It’s wild how banana republic level corrupt the US is all of a sudden. Really went from 0 to 100 in months
The weirdness here comes from the president owning a social media company. I think they're playing up how markets move on their posts for obvious reasons. But social media companies likely sell priority access. They're called enterprise licensing deals. Same with news media, like Bloomberg, Dow, Reuters.
This isn't "insider trading" its publicly available information. The idea that the "little guy" is somehow screwed over by this is just silly.
https://www.barrons.com/advisor/articles/insider-trading-fbi...
(Critical to the whole thing is unfortunately https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in... , where the judge inexplicably decided to waive sentencing for a felony conviction)
Because if this isn't the case, then people will be forced to compete by "slightly" violating the law, everyone a little bit more, until the law is a total joke. This has happened in history.
It’s wild how utterly predicable this was and yet it was the chosen path.
A politician should do TWO things: get elected, and convince the electorate about a path forward, including any compromises needed. Obama is the last president that actually did that. As we all know. Trump just doesn't even bother. And before anyone else points this out: yes, I kind of agree, Biden didn't either. Democrats are their own worst enemy, just like republicans are.
I really miss Obama.
"Surely our first priority is to figure out a way to work with Congress"
Then the president joins and is caught up by the note taker and embarrasses the VP with
"Our first priority is to work with congress? Surely our first priority is to serve the American people"
-- Joseph de Maistre, 1811
The markets are very headline driven these days because Trump is a prolific poster and is highly unpredictable. This is basically him selling preferential access to market moves that he himself generates.
It's truly an unprecedented level of grifting happening.
The music on this sinking ship will keep playing till the very end. It's a decline. There is no observable way up from this point.
The mid terms?
...
> The company, which launched its social media app in 2022, said some firms have been copying its data for months without permission.
> McGurn warned that Trump Media will soon block these methods, forcing firms to buy the official feed instead.
This looks like it is monetizing and organizing scrapers. Isn't basically everyone doing this with data feeds these days?
At best this just gives a few milliseconds head start to subscribers and cracks down on automation. I would be shocked if NYSE, etc. don't already have premium tiers with faster market data and those feeds are certainly paid APIs. It's known that HFT shops will co-locate, for example, to have low latency.
This looks really bad, but if it were X and not Truth Social, there wouldn't be anything to see. It goes to the underlying issue of Trump owning and trying to profit from Truth Social generally.
So the US president has created a wrapper corporation that sells early access to official government communications. It doesn't matter if it's only milliseconds, that's enough for trading systems to make money.
How can any of this be legal in a democracy?
The problem is trying to untangle which are the economic indicators that matter and what the causality is. Despite everything, the stock market is at or near an all time high (mostly due to AI), and that grants Trump a lot of leeway from the money class.
It's also why this matters: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-stocks-us-strate...
Oil prices going up would probably also be extremely unfavourable for the Trump regime. So simply empty the US SPR onto the market to keep prices down and avoid the Iran war having any impact. Should last for the rest of his term.
The supply of mineral and energy resources is absolutely critical to an industrial economy, even if rivers are polluted to the point they catch fire ala the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969?
I suspect it's worth the effort to minimise and prosecute the corruption, waste, and harmful externalities.
Well, yes, you can't solve this problem by cutting off the supply of food and then declaring that you've ended waste.
by doing something I did not suggest. Agreed.
What I did suggest is not putting up with corruption, waste, and toxic externalities "just because".