Author Archives: Bok
Facebook Face Plant
The stock market unfriended Facebook yesterday. Investors vaporized $119 billion of Facebook’s value – 20% of the company’s market cap. It was the biggest 24 hour stock sale in history.
Facebook Face Plant
Founder Mark Zuckerberg face planted too. He lost $15 billion in for the day.
Hope his student loan is paid off.
FISA Court Uncovered
In a Saturday document dump the FBI released 400 pages of its FISA court application seeking permission to spy on Carter Page. And it turns out the application was based on the Steele dossier.
FISA Court Uncovered
That’s the “salacious and unverified” dossier Comey testified about to Congress. It’s purpose was to dig dirt on Trump. It was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Kavanaugh Paper Trail
President Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh has lots of experience. And that means a long paper trail. Chuck Schumer hopes to use it to blow up his nomination.
Here’s a WSJ editorial that says Schumer is trying to show Kavanaugh would have let Nixon off the hook over the Watergate tapes. (No relation to the Cohen Tapes.)
The editorial is titled Tricky Dick Schumer.
King Dollar Rate Hike
President Trump doesn’t want the Fed to raise interest rates. And he said so. Which is frowned on since the Fed is supposed to be independent.
It’s also awkward for Trump’s chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow, a strong advocate for a strong dollar. Or King Dollar as he likes to say.
Trump hired Kudlow in March. But in February here’s what Kudlow had to say on CNBC:
A strong dollar is an essential pillar of economic prosperity with minimal inflation, but we worry that the White House has not adopted this strategy. So we urge the Trump administration to return to the successful “King Dollar” policies that worked in the 60’s, 80’s and 90’s.
Uh oh. He went on to say:
We also worry that the recent widening trade deficit numbers will further tempt the administration into a weak dollar strategy.
In The Intelligence Community We Trust
The intelligence “community” is popular with the never Trump crowd these days. Former CIA Director and Communist voter John Brennan says Trump’s behavior in Helsinki was “treasonous” and “impeachable.” The president did take Putin’s word over that of his own national intelligence director’s after all. (He changed his mind the next day with the old double negative apostrophe explanation.)
National intelligence directors didn’t always get the last word, though. James Clapper told The Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA didn’t spy on phone calls of ordinary Americans. But ordinary Americans weren’t buying it and he later admitted, “it was the least untruthful statement he could make.”
