Mara

[Mark Gubrud 🇺🇸 @mgubrud]

"for a close ally" WRITES THE NEW YORK TIMES

Trump just completely trashed nonproliferation policy, agreeing to give the Saudis uranium enrichment capabilities, a quick and easy route to nuclear weapons.

No enrichment has often been a reason-of-the-day for Trump's Iran debacle.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

Embarrassing.

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

Three years of construction noises at the arch could disrupt funeral processions at Arlington National Cemetery, which conducts up to 30 funerals every day for fallen service members

“We ask our dead for everything. The least we owe them is silence.” https://t.co/Lf0ufOkPI1

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

“Trump’s War has cost $113 billion and counting. Trump’s War has resulted in a collapse of U.S. credibility in the region and beyond. Trump’s War led to Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. And gas prices have gone from about $3 to $4 a gallon today.”

https://t.co/1rd2uWB3Yi

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

For years Republicans said:
"Just give us control of the govt and we'll slash spending," and
"Big tax cuts are fine because we'll also slash spending."

Well, here they are again. Unified GOP government. Big spending hikes. Zero spending cuts. Everyone falling in line. Yet again.

[Nancy Pelosi @SpeakerPelosi]

Republicans in Congress had a choice: lower costs for the American people or hand Trump another blank check for war.

To the surprise of no one, they chose endless unwanted wars while working families struggle to put food on the table and fill up their gas tank.

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

Trump's $4 billion Presidential windfall is unprecedented in scale & source.

Obama's wealth grew from royalties on books written before office — and Bush's mostly from a sports‑team stake from over a decade prior.

Most of Trump's new billions are from deals made in office.

[Hanno Lustig @HannoLustig]

Are central bankers chasing their own shadow? Central bankers operate in a world where real rates may not have a large impact on aggregate demand, much weaker than in the textbook models used by their staff. As a result, when central bankers lower real rates and don’t see the big economic boom they expected to materialize, and they don’t see a spike in inflation either, they conclude that r-star is even lower than they thought it was, and they continue to lower real rates.

This is the point made by Paul Beaudry, Paulo Cavallino and @timwillems85 in a really interesting and provocative new paper they just presented at the NBER Summer Institute, an annual summer camp for economists on the Charles in Boston.

When the Fed responds to a purely temporary demand shock by cutting rates, the LW r-star estimate itself remains low five years later, long after the shock's effects on growth and inflation have died out, according to BCW. Rate cuts that were supposed to be transitory gradually become locked in when the Fed does not see the output and inflation response it anticipated. Real rate hysteresis is what BCW call it.

The most direct effect of low real rates is to boost asset valuations, which generates a huge wealth transfer to households with lots of duration in their portfolio from those who don’t. But asset markets are the one place central bankers tend not to look for feedback on whether they’re plotting the right course.

My write-up here:

https://t.co/StSdkR5hxd

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Hunter Biden on Trump: “Everything he does, from the time he was bankrupting casinos to the time he became president, is all an act. He’s been doing it since his dad handed him a $400M check and he lost most of it and said I’m a self-made man. We’ve known who Donald Trump was from the get-go. He’s a con artist”

[Brennan Center @BrennanCenter]

The Trump administration has spent the last year systematically slashing and reassigning staff responsible for detecting and disrupting foreign disinformation operations in U.S. elections. https://t.co/ULZeaVL1i4

[The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow]

State capitalism inevitably produces malinvestment because capital is allocated according to political loyalty rather than innovation or economic merit. This is the system President Trump is seeking to institutionalize in the United States.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

The US is spending $50 billion on data center construction, exceeding the combined spending on airports, ports, and mass transit, per Bloomberg.

[Joe Scarborough @ScarboroughNow]

Social Security starts running out of money in 6 years, as Republicans keep spending America into record debt. By the end of this term, Trump will be responsible for 35% of all US debt accumulated across 250 years of US history.
https://t.co/1vIvfT5zOI

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

He's just another low-IQ thug in a Trump suit who can barely speak coherently presiding over an agency that murders people routinely while he covers it up. This is an utterly lawless regime of gangsters. https://t.co/Aa1A6PRWK2

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

Things conservatives told me when I was in my 20’s:

*Character counts
*Crony capitalism is bad
*Russia is our enemy
*Tariffs are taxes
*The Constitution is sacrosanct
*Government power should be limited, restrained, and checked by congress.

Guess they were just joking.

[Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D @RVAwonk]

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Trump’s speech & all of the declassified docs aren’t really about what happened in 2020 — they’re about what is going to happen in 2026 & 2028. They are laying the groundwork to interfere in the elections in the name of “election security.”

[The Editorial Board @johnastoehr]

Some policies Trump has pursued are so socialist that they verge on things Stalin might have approved of. He is consolidating the means of production to increase prices as well as his grip on the economy. Trump is creating a cartel.

And he's the boss.

https://t.co/vP4rtSrg0q

[Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker @TrumpsPortfolio]

Buried in Donald Trump’s financial disclosure: Encore Capital Group.

It’s one of the largest debt collectors in America — it buys up people’s defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar, then comes after them for the full amount.

The President owns a piece of it.

He profits when Americans can’t pay their bills.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

Fun fact: The Strait of Hormuz was open every fucking day when Obama and Biden were president.

[Brad @BraddrofliT]

Trump is paying himself a 2.5% general contractor's fee on his 400 million dollar
ballroom.
That's 10 million dollars.
When will MAGA stop making excuses for his corruption?