'Amazing': Nobel-winning economist floored as data shows how many 'suckers' Trump fleeced

Nobel Prize-winning economist turned political analyst Paul Krugman ran over the latest numbers on just how many people fell for President Donald Trump's self-enrichment scams — and came up with an astonishing figure.

This follows a New York Times report that details the losses to investors from Trump's cryptocurrency "meme coin" issued around his second inauguration.

That report estimated a loss of $3.8 billion — but more than that, Krugman noted, "even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million. That’s really amazing."

Trump himself promoted the $TRUMP coin, noted the Times report, and while around 500,000 people did profit off the trades, it “reflects a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses,” said analytics firm Nansen — a classic hallmark of so-called "pump and dump" schemes, which are prosecuted as illegal when they occur in the stock market but are harder to police in the more lightly regulated crypto world.

"If you don’t know the background, Trump used to be highly critical of cryptocurrency, saying it was worthless and a scam, which was true," noted Krugman. However, right around the 2024 election, "crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump" as he realized they could make him rich, and all of his promises to deregulate crypto meant "the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion."

That valuation has since crashed, putting Bitcoin around where it was originally at $2 trillion — which looks suspiciously like its own pump and dump, Krugman said, as Bitcoin is "a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases" other than to finance criminals and rogue states like North Korea.

It's one thing for investors to lose $3.8 billion, but $2 trillion is a completely separate universe, Krugman noted.

Pump and dump schemes go back centuries, or possibly millennia, Krugman said. This situation, however, "is on a scale we’ve never seen, and with the president of the United States in the center of it. Which I guess given everything else comes as no surprise."