Baby Trump is Having A Tantrum

[HipKat]

Trump Burns It All Down, TORCHES Fox News and Rest of the Murdoch Empire for Going ‘All In’ on ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’

Former President Donald Trump attacked numerous news outlets and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in a statement he released to his followers Thursday night.

The former president, who is largely being blamed for costing Republicans big in the midterms, again referred to DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious.” He also accused media outlets owned by the Murdoch family of colluding against him.

“NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did!” Trump wrote.

Trump continued:

Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers. Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win.

I didn’t know Adam so I said, “Let’s give it a shot, Ron.” When I Endorsed him, it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off. Years later, they were the exact words that Adam Putnam used in describing Ron’s Endorsement. He said, “I went from having it made, with no competition, to immediately getting absolutely clobbered after your Endorsement.” I then got Ron by the “Star” of the Democrat Party, Andrew Gillum (who was later revealed to be a “Crack Head”), by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one.

I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…

Trump went on to accuse DeSantis, who he has now threatened, of “playing games.”

“The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, ‘I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future,'” Trump wrote. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.”

Trump concluded:

This is just like 2015 and 2016, a Media Assault (Collusion!), when Fox News fought me to the end until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive. The Wall Street Journal loved Low Energy Jeb Bush, and a succession of other people as they rapidly disappeared from sight, finally falling in line with me after I easily knocked them out, one by one. We’re in exactly the same position now. They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win. Put America First and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

 

 

 

[SpikedLemonade]

TRUMP IS A PIECE OF SHIT

[deleted]

'Ron DeSanctimonious'?  How awesome is that?  Just when people were saying that the Aquarian has lost his fast ball he comes out with something so brilliant.   DeSantis can learn from this constructive criticism and better himself.   Thanks for posting.  

[Very Wide Right]

TDS WARNING 

[Nuke]

Trump needs to go away. Tuesday turned into more about what independents think of Trump then Biden. Trump running again for President would be a huge disaster for the Republican. He would be a sure loss vs anyone other then Biden and  after last week I don’t think he could beat Biden. 

[SpikedLemonade]

8 minutes ago, Nuke said:

Trump needs to go away. Tuesday turned into more about what independents think of Trump then Biden. Trump running again for President would be a huge disaster for the Republican. He would be a sure loss vs anyone other then Biden and  after last week I don’t think he could beat Biden. 

Good Analysis.

Let's hope Trump announces this week that he is running.

He really needs to run and LOSE again.

That way LOSERS like him that post here will have their dark diseased souls crushed again.

[HipKat]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

Trump needs to go away. Tuesday turned into more about what independents think of Trump then Biden. Trump running again for President would be a huge disaster for the Republican. He would be a sure loss vs anyone other then Biden and  after last week I don’t think he could beat Biden. 

Polling agrees, he'd lose to Biden.

Of course, losing is what Trump does best

[Very Wide Right]

1 hour ago, HipKat said:

Polling agrees, he'd lose to Biden.

Of course, losing is what Trump does best

So we have 40-year high inflation, 20% on average stock and 401K losses, an out-of-control open border, an impending recession forecasted by most leading financial experts and a president who said this week that he'll do NOTHING to curb any of these woes when asked by a reporter. I would submit to you that no matter how stellar the Republican candidate is the fact is that the democrat electorate would elect a glass of water if it meant that they could kill their own children until the 9th month, get hand outs and get high all day without incident. Any thinking person would take the Trump border policy, fiscal management, domestic energy policy and stock market-401K results back. You are the typical cut my nose off to spite my face guy at this point.

[Nuke]

15 minutes ago, Very Wide Right said:

So we have 40-year high inflation, 20% on average stock and 401K losses, an out-of-control open border, an impending recession forecasted by most leading financial experts and a president who said this week that he'll do NOTHING to curb any of these woes when asked by a reporter. I would submit to you that no matter how stellar the Republican candidate is the fact is that the democrat electorate would elect a glass of water if it meant that they could kill their own children until the 9th month, get hand outs and get high all day without incident. Any thinking person would take the Trump border policy, fiscal management, domestic energy policy and stock market-401K results back. You are the typical cut my nose off to spite my face guy at this point.

We just had an election and much to my amazement…. There are A LOT of people that just don’t care about any of that

[micknaboz]

vwr

 

LMFAO

[HipKat]

40 minutes ago, Very Wide Right said:

So we have 40-year high inflation, 20% on average stock and 401K losses, an out-of-control open border, an impending recession forecasted by most leading financial experts and a president who said this week that he'll do NOTHING to curb any of these woes when asked by a reporter. I would submit to you that no matter how stellar the Republican candidate is the fact is that the democrat electorate would elect a glass of water if it meant that they could kill their own children until the 9th month, get hand outs and get high all day without incident. Any thinking person would take the Trump border policy, fiscal management, domestic energy policy and stock market-401K results back. You are the typical cut my nose off to spite my face guy at this point.

That impending recession has been coming for a year and a half - not here. Border, not out of control any more than it ever has been in history, well except when Obama was President and net crossings were zero. Border crossings increased under Trump because of his lies about closing the borders from the caravans that never existed.

Trump had NO Fiscal responsibility. He added trillions to the deficit. Where's your outrage??

Trump Racks Up $8 Trillion In National Debt Throughout Presidency

Meanwhile, you'll ignore this, too

How Trump Caused Inflation

Quote

 

It was just one loophole. But it was big enough to swallow the global economy.

Wall Street created the loophole almost a decade ago, to escape U.S. regulation of complex financial trades related to commodities like oil and wheat. Then the Trump administration fortified the loophole.

On Tuesday, gas prices hit a record high. Today, the March Consumer Price Index is expected to show overall inflation still running above eight percent.

Republicans are blaming inflation on Pres. Joe Biden and rising wages. Democrats blame corporate price-gougers and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. There’s some truth in there: the war in Ukraine and pandemic-related supply-chain issues obviously caused price fluctuations.

But the massive, wholesale run-up of global commodity prices is out of step with the fundamentals of supply and demand, a growing number of analysts say. And functioning futures markets would be buffering against the volatility we’re seeing – and the inflation resulting from it.

In other words, if Putin throws a stone into the oil markets, well-regulated futures markets should smooth it out to a ripple. In a dysfunctional market, Wall Street blows it up into a tsunami. That’s why consumers are now underwater from rising prices on everything from gas to food to the rare minerals in their electronics.

On March 24, Public Citizen Energy Program Director Tyson Slocum wrote that, “The past two years have seen an extraordinary surge in commodities market volatility.” He cites “evidence of excessive [Wall Street] speculation.”

As Antonia Juhasz reported for The Guardian, oil supplies are actually at record highs, and so is trading. And, as Juhasz notes, industry analyst Phil Verleger has said shifts in fundamentals that once might have accounted for changes of a dollar or less per barrel are now leading to spikes of as much as $10 per barrel.

What isn’t widely understood is that this Wall Street speculation didn’t just happen. As regulators began crafting new rules based on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, Wall Street swung into action, sleuthing out loopholes they could use to smuggle their swaps and derivatives business out of regulatory jurisdictions. They succeeded.

Their solution was so obscure, however, that even Slocum hadn’t heard of it. When I explain how it worked, he says, “Well, that’s interesting…what you’ve just described to me, that seems to be a serious problem.”

That’s what regulators under Pres. Barack Obama thought, too, when they found out about it. But one month after they proposed a rule to fix it, Trump won the presidency. His appointees blocked the fix, and there’s no indication that the Biden White House is even aware of the problem (even though the Obama administration was).

That’s inflation’s dirty little secret in a nutshell. Here’s the nuts and bolts, and how Democrats can fix it.

Footnote 563

Dodd-Frank was supposed to clean up after the last Wall Street assault on the global economy, and prevent the next one. Then it was up to agencies like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to translate Dodd-Frank into functional rules by which Wall Street and its regulators would operate.

An early draft of one CFTC rule focused on international swaps trades.

Unlike futures contracts, which are ostensibly just promises to buy or sell commodities at a later date, swaps aren’t traded on one of the big commodity exchanges. Swaps are one-to-one deals. Almost all of them involve a big Wall Street or private-equity firm. And they’re essentially bets on commodity prices. (Derivatives, including swaps, are financial instruments that derive their value from something else, in this case, the price of oil or beef or coffee or…)

It’s hard to understand the importance of swaps without recognizing that almost no one trading them is actually drilling for oil or slopping Berkshire swine. Something like 90 percent of these trades are done by financial firms, which means it’s Wall Street trades — not the tiny handful of trades still made by actual hog farmers or nickel miners — that dominate the market and, therefore, drive the prices. (If you can follow the jargon, check out what Wall Street did with nickel in March).

In the case of commodity swaps, the CFTC knew that other countries had virtually nothing like Dodd-Frank. Which meant Wall Street could escape CFTC regulation of its swaps simply by trading them via overseas affiliates.

Obama had provoked an angry firestorm on the left when he put former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler in charge of the CFTC. But Gensler knew how Wall Street worked.

Swaps had only been invented (beware financial inventions!) back in the 1980s. Some traders were wary of them. So in 1992, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) made it standard practice for U.S. firms’ affiliates to back their swaps with a written guarantee that the parent company would stand behind them. Swaps trades were now safe (for Wall Street, anyway) because Wall Street was guaranteeing its affiliates making the swaps.

Gensler knew all this. And he knew the banks would use affiliates outside the U.S. to escape federal regulation. So the CFTC asserted its jurisdiction not just over Wall Street, but over every swaps trade carried out by any affiliate on the planet that was guaranteed by Wall Street. Can you see where this is going?

In an extraordinary 2015 Reuters investigation, reporter Charles Levinson revealed the inside story of how Wall Street found their loophole.

Edward Rosen was a derivatives lawyer with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. The firm had been hired by a coalition of 13 global banks to thwart the CFTC’s global ambitions.

By 2012, Wall Street’s biggest firms had been using ISDA’s boilerplate swap-guarantee forms for 20 years. But early that year, with the CFTC circulating draft policy, Rosen raised a simple question on a call with his Wall Street clients. According to Levinson, Rosen said: “What happens if you just stop guaranteeing those transactions?” That, it turned out, was the hundred-trillion-dollar question.

Wall Street pushed for the CFTC’s new policy to cover only “explicit” guarantees. In other words, Wall Street could keep trading outside CFTC jurisdiction, as long as its swaps were traded by ostensibly non-U.S. affiliates that had been guaranteed not in writing but with a wink and a nod.

By March 2012, Goldman Sachs had taken Rosen’s question to heart. The firm told clients they had to sign off on Goldman moving its swaps to London, Singapore, or wherever Goldman wanted, whenever Goldman wanted. Who’s gonna argue with Goldman Sachs when all the other big firms are all pulling similar stunts?

Gensler’s CFTC kept working on its new policy, unaware that Wall Street had already tunneled through it. On July 26, 2013, the CFTC finally issued its ”Guidance and Policy Statement.” And there, in footnote 563, the CFTC noted that its regulations wouldn’t apply if non-U.S. traders explicitly affirmed that they weren’t financially backed, or “guaranteed,” by a U.S. firm.  In other words, if a Spanish trader and a Hong Kong trader gave each other written assurances that they weren’t backed by Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, then the CFTC had no jurisdiction. They could bet each other about oil prices all day long.

It took ISDA less than four weeks to formally, but secretly, invite all its members – the biggest financial firms in the world – to waltz right through the footnote 563 loophole. On Aug. 19, 2013, the ISDA sent its members a new form letter to use for their swaps. The form let traders affirm that no one in the U.S. was guaranteeing them simply by checking a box.  Technically, it was true – U.S. firms weren’t legally obligated to back up the swaps and other bets their affiliates made. But they risked reputational damage if they didn’t. And everyone knew it

(As Securities and Exchange Commission member Kara Stein explained just a year later, explicit guarantees weren’t needed anymore. The Wall Street Journal reported that in June 2014, Stein said, “The recent financial crisis is replete with examples of firms rescuing their affiliates… [and] firms do not jettison them off to fend for themselves in times of crisis; they bail them out.”)

Just one month after ISDA members got their new boilerplate forms for de-guaranteed swaps, Gensler spoke at the ISDA’s European Conference in London, on Sept. 19, 2013.

In his remarks, Gensler took a victory lap for closing an earlier loophole, which had let traders drive up gas prices to more than – wait for it – four dollars a gallon in 2008. Gensler told the conference attendees, the world’s top derivatives traders, “These reforms will finally close what had been known in the U.S. as the ‘Enron Loophole,’ which had allowed for unregistered, multilateral swaps trading platforms.”

Some of the traders there must have been laughing at Gensler. And even after politely listening to his demolition order for the Enron Loophole, none of them appear to have told him they had already set up camp in their new loophole, footnote 563, safe from the CFTC under the tent of the ISDA’s handy form letter.

While most companies who made stuff overseas wanted to slap “Made in the USA” on their products, Wall Street was now doing the opposite.

An American citizen who lived in Greenwich, CT, and worked for a U.S. firm, could now go to their office in lower Manhattan, arrange, negotiate, and execute swaps all day long, and keep them all from the CFTC just by checking a box “assigning” the swaps to a foreign affiliate. And on top of that, a good (or bad) number of these thousands of “non-U.S.” affiliates apparently were shells, legal fictions created on paper solely to conceal the fact that their products were secretly one of the few remaining things in the world actually manufactured entirely in the U.S.A. (The ISDA and the five financial firms mentioned in this report either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.)

The Whistleblower

It’s not clear who snitched, but the CFTC found out about this in the spring of 2014. A 2018 paper published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking concluded it was “likely” that the CFTC got “tipped off.” The author of that paper was Michael Greenberger, who once ran the CFTC’s Division of Trading and Markets and then founded the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security, where he’s now the director. In a 2019 followup piece for the Journal of Business & Technology Law, Greenberger wrote that the tip-off came in May 2014. Greenberger told me he believes someone from ISDA “let the cat out of the bag.”

Either way, the CFTC was slow to respond. Greenberger wrote that the agency “at first unknowingly, and then largely unquestioningly” let Wall Street’s biggest firms keep moving swaps “overseas.” At the time, Greenberger writes, 90 percent of the swaps market was controlled by Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America.

The swaps exodus had already begun to attract the attention of business journalists. The Wall Street Journal’s Katy Burne reported in April 2014 that the four financial firms, plus Morgan Stanley, were “changing the terms” of their offshore swaps units, “so they don't get caught by U.S. regulations.”

By the time the CFTC got their tip, Gensler was gone. And it wasn’t until November 2014, Greenberger writes, that CFTC Chair Tim Massad first raised questions. The CFTC did manage to close the loophole for one type of Dodd-Frank swaps regulation. But 12 other types still had Wall Street welcome mats out.

In late 2016, the CFTC formally proposed new rules to close the footnote 563 loophole entirely. But by then it was October 18. The country was just three weeks away from President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Trump had come of age in Wall Street’s shadow, literally. His tawdry New York real-estate dealings played out in a world of mobsters, shady deals, and a steady stream of legal troubles and exposés. He was a fixture of lurid New York tabloid front pages while richer, respected, Wall Street titans appeared as line-drawn portraits in the Wall Street Journal.

Running for president, Trump pledged to do Wall Street’s bidding. His economic plan, he told Reuters in May 2016, would be “close to [a] dismantling of Dodd-Frank.” He wasn’t far off.

Enter Trump

The day Trump took office, CFTC member Chris Giancarlo took over as head of the CFTC. Giancarlo, a long-time veteran of the industry he was charged with regulating, had joined the CFTC under Obama.

It’s not that Obama chose Giancarlo for the job. But presidents can only appoint so many members of their own party to the CFTC. According to Eleanor Eagan of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks federal nominations, to appoint members of the opposite party, presidents traditionally defer to that party’s ranking senator. In Obama’s case, that was Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Giancarlo would do McConnell proud. And he took Trump’s campaign promise seriously.

It wasn’t Trump’s fault (yet), but by February 2017, there was “massive… [swaps trading] misconduct” going undetected, former CFTC enforcement chief Aitan Goelman told Reuters. But Giancarlo wanted less regulation, not more. In March 2017, Giancarlo told the International Futures Industry Conference, “The American people have entrusted the Trump Administration to turn the tide of over-regulation.”

Giancarlo told his Boca Raton audience that the CFTC’s job was to help Wall Street, not restrain it. The CFTC, he said, had to “foster open, transparent, competitive and financially sound markets in ways that best foster American economic growth and prosperity.” At that point in Giancarlo’s prepared remarks, a footnote explains that, “The President’s executive orders… require elimination of two regulations for every new one issued.”

Meaning: No way in hell would Trump’s CFTC close the footnote 563 loophole. And that fall, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made it clear he wanted the footnote 563 loophole not only to stick around, but to take off its shoes and get comfortable.

An October 2017 Treasury Department report to Trump by Mnuchin and his counselor, Craig Phillips, refers to the then-still-pending CFTC rule that would close the loophole. Mnuchin and Phillips write that the CFTC should “reconsider” trying to regulate swaps between foreign U.S. affiliates “merely on the basis that U.S.-located personnel arrange, negotiate, or execute the swap.”

Mnuchin was explicitly telling Trump that the CFTC shouldn’t regulate ostensibly non-U.S. swaps merely because of the tiny, nitpicky fact that the swaps were actually done by U.S. traders for U.S. firms on U.S. soil.

By this time, footnote 563 had totally upended commodities trading. It wasn’t yet driving wild price fluctuations, but it was Hoovering swaps trades overseas and out of regulated territory.

By as early as August 2014, the volume of U.S. swap trades in regulated markets “had plummeted,” Levinson reported. By the spring of 2015, it was enough to shift the center of gravity. Levinson writes:

“This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished.”

The trades were still happening, it turned out, but “the major banks had tweaked a few key words in swaps contracts and shifted some other trades to affiliates in London, where regulations are far more lenient.”

The shift, Levinson says, “reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks – including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley – to get around new regulations on derivatives…”

By December 2014, Levinson reported, some swaps markets had lost 95 percent of their trading volume in less than two years.

In June 2018, Greenberger’s paper came out, connecting the dots. It reads like a detective novel, albeit one written for Wall Street nerds. Spoiler alert: Footnote 563 did it.

In the latter half of 2019, the CFTC got a new chair: Trump appointee Heath Tarbert. An industry attorney, Tarbert wasn’t just a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, his most recent gig had been as an acting undersecretary at the Treasury Department — working for Mnuchin. (Bloomberg later wrote that Tarbert had a “pared-back approach to policing overseas swaps trades.”)

Not surprisingly, by the end of 2019, Tarbert had made progress on Mnuchin’s earlier recommendation. Tarbert came up with a new rule correctly interpreting what Mnuchin meant by “reconsider”: Kill the 2016 proposal to close the footnote loophole. The now-Republican-run CFTC wrote:

“The Commission is today withdrawing the 2016 Proposal. …the Commission's current views on the matters addressed in the 2016 Proposal [have] evolved since the 2016 Proposal as a result of market and regulatory developments in the swap markets and in the interest of international comity…”

That last line about “international comity” alludes to European nations threatening a swaps trade war if the CFTC asserted international jurisdiction. (Never mind how much of the European swaps market was actually U.S. shell companies.)

The two Democrats on the CFTC dissented against withdrawing the rule. One of them, Rostin Behnam, wrote that Tarbert’s new rule was coming “seemingly in response” to Mnuchin’s recommendations, which, in turn, explicitly arose from Trump’s deregulatory executive order.

What About Inflation?

Greenberger’s 2018 paper was called “Too Big to Fail” because the concern was (and still is) that these commodity swaps could cause another crash a la 2008.

Without regulators checking that U.S. firms have the money to back up their bets, and with no transparency about who’s betting how much with whom, another global economic crisis is just one domino away. But a crash is just one peril of deregulating swaps.

If a global crash is the planet-destroying meteor of swaps, inflation is the global warming of swaps. And just as you can’t quantify how much of any given storm is caused by global warming, there’s no way to tease out the exact inflationary impact of swaps on any given commodity.

But in any industry, the pros can tell when the supply-and-demand fundamentals are out of whack with the market’s price-setting. That could mean price-gouging…but in that case, how come there’s no oil company hunting for market share by undercutting their price-gouging competitors? Those undercutters don’t exist, because everyone who actually sells real, black, gooey oil is outnumbered ten-to-one by traders who’ve never seen unrefined oil, let alone sold it.

“You can’t do it,” Greenberger says, referring to undercutting. “If somebody came to the market today and said, ‘I’m going to sell my oil at $80, it won’t work because of the futures/swaps price.”

So Wall Street dominates the swaps markets, which drive the futures markets (where Wall Street also bets), which drive the spot prices (ditto). Oil companies reap a benefit, for sure, but they couldn’t buck Wall Street if they wanted to.

But if Wall Street sets the price, why run it up? Because the bigger the bet, the more money they make.

If a Wall Street trader bets that oil will hit $80 a barrel, that bet influences how other traders bet. Someone’s likely to up the ante, even if it's just by a dollar. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I win the bet,” Greenberger says. Left unchecked, it’s a one-way ratchet. “The prices are always going up until they’re finally caught.”

(As TYT reported at the start of the pandemic, those Wall Street firms secretly wanted to help oil-company clients by goosing the price of oil. How? By getting people back in offices – pre-vaccine, in the middle of a pandemic – so they’d have to buy gas to get to work.)

Greenberger told me that he was approached early this year by a Senate staffer who wanted to know whether Wall Street could be responsible for rising gas prices. Greenberger didn’t think so. After all, people were commuting and traveling again. The fundamentals of supply and demand lined up.

But by the time I spoke with Greenberger, with the same question the staffer had asked, prices had soared. And by then, Greenberger had changed his mind.

“We’ve got a war in Ukraine, but it doesn’t justify oil being at $100 [per barrel],” Greenberger says. And it’s not just oil. I ask him whether this dynamic applies to other commodities. He says, “Absolutely.”

According to Greenberger, “There is a question about how unmoored the [commodity] markets are from supply and demand,” but we can’t quantify it, because no one’s even investigating the possibility that it’s happening.

Why did I and a Senate staffer both turn to Greenberger on this question? Because he's the one who figured it out the last time Wall Street did this.

Biden’s Time

If you’re wondering why the CFTC hasn’t looked into this under Biden, you’re not alone. A CFTC source said that the CFTC can investigate fraud and manipulation, but looking into inflation is “not our remit.”

And for most of Biden’s presidency, the CFTC’s five-commissioner board hasn’t been at full strength. “The CFTC actually, this year, was without a quorum for a period,” says Eagan, who’s the research director for the Revolving Door Project’s governance team.

Biden could have had a Democrat-dominated board, as the law permits, after Tarbert left on March 5, 2021. But Biden didn’t send the Senate his first nominees until six months later, when the CFTC board was down to two commissioners.

“It took quite a while for Biden to nominate commissioners,” Eagan says. “Very often these nominations get overlooked, despite how important they are.”

She says, “The Senate moved a little bit faster in this case, but certainly not as quickly as one would have hoped.”

The Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC (because this used to be about farmers), sat on the nominations for months. The Senate confirmed Biden’s nominees more than a year after he took office.

Biden took “too long,” Slocum says. “And then the Senate [was] not acting fast enough.” Why the lack of urgency? Slocum says Biden “doesn’t have top people that understand commodity markets.” And Greenberger says, “there’s nobody on the Hill who’s really on top of this stuff.”

When Sen. Maj. Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said last month that gas prices had Democrats “picking up the hood and shining a spotlight on how these corporations price and function,” he was referring to oil companies, not financial firms.

Whether the Biden CFTC will take any action remains unclear. The CFTC declined to comment and the White House did not immediately respond to my email. Slocum is clearly frustrated and tells me part of what motivated his March letter about excessive speculation was: “Where is the Biden administration there? Why do they continue to be silent?”

Slocum adds, “Biden has been committing a lot of unforced errors, but his mishandling of higher energy prices, I mean…I’m just at a loss.”

Biden’s CFTC chair is Behnam, the Democrat appointee who dissented back in 2019, so he would seem to be aware of the problem but might not recognize its possible ties to inflation. “We’ll see what Behnam is able to do,” says Slocum, who also sits on two CFTC advisory committees.

Either way, though, because Trump’s appointees killed the 2016 proposal, the CFTC would have to start new rule-making procedures from square one.

But the CFTC can take other steps. Greenberger told me the CFTC and the Dept. of Justice could launch antitrust investigations to root out any possible collusion by financial firms individually or via ISDA.

“A true antitrust enforcer would say ISDA is a charade,” Greenberger says. The question, he says, is “Does anybody at the CFTC care? …[N]o one who is a commissioner of the CFTC, at this point, has gotten into this deeply enough to understand that.”

And even just launching investigations could curb the kind of excessive speculation that supercharges prices, Greenberger says. “[I]nvestigations by federal agencies and Congress, in and of themselves, drive down excessive speculation and sky-high prices by big bank-driven speculation,” he says. “The banks run for cover with even a sustained whiff of regulatory — and perhaps criminal investigatory — seriousness.”

One remedy Greenberger offered in his papers came in the context of the Trump years – when federal action was unlikely – but it remains viable today. State attorneys general and other officials can file suit to enforce Dodd-Frank’s provisions. No one has done so, Greenberger says, because every agency has low-hanging fruit, far better understood, to pursue with their limited resources.

The irony is that Democrats, ostensibly the party of policy wonks, appear to have largely forgotten the lessons of the Dodd-Frank fight — or aren’t listening to its veterans.

Gensler and another Democratic CFTC alum, Dan Berkovitz, have their hands full at the Securities and Exchange Commission, a much larger agency. Others are in the private sector, getting paid by the industry they once regulated.

Two heavy hitters who understood the problem publicly supported Greenberger’s report back in 2018: FDIC Vice Chair Tom Hoenig and former Fed Chair Paul Volcker. But those voices are no longer being heard. Hoenig has retired. Volcker died one year after backing Greenberger’s warning.

 

Now the facts.

Inflation down to 7.7% from 8.8%
GDP up 2.6% in Q3
Consumer spending up by 1.1 billion in Q3
Oil production at 11.6 million BPD, just under levels from pre-Covid.
Unemployment 3.7%
Job creation up  5.050 Million in 12 month period.
Stocks rebounding 3500 pts in the last 6 weeks.
Gas prices falling.

Oil prices are due to war in Ukraine and price gouging by oil companies indicated by increasing profits.
Supply shortages still affecting shelf-prices

What Is Behind the Supply Chain Disruptions?

Quote

 

 

While shortages for all manner of goods have been a hallmark of this pandemic induced recession and recovery, it is important to understand what is driving these issues. As we look for the causes of these supply chain disruptions, we find a myriad of factors. While demand for certain goods, such as semi-conductors and steel, has overwhelmed supply, overall global exports are at an all-time high. Importantly, global industries are currently producing goods at a record pace in this globalized economy. As the following chart shows, global exports for OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries collapsed with the COVID-19 induced lockdowns. However, exports quickly reversed and are now running at levels above the previous cycle trendline from 2010-2019.

 

Global exports are booming, but the capacity to ship these goods has yet to recover from the losses incurred during the global economic lockdown. For example, according to The Logistics Managers Survey, which measures U.S. transport and warehousing capacity growth and contraction, the U.S. shipping industry continues to struggle to build capacity.

We can also see an example of this by looking at the number of container ships and tankers in port and at anchor awaiting space at the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Ports on the U.S. west coast are the nearest point of entry for goods coming from Asia. According to the Marine Exchange of Southern California as of September 17th, there were a record 147 total vessels in port, at anchor, and in drift areas ships. As a result, many goods that are in demand are sitting on ships waiting to be offloaded and sent to market. This congestion may be attributed to increases in new orders and infrastructure bottlenecks, including a lack of transportation and qualified workers.

COVID-19 closures have also caused spending to deviate from services towards goods, which has intensified demand for a broad array of goods contributing to supply chain disruptions. In addition, we find that other factors, such as logistical and transport constraints, are also contributing. In effect, the record number of exports has overwhelmed transportation capacity. Eventually these issues will be worked out as demand normalizes and transport capacity increases. Until then, we expect supply chain disruptions to continue.

 

 

All these things are factual and proveable, no matter how you want to deny them.

YOU are the one with TDS, bud. You are brainwashed by your Trump-love and the Right Wing media you probably never turn off. I can totally see you being one of those people that has the News on 24/7

You need help, seriously.

 

[HipKat]

41 minutes ago, Nuke said:

We just had an election and much to my amazement…. There are A LOT of people that just don’t care about any of that

Because it's almost all propaganda for stupid people, like you

[Very Wide Right]

3 minutes ago, HipKat said:

That impending recession has been coming for a year and a half - not here. Border, not out of control any more than it ever has been in history, well except when Obama was President and net crossings were zero. Border crossings increased under Trump because of his lies about closing the borders from the caravans that never existed.

Trump had NO Fiscal responsibility. He added trillions to the deficit. Where's your outrage??

Trump Racks Up $8 Trillion In National Debt Throughout Presidency

Meanwhile, you'll ignore this, too

How Trump Caused Inflation

Now the facts.

Inflation down to 7.7% from 8.8%
GDP up 2.6% in Q3
Consumer spending up by 1.1 billion in Q3
Oil production at 11.6 million BPD, just under levels from pre-Covid.
Unemployment 3.7%
Job creation up  5.050 Million in 12 month period.
Stocks rebounding 3500 pts in the last 6 weeks.
Gas prices falling.

Oil prices are due to war in Ukraine and price gouging by oil companies indicated by increasing profits.
Supply shortages still affecting shelf-prices

What Is Behind the Supply Chain Disruptions?

All these things are factual and proveable, no matter how you want to deny them.

YOU are the one with TDS, bud. You are brainwashed by your Trump-love and the Right Wing media you probably never turn off. I can totally see you being one of those people that has the News on 24/7

You need help, seriously.

 

Cherry picking facts from short duration time frames isn't changing this country's realities. Gas prices are falling after RECORD HIGHS, what was the price when Trump left office again? Oil prices are due to Bidens foolish drilling policies PERIOD, that is why we are now begging the Saudis for more oil production, yet they gleefully gave Biden the middle finger. The rest of this ridiculous list is nothing but cherry picking like "6 week stock" increases is laughable. You may have a bright future as a propagandist my friend. You should do the Sabres next, make them a Stanley cup contender, just find a 3-game winning streak and work around that.

[212frawk]

Maybe, just maybe, ppl are sick to death of a sociopathic lying sack of shit and the constant infantile actions to keep the spotlight on him so he can feed his limitless ego.  
 

[212frawk]

Oh.  And crimes. They are done with that shit too.  
 

[HipKat]

10 minutes ago, 212frawk said:

Maybe, just maybe, ppl are sick to death of a sociopathic lying sack of shit and the constant infantile actions to keep the spotlight on him so he can feed his limitless ego.  
 

The people have spoken and they want governance and not chaos

[HipKat]

18 minutes ago, Very Wide Right said:

Cherry picking facts from short duration time frames isn't changing this country's realities. Gas prices are falling after RECORD HIGHS, what was the price when Trump left office again? Oil prices are due to Bidens foolish drilling policies PERIOD, that is why we are now begging the Saudis for more oil production, yet they gleefully gave Biden the middle finger. The rest of this ridiculous list is nothing but cherry picking like "6 week stock" increases is laughable. You may have a bright future as a propagandist my friend. You should do the Sabres next, make them a Stanley cup contender, just find a 3-game winning streak and work around that.

Record highs that resulted from COVID shutting down refineries, and then the length of time and the difficulty finding people to refire them as demand spiked from lock-downs ending.

People who stayed home to collect the extra $600 a week on Unemployment that TRUMP authorized.

But keep pushing false narratives that only exist to falsely exonerate the President, errrr ex-President that you worship

[HipKat]

Meanwhile, lol

JARED AND IVANKA SWEAR THEY HAVE NO INTENTION OF HELPING REELECT TRUMP

When Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made the decision to take jobs in her father’s administration, they clearly did so in the belief that it would be a stepping stone to bigger things. What would those bigger things be? Obviously, as two people who think hilariously highly of themselves, the list reportedly included Ivanka becoming the first female president. But even if that particular gig didn’t pan out, the pair no doubt expected their time in the White House to launch them into an even higher echelon of society. In this fantasy, Time would dispense with their “Person of the Year“ issue in order to name them “Duo of the Decade.” Major foundations would beg them to sit on their boards. When wars broke out, Kushner would be the first person four-star generals would call, starting the conversation by saying, “We knew we had to get advice from the guy who brought peace to the Middle East.” Whenever in Ivanka’s presence, world leaders would do whatever the opposite of pulling a “Who the f--k is this and why is she here?” face is. Average Joes would line up around the block just to get a glimpse of the pair, telling their families for years to come what it was like to be in the presence of American royalty.

Unfortunately for Javanka, things did not work out this way and they were basically run out of town. Obviously, though, they’d like to be accepted by important people and beloved by little ones, which is why they’ve spent their time in relative exile trying to convince the world that they want nothing to do with Donald Trump.

First, there was the anonymously sourced report in June 2021 that “the gap between Trump and his daughter and son-in-law [was growing] wider by the week.” Then there was The New York Times story, a year later, declaring that the pair had actually washed their hands of Trump months before the conclusion of his presidency. And now comes word that should Trump run for office again—and it’s looking like he will—they neither want to be there to help nor will they return to Washington should he be reelected.

Per CNN:

Senior adviser to the president is not a role Ivanka Trump wishes to resurrect. “(Ivanka) would never go back to that life,” says one of the people familiar with her thinking. “She knows it’s not something that would serve her or her family at this point.” Another person says Ivanka has been “done” with Washington “since the day she left” and that “hasn’t changed.” A third person contends if Ivanka had any interest in taking part in politics again, people would have seen her on the campaign trail, pushing candidates for the midterms. Yet she made zero appearances or public endorsements, despite requests for participation by some of those in tight races, says a person with knowledge….

Trump would also lack the presence of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, once the gatekeeper for Trump in the White House and one of the most connected and influential voices of his administration.

“Jared does not intend to join the campaign and get back involved,” says a source familiar with Kushner’s plans. CNN reached out to a spokesperson for Jared Kushner and did not receive a response.

The person added that that while Kushner would maybe offer a piece of advice here or there, “it would be a far cry from helping in the way he helped before,” saying that the former first son-in-law has “moved on” and is focused on running his private-equity firm (the one that received a $2 billion check from his good pals in the Saudi government).

Whether Jared and Ivanka would actually stay off the 2024 campaign trail obviously remains to be seen, but even if they do it’ll probably be difficult to make people forget the lowlights of their time in politics, which included shrugging off murder by bone saw and making their Secret Service detail go to extreme lengths “to find a bathroom.” In addition to, y’know, sticking by Trump ’til the very end. Both before and after that whole insurrection business!

[HipKat]

Well he is back at it-

It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault. Spending money to defeat great Republican candidates instead of backing Blake Masters and others was a big mistake. Giving 4 Trillion Dollars to the Radical Left for the Green New Deal, not Infrastructure, was an even bigger mistake. He blew the Midterms, and everyone despises him and his otherwise lovely wife, Coco Chow!
Truth Social

Nope, he is not a racist. 

[Thebowflexbody]

10 hours ago, HipKat said:

Polling agrees, he'd lose to Biden.

Of course, losing is what Trump does best

He did beat nasty Hillary...

[HipKat]

19 minutes ago, Thebowflexbody said:

He did beat nasty Hillary...

Only by the electoral college. Popular votes, he loses every time.

As he did with the Presidency, the House and the Senate

 

[Thebowflexbody]

3 minutes ago, HipKat said:

Only by the electoral college. Popular votes, he loses every time.

As he did with the Presidency, the House and the Senate

 

Uhhhhhhhh, electoral college is how Presidential elections are decided.  Ain't you heard?  Not exactly news.  Better luck next time...

 

[HipKat]

29 minutes ago, Thebowflexbody said:

Uhhhhhhhh, electoral college is how Presidential elections are decided.  Ain't you heard?  Not exactly news.  Better luck next time...

 

No need for luck, he lost his ass and his MAGA Election deniers lost their asses. 

[SpikedLemonade]

18 hours ago, HipKat said:

Polling agrees, he'd lose to Biden.

Of course, losing is what Trump does best

Just like Trump's supporters.

[SpikedLemonade]

15 hours ago, HipKat said:

Record highs that resulted from COVID shutting down refineries, and then the length of time and the difficulty finding people to refire them as demand spiked from lock-downs ending.

People who stayed home to collect the extra $600 a week on Unemployment that TRUMP authorized.

But keep pushing false narratives that only exist to falsely exonerate the President, errrr ex-President that you worship

I was NEVER involved in this.