Musk now controls all US payments 🚨 | USDA freezes payments to farmers

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superrific

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This needs its own thread. It is one of the most dangerous things the administration is doing. We can't lose sight of that in all the other shit about DEI, which is headline grabbing but ultimately it's relatively harmless. What Trump undoes, can be redone.

But if they start fucking with payments, that cannot necessarily be undone. And the payment system contains a lot of other information that Musk and his people have no business seeing.

www.nytimes.com

Canada and Mexico Move to Retaliate on Trump Tariff Orders

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Paine said:
So what’s the end game? Is Musk angling to create some kind of payment processing fee on disbursement of government money that he can profit from?
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1. He gets access to payments made to rival companies. He now understands the terms of every government contract
2. This is a way to get leverage over people. Speak out? No money for you. Sue to get it. It's basically the Trump approach to contractors for the world's largest economy.

There might be other reasons too. Those come to mind. But who knows? Uncharted territory.
 
No idea what Musk's angle is, but there has been lots of speculation that the Government would start making these payments via the new FedNow instant payment network rather than issuing checks or ACH deposits. The network launched in July 2023 and banks are still getting up and running on it but government disbursements would really help the network take off.
 
NCK9 said:
No idea what Musk's angle is, but there has been lots of speculation that the Government would start making these payments via the new FedNow instant payment network rather than issuing checks or ACH deposits. The network launched in July 2023 and banks are still getting up and running on it but government disbursements would really help the network take off.
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His aim is to be Lex Luthor.
 
uncmba said:
Information is power. I’m quite sure his folks are mapping out with extreme detail where this money is going.
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I wonder if this could create a potential Jan 6th style prosecution when the next administration comes in. Not sure how it is lawful for Musk, a non-governmental employee, to access such data.
 
Calheel said:
I wonder if this could create a potential Jan 6th style prosecution when the next administration comes in. Not sure how it is lawful for Musk, a non-governmental employee, to access such data.
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I'm increasingly of the opinion that if we do get a next administration, we're going to clean house before reimposing the rule of law. We will need a dramatically different constitution, and personally I'd like to finish Reconstruction. We should recognize no Trump pardons; the Supreme Court will be dissolved and reconstituted; and prosecutions of folks like Musk will be military tribunals.

We gave the rule of law a second bite at the Trump lawlessness and it failed. So future coups will have to be deterred in the way they are deterred virtually everywhere else in the world.
 
superrific said:
I'm increasingly of the opinion that if we do get a next administration, we're going to clean house before reimposing the rule of law. We will need a dramatically different constitution, and personally I'd like to finish Reconstruction. We should recognize no Trump pardons; the Supreme Court will be dissolved and reconstituted; and prosecutions of folks like Musk will be military tribunals.

We gave the rule of law a second bite at the Trump lawlessness and it failed. So future coups will have to be deterred in the way they are deterred virtually everywhere else in the world.
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I think you are correct but to get to that point the next administration will need the high ground to be able to fix things. I don’t see that being possible without a lot of suffering first. Trumpism has to be broken from within.

It is like Germany post WW2. Removing the remnants of Naziism was easy because the people suffered so much from Naziism and the war they. Even ones who supported the regime to the end of the war were no longer willing to put up a fight for it.
 
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ChapelHillSooner said:
I think you are correct but to get to that point the next administration will need the high ground to be able to fix things. I don’t see that being possible without a lot of suffering first. Trumpism has to be broken from within.

It is like Germany post WW2. Removing the remnants of Naziism was easy because the people suffered so much from Naziism. Even ones who supported the regime to the end of the war were no longer willing to put up a fight for it.
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The remnants of Naziism took a lot longer to disappear than you imagine. All of a sudden, a lot of stuff got overlooked once the Cold War started.
 
Paine said:
Democrats need to really hone in on the smash and grab that the billionaire class is doing to our government right now.
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You, me, Bernie and Kamala all agree on that. LOL. But I fear it's going to be hard to get Americans too jazzed up about that unless they see it affecting their own lives.

And fortunately for us, Musk and Trump seem to be as hell-bent on making their bullshit affect as many lives as possible.

Trump wants to own his tariffs. Good. Nobody should ever forget who is responsible.
 
Paine said:
So what’s the end game? Is Musk angling to create some kind of payment processing fee on disbursement of government money that he can profit from?
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Wouldn’t surprise me.
 
Going to take a wild guess it has something to do with this, there's been a lot of chatter the Bank of England is essentially broke at the moment, and a ton of gold is moving into the US futures market right now.

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finesse said:
The remnants of Naziism took a lot longer to disappear than you imagine. All of a sudden, a lot of stuff got overlooked once the Cold War started.
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I am sure but they had no power. Maybe that was simply because of the military occupation. But either way, I would argue that the suffering the Germans faced both directly by the Nazis and indirectly because of the wars the Nazis started helped Germany move on from Naziism.

We can’t move on from Trumpism until the right decides it is necessary - either because they lose public support or don’t like what they get out of Trumpism. Neither of those are reached easily.

The other alternative that the pendulum swings really hard and we end up with some type of left wing authoritarianism. That is the fire that those on the right are playing with. When you destroy democracy and social norms and ruin the economy, you don’t know what you will end up with.
 
The UK holds a tremendous amount of our debt, if you include the Caymans where all the British hedge fund money resides, it exceeds Japan.


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Why this also might matter is because there is simultaneously a ruling that came down from the SEC last year (and is being implemented this year) about centralized counterparties (CCPs) for clearing transactions in US treasuries as well as in the repo market, which transacts around $5 trillion daily. Currently both are settled overwhelmingly outside of CCPs (e.g. the CME could be a CCP) and instead settle bilaterally, away from the careful watch of regulators. Bilateral settlement on transactions is very risky as it's allowing small players in the market to dictate the price of treasuries, and there are too many long term holders of treasuries to allow a few hedge funds to control price action in the world's largest market. We had a preview of what that could look like in March 2020 when treasury market volatility spiked to the highest levels ever. Plus these hedge funds engage in a rather risky trade in the market known as the basis trade where they're basically betting on the interest rate differentials from the cash price in repo to the treasury futures price. This sometimes can lever up their book without even realizing it, causing the banks (who lent to them initially in the repo market) to have to eat the cost and bail out their client if their entire book goes under, as was the case with Archegos Capital in 2021.

The point is all of this is changing this year, and there was a minor point that Senator Cornyn made in Scott Bessent's confirmation about how one of the approved CCPs / Clearing companies is London-based and is outside of our jurisdiction. The CEO of the CME Group (who also owns the COMEX gold futures market) was making a big stink about this when I looked it up because in a crisis it would give British bankers tremendous power to dictate our policy if they also could corner the Treasury market. Some may remember this was a big deal in 1991, Solomon Brothers (who was very much linked into the Robert Maxwell world back then) tried to corner the US Treasury market and was fined and basically pushed out of business for attempting to do so. The person who took on the Solomon case on behalf of the Treasury was none other than Jerome Powell, who was Deputy Treasury Secretary back then.
 
Sometimes it feels like we're going to need a Designated Survivor scenario to reset everything that Trump and company are going to screw up.
 
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