#644
The Imitation Game
Published:
May 30, 2026
Author:
Sarah Parsons Wolter
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The smartest political bet in Washington right now is a market-neutral one. You fund a group on the left, fund a group on the right, and you come out ahead no matter who wins. The crypto industry figured this out first. Which is a bit embarrassing for Wall Street, given that hedging is their invention, and they're only now copying it.
Since the Financial Crisis, the banks’ political strategy had been to keep quiet. They were the piñata of bipartisan rage, and the smart money said play dead. Then a sector they'd spent years dismissing out-organized them. Fairshake became the biggest single-issue super PAC ever, spending $135 million across dozens of races in 2024, and got more than two dozen of its candidates onto the committees that now write crypto law. The banks noticed once it started costing them, in this year's fight over whether crypto firms can pay savers a yield on stablecoins.
So they've copied the model. The eight largest US banks have set up the American Growth Alliance. Since December, it has pushed about $100 million into two nonprofits, one leaning left and one leaning right, running ads in half a dozen states. Wall Street has decided the responsible move is to behave exactly like the upstarts it spent years lecturing.
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