The king of manipulating Wall Street shorts is Citadel founder Ken Griffin.

The Wall Street hedge fund billionaire has made most of his money betting against Main Street stocks and then manipulating their downfall to reap the rewards.

Griffin is despised by small investors, especially the Reddit WallStreetBets group who went head-to-head against the titan in the Gamestop and Robinhood story {backstory}.  Recently Griffin moved his financial HQ from Chicago to Miami after giving Florida governor Ron DeSantis $10 million for his reelection effort.

Bloomberg News reported earlier today that Ken Griffin has said he is open to taking the position of U.S. Treasury Secretary after he is successful installing Ron DeSantis as the 2024 presidential winner.

[New York] – […] Griffin also revealed that he would be open to serving as Treasury secretary in a Ron DeSantis administration if the GOP governor of Florida decides to make a bid for the White House in 2024.

He told Bloomberg that he “will definitely be involved in the presidential race” and that he would consider moving to Washington, DC, if called upon to do so by a Republican president. (link)

There are trillions at stake…

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“Hoffman Estates” is a Chicago area location containing an abandoned furniture store and warehouse.  The Obama Foundation leased, then re-upped the lease, to use the facility to store all the paper documents from the Obama administration {Location Link}.

The Obama administration told the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) they were going to upload the documents into a digital form for use in the Obama library.  The paper documents were, still are, held at the Hoffman Estate warehouse while this digitization process took place.  It should be noted, the Obama Foundation has never digitized the records, hence they renewed the warehouse lease.

Contrast against the DOJ-NSD legal position about classified records held in the secure facility of Mar-a-Lago, a 2018 letter {Obama.org pdf here} from the Obama Foundation to the NARA is an example of the two-tiered selective justice system.  Within the 2018 letter the Obama team admit to storing both “classified and unclassified” documents at the warehouse: [Page #2, bullet-point 7]

[Obama.Org pdf]

Obviously, there were no raids on Hoffman Estates from the FBI to secure the classified documents.  Nor did the DOJ National Security Division trigger a criminal investigation of President Obama for holding documents, particularly classified documents, against the interests of the NARA while they “digitized them;” a process, which again should be noted, never even began.

The intent of sharing this information is just to highlight the political dynamic within the NARA, DOJ and FBI as it pertains to selective enforcement of presidential records.

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The first New York State AG approach was to claim Donald Trump and the Trump organization undervalued their company assets, specifically real-estate assets, in order to avoid income and property tax liabilities.  That didn’t work.  Apparently, they discovered the complex valuation system of finance in real-estate that ebbs and flows as property evaluations rise and fall under market conditions.

Next up, the same New York AG moved to target Donald Trump and the Trump organization for overvaluing their company assets, specifically real-estate assets, in order to gain favorable financial and banking terms.  Thus, the claims today from New York’s political activist Attorney General Letitia James, which will, like all efforts before, eventually fail.

The leftist goal is to continue targeting President Donald Trump through lawfare in order to bleed him out and/or make him go away.  Which really raises an interesting aspect as to the unique nature of Donald J Trump.

What is it about this one man’s outlook that causes such levels of fear and targeting?

The big picture answer is found in the primary Donald Trump objective, “America-First!”

….There are trillions at stake.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has come under fire for his transfer of illegal aliens from Texas to Massachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard.   The Lawfare operatives within the leftist open-border community appear to be targeting DeSantis over technical elements in the Florida law he used to transfer 50 alien arrivals.

The legal maneuver being deployed to target the Florida governor, seems centered around his authority being limited to the movement of aliens who traveled to, or were residing in, Florida at the time of their transfer – as constructed in the Florida law used to authorize the use of taxpayer funding for his action. {LINK} As the argument is made, if the aliens were never actually in Florida, their legal transport would not be covered by the FL legislative authority that provided for their removal.

Today, during a press conference to announce state sales tax relief, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis fired back at those who are targeting him.  WATCH: 

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The transport of the alien arrivals to Martha’s Vineyard was a great way to bring attention to the national border crisis.

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The star is not John Gibbs, he was already an exceptional candidate having defeated Pete Meijer in the primary.  The star of this commercial is John Gibbs’ mom.

In this excellent television ad for Republican John Gibbs for Michigan CD-03, mom steps in with a resounding endorsement.  It’s a great ad, WATCH:

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John Gibbs for Congress – HERE

John was appointed by President Trump as Acting Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development at HUD under Secretary Ben Carson, where he oversaw an annual budget of $8 billion to help fight homelessness and expand economic opportunity.

Gibbs is a Michigan native, the grandson of Black sharecroppers from the deep south, and the first in his family to attend college – a life journey which exemplifies the opportunity our great nation provides. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.

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Trying to survive current price increases in housing costs, energy costs, electricity costs, food and fuel costs has forced consumers to reevaluate purchasing decisions.  As consumer demand for non-essential items has collapsed, and as Americans dig deeper into their savings just to sustain current unavoidable expenses, major retailers are now cancelling Christmas inventory orders.

On one hand the leaders of large multinationals must pretend everything is splendid; after all, the only acceptable position they can articulate is to support interest rates being raised because demand is just too darned high.  lololol…  pretending.  But on the other hand – those same retailers are furiously trying to calculate how to avoid being stuck with billions worth of unsold inventory.

RetailWire – Walmart, Target, Macy’s and Kohl’s are among retailers that have recently said they are canceling some orders to better balance inventory levels, a replay of a strategy used at the start of the pandemic.

Other steps retailers are using to clear inventories as spending has slowed on some non-discretionary categories are employing markdowns and packing away products for the following year. The elevated inventory levels also reflect intentional over-buying to mitigate shortages and the easing of supply chain constraints.

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The statistics behind the energy impact upon the German economy, the largest economy in the European Union, are almost unfathomable in scale.  There is no way for the German industrial economy to continue with this level of price pressure.  Stick a fork in the current creation of German industrial products and exports, the inflection point of feasibility for continued production has been crossed.  They are done.

According to release statistics from the German economic ministry, energy prices in August were more than double the same period last year, up 139%.  The monthly increase was more than 20.4% higher than July.  Additionally, producer prices for electricity rose 174.9% compared with August 2021 and by 26.4% in a single month.

This jaw-dropping increase in energy cost has resulted in German manufacturing prices for industrial goods jumping 7.9% in August alone, with a year-over-year increase in the cost to manufacture goods at 45.8%.  That is the highest rate of price increase since Germany began recording their statistics in 1939.

BERLIN, Sept 19 (Reuters) – German producer prices rose in August at their strongest rate since records began both in annual and monthly terms, driven mainly by soaring energy prices, raising the chances that headline inflation will surge even higher.

Producer prices of industrial products increased by 45.8% on the same month last year, the Federal Statistical Office reported on Tuesday. Compared to July 2022, prices rose 7.9%, it added.

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I was asked recently, what I considered to be the biggest problem of the current moment, and how would I describe it to my future self.  My response was, we are living in an era of great pretending, and if you elevate yourself and pause its actually quite interesting to watch.

The pretending issue goes beyond politics, it’s everywhere.  Sure, there was always an era where reality was skewed in favor of one position or another by various groups, people and leaders, where denying the obvious was always odd.  However, this current state of our national and international disposition extends far beyond politics into almost everything.

A person would ordinarily expect to see cultural or social pretending as an outcome of political correctness.  Denying the underlying social construct behind the rules of the urban society has been the norm for several years.  However, the pretending has become so pervasive it has recently extended into finance and economics; places where reality -actual outcomes- used to inoculate facts and figures against pretense.

It is no longer uncommon, heck, it’s become almost standard in this new era, to see CEO’s, CFO’s and even entire boards of directors, maintaining a standard of pretense. It is quite weird to see it happening.

Yes, this era -for a host of reasons- has made delusion somewhat of a norm.

In the social sphere, cultural norms now claim men can have babies, people can choose their gender, labels and pronouns, and everyone else bears the responsibility to conform to the delusion.  While goofy, that part is somewhat a weird cultural phenomenon of this western era.   If we were not pretending people like AOC would have no career opportunities.

In the political sphere, the axiom of politics being downstream from pop culture is perhaps the reason the infection of pretense has overwhelmed congress and the professional bureaucracies of government.  The social pretending has metastasized from the federal level to the state level, and now we see efforts to counteract “wokeism” as a social priority for state and local leaders.   It’s weird to see so much time and effort being exhausted on combatting social pretense at every level.

But the more stunning development comes in the sphere of economics, where factual outcomes of transactions are matters of simple accounting.  A ledger of sales and profits would normally dictate whether a business was successful or failing, and in the bigger picture would show empirical evidence of the financial health of the community of customers who purchase goods and services.

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Joe Biden’s economic policies, mainly driven by excessive spending and the Green New Deal climate change agenda, are the origins of massive inflation.

In an attempt to diminish the outcomes of his energy policy, the Biden administration has been releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in an effort to curb gasoline prices.  However, that process is about to end as the SPR is becoming dangerously low and will need to be replaced (more spending).

When asked about the current status of inflation during a CBS interview, Biden responds by saying it could be worse, citing the last two months where the SPR spigot has been running at maximum release.  WATCH (48 seconds):

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An unusual article in The Intercept is noted with the following headline: “House Republicans Planning to Investigate The Chamber of Commerce if They Take Majority.”  The article is framed around the statements of an unnamed congressman, who appears –from the sourcing inference– to come from the House Judiciary Committee.

If you have followed the deep political weeds, you know the CoC is the anti-MAGA element within the America-First economic battle.  However, it is also true the CoC and the Washington DC UniParty members they feed with lobbying dollars are peas and carrots, this includes the entire republican establishment apparatus.

The republican party investigating the CoC is never going to happen.  It would be a move akin to Adam Schiff investigating the origin of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

The CoC is not only an organization made up of lobbyists for Wall Street, but the members within it are also the close personal friends of just about every influential GOP politician.

The framework for the investigation, as written in the article, surrounds the leftist Environmental Social Governance (ESG) outlook of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is factually accurate.  The CoC is indeed an organization that is ‘all-in’ to position themselves for the benefits of climate change in the corporate sphere.  If there is money to be made from ESG economics, the CoC is the lobbying firm shaping legislation toward that benefit.

However, the CoC is too entrenched with republican party apparatus to ever have their agenda challenged by the “republican” politicians in DC.  So, what exactly is going on here?  A MAGA-minded republican within the House Judiciary Committee wants to investigate the CoC?

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