How America Became a Loophole Economy

What does it take to be prepared for disaster? You have to be confident. You have to be calm. Will you be perfect? No. But the idea is that you'll have your bearings, and this won't be something new to you. This week on Explain It to Me, how to stay ready so you don't have to get ready. New episode Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the week from Prop g Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, May 22. This week, we talked a lot about rules, rules around war, rules around markets, rules around political power, and what happens when people making decisions stop following them. Let's get into it. On Wednesday's ProfG markets episode, Ed sat down with Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director and founder of SkyBridge Capital, to go through the 3,700 plus stock trades the president made in the first quarter of twenty twenty six. That's more than 40 trades a day, altogether valued somewhere between 220,000,000 and $750,000,000. And as Ed laid it out, a lot of those trades weren't random. January 6, he buys up to up to a million dollars worth of NVIDIA stock. And then January 14, just a few few days later, he approves Nvidia to start selling chips to China. That to me is like, okay, that's a very big deal. Similar thing happens January 12, he buys a bunch of Oracle stock. A week later, the deal for Oracle to buy a stake in TikTok is finalized. And of course, the only reason it's finalized is because he approves it. His administration approves it. Similar thing with Boeing. He buys Boeing stock and then he says that China is gonna purchase all these Boeing jets. Like there are several examples here where it seems very very plainly obvious that he had very important material, non public information, and this is just the way that the law talks about it. And then before that happens, he goes in and he buys the stock. And so in those cases, to me, I'm thinking that's just illegal. You know, I guess there's three things I wanna say. Number one, it's disgusting. It's, it it's probably legal, Ed. That's the irony of the whole thing. It created these loopholes for themselves, but it's absolutely disgusting, and it makes people very cynical and very turned off by politics. Number two, I think this is probably the most important thing about it is he doesn't care, which means that worse things are on the way. You're gonna see a tsunami of corruptive activity over the next two and a half years and it's gonna be put right in your face. The bottom line is this is going to happen. Okay? The bottom line is for your viewers and listeners, life is unfair and these guys are sitting there, ladling money into their own accounts for their own self …