The Shadow of What Was
“this absence of consequence is what troubles me the most”
“Every Treasury Secretary worries a little bit about who's going to show up at the five, seven, and 10-year auctions.”
The Fed Decision™
"The Fed is in the business of price-fixing.
It fixes interest rates and then tries to predict the future."
Jim Grant
Trade Deficit Widens to Record High in March
I’m told it was pre-tariff “front-loading”.
“The central point made by Mohit Mittal — Pimco’s chief investment officer for core strategies — is that this is a great time to buy bonds.”
Speaking of Pimco…
“The Fast-Approaching Digital Control Grid: A Checklist of Trump Administration Actions to Date”
“A digital control grid is an electronic network of digital telecommunication and information systems that allows individuals to be surveilled, tracked, and made subject to invasive controls applied to their financial transactions and resource use (such as electricity, food, water, transportation)—compromising, if not ending, all human rights and liberties. Control grids operate with significant data collection and A.I. to apply social credit systems that can be dictated on a highly centralized basis. A digital control grid ends financial freedom, replacing markets with technocracy—a system run by rules created and maintained centrally by “experts.””
“Musk is a true technocrat and represents the forefront of a new technocratic form of government that we are hurtling toward at light speed. However, the notion of technocratic governance is simply not on the radar screen of the MSM, various political think tanks, and Congress.”
I quoted this back in December 2023 in my now un-paywalled post, “Debaser":
The Fourth Turning: "It never seems to occur to [Neil] Howe that the American regime (and the whole Western world) could be structurally failing precisely because it has been captured by run-away progressive managerial technocracy..."
N.S. Lyons
And this, which I mentioned in July 2022’s, “War is a Racket”:
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Disclaimer:
Remember, when I quote someone, I am endorsing every single thing they have ever said, written or done.
“A lot of things that are currently happening in the digital asset/stablecoin space are are creating a lot of questions about the integrity of the space, because it starts at the top. There are an incredible number of conflicts when the leader of the free world and his family are creating companies with obvious conflicts, where the only defense is um, yes, I'm involved, but my kids are managing the trust, so therefore it's okay, and in the interim I will fire all the nonfriendly regulators. I will put regulators in place or no regulators or friendly regulators that are also involved in the same projects, that can profit from the same projects, so in other words, the grift is on. It's major league. It's a big time conflict of ethics…nobody ever thought that it would be the president of United States that would make the most money in the crypto space from doing things that were conflicted.”
I agree with the above.
Dylan Ratigan’s response, though, was interesting (he’s a liberal guy):
“I think the Trump family at this point is off to a really good start in terms of monetizing the Presidency. Now I would argue Barack Obama did a really good job monetizing the Presidency. Bill Clinton kind of invented the idea of monetizing the Presidency, and I'm sure if crypto existed in the era of Obama and Clinton, they might be perfectly happy instead of selling books or selling speeches or creating nonprofits or other ways to take backdoor money - you know, the the technology has just changed to allow the President now to take extraordinary amounts of backdoor money via crypto as opposed to Pelosi's insider trading, or Hillary Clinton's speaking fees, or Barack Obama's book sales.”
From the Youtube comments hating on Ratigan, it seems like this podcast (first time I’ve seen it) must be a rah-rah blue space (which is fine). Sosnoff lost me in his response to Ratigan. He simply refused to criticize or even really acknowledge wrongdoing by any of the people mentioned besides Trump (and felt the need to defend Bernanke for some reason. Oh, Sosnoff is a billionaire. Probably a coincidence.)
As Dylan says, it’s been a long slippery slope of Presidential grifters.
I miss Ratigan on CNBS. He was bipartisan in his rants, unlike, say, Joe Kernen on the right, or Sorkin on the left. Ratigan was one of the only ones I thought who was worth a damn on financial news back in the day (Tom Haines was also good in his way).
I’m also reminded of “The Obama Factor” from 2023, which had this brutal but dead-on take by David Garrow on the Obamas:
“What do the Obamas and their circle have in common with each other? They are Ivy League people, who ran away from whatever they came from in order to become members of the credentialed elites, whose loyalty is to the system that gives them prestige—or rather, gives prestige to their degrees, of which they are the holders. Once they pair off and reproduce under the seal of Harvard or Yale, they may find it seemly to donate money to an NGO that offers microloans to female entrepreneurs in Pakistan.
So why should Obama, the ultimate winner, carry on the charade that he’s part of a community, whatever that means, with these people? He’s happy to go on NPR and talk about meaning or Marilynne Robinson novels or whatever, to make the wine moms identify with him, so he can put one over on them. Just don’t ask him to visit the hospital when you get cancer, because he’ll be hanging out on someone’s yacht, with the other winners.”
And this gem, from David Samuels, which nails the Clintons:
“Then again, they’re all like that now. Think of the Clintons. The man from Hope. And Hillary, the great defender of children and the poor. And then its like, “Wait a minute. Did they just amass $3 billion in a private foundation, plus a private fortune of $300 or $400 million within three or four years after leaving the White House?” It’s not just the Obamas. The whole system is sick.”
“A small group of traders earned a $99.6mn windfall by buying Melania Trump’s cryptocurrency token in the minutes before it was made public, an analysis by the Financial Times has found.”
“In the two and a half minutes before her post went live on Truth Social, two dozen digital wallets bought $2.6mn of the tokens from the crypto marketplace where they had been deposited.
The traders profited when Melania Trump’s post sent the price of the tokens soaring. The wallets offloaded most of their coins rapidly, with 81 per cent of their sales taking place within 12 hours…
According to its official website, the $MELANIA coin is marketed by MKT World LLC — a Delaware-registered firm the First Lady has used for various ventures since 2021. The project’s official terms do not clarify whether MKT World is the coin’s issuer, nor how profits will be split with other entities involved. Melania Trump has not responded to requests for comment.
Hayden Davis, a 28-year-old crypto entrepreneur from Texas, has said he was involved in the launch of $MELANIA. Davis, who was listed as chief executive of Kelsier, a crypto business, was also involved in the launch of the $LIBRA memecoin. This token, which was briefly endorsed in February by Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, turned into a political scandal after a price surge and crash.
The first account to buy coins in the run-up to launch bought $40,000 of $MELANIA 141 seconds prior to launch. The account went on to sell 86 per cent of its holding within two hours, making $2.5mn.
The FT has confirmed findings by Bubblemaps, a crypto analytics platform, that this wallet was funded via an account which has previously been used in ventures involving Davis.”
The rest of this post is packed with exciting weekend beach reading, including stuff from Marvin Barth, Grant Williams, the lingering effect of the GFC (i.e., Great Depression 2), Boston, CMBS, CDS, REITs, Rome, Europe, Dan Rasmussen, a FRED chart, private-equity, TWAP orders, Melody, Kris Sidial, Danny Moses, Bethany McClean, Whitney Webb, cartels, Rite Aid, Sam Zell, buybacks, Aretha Franklin, Duane Allman, King Curtis and Jim Cramer, and a few other things.
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