INSIDER CAPITALISM
Let us concentrate on describing insider capitalism on just three points: profiting from public office, inside access to the president, prediction markets (betting).
Profiting from office. In Trump’s first term, he profited from Trump hotels in Florida and Washington, D.C. Now his organization focuses on foreign hotel deals: in the Maldives, Vietnam, Serbia. Then there are licensing deals: the Trump name on clothes, fragrances, guitars, golf balls. But these are small potatoes compared with what Trump is making on cryptocurrencies, i.e. assets that have no intrinsic value but only the value that people give them by throwing money at them. In one crypto deal alone, the Trump machine took $413 million profit.
Insider access. This usually involves the big dogs of capitalism. In exchange for “splashy investment plans, ballroom donations, and old-fashioned flattery,” the big dogs get deregulation, tariff exemptions, merger approvals, and even government investment (e.g. Intel).
Prediction markets. Insider information allows “informed individuals to wager against dumb money” on practically anything from “the outcome of a basketball game, Time magazine’s person of the year or the number of times Jerome Powell says “‘tariffs’ in a press conference.”
Source: The Economist,11/22/25