Justice Department drops investigation into Federal Reserve and Jerome Powell

Whats sad is that might actually fool him

500000% do better

It's a bit more complicated but the basic gist is that interest rates will be based on the risk-free rate plus the risk premium. The risk free rate is virtually always the US Treasury rate. So if the return for taking no risk goes up, investors will want the return for risky assets to increase, too, otherwise they're just throwing money down the drain.

They don’t, no. But the zero and even negative interest rate loans incentivized lending at incredible scales. The PE and VC companies had the ability to get their money from commercial banks at almost zero interest. And they turned around and threw money at all kinds of stuff, knowing that as first line investors even if the project went bust they could usually get their money out before their failed project went fully bankrupt. And on the ones that did, they could get an insane return on their investment. As a thought experiment, to tie all of the disparate threads together and show how all of this money sloshing around at the top of the economy made things way worse at the bottom: Zillow, Airbnb, and a company that makes property management software all got VC money. Zillow started out as just a website that brought together sellers, lenders, realtors and buyers. But then the company started buying property itself to manipulate the market and distort prices. They did this with heavy investment from VC firms in order to drive up property values. Airbnb originally started as a similar concept but for people who wanted to rent out their spare bedroom to people who didn’t want to get a wildly overpriced hotel room, or just be able to book a stay in a place where there just isn’t hotel capacity available. And then VC and PE companies got involved and started buying up houses to short term rent because they saw that people were renting out a room in their house 3-4 days a month and making enough to pay rent. The property/rental management software was basically just a backend service that allowed landlords and property managers to handle the process of vetting tenants and tracking the status of their rental units. Along the way, the service also designed some software that calculated rent, what the market rate was for an area, and whether or not a landlord was charging less than the market would bear. The software effectively allowed landlords to price fix and dramatically increase rent, at the same time that homes were being bought up by VC/PE companies to turn into airbnbs or just sit vacant to remove supply from the market and drive up prices. These things, combined with tighter government regulations on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac mortgages, meant that home buyers needed way more money as a down payment than prior to 2009, which meant they had to rent for longer. At higher prices thanks to the management software. All the while, the housing market is being distorted by Zillow and other property selling platforms and homes are being hoovered up by PE firms. All of these companies were funded through periods of insane unprofitability while they established themselves and effectively cornered their respective markets. Prior to the free money spigot and effectively zero risk VC funds, none of those companies would have been able to sustain their losses long enough to survive.

She needs somewhere to bang here boyfriend, for goodness sake

Luckily there is no case there, just like with the Southern Poverty Law Center bullshit that legal experts say is exactly as flimsy as the Comey and James cases with zero merit, badly written indictments and incorrect use of laws and statutes, besides all the spelling mistakes highlighting the incompetence of the now diminished DoJ due to all the firings and those who quit.

The interesting thing is that those sorts of laws and anti-SLAPP are usually directed at individuals or organizations who file nuisance or harassing lawsuits. There isn’t really an equivalent for the government itself doing it. And in either case, who’s going to stop them? Practically speaking, laws are only as powerful as much as they’re enforced. This administration is banking on the fact that nobody will or can stop them. They move fast and with force against opponents with their “flood the zone” strategy. If the executive is out of control, it requires Congress and the courts to stop them, but they’re either enfeebled or complicit. There’s been a number of actions the administration has taken, notably the DOGE shit last year, that were found to be illegal, yet when an agency is destroyed or swaths of workers are fired, a court can’t come back 6 months later and reinstate everything as if nothing happened. If a court found the investigations against Powell or Brennan or Comey or whoever were illegal or dismisses them months later, or even get voluntarily dropped, those targets are still out tons of money and all the other effects of their lives. And in this environment, who would spend even more money and stress to sue to recover anything when the system is clearly corrupted?

Most of the affected tankers haven't been missed at port yet. Then the supply shocks begin.