Hello: At this writing, a bill to release all unclassified Justice department files about Jeffery Epstein is headed to President Donald Trump’s desk.

Trump, who had been friends with Epstein before he was convicted for sex crimes, had fought hard to suppress the files before abruptly switching his stance this week. Epstein died in prison in 2019.

Recent Epstein document dumps have already blown back on former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who kept up email correspondence with Epstein through his first conviction and up to his last sex trafficking arrest. Summers apologized, and said he’d withdraw from public life while keeping his teaching position at Harvard. 

We have a lot more Trump news to talk about in today’s newsletter, but first let’s talk about a pillar of his second administration and Trump's family business: Crypto. —  Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

Bitcoin has taken a bit of a beating recently. Since reaching an all-time high in early October, the OG cryptocurrency has lost about a quarter of its value and the overall crypto market is down about a trillion dollars.

Until recently, 2025 was a banner year for crypto entering the economic mainstream. Crypto exchange Coinbase joined the S&P 500, Congress passed a law allowing major banks to play with stablecoins, and even crypto holdout JP Morgan announced it would allow clients to use Bitcoin as collateral for loans.

All of those connections between the real economy and the blockchain were happening mostly when crypto was on the upswing. So what happens now? 

Longtime crypto investors, like Leigh Drogan at Starkiller Capital, are used to watching crypto prices fall off a cliff. But he said this most recent nosedive was different, because crypto had reached the top of the cliff just a second ago.

“It's the ferocity of the reversion from a good momentum, new high, straight into basically a crash,” he said.

Bitcoin true believers will tell you the cryptocurrency will ultimately become digital gold — a safe store of value against inflation and rising national debt.

Well, we still have sticky inflation and a rising national debt, but right now investors are viewing Bitcoin less like gold and more like a risky tech stock.

“There are just a lot of different things coming together at the same time that are causing investors to be scared of risk assets in general, and crypto is the risk asset of all risk assets,” Drogen said.

For you non-crypto folks out there, I know what you’re thinking: What do I care if a bunch of crypto bros lose their Lamborghini savings fund? 

Well if your 401(k) is invested in an index fund that tracks the general stock market, you probably own some stock in crypto companies.

”If there’s a downturn in those parts of the markets, the equity markets, the crypto markets, there would be some knock-on effects on spending,” said Todd Baker, a lecturer at Columbia Law School.

And that could hurt the real economy.

Cohen added military commissaries are able to bring prices down further, as much as 25% below commercial supermarkets. City-owned grocery stores were one plank of the affordability platform that helped Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani win New York City’s recent mayoral election. 

Government stores don’t have the same profit motive, the thinking goes. and they have less overhead because they operate on existing public land. Other cities have tried it, and these stores have a mixed savings record. We took a closer look.

Finally, here’s a story about consumer behavior for you to ponder this evening. The days of every item at dollar stores actually costing $1 are long gone.