The Congressional Research Service found that Hamas, the terrorist organization, likely received over $100 million in cryptocurrency to fund its operations. Bloomberg has reported a United Nations official estimates 5% to 20% of terrorist attacks were financed by cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency crime was estimated to exceed $20 billion in 2022. Furthermore, ransomware attacks largely wouldn’t exist without cryptocurrency as dollars and bank accounts are significantly easier to trace and subject to U.S. Treasury oversight. 

This lack of legitimacy exists even before we consider high-profile crypto frauds like FTX. The industry is in drastic need of a public relations reset and it wants the U.S. government to lead the charge. Lending credibility to Bitcoin would give retail investors a false sense of security at a time when trust in institutions is at historical lows. It would be rightly viewed as a government-backed scheme for President Trump to enrich his wealthiest donors and supporters. This would further erode that trust and threaten the financial well-being of everyday taxpayers. Furthermore, imagine how it would look if the U.S. government purchased Bitcoin, and it immediately lost half or a third of its value? The headlines write themselves.

The financial implications are reason enough to oppose a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It would be a transfer of wealth to existing Bitcoin holders while transferring the risk to the U.S. taxpayer. From a credibility standpoint, Bitcoin should figure out a way to stand on its own without using the U.S. taxpayer as a crutch. Either way, if we establish a Bitcoin reserve the U.S. taxpayer loses and the wealthiest Bitcoin holders win. Heads they win; tails we lose.