A friend of mine runs a denim brand. His jeans cost $300 because they're cut and sewn in Los Angeles using premium Japanese denim.
He tells me that Trump's trade war has done three things:
1. They've raised the cost of his inputs. He can't substitute his Japanese denim with American denim because doing so would lower the quality of his product. If he's going to make premium jeans, he has to use premium materials. And the best stuff right now comes from Japan.
2. They've made his products more expensive abroad. In Canada, for instance, the price of his jeans has gone up because of the trade war.
3. He's seen a decrease in overseas sales. He tells me that a Canadian store reduced its orders this year because, as they told him, customers now come in and explicitly say they won't buy anything made in the US.
Of course, if the tariffs encouraged Americans to switch from their cheap $50 imported Levi's to $300 made-in-USA jeans, then that would be great! But that has not happened. People who buy $50 Levi's may pay $60, reducing their purchasing power elsewhere, but they don't switch to made-in-USA jeans.
Hard to see the point of this trade war with Canada.
Absolutely boggles my mind that 21-year-old investment bank interns are subject to stricter insider trading rules than members of Congress.
These guys have access to more material non-public information than anyone on Wall Street—legislative changes, pharmaceutical trials, classified military intel, defense contracts—and they’re using it to operate their own amateur hedge funds from the House cloakroom.
Pelosi and her serial drunk-driving husband consistently outperforming the market. Ro Khanna making thousands of trades every year. Hundreds of other examples, across both parties. It’s completely absurd.
If you want the extraordinary privilege of being one of the most powerful people in America, you—and all members of your immediate family—should be required to place your liquid assets in a trust that can only invest in the S&P 500, a bond market ETF, and a money market fund. You can change your allocation among the three choices quarterly, but that’s it.
No more call options on biotech companies that just told the FDA about a medical breakthrough. No more short-selling defense contractors that just briefed the Armed Services Committee about production delays. No more fake “blind trusts” whose rules aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
Show up, do your job, and faithfully serve the American people. If you don’t want to do that, go study for the CFA exams and test your mettle against Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen in the trading world (for some reason, I don’t expect your streak of beating the market to continue once you and your staffers are no longer getting confidential briefings).
But no more of this Capitol Hill Wolf of Wall Street bullshit. It’s corrosive to good governance, it undermines democracy and trading markets alike, and we, the American people, are done with it.
This is really extra (obviously). But it’s so funny how people proactively and aggressively forget that pronouns are just a simple function of the English language, and it’s grammatically correct and appropriate to reference a person as “them”
“ I like to grab them by the pussy”
MAGA: That’s just locker room talk.
“Trump likes to spend time with Natalie.”
MAGA: Oh my God, that’s the most misogynistic thing I’ve ever heard!
George HW Bush lost the presidency and Bill Clinton lost Congress because they both made difficult decisions on raising taxes and reining in spending that ended deficits, so subsequent American political leaders collectively said "Let's never do that again!"
Trump once brought multiple women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to a presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, and you want me to be offended that Jon Ossoff said a staffer’s name in a throwaway line in a speech? Please.
As a FL legislator, Mike Caruso supported death penalty for pedophiles in 2023
Now he has been arrested for allegedly molesting his grandson
The state plans to present the case to a grand jury and that could lead to his own execution if he’s charged and convicted under that law
I think it was bad when Republicans broke into Ashley Biden's home, stole her diary, and then started publishing fake excerpts from it.
Possibly even worse than mentioning a lady's name.
If I had a friend ask me to be in his wedding and then tell me I had to learn a choreographed dance for the reception, I’m respectfully asking to be removed from the wedding party.
I’d rather die.