Tag: Janet Yellen

…meanwhile…

FRIDAY 3/17/23

(U.S. European Command has released de-classified video footage of a Russian Su-27 “conducting an unsafe/unprofessional intercept of a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 in international airspace over the Black Sea…” Russian aircraft spilled fuel on the MQ-9 drone before an Su-27 caught its propeller and forced European Command to down it. See the released footage here:https://www.eucom.mil/article/42318/media-advisory-camera-footage-release-from-us-air-force-mq-9-interaction-with-russian-su-2)

Slovakia Joins Poland – Slovakia becomes the second NATO country to provide warplanes to Ukraine for its defense against Russia’s invasion. It will send 13 MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. Earlier this week, Poland announced it will send four of the Soviet-era warplanes to the country. According to The Kyiv Independent, Ukrainian Prime Minister Eduard Heger said the jets will be used to protect the country’s skies and “not to carry out attacks against Russian military.”

Meanwhile: Beijing has announced Chinese leader Xi Jingping meets with Vladimir Putin in Moscow next week (per NPR).

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Truth Social Money Laundering Probe – Top executives of Truth Social became concerned last spring about “opaque entities in two emergency loans” to Donald J. Trump’s struggling social media site, The Guardian reports, citing “documents, emails and sources familiar with the matter.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York is investigating yet another potential crime in connection with the former president, in a scoop by The Guardian earlier this week. 

The two “emergency loans” include $6 million from the ES Family Trust in February 2022 (the month Russia invaded Ukraine), the trustee of which turns out to be a director of Paxum Bank, a part-owner of which is a relative of a Putin ally. The first of the two loans came in December 2021 from Paxum Bank, which is registered in Dominica.

Trump, Meanwhile, Defends Russia: In a video he released Thursday, Trump said, “the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia,” per another UK-based newspaper, the Daily Mail, “it’s probably more than anything else ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people.”

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Other Banks Save First Republic – Eleven banks led by JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo & Co. have deposited $30 billion into First Republic to save the San Francisco bank. The bailout includes $2.5 billion each from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and The Wall Street Journal reports that First Republic executives sold $11.8 million in stock in the two months leading up to the bank’s crash, at an average price of nearly $130 per share.

Executive Chairman James Herbert II was among the bank’s executives who sold shares before First Republic stock fell to $34.27 per share and credit-rating agency S&P Global downgraded the bank four notches to “junk” status. WSJ notes that insider stock sales at banks are exempt from normal disclosure rules.

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--TL

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THURSDAY 3/16/23

Ukraine to Get Warplanes – Poland will provide Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, President Andrzej Duda said at a news conference Thursday (per The Washington Post). Poland is the first NATO nation to provide fighter jets, long requested by Ukraine after Russia’s invasion more than a year ago.

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TikTok ... Time Out? – The Biden administration demands that Chinese-owned TikTok be sold to avoid a potential ban in the United States, according to NPR’s Morning Edition. It is not clear whether federal officials have set a deadline for such a sale, the report says. 

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) has been examining for two years whether U.S. data collected by TikTok are properly safeguarded from employees of the social media site’s Beijing owner, ByteDance. TikTok has commited $1.5 billion to its “Project Texas,” in which U.S.-based Oracle is to build a firewall to ensure security for users in the U.S. 

The Trump administration had attempted to put TikTok out of business, NPR notes, but efforts were halted by federal courts.

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Banking “Remains Sound” – Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will tell the Senate Finance Committee Thursday the U.S. banking system “remains sound” and promote the government’s “decisive and forceful actions” to shore up confidence, Axios reports. 

Meanwhile: Credit Suisse will borrow up to $54 billion from Switzerland’s central bank. Shares in Credit Suisse momentarily plunged 25% Wednesday after Saudi National Bank indicated to other European banks it would no longer support the Swiss bank.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Culture Wars Go to College

By Todd Lassa

A bit like an NCAA football rivalry, the Culture Wars have stumbled onto the battlefield of the college and university alumni of presidential candidates’ staff and cabinet. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., fired an early shot as the former vice president began announcing his choices to staff the White House. Rubio expressed concern about people who received degrees from Ivy League schools, presumably in an effort to appeal to the Trump wing, as one of Trump’s biggest demographic constituencies consisted of non-college educated white males.*

Then the Biden transition team launched a trial balloon, or canary in the Senate coalmine if you will with Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, nominated to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden was a longtime confidant of Hillary Clinton tipped to potentially be her chief of staff, background that has drawn some opposition from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who believe she helped torpedo his 2016 Democratic nomination bid. When Trump won instead, she took to Twitter with the “#Resistance” hashtag. Since Biden announced his intention to nominate her, she has deleted more than 1,000 tweets from over the last four years, according to the New York Post.

Her tweets’ alleged nastiness has drawn the ire of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, both Republicans, though one might presume that as far as Rubio is concerned, she won’t be among the “polite & orderly caretakers” of the nation’s decline. 

What’s more, Tanden has a law degree from Yale.

The other intended cabinet are mostly ivy leaguers. They include Ron Klain (chief of staff; Georgetown University and Harvard Law), Janet Yellen (Treasury; Pembroke College of Brown University and Yale), Antony Blinken (State; Harvard and Columbia), John Kerry (special envoy for climate; Yale, though he had “low grades”), Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security; University of California-Berkeley and Loyola Law), Linda Thomas-Greenfield (United Nations ambassador; Louisiana State and University of Wisconsin-Madison, a “public ivy”) and Jake Sullivan (national security advisor; Yale). [Hat tip to Wikipedia and New York magazine’s Intelligencer.]

Biden will be the first non-Ivy grad to take the White House since Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84. He attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse University for law. Trump is an Ivy League grad with an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Reagan? Eureka College. According to Lou Cannon writing in a piece for the UVA Miller Center (https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/life-before-the-presidency) “He majored in economics but was an indifferent student, graduating with a "C" average in 1932.”

Sounds like Rubio’s kind of guy.

*It should be noted that Rubio (along with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson) is considered a lead Republican candidate for president in 2024, assuming the party remains centered on its Trump populist wing and that no members of the outgoing president’s family—Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner—announce they’re running (which could explain the rumored pre-emptive pardons). To say nothing of Trump himself announcing another run in ’24 (which could also explain the rumored self-pardon).

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