Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has had his Truth Social company go public by merging with a publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. Under the deal SSAT owns nearly 79 million shares, about 58% of the total. While the share price peaked at $79.38 on March 22, making his shares worth about $6.3 billion, it has since dropped precipitously, and as of yesterday was trading at $33, making its worth about $2.6 billion.

David Cay Johnson writes that the true value of the stock in Trump’s company is zero since it lost $58 million last year and had revenues of just $4 million with no sign that revenues will rise. Johnson says that because the stock is highly over valued, it is the target of so-called ‘short sellers’, who make money by betting correctly that a stock’s price is going to fall.
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One of the worst things about professional sports in the US is that the owners of teams extort local communities to foot the bill for fancy new stadiums by threatening to take the teams elsewhere if they do not receive massive taxpayer subsidies. Studies have shown that the economic benefits that the stadiums supposedly provide are often wildly inflated and in reality bring nowhere near the amount that the public puts up. The team owners have pulled off this scam many times but it looks like citizens are getting wise to this extortion racket and refusing to pay.
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Amazon has become a retail behemoth, driving out much of the retail competition. It did this by providing low prices for an immense array of goods and fast delivery, and with those methods managed to develop a huge customer and supplier base. The way it did that was by selling below cost and offering incentives to sellers and in the process running up huge deficits in the initial years. By those methods, it persuaded manufacturers and other retailers to sell through the site. I read about a company that sold diapers online and was doing well. Amazon tried to buy the company but when the company turned down its offer, Amazon cut the prices of its own diapers well below cost and drove the rival out of business. That kind of tactic is only possible for companies with large cash reserves or huge amounts of venture capital and other financing.

Initially, both manufacturers and consumers got a good deal. But once they all got hooked and Amazon became almost a monopoly, Amazon started squeezing them by raising prices. It is an old trick. Since manufacturers who sold through it had to guarantee that their product would not be available cheaper anywhere else, what they did was raise the price of their product everywhere outside of Amazon to be higher. Someone I know recently went looking for a part to fix his dishwasher. He found that Amazon had the lowest price but that the part at the manufacturer’s own site was a few cents more.

The Federal Trade Commission is currently suing Amazon for this and other monopoly practices.
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I was skeptical about cryptocurrency and was utterly baffled by the appeal of NFTs. The former seemed risky and the latter felt very much like a speculative bubble driven by hype in which the underlying entity being bought and sold had no intrinsic value. So I was not surprised by the collapse of various cryptocurrency endeavors like FTX and even less surprised by the recent lawsuit filed against Sotheby’s auction house, accusing them of fraud in inflating the value of the ugly Bored Ape BFT and using celebrities to hype it.
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The invaluable ProPublica has come out with another article about how billionaire Harlan Crow, the generous benefactor of justice Clarence Thomas who showered him with vacations on his luxury yacht and private planes, has used the tax law loopholes to avoid paying taxes.

He adopted a well-known tactic by the wealthy, to use so-called ‘business losses’ to reduce their net income. In his case, how this was done was to set up a company for his luxury superyacht that was purportedly a business and then use the ‘losses’ incurred by the company (i.e., the money used to run the yacht for him and his family and friends) to offset his income.
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The deal to raise the debt ceiling has passed both houses of congress with bipartisan support and will be signed into law by president Biden on Saturday, two days before the projected X-date (June 5th) when treasury secretary Janet Yellen said the government will run out of money to pay its bills. As of Thursday evening, the closing balance in the government’s account was just $22.892 billion, the lowest it has been since the recent crisis started.

The current debt ceiling limit is $31.4 trillion which has already been reached. The deal did not raise the ceiling by a fixed amount. Instead it agreed to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025, just after the next election. As I understand it, ‘suspension’ means that there is no debt ceiling at the moment so it is possible that the US treasury could, in theory at least, run up the debt by a huge amount by selling off US treasury bills.

But I don’t think they will do that.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy and his Republican negotiators have reached a deal with Joe Biden and Democratic negotiators over a deal that would raise the debt ceiling to carry it over until 2025, i.e. after the next election. There still remains the task of having the deal passed by both houses of congress before the X-date of Monday June 5. It is scheduled for the first vote in the house on Wednesday, May 31.

I am no federal budget expert but on the surface it seems like a deal that could just as easily have been arrived at without all this brinkmanship. This article outlines what is in it.
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