Posted by Qem 2 days ago
Yeah that's because IT's HIM.
Jesus how much more proof do you people need that the Trumps themselves are looting the country.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook-rema...
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
There's at least two other belligerents in this war who get a say, as well as a large number of other countries which count as victims (everyone from Lebanon to UAE). No US decision can stop Israel and Iran from fighting.
He has operational control of the armed forces. This has never been disputed recently; he can order whatever shots he wants. The armed forces funding is in one whole pot which is guaranteed even against a "shutdown". He also has total legal immunity for official acts.
Whos gona prosecute america? Germans ar still waiting for somebody to go to jail for Dresden, and rightly so
1. The size of this market manipulation can be measured by the gap between spot or physical oil prices (which generally aren't public) and the future or paper price [2]. Historically these have tracked each other so close it was a non-issue. Now it's a huge issue;
2. Part of the gap can be attributed to the financial markets being in denial [3] and the market itself being in extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot price is significantly higher than the future price. It indiciates some sort of market dysfunction (or delusion). We saw this in the silver market last year.
All credit for this wanton insider trading goes back to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity out of thin air [4][5] and a Congress that has completely abdicated any kind of constitutional responsibility.
You might think there might be some kind of criminal prosecution or at least investigation by government agencies of the players involved. Well, sycophants and crackpots have put in charge of those agencies (eg Michael Selig of the CFTC [6]).
And if that fails, just buy a pardon [7].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955623
[2]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-interpret-wartime-oil-pric...
[3]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Reality-Finall...
[4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/supreme-co...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
[6]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/12/michael-selig-predi...
[7]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-...
Whataboutism is not useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Supplying news as fast as possibles is also the business model of Thomson Reuters.
https://www.thetradenews.com/thomson-reuters-algo-news-feed-...
No they don't. They might have duties not to leak classified information, but not fiduciary duty.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
https://fortune.com/2024/01/03/members-of-congress-profit-fr...
"Congressional Stock Trading: The Law, the Conflicts, and the Push for a Ban"
https://govfacts.org/accountability-ethics/ethics-conflicts-...
"The 2 ETFs That Track Congressional Stock Trades"
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
The insider trading on oil futures is just on much bigger scale.
People have been strung up for less than what counts as business as usual in contemporary, rotten to the core, American business & politics.
Not really. Paul Pelosi was a tech investor. If you were heavily concentrated in META, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, etc you should have crushed the S&P and Warren Buffet too.
Famously, Warren Buffet's recent outperformance mostly came from AAPL, which was <1% of his positioning when he put it on. Imagine if it had been several percent! Such were the delights of many tech investors over the last 20 years or so.
https://watcher.guru/news/congress-stock-trades-outscores-bu...
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
That's not "fiduciary duty". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Relationships
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
This kills the crab.
(investors are driven out of markets when it is obvious that they are being cheated)
> The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going.
This also kills the crab. (And most of us along the way: we're already in a limited kind of world war, the sort of thing that has a history of escalating)
Who else here is old enough to remember when Martha Stewart got jailed for insider trading?
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
That is not an example of insider trading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_of_Jeffrey_Epstein...
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-rothschild-dynasty-s...
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/epstein-files-show-...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/02/05/j...
However, if your "lie" accusation concerns their frequency in the Epstein files, the data is easy to verify. A search on the JMail database shows 6,307 hits for "Trump" compared to 7,845 for "Rothschild."
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
At my local CVS, they just started locking up the bulk candy. You don't take the the sales hit and the expense of those locking cabinets unless you have a real shrinkage problem.
They absolutely would.
Shrink has not gone up
The National Retail Federation, which publishes those numbers yearly, has stopped publishing those numbers to hide that fact.
There are real shoplifting problems but they are extremely local. Your local police department needs to stand up and do their fucking jobs to identify and take down the organized crime perpetuating it.
Like how Cloudflare wants you to think every unprotected website gets DDoSed.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.
There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.
There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.
Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too. Poor people do not benefit from stores closing, or having the stores closest to them have everything locked up.
"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.
People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.
> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.
Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).
Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.
Yes and no. Enforcement deters career criminals by increasing the cost of doing business. Improving society means fewer honest people have to turn to crime.
> insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them
Right, so career criminals. See above.
But it can and will massively help against large scale white collar crime. When you got dozens of millions of dollars in wealth, now you have the means to make more out of it (honest or not), the incentive to make more out of it - and also, a lot to lose, should they get caught.
I disagree. Career criminals also do petty crime.
I'm a fan of an idea I ran across recently. Instead of calling Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, etc the richest people in the world, we should call them the greediest.
"Greediest man in the world Elon Musk promises robotaxis" hits different than the "Richest man" version
Don't say "Billionaire Jeff Bezos does <thing>", say "Champion of Greed Jeff Bezos..."