Wrap

The market was flat today. Bonds were unchanged; oil was flat, the dollar moved back up, but only to retrace it’s move of yesterday. EUR.USD is 1.22, pretty much where it was three months ago. US equities were up a bit, QQQ being ahead of the others; the Dow (old industry) didn’t really move.

Controlling the narrative

Francine McKenna writes long detailed, forensic pieces about how frauds get committed, how the people who commit these frauds often get off Scot free because they are well connected, and the powers that be like to protect their friends.

Jay Clayton was notoriously averse to prosecuting egregious cases of stock price manipulation, most notoriously by Elon Musk. Now Trump has gone, there is a new SEC chair, Gary Gensler, ex head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, often considered more effective than the SEC.

Gensler has had a much better press than Clayton, because, presumably, from the point of view of the Washington Post he is ‘our guy.’ McKenna thinks he’s not the guy and makes the case that his involvement of the MF Global case is Exhibit A. Maybe I should have written ‘his recusal, or non-involvement in the case’ but you’ll have to read McKenna’s piece for the details.

The political appointment of these regulators seems guaranteed to result in selection of individuals who are the choice of lobbyists. Washington truly is a swamp, as Trump declared, not that he had any intention of doing anything other than filling it with his own alligators.

Does this make any difference to me? Probably not, but because the US has such a lively population of truly independent investigative freelancers like McKenna that we can get a glimpse behind the curtain, in a way that we don’t in the UK. I don’t really know why that is, maybe it’s because things have gone further in the US, and the abuse of power is more outrageous, and sufficient to make these heroes make the decision to make the sacrifice to make their fellow citizens aware of the abuses. I don’t know, but I hope they prosper.

Currently, Substack seems to offer a platform for this material, but we’ve seen from Twitter’s behaviour that once free speech gets to the point where it seriously challenges the status quo ante ‘no platforming’ becomes a thing.

A post like this is not complete without a mention of the Martens who are indefatigable in calling out the abuses of the bulge bracket banks, for example in this article published today.

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