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Equinor.co.uk. Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, December 5th, and this is your FT News Briefing. Donald Trump has named his pick for Wall Street's top watchdog. And South Korea's president took a massive political risk in declaring martial law, but it backfired. Plus, what links Russian spies with Irish cocaine traffickers? Well, they're both allegedly using the same crypto crime network. I'm Sonia Hudson, and here's the news you need to start your day.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Paul Atkins to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission. Atkins is a former commissioner for the agency. Trump's choice signals that the SEC will take a looser approach to regulating Wall Street and a friendlier stance on cryptocurrency. Atkins has talked before about wanting to enable crypto markets to flourish. He's also been a critic of the U.S. audit watchdog, which the SEC oversees. Industry leaders celebrated the announcement.
the CEO of the American Securities Association, said he's looking forward to working with Atkins to, quote, rebuild the public's trust and confidence in the agency. which was a not-so-subtle dig at the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler. He has issued a ton of new rules and pursued a lot of enforcement actions. It's been a wild few days in South Korea.
Conservative President Yoon Suk-yeo declared martial law in a shocking address to the nation late on Tuesday night. But then just hours later, he was forced to lift the order after Parliament voted to block it. It was a gamble by the president that has rocked the country and put his political future at risk. My colleague Christian Davies has been following the saga and he joins me now. Hi, Christian. Hello.
So we are speaking to you on Wednesday night in Seoul. What's the mood like? So this has really been a sort of lightning dash from peace and stability to feelings of... real insecurity and concern and now overwhelmingly of confusion and probably we're starting to see now growing anger at this what looks like a botched political gamble. which has backfired spectacularly on the president. So walk me through this scheme. How exactly did it work?
Yes. So President Yoon won presidential elections in 2022 by a margin of less than 1%. In Korea, the presidency and the parliament are chosen in separate elections. And so it's quite common for the president and the parliament to be controlled by different parties. And so this is the situation. We have at the moment with a left wing majority in parliament. This has left him boxed in, not only by the opposition majority, but also by his own unpopularity and a series of scandals.
and very, very little room to manoeuvre. And analysts believe that this was really an act of desperation from an acutely isolated president. The irony... is that he may well have curtailed his own presidency and possibly even sealed his own fate in terms of impeachment but of course we don't know yet if that's going to be the case What's likely to be the economic impact of the political instability for South Korea?
One of the reasons that Korean stocks have historically been quite undervalued is precisely because of this kind of political instability that South Korea has historically experienced. And so the other important backdrop... is rising concerns about South Korea's slowing economy. And on top of that, of course, more recently, there's a great deal of anxiety in the country
President-elect Donald Trump's potential trade policies, because South Korea, of course, is a famous trading nation with an export-dependent economy. And so this... Political instability is happening at a time of economic anxiety, which has contributed to a sense of drift at a time where actually the country really needs to engage in serious reform efforts.
And what happens now in the immediate aftermath of this attempt to impose martial law? Opposition parties have submitted a motion to impeach. the president but the dynamic which is not yet clear is the extent to which the street protests will sway the outcome because it's widely understood that korean democracy and Korean democratic and legal and political institutions are extremely sensitive to public opinion. This gambit was pretty roundly rejected.
by wider South Korean society. And so in many ways, although this is a depressing episode, it has also illustrated the resilience of South Korean civil society and democracy in the face of what... looks to have been a foolish action from its elected president. Christian Davies is the FT's sole bureau chief. Thanks, Christian. Thank you very much.
French Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted yesterday in a no-confidence vote. Both left and right-wing parties in Parliament banded together to approve the motion. A lot of lawmakers were unhappy with his controversial budget. It included 60 billion euros in tax rises and spending cuts to rein in the country's deficit. The vote also triggered the collapse of the government. It's the first time that's happened in France since 1962.
President Emmanuel Macron will now have to select a new prime minister. And with such a divided parliament, that will definitely be difficult. A multi-billion dollar money laundering scheme came to light yesterday. The UK's National Crime Agency has uncovered a network that used cryptocurrency to move money across borders. Drug traffickers and Russian spies were among its top clients.
The FT's Miles Johnson has been investigating how this underworld operated. He joins me now. Hi, Miles. Hi. So walk me through this network. How did it work exactly and who used it? So this network, it's a sort of two-sided network that brings together two very different types of people. So on the one hand, you have these organized criminals in Europe.
frequently cocaine traffickers who are making vast amounts of money, which builds up in physical cash. And then on the other side, you have these Russian crypto exchanges, which are often being used by so-called ransomware groups, which extort people on the internet, and they're often paid in crypto. They want to change that crypto into physical cash. So they both want kind of...
these things which are mutually beneficial. And so to do this, they used what's called a stable coin called Tether. Unlike Bitcoin, which is very volatile in price, Tether is tethered to the US dollar. Okay, that's how this network got the cash and the crypto to launder money. Who then is using this network?
So this is a sort of fascinating network where really some quite unlikely characters are sort of brought together through this money laundering scheme. So you have, according to UK's National Crime Agency, you have... cocaine traffickers you have the sort of notorious Kinahan cartel which is this Irish family which is sanctioned by the US government for being
really huge cocaine traffickers. You have Russian spies, you know, the NCA that said that this network funded Russian espionage operations. You have oligarchs. trying to buy property in the UK. So, you know, it really is this sort of quite colourful cast of characters. And do we have any indication of just how widespread these types of criminal rings using crypto could be? So in the instance of this investigation...
There have been 30 countries involved. And this is just one network. Over recent years, we have seen a sort of move to crypto, which has been... accelerated by a couple of things. Firstly, on the sort of street level criminality side, the COVID lockdowns had a big impact where it became harder to physically move cash. It became more suspicious. And then also sort of geopolitical events.
So the avalanche of Western sanctions against Russia, you know, stuff to do with Iran and non-state actors backed by Iran. That has also seen a sort of move in certain instances towards crypto. And so that is definitely something. today would be a growing trend. And, you know, Miles, the timing of this feels...
interesting because crypto is kind of back, right? You know, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump seems to have embraced it. So how do stories like this one complicate the industry's attempts to rebrand it? I think for people who are already crypto evangelists, I don't think something like this will change their opinion. I think that people who are defenders of crypto will say, look.
this is a currency and crime has taken place but crime takes place using us dollars but it does raise some more serious questions about the sort of evolving nature of global money laundering and how countries which are sanctioned by the US government are using Tether and other stablecoins to conduct activity which the US government is trying to stop.
And so I think it remains to be seen what happens with this incoming Trump administration. But maybe over time, people will become more cognizant of the fact that this network is going to be being used for stuff which really is seen to be contrary to the interests of the United States. Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the FT. Thanks, Miles. Thank you. Before we go, weather forecasts could start getting more accurate thanks to, you guessed it, artificial intelligence.
Google DeepMind has unveiled a model that outperforms traditional ones on things like temperature, wind speed, and humidity. And it's faster. We're talking eight minutes versus several hours. The new model still needs more testing on extreme weather events though. But robots won't completely take over just yet. A lot of scientists say the best forecasts come from a combination of AI and traditional physics.
You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news. Proving trust is more important than ever, especially when it comes to your security program.
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