On The Record (4-27-26).

Hey, did anybody happen to catch the White House correspondent's dinner?

You know, it's the first one that Trump's been to since he was president.

So I'm sure it was a hoot, but everybody had a lot of fun.

Anywho, economists everywhere are predicting a global recession this summer and an oil market

crash in about 30 days from now.

So we're going to bail out the UAE because America first.

So I thought we would actually talk about bailouts and money printing in max notes today.

Our chart of the week is Bitcoin, don't be fooled by the rally.

KLTW goes to the majority report for an excellent discussion about Mamdani.

Headlines from Bloomberg, Mother Jones, and World Socialist website, all that and more,

on this week's on the record.

You and FDR.

So I can't find a clip of it, but I have to share my favorite part of the White House

correspondent's dinner.

No, not that.

Just before the event, there was a CNN panel that featured one of my favorite pundits

and podcast hosts, Van Lathen of the Ringer podcast universe.

He's the host of higher learning, but he's also on the rewatchables, which is personally

my favorite show.

Anyway, he was asked his take on the festivities and he used his time to say that it was kind

of his first time in DC leading up to the White House correspondent's dinner and he was

attending parties and amazed to watch that the people that he believed to be mortal

enemies on TV, at least, were just paling around with each other and being chummy, at which

point he said something to the effect of, and I'm paraphrasing here, either everyone

in this town is full of shit, or this is just a game to everybody.

Needless to say, there was no follow up, nor did they cut back to him at all.

Oh, and someone tried to kill Trump.

So, of course, his excellency was able to milk this event for all its worth and turn

it into a press conference for his ballroom and a call for peace.

But the strangest thing surrounding this whole affair is how the far right is treating

it.

Because even before this latest attempt, the far right has been floating conspiracy theories

about the Pennsylvania attempt on Trump saying it was staged and they've been saying it

a lot lately.

So when this happened, it was actually the right wing universe that called bullshit.

I mean, literally nothing is normal anymore.

All right, with that out of the way, let's get down to business because we have a lot

to cover today.

A very focused on Kevin Warsh, who's pretty much clear to take over as the Federal Reserve

Chair.

He's very interested.

I did a very long piece on Midas touch about his world view.

So I'll link it in the notes.

But for our purposes, I'm interested in him for a couple of reasons.

The chatter about this job, of course, is all about rates, but rates are determined by

the full committee, the full FOMC, and it's the least interesting part of the job right

now because the economy is so fucked that rate policy is literally the least effective

tool in the Fed's toolkit right now.

So the other big issue that the mainstream is focusing on, of course, is the idea of

Fed independence.

So let's see how he did when he was pressed by Liz Warren.

I'm asking did Donald Trump lose in 2020?

Man, I'm suggesting you in 2020 the Fed made your huge inflation problem and you certified

the election.

So let me ask another question.

So let me ask one other question.

Out of monetary policy.

In our meeting, you said you would be independent because you're, quote, a tough guy.

Those were your words, tough guy.

And you will be able to stand up to President Trump.

So let's try it again.

Name one aspect of President Trump's economic agenda with which you disagree.

Well, Senator, the Federal Reserve in recent years has wandered outside of its remit, wandered

into other areas.

I'm asking for something.

That's not something I'm prepared to do.

I'm asking for something I'm prepared to do.

If I'm confirmed the Federal Reserve should stay in its lane.

Just one.

Just one little place where you disagree with Donald Trump.

Well, I do have a disagreement actually, Senator, with the President.

I think even this morning, he said that he thought I was out of central casting.

I think central casting, I'd look older, grayer, maybe show up here with a cigar of sorts.

Quite adorable.

Well, there's your answer.

Kevin Warsh, son-in-law of billionaire Zionist asshole Ronald Lauder, who's worth so much

money that he has $100 million in undisclosed assets that he refuses to address, even when

Warren asked him if any of this money was tied to investments by Jeffrey Epstein or

China, Donald Trump's organization, or any company known to have participated in money

laundering.

He just didn't answer.

You have more than $100 million in investments that you have refused to disclose to ethics

officials and to the public.

Now, some of this is important, and some of it is theater, but the real deal-holy field

part of this job that we should be talking about is what this guy will do when the next

financial crisis happens.

So that's what we're going to talk about in Max notes, because Warsh's on record firmly

stating that not only does he think that rates should be lower, which is fine, who gives

a shit, but he would like to shrink the Fed's balance sheet.

And that could be a very big problem.

So quick roundup.

The incoming Fed chair, the person responsible for money, is worth about $250 million is

married to a billionaire, Eris, and personally has $100 million that he can't talk about.

Trump called Jared Kushner, Steve Whitkopf, and JD Vance away from Pakistan to come back

to DC in time for the correspondent's dinner, of course, which is good since no one from

Iran was notified that there was even a meeting in Islamabad.

So the ceasefire is extended, but oil traffic remains jammed.

We say we're in control of the straight, and so does Iran.

Trump's would-be assassin said that he was going to work his way through the entire cabinet

starting with Trump, but spare cash Patel.

Tim Heidecker is now in charge of Info Wars, which is owned by the Onion, and the right

wing thinks that every assassination plot on Trump is a false flag.

Okay, sure.

Okay.

And now, Max notes.

So what will the next bailout look like?

Donnie Boy recently floated the idea of bailing out the UAE, and it got me noodling.

Me thinks he might want to hold on to some of that dry powder for someone else.

Namely, us.

By now you've heard me prattle on and on about how most Americans never really emerged

from the Great Recession.

The corporate world has kept turning on its axis, but the majority of working people

have been running in place or falling behind since that time.

The entire UNFTR canon is pretty much dedicated to explaining why and how this all came about.

And then in a nutshell, Stagflation in the 1970s from Nixon's currency shock and dual

oil embargoes upended Keynesian norms and provided an opening for the Chicago School

economic philosophy known as neoliberalism to take hold.

The paper neoliberalism model was and remains entirely theoretical.

We actually wound up with the worst of both worlds, a nation led by neoliberal enthusiasts

who never implemented the truth theoretical framework.

Instead, we wound up with an inverted totalitarian model where corporations have full access

to the US treasury and run the economy for their primary benefit.

And all of the profits went into corporate coffers and wealthy pockets, though, a tremendous

amount of money was spent to take over government functions in order to tear down the regulatory

regime and implement favorable tax policies.

And it was all rather elegant and slow moving.

So by 2008, the game was up.

The manufacturing core of the United States was hollowed out.

The purchasing power of average Americans was in full decline.

The attempts to whitewash greed went out the window as corporate America reached new

heights of recklessness and depravity.

And so it all came tumbling down.

And at that point, we had a choice.

Put an end to the near 40 year failed neoliberal experiment or double down.

And we chose the latter.

So I'm going to run through the numbers shortly to prove this assertion.

And when you put it all together in black and white, it would make your hair curl.

And first, I think it's helpful to take stock of where we are today, just a year and change

into Donald Trump's second term.

As the manager of the U.S. economy, he tells us that everything's great and his minions

not in unison.

The golden age that President Trump promised is starting to be very visible in the profit

data, but also more importantly in the wage shada.

The millionaire presenters in the mainstream media, increasingly owned by individual billionaires

by the way, play their part as well by talking about financial conditions as though everything

is normal.

But in fact, nothing is normal.

Donald Trump is very bad at this.

He inherited an improving yet still neoliberal framework economy that doesn't work for the majority

and promptly started dropping hand grenades everywhere tariffs tax cuts ending trade deals

starting wars terrorizing citizens, not normal, but not for nothing.

We should have seen it coming.

An interesting thought experiment is to consider what the U.S. economy would have looked like

had COVID not interrupted global supply chains and led to a worldwide shutdown.

Because we're going to have very similar questions about Trump's second term as we're living

a slow motion repeat of COVID-sized disruptions and we've only begun to experience the fallout.

I mean, experts in oil and gas like we set up top are insisting that the supply disruption

from closing the straight of her moves is already more significant than the shutdown in 2020.

I mean, think about that.

So because Trump's superpower is flooding the zone to make you forget about yesterday,

it's worth recalling what he did to the U.S. economy in his first term.

By late 2018 and into 2019, we were on pretty shaky ground.

The yield curve, which is the spread between the three month and the 10 year treasury,

inverted in March of 2019 and it stayed inverted for months.

That's a signal that it proceeded every U.S. recession since the 1950s.

Manufacturing activity contracted sharply with the ISM manufacturing index falling into

contraction territory starting in August of 2019.

This investment decelerated GDP growth slowed from 2.9% in 2018 to 2.3% in 2019.

Global trade volumes declined partly a consequence of Trump's first escalating tariff or with China,

by the way.

Corporate earnings growth stalled and the stock market suffered its worst December since

the Great Depression in 2018 right before the Fed began cutting rates in July of 2019,

which was its first cut since the financial crisis.

Effectively acknowledging that the expansion was running out of steam.

So had COVID not arrived in 2020, there's a lot of economists that believe that a technical

recession was already baked in and look, here's where I'll let Donnie off the hook for

a moment.

In 1973, we had a technical recession exacerbated by the first oil embargo.

In 1980, we had a double-dipper under the Gipper.

So it lasted, it started in 1980, but it went all the way through 1982, 1990.

The Gulf War recession, 2001, the so-called dot com recession, and then of course 2008.

The grand design of the capitalist system is to move between periods of boom and bust,

expansion and contraction, and it happens on average every seven to eight years.

Now because the GFC was closer to a depression than a recession, it lasted even longer.

And the intervention required to prevent total collapse was the biggest on record.

And that's key.

So hold that under your hat for a second.

So where Donnie gets a pass is that we were technically due for the next one during his

first term.

And if you look at the majority of US households, I would argue that we were there, even

if the technicals didn't show it.

Now take that thing out from under your hat.

The reason we haven't dipped into a technical recession since 0809 is because the government's

money printing machine hasn't allowed it.

Remember GDP doesn't measure the health of the economy.

It measures activity.

And the activity in the corporate world is that it's been a wash and a historic amount

of government cash and it's been enough to prevent back-to-back negative GDP quarters,

which is how these things are measured on a technical basis.

So if we had an honest assessment of US economic activity, it would likely reveal that US households

have gone backwards since the onset of the Chicago school philosophy.

I mean, household debt is in an all-time high and purchasing power is on the decline.

And it's about to get a whole lot worse.

It's that inflection point that I mentioned earlier that both explains how and why corporate

America continues to thrive.

It's also what makes the next chapter so disappointingly predictable.

The moment when we decided to run a fully financialized economy that exists on government

money and corporate bailouts rather than sound economic fundamentals.

The thing about relying on bailouts and massive financial interventions is that the economic

footing of a nation continues to erode if you do nothing to shore it up.

Now I'll give Biden credit, at least for making an attempt with the Inflation Reduction

Act.

But even this wasn't enough to repair the decades and decades of damage done to the real economy.

And of course, the Trump administration has done everything in its power to strip apart

even the productive parts of the IRA under Russell Votes impoundment agenda.

Grasping the scope of what can only be considered the greatest theft of capital in recorded history

helps us do a couple of things.

First, it helps mitigate those feelings of despair that you get, watching unserious

and unproductive people get ahead while you work your ass off and fall behind.

Second, it provides breadcrumbs for us to piece together how the system truly operates

and most importantly, it helps predict where we're headed.

So here's the grand scale of it all, you ready?

In isolation, each one of these events should be considered historic.

Making together, I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to describe the greatest heist

ever.

Let's start with this mind bending acronym soup, tarp, taff, maiden lane one, two and

three, A.I.G, A.R.R.A, Cares, PPP, PSP, one, two and three, SMCCF, PMCCF, MLF, MSLP,

CAA, ARP, I.I.J.A, Chips, IRA, there's a laundry list of money that was invented.

It's manufactured out of thin air and then sent coursing through corporate America's coffers.

So let's start with tarp for the troubled asset relief program because this was the original

sin.

Congress authorized $475 billion in October of 2028, remember to buy up all that toxic

garbage that Wall Street had been manufacturing for a decade.

So the banks got whole, but homeowners didn't.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve was running a parallel operation in the shadows.

They had a handful of programs in addition to rescuing Bear Stearns, and they were known

as the maiden lane facilities, and they added up to a cumulative commitment of $7.7 trillion.

A.I.G.

alone got $812 billion between the Fed and the Treasury because the world's largest insurance

company decided to become the world's most reckless derivatives casino, then came

A.R.R.A.

That was Obama's big swing in 2009, right?

$831 billion in stimulus to pull the economy out of the crater that Wall Street had blasted

it into.

It was real money for real things, but it wasn't enough.

And the austerity that followed made sure that the recovery was the slowest and most uneven

in modern history.

That's the different story.

Skip forward a decade to when a respiratory virus shuts down the entire global economy,

and our money machines go into overdrive, starting with the CARES Act in March of 2020.

$2.2 trillion, the single largest economic relief bill in American history at the time.

Now inside of that was $350 billion in forgivable loans through the PPP, $25 billion in grants

to the airlines, $17 billion for national security industries like Boeing and $454 billion

to the Treasury to backstop and supercharge the Fed lending facilities that leveraged

into $4 trillion and more in corporate credit.

The Fed's balance sheet went from $4.2 trillion to $7.2 trillion almost overnight.

And actually PPP across all rounds totaled about $953 billion with over $800 billion

forgiven or dispersed.

And a lot of it actually went to small businesses.

A meaningful chunk of it went to businesses that were never in danger of closing.

So the Consolidated Appropriations Act in December of 2020 added another $900 billion in another

PPP round at $284 billion, another $15 billion to the airlines because apparently $50 billion

wasn't enough for an industry that had spent the previous decade buying back its own stock

instead of building a cash cushion.

Titan comes in and signs the American Rescue Plan worth $1.9 trillion, which included

another airline bailout bringing the total aviation haul across all three rounds to $59

billion in grants, not loans grants.

Then the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act, $1.2 trillion, the Chips and Science, $280

billion with $52 billion in direct semiconductor subsidies.

Then the Grand Addy, the Inflation Reduction Act, $890 billion authorized at a cost that

ballooned us somewhere around $2 trillion over 10 years.

So now let's do the tally by administration and see if you can pick up on something kind

of curious here.

Roughly $8 trillion was essentially spent in the twilight of the Bush years, $475 billion

in tarp plus $7.7 trillion in Federal Reserve Emergency Commitments that were largely unnoticed

because they didn't require a congressional vote.

Now this started under Bush, but it's kind of belongs to Obama as well because it continued

under his administration and he added about $831 billion in new direct fiscal spending.

Then there was somewhere between $4 and $5 trillion in direct fiscal outlays under Trump's

first term.

Cares, PPP, December package, right, plus a Federal Reserve balance sheet expansion of $3 trillion

and backstop commitments that dwarfed anything seen in 2008.

And lastly, roughly $4.3 trillion under Biden spread across four major legislative packages.

So you added all up and you're above around $10 to $12 trillion in direct fiscal commitments.

This is before you start counting the off balance sheet Federal Reserve activities.

The implied guarantees, the secondary market interventions and what have you.

So the real number is genuinely unknowable because the significant portion of it was engineered

to be unknowable.

Now it's worth noting that in terms of direct fiscal outlays, the biggest offender was

Donald Trump in his first term.

But Mr. Zone flood would have you think that that never happened.

And the Democrats are too infuriatingly incompetent to drive this point home.

Every program, every facility, every acronym on that list was designed to stabilize the

system as it existed, the financialized extractive shareholder first system that produced the crisis

in the first place.

The money always flows up and the risk always stays down with the rest of us.

And when the next financial crisis comes and it will, we'll do it all over again because

we never once asked whether the machine was worth saving.

But sure, go ahead and bail out the UAE.

I'm sure we won't need the money and good luck to Kevin Warsh who wants to shrink that

balance sheet.

All right, it's time for killer left take of the week.

Our KLTW goes to the majority report where Sam and Emma talk about Zoraan Mamdani and

how he keeps coming out ahead in his meetings with the big boys first Trump and now Obama.

And it's an important discussion because it shows how the establishment tries to either

draft Zoraan's popularity or quell it, but to no avail.

The greater his influence and the more wins he stacks up, the greater the perceived distance

between the new era of democratic socialism and the old new Democrat neoliberal era.

For better or worse, Obama is still a popular brand.

The hopes that the Democratic Party will be educated as to the things that Obama did

that were really bad, starting with, as reported by Barney Frank back in the day, Obama had

the opportunity with Paulson in the wake of the financial crisis to bail out homeowners

as opposed to bailing out banks and hoping they would bail out homeowners.

Oddly, we find out that bankers are actually in the business of enriching bankers and

not necessarily homeowners.

It's fascinating.

But there were some fears when it came out, there was an op-ed in the Times that Obama

and Zoraan had a conversation that, oh no, perhaps Zoraan is going to automatically abandon

all of his principles.

That's the most online leftist take on this front.

We've seen, I think, definitively so far that that has not been the case, given how he's

governed in his first 100-plus days.

My point is that why this is a good thing is, yes, for better or for worse, Obama remains

maybe the most popular Democrat in the country.

I'm excluding Bernie Sanders as an independent with a variety of voting populations where

selling Democratic socialism to them and leveraging Obama's popularity for that purpose.

It is disproportionately a win for Democratic socialism and Zoraan, in my view, than

it is for Obama, who, yeah, he may want to co-opt this insurgent leftist movement and

capture it.

That is probably part of his agenda, but I don't think that the momentum's on his side.

Yeah.

Chart of the week.

Beware Bitcoin.

I'll give you the disclaimer that I think you're supposed to give on these things.

I'm not a financial advisor and I'm not giving financial advice.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm just a guy making observations here.

Now most Americans with savings got there through hard work and discipline, or maybe a bit

of good fortune or bad luck with the case of an inheritance, but no matter how you got

there.

If you're part of the elite society that traffic and compounding strategies that produce

double-digit returns, then you should be risk averse when it comes to the crypto game.

Now why do I bring this up now?

Because Bitcoin is quietly moving up again.

So while the world fixes its collective gaze on the oil markets and waits for Trump's

next market moving social post, crypto looks to be finding its footing again, enough that

it might start to catch your eye, but buyer beware.

The temptation is to tie this to some sort of fundamental, like take gold, for example.

Procarity in the markets and fear among global investors drove central banks, institutions

and wealthy individual investors into the arms of precious metals, especially gold.

And when Bitcoin went the other way, it exposed crypto for what it was.

The speculative bet.

The theory that Bitcoin was just digital gold went out the window in 2025, leaving the

faithful out in the cold.

So what does it mean that it's beginning to recover?

Bloomberg has some thoughts, quote, a greater number of analysts have pointed to strategies

role within the market.

As a Bitcoin Treasury firm, its primary purpose has been to accumulate Bitcoin using money

raised across the capital markets.

In March, strategy began to deliver on a long-promised pledge to fund the purchases more with proceeds

raised from the sale of preferred shares.

That's helped to swage concern about the delusion among holders of the common shares.

So strategies the name of the company, it's the Bitcoin Treasury vehicle built by Bitcoin

and enthusiast Michael Sailor.

Now, if you've dipped your toe into the crypto world, then you've definitely heard of

him.

He still thinks that Bitcoin is poised to hit one million.

And I'd be wishing that into existence too.

If I was sitting on $62 billion worth of Bitcoin, yes, you heard that correctly.

That's what strategy does.

And that's why they care so much.

So the company exists to buy Bitcoin and it does this through a combination of leverage

and shareholder money.

So as of now, strategies basis, which is the combined per Bitcoin value of their holdings

is around $75,000, which means they're basically at break even on a market to market basis.

So when the person with the most to gain or lose makes a massive market moving investment

into a specific vehicle, any vehicle, it's not caused to rush in right after them.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Okay, time for some headlines.

Our first is from Bloomberg.

Climate change is already showing up in the cost of living.

Now I normally don't like to link to pay walled articles.

So I'm going to give you a longer synopsis because it's one of those finally moments.

So this Bloomberg article speaks to the growing body of research and emphasis placed

by central banks on the modeling of the impact of climate change on the global economy.

Now true to form one of the first things that Trump officials like Scott Bessett and

Stephen Mayer and criticized was the federal reserves own research and modeling in this

very area.

And Kevin Worsh, who's about to be the next Fed chair, agrees wholeheartedly that we should

just get rid of it all.

The whole project 2025 contingent sees all of this climate modeling as woke nonsense.

So that's what pushed the Fed out of compliance with its mandate according to these guys.

And as usual, the rest of the world sees things way more clearly and is beginning to incorporate

the impact of natural disasters, rising sea levels and a hotter climate into their economic

projections.

Smart.

Next up, we have number go up, the oligarchy and overdrive from mother Jones.

So this mojo piece is mostly visual.

It's a bunch of charts and graphs that might make you puke.

It's about how much the tech oligarchs are worth, what they spend on lobbying, how much

they're pouring into data centers to kill our jobs and what our electric bills also look

like as a result.

And our last headline is from the world socialist website, El Salvador's bouquelet regime

stages mass show trial for nearly 500 alleged gang members.

So what if 500 alleged gang members are tried all at once without representation serves

them right for being gang members, right?

They're all gang members, aren't they?

They're all bad people beyond a shadow of it out, right?

Even so-called liberal media critics have been loath to criticize the dictatorial tactics

of naive bouquelet in El Salvador because his actions to clamp down on gang activity

are seen as mildly unfortunate but wholly necessary.

A little shock therapy never hurts anyone and all that ends justify the means and so

on.

Elie regime has even graciously offered to host our deported souls in horrific overcrowded

conditions without access to legal representation because that's what friends do.

So this WSWSP does the right thing by actually taking a critical look at what happens under

authoritarian rule and why there's never an excuse to suspend civil rights and liberties.

All right, before we get out of here, we've got pod love and book love.

So for pod love this week, it's our friends over at straight white American Jesus project

2025 in action.

So Brad and Dan discussed the Trump DOJ's indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center alleging

that it defrauded donors by paying informants for access to extremist groups with charges

including wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy and money laundering and they note legal

experts, you know, are a little skeptical here because of their past cooperation with

law enforcement and argue that it reflects maga hostility in a project 2025 project

ester style push to label opponents as domestic terrorists.

Now for book love, next month, there's a new Elon Musk book coming out.

It's called Muskism, a guide for the perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff.

Everyone's got an Elon take.

He's a Messiah.

He's a medic.

He's a genius, a clown.

The verdicts differ, but they share one theme.

They treat him as an individual, but Muskism argues otherwise Elon Musk isn't a glitch

in the system.

He is the system.

His worldview promises sovereignty through technology, plug in power up and become self-reliant.

But the more you connect, the more he owns you.

All right, that's it for us this week.

Don't forget to like and subscribe because it's free and it helps us a lot.

Go to UNFCR.com to read our essays.

No paywall there.

You can peruse our directory of progressive resources.

And if you haven't yet done so, make sure to sign up for our free weekly newsletter on

which on the record is based by the way.

And I'm sure nothing weird will happen between now and the next time we see each other again.

So Tata for now.