Month: January 2025

Authored by Yohan Yun via CoinTelegraph.com,

Everything looks set to change for crypto regulation and legislation in the United States in 2025.

Token Alliance co-chair Paul Atkins has been nominated to replace crypto antagonist Gary Gensler as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), signaling a major shift in how crypto is regulated in the United States. 

Gensler’s tenure, though instrumental in laying regulatory groundwork and case laws, drew heavy criticism for its reliance on enforcement-driven regulation.

Across the Atlantic, the European Union has implemented the first of its kind Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation to oversee the crypto industry. While praised for its ambition, MiCA’s stringent rules are driving some businesses out of the region, adding to debates over the regulatory burden on digital markets. Meanwhile, Asia continues to integrate crypto into its legal systems, with significant cases setting local precedents.

To unpack the most important legal developments of 2024 and forecast what’s next, Magazine spoke with legal experts Catherine Smirnova and Yuriy Brisov of Digital & Analogue Partners in Europe, Joshua Chu of the Hong Kong Web3 Association, and Charlyn Ho of Rikka Group in the US.

The discussion has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Magazine: How will crypto law in the US change under the new administration?

Brisov: The Biden administration did a lot to prepare the legal frameworks for crypto assets. I’m sure that the proceeds of this preparation will help the next administration.

Willingly or not, the SEC helped shape the surface of crypto regulation so far. Common law countries are usually based on case law. We usually regulate when we have a sufficient amount of case law, and now is the time. 

A 1946 case stands as the basis for modern-day digital assets. (Alvaro Carriho)

Today, both Republicans and Democrats agree that crypto legislative reform is needed in the US. We still base crypto decisions on the orange groves in California in 1946, or the Howey case. 

Ho: The stepping down of Gensler and the nomination of Atkins to head the SEC is going to create a lot of change in the way that the crypto industry is regulated. When I say regulated, I don’t think that we will have an overarching regulatory regime in the next year. In fact, I would hazard a guess, Trump and Atkins are probably opposed to creating new regulations, but rather increasing the clarity as to where the crypto industry can operate. 

Gensler was criticized for taking an overly aggressive approach where he was stepping outside of the SEC’s congressional mandate and essentially making up powers and exercising what it did not have constitutionally. The change we’ll see is hopefully a decrease in such regulation by enforcement and perhaps more of a proactive, business-friendly, crypto-friendly approach taken by the agency as opposed to more of an antagonistic one. 

 

Magazine: What changes can we expect at the SEC with Atkins stepping in as chair, and how much influence will he have on ongoing legal matters?

Ho: From all accounts, Atkins’s background is very pro-business. He was an SEC commissioner previously so there is some history in how he would approach this role. 

Paul Atkins has been selected to lead the SEC after Gensler’s resignation. (SEC)

That being said, there is a precedent set by Gensler for him to follow. Just because a new [chair] is named doesn’t mean that all the legal work product that has come out previously is just gone. Let’s hypothetically say there’s a lawsuit pending—and there are many. If Atkins wants to change the SEC’s position, he wouldn’t just be able to declare it. They would have to go through the legal process and have some justification in order to alter their claims. If they’re the plaintiff, they could just drop the lawsuit entirely. But the commissioner doesn’t have unfettered discretion to completely change everything that’s in process. 

Magazine: How are businesses in the EU responding to the implementation of MiCA and other digital regulations?

Smirnova: This year, what I call the Mario Draghi report said that our digital policy is not as good as we expected as a lot of potential unicorns are moving to the US. We believed that ex ante and clear regulation from early on will give transparency, but no—businesses treat it as a regulatory burden. 

MiCA, of course, which is the first [crypto] regulation in the world covering all the fields, trying to make this market more transparent and clear to all participants. Now we have regulation which is more strict and doesn’t require any additional actions from national jurisdictions. 

Next year, we’ll see if we still have a crypto market in the EU or if the regulatory burden will drive them out. We’re also expecting additional protection for digital consumers, through the Digital Fairness Act. What we’re witnessing now is that digital assets markets are regulated more by regulations that aren’t specially crafted for them. We have E-commerce Directive, DMA, DSA and GDPR. The proposal [for the Digital Fairness Act] was published already and released by the European Commission for comments, and we expect it will come into effect next year. It will be a high burden of pressure on digital business in the EU.

Italy’s former prime minister’s 2024 report presents a reality check for the future of European competitiveness. (European Commission)

Chu: You need three things: legislation, enforcement action, and ultimately those two to be tested before the court of law; before you can really say that the regulatory regime in any particular jurisdiction is maturing. 

Using GDPR as context, when it came out, it rocked a lot of boats. The clarity on what to do only came about when the enforcement and fines started raining down.

Magazine: And are there crypto cases that have been tested in Hong Kong’s court of law?

Chu: In Hong Kong, we have seen this year legislative cases that are now being tested in court. So we have quite a few landmark decisions in Hong Kong, including the first case against JPEX. We will likely see more developments of that fraud case coming in the next year. 

We have also seen cases against decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). So we’re seeing how private parties, as well as regulators are catching up in terms of tackling these new entities.

Magazine: How can Hong Kong fulfill its crypto hub ambitions with only a few licensed exchanges?

Chu: Do you really need that many exchanges floating around? If we look at it in the more traditional sense of a stock exchange, there’s one stock exchange. Why do we suddenly need three exchanges trading the same ten tokens aside from maybe arbitrage environments? 

Being a hub is great and having choices is great. But similar to virtual banks, there will be batches being rolled out. The last thing you want to do is create way too many competing exchanges and then it gets nowhere. It also spreads regulatory oversight quite thin as a result. 

Hong Kong has one of the more stringent regulatory regimes. You can’t even have options or derivatives. So people are wondering why are you buying it if it’s just on spot and you’re holding it. There are lots of issues that need to be ironed out.

Magazine: What are some legal developments that are generally being overlooked by crypto industry participants?

Smirnova: First, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act came into effect and a lot of tech companies just left the EU. 

Number two, the EU AI Act was adopted in and it affects all jurisdictions. It’s expected to have the same effect as the GDPR. If you provide AI related services in the EU, this act is applicable to your business. It doesn’t matter where you are incorporated. 

EU AI Act expected to have a GDPR-like effect on companies on all jurisdictions. (Sanket Mishra)

Now, digital companies need to worry about competition, transparency, privacy, AI and about consumer welfare.

Ho: I was keen on some of the AI agents and AI token developments. I think that is a huge development in 2024. We’re only going to see more of that in the future, especially with Coinbase’s AI agent transactions. To me, that’s just a little crazy. I find that pretty novel and legally very gray in terms of liability. 

I would say we probably won’t see much legislation, but there may be court cases that shed light on liability allocation. The reason I say that I don’t foresee a lot of legislation is because for many years, the crypto industry has been without an overarching legislative regime in the US. We don’t have a MiCA equivalent here. That’s kind of why the current SEC has been enforcing the way it has. They are essentially operating and interpreting laws that are many years old and that were never kind of contemplating crypto in mind. So to think that we would have AI-crypto legislation, I think is kind of a tall order. 

AI agents started to own their own crypto wallets in 2024. (Ethermage)

One of the other big things that happen is the overturning of the Chevron deference doctrine. The Supreme Court basically overturned this doctrine that’s been in place for quite some time that essentially granted or required deference to an agency’s interpretation of a rule.

That’s important because in this particular instance with crypto, that means that the courts don’t need to defer to the agency’s interpretation. Gensler’s interpretation or his commission’s interpretation was certainly very limited in crypto industries’ ability to operate. If the courts no longer have to defer to that interpretation, the logical thought would be that the crypto industry would have more freedom to operate.

Brisov: A big development for next year I expect is the understanding of crypto assets. In common law, we have two types of assets. We call them chosen in possession and chosen in action, which are basically tangible and intangible things. Possession is your iPhone, your apartment, or your car. Things in action are like securities, dept, or intellectual property. 

If we take NFTs, for instance, they used to be treated as just some form of tangible assets, though they are literally intangible. Therefore they couldn’t be security. But now, the SEC has started to investigate OpenSea. They claim that NFTs can also be securities. 

Legal classification of digital assets advances. (Jonathan Borba)

In the UK, there is a bill that offers the third dimension of assets which is not chosen possession, not chosen action, but a third category of assets: a digital thing, or digital asset. Through the case law in the US and in the UK, I think that legislation is also upcoming. This specific digital asset will form a new type of asset in the legal domain. That will be a huge trend that will be moving forward through upcoming years.

It’s Bitcoin’s birthday: The very first Bitcoin block was mined 16 years ago today.

Bitcoin’s first block was mined on January 3, 2009.

Known as the “Genesis Block,” Decrypt reports that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto minted 50 BTC into existence with the move. 

Since then, 877,665 blocks have been mined and added to the network’s long ledger. On a blockchain, blocks contain data on transactions.

Only miners can add data to the network, and the difficulty level helps prevent unauthorized additions or edits to the chain, as it would take an incredible amount of computational power to take over the network.

And the network is stronger than ever, with mining difficulty reaching a new all-time high mark as the biggest cryptocurrency rides into the new year.

As CoinTelegraph’s Alex O’Donnell reports, Bitcoin’s hashrate – the total computing power securing the Bitcoin network – reached a new all-time high on Jan. 3 of over 1,000 exahashes per second (EH/s), according to data from CoinWarz. 

Source: CoinWarz

That is nearly double the network’s hashrate 12 months ago. According to CoinWarz, Bitcoin’s hashrate hovered around 510 EH/s in January 2024. At the time of this article’s publication, Bitcoin’s hashrate had retraced to approximately 780 EH/s. 

The network’s rising hashrate indicates Bitcoin miners are devoting more computational resources to the blockchain, thus improving the network’s security. 

Miners are continuing to expand production even after Bitcoin’s April halving reduced mining rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

Source: CoinWarz

Overcoming headwinds

In 2024, Bitcoin’s strong performance partially offset headwinds from the halving, especially for cash-heavy mining companies like Riot Platforms and CleanSpark.

Mining firms “acquired other miners with turn-key facilities to increase near-term hashrate and increase their power pipeline,” JPMorgan said in a Dec. 10 research note shared with Cointelegraph. 

Miners have also prioritized accumulating BTC on balance sheets. In December, JPMorgan raised price targets for four Bitcoin mining stocks to reflect value from the miners’ electrical power assets and BTC holdings, JPMorgan said.

JPMorgan cited the stock performance of MicroStrategy, a software company turned de facto Bitcoin fund, which traded at a roughly 2.4x multiple to the value of its BTC treasury as of Dec. 10.

Bitcoin miners, including Marathon, Riot and CleanSpark, hold BTC treasuries worth approximately $4.4 billion, $1.7 billion and $910 million, respectively, according to the BitcoinTreasuries.net data service.

Source: Bitcointreasuries.net

Institutional inflows

Bitcoin’s rising hashrate — and the resultant improvement in network security — is especially important as institutional investors pour capital into BTC exchange-traded funds and other regulated cryptocurrency investment vehicles.

In November, Bitcoin ETFs broke $100 billion in net assets for the first time, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence.

Asset manager Sygnum expects this dynamic to accelerate in 2025 as large institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and pension funds, add Bitcoin allocations.

“With improving US regulatory clarity and the potential for Bitcoin to be recognized as a central bank reserve asset, 2025 could mark steep acceleration for institutional participation in crypto assets,” Martin Burgherr, Sygnum’s chief clients officer, said in a statement.

However, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) just saw record-high outflows on Jan. 2.

Isaac Joshua – the CEO of token launch platform Gems – also told Decrypt yesterday that the recent downturn “can largely be attributed to end-of-year tax-loss harvesting by investors,” he explained.

Founder of Obchakevich Research Alex Obchakevich told Decrypt that “the main reason for the outflow is profit-taking by investors in early 2025.”

“At the end of the year, investors and funds often review their investment portfolios, which can lead to the sale of some shares,” he explained.

Though, bear in mind, IBIT surpassed $50 billion in assets under management just 228 days after its launch – more than five times faster than any other ETF in history.

Via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: Looking at the intersection of finance, economics, politics, and culture, what is your most significant prediction for 2025?

What major event or trend should people prepare for that most are currently overlooking?

Doug Casey: The trends that appeared, seemingly against all odds, in 2024 are going to accelerate.

The climate changed with the election of Trump. That was emblematic, but similar things are happening in other countries. The conservative/libertarian AfD will likely oust the current German government, which resembles that of the old East Germany. Castro’s son will be dethroned in Canada. And almost everywhere, even the media, has come to recognize that the Milei revolution in Argentina is succeeding.

It’s becoming apparent that progressivism and wokeism are morbid. White males are less afraid of committing thought crimes, being canceled, or being labeled racist or sexist. DEI, ESG, and Woke values are retreating. These trends will grow, even while leftists, statists, and socialists pull out all the stops to resist them.

It’s funny that the WEF and their ilk still talk about 2030 as being a magic year because the change in the trend that started in 2024 runs counter to everything that the WEF and the progressives were aiming for in 2030.

I’m surprised—and very pleased—to see what looks like a cultural sea change. But we’re still on the cusp of a giant financial crisis. If the markets melt down, the kaleidoscope could reset mass psychology radically. The fundamentals remain very shaky. The climate and CO2 hysterias are ingrained in the public psyche. And there’s an excellent chance the usual suspects will try to ramp up another vaccine hysteria. A bird flu seems to be on the dance card for 2025.

International Man: You’ve spoken about societal decline in the past. Do you see any path toward reversing this trend in 2025, or is societal breakdown inevitable?

What do you think happens next?

Doug Casey: Trends in motion tend to stay in motion until they reach a crisis and a new trend emerges.

Fortunately, technology continues to advance at an accelerating rate, and that’s crucial. Throughout history, innovation has changed the nature of life much more than politics, personalities, or even war.

Roughly five thousand years of recorded history show the trend is up, exponentially. That’s why I’m essentially an optimist. But one who recognizes that humanity suffers from occasional bouts of evil and stupidity. Time is on humanity’s side, although that can be an academic observation from the point of view of your own short lifetime.

On the pessimistic side, about 50% of the population in Western societies have been transformed into parasites, collecting much more from the government than they contribute to society. That’s a big deal because almost all progress has come from the West.

Europeans, especially, have become ingrained with bad habits and values. We’re undergoing another stage of the Industrial Revolution that started about the year 1800. It’s destroying lots of old jobs—mostly a good riddance—which will upset the people whose rice bowls are broken. But things will be fine, as long as enough of the middle class survives. The plebs and the “elite” will survive (because they’re basically parasites), but the middle class is the source of production and vitality in any modern society.

Unfortunately, society has retrogressed over the last few generations. But perhaps a counterrevolution has started. The remaining middle class wants to eliminate the parasites. I’d like to believe that the current technological expansion will aid in that and lead to another boom—not just a financial boom, but an economic boom featuring vastly more production at vastly lower costs.

In the short term, however, the Greater Depression will cause the average guy’s standard of living to drop. That’s the best case, even if society stops supporting parasites. Why? Because capital will be reallocated away from consumption and back to rebuilding wealth.

The worst case is that the world continues to party on, with borrowed money. Then, we could have a hyperinflationary depression.

Even though I think the Greater Depression will persist at least over the next decade, the long-term uptrend—which has been going on since the end of the last Ice Age—will continue and hopefully accelerate radically.

So what happens next?

The elite and the parasites still control the State, and that’s critical. The State still has legitimacy, but it’s not part of the cosmic firmament. Though it’s losing its legitimacy, people still view the institution the way children view their parents. Even though those who control the apparatus of the State act more like predators than parents. They will use it to their personal advantage.

I expect promiscuous spending will continue under Trump, notwithstanding the best efforts of Elon, Vivek, and DOGE. That’s because if they don’t keep spending and creating money, the whole pyramid of debt that’s been built up over many decades will come crashing down.

The US dollar, therefore, will continue being inflated. But at the same time, if the Trump administration deregulates radically, efficiency in manufacturing and production will improve radically. Despite lots more money being created, costs and retail prices could drop enough to disguise the effects of inflation.

Despite the positive effects of deregulation, there will be lots of unemployed people as distortions in the economy are liquidated. The good news is that the economy, which is to say the amount of real wealth being created, will start improving, even while the financial situation—stock and bond prices—gets ugly. Rapid change presents lots of paradox.

International Man: What does Trump’s return to the White House mean for the geopolitical situation?

How will the US’s role in the world evolve in 2025?

Doug Casey: There are two contradictory trends at play. Look at the following chart, courtesy of my friend Alex Krainer. It’s quite shocking.

It shows the size of companies born in the last 50 years in America and Europe. America, as heavily regulated and taxed as it is, is vastly more conducive to business than Europe. That trend will widen over the next few years.

It’s important to recognize that the US government is bankrupt, living on borrowed money, and that trend has gone exponential. I know it looks like Morning in America with the defeat of “Kamala and the Jacobins”… that’s a good name for a rock band. But, seriously, the US has become an overextended and corrupt multicultural domestic empire. It’s unsustainable in its present form. Anyway, morning only lasts for six hours.

The US is more militarily aggressive than ever. It’s said—I don’t think anybody knows exactly—that there are over 800 bases abroad in 80 or 100 countries. This is, to use a currently fashionable word, completely “unsustainable”. Trump says that he doesn’t want war, and that makes sense. But he’s all for more military spending. He apparently doesn’t understand that more spending is a provocation to the Chinese, and just a grift for weapons manufacturers, so-called defense companies.

Trump seems committed to using the US dollar as a weapon, by trying to force other countries to use our fiat currency. He sees that exporting paper money in exchange for real goods yields a higher standard of living, and wants to keep that Ponzi scheme going. But he doesn’t seem to understand the huge reaction it’s causing.

The thought of using tariffs to punish foreigners who are shipping goods to the US in exchange for depreciating fiat dollars is quite idiotic.

International Man: Following Trump’s victory, many Americans feel more optimistic about their portfolios and the nation’s economic prospects for 2025.

Is this optimism warranted? What’s your perspective on potential economic developments this year?

Doug Casey: No doubt that the Trumpers will try their best to get rid of egregious stupidities, as did the Reaganites when they took over in 1980. But the stupidities are much more ingrained and embedded than they were in Reagan’s day. It’s going to be tough.

Abolishing regulations is fantastic and will liberate the economy. Moore’s law, which is about computers becoming roughly 50% more powerful and 50% cheaper every year, now seems to apply to many areas of high tech—AI, space exploration, and biotech among them. It will accelerate until we reach Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity.

In the next five years, we’ll see humanoid robots become common, cheap, and extremely powerful, moving in the direction of those in the movie Terminator. Hopefully, they’ll be programmed to make love, not war.

The Singularity is almost guaranteed by exponential advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nanotechnology. As we advance toward the Singularity over the next decade, the whole nature of life will change. For the better—barring WW3.

International Man: Given your outlook for 2025, how are you preparing your portfolio?

What asset classes do you believe will perform best in the year ahead?

Doug Casey: No changes here. As regulations are rolled back, companies that own mineral deposits should boom. There will be lots of 10-1 shots over just a few years; it’s a sector everyone hates, assuming they even know it exists—which they don’t.

The general stock market is in a historic bubble, and the public loves it. I think the party is over. The bond market remains a triple threat to your capital—interest rate risk, default risk, and currency depreciation.

But let’s put money aside. Your main asset isn’t things. It’s your knowledge, your skills, and your character.

In an era of extremely rapid change, if you don’t constantly improve, you may inadvertently become a useless mouth. It’s more critical than ever that you build both physical and intellectual capital. And, most importantly, moral capital. Weakness and poverty are forgivable; there’s no excuse for villainy. Do the right thing. Many people will forget that as times get tough.

*  *  *

Doug Casey’s forecasts helped investors prepare and profit from: 1) the S&L blowup in the ’80s and ’90s, 2) the 2001 tech stock collapse, 3) the 2008 financial crisis, 4) and now… Doug’s sounding the alarms about a catastrophic event. One he believes could soon strike. To help you prepare and profit, Doug and his team have prepared a special video. Click here to watch now.

Money market assets surged again in the last week of 2024 to a new record high of $6.848 trillion and at the same time money flowed into bank deposits for the fifth straight week, recovering all the outflows from the SVB crisis…

Source: Bloomberg

On a seasonally-adjusted basis, banks saw $58.5BN of deposit inflows (after 3 weeks of outflows)…

Source: Bloomberg

On a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, banks benefited from a 5th straight week of deposit inflows (+$31.5BN in the last week of 2024), heading back up near record highs…

Source: Bloomberg

However, under the hood, excluding foreign deposits, Small Domestic Banks saw sizable outflows into Christmas (as Large Domestic Banks saw inflows)…

Source: Bloomberg

On the other side of the ledger, both small and large bank loan volumes shrank in the last week of the year…

Source: Bloomberg

Additionally, The Fed’s bank bailout facility is almost (for all intent and purpose) fully reversed after this week’s decline with only $4.4BN outstanding (down from the peak $168BN)…

Source: Bloomberg

Perfect timing for another banking crisis bailout right as Trump takes office.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of many once and unfairly pilloried public figures.

Elon Musk weathered nonstop attacks on his X social media platform. Furor escalated over his newfound 2024 Trump advocacy—even as he ended 2024 with his iconic Tesla brand still the best-selling car in six states and the most popular electric vehicle in the entire nation.

Tesla’s rising stock prices ensured by year’s end that Musk was by far the richest man in the world with a net worth of well over $400 billion. His recyclable SpaceX Super Heavy starship rocket booster mesmerized the nation as it returned to the launch pad to be caught by a huge mechanical arm.

After January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating. Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines.

Now he is a reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in disarray.

The Trump-hating media who swore Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle” are mostly discredited and are, for now, still bleeding audiences. And Trump’s chief political adversaries, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Obamas are increasingly either unpopular or irrelevant—or both.

Yet one unremarked-upon return is that of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who, after 20 years of representing Central California in Congress, retired on January 1, 2022, from the House to become CEO of the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, tasked to oversee its social media platform, TruthSocial.

Nunes has regained public attention over the last two weeks after Trump appointed him to become chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the conduct and performance of America’s intelligence agencies.

And once more he too is the target of tired residual left-wing venom, as a “pugnacious Trump loyalist” in the words of the New York Times.

Like almost all former chairs of this nonpaying advisory board, Nunes keeps his full-time job. His old critics claim he has conflicts of interest, given he serves Trump in both a private and public capacity.

Of course, these complaints come from those who saw no conflict of interest when Vice President Joe Biden flew to China with his son on Air Force Two to shake down foreign communist oligarchs and apparatchiks by using his office to enrich, tax-free, the Biden family syndicate. And no one alleges that Nunes ever became rich, in the fashion of the two Pelosis, who leveraged privileged congressional insider knowledge to make “wise” investments.

But more importantly, why would Trump not pick Nunes to enact the board’s mission statement to oversee “the Intelligence Community’s compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws, executive orders, and presidential directives?”

After all, he shattered the Democratic hoax of Russian-Trump collusion between 2015 and 2018, even as his lead investigator, Kash Patel, the next FBI Director, was himself an object of FBI surveillance.

As Nunes once pointed out, why did Obama’s non-intelligence officials, like UN Ambassador Samantha Power, seek to unmask dozens of names of U.S. officials, most of whom were political opponents?

So, who could Trump better trust to oversee the intelligence and investigatory bureaus than someone who knows all too well the descent of these agencies into Trump-Derangement-Syndrome-inspired chronic dissimulation and illegal surveillance?

After all, the former CIA Director John Brennan, the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and the former interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe all, by their own admissions, lied under oath either to Congress or federal investigators. Former FBI director James Comey pled amnesia or ignorance 245 times before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee.

Trump himself, remember, was the object of a vile and fabricated hit “dossier” of Christopher Steele. Nunes proved Steele was a Democratic Party-paid opposition research functionary and an erstwhile FBI informant. Should not Trump have good grounds to want a known bulldog as an overseer of the suspect intelligence agencies?

Do we remember the “51 former intelligence officials?”

Some were hardly “former” at all, given they still had enjoyed contracts with government intelligence agencies. On the eve of 2020, they blatantly “misled” the nation that Hunter Biden’s laptop, authenticated at the time by the FBI, had all the “hallmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation.

Such unapologetic election interference by our best and brightest—including former CIA Directors Leon Panetta and John Brennan—may well have played a role in the outcome of the 2020 election.

But what perhaps infuriates the left most is Nunes’ resiliency and ability to sluff off its chronic hysterias. Again, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he revealed to the nation that Christopher Steele’s accusations were little more than gossipy fabrications from a discredited ex-British spy—at a time when the media and the Democrats in Congress had cited his “research” chapter and verse in near-biblical fashion.

Moreover, Nunes showed that Steele himself was hired by Democratic interests through the use of various paywalls—the DNC, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS—to help ruin the 2016 Trump campaign, on the false and ridiculous charge of colluding with the Russians to throw the election. His team further found that the dossier of Steele, again a one-time paid informant of the FBI, was used in part to obtain an FBI lawyer-forged FISA warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page.

At the time, candidate and then President Trump was under unprecedented attack. At his inauguration, riots broke out. Madonna publicly declared to a crowd that she thought about blowing up the Trump White House.

Trump was branded a Russian “puppet” who should be removed just days after his swearing-in. Indeed, according to a Foreign Policy article by one Obama administration leftover official, the left was supposed to depose him quickly, either by impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or a military coup.

So those were certainly surreal times, at least until Nunes’s committee issued a controversial memo that laid out most of the skullduggery but only earned him unprecedented media venom.

Only years later, with the issuance of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigative report, the conclusions of the House oversight committee investigations, and the reportage of a few bold journalists, did the public fully confirm there was never anything to the “Russian collusion” charge, other than a Clinton, and then administrative state, effort to destroy Trump by any means other than an election.

In those crazy times of 2017-2020, the media buzzed with predictions that special counsel Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-star” lawyers would consume Trump and his supporters.

Nunes himself was written off as a California dairy farmer way over his head, with legacy media headlines blaring, “Trump-Russia Investigation: A Former Dairy Farmer, Rep. Devin Nunes Leads Historic Probe!”

The media sought to contrast Nunes with supposedly brilliant, Harvard-law-trained Adam Schiff, the then-minority party’s highest-ranking member on the Nunes committee. Schiff would supposedly devour the chairman—in what the media would boast would become a war between a supposed yokel from the Central Valley pitted against an Ivy League pro. Years later today, Schiff’s prior insistence on a real Trump-Russian collusion effort in 2016 and his persistence that the Steele dossier was factual remain even more laughable. A farmer might editorialize that its takes far more savvy and resilience to run a dairy farm than it does to graduate from Harvard.

When Trump appointed Nunes the head of TruthSocial, the same sort of hick/rustic stories reemerged about Nunes. He was now again supposedly “over his head,” as the blinkered rustic trying to make it in the cutthroat world of sophisticated social media.

We were told TruthSocial would meet the same fate as Parler. That ascendant 2020 start-up conservative alternative was sabotaged by the left-wing Twitter monopoly that had conspired to ban Trump and partner with the FBI to suppress news unfavorable to Biden’s 2020 campaign.

It was left to the trifecta of Apple, Google, and Amazon to destroy Parler by denying its critical application platforms to the general public.

Over the last three years, the media gleefully reported, erroneously, that TruthSocial was nearly bankrupt, hemorrhaging users, piling up operating debt, without operating capital, and losing a critical merger bid. They high-fived the TruthSocial 30-month war with the SEC—one of the most drawn out and politicized in its history—which, in likely partisan fashion, had sought to delay or block TruthSocial’s partnership with Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC).

As in the case of the Russian collusion hoax, the media was both predictably hostile and wrong, as it serially predicted that Nunes and Truth Social would fail from its very beginning. For nearly three years, it sounded the same “walls are closing” doom and gloom hysterics where it had left off with ‘Russian collusion.”

We were assured that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter meant that the huge social media platform would veer right and preclude any need for TruthSocial. For over three years, headlines in scare caps assured, as did a Bloomberg autumn 2022 screed, that “The Walls Are Closing in on Trump’s TRUTH Social.”

At about the same time, a giddy Washington Post boasted that “Trump once reconsidered sticking with Truth Social. Now he’s stuck.” And still, the chorus continued a year later with New York Magazine blaring the same narrative, “Trump’s Truth Social Is an Unmitigated Failure.” And on and on.

Certainly, when Musk purchased Twitter, renamed it the free-speech platform X, endorsed Donald Trump, and welcomed banned conservatives back to the now-reinvented old Twitter, it questioned the original reason-to-be of TruthSocial.

Yet despite media obituaries, 2024 ends with the Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock price at some $35-37. In October, the company’s worth soared to an incredible $10 billion in market capitalization—albeit a figure representative of speculative interest rather than the size of its profits or market share.

Still, unlike the old Twitter, TruthSocial had little overhead and ran a tight ship. It reportedly has some $700 million in cash on hand. And it enjoys something no other platform can quite rival—the near-exclusive domain of the President of the United States, 8.4 million of his followers, and over 600,000 investors. Most of the media’s sensational stories about its massive operating losses were never borne out by its officially released filings.

Tens of thousands of Americans have invested in TruthSocial because of what it stands for and their faith in Donald Trump. In that sense, they confound Wall Street orthodoxies about the magnitude of company size and profitably in gauging stock prices.

There is a sort of nemesis theme to all these hubristic Nunes hit stories: the clueless bumpkin from a California dairy who turns out to have exposed one of the great scandals of political malfeasance in modern history, or the fumbling ex-farmer driving the ridiculous Trump media platform into, at one recent point, a $10 billion net worth—and multibillion-dollar profit for Donald Trump.

Critics are right that the TruthSocial stock is astronomically “overvalued”, but seem clueless as to why that is and why it may remain more or less so.

It is a well-run company, and its inseparable brand, Donald Trump, is no longer the media’s Satan but increasingly a widely admired, resilient, and indomitable figure, traits that even his exhausted enemies grudgingly concede.

So, looking back at the years of insanity, where now are all the officials and pundits who swore that Nunes was either incompetent or sinister?

Ryan Lizza, who in 2018 published a bizarre hit piece for Esquire by bird-dogging Nunes’s parents on their dairy in Iowa, was fired for sexual misconduct from The New Yorker. He was recently embroiled in a messy, he-said/she-said courtroom psychodrama—replete with charges and countercharges of blackmail, theft, and physical intimidation—with his erstwhile fiancé, the peripatetic Olivia Nuzzi.

The dissimulator quad of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe has receded into irrelevancy, only occasionally reemerging in half-hearted fashion to reassert their stale first-term Trump accusations.

No one believes the pompous Schiff memo was more accurate than the Nunes brief it attacked.

No one vouches for the bogus Steele dossier, or that Steele himself was a skilled and professional ex-intelligence agent, or that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow, or that Carter Page was a Russian spy working to subvert the 2016 election.

No one trusts that Samantha Power had legitimate reasons to request the unmasking of nearly 300 Trump officials, many of them her political enemies, or that the FBI did not collude with social media to suppress news unfavorable to Joe Biden in 2020, or that the intelligence agencies initially were accurate in parroting the official line that the COVID virus was birthed by a bat or pangolin.

Yet the disillusioned public also wants to know what these intelligence agencies did not do when they were otherwise so busy hunting down fantasy conspiracy theories and knee-deep in domestic partisan politics.

Did they warn us that the entire U.S. effort in Afghanistan was about to collapse, in the greatest humiliation of the U.S. military in a half-century, as it abandoned over $50 billion in weapons to terrorists?

Did they have a clue about what Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah were up to before October 7?

Did they ever sense that Vladimir Putin was about to stage a massive attack on Kyiv on February 24, 2022?

Did they ever have any hint about what two near-successful Trump assassins were up to?

Did they ever honestly report what exactly was going on at the Wuhan virology lab and to what degree our own health officials were complicit in it?

And how does China keep producing state-of-the-art ships, warplanes, drones, and weaponry that seem eerily to resemble or replicate original American designs?

As in the case of the newly appointed reformist directors of the wayward FBI, Pentagon, or National Institute of Health, so likewise the intelligence agencies need and should welcome the civilian oversight of Devin Nunes and his new board – to ensure they start doing what they were tasked to do and not continue to do what they were not.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has rejected an attempt by President-Elect Donald Trump to dismiss his business records case and ordered sentencing for Jan. 10.

“This Court finds that neither the vacatur of the jury’s verdicts nor dismissal of the indictment are required by the Presidential immunity doctrine, the Presidential Transition Act or the Supremacy Clause,” Merchan said on Jan. 3.

“Finding no legal impediment to sentencing and recognizing that Presidential immunity will likely attach once Defendant takes his Oath of Office, it is incumbent upon this Court to set this matter down for the imposition of sentence prior to January 20, 2025,” Merchan wrote.

However, while some on the left may be hoping this is the last gambit to avoid four years of ‘Hitler’ reigning over them with the chance of the judge to #LockHimUp, Merchan said an unconditional discharge “appears to be the most viable solution” and he would allow Trump to appear virtually.

“While this Court as a matter of law must not make any determination on sentencing prior to giving the parties and Defendant an opportunity to be heard, it seems proper at this juncture to make known the Court’s inclination to not impose any sentence of incarceration, a sentence authorized by the conviction but one the People concede they no longer view as a practicable recommendation,” Merchan wrote. 

Trump, 78, had faced as many as four years in prison in the hush money case after a jury in May found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for payments to an adult film star before the 2016 election.

Merchan rejected each of Trump’s arguments for dismissal, including that allowing a criminal conviction to hang over a sitting president would undermine his authority. The judge noted that Trump won the election even after he was convicted in the case.

“Whatever stigma that might have existed, will most certainly not interfere with defendant’s ability to carry out his duties — both as president-elect and as the sitting president,” Merchan said.

However, as The Hill points out, Merchan’s decision keeps Trump’s criminal conviction on the books.

“This court has painstakingly considered the respective arguments of the parties and finds that setting aside the jury verdict is not the best or only way to reconcile the competing interests,” Merchan said.

The judge state that the importance of keeping the New York jury’s guilty verdict against Trump intact could not “possibly be overstated.”

“Indeed, the sanctity of a jury verdict and the deference that must be accorded to it, is a bedrock principle in our Nation’s jurisprudence,” he said.  

This would mean he would be the first felon to assume the presidency, though Trump can still appeal the jury’s verdict.  

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, in 2024, agreed to play out their roles as uncontactable zombies, baying for the blood of Americans at the altar of a dying Moloch.”

– Celia Farber

I hope that the first lesson of the Bourbon Street massacre is not lost on you: There is no end of opportunity now for Jihadis and other maniacs to attack soft targets across the land.

Americans are sitting ducks. And there is no shortage of jihadis and maniacs at large in our land, thanks to “Joe Biden” and Alejandro Mayorkas.

Do you have any idea how much carnage can be created with what are called small arms, meaning, light weapons, guns, rifles, grenades, and improvised explosives used tactically in public places by enemies of our country? It looks like we are going to find out. And just regular motor vehicles, too, as in New Orleans and Las Vegas. Among the millions of foreign vagabonds ushered across the border illegally are perhaps tens of thousands fanatically avid for mayhem, many of them surely organized into cadres trained to carry out atrocities, just hanging back with their US government-issued debit cards, enjoying DoorDash deliveries in their government supplied hotel rooms, waiting for the signal to activate themselves.

Do you think we can harden the millions of targets out there, make them secure? Forget about it. Many of these are plain old streets in the cities, countless bridges and tunnels, endless runs of railroad track and highway, hundreds of airports, not to mention malls, schools, big box stores, office buildings, restaurants, sports venues, cruise ships, skating rinks, theaters, churches. It would only take a couple-three more episodes like the New Orleans incident to paralyze public life in America just as badly as the Covid-19 op did. Are tourists rushing back to Bourbon Street now? Will they return for Mardi Gras on March 4?

And now, of course, the matter of drones has been brought to your attention. How many thousands (millions?) of these ingenious toys have been sold over recent years. You can walk into Best Buy today and get one, ranging from a couple of hundred bucks to models with advanced guidance electronics at several thousand bucks. Timers are cheap. C-4 and Semtex plastic explosives are easy to purloin from military bases, or just traded on black markets. Drones can be launched from anywhere, including out of windows anywhere. They can be launched in swarms.

You must also imagine that these Jihadis and other maniacs are primed to let loose on the imminently incoming Trump admin. The “Joe Biden” regime years were just the set-up period. Why open up with terror ops and show your hand prematurely while “JB” offered so much free and easy assistance in preparing the battlefield? And anyway, since so much of what “Joe Biden” was up to on his own initiative was obviously damaging to the USA in three dimensions — economically, strategically, and psychologically — then why interrupt all that serendipitous mishchief?

In the twilight of his twilight presidency, “Joe Biden” makes his final moves – that is, the people in the shadows behind “Joe Biden” make their moves – to fortify the progress he made working to destroy his own country, really anything that might hamper Mr. Trump’s ability to correct the deliberate desecration of our national life.

And, of course, to shelter any of those persons responsible from a legal reckoning in the future.

In a most garish example, “JB” awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to former Rep. Liz Cheney for her role on Congress’s J-6 committee. This, you understand, was done in defiance of what is already known and alleged about the treasonous misconduct of that body — withholding and destruction of evidence, tampering with evidence, coaching witnesses, lying to the media about testimony received, and obstruction of justice. You might lay a conspiracy charge over all those misdeeds, since they involved the formal agreement, discussion, and knowledge of it all among committee members. That is, it was done clearly in concert. This is how The New York Times put it:

The plea there is transparently and obviously mendacious, yet The Times, being the mouthpiece of the nervous DC blob, can’t resist laying out the game: how can you prosecute somebody for acts they’ve been given a presidential award for committing? Of course, a pardon will signal that Liz Cheney is, ipso facto, a criminal. And would “Joe Biden” then have to pardon every member of the J-6 Committee — since, being a conspiracy, are they not all culpable for the same crimes? But then, the J-6 Committee crimes against the people of America comprise only a small portion, a side dish, to the many other crimes committed by the officials working under “Joe Biden.” If he pardons Liz Cheney, won’t this president also have to pardon hundreds of other officials from Mayorkas, Wray, Garland, Fauci, Walensky, Austin, Blinken, Sullivan on down?

“Joe Biden” will no doubt wait until the morning of January 20 to issue those pardons, if he dares to, and he might well include himself in the package as having committed bribery and treason. Since his dementia is not total, he probably has enough brain left to reason fallaciously that the country will be too distracted by the Trump inaugural to notice what he did. He will think that he has acquired magic powers of invisibility. Not to history, of course.

And history will resume at noon on January 20. From that moment on, “Joe Biden” is certified as the most odious villain in our nation’s history.

Despite the ugly PR start to the year for Tesla’s Cybertruck, there is some good news: the vehicle “qualifies for up to $7,500 in US tax credits for the first time this year”, according to Bloomberg.

At least for now, the number of EVs and plug-in hybrids eligible for credits has dropped to 18 from 22, due to stricter domestic sourcing rules for batteries under President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The Bloomberg article stated that demand for battery-electric vehicles has waned as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to potentially end federal EV subsidies. Currently, 10 brands, including Tesla’s Cybertruck, Hyundai’s Ioniq models, and Kia’s EV6 and EV9, still qualify.

Eligibility for the subsidy depends on income and vehicle price, limiting access for some buyers. Volkswagen’s ID.4 crossover lost its full $7,500 tax credit, while select models from Ford, Nissan, Rivian, Stellantis, and VW no longer qualify for partial credits, Bloomberg noted.

Cybertruck has recently been in the news due to a tragic incident in Las Vegas, where on New Year’s Day, a Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel, resulting in the death of the driver and injuries to seven bystanders.

The driver, identified as 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant, reportedly shot himself before the explosion. The vehicle was loaded with gas canisters and fireworks, leading authorities to investigate the incident as a potential act of terrorism.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, highlighted the Cybertruck’s durability, suggesting that its robust design helped contain the blast and minimize further damage. Las Vegas police have acknowledged Tesla’s cooperation in providing information and footage to assist in the investigation.

Authored by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke via Truth Over News,

McCabe tried to re-engage Christopher Steele after Comey firing in preparation for newly fabricated investigation…

Journalist Aaron Mate released a copy of the May 16, 2017 Electronic Communication that was used to open the FBI’s formal investigation of then-President Donald Trump as a foreign agent of Russia. The document, received by Mate under a Freedom of Information request he filed, totals six pages in length and is heavily redacted.

The FBI’s opening of a new investigation of President Trump in May 2017 followed the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation in July 2016, which targeted the Trump campaign as a whole. This newer investigation also sought to determine whether Trump “obstructed” the FBI’s July 2016 Crossfire Hurricane investigation and/or any other “associated” investigations.

The May 16, 2017 date of the Electronic Communication remains highly relevant—particularly when we bear in mind two other specific events that surround the filing of this document: the firing of former FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017 by President Trump and the sudden appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel on May 17, 2017.

At the opening of this new (and completely unprecedented) investigation into a sitting US President, the FBI was being led by Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe—who can currently be found running cover for the FBI on CNN.

McCabe had been a key player in the FBI’s counterintelligence Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump presidential campaign, which relied heavily on fraudulent information provided by Steele—whom McCabe likely knew from his time leading the FBI’s Eurasian Crime Squad.

McCabe was also long-time friends with Senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr—who conveniently had a personal and professional relationship with Steele that went back almost ten years.

Ohr personally brought the Steele dossier to McCabe in early August 2016. A few months later, McCabe made Ohr the FBI’s unofficial conduit to Steele after the British spy was formally fired by the FBI for ongoing contacts with the media in the fall of 2016.

As we’ll see, in the days immediately following the May 9, 2017 firing of former FBI Director James Comey by President Trump, McCabe sought to directly re-engage with Steele—once again using Bruce Ohr as the FBI’s intermediary.

On July 30, 2016, Bruce and Nellie Ohr met with Steele and an unknown associate of Steele’s. Almost immediately after the meeting, Ohr initiated an early August 2016 meeting with FBI Deputy Director McCabe to detail his conversation with Steele. Also present at the meeting was McCabe’s counsel, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who would go on to play a key role in the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.

Shortly thereafter, on August 15, 2016, FBI agent Peter Strzok sent the now-infamous “insurance policy” text. A short while later, the FBI suddenly reached out to Steele asking for all of the information in his possession.

Steele’s formal status as a source for the FBI was short-lived. He was officially terminated as a source by the FBI on November 1, 2016 for communicating with the media—specifically, Mother Jones reporter David Corn. Steele’s meeting with Corn led to the October 31, 2016, article “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump,” which provided the first public reporting on the existence of the fraudulent Steele dossier.

But despite his formal firing, the FBI still wanted to receive information from Steele that could be used against Trump. Ohr, who was serving as the highest-ranking career official in the DOJ, played a pivotal role in passing on the unfounded allegations against Trump from Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson to the FBI.

Ohr would later testify that he had known Steele since 2007, when they met during an “official meeting” while Steele was still employed by the British government. After that, they maintained contact approximately “once a year.”

Ohr had also met with Fusion’s “Simpson on various occasions over the years” and his wife, Nellie Ohr, was actively working for Simpson’s firm as an open-source researcher on Trump. A 2010 report by the National Institute of Justice listed all three as participants in a paper.

Interactions between Ohr—who at the time was associate deputy attorney general—and Steele were so frequent that Ohr was assigned an FBI handler, agent Joe Pientka, who summarized Ohr’s conversations with Steele in FBI FD-302 forms.

The 302s of Ohr’s conversations with Steele ran from November 22, 2016 (just after the presidential election), to May 15, 2017—just one day before the FBI’s above-mentioned May 16, 2017 investigation into President Trump was officially opened. Although the FBI’s 302s ended on May 15th, Ohr later testified that he maintained contact with Steele and relayed those conversations to the FBI into November 2017.

Q: “On page 2 of the letter it lists 12 separate dates and 302s where the FBI interviewed you indicating the first interview took place on November 22, 2016, and the last one on May 15, 2017. Is this list of interviews and dates generally consistent with your recollection?”

Ohr: “Yes. The caveat I would say is, I continued to have some conversations with Christopher Steele after May 15, 2017. I’ve reported all of those to the FBI, but I do not see any 302s relating to those conversations.”

The information flow between Ohr and Steele typically went in one direction. Steele would provide information to Ohr, who would then provide it to the FBI. But in May 2017, the direction suddenly changed when the FBI decided to reach out to Steele in the wake of Comey’s firing:

Ohr: “The FBI had asked me a few days before, when I reported to them my latest conversation with Chris Steele—next time you talk with him, could you ask him if he would be willing to meet again.”

Q: “So this is the re-engagement?”

Ohr: “Yes.”

The texts being referenced in Ohr’s testimony were sent on May 12 through May 15, 2017 and refer to the request that Ohr received from the FBI to seek Steele’s re-engagement. It’s worth re-emphasizing that the FBI’s request occurred in the days immediately following Comey’s May 9, 2017 firing.

What is even more notable is that Steele’s professed source, Igor Danchenko, disavowed the dossier during a January 2017 FBI interview, confessing that the so-called “’intelligence” it contained was nothing more than barroom gossip from his childhood friends in Russia. What was the purpose of re-engaging Steele at this stage, given that the FBI already knew his entire dossier was a pack of lies? The only plausible explanation is that the FBI needed to ensure that Steele was aligned with their objective–which was to remove Trump.

On May 12, 2017, Ohr and Steele exchanged a series of text messages that show Ohr reaching out to Steele following the FBI’s request for re-engagement:

Ohr: “Thanks again for your time on Wednesday. Do you have time for a short follow up call sometime this weekend?”

Steele: “Yes, of course. Perhaps sometime tomorrow. When might suit?”

Ohr: “Would 3 pm your time work? I’m pretty open so just let me know. Thanks!”

Steele: “Fine, or possibly even at 2 pm our time if that works for you? Best”

Ohr: “2 pm your time is good. It will be quick. Thanks!”

The next text message is a response from Steele on May 15, 2017:

Steele: “B, having now consulted my wife and business partner about the question we discussed on Saturday I’m pleased to say yes, we should go ahead with it. Best C”

Ohr: “Thanks! I will let them know and we will follow up.”

Ohr is obviously referring to the FBI in his last message. The sudden firing of Comey appears to have been the precipitating event that led Acting Director McCabe and the FBI to suddenly re-establish contact with Steele. As this contact was being initiated by Ohr, the new FBI investigation into President Trump was formally opened by the FBI on May 16, 2017.

This seemingly irrational behavior by McCabe—the direct targeting of a sitting president of the United States—may have led directly to the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel the very next day, on May 17, 2017.

Indeed, text messages to Ohr from Steele provide some hints and highlight an abrupt pullback by the FBI. In June 2017, Steele sent Ohr the following text:

“We are frustrated with how long this re-engagement with the Bureau and Mueller is taking. There are some new perishable operational opportunities we do not want to miss out on.”

Steele sent another text to Ohr on Nov. 18, 2017:

“I am presuming you’ve heard nothing back from your SC colleagues on the issue you kindly put to them for me. We have heard nothing from them either. To say this is disappointing would be an understatement.”

Although McCabe likes to maintain the pretense of being a political victim, the truth is much harsher. McCabe was fired from his position for lying to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, to agents from the FBI’s Inspection Division and to the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.

Indeed, Inspector General Horowitz determined in a February 2018 report that McCabe lied at least three times under oath regarding his leaks to the media—leading Horowitz to issue a formal referral to the FBI regarding McCabe’s conduct. McCabe was ultimately fired by the FBI on March 16, 2018.

Interestingly, former FBI Director James Comey was fired by President Trump on the very same day (May 9, 2017) that McCabe was initially interviewed by agents from the FBI’s Inspection Division (INSD) regarding his leaks to the media. McCabe lied to the INSD agents regarding his participation in the leaks and in the process of uncovering McCabe’s deception the IG also discovered the massive series of text messages sent between Strzok and Lisa Page.

McCabe was also instrumental in running cover for Hillary Clinton during the FBI’s investigation of her use of a personal email server.

His wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, ran for a State Senate seat in Virginia in 2015. She had no prior political experience. The McCabe’s took $468k in campaign contributions from long-time friend and political ally of the Clinton family, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, who met with the McCabe’s on March 7, 2015. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to convince Jill McCabe to run for office – her first run at any public office.

Conspicuously, Clinton’s private server had just been uncovered by the New York Times on March 2, 2015 – five days before McAuliffe’s first meeting with the McCabe’s. McAuliffe’s contributions represented more than a third of the total contributions raised by Jill McCabe’s campaign. She lost the race despite heavy funding and an endorsement by the Washington Post.

Interestingly, McAuliffe himself was under investigation by the FBI – at exactly the same time – for donations made to his campaign:

The investigation is examining $120,000 of donations to the Democratic governor’s campaign and inauguration made by U.S.-based companies controlled by Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang.

Another of Mr. Wang’s companies, Rilin Enterprises, has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. The investigation dates to at least last year.

The FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server was formally launched on July 10, 2015. At the end of July 2015, Andrew McCabe was suddenly promoted to the number three position within the FBI. In the middle of October 2015, McCabe emailed investigators that Clinton would get an “HQ Special” – special or lenient treatment.

McCabe’s office initially provided personnel and resources to the Clinton email investigation, but when matters heated up, McCabe took personal control of the Clinton email investigation on Feb 1, 2016. Despite pressure from Congress and the American public, McCabe refused to recuse himself from the Clinton investigation until just one week before the 2016 election.

McCabe is long gone from the FBI, along with the entirety of the FBI’s leadership from the 2016-2017 period but nothing has changed at a fundamental level. The FBI remains a corrupted institution that exists only to protect the members of the Establishment and the status quo.

In his release of the heavily redacted Electronic Communication, Mate noted that he was “most interested to learn the factual basis for the FBI taking the extraordinary step…of investigating the sitting president as an agent of Russia. But that part is entirely redacted.”

The intentional and unwarranted obfuscation by the FBI continues unabated. Incoming FBI Director Kash Patel and the rest of the new Trump Administration can’t begin soon enough.

Back in October, when the repo market started cracking under the weight of the Fed’s gradual reduction in Reserves and Reverses, and funding spreads briefly exploded, we quoted BofA STIR expert – and former NY Fed repo guru – Mark Cabana, who said that according to his estimates, the Lowest Comfortable Level of Reserves (or LCLOR) is around $3-3.25 trillion given “(1) bank willingness to compete for large time deposits and (2) reserve / GDP metrics (back in 2019, the repo market locked up once reserves dropped to about 7% of GDP not too far from where they are now).”

We bring this up because in the latest weekly Fed balance sheet update, we find that the amount of Fed reserve balances as of Wednesday, Jan 1, tumbled by a whopping $326 billion – the second biggest drop on record – pushing the total from the comfortable level of $3.218 trillion to $2.892 trillion, the lowest since November 2020.

Normally, this liquidity-draining plunge would have been sufficient for funding spreads blowing out and stocks being flushed into a liquidation frenzy, however in this particular case there was a footnote: the fact that it took place at year, means that there was a mitigating factor, namely the flood of reserves went largely into reverse repos, which as we noted previously, soared by a near-record $213BN to $474BN, the highest since June, after previously dropping below $100BN.

Reverse repo soars by a near-record $213BN to $474BN, the highest since June, on year-end window dressing and funding shortage. Expect this to drop to $80BN by the weekend. pic.twitter.com/NhLLvIaIdq

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 31, 2024

This, as frequent readers know by now, is largely for window dressing purposes with banks scrambling to pad their books for regulatory purposes at quarter and year-ends, in the process draining substantial liquidity out of the system… then just days later reverting to normal, and sure enough on Wednesday we already saw a huge drain in the reverse repo balances, which dropped by 50%, or $233BN in one day, to $240BN, an amount which  we are confident will slide aggressively, and back below $100BN, in the coming days.

That also explains the market’s sanguine take on the recent plunge in reserves: it is quite confident the numbers will increase in the coming days.

There is another reason why what would otherwise be a concerning drop in systemic liquidity has yet to manifest itself in any funding spreads blowing out, and for that we have to thank Democrats for refusing to kick the can on the debt ceiling, which as discussed previously, will hit within days and restart the familiar 4-6 months liquidity flood that traditionally precedes the next debt ceiling crisis.

As Goldman’s William Marshall writes in a Thursday note (available to pro subs), the start of 2025 brings the end of the debt limit suspension period. And while the treasury likely won’t have to dip into its extraordinary measures until the middle of January, as Janet Yellen noted recently, from that point it will generally have to operate under the constraints of cash on hand plus available extraordinary measures until there is a resolution. At that point the countdown to the next debt ceiling crisis begins, and the deadline for the next D-Day, or debt limit action, is likely not until July or August 2025.

Some more details from the Goldman report:

We estimate Treasury will start out with slightly more than $1tn in headroom, reflecting the sum of the Treasury’s cash balance plus extraordinary measures available up front. As Treasury Secretary Yellen noted in a letter to Congress, it likely won’t be until the middle of January that Treasury actually has to start dipping into its extraordinary measures thanks to redemptions of nonmarketable securities on January 2. In addition to the capacity available to begin with, we assume some incremental headroom will come available each month alongside a more sizeable boost at mid-year.

There is uncertainty as to how exactly Treasury will manage its available levers—i.e. the pace at which it draws down the TGA versus depleting extraordinary measures via higher net marketable borrowing. Still, the overall effect will be less bill supply and higher levels of broad liquidity (thanks to a lower TGA) in the system than the counterfactual of no constraint. Exhibit 1 illustrates the average change in T-bills outstanding and cash balances normalized to past debt-limit resolutions (using a sample since 2011).

On average bill supply falls by about $130bn and the TGA drops roughly $225bn in the 6 months into an agreement. The subsequent rebuild tends to be somewhat faster—on average bills outstanding and the TGA both reverse that decline within the month or two following a resolution.

As noted above, the TGA will be starting off at a considerably higher level compared to when Treasury has reached the debt ceiling in the past (highs of approximately $450BN in 2021 and 2023). Goldman expects this year’s TGA drawdown to be comparable to the 2021 and 2023 experiences when cash balances fell roughly $425bn in the window between reaching the debt ceiling and resolution.

That said, a process that drags into Q3 could see TGA fall significantly further still as July and August tend to be seasonally large deficit months, and thus GS estimates meaningful bill paydowns in the $400 to $600bn range over the first two quarters in this scenario, on par with the paydown observed in 2021

Paradoxically, and as we explained in early 2021, the period preceding a debt ceiling D-Day (which will takes place some time in Q3) tends to be very beneficial for risk assets, not because markets fail to discount a potential looming political crisis, but because overall liquidity levels soar. 

Indeed, as Goldman confirms, “debt ceiling limitations mean that until there is a deal there will be less bill supply and higher levels of broad liquidity than would have been the case otherwise.” Less Bill supply means the Treasury is forced to draw down on its Treasury General Account (i.e. cash balances) as it can’t roll Bills, and meanwhile the liquidity from maturing Bills is allocated to other risk assets lifting them in the process despite what is clearly another looming crisis.

To wit, the bank writes that “balance sheet runoff means, however, that a given TGA drawdown is likely to translate to a smaller build in overall liquidity in the system (measured as reserves plus RRP) — we expect this would rise roughly $150-250bn through mid-year under our QT baseline assuming no resolution ahead of then.“

Ironically, as with the scope for a larger TGA drawdown, a more protracted process that spills into the second half of the year could see a sharper rise in overall liquidity that exceeds what was seen in 2023 when injections from the Bank Term Funding Program also helped offset the impact of QT. Conversely, a later tapering and/or end to QT than baseline expectations of an H1 end, would dampen any potential rise in liquidity although should Trump pursue an activist Fed to boost overall liquidity, we don’t expect this happening. Ultimately, absent any debt limit constraint, bill supply would be roughly flat alongside a roughly $350bn draining of overall liquidity from the system in the first half of the year.

In other words, the good news is that with just days to go until the countdown to the next debt ceiling fiasco begins, the Treasury cash balance is historically high compared to past instances when the debt ceiling has been reached as discussed above, and If there is no resolution in the first half of the year, the TGA drawdown would more than fully offset the draining of liquidity via QT alongside meaningfully negative bill supply.

Not surprisingly in light of this imminent liquidity flood, Goldman thinks that “the higher starting level for the TGA and magnitude of any potential bill paydown should at least support a more benign first half of the year in dollar funding conditions than would have been the case otherwise, dampening the tightening bias in swap spreads that have prevailed in prior debt ceiling episodes.”

Goldman’s rule of thumb is that a $100bn rise in liquidity from current levels is worth 0.5bp to SOFR-FF, while a $100bn drop in bills outstanding is worth about 0.1bp. That said, the market prices that in to a large degree, with most SOFR-FF tightening backloaded into the second half of the year…

… which leaves vulnerability to a faster resolution of the debt limit (or a later/slower ending of QT). It’s also worth noting that balance sheet capacity constraints (rather than the overall level of liquidity) have played a greater role in driving volatility in funding markets over the last year—these may ease now that year-end is behind us, but not because of the debt limit.

Putting it all together, Trump could not have asked for a better “debt ceiling crisis”, because while Democrats have been hoping to pull the rug from under Trump as soon as he is in the White House (expect the reality of the US jobs market to be unloaded by the deep state apparatchiks at the BLS like a ton of bricks), the accelerated drain of some $750BN in Treasury cash will provide a generous buffer for risk assets to maintain their levitation well into the second half of 2025 much to the delight of the 47th US president.

Ironically, it would be the end of the debt ceiling fiasco that is bearish for markets! That’s because, the Treasury tends to rebuild the TGA fairly quickly upon resolution, suggesting risks of a swift undoing of any tailwinds in funding and spread markets.

That said, the intersection of this episode with the more mature phase of Fed QT may see Treasury proceed somewhat more cautiously in eventually returning the TGA to target, however, particularly with Treasury’s “steady-state” TGA target somewhat higher than it was pre-pandemic.

According to Goldman, the August-September 2019 repo crisis is perhaps the closest analog: QT had ended, and the mid-September jump in the TGA coincided with the surge in funding market volatility that prompted Fed liquidity injections. While the end point would ultimately be the same, a more gradual replenishing of Treasury’s cash balance would reduce the risk of excessive volatility that could arise from quickly withdrawing liquidity from the system.

In other words, stocks – and liquidity sppoppnges like Bitcoin surge – for the duration of the TGA drain, then risk tumbles once the debt ceiling resolution drains $750BN from the market some time in Q3, and then – if the stress from said drain is too much – we get another “Not QE” from the Fed, which triggers the next inflationary shock into late 2025 and onward.

More in the full Goldman note available to pro subs.