It’s absolutely a prototype for altright conspiracy theorizing.
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Bessent’s yen buy last week, $5-10 billion, is insufficient, especially if we are talking about a $20 trillion systemic risk exposure to the global financial system. We saw the margin call crisis of the yen in 2024. Should have been a wake-up, but nobody took away the punchbowl. Japan is the largest holder of US sovereign debt, $1.2 trillion, so when they dump treasuries it puts upward pressure on US interest rates.
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Trump’s money-laundering schemes were back in the news this week.
Trump worked with Russians seeking to offshore wealth throughout the 2000s and 2010s, including the star-crossed (and Epstein-adjacent) sale of a gaudy mansion to oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev in 2008. So it is interesting the cut-off point of these 2021 “concerns” coincides with Putin’s change of tactics in Ukraine. The 2013 flight of Russian money out of Cyprus to e.g. Portugal and Malta was also a big time for the Trumps in handling investments from Russia and former Soviet states.
Real estate is almost ideal for money laundering.
But only almost. The problem is that land is physical, and tends to stay in the same place in non-geophysical time-scales. It may not even be Trump who brings himself down, but somebody else caught up in shady land deals. Bank crises, even with government bail-outs, precipitate audits of bank practices. They invite scrutiny. It’s all great until the punchbowl gets taken away.
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Vance floats Abdul el Sayed being president ‘in three years’
Vice President JD Vance floated on Wednesday the possibility that in three years’ time, firebrand Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed could be sitting in the White House as commander in chief.
Vance raised the prospect of an el Sayed administration during an anti-fraud event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, arguing that Congress needs to codify stricter guidelines to prevent future scams in taxpayer-funded federal programs
“This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us,” he said. “We don’t want the next administration, whoever you know, God forbid, you’re going to have President el Sayed in three years. We don’t want him to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing when we’ve been taking out the fraudsters and saving the American people money.”
Vance made the comments only hours after el Sayed was declared the victor in Michigan’s hotly contested Democratic primary to replace Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI).
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Ginger Luckey, the wife of Matt Gaetz, has a big brother making bank off your tax dollars. Spoiler alert: Peter Thiel.
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