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In this mailing:
* Lawrence Kadish: Cryptocurrency: 'Digital Gold' or 'Monopoly Money'?
* Amir Taheri: Two French Ghosts and President Macron


** Cryptocurrency: 'Digital Gold' or 'Monopoly Money'? ([link removed])
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by Lawrence Kadish • March 16, 2025 at 5:00 am
(Image source iStock/Getty Images)

As Jack and his beanstalk can tell you, there are no magic beans. Unfortunately, those who believe cryptocurrency is their ticket to enormous wealth or financial security will soon find out that they, too, have no magic beans. What they may have is Monopoly money.

With that in mind, it needs to be said that recent actions to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve opens the door to potentially serious issues.

Equally chilling is the vulnerability of cryptocurrency to hackers. Media reports reveal that North Korean hackers recently stole $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency from Bybit, described as the world's second-largest crypto exchange. One can probably assume those hackers were operating under instructions from their government.

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** Two French Ghosts and President Macron ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • March 16, 2025 at 4:00 am
* In the past two weeks... Macron has been all over the place with the alacrity of a butterfly. He has assumed that the 80-year alliance between European and American democracies is over, that NATO is dead, that Russia is determined to conquer Europe and that war -- if not World War III -- is inevitable.
* Talleyrand might have invited Macron to wait and see if the Oval Office show doesn't have a sequel that might twist the plot in another direction, now that Zelensky has opened a new dialogue with the new US administration.
* [Talleyrand] would have asked the French president to wait and see whether or not Trump attends the planned NATO summit to be held in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 24-25.
* Foch would have advised Macron not to assume that the US will sit back and watch as Russian President Vladimir Putin's army of North Koreans, Uzbeks, Chechens and Kazakhs, backed by Iranian drones, march into the Champs Élysée.
* Foch could have quipped that you can't push back a foe just by big-talk. If you really wish to pin Putin's back to the floor, then end his control of Ukrainian skies. That means giving Ukrainians some of the warplanes that EU member states own.
* Should Europe regard Russia as an eternal mortal foe or consider turning it into a tolerable neighbor -- if not a friend -- in a few years' time?

In the past two weeks, France's President Emmanuel Macron has been all over the place with the alacrity of a butterfly. He has assumed that the 80-year alliance between European and American democracies is over, that NATO is dead, that Russia is determined to conquer Europe and that war -- if not World War III -- is inevitable. Pictured: Macron meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky at the EU headquarters in Brussels on March 6, 2025. (Photo by Ludovic Marin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

As France's President Emmanuel Macron casts himself as Europe's new leader in a joust against US President Donald Trump, he might do well to have a look at two great Frenchmen who advised against haste and hubris.

The first is that paragon of diplomacy, Talleyrand, who managed to survive four regimes, including one created by a bloody revolution and another that set Europe on fire before drowning it in blood.

One day, Talleyrand was called in by an angry Napoleon, who ordered him immediately to draft a declaration of war on Austria in reaction to "insults from Vienna". The diplomat did so but, as he later recalled, kept the war declaration under his pillow until the following day, when the Emperor ordered him to forget about it as France wasn't ready for war.

Prudence was the better part of valor.

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