The Scapegoating Continues: Programmer Who Built “Flash Crash Trader” Software Goes On Trial

Nearly nine years have passed since the May 6, 2010 flash crash – when the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points within minutes, before swiftly recovering most of the loss – yet the scapegoating of those alleged to be responsible by the CFTC continues.

The trial of a Chicago programmer who allegedly created the software used by Navindar Singh Sarao, the “flash crash trader” who pleaded guilty in November 2016 to one count of wire fraud and one count of spoofing futures markets, began on Monday, with Sarao expected to testify as the prosecution’s key witness.

Jitesh Thakkar, who is being charged with conspiracy to manipulate markets, never placed any trades. Prosecutors are claiming that the conspiracy occurred between 2011 and April 2015, beginning with an email exchange with Sarao where he agreed to build the software. For those keeping score at home, this means that Thakkar’s alleged misbehavior occurred after the 2010 crash (though, to be fair, there have been several similar ‘flash crashes’ since, including the Aug. 24, 2015 ‘flash crash’ where the Dow dropped 1,100 points during the first five minutes of trading.

Sarao

Nav Sarao

According to Bloomberg, the program Thakkar created for Sarao had a “back of the queue” function that automatically delayed the execution of the spoofed orders for S&P 500 futures contracts on CME Group Inc.’s Globex trading platform. After placing the spoofed orders, Sarao would open positions intended to profit off these orders, before cancelling them. Spoofing became a crime in the US with the passage of Dodd-Frank.

Thakkar isn’t the first programmer to become embroiled in a spoofing case, as BBG explains. Some suspect that a programmer who testified against convicted spoofer Michael Coscia would have been indicted if he hadn’t agreed to testify. Though Thakkar will be the first non-trader prosecuted under the Dodd-Frank law.

The first person convicted of spoofing was Michael Coscia. During his 2015 trial, the programmer who designed the algorithm Coscia used was a key prosecution witness. Some legal experts speculated the programmer might have been charged had he not agreed to testify. Prosecutors have indicated that traders aren’t their only targets when it comes to market manipulation cases.

By prosecuting Thakkar, prosecutors said they’re hoping to send a message.

“We will also seek to find and hold accountable those who teach others how to spoof, who build the tools designed to spoof, or who otherwise aid and abet the wrongdoing,” the US Department of Justice said in a statement announcing the criminal charges in January 2018 against eight individuals, including Thakkar. “The government wants to send a message that you have to be careful how you design these programs” for traders, Wayne State’s Henning said. If Thakkar is found not guilty, the message will be that “you have to be careful about how you design these programs, but you don’t really have much to worry about,” he said.

Fortunately for Thakkar, the bar for a conviction is high. To convince the jury that Thakkar is guilty, prosecutors will need to prove that he knew he was participating in an illegal scheme to dig markets.

Sarao, who hasn’t given any interviews since his guilty plea, earned (and was later scammed out of) tens of millions of dollars trading from his parent’s home outside London. He is cooperating with authorities to try and earn as light a sentence as possible, though he has been banned from trading for life.

Meanwhile, HFT traders on Wall Street have been largely ignored by regulators as the scapegoated Sarao, who made just under $1 million on the day of the flash crash, a pittance in the grand scheme of things. Though a former programmer for Goldman Sachs was famously convicted, then vindicated, then convicted again for “stealing” code, including some of the bank’s HFT strats.

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12-Year-Old Michigan Boy Fills Neighborhood’s Potholes Because the Government Won’t

A 12-year-old Michigan boy has taken it upon himself to do what the government can’t seem to manage.

Monte Scott of Muskegon Heights used a garbage can full of dirt to fill at least 15 potholes near his family’s home last week. “I didn’t want people messing up their cars like my mom did,” he told WZZM. “If somebody were to drive down the street and hit a pothole, and then would have to pay like $600-700 to get their car fixed, they would be mad.”

Scott has gone viral in recent days after a video posted to Facebook on Wednesday showed him at work:

“He really got a garbage can filling these potholes,” a woman can be heard saying in the video. “Because his granny drive down this street and they down here.”

Scott told the Muskegon Times he’s wanted to fill potholes for months, and finally did so following a half-day at school. “People complain and complain, and the city never fills them up,” he said. “And I feel horrible because they never do it. They should fix the streets.”

His mother, Trinell Scott, expressed similar sentiments. “What are they doing with the money people are paying with taxes?” she asked the Times. “You could lose control of your car if you hit a pothole and then you could hit a pole.”

According to Muskegon Heights Mayor Kimberley Sims, potholes are a major issue in the area. Sims told the Detroit Free Press she feels somewhat bad “the problem is so bad that [Scott] feels he has to do that.”

This is not the first time private citizens have taken it upon themselves to fix the roads. In 2017, masked anarchists took to the streets of Portland to patch up potholes. Amazingly, a transportation bureau spokesperson suggested they might be breaking the law.

And in 2018, Domino’s answered the age old question: Who builds roads in a libertarian society? The pizza chain helped fix roads in numerous states around the country. It was the perfect solution, as Reason‘s Christian Britschgi noted at the time:

Roads exist to service people’s transportation needs, whether that’s getting to and from work, schlepping freight between cities, or, yes, delivering freshly cooked pizza. Aligning the funding of roads with the purposes they’re used for would make infrastructure more responsive to the end user.

Michigan, meanwhile, has the worst roads in the United States, according to a study released in October. The state and local governments there have shown themselves to be utterly incapable of filling potholes on a timely basis. While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) may have campaigned on a promise to “fix the damn roads,” it sure looks like a 12 year old is actually getting real results.

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Forget RussiaGate: America’s Anxieties Are About To Go Biblical

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The sore beset people of this land may be good and goddam sick of politics, RussiaGate, and Trump-inspired social strife, but they may soon have something more down-to-earth to worry about: Biblical floods and plagues.

Media hysteria around the Mueller Report has nearly eclipsed news of historic flooding in the midwest that has already caused $3 billion in damage to farms, homes, livestock, and infrastructure. With spring rainfall already at 200 percent of normal levels, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement in late March saying, “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”

More to the point, two major western dams show disturbing signs of potential failure that may bring on unprecedented disasters. The Oroville Dam on the Feather River north of Sacramento — the highest earthen dam in the US — nearly blew out in February 2017 when record rains damaged the main spillway, threatening to send a 30-foot wall of water downstream towards California’s capital and towns along the way. When that spillway was closed to assess the damage, which was significant, the secondary emergency spillway was opened for the first time since the dam was built in 1968. It too started disintegrating and before long Lake Oroville began flowing over the top of the dam itself. The state had to order evacuation of 188,000 people in three counties. Frantic efforts to drop sandbags from helicopters stabilized the damage and, luckily, the rain stopped.

Subsequent lawsuits against the state’s Department of Water Resources revealed shoddy maintenance, theft of equipment, and poor record keeping. Now, two years later, new cracks have appeared in the repaired Oroville Dam main spillway. The Sierra Nevada snowpack stands at 153 percent above average, and the National Weather Service predicts that weak El Nino conditions with above-average Pacific Ocean temperatures are likely to produce above-average rainfall this spring along with the snowpack melt.

The Fort Peck Dam on the upper Missouri River in Montana is likewise troubling experts watching a record snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. It too is an earthen dam — the world’s largest by volume — filled with hydraulic slurry. Because it is located on the flat high plains, the dam is extremely long, running 21,000 feet — about four miles — from end to end. Behind it is a reservoir that is the fifth-largest man-made lake in the nation.

Concern is rising because the coming snow melt coincides with unusually active seismic activity around the Yellowstone Caldera, one of the world’s super-volcanos. The slurry construction of the dam inclines it to liquification when the ground shakes.

Failure of the Fort Peck dam would send the equivalent of a whole year’s flow of the Missouri River downstream in one release that could potentially wash away the other five downstream dams in the Missouri River Mainstem Reservoir System, along with every bridge from Montana to St. Louis, an unimaginable amount of farm and town infrastructure, and several nuclear power installations.

It would be the greatest national disaster in US history. Just sayin’.

A shy, science-nerd correspondent writes:

“Epidemiologists speculate that a flooding event in Central Asia steppes triggered the 1347 Eurasian plague outbreak.  Rumors of a mass human die-off in India reached Europe in the mid-1340’s.  The Mongols besieging the coastal city of Trebizond on the shore of the Black Sea catapulted plague infested corpses over the city walls and Italian merchant ships fleeing Trebizond carried the infestation to Genoa which foolishly permitted the dying crew to land…

Rodents hosting plague spreading fleas typically inhabit arid grassland regions such as the Great Plains of America and the semi deserts of California and New Mexico. The current flooding of the American Mid-West and the mass dumping of flood tainted wheat, corn and soybeans will likely spark a rodent population explosion in the region, which in the context of rat-swarming homeless encampments may yield a 1347 repeat event in North America during the 2020s. What happened before can happen again.”

The homeless camps around Los Angeles have turned up cases of other medieval-type diseases typical of human settlements before public sanitation became a standard feature of civilized life: Many are spread through feces (as well as drug use): Hepatitis A, Typhus, shigellosis (or trench fever, spread through body lice), and tuberculosis. Gawd knows what is coming across the border into America’s proudly leading “sanctuary state.” Wait for it. Just sayin’.

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Costner and Harrelson Chase Bonnie and Clyde in The Highwaymen: New at Reason

'The Highwaymen'The story of Depression-era outlaws Bonnie and Clyde has been told many times, in just about every conceivable perspective, except one: that of the law enforcement officers who pursued them.

Knock that concept off the list with the arrival of Netflix’s excellent The Highwaymen, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the two Texas deputies who outfoxed and outgunned their quarry. Occasionally funny and often grim, The Highwaymen is sometimes reminiscent of another buddy movie involving a posse in pursuit of a famous outlaw duo, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, with its poles reversed. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a closer look.

View this article.

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Second Biden Accuser Emerges As Rep Calls Accusations Of Creepy Behavior ‘Smears And Forgeries’

On Monday, a Connecticut woman claims that Biden touched her inappropriately and “rubbed noses” with her during a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich. 

“It wasn’t sexual, but he did grab me by the head,” Amy Lappos told The Hardford Courant on Monday. Lappos is a former congressional aide to Rep. Jim Hines (D-CT) and first posted about the alleged incident in the Facebook group Connecticut Women in Politics on Sunday using a pseudonym. 

“He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.“

“I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody,” said Lappos. “There’s absolutely a line of decency. There’s a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It’s not cultural. It’s not affection. It’s sexism or misogyny.”

False narrative? 

A spokesman for former Vice President Joe Biden says that recent reports of decades-old images and footage of him creeping on women and children is a “false narrative” perpetuated by trolls from the “dark recesses of the internet,” according to Business Insider. 

Biden spokesperson Bill Russo said in a statement Monday that multiple pictures being used to paint the potential 2020 presidential candidate as creepily touching women are being misinterpreted and have been refuted by the subjects of photos that have gone viral.

…

“These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while,” he said. “And to this day, right wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain.” –Business Insider

It’s unclear what Russo means by “forgeries” – since the authenticity of the material has not been challenged to this point. 

“There are other, even more insidious examples of claims about the Vice President that have no foundation: the use of photoshopped images and other manipulations of social media,” added Russo. “Perhaps most galling of all, a cropped photo of the Vice President comforting his grandson outside of his son Beau’s funeral has been used to further this false narrative.” 

Which, of note, is distinctly different than this picture of Biden about to mouth-kiss his grandson Hunter after taking the oath of office.

Former Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor Lucy Flores accused Biden of smelling her hair before planting a “big slow kiss” on her head in a 2014 incident. 

The day of the 2014 rally, speakers gathered and took photos before going on stage. Flores (right) is pictured with Longoria and Biden before the uncomfortable encounter.

On Sunday, Flores recounted the incident on CNN‘s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper, stating that amid the chaos and energy of the event, Biden “very unexpectedly and out of nowhere,” Biden “put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair, and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.” 

Biden’s odds of winning the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, according to PredictIt, have taken yet another dive on the news of his second accuser. 

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Woman at the Center of a Viral ‘Creepy Uncle Joe Biden’ Photo Says It Wasn’t a #MeToo Moment

BidenSeveral women have accused former Vice President Joe Biden, a likely 2020 contender, of inappropriate physical conduct.

One of those women—Lucy Flores, a former candidate for lieutenant governor of Nevada—writes that Biden smelled her hair and kissed her on the back of the head during a campaign stop in 2014. Another woman, Amy Lappos, says Biden put his hands on her head and pulled her closer during a 2009 political fundraiser.

These and other accusations lend credence to the media caricature of Biden as “creepy Uncle Joe,” an idea the former veep’s critics on both the left and the right have been eager to popularize. The #MeToo movement has made the public more attuned to sexual misconduct, and warier about powerful men in government, media, and entertainment who stand accused of wrongdoing. Biden’s reputation as a man who is overly familiar with women could hurt his campaign for the presidency—though anyone who thinks this is guaranteed to doom him should be gently reminded that the current president is Donald Trump.

At the same time, it’s important not to mischaracterize matters. Some forms of #MeToo advocacy has eroded careful distinctions, particularly on college campuses.

For instance, one of the viral images most associated with the “creepy Uncle Joe” headline is this picture of Biden rubbing the shoulders of Stephanie Carter while her husband, Ashton Carter, was sworn in as secretary of defense. But as she explains in a recent Medium post after the picture started making the rounds again, it does not depict a #MeToo violation. Biden’s contact with Carter was welcome and consensual.

Carter had slipped and fallen on some ice just before the ceremony, she writes, and the incident had left her shaken:

By the time then–Vice President Biden had arrived, he could sense I was uncharacteristically nervous—and quickly gave me a hug. After the swearing in, as Ash was giving remarks, he leaned in to tell me “thank you for letting him do this” and kept his hands on my shoulders as a means of offering his support. But a still shot taken from a video — misleadingly extracted from what was a longer moment between close friends — sent out in a snarky tweet — came to be the lasting image of that day.

In that context, Biden’s touching of Carter wasn’t inappropriate. It wasn’t inappropriate, because the sole person with the authority to judge that—Carter—says it wasn’t.

Carter’s experience does not invalidate Flores’s or Lappos’s. But it should serve as a reminder not to lump together a bunch of unrelated or misleading moments when discussing Biden’s fitness as a candidate. At the very least, the media should give Carter the final say on the 2015 photo and stop recycling it for “creepy Uncle Joe” coverage.

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Trump’s Threat to ‘Close the Border’ with Mexico Is His Most Insane Trade Idea Yet

Even by his “Trade Is Bad” standards, President Donald Trump’s threat to shut America’s border with Mexico is a doozy.

“I’ll just close the border,” Trump said during a brief press conference Friday afternoon at Mar-o-Lago. “And with a deficit like we have with Mexico and have had for many years, closing the border will be a profit-making operation.”

Where to begin to that?

Even if the United States were a single large corporation—a bad analogy for many reasons, but one Trump seems to be grasping towards—closing the border would not be a “profit-making” move, any more than a business would be making a profit by deciding not to buy or sell anything. That’s actually a fine way to guarantee that you don’t make a profit.

Reading between the lines a bit, a Trump supporter might argue that closing the border with Mexico would reduce America’s trade deficit with its southern neighbor. That’s probably true, since no trade would indeed mean no trade deficit. But cutting losses is not the same as making a profit—or, in this analogy, eliminating the trade deficit is not the same as creating a trade surplus. A Wharton School grad like Trump should probably know that.

And that whole analogy is flawed, because the U.S. is not a single corporation and the president is not our CEO. Cutting off trade between the U.S. and Mexico would have enormous negative consequences for businesses on both sides of the border, because cross-border trade is the result of countless individual decisions dictated by market signals. It’s not the United States that trades with Mexico and vice versa; individuals and businesses on both sides of the border trade with one another, seeking mutually beneficial deals.

“First, you’d see prices rise in­cred­ibly fast,” Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Arizona-based Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, tells The Washington Post. “We would see layoffs within a day or two.”

The scale of trade across the Mexican border is staggering. More than 1,000 trucks cross the border every day at the Calexico East crossing in southern California, the Post notes. Annually, trade between the two countries totals more than $600 billion, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

During an address to mayors of cities on both sides of the border last year, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg noted that more than $1 million worth of commerce takes place along the southern border every minute.

Slamming the border shut would recklessly and unnecessarily disrupt markets large and small. It would wreck international supply chains. And might actually increase illegal immigration. One big reason illegal immigration from Mexico has fallen in the two decades since the North American Free Trade Agreement is the growth in Mexican-based manufacturing. What’s going to happen when Trump’s border shutdown triggers job losses in those plants?

Trump’s comment is yet another indication that the president does not understand how trade works, despite that fact that he’s made trade policy one of his administration’s signature issues. Trump has falsely claimed that other countries pay for tariffs when in fact they are taxes that U.S. importers pay. He has confused the federal budget deficit with America’s foreign trade deficit—and he has claimed that tariffs will reduce both deficits, though the opposite has occurred on his watch. And he often describes trade arrangements as win-or-lose, us-or-them, zero-sum operations controlled by national governments. In fact, trade between nations is beneficial in the aggregate for both sides. It’s the result of millions of individual decisions made by people and businesses.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Trump may not actually mean what he said. To quote National Review‘s Kevin Williamson, Trump’s version of America First nationalism is “3 percent policy and 97 percent aesthetics, rhetoric, and affectation, a kind of identity politics of the Right.”

Talking smack at Mexico, at the people who come to the United States from Mexico, and at the American businesses that do business with businesses in Mexico is an essential part of Trumpian nationalism. Threatening to close the border is probably more akin to Trump’s campaign promise that Mexico would pay for the border wall than a proposal the White House seriously plans to push.

And yet the White House doubled down on Trump’s nonsense on Sunday. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor, told Fox News that the president’s threat “certainly isn’t a bluff.”

If so, Trump is about to embark on the most insane and counterproductive trade policy yet.

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China “Green Shoots” Spark Global Optimism Despite US Retail Apocalyft

China’s manufacturing PMI surged overnight back above 50, “proving” that all that stimulus hype has finally fixed the Chinese economy – sparking stock and commodity buying worldwide as a reflation-fest sent bond yields reeling higher.

There’s just one thing… we’ve seen these PMI ‘green shoots’ a few times before in the last decade…

But never mind that – US stocks soared (despite a big disappointment in US retail sales) mean ‘everything is awesome’ again…

Chinese stocks surged on the ‘green shoot’ – with ChiNext up 4%!!

As a reminder – foreign investors bought the most China stocks since December on Friday…

Despite a wall of disappointing PMIs across Europe, European stocks were panic bid at the open thanks to China optimism (UK’s FTSE lagged)

 

US equity futures show the opening panic bid drifted through the EU session then the algos stepped into lift it across the US day session…

 

Trannies were the day’s big winner – up a shocking 2.5%…

 

Busting above the 200DMA… (5th up day in a row)

 

 

The S&P took out the pre-Fed highs back to the Oct 10th plunge levels…

 

Remember The Dow has not fallen in April since 2005, and April seasonality for US Equities is a powerful phenomenon: April has posted the best avg monthly return for the S&P over the past 30 years (+1.64%) and actually posts the second-highest % hit-rate of “positive return instances” of any month over the past 90 years

There’s just one thing – VIX wasn’t playing along at all!!

 

 

So much for 20x oversubscribed! LYFT crashed back below its IP Price…

 

Grocers got hit on AMZN headlines…

 

US Treasury yields exploded higher today as the US Manufacturing ISM beat (after an initial kneejerk on the China data)…

 

Today was the biggest 10Y yield spike since Jan 4th’s big rebound from the Dec lows…

NOTE – the pattern of yields pikes at the start of each month.

 

The 3m10Y curve has surged back from inversion…

 

The market’s expectations of Fed dovishness have hawkishly surged in the last three days…

 

The dollar ended the day unchanged, finding support overnight at around 97.00 figure once again…

 

Cryptos were mixed with Bitcoin back above $4100 but Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin lower…

 

Copper and Crude jumped as China’s data hit but copper did not follow through at all…

 

WTI Crude kneejerked on Saudi production and then the liftathon algos took over…

 

Gold futures managed to scramble back above $1300 early on but then someone decided to puke over a billion notional paper gold into the market…

 

But if China is so awesome for the global economy, why didn’t copper rally?

And if oil is such a great signal of global growth, why aren’t inflation expectations following through?

Finally, we note that the last 24 hours have seen Aussie PMI plunged, Japan’s Tankan disappointed, South Korean exports disappointed (-8.2% YoY), German manufacturing massacre, French PMI miss, Italian new car registrations collapsed, EU inflation weak, US retail sales unexpectedly tumbled… but fuck yeah – we will focus on China’s PMI!

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Kroger Shares Slide As Whole Foods Slashes Prices On Hundreds Of Items

Just days after the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge disappointed once again in its reading for January, Amazon has handed Jerome Powell another excuse to keep interest rates on hold – or maybe even, as investors keep insisting, consider a cut.

Not long after it reported that Amazon’s Whole Foods would be raising prices on certain items at the insistence of vendors, who are struggling with higher transportation costs, the Wall Street Journal has returned with another Amazon “scoop”, this time reporting the exact opposite: The grocer once derided as “Whole Paycheck” will be cutting prices on hundreds of items in what WSJ described as “some of the broadest [price cuts] since Amazon bought Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017.” Citing internal WF documents, WSJ said the cuts would be implemented on Wednesday at the 480 stores, as competition between grocery chains heats up.

The average discount was reportedly around 20%.

Prices on more than 500 items, with more being added, are set to drop at Whole Foods stores across the U.S. on Wednesday, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The products range from sliced salami to popcorn to cod fillets.

The cuts are some of the broadest since Amazon bought Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017, spanning many product categories across the supermarket. The e-commerce giant has tried to extend its own reputation for low prices and convenience to Whole Foods, to counter a sense among some consumers that shopping there required a “Whole Paycheck.”

Whole Foods is cutting as Wal Mart and Kroger have insisted on keeping prices low to try and hang on to their share of the $1 trillion market for groceries in the US. Kroger shares tumbled during the last hour of the trading day after the Whole Foods news hit the tape.

Kroger

Meanwhile, the reaction in Amazon and Wal-Mart shares was relatively muted.

AMZN

WM

Further discounts of up to 10% on sale items will be offered to Amazon Prime members. During the weeks before the cuts, the news was kept under wraps at the company to prevent leaks, with most employees at the chain’s stores unaware of the cuts. Employees will work overnight on Tuesday to change out labels on impacted products, which will include more meat and poultry items then past rounds of cuts. Notably, WF is moving ahead with the cuts as Amazon prepares to open another chain of grocery stores aimed at more middle-market shoppers.

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Trump Considers “Immigration Czar” To Coordinate Border Policy Across Agencies

The Trump administration is floating the idea of hiring a “border” or “immigration” czar who would coordinate executive policies across several federal agencies, according to TPM, citing three anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. 

Two candidates are reportedly under consideration; Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli – both of whom have strong conservative views on immigration.

President Trump and Kris Kobach

It has yet to be decided whether the post would be housed within the Department of Homeland Security or the White House.

White House press aides, Kobach and Cuccinelli did not immediately respond to requests for comment. –TPM

Trump, meanwhile, halted foreign aid to the Central American ‘caravan’ countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – and threatened last week to close the US border with Mexico. 

On Friday Trump accused the countries of ‘setting up’ migrant caravans,  per CNN. 

“We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we’re not paying them anymore. Because they haven’t done a thing for us. They set up these caravans,” Trump reportedly said. 

“At the Secretary’s instruction, we are carrying out the President’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” said a State Department spokesperson. “We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.”

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