This is confusing. What does he mean by "$200 BILLION DOLLARS [sic] IN CASH." The GSEs have $147 billion in capital/retained earnings--below their statutorily required level. The GSEs also have more than $250 billion in untapped commitments from Treasury. This is a line of credit, not cash. 1/

It was pretty obvious this was where things were headed after the Supreme Court's immunity decision if Trump won in 2024. An historically terrible decision that has already aged extremely poorly.

Today, the Trump family’s crypto company applied for a banking charter. The application should be denied, but there’s realistically no way Trump-appointed regulators will do that. This charter will help the president profit from the recently passed stablecoin law. www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

Everything is being turned into financialized speculation, and the administration’s hands-off approach is going to make it very hard for future regulators to undo before a lot of people lose a lot of money.

Highly recommended! "Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt" by Iñaki Aldasoro, Sebastian Doerr, and Daniel Rees www.bis.org/publ/bisbull...

A whale went on Polymarket a few days ago & earned $400,000 correctly predicting Maduro's capture. @emmarjanssen.bsky.social had already been studying how easy it would be for White House officials to use prediction markets to self-enrich based on their own policy decisions. This is a great report.

This strikes me as an apt summary of the president’s general worldview, not just with respect to Venezuela.

It will be interesting to watch how senators try to obscure what the president is saying explicitly about his criteria for Fed chair. That Miran was allowed to serve concurrently as CEA chair and Fed governor with very little pushback is not a good sign.

Among our findings so far: Epstein repeatedly updated his will over the years and included top Wall Street figures (and Larry Summers) as his executors. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

Not sure how the government getting into the debt collection business is supposed to help this administration's approval rating on the economy and affordability.

An interesting and nuanced look at the Fed’s approach to protecting its independence. My view is that accommodation hasn’t worked for universities or law firms and it’s a risky strategy for the central bank. Some new strategies and tactics may be in order. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Great news for Oakland residents: all but one city council member voted last week to extend Flock's contract with the city. oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/o...

Interesting to revisit this take that the Binance settlement signaled crypto was succumbing to government oversight. It's obviously not the case given the Trump administration's crypto deregulation, but the FT report suggests Binance never intended to change its ways. www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

Banks and credit unions are using AI to screen borrowers and buying insurance against errors made by the AI tools. Shifting risk to insurers such as David Einhorn's Greenlight Re is helping them trim their regulatory capital requirements & loan more: www.ft.com/content/9317...

This is the ostensible *moderate* choice from the current short list of Fed chair candidates. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Highly recommended! "The Incidence of Tariffs: Rates and Reality" by Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman. "...tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs." bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/u...

When I worked in the Senate, this was a popular strategy: say you're for a popular policy but don't actually work to pass it (and at times even obstruct its passage). Problem is, politics is about more than messaging. You wind up depriving yourself of concrete legislative victories to point to.

If the White House wants observers to view the independence of its Fed chair nominee as credible, it should tell cabinet secretaries to stop doing tv appearances promising the next Fed chair is going to cut interest rates. (To say nothing of the fact it's not the chair's decision alone to make.)

SCOOP: Prosecutors proposed 3rd felony charge against NY AG Letitia James & dropped rent allegations in indictment federal grand jury in Alexandria, VA voted down last week. DOJ asked magistrate judge to seal it, but he declined. w/ @hassankanu.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

State capitalism in action: Privately, many business leaders recoil from Trump’s intrusions, just as they deplore his attacks on the Federal Reserve and on law firms and media companies that cross him. Publicly, they are mostly silent, or even supportive.

WELLS DESK, on this report: ".. Blue Owl is up to its gills in data center exposure. .. lenders are getting stricter .. data center build outs now have another form of headwind that is not related to actual infrastructure build out but rather financial complexities .." www.ft.com/content/84c1...

As anxiety over an artificial-intelligence bubble reached a fever pitch in recent months, no Wall Street bank helped the industry power past the noise like Morgan Stanley

There are more men named Kevin than there are women under consideration to be the next Fed chair.

“.. concern that the National Economic Council director is too close to the president, the sources said ..” @cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/12/15/h...

The Times looks at how Trump business interests overlap with SEC crypto cases in the second term. NYT finds that the SEC inherited 23 crypto cases, of which 14 were dropped, frozen, settled, or conceded. All of those had Trump ties. None of the remaining nine cases do www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/u...

Bloody hell, the SEC’s Caroline Crenshaw is not leaving the organisation quietly. She says there is a “rapacious” appetite to deregulate, and warns that “the darkest depths of winter still lie ahead for America’s capital markets”. www.ft.com/content/7027...

Steph tunnel shots are so back

Beaten to the punch by @mattpeterson.bsky.social, but this backs up our piece from last week about concerns among bigwigs on Wall Street about the race for Fed chair www.ft.com/content/df10...

Crypto can only survive long-term if it gets access to the publicly backed banking system. In one fell swoop, the OCC—the regulator for national banks—just approved five (5) bank charter applications by crypto companies. www.occ.gov/news-issuanc...

It is not! A “scrivener’s error” is for things like fixing typos or very minor non-material errors, not retroactively adding a deportation order that doesn’t current exist!

Every. Time. apnews.com/article/carl...

Central California is currently experiencing one of the most remarkable temperature inversions I've ever seen in this part of the world. The Central Valley remains miserably damp & chilly under dense fog layer, but it's balmily warm & sunny just 2,000ft up nearby mountain slopes!

A grand jury, for a second time, has declined to bring a new indictment against Letitia James, the New York attorney general who defeated President Donald Trump and his company in court, according to multiple sources. https://cnn.it/4ab2N4j

For people who are allegedly committed to "the rule of law," the Treasury Department's new deregulatory approach FSOC appears to be in direct conflict with the Council's actual statutory authorities.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council was created after the 2008 financial crisis to prevent future crises by spotting and addressing emerging risks. The Trump administration is ignoring that history and turning the FSOC’s mission on its head, making it into a tool for deregulation.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that…cryptocurrency bills pending in Congress are little more than window dressing whose main effect is to transfer regulation…from the hitherto most aggressive agency, the SEC.” —Jed Rakoff

To say this report is a nothingburger frankly overstates its findings. As the report notes, many of the banks' actions "specifically those relating to environmental issues, were consistent with practices the banks described in their public-facing documents." occ.gov/news-issuanc...

Is asset manager diplomacy the new asset manager capitalism?

For outgoing SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw, Trump’s deregulation of Wall Street feels a little too similar to the runup to the Great Depression. Inside her parting warning about crypto, transparency rollbacks and an understaffed SEC.

Same product. Same store. Same time. But on Instacart, different customers may see different prices. My story on a fascinating new experiment from @groundwork.bsky.social & @consumerreports.org and how the idea of a single price is breaking down in the digital age: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/b...

The administration’s argument about why the Fed is different from other agencies is that SCOTUS said so in a short, unsigned order which the gov’t isn’t challenging. Cold comfort given the president is trying to remove a Fed governor based on trumped up (pun intended) mortgage fraud allegations.

It is a truly remarkable time for the Supreme Court to decide we need *less* agency independence as the president inserts himself into all manner of regulatory decisions in furtherance of his political, personal, and financial interests.

One consequence of SCOTUS’s decision in Slaughter, the FTC case, is that the Senate electoral map creates asymmetric power. An R president is more likely to be able to fire D agency heads and confirm R replacements than for D presidents to replace R holdovers.

Oops www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Kav: Why is the Fed different? Sauer: Because you said so.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sought Donald Trump's blessing for the Warner Bros. takeover in a November meeting.

(1/4) Catch up on our recent analysis: • U.S. strikes / Venezuela • Book recommendations • Ethiopia • Trump executive actions • Supreme Court • Economic diplomacy • Civil society • Emerging technologies www.justsecurity.org/125922/diges...

FITCH: “.. The most pronounced bubble-like characteristics appear in data centers, which are experiencing record supply .. “.. Sponsors are securing sites speculatively in power-constrained metros, often commencing construction before tenants are secured.” 👀 www.fitchratings.com/research/str...

Banks are making AI data center loans and then pitching synthetic risk transfers to shift some of the risk to private credit. This is an obvious thing supervisors should be keeping an eye on, and yet I don't have much confidence they are. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...