#Federal Reserve Chair Powell

[notayesmanseconomics]

The path for interest-rates in 2025 was raised quite a bit by the Federal Reserve last night

Last night or evening if you prefer saw rather a change in expected policy from the US Federal Reserve and it immediately echoed around financial markets. Indian rupee falls to a record low of 85 per US dollar ( @business) Brazilian Real plunges to its weakest level against the U.S. Dollar in history. ( @barchart) BREAKING : Japan Japanese Yen getting hammered this morning as it falls through the…

[breakingfirst]

Jerome Powell says, "NO." He WILL NOT leave if Trump asks him to 🤔⬆️

[bitcoinversus]

Beef with the Chief: Federal Chair Jerome Powell Says Donald Trump Can’t Fire Him

"The Federal Reserve Act stipulates that Board members, including [Fed Chair Jerome Powell], can only be removed "for cause," a term generally interpreted to mean misconduct or incapacity, not policy disagreements."

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has firmly stated that he cannot be dismissed or demoted by the President without cause, emphasizing the legal protections afforded to his position. During a recent press conference, Powell responded to inquiries about potential presidential interference by asserting, “Not permitted under the law.” This declaration underscores the Federal Reserve’s…

[36crypto]

Federal Reserve Signals Imminent Rate Cut Amid Economic Shifts

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell states that the central bank is ready to perform a long-discussed rate cut this September. At a recent press conference, Powell explained that the economy is gradually getting closer to the conditions requiring a change, including cutting the current policy rate. He further stressed the Fed’s approach: “In that, we will be data dependent, but not data point…

[badbirdnews]

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell may have intentionally sabotaged the Trump economic boom.

The O’Keefe Media Group recently released an undercover video where a lead economist for the Federal Reserve confessed to Powell’s alleged motive. According to this economist, Powell was not only a Trump-hater but also had a personal agenda of being remembered in history for undermining President Donald Trump by raising rates prematurely.

This revelation has sparked outrage among Trump supporters who have long believed that the economy could have reached even greater heights if it wasn’t for the actions of the Federal Reserve. Many argue that Powell’s decision to raise rates too soon stifled economic growth and hindered the progress made during the Trump administration.

The role of the Federal Reserve in shaping the economy is crucial, and any deliberate attempt to manipulate it for personal or political gain is highly unethical. This revelation raises serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of Jerome Powell as the head of the Federal Reserve. It also highlights the need for transparency and accountability within such influential institutions.

It is essential that any decisions made by the Federal Reserve or any other governing body are based on sound economic principles rather than personal biases or political agendas. The American people deserve an economy that is driven by objective analysis and informed decision-making rather than partisan interests. In 2018, as the DOW continued to reach all-time highs, consumer confidence hit all-time highs, and unemployment hit its lowest rate in 50 years under President Trump.

[robertreich]

Debunking “No One Wants To Work Anymore” 

I keep hearing "no one wants to work anymore."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate America’s biggest lobbying group, claims there are over 10 million job openings right now in the US for which employers can’t find workers.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell says the U.S. is dealing with a “structural labor shortage” that won’t be resolved anytime soon.

But here’s the truth: there is no labor shortage.

There is a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.

When a problem is wrongly described, the solutions posed often turn out to be equally wrong.

For most Americans, real inflation-adjusted wages continue to drop. Any pay increases workers may have earned in the past few years have actually been pay cuts, because wages have lagged behind the rising costs of basic necessities — like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare.

You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.

So, what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?

Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.

Many corporations are raking it in right now, they can clearly afford to.

Of course Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the so-called “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.

But the Fed increasing interest rates to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting desperately-needed raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women and people of color.

Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.

Rubbish. Most unemployed people are already hard up.

Pandemic benefits are long over, and even before COVID, America’s unemployment system was already the least generous of any rich nation.

Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument holds water only if you don’t give a damn about workers.

Sure…you could eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever it demands.

But do this, and we’ll end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s economy.

Look: If we want more people to take jobs — AND we wish to live in a moral society where people can maintain decent lives — the answer is to pay people more.

Instead of saying “no one wants to work anymore,” we should be saying, “no one wants to be exploited anymore.”

[misfitwashere]

October 15, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 16

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fairarticle, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

—

[bighermie]

WATCH: Federal Reserve Principal Economist who Reveals to O'Keefe Media Group that Fed Chair Jerome Powell "Wants to be Remembered in History" for Undermining Trump, Says Conservatives are "Dumb" and Discriminated Against at Federal Reserve | The Gateway Pundit | by Jordan Conradson

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 15, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 16, 2024

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[simply-ivanka]

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told a House panel "there will be bank failures" due to losses from commercial real estate loans.

But Biden says the economy is strong?

[comeonamericawakeup]

Immigration is a gift to the economy, said Catherine Rampell. Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released updated 10-year economic and budget forecasts. "The numbers look significantly better than they did a year earlier," and a surge in immigration that began in 2022 "is a key reason." The CBO found that immigrant-driven revisions to the size of the labor force will boost GDP by $7 trillion and improve revenues by $1 trillion between 2023 and 2034. That's a "multitrillion-dollar windfall for both the overall economy and federal tax coffers."

Today's immigrants are mostly young, putting them at working age at a time when the majority of our native-born population is aging and nearing retirement. They typically have "higher entrepreneurship rates," and offer "disproportionate contributions to science, research, and innovation." Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told 60 Minutes recently that he credits the strength of the U.S. labor market to "immigration returning to levels that were more typical" before the pandemic closed our borders.

It's true that the U.S. has done a terrible job of managing the flow of immigrants from the southern border. Handled right, though immigration is not the "invasion" of GOP scaremongering, but a chance to "harness the energies and talents" of the world.

THE WEEK February 23, 2024

[sataniccapitalist]

“Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said he would not step down if Trump asked and that it is “not permitted under law” for the White House to force him out… Interest rates on US debt have already jumped this week…”

[talkingpointsusa]

Trump Ally Laura Loomer spins baseless conspiracy theories about Tim Walz having ties to ISIS

Laura Loomer is a person who sucks. She's essentially a self-described "proud Islamophobe" and white nationalist whose whole schtick is calling everybody she doesn't like ISIS. She believes that the Democrats can control the weather and has a bizarre obsession with Kamala Harris’ race.

Despite the fact that this person is clearly extremely fringe and has a belief system not that far out of step with the Neo-Nazi movement, she also has a scary amount of influence on the right having scored interviews with prominent GOP politicians and celebrities like Kari Lake, J,D. Vance, and Nancy Mace. As a result I think it is worth talking about who Loomer is, what she’s all about, and how pretty much everything she says is bullshit. Unfortunately for my sanity, that process involves me watching Laura Loomer. Oh well, lets see what deranged thing she's lying about this time.

TW: Loomer's whole "thing" is basically being an Islamophobe and that carries on in this episode. If you're not comfortable with that, I don't blame you, I'm not either which is why I'm debunking and countering this bullshit while also showing how close it truly is to the modern Republican Party.

21:25, Laura Loomer: "Good evening and welcome to episode 65 of Loomer Unleashed, I'm your host Laura Loomer. If you had any doubts that a Kamala Harris presidency would be anything but a total disaster for the United States of America than the past few days ought to set you free. Yesterday, stock markets all around the world posted one of their worst days ever as investors fear that America is headed for a recession."

On Monday the stock market plummeted after the release of a weaker than expected jobs report coupled with the Federal Reserves decision last week not to lower interest rates, a decision that has been panned by multiple economists who are now suggesting that the Fed make an emergency rate-cut. The current chair of the Federal Reserve is a man by the name of Jerome Powell who was appointed by the Trump Administration. So, while Trump and his sycophants want you to believe that the chaos on Monday was a Kamala crash it was more of a Donald drop.

This crash had nothing to do with Kamala Harris but that didn't stop key figures on the right like Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and now Laura Loomer from blaming the crash on the vice-president. In Loomer's case this is particularly embarrassing since she posted this episode on August 6th...the day that the stock market rebounded and investors started to regain some of their losses. Oops, bad timing there.

22:12, Laura Loomer: "Lets make one thing perfectly clear, even though Joe Biden is currently 'the president' (her quotes not mine) we all know that he has not really been in control of the government and the decision making if that couldn't be more obvious to all of you."

No proof, just vibes. Isn't it interesting how far-right media never offers up any concrete evidence outside of "Well, I saw this thing through my distorted worldview and here's the vibe I got!"

But she did put forward that absolutely ridiculous statement with a purpose. Here's where she's going with that line of thinking - this is really dumb and gets contradicted by her multiple times over the course of this episode.

22:30, Laura Loomer: "That means that for the past few years Kamala Harris has already been, in a large part, running our nation. That means that all of the problems over the past four years can be hung around her neck."

I love how they basically have to make fan-fiction up because they don't really have anything on Harris and Walz and got blindsided by Harris deciding to run in the first place. It's been absolutely hilarious to watch.

"Wait guys! Ignore everything that I've been saying for the past four years, Kamala Harris was actually the president this whole time which means all that stuff we made up about Biden actually applies to her! Yeah...that's it."

23:38, Laura Loomer: "Even though the market had been doing quite well prior and has now recovered slightly, just a little, well Monday's disaster is a sign of volatility. And what exactly does this volatility indicate? It indicates uncertainty, massive uncertainty, a lack of confidence, and underlying problems."

Interesting way to try and reconcile that. "Oh yeah, the stock market was doing really well before Monday and has recovered now but uh....the Democrats are still responsible for this." It's almost like there's something that caused such a sudden reaction on the market that Laura isn't telling her audience.

In case you're wondering, she never brings up the Fed or the jobs report in this episode because why would she? It goes against her bizarre narrative that Kamala Harris, who isn't even the president yet, was somehow responsible for a global stock market downturn.

25:12, Laura Loomer: "If this is how Harris's economy has been while she's VP imagine how much worse its going to be when she has full control of the reigns as president, god forbid."

Wait, isn't Harris already the president? You know, back during that long since passed wistful period of three minutes ago when Biden had dementia and Kamala was secretly running the country.

There's a certain level of turning your brain off required to uncritically consume shows like Charlie Kirk and Laura Loomer. If you pay attention to them you'll start to notice that these guys contradict themselves constantly. They have a spread of talking points and they just say shit for two hours without actually thinking about what they're saying beyond "This thing can piss off my audience at this exact moment". If you don't notice these direct contradiction when watching this kind of media, you aren't paying attention.

25:50, Laura Loomer: "The same is true of the immigration crisis which has been at all time lows when President Trump left office partly as a result of COVID."

During the pandemic, undocumented immigrants crossing the border dropped significantly because, well there was a pandemic. However, in the last four months of the Trump presidency encounters at the Southern Border were 14.7% higher than the first month he was in office. This pandemic number was also not an all time low, that would be in April 2017 shortly after Trump took office and before another large spike.

The notion that the Biden-Administration has some sort of "shadowy open border policy" is a total myth that's deeply rooted in white nationalism, as we'll see later on in this post when Loomer starts peddling white nationalism. As a matter of fact, the Biden Administration has increased spending on the border from Donald Trump's $20.9 billion to $23.5 billion. Unfortunately, this also means that many of the human rights abuses at the border that were carried out in the Trump years also carried on during the Biden years which is policy that I obviously don't support.

When people like Laura Loomer talk about "the open boarder" they are essentially admitting that they don't want anybody coming in whether illegally or legally. That is because these people want a white nation, something which Loomer has literally admitted out loud in the past. It's a very thinly disguised dog whistle that you see on every spectrum of the right-wing media ecosystem, from more fringe outlets like Laura Loomer and Infowars all the way to more "mainstream" ones like Daily Wire and FOX News.

26:19, Laura Loomer: "Once here, the Biden/Harris Administration has resorting to simply letting these invaders go free or worse, they have been shipping them to small towns across the country."

Fear-mongering against "the other" is a hallmark of fascist propaganda and it's no exception here. This is all just great replacement theory shit that has nothing backing it up. Notice how nobody ever shows a picture or video of these Biden Harris vehicles shipping migrants to small towns.

This isn't just about migrants at the Southern Border, it's about legal immigration too. The Laura Loomers of the world don't want any immigration unless the people immigrating are white and even then only white heterosexual Christians. Don't believe me? Here's Loomer going on a bigoted tirade against Somali immigrants in Minnesota.

26:30, Laura Loomer: "In fact, Minnesota the state where Kamala's VP pick Tim Walz is governor is a perfect example of how this invader resettlement has gone terribly wrong. A lot of people refer to Minnesota as Little Mogadishu, a little spin-off off of Somalia because of the massive population of Somali Muslims who refuse to assimilate in Minnesota."

What she's essentially saying is that Islamic communities that consist of Somali-American's who are here legally, some even second generation immigrants as the Somali immigration into Minnesota began during the beginning of the Somali Civil War in the 1990's that led to thousands of refugees leaving Somalia and immigrating to the United States, are still invaders. This is because in Loomer's eyes anybody who isn't white is inherently an "invader". It's naked racism in its purest form.

You would think that this kind of rhetoric is fringe on the right but one of the reasons that I'm covering Loomer here is that it really isn't. Touch this up a little, put a bit of a mask on it, and it could easily be the opening monologue on something like The Matt Walsh Show or The Charlie Kirk Show.

And you know what? Mainstream Republicans have embraced Loomer despite this clear white-nationalist rhetoric. Before he was vice-president, J.D. Vance appeared on Loomers show to raise campaign funds. Loomer was a white nationalist and extremist back then too, nothings changed. Donald Trump himself has also embraced Loomer, referring to her as "great Laura Loomer" in a speech and Loomer has rode with Trump aboard his private jet in the past. Donald Trump Jr has also floated Loomer for a spot in the Trump administration if Trump gets elected for a second term. So, when I show you this next quote about Somali Muslims let it be known that this is what the Trump Administration explicitly endorses through their continued association and praise of Loomer.

26:55, Laura Loomer: "There, these people leech off the system, they breed like rabbits, they disrupt the natural communities and they commit violent crimes without contributing anything of value to our society."

I hope J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are proud of what they're endorsing when they associate with this woman. Don't get it twisted, this talk of breeding wouldn't be out of place in a Neo-Nazi pamphlet and it's being peddled by a key ally of the current person that the GOP is running for president. This is not fringe anymore, it's what the GOP explicitly endorses and that should be scary as fuck to you!

If you are a more moderate Trump supporter, you know someone who maybe catches FOX News from time to time and is concerned about the economy and whatnot, first of all welcome to the blog! I actively welcome you to read my back catalogue and see how the stuff you've been consuming is total bunk consisting of half-baked lies. But second of all, your candidate endorses this! Take a look at this stuff, compare it to what Nazi's say on a regular basis, look at your candidate embracing this person, and ask yourself; is this the kind of thing that I support?

27:47, Laura Loomer: "Governor Walz has been in office since 2019. While BLM ran rampant in his state burning entire sections of Minneapolis to the ground following the overdose death of career criminal thug George Floyd, Walz didn't just sit idly by, he actively encouraged it."

As we saw when mainstream right-wing commentators like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson, more proof that these guys are all peddling the same rhetoric by the way, pushed this exact same lie about George Floyd, it's complete bullshit.

The autopsy report released by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, while it did show that Floyd hand fentanyl in his system, ruled that Floyd died from “cardiopulmonary arrest from law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression."

We literally saw Floyd get murdered on camera and there are mountains of testimonies from the Chauvin trial showing that it was absolutely Chauvin's fault that Floyd was killed. Not that it matters when you're a racist who's overly concerned with breeding that's also actively using racist dog-whistles like calling a black man a "thug".

29:04, Laura Loomer: "This guy is clearly a loony left-wing radical dressed up as an old white grandpa. He wants you to think that he's your typical old-white grandpa and he's very dangerous. He's basically a less senile and more radical Joe Biden."

While it is definitely important to point out how extreme Loomer is, it's also important to point out that she's also a complete dumbass.

Ah yes, famous left-wing radical *checks notes* Joe Biden. We've lived through four years of the Democrats and none of the stuff that Loomer said would happen happened. She's just somebody who's good at drumming up fear and rage in racists without providing actual evidence.

29:47, Laura Loomer: "He certainly isn't going to be driving anybody to go vote. Really, lets just think about this for a second. What young voter or minority is looking at Tim Walz, an old white man, and is saying 'yes, that's our guy. I'm in. He's going to represent me.'"

The polls say that voters like Tim Walz more the J.D. Vance but I guess if you want to live in fantasyland go right ahead.

30:16, Laura Loomer: "And so, as the election approaches President Trump needs to be asking himself 'How would a Kamala Harris presidency be any different from the past four years?' She's been running the White House already."

Kamala Harris: She's more extreme than Biden and will turn America into a communist hellhole....also she's been running the White House already and if she wins it'll just be more of the same. None of this makes any sense, even internally.

Laura does an ad that's basically her playing clips of Alex Jones praising her and some clips of her dumb attention starved PR stunt bullshit like running around in a stereotypical "Mexican" outfit to protest immigration. You know, for someone who is pretending to be a journalist that has this breaking proof that the Democrats have ties to ISIS, Laura is really just stretching to waste time here. She comes back, talks more about the stock market, and contradicts herself again.

33:52, Laura Loomer: "We can look at some of these posts, him calling this crash yesterday the Kamala crash and that's what exactly everybody needs to be referring to it as because this is exactly what we're going to see if Kamala Harris gets into the White House for another four years and she is just as much involved with our policies in this country as he is."

Is Kamala the president right now or isn't she? Make up your mind Laura!

The thing with Laura Loomer's show is that half of it is just the "Riffing About Trump's Truth Social Posts and Twitter Show". She continues down this route of riffing on Trump's Truth Social posts and I decided to open up the stopwatch app on my phone and time it.

Laura's Truth Social commentary clocks in at around a minute and fifty five seconds give or take the few seconds it took me to open up her Rumble page after I hit go on the stopwatch. It's just two whole minutes of reading tweets and "The Kamala crash, Trump called it the Kamala crash!" with absolutely no substance to it.

So, she goes on to talk about the guy from Pakistan who got arrested for plotting to assassinate key government officials and honestly covering this wasn't a smart move on her part at all. I'll explain why in a minute but lets hear her out.

40:46, Laura Loomer: "And just today actually, we saw how grave the national security issue is when the DOJ announced that a Pakistani national has been arrested and charged for plotting to assassinate president Trump."

This story is about a Pakistani man named Asif Merchant with alleged ties to Iran who was arrested last month for plotting to carry out the assassinations of key government figures including potentially Donald Trump. Court documents actually did not specify who this guy was planning to assassinate however a threat on Trump's life from Iran due to the killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 led to many people speculating that the person that this guy had in mind was Trump.

First of all, we just don't know a lot about this story. While it is likely that Merchant might have had Trump on his list and many sources have backed that claim up, those same sources are saying that this guy had targets from both sides of the political aisle in mind. There's a lot of unknown here and its all very messy meaning that it's Loomers responsibility as somebody calling herself a journalist to be really careful about what she says while covering this. In that respect she absolutely failed.

Second of all, the fact that Merchant was arrested and charged blows everything that Loomer was saying earlier out of the water. I thought that the Biden Administration was just letting criminals run rampant and not charging anybody. Guess that's no longer something that's happening. I also thought that the Democrats wanted to kill Trump. Dumbasses like Laura Loomer have been speculating that the Democrats intentionally let the Trump shooting in Butler PA happen for weeks. But I guess the evil Biden DOJ that I've been hearing about for months now just arrested and convicted this guy that may have been planning to assassinate Trump, thus foiling their evil plot, for....reasons I guess.

Laura Loomer absolutely should not have covered this story. I get that it's low-hanging fruit in MAGA-world right now but its very existence messes up this narrative that MAGA media has been pushing for what feels like centuries now about Biden just letting people run rampant and the Democrats allowing the Trump assassination attempt to happen.

So, Loomer finds out that Merchant contacted a confidential informant for the FBI and of course gets the story completely wrong. What actually happened was that Merchant landed in the states and contacted a person who he felt would help him carry out his plans. After Merchant contacted this guy, his contact immediately called law enforcement and became a confidential informant for the FBI that helped the authorities eventually bring Merchant in.

The way that Loomer seems to interpret this part of the story is "Oh, the FBI contacted Merchant and was giving him his marching orders" which doesn't even make any sense with the facts that Loomer presented! If the FBI wanted this guy to kill Trump and was giving him his marching orders, why would they then arrest and charge this guy for doing what they wanted him to do in the first place? It makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever.

42:15, Laura Loomer: "Ok, so the FBI was in touch with Iranian hitmen to kill President Trump. Don't tell me for one second to that this attack that we saw in Butler Pennsylvania, probably, what are they going to say? 'Oh, this was just a mentally disturbed kid'. When's it gonna come out that he was also talking to confidential informants in the FBI."

This is just complete nonsense that is completely devoid from reality. This is somebody who calls themself an "investigative journalist" messing up basic details about this big news story to push a political agenda. It's embarrassing behavior and anybody calling themself a "journalist" who acts like this should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.

42:38, Laura Loomer: "So, you see how dangerous our intelligence agencies are because they intentionally lead people to these positions. They allow this guy to travel to New York where he was planning on killing president Trump and we just saw that somebody got very close. We know that this Thomas Matthew Crooks individual, they're not saying that there's ties between this guy and Thomas Matthew Crooks but Thomas Matthew Crooks had overseas encrypted bank accounts."

They also arrested him after getting the appropriate evidence needed to convict. This conspiracy theory makes zero sense in the real world.

Thomas Matthew Crooks didn't have overseas bank accounts. That claim was spread by an Instagram post made after the assassination attempt and nobody provided evidence to back this claim up. The FBI has came out and stated that Crooks didn't have overseas bank accounts and until somebody provides actual evidence proving them wrong I'm inclined to believe them.

As any regular listener of Knowledge Fight (hello, fellow wonks) will tell you, guys like Laura Loomer and Alex Jones mainly get their "news" from shitheads on Twitter and Instagram without actually looking into it and this is an excellent example of that.

I figured this out in five seconds and I'm just some university student with a blog. I don't run a massive produced show and hobnob with key government figures, I'm just a guy with a laptop sitting at a desk in my home debunking bullshit. Yeah, I'm majoring in journalism but you don't just magically gain the ability to verify stuff the day you step into a journalism lecture, Google is a thing that exists and it's a really easy tool for journalists to use! The minute that people like Laura Loomer start calling themselves "journalists" becomes the minute that they become responsible to vet the stuff they're saying and whether or not it's accurate. Loomer has failed her audience and on a broader level her basic duties as a journalist.

So, Laura decides that Tim Walz has ties to ISIS because at this point we're openly playing make em' ups. What's her proof of this absolutely damning claim?

45:16, Laura Loomer: "So, Tim Walz of course is the governor of Minnesota and that's who Kamala Harris decided to pick today as her vice-presidential pick. He is openly tied to Ilhan Omar, Keith Ellison, a lot of these very dangerous radical Muslim politicians."

Surprise surprise, it's just more disgusting bigotry. Naturally, Loomer sees two Islamic progressive politicians and thinks "They must be tied to ISIS" without having any evidence tying them to ISIS. There used to be a word for that, I remember that it started with an R and ended with ACISM. Not that this critique matters much when it comes to Laura who doesn't try to deny her racism but it's still absolutely worth pointing out just so that it's on the record.

45:32, Laura Loomer: "But probably the most radical situation of all is the fact that Tim Walz advocated for an ISIS affiliated Islamic centre called the Dar-Al Farooq Islamic Centre which I have personally visited by the way in Minnesota."

There is absolutely no proof that the Dar-Al Farooq Centre is tied to ISIS and what Loomer is doing here is disgusting for a bunch of reasons.

The thing that got the ball rolling about this mosque being "ISIS affiliated" is an incident in 2016 where three youths who attended this mosque tried to flee the country and join ISIS. While this was obviously an extremely bad thing and it's a good thing that these kids got caught, there's no proof that mosque leadership knew about this nor is there proof that anybody else at the mosque knew about what these kids were planning. However, that didn't stop far-right media from starting a targeted smear campaign against this mosque. Congregants reported far-right social media figures showing up to the mosque and filming their children.

This eventually reached its apex when in 2017 three white males traveled eight hours from their home state in Illinois in order to plant a pipe bomb inside the Dar-Al Farooq Centre, thankfully nobody was hurt in the attack. According to the bomber his motive was to scare Muslim's into leaving the US and that he heard that Dar-Al Farooq was "training ISIS members". Now, look at the fact that Laura Loomer is pushing the exact same kind of rhetoric that nearly got innocent people killed....yeah. I cannot stress this enough, fuck! this! shit!

There's absolutely zero reason for Loomer to not know that far-right disinformation like her show played a huge part in children being harassed and actual terrorism and yet here she is spreading this crap about this mosque anyway despite everything that it's caused. It's easy to laugh at how dumb these people are and how they have no idea what they're talking about but I cannot stress this enough, this shit has the potential to get people killed.

On that happy note, Laura starts interviewing a man named John Guandolo and I really don't care. For those who don't know, John Guandolo is a former FBI Agent who runs the SPLC registered extremist group "Understanding The Threat". Guandolo left the FBI in 2008 while he was being investigated by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility over having an affair with a confidential source and soliciting $75,000 dollars for an "anti-terrorism group" that he was working on creating at the time. Real cool and trustworthy guy. John's "coolness" only continued after he left the FBI and formed Understanding the Threat which basically runs bizarre "counterterrorism training" sessions for law enforcement officials and civilians alike that are basically just seminars devoted to islamophobic conspiracy theories. Guandolo also has a long track record of assaulting people and then promptly getting has ass sued. In 2023, Understanding the Threat shut down in part because John kept doing dumb shit that got his ass sued (although the exact details of why they shut down are kind of murky at best).

Essentially, he's one of these ex-military/FBI "counterterrorism" grifters that were a dime a dozen after 9/11, he's cut from the same cloth as guys like Jack Idema. I don't have enough time to go into all the specific nuances of how much of a loser John Guandolo is but suffice it to say this guy really fucking sucks. We're not going to look at too much of his interview because it's just boring and dumb islamophobic conspiracy theories but there is some stuff in there that we should talk about.

50:03, Laura Loomer: "I was just explaining prior to you coming on that we spent a lot of time together in Minnesota doing counter-terrorism and also investigating on the ground with other counter-Jihad experts. People like Ilhan Omar, Keith Ellison and their radical networks which includes Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and also ISIS."

"And by on the ground doing counterterrorism I mean us running around doing dumb stuff on the internet."

Neither of these guys have presented evidence to back up what they're saying outside of "we don't like Muslims". I couldn't find what kind of "counter-terrorism" these guys were up to in 2018 but given Loomers past track record I'm sure it was just running around being a public nuisance and acting like an absolute drain on society in front of mosques.

50:43, Laura Loomer: "Obviously it's all factual and you can confirm it."

This show is just Islamophobic LARPing at this point.

51:32, John Guandolo: "Number one, Dar-Al Farooq is an -- and it's not a secret. That's a jihadi mosque. The leadership of the mosque, those are jihadi's running it. And you mentioned something a moment ago that I think is important to put a real fine point on for your audience, Shayk Idris at Dar Al-Farooq is the chairman of the Islamic University of Minnesota, the first of its kind in America, and its built to teach sharia to a wide variety of folks but its really to train people that are looking to be scholars and the way it fits into the broader Jihadi movement in the United States is the Brotherhood is very interested in raising up Jihadi's here that are American's so they needed to build the Islamic university here and they chose Minnesota."

The Islamic University of Minnesota is basically the Muslim equivalent of a bible college. They aren't "training Jihadi's" and if they were the FBI would be all over them in eleven seconds. This is just conspiracy theory nonsense from two people who have built their careers around pushing islamophobia and like I said before, this shits dangerous and could very easily lead to violence in the real world.

53:14, John Guandolo: "That entire culture there is in bed with and I mean protecting and defending the Jihadi's in the Twin Cities and it's why when my team came through prior to the 2016 election and I wrote that article, it was entitled 'In This War: The Twin Cities and Minnesota' and I still believe today more than I did then it will take literal military intervention to liberate Minneapolis/St Paul."

Not much to say other than this guys calling for the military to come in and kill civilians because they're immigrants. I hate these two so much. By the way, as stated previously in my last post on the Walz nomination, crime has been down in Minneapolis recently.

The entire interview is like this so we don't have to spend a lot of time on it. Just two bigots lying to each other and potentially inciting violence. We have one last quote, here's Loomer saying that the Democrats want to form an "Islamic Caliphate". Never heard that one before except for when Obama was elected, or during Hillary's campaign, or....

01:39:36, Laura Loomer: "We are literally in the middle of an Islamo-fascist communist takeover of the Western world and the United States of America. Make no mistake, you see these videos right now in the United Kingdom where people are setting fire to cars, they're raping women, they're stabbing people, they're attacking white people in the streets. We're gonna have Muslim gains like that here in the United States of America. We already do, in cities like Dearborn, Michigan and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City. We've seen these pro-Hamas riots where we have these people waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. So I'll tell you right now, if Kamala Harris gets elected as president of the United States, we are, we are going to have an Islamic caliphate in this country."

She said about the UK during a period where the UK is dealing with extremist anti-immigrant rioters setting fire to buildings but that's honestly a topic for its own post. This is just a bizarre slew of Islamophobic talking points that make zero sense, a fitting way to end a post full of Islamophobic talking points that make zero sense.

Conclusion:

That was a particularly gross thing to watch. The thing that freaks me out about Laura Loomer is the fact that this woman has influence. In a reasonable society folks like Laura Loomer and John Guandolo would be guys yelling on street corners with little to no influence but instead here they are spreading hate to a massive audience full of people that unquestionably believe it. The only thing you can really do is call it what it is: hateful bullshit.

Quite frankly, there's very little separating stuff like this and some of the more "mainstream" organizations on the right like The Daily Wire. Just ask Matt Walsh who's very concerned about the white birth-rate or Michael Knowles who believes in the Great Replacement Theory. The difference between them and Laura Loomer is that Loomer doesn't really try to hide her naked bigotry whereas FOX and the Daily Wire try to couch it in double speak and dog-whistles.

On the bright side, it says a lot about Tim Walz' record that they have so little to go with that they have to just up and make shit up about him. While there's very little you can do to win over extremists, Walz' record can do a lot to win over moderates and watching people like Laura Loomer flail around trying to find new ways to smear him gives me some hope for the election.

Original Video:

“EP65: SUMMER of JIHAD: Kamala’s vp Pick EXPOSED for ISIS Ties!” Rumble, 6 Aug. 2024

Sources Cited:

Dorn, Sara. ““Kamala Crash”: Trump Tries to Pin Stock Market Downturn on Harris.” Forbes, 6 Aug. 2024.

Picciotto, Rebecca. “Trump Quiet on Markets after Stock Rebound Robs Him of “Kamala Crash” Attack Line.” CNBC, CNBC, 6 Aug. 2024.

Farley, Robert. “Trump’s Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration.” FactCheck.org, 4 Apr. 2024

Miller, Todd. “Biden’s Supposed “Open-Border Policy” Does Not Exist.” Www.thenation.com, 22 Nov. 2023

Smith, Allan, et al. “Trump’s Embrace of Far-Right Activist Laura Loomer Worries His Allies.” Nbcnews.com, NBC News, 14 Jan. 2024.

Hananoki, Eric. “Laura Loomer Helped JD Vance Raise Funds While He Appeared on Her Show.” Media Matters for America, 29 July 2024.

TUCKER, ERIC. “Pakistani Man with Ties to Iran Charged in Plot to Carry out Political Assassinations.” AP News, AP News, 6 Aug. 2024.

Thrush, Glenn. “Justice Dept. Charges Pakistani Man in Alleged Plot to Kill U.S. Leaders.” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2024.

“Understanding the Threat.” Southern Poverty Law Center

Montemayor, Stephen, and Stephen Montemayor. “3 Illinois Men Charged in Bloomington Mosque Bombing.” Startribune.com, 14 Mar. 2018.

Riham Feshir. “Twin Cities Mosque on Edge after Opponents Start Pointing the Cameras at Children.” MPR News, MPR News, 4 Oct. 2019.

[dertaglichedan]

What to know about Scott Bessent, Trump's U.S. Treasury pick

Treasury secretary, which would make him the incoming administration's top economic official.

Why it matters: Bessent would bring to Treasury deep knowledge of bond and currency markets and a close relationship with Trump — as well as a surprising connection to hedge fund manager George Soros, mega-donor to liberal causes and bogeyman to the political right.

Zoom in: Bessent, 62, founded hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. Before that, he spent most of his career at Soros Capital Management, including as chief investment officer from 2011 to 2015.

Bessent has been an avid fundraiser for Trump and a defender of the president-elect in media appearances.

Trump has threatened to impose high tariffs on all U.S. imports. Some economists have warned that such aggressive tariffs could reignite inflation.

In recent interviews, Bessent has tried to play down Trump's trade threats.

"The idea that he would recreate an affordability crisis is absurd," Bessent told Axios' Mike Allen in a phone interview this earlier this month.

Bessent told Axios that Trump "regards himself as the mayor of 330 million Americans, and he wants them to do great, and have a great four years."

He also told the Financial Times last month that the tariffs were a starting point for negotiations with trading partners.

"My general view is that at the end of the day, he's a free trader," Bessent told the FT.

The intrigue: Bessent has been critical of the Federal Reserve and will likely be a key voice as Trump selects his appointees to run the central bank.

Last month, he put forth a novel and unorthodox idea to name a "shadow Fed chair" who would be heir apparent to Jerome Powell when Powell's term is up in 2026. The idea was criticized for the potential impact on financial markets.

Bessent has since backtracked on this idea. Speaking on CNBC earlier this month in the aftermath of the election, he clarified that he thinks the incoming Trump administration "should nominate the next Federal Reserve chair early."

...

Bessent is married to John Freeman, a former prosecutor, and they have two children. If confirmed, Bessent would be the first openly gay Treasury secretary. They live primarily in Charleston, S.C., and preserve historic mansions, per the Wall Street Journal.

*** Libs losing their minds over the last footnote in this article. LOL

[head-post]

Fed’s Powell marks patient approach after rate cut

The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point amid what could be an economic challenge when President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year, according to Reuters.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election would not have a “near-term” impact on US monetary policy. Powell added that the Fed will continue to evaluate the data to account for inflation, which slowed markedly last year and is approaching the US central bank’s 2% target.

It’s a process that takes some time. It’s all of the policy changes that are happening. What’s the net effect? The overall effect on the economy at a given time? That’s a process … we go through all the time with every administration.

However, the exact destination remains unknown and will be even harder to determine if fiscal and tax policy changes as quickly as Trump has promised. Powell, who was appointed by Trump and then clashed with him during the Republican president’s first term, will now oversee monetary policy in the first critical months of the new administration.

So far, inflation and interest rates have fallen in line with the Fed’s forecast, which believes price pressures continue to ease amid continued economic growth and the labour market.

Elyse Ausenbaugh, head of investment strategy at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management, did not rule out the possibility of another quarter per cent rate cut at the Fed’s final meeting of the year on December 17-18.

The easy cuts have been made, and maybe December won’t be too contentious either. Thereafter, I imagine the Fed is asking the same questions as investors – to what extent and when will the incoming Trump administration implement its campaign policy proposals?

Powell said the economic outlook was good at this point and the Fed hoped it would remain that way.

This further recalibration of our policy stance will help maintain the strength of the economy and the labor market, and will continue to enable further progress on inflation as we move toward a more neutral stance over time.

The Fed’s policy statement noted that risks to the labour market and inflation are “roughly in balance,” repeating language from the statement issued after the September 17-18 meeting.

Powell stated that the change in wording did not mean that inflation had become sustainable. The Fed, he said, had always expected progress to be uneven, and policymakers have confidence that inflation is on a steady path toward the 2% target.

Read more HERE

[meret118]

"That Powell's Fed still refuses to lower interest rates—after Trump said that rates shouldn't be lowered before the election—raises questions about the central bank's independence," said one watchdog.

“We cannot win if people think we’re headed into a recession,” one Democratic National Committee member said.