The New American Credo: When The Truth Hurts, Lie

   The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Gary Cohn, Director of the National Economic Council, President of Goldman Sachs, is below. You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here. ~~~ This is Masters in… Read More The post Transcript: Gary Cohn appeared first on The Big Picture.    The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Gary Cohn, Director of the National Economic Council, President of Goldman Sachs, is below. You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here. ~~~ This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio [Barry Ritholtz] 00:00:07 This week on the podcast, what can I say? Gary Cohen with just a stellar career at Goldman Sachs, where he spent 25 years rising through the ranks, commodities trading, fixed income currency, eventually running equity, and soon after becoming President and Chief operating officer at Goldman, soon after he’s tapped by the White House to become director of the National Economic Council and Chief Economic Advisor to President Trump. Starting at the beginning of the administration in 2017. Really a fascinating career, a really, really interesting person. We dive deep into all sorts of things about running businesses, managing risk, and then when we began talking about his public sector service, we went deep into the Tax Cuts and Job Act of 2017. If you’re at all interested in that, you’ll find this to be an absolutely masterclass in how legislation is assembled, how it’s shepherded through the house, through the senate, through all the competing interest groups. I found this discussion just really to be absolutely fascinating, and I’m positive you will also, with no further ado from the White House and Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohen, [Gary Cohn] 00:01:34 Barry, it’s great to be here. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:01:36  It’s great to have you. So let’s start out talking a little bit about your background and your career. I never would’ve guessed you began at US Steel. Tell us when was that and, and what’d you do there? [Gary Cohn] 00:01:47 So, it was a very short career at US Steel. So, you know, I I, I, I graduated college in 82 and I, I thought I was gonna take a, a few months off and regroup, and my dad didn’t think that was part of the agenda. So he, you know, woke me up my first Monday morning home at 6:00 AM through the lights on, asked me what I was gonna do with the rest of my life, and I think I made some wise crack. And he said, go [Barry Ritholtz] 00:02:13 To Europe, gonna spend a few weeks [Gary Cohn] 00:02:14 Away. Yeah, I, I, I think I told him, I, I, I said, I think I told him you’re looking at it. And he said, yeah, not in my house. So I went out and tried to find a job locally. This is when I was still living in Cleveland, and I got a job with the home building Products division of United States Steel, which was a company that United States Steel had acquired in Cleveland, called All Side. They sold replacement windows, vinyl siding, aluminum siding, gutter coil, things like that. I ended up starting there in the summer of 82, and by the fall of 82, I was gone. Now, there was one really important part of, of that as part of my job training, I was sent to the big sales offices to learn how the product was sold. One of the big sales offices was out in Long Island in Garden City. And so in my second week in the sales office in Garden City, I said to the, the gentleman I was working with, I said, you know, I think we’re gonna work really hard Monday to Thursday, and I’m gonna go in the city Friday. And he said, that’s a really good idea. So I went in the city on Friday, and that’s how I found my way down to the commodities exchange, the commodities floor. And that’s where I got my job, and that’s how I turned my career into a financial career. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:03:33 So I had a wildly incorrect assumption. I just pictured you working with the various input commodities to steal iron plus energy, plus manganese, nickel, chromium, carbon  all those things, and said, Hey, I could move to the commodities exchange and, and make a killing trading. Nothing like that happened. [Gary Cohn] 00:03:52 Nothing like that. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:03:53  How did you find your way to the Comex? [Gary Cohn] 00:03:56  So two years earlier, and now we’re going back in time, the summer of 80, for those of you that remember the summer of 80, the Hunt brothers at that point were silver, were exactly, were trying to corner the gold and silver market. I was doing an internship at a local brokerage office in Cleveland, Ohio, and I did the typical internship, you know, a week in the back office, a week in equities, a weak in fixed income and weak in commodities, a weak in bonds, and then four weeks, wherever you’d like to go. And of course, where I would like to go is where the guys are screaming and yelling in the back corner, which were the commodity guys. So I ended up being allowed to go sit with the commodity guys. And at the time they were doing the Chicago, New York gold arbitrage. They had sent, set up a gold arbitrage desk, meaning [Barry Ritholtz] 00:04:46 That the slight difference in prices between the two exchanges, they would help bring ’em into line and maybe pocket a few cents on each exchange. [Gary Cohn] 00:04:54 Exactly. And at the time, they weren’t slight differences. Oh, really? Yeah, because it, the, the, the Hunt brothers, when they came into the Comex at the time, they were only buying one market. They were buying the, the Comex market. So the Comex market would move, you know, 10, 20, $30, and the Chicago market would lag dramatically behind. Wow. So there were these five plus dollar disparities in the price of gold. And so they would sit there and trade. And so after a week there, I, I said to the guys on desk, Hey, can I open an account and do this? And they said, you know [Barry Ritholtz] 00:05:27 Hey, how hard could it be? [Gary Cohn] 00:05:28  Be? Yeah, you’re, you’re, you’re allowed to open an account. So I opened an account and I sat there and I traded the, the New York Chicago Gold arbitrage for the next sort of close to month. And I said, wow, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. They’re just giving away free money.  I was making cash while I was sitting there. So I decided that point. I said, oh, I, I, I, I gotta go to the floor of the exchange. This is really interesting. This is a really interesting opportunity. And I really did not want to go back to college. You know, I had a, a long discussion with my dad, you know, I said, dad, this is silly that I go back to college. There’s this unique opportunity. I don’t know how long it’s gonna last, and I’m gonna sit here and trade this. There’s gold arbitrage. And he said, no, no, you’re going back to college. I don’t care what you do. So I did the best thing I could do. I went back and did my next three years of school in two years, and then I got myself to the floor of the exchange by the end of 82. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:06:26 And then what were you doing on the, what were you trading on the floor and how did you stay long? Did you stay as, as a floor trader? [Gary Cohn] 00:06:32 So, in, in many respects, I got lucky in my first job offer because the Comex had just started to trade options on futures. It was brand new. No one on the floor knew the options market. So one of the large firms there approached me and said, Hey, do you know anything about options? Can you help us trade options? And I said, of course, even though I knew nothing about options, [Barry Ritholtz] 00:06:59 But nobody knew anything about Options on Futures. They, their brand spanking knew, [Gary Cohn] 00:07:03 Right? No one, no one had traded ’em on the floor. There were no option traders there. The big option, trading firms from the other option, trading Exchange hadn’t come down to the floor. They hadn’t become members, they hadn’t rented seats. So it was, there was no real knowledge there. So literally in the course of five days, I went out and tried to learn how to trade options, and I got lucky enough to get a job. I stood behind one of the brokers for one of the large firms, and I was literally saying, okay, buy that call, sell that, put, go sell those futures. And he goes, what’d I do? Well, you locked in, you know, $4 an ounce. He goes, how how’d I do that? I said, well, here’s how you do that. How do I get out of it? I said, okay, we’re gonna work our way out of it. And I stood behind that person for the better part of a year. And then after a year, you know, I, I, I said, this is kind of silly. I’m sitting here telling this guy what to do, right? I gotta figure out how to get my own seat and trade my own account. And so, about a year into my experience on the floor, I went out and, and got a seat on the floor of the Comex. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:08:04 What do you remember what they cost back then? [Gary Cohn] 00:08:06  About 150,000 bucks. Okay. It was a, it was a 00:08:09 [Barry Ritholtz] Real money in ’82. [Gary Cohn] 00:08:10  It was a substantial amount of money. Now, the good news is you could lease ’em, you could lease seats on a, on a monthly basis. So I went and got a floor, and I, and I opened up a, an account with a clearing member when the clearing member guarantees your trades. Right. And I started trading for my own account. And so I traded my own account from sort of the end of 83 until I left the floor of the exchange. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:08:32 And that was how much later. [Gary Cohn] 00:08:33 So I, I stayed on the floor till, till basically 1990. And, you know, ended up moving from trading options to trading more and more futures, you know, the futures markets were, were expanding, they were growing. It was a interesting time, right. But I, I, you know, I would trade almost anything that was volatile that day. And it was an inter, it was really an interesting experience learning how a fundamental terminal market works. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:09:00 So I’m glad you mentioned you shifted somewhat from options to futures options. Your risk is predefined. However much you’re putting up, that’s as much you can lose. Well, [Gary Cohn] 00:09:10 Unless you, unless you sell a naked call, oh, 00:09:12  Okay, fair enough. You sell a naked call, you [Barry Ritholtz] Right. It’s, it’s no different But, but inherently in futures, a whole lot more leverage, a whole lot more risk. How fundamental was that to your learning about investing, trading risk management, starting with futures? So, [Gary Cohn] 00:09:29  It, it was important where I found a real niche on the floor, and everyone finds their little niche on the floor and, and being on the floor. It’s an interesting environment because everyone’s there for their own little specific reason. And where I found the niche is at that time, because things have changed dramatically. You know, the, the futures exchange is listed about 24 months of futures contracts. You know, the, the first and second delivery months traded 90% of the volume. But then you had people that wanted to trade the outdated months, you know, they wanted to trade the one year forward or the 18 month forward. Where I really specialized and where I spent my time is figuring out how to price the one year forward or the 18 month forward, and making prices in those markets. There were only two or three of us on the floor that did that. So when any of the orders came in to buy the non-active months, there were only two or three of us that would make a price. And so I carved out a, a, a unique opportunity. There was some other people, I wasn’t the only one doing it on the floor. And, and it was a unique opportunity to really learn more of the fundamentals of the business. It also brought in, you know, interest rates and interest rates expect, because the forward curve is a function of interest rates [Gary Cohn] 00:10:52 . You’re doing a lot of math in your head on the Fly. I’m doing, I’m doing an awful lot of math in my head on the fly. And to hedge your position, you know, how do you hedge, you know, a a long dated future versus a short dated future? It’s not one-to-one. There’s mathematical formulas on to, on how to hedge your book and count your months of exposure and look at your interest rate exposure, look at your underlying exposure, look at your present value of your future cash flows. It becomes much more interesting than just trading the spot month in and out. So that’s where I really learned how to trade and how to think about cash flows and think about supply demand. [Barry Ritholtz] 00:11:28 It’s a fairly obvious transition from the floor of the Comex to Goldman Sachs. How, how did you meet Goldman? What, how did, how did that next step come about? So, [Gary Cohn] 00:11:40  By the time I was sort of at the end of my career in 80, 89, 90, you know, I’d become a fairly large trader on the floor. And when you’re a fairly large trader on the floor, that means you’re taking the other side of the institutional business flow. The institutional business flow at the time was probably the biggest player was, was, was Goldman Sachs. It was j Aaron, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, a little bit of a I g a little bit of JP Morgan, you know, and then a bunch of the, the funds. So I knew all of the Goldman traders because when they came in to move volume, I was there to, to, to make prices. And, and, and so we had a, you know, we had a a, a good relationship with each other. 00:12:26 [Speaker Changed] I’m gonna assume you weren’t taking the other side of the trade all that often with them, or, 00:12:30 [Speaker Changed] Oh, I was taking the other side of the trade all the time. Oh, really? Okay. But remember, we, we had completely different things we were trying to accomplish. Goldman had clients on the other side. They were trying to make their clients a ahead price and get hedged, and they were gonna walk away from the trade. I was making a price, and I may be out of it in 30 seconds or 40 seconds or 50 seconds. I was trying to figure out, you know, what was the price I needed for the next five minutes to clear the volume, got it, and move it around. And if I traded something, where could I move it? What could I, what could I, what could I buy or sell against it to make myself as, as risk reducing as possible? So we had different motives and, and so I was able to do my job. 00:13:13 They were able to do their job. And that’s what a, a terminal market does. It allows the different factors or the different people trying to get done what they need to get done, a place to meet. And, and, and so I had become closer and closer to the Goldman Sachs people. I’d become closer to the a i g people. I’d become close to everyone in, in, in, in 1990, Goldman had partner elections, and the, the gentleman who was running the medals trading desk, you know, called me in the office one day. And I just thought we were gonna have a conversation about the markets. And you know, what, what I was thinking, what he was thinking. And he said to me, he said, Hey, look, you know, I just became partner here. I think there’s a great opportunity. I’m gonna really continue to build this business. 00:13:56 And instead of you just taking the other side of our business all day long and fighting with us, why don’t you come up here and join us? At the time, it was the farthest thing from my mind. But the more I thought about it, and the more I saw the trends of what was going on in the industry, and the industry had changed quite dramatically over the prior five years. It had gone from a fairly, fairly heavy retail business to a very institutional business. No, no individual was really trading commodity features. If you wanted that exposure, you were giving your money to a professional, a commodity trading advisor, or some hedge fund. So it was becoming very institutionalized. So it was harder and harder to make money, or I was taking more and more risk to make the same amount of money. So when this individual, Jim Riley came to me, I said, you know, this is, this is not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. And he and I came to an agreement that I could keep my seat, if I ever wanted to go back, I could do a few things to make sure that if the transition upstairs from the floor environment to the trading desk environment didn’t work, that I felt like I had a safety net. Well, I never really needed that safety net, but it was nice to have that safety net. Huh. 00:15:04 [Speaker Changed] Really quite fascinating. You, you then spend what the next 25 years at, at Goldman Sachs. You rose through the ranks, eventually becoming president and c o o pretty good decision leaving the floor of the comics. 00:15:19 [Speaker Changed] I think it was one of my great decisions in life, really. So besides, besides getting married and a few other things, I, I, I, I can’t really just tell tell you what other better decisions. 00:15:28 [Speaker Changed] So you run commodities for a while at Goldman. What was that like? And do you still like, look at what’s going on today in energy when you look around? Do you get that itch? Do you feel like, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna do some futures trading, or Yeah. 00:15:43 [Speaker Changed] Look, once a trader, always a commodity trader, right? So I look at prices of commodities every day, and I have views on the markets every day. I don’t know if they’re sophisticated enough that I would trade futures, but, you know, trading underlying equities and trading, you know, equities that have high correlation to commodities is something I, I’m comfortable with. It was a unique opportunity at the time, because if you go back to that early nineties period, you know, commodities were somewhat in a bull market. It was a, it was a pretty bull market environment. And, you know, there were a lot of hedge funds talking about how to, how they were making 20, 30, 40% returns in commodities. Well, the team at Goldman Sachs had figured out if you bought like one gold future contract for the year, you would’ve made 30%. So, you know, we, we, we got involved and created a benchmark, a commodity indices at the time. 00:16:40 So there was a way to judge yourself. Did you actually outperform the market? You know, I had the interesting opportunity to be part of the team that built a commodity index. I, once I got done building it, I, I was the one that traded that index. So I got exposure to 18, 18 markets, many of which I’d never traded in my life. So that was really unique. It allowed me to build some new, a new business allowed, it allowed me and Goldman to expand into a lot of new markets where there was huge business opportunities for our clients. Hmm. Really, 00:17:12 [Speaker Changed] Really intriguing. So let’s talk a little bit about what makes Goldman Sachs so special. You spent most of your career there. Why is it so unique? 00:17:24 [Speaker Changed] So, when I went to Goldman in, in, in 1990, it was a small private partnership. I mean, it was a really small private partnership. Looking back, 00:17:35 [Speaker Changed] 500 partners, 00:17:37 [Speaker Changed] Oh, less, substantially less, really? Yeah. I, I think the most interesting document that I pull up from time to time is the SS one from the public filing of Goldman Sachs, which was in the, in the late nineties. If you look at the, if you look at the filing and you look at the size of the company and the revenue, the entire yearly revenue numbers would be a bad quarter right? Now. That’s unbelievable. It just tells you. And, and so there was so much growth going on in Goldman when I went there in the nineties, and I had a unique seat, you know, in, in, in, and the partners there provided me a unique seat, and they gave me enormous amount of latitude and responsibility to keep building businesses. So a as you said, I I, I, I joined the firm as part of j Aaron. 00:18:35 At that point, J Aaron still was a quasi quasi standalone business. It was wholly owned by Goldman Sachs, but we hadn’t quite integrated into the Goldman Sachs culture. So the first thing that happened in my career there is, you know, j Aaron became part of fixed income. So we, we became, we went from fixed income and j Aaron to thick fixed income currency and commodities. That was a big move, taking these, you know, crazy commodity guys, right? And putting ’em in with these very sophisticated fixed income guys. So part of that transition, and that was, that was a big move to create thick. And, and it didn’t happen overnight. There was a lot of natural tension in involved in that. And then even when we were combined by name alone, we still ran ourselves independently. So then I got the unique opportunity to be the, i, I would call it Guinea pig. 00:19:34 I was the, the, the commodity guy. The got put into running a fixed income business. I didn’t lose my responsibility of running the commodity business, but we moved the emerging market business down to what used to be the j Aaron floor. On the j Aaron floor was the commodity businesses as well as the FX business. So we had the, you know, the metals business, we had the oil business, we had the grain business, we had the coffee business, we had a coffee roasting room. We had a tasting room, and then we had the FX business. And in the middle, we decided, which made sense to put the emerging market debt business, all, all 00:20:12 [Speaker Changed] Related currency. Yeah, commodities and EmTech 00:20:15 [Speaker Changed] Made sense to us. Yes. Made sense. At the time, the Mexican, after the Mexican restructuring, they had, they had Mexican bonds with an oil option embedded in them. You had a lot of currency forwards trading, which made se made sense. So we moved emerging markets down, and I was asked to run the emerging markets business. So I was the first sort of guy that went from being a pure j Aaron Guy to making that crossover to commodities and a fixed income business. 00:20:43 [Speaker Changed] So prior to that, have you had any management experience or leadership experience that’s a big raucous floor, and I would imagine that desk was, was a handful to deal with. What, what was it like stepping into that role? 00:20:57 [Speaker Changed] So I had been running the commodities business. So I had been managing the commodities business. We had built some new businesses. We had built our, our Goldman Sachs commodity index business. So, so I had had, you know, a lot of responsibility building a business and, and, and, and building it out quite well. I had spent four years in London building our commodity business there. So the management piece of it was not what was the challenge to me, the challenge to me was I had never been involved in a fixed income business. You know, to me, I remember the moment, you know, where, where, where, where I had to learn something new for the first time I had, I spent my whole life in supply demand. So this is supply, this is demand, you know, this is how you look at supply demand. And all of a sudden I am in this world where, okay, we’ve got the, you know, Mexico 23 bond trading X, y, Z, and it’s 1 0 2, 1 0 3, 1 0 4. Like this thing is under value, we should buy it. And the guys go, no, no, no, no, no. I go, why won’t we buy it? We gotta own this thing. They go, they can turn around and issue more tomorrow. And I go, oh man. Like the whole supply demand fundamentals, right? I had to change my whole thinking. 00:22:06 [Speaker Changed] There’s on, there’s only so much gold and silver around, right? But bonds how much you want, right? Bonds, you got 00:22:11 [Speaker Changed] All you, we can call, you want bond, you know, the government of Mexico can turn around and reissue can, can open the issue or reissue a new bond tomorrow. So the amount of Mexican sovereign bonds can change tomorrow, which all of a sudden was a whole new way of thinking about the world. That the supply demand fundamentals of a commodities market are not the same as the supply demand fundamentals of a fixed income market. So, you know, the, the, the opportunity to bring that emerging markets desk down to into the j Aaron world worked out fairly well. I got the opportunity to go from the emerging markets world into the mortgage world. So they, they, they, they sent me into the next beast, which is the mortgage world. And, 00:22:50 [Speaker Changed] And I have to interrupt you and just point out, 1990, when you start, think about the timing. You’re halfway through an 18 year equity bull market, which we’ll talk about in a minute. You’re a decade into what’s gonna end up being a four decade fixed income bull market mortgages are really starting to ramp up and becoming very tradable. Your timing couldn’t have been been any better when were you promoted to global co-head of equities and fixed income. 00:23:21 [Speaker Changed] So it went something like this. So I end up going into the mortgage businesses, end up building a big mortgage business. We ended up becoming a very big trader and pass throughs end up, end up doing in mortgages. What we’ve now done in all of our commodities business, what we’ve done in the emerging markets, we then really have a fixed income currency, commodities business run as one business. So we, we managed to make that work. We managed to crosspollinate. We, we run ’em as a business. We no longer have fixed income guys and commodity guys. We now have a, a, a division and, and, and it’s working quite well as you’re right. We, we had some very good markets going on in, in the mortgage space. We had some very good markets going on in the commodity space, and we were able to capitalize on those things in the early two thousands after I would say the.com bubble had burst, you know, I was asked to go over and run the equities business. 00:24:23 [Speaker Changed] So obviously somebody looked at you and said, Hey, this guy’s talented. He knows how to run a team. He knows how to manage risk, and he knows how to trade for a profit for a p and l. So clearly your background was well suited. Yeah. 00:24:37 [Speaker Changed] Look, may maybe lucky, maybe good, most likely a combination of both. Right. Never 00:24:43 [Speaker Changed] Hurts. I had, I I always assume good is table stakes at a place like Goldman. Lucky never hurts. 00:24:49 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I look always take, I I I’ll always accept the good luck. If you want to give me some, I’ll take it. So look, I, I had had a very good track record of building businesses from rebuilding our commodities business, emerging markets business, mortgage business. You know, I had gone through business by business, by business and, and, and, and, and helped build and helped transition them into much more client facing, client friendly, bigger risk taking businesses, bigger client facilitation businesses where we had a brand and reputation on the street as the go-to shop in fixed income currency, commodities, our equities business was really good going into the.com crisis, like it was a big business. We dominated, dominated, 00:25:29 [Speaker Changed] Did a lot of syndicate, a lot of underwriting, a lot of IPOs we did. 00:25:32 [Speaker Changed] And then all of a sudden that world changed and that world changed dramatically. And so I was asked to go over to the equities division and you know, I I, I went in knowing absolutely nothing about the equities world. But look, I had done that. I knew nothing about emerging markets. I knew nothing about mortgages. I knew nothing about government bonds. I knew nothing about anything in that world. So I just said, look, it’s another learning experience. I’m gonna learn about it. And realized that, look, we had one of the most unbelievable capital markets syndicate shops. Like we could place new issues better than anyone. The problem was the new issue, market and calendar was gone, right? And we had to transition from a new issue, capital market syndicate shop, to a secondary trading facilitation, one delta derivatives shop. And so I, I went into the equities and with some help of some, some really smart people, we transitioned that business to look much more like we, what we had built in the fixed income currencies and commodities business. 00:26:37 And that was done in the early, you know, the early two thousands. And then, you know, as, as as we had, as I had done in other businesses, and we had done, you start realizing the synergies between different businesses and all of a sudden you realize like the, the one delta or the equities business, their trading specific company names, but so are the corporate bond guys, the corporate bond guys are trading company names, corporate names. And a lot of the underlying factors that are affecting corporate bond trading are affecting equity trading. So then we decided, look, look, maybe we should put all of these businesses together and create a securities division. And the corporate bond people should sit on the same floor as the equities salespeople. And so they can talk about companies, you know, if you, if if you got something going on in company X, it’s not just affecting the equity, it’s affecting the converts, it’s affecting the preferreds, it’s affecting the corporate bonds. And those traders, it, when we started, they were in different buildings. They didn’t even know who they were. Wow. And so should we put them all on one floor, which we did. And that’s how we created the securities division. 00:27:48 [Speaker Changed] That, that makes a lot of sense. ’cause you would imagine everybody is looking at a, the six blind men describing the elephant. Everybody’s seeing a different part. And that intel has to be useful for, for the rest of the floor, whether it was preferred convertibles, corporate bonds, or, or equity. 00:28:04 [Speaker Changed] Absolutely. Yeah. So I, I remember the first time we were on the equity desk and, you know, and equity was getting sold off hard. And I said, I picked up the phone and called, you know, the guy over on the, on the, on the corporate desk desk and said, Hey, what’s going on this name? And he said, nothing like, you know, no, no nothing. And all of a sudden I sat there think, okay, what, what we, we need to learn by this. We need to understand is this a liquidation of a big position? Right? You know, should we, should we be going out to the market and selling this and getting people into the name? We have to learn by the whole capital structure because it is a capital structure. 00:28:38 [Speaker Changed] Hmm. That’s really intriguing. And you continue working your way up. You obviously did a, a pretty good job there. You continue working your way up eventually in oh six, becoming appointed president and co-Chief Operating officer, you end up as a member of the firm’s board of directors as well as chairman of the firm-wide client and business standards committee. Tell us a little bit about what it was like to get kicked upstairs to the C-suite. 00:29:06 [Speaker Changed] So that was 2006. I had, you know, it, it had come after we’d put all the trading businesses together. We now had the securities business. So we had put everything together, which, which made a lot of sense. We, we had, had, had done a, a very good job of that. Hank Paulson had left to go become treasury secretary. Right? And all of a sudden, you know, we’re, we’re, I’m sitting in the executive office floor and you go from sitting on a trading desk where you know exactly what’s going on, or you think you know exactly what’s going on in every market moment to moment, minute to minute. And all of a sudden you’re sitting in an isolated office trying to figure out how to run a big global firm that’s not just a, a, a securities trading business. You’ve got a big asset management business that you care about. 00:29:57 You’ve got a big banking business that you care about, and you’ve got a lot more aspects of the company that you care about. So, you know, it, it, it, it became another moment in time where I sort of take a deep breath and say, okay, how can I contribute most to Goldman Sachs? And I felt like there were a few different unique opportunities at the time. We did not have the strongest West Coast banking presence. So, you know, I saw what some of our competitors were doing. You know, I’ll be honest, Morgan Stanley had a really dominant banking presence in, in California, in West Coast and Silicon Valley, 00:30:37 [Speaker Changed] Mary Meeker Yeah. Absolutely dominated that 00:30:39 [Speaker Changed] Space. Yeah. They had a dominant position. They really did. And it was hard to deny that. And, you know, every time there was a, a, a big capital markets deal, or a big I p o coming outta there, we were, you know, begging to get to be the number three of a number four and number five. And I said, you know, to the team out there, I said, look, we’ve gotta go build this. This is something I can take on. So, you know, I found niches where I felt like I could contribute to growing the firm, helping the people in the firm while taking on my responsibilities to really manage the firm and operate the firm on a day-to-day basis. You know, my, my number one priority was to operating the firm on a day-to-day basis. But I felt my, my, my importance to the firm and the way you create clout and the way you create the ability for people to listen to you and follow you at Goldman is you still have to be a revenue leader or near the revenue. I don’t think you can get disconnected from revenue. You can’t be a sit in your office manager at Goldman, at least in these times. So I wanted to be a valuable part of the revenue driving machine, which also made my ability to manage and drive the organization that much more impactful. So 00:31:51 [Speaker Changed] That, that’s pretty unusual, isn’t it? Typically when you’re in the C O O President slot, you have subordinates reporting to you from different divisions. It’s un is it unusual to roll up your sleeves and say, Hey, I’m gonna help build this out? Or did it just help you better understand what everybody else was doing in the company? 00:32:11 [Speaker Changed] I think it helped me better understand. So I spent enormous amount of time on the road. I spent enormous amount of time with our coverage people. I was out seeing clients, you know, as many days of the years I possibly could really without, you know, without, you know, sort of putting the firm in, in, in any apparel or any jeopardy, making sure the firm was well run, dealing with all the bigger issues of the firm. But I felt the time I spent outta the office in other locations, in other offices with our senior most people and with their clients, was the most valuable thing I could do for the firm. 00:32:47 [Speaker Changed] You mentioned Hank Paulson, one of the few people who comes outta the financial crisis reputation intact. So you’re, you’re president and c o o and what, two, two and a half years later, suddenly the world starts to unravel and everything goes to hell in the hand basket. Although I think Goldman held up better than most. What was that era like for you? 00:33:11 [Speaker Changed] You know, look, it was tough. You know, it, it was a tough period in time. You know, you, you could see to some extent what was going on, even though you could see what was going on. There were certain things you couldn’t avoid. You know, you, you have certain structures, you have certain securities, you have certain assets on your balance sheet or that you’ve created. And you can’t un-create them, even though you said, wow, what, you know, I wish we hadn’t done that. Well when we did it six months or a year ago, different world. It seemed like a rational thing to do. And you’re, you’re sitting there, you’re watching, you know, you’re, you, your fellow competitors, whether it be a Bear Stearns or a Lehman Brothers, you know, get in trouble and, and, and you’re watching what’s going on and you’re understanding the fragility of an industry. 00:34:03 You’re understanding that, look, you have a lot of the risks that they do. You know, funding a, a a a a institution or funding a bank is really important. As I, as I always used to say to people, you know, these banks or these financial institutions, they don’t run outta equity. They run outta liquidity. So liquidity becomes such a crucial part of the organization. How can you finance yourself? How can you fund yourself? How can you make sure that you have liquidity? And how can you reassure clients that you have liquidity? And so we at Goldman as, as a team, we spent enormous amount of time and we took our best and most important people and said, look, drop what you’re doing. Make sure that we are dealing with our own situation and make sure that we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure we have liquidity almost at any cost. What, 00:35:01 [Speaker Changed] What was the date on that? Because for a little context, I want to say the markets peaked sometime October oh seven, something like that. But really it didn’t feel like they were rolling over till first quarter of, of oh eight when, and, and lots of competitors were doing a slow bleed Yep. And not exactly publicizing it. When did you say, Hey, this could get really bad. We need to, we need to be proactive. You 00:35:28 [Speaker Changed] Know, we went, I don’t remember the dates exactly, but, you know, we were watching the, the mortgage banks, the mortgage originators, right? And remember there were, I think it’s about 32 mortgage banks, mortgage origins. They didn’t make it through 2008. You know, we had done business with basically almost all of them. They originated mortgages, they sold them to us, we repack them, sold to everybody, right. Sold ’em to everyone. Like we weren’t, we weren’t unique. But, you know, just watching what was going on on a day-to-day basis and having conversations with those organizations and, and, and seeing what was going on, and understanding what was going on at the agencies that Fannie and Freddy, and understanding what their positions were, and understanding what was going on at a i g and, and, and understanding what was going on with some of our private equity credit clients. You know, I, I think there was a seminal moment. I think it was July 4th weekend. 00:36:31 I remember getting a phone call at, you know, like six o’clock at night from a very large private equity firm that, that also ran a big credit fund. And the credit fund had bought a debt security from one of the, their private equity’s own deals. Oh. And he was reneging on the deal to himself. He was reneging on the, the debt deal. ’cause he couldn’t get it funded in the secondary market. Wow. I said, you know, you’re reneging on your own deal. Like this is your paper from a company that you guys own. That was a seminal moment. Right. I can imagine that was a moment where I said, oh, like the world is changing dramatically right now. When, when, when someone won’t fund paper from a a, an in-house deal for a major private equity player. So there were, there were moments along the line, you know, and then you get into disputes on what things are worth. 00:37:27 And certain, you know, really major companies are disputing margin calls because they’re disputing what a security is worth. Like I never in my career had a major corporate disputed a margin call on what a security is worth. Like, it, it, it really didn’t ma it really was unprecedented. It was unprecedented. Right. It was unprecedented. So there were, there were a lot of signs along the way that liquidity was getting tighter and tighter and people were, you know, hoarding liquidity if they had it and protecting it if they didn’t have it. And, and, and, you know, we as a firm, we were conscientious of this to the point where we actually went out and issued a bunch of debt and equity early on. Yeah. We went out and did that big Warren Buffet deal. Yeah. 00:38:19 [Speaker Changed] So the, the Warren Buffet story could be my favorite story of the whole financial crisis because as much as people said, what, what was it like a 9% or 11%? It was a big note. Everybody kind of forgets Buffet offered that to Dick fold and Lehman months before and fold said, no, too expensive. Yeah. It could be the single biggest error of the entire crisis. Yeah. They might still be around, who knows. Buffet 00:38:46 [Speaker Changed] Offered it to us in the morning and said, you can let me know by five o’clock tonight. And we, and and we said, don’t worry, we’ll be back to you and all we have to do is get our board together. We got our board together. And we said, done. And we did a big secondary equity raise around 00:39:01 [Speaker Changed] It following that. I remember 00:39:02 [Speaker Changed] That. You know, and, and the only conversation we had from people in the secondary raise is everyone said, well, I would’ve done the buffet deal. And I said, the only problem is you’re not Warren Buffett. That’s 00:39:10 [Speaker Changed] Right. That’s exactly right. And, and it was one of those moments where God bless Warren Buffett. Yeah. It, it really made a huge difference to everybody. Even though there was more downside in the equity market, it’s, Hey, we’re not all gonna go down the drain. Well 00:39:25 [Speaker Changed] Then, then a week or two later, I think it was within a week or two, that’s when treasury decided they were gonna put tarp money into all the banks, regardless of those that had raised capital or not. And but by the way, I don’t disagree with them either. They, they, they were trying to infuse capital in the system and, 00:39:41 [Speaker Changed] And not single out any specific bank which would cause a run. Right. So yeah, really it was a, it was, you know, I I’m always reminded of the scene from, from Apocalypse Now where they’re surfing, Hey, one day this war’s gonna end. And it’s, it’s really when you were in that moment, it was really, really one of a kind, which all of which leads to the question, given the breadth of that experience at Goldman through everything from really the bull market and bonds and equities to the dotcom implosion to the financial crisis, how did that experience set you up to become a leader in the public sector? 00:40:23 [Speaker Changed] So a lot of those skills are very transferable. You know, my job at goldman net net, when you boil it down, was dealing with crisis or opportunity e every day. And by the way, most days I was dealing with both, you know, and, and, and some opportunities became crises and some crisis became opportunities. So I I, I consider myself being the crisis management or opportunity management business because when you’re running a very large balance sheet globally with lots of people committing capital and lots of people making promises or commitments or underwritings, you’re gonna have problems. It’s just the nature of the business. No matter how well intentioned people are, there’s gonna be mistakes and clients are gonna get unhappy and, and and, and you just have to deal with them. So, you know, having spent the last almost 11 years of my life at Goldman, and I’d done it before being a, a crisis manager, and that’s really what I did. It was a crisis manager trying to look for opportunity. You know, I think it prepare, prepared me well to go into the government because I, I was always trying to figure out how do we create a solution? How do we create something that works? What is the compromise? What is the way out of this situation? Is there, there, because there’s a way out of every situation. So, you know, I never believe there wasn’t way out of a situation. So, so 00:41:47 [Speaker Changed] Let’s break that down before we spend a little time in the public sector. Let’s stay with crisis management. ’cause I kind of get the sense reading your background, you created a, I don’t wanna say formulas to is probably overstating it, but you seem to have created a structure where every time there’s a crisis, you followed a few specific steps. So crisis shows up on your desk. What, what is the Gary Cohh three or five step response? What’s the playbook 00:42:19 [Speaker Changed] Be? I i, I don’t know if there’s a playbook ’cause they’re 00:42:21 [Speaker Changed] All different. They’re all different. 00:42:23 [Speaker Changed] I, but 00:42:23 [Speaker Changed] There’s some themes that seem to be consistent 00:42:25 [Speaker Changed] Is, as I used to always say, is, you know, we at Goldman, we’re, we’re very creative in the problems we have. We’ll never usually have the same problem twice because we’re, we’re, we’re really good at fixing the last problem we had. We’re not good at, we’re, we’re not as good as anticipating the next problem, but we’re good at fixing the last problem. 00:42:43 [Speaker Changed] Okay. So in, in my, I’m gonna interrupt you and say in my research into you, one of the things, and some of the speak people I spoke with, Gary will own the problem. Yeah. Apologized for it. Yeah. Here’s what we’re gonna do to fix what took place and here’s how we’re gonna make sure this doesn’t happen again. That’s what I was referring to. Okay. Did I putting words in your mouth or is that 00:43:05 [Speaker Changed] Not fair? Yeah. No, no, you’re not, you’re not putting words in my mouth at all. So look, I always believe you have to own the problem. I mean, ownership is, is 90% of the battle. You know, I, I never had a problem where I did where I would say, it’s not my problem. Because if you’re the chief operating officer, the president of Goldman Sachs, every problem is your problem. Yes it is. It’s, it’s my problem. It’s my problem. And it’s, and and, and it’s my job to make sure it gets solved. So a I would always start with ownership. B I would always need the facts. So, you know, if you really wanna go through the chronology of a, of a problem, you know, okay, problem arises, number one, get all of the facts into the room. Try and agree upon the facts. You know, one of the hardest things sometimes is agree upon the facts. 00:43:54 You know? And, and, and, and my job was to sift through the facts and sit, not just sift through the facts from my, my team’s perspective. I needed to talk to the other side. If there wasn’t other side, you know, I need, I needed both sides of the opinion. And, and I always trusted, you know, in, in the words of Ronald Reagan, trust, but verify. You’ve gotta trust but verify everything. So go through it, understand the facts, understand what, what happened. Own the problem. Try and fix the problem. And, and, and be realistic. And, and, and I always thought, if I go to the people and tell ’em exactly what happened, tell ’em the truth. Tell ’em how we’re gonna rectify it. 95% of the time it’s gonna solve the problem. ’cause really people understand there’s gonna be problems. They just want to understand what actually really happened. 00:44:47 [Speaker Changed] And everybody walks away happy after that. 00:44:49 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Look, they, they walk away as happy as they can be. Right. I don’t, I don’t wanna sit here and tell you, oh yeah, every time people walked away happy, they walk away as happy as they, they walk away. How about this? They walk away 00:44:58 [Speaker Changed] Satisfied. Right? Well, these are complex problems with big money involved. And occasionally people are gonna argue about, Hey, who has this loss? Or who has this profit? And sometimes that leads to disputes. Yeah. 00:45:10 [Speaker Changed] If it, if it’s just a loss, if it’s just money, sometimes those are easy to cure, right? I, I don’t wanna be cavalier, but if it, you know, if it’s just a money problem, it’s, it’s sometimes not a big deal. It’s like a deal can’t get done and someone blames someone for something. Okay, now we got a problem. 00:45:28 [Speaker Changed] Now you got personality and ego, right? And turf wars and everything else. 00:45:32 [Speaker Changed] And, and, and why can’t the deal get done? And now people are, are pointing fingers, well, the deal can’t get done because this happened. You didn’t do this or you did do this, or you shouldn’t have done this. And now all of a sudden it’s like, okay, now I, like money’s not gonna solve the problem. I’ve gotta get people back to a position, understand why the deal can’t get done. Maybe the deal never could have gotten done. Maybe someone just never explained to the client. Maybe, maybe, maybe they told the client things that they just wanted to hear. Which is, which again, I have to own that and say, look, my team didn’t do a good job. My team should have told you six weeks ago this couldn’t get done or this wasn’t gonna get done, or for this to get done, these five things had to happen and none of these five things happened. 00:46:12 [Speaker Changed] So I don’t really think of c o o as a fixer, but really what you’re saying is you are a free safety and anything that could go awry, you’re on top. You have to be responsible for, 00:46:24 [Speaker Changed] I think in a firm like Goldman Sachs, you have to, you have to, when you’re in a transactionally driven business where your clients are depending upon you for advice, capital and, and really the future of their company, in many respects, you have to, as, as, as a senior person, you have to, you know, be there as the free safety and help make sure you guide these things to, to the, to the softest landing. You can if, if and when there’s a problem. Now the, the good news is the vast majority of the time these things just run their course. And the teams are so good that they all happen by themselves. 00:47:01 [Speaker Changed] You, you are there for the, for the ones that, that aren’t self-repairing. Exactly. Really intriguing. So let’s talk a little bit about that period. Your chief economic advisor to the president. You managed the administration’s economic policy agenda and you spearhead the Wage and Tax Reform Act, which was a, a substantial policy success in the Trump White House and a pretty substantial rejiggering of the tax code emphasizing small businesses, LLCs, tell us a little bit about what was life like in the White House? 00:47:40 [Speaker Changed] Well, life in the White House is fascinating. It was probably of, of all the things I’ve done in my career, the most fascinating experience I’ve had. And, and, and I’m very thankful that I had the opportunity, very thankful that I did it. You know, wall Street is a, is a good preparatory class for Washington. You know, it’s, it’s long arduous days, which are, which you’re used to. You know, my my day was, was was pretty simple in many respects and pretty chaotic in other respects. But no different than a day at at Goldman Sachs. You know, I used to say my days at Goldman Sachs is about 20% of it. I have an idea what’s gonna happen about 80%, I have no idea. And I just hope and pray it’s not too crazy. And I would say the White House was pretty similar. About 20% of the day, I sort of had an idea of what was gonna happen. And the rest of the day we were gonna deal with the issues or the problems or the opportunities of the day. You know, my days would start early in the morning with the presidential daily brief. C i a would come in and brief and, you know, you’d see what 00:48:46 [Speaker Changed] C i a comes in and briefs that, that. So I imagine at Goman you have great business intel. What’s it like getting briefed by by the spooks? 00:48:54 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, look, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve got a, we’ve got a really interesting, you know, intelligence network around the world and it’s their job to make sure those of us discussing policy in the White House have the information we need and that we’re all have the same information. And so there’s a, a group of us that get the, the, the daily brief and, you know, you can get it, you know, I think most of us got it fairly early in the morning and you can get it when you want. And so I used to start my day with it early in the morning, and that was how I started then, you know, I would go from there to the, most of the chiefs of staff would have a staff meeting in the morning. So the, the, the senior White House people would get together in the morning around 8:00 AM or so, seven 30 or eight, discuss the issues for the day, discuss the opportunities for the day, discuss the messaging for the day, you know, you’d get done with that. 00:49:55 Then I’d have my staff meeting around nine o’clock or whenever the senior staff meeting was over, you know, I relay to my staff what the messages for the day that we would discuss what problems we’re working on. And, and then we would go into our more, you know, day to day agenda depending on what we were working on from a policy standpoint. We spent a lot of time up on Capitol Hill working with various members of different committees, both in the House and the Senate. ’cause at the end of the day, you know, a lot of what we’re trying to do is get legislation done, which as, as we know, it takes 60 and 60 in the Senate, 2 35 in the house and a presidential signature. There’s ways around that during reconciliation for budget bills and things like that. But the overall legislation, you know, you’re, you’re trying to do regular way or normal way and, and you’re working on trying to get legislation done. And, you know, I think it’s the, the, the job of the White House to drive normal way process legislation working with either majority or minority leaders in the Senate or, or, or, or in the house. You have a really intricate working relationship with them on their agenda. And, you know, they have a pretty good idea who stands where on what pizza of legislation. So we’re attacking, you know, the, the, the various constituents on on who needs time, who needs effort, who needs persuasion, who they 00:51:26 [Speaker Changed] Have the headcount, you know, who to go to, 00:51:28 [Speaker Changed] Who needs handholding, who who, who’s solidly in your camp, who’s solidly against you, who’s on the fence. And you know, that’s sort of a typical day, but intertwined in there. You’re at the beck and call of the president, and the president, you know, can decide at any moment of the day, basically, he wants you tear 00:51:48 [Speaker Changed] Up the script and go this way. 00:51:50 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. He wants you in the Oval Office, he wants you some meeting, he wants you involved in something. And like, you know, at a Goldman Sachs, your entire calendar, your entire schedule can get, you know, blown up in 30 seconds or less. And that’s, that’s what, that’s the way it works. And you know, one of my, I I think one of my important attributes is, you know, I made sure that I sat down with the president every day, you know, I sort of knew the times the day to go in and see him. And I tried to spend, you know, an hour or so, a day alone when he wasn’t distracted with other people coming in and out, right. And say, Hey, look, this is what we’re trying to get done. Here’s where we are. What are your thoughts? You know, you okay with where we’re where we’re going? ’cause you know, you always want to be on the same page as the ultimate decision maker 00:52:40 [Speaker Changed] To, to say the least. So let’s talk about probably the biggest economic legislative success of the entire administration, the, the T C J A. Yep. Tell us a little bit about how this came together, how the parameters were formed, who was really driving the different aspects of that? It, it, it’s really a fairly comprehensive package and very different than previous tax cuts that were just, Hey, we’re just gonna play around with the different rates. 00:53:11 [Speaker Changed] So it, it’s very comprehensive. We started on that plan in December of 16. So I had agreed to join the administration sort of beginning of December of 16. And by the middle of December we’re already starting to talk about taxes. We know that we want to get tax done. And look, one of the reasons I went into this job was taxes. I felt that we had a tax policy in the United States that was hindering growth and deterring US corporations from investing in the United States and penalizing them to do things that they actually wanted to do that were positive for the US economy and positive for US jobs. And to me, I felt this was a huge opportunity and there was an opportunity to fix this. 00:54:10 [Speaker Changed] And, and let me just remind everyone of the timeline. So the election, November, 2016, December of that year, you’re teeing it up, president’s sworn in January 20th and you’re hitting the ground running. 00:54:23 [Speaker Changed] We’re hitting the ground running already in December. Wow. So by December, me and, and other members of the team at this point, it’s a large team, you know, like, like everything. It’s a large team. ’cause everyone wants to be involved. 00:54:37 [Speaker Changed] Did you bring people over from Goldman with you or was 00:54:39 [Speaker Changed] No, I didn’t bring any, just 00:54:40 [Speaker Changed] Stood up a brand new team. 00:54:41 [Speaker Changed] I didn’t, I stood up a brand new team. I look, the first thing I did, let, let me back up ’cause this is really important. The first thing I did when I accepted the, the, the N E C hijab is I went out and I hired a world class and I mean a world class team of experts. And, and, and I looked at it like, this is Goldman Sachs. Like, I need the best people in the world in each of the roles. And the n e C job is really interesting because it touches the broadest spectrum of economic policy. 00:55:11 [Speaker Changed] And, and feel free to name drop who, who’d you, who’d you stand up with that group? No. 00:55:15 [Speaker Changed] Like, like I went out and hired Jeremy Katz to be my deputy. You know, Jeremy was amazing. He had worked in the White House before. He really knew the right people to go out and hire. He understood the roles, he understood what could get done and what couldn’t get done. He knew that I really wanted to get taxes done. He told me, look, there’s a woman by the name of Shahir Knight, you’ve gotta go out and hire Shahira if you want to get taxes done. Like Shahir is your person. We went out, we got Shahir hired, you know, but then you’ve gotta go out and hire people in the healthcare space. You’ve gotta go out and hire people in the energy space. You’ve gotta go hire people in the technology space. You’ve gotta go out and hire people in the agricultural space. Jeremy knew all those people to hire. 00:56:01 He went out, he brought me in the best people ever. And it was, it was kind of interesting to me because it, it was interesting and really rewarding because, you know, Jeremy would bring these people in. He’d do the first and second round interviews, and then I’d meet ’em and Jeremy says, look, you gotta meet these people. They wanna meet you before they come to work for you. And I would sit down and talk to ’em and, and they were all amazing. They were amazingly talented. And I would si.....»»

In search of a status symbol, I wound up getting ripped off big-time. But the real scam is how America's payment apps treat their customers. A pool could have been evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. But after we Zelle-ed the deposit to our contractor, things started to go very wrong.All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.Illustrations by Madison KetchamI was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth."I'm sorry, Gary is not available right now," said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn't have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary's wife, but I couldn't imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary."Do you know where he is?" I said. "This is urgent.""Um. And who is this?" said Cheryl.I gave her my name and her tone changed a bit. "I see," she said tightly. "Well, I'll tell him that you called. Again." "Please do," I said, trying to sound both grateful and angry. Then I hung up.It's true that my wife and I had been calling Gary a lot. About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard. It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame. And thanks to the support of my friends and family, I was able to bury my feelings deep inside and become invested in the idea of having a pool. A pool could be evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. When I found myself at a party with intimidating people, I would sometimes say to myself, I am a person with a swimming pool, so I could believe I had the same right to exist as anyone else. And people would have to be friends with me, right? Because who doesn't want a friend with a pool? It would be like when Jeff Allen's mom used to let him have pool parties at his house in eighth grade. Sure, after everyone ate all the grilled cheeses his mom had cut into triangles and sneaked shots of vodka and then thrown up in the bushes, they all left and didn't invite him to come along. But wasn't that better than sitting at home alone on a Friday night, which was probably what Jeff would have been doing otherwise? Wasn't that a win?It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame.(Side note: Jeff grew up to be a heavy Facebook poster who writes screeds about how if people are so sure a man has a right to marry a man, then shouldn't a man have the right to marry a dog? He lives in Tennessee now with his wife, Krystal, whom he proposed to by having a trained dolphin swim up to her strapped with an engagement ring. Some people stay true to themselves.)Originally, the pool work was supposed to commence in April 2020. But obviously that didn't happen, because that was when everyone was sealed in their homes rinsing groceries in a solution of three parts water to one part Clorox. But now it was 2021. The construction trade was beginning to lurch back to life. There were delays, of course. We were in the throes of the great pandemic renovation boom, and there weren't enough workers or materials. Container ships were lined up for miles at the ports, and the cost of lumber had become something normal people talked about. The New York Times was publishing hate-reads about people from cities moving to places like the Berkshires and building swimming pools and bringing their obnoxious, demanding, me-first city culture with them.And so that March, we began calling Gary to say me first. Can you ensure we'll be first in line once the ground thaws? He'd try, he said. We took that as a promise.We called him in April. We called him in May. The further into summer we got, the less responsive he became. If you've hired a contractor, this will sound familiar. Why answer the phone just to get yelled at by some people from a New York Times hate-read? June crept along, and Gary went completely dark. We were anxious. We felt wronged. We let our feelings be known: Gary, and here I'm paraphrasing our email, we Karen-ed our way into being first in line to build a pool in the spring and now here it is in the middle of summer and we literally cannot get ahold of you. Finally, on July 5, we received a response. Gary emailed us that he was ready to begin. He said he could start within the week and reminded us that, according to the contract, we owed him $30K-plus before construction commenced. We checked the contract and saw that he was right. He sent another email with instructions for payment. Because a lot of bank branches were still closed, and the crew wanted their money, he requested that we transfer the money via Zelle. But because there are daily Zelle limits, he said, we should just transfer a little bit every day.We Zelle-ed $3,500 on the 6th, $3,500 on the 7th, $5,000 on the 8th and again on the 9th. Now that he was getting his money, Gary was more responsive. Do you have all the materials you were waiting for, we asked in an email. Yep, mostly. Can you start next week? Yes. The emails were strange. We sometimes had to read them aloud: What if you put a period here, would it make sense then? What if there were a verb? But Gary's emails had always been weird. After all, you don't go into the Cheryls business because you care about the syntax in your electronic correspondence. This man ran his company from an AOL account, which I didn't even know you could still have.After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit? We asked him to send us a signed receipt for the $23,000-ish we'd sent. Certainly, he said, I'm on a job, give me a few minutes. A few minutes later we got a signed receipt from Royal Palace Pools and Spas, printed on letterhead and photographed. All we had to do was send another $3,500 on the 12th and another $5,000 the 13th, his start date. If things went our way, the construction would be finished in a few weeks. After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit?And then July 13 arrived. Early that morning we received an email from Gary that he was down the road with his crew and would be there imminently. But hours passed, and he didn't show. That's when we reached Cheryl and she said, "Oh, it's you," and told me she'd get him a message. We started calling every 15 minutes. This guy had taken our money and who knows when — or if — he was ever going to start building us a hate-read-worthy swimming pool.Then, early that afternoon, we got Gary on the phone. Yellllow he said. We asked him where he was. He was confused by that. He was at the office, he said. But you told us you were on your way here, we said. You emailed us and said you were already on the road.Gary was silent for a moment."I haven't emailed you in a month," he said.Then my wife said holy fuck.Like so many things I use to conduct the most critical tasks in my everyday life with a carefree obliviousness, I didn't really know what Zelle was. I now know it's an entity wholly owned by a company called Early Warning Services LLC, which is itself owned by a consortium of America's largest banks: Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, Truist, Capital One, and US Bank. The reason for this byzantine structure is that 1) it's pretty hard for a bunch of enormous banks to own something together without forming a separate company to own that company and 2) it allows the banks to not be liable for losing someone's 30 grand.Perhaps the most significant thing to know about Zelle is the people who own it probably wish they hadn't been forced to invent it. For years, Silicon Valley venture capitalists funded PayPal and other "peer-to-peer" payment apps as a kind of Trojan-horse play to disrupt the extremely lucrative and quasi-oligarchic banking industry. The idea was mostly to lose money on the P2P apps (they're free to use) in order to grow as quickly as possible. It worked: As P2P apps accrued enormous numbers of customers, banks began to view them as an existential threat, and Zelle was born. Just as Disney and NBC and Warner Bros. knew they must chase Netflix on a downward spiral of shrinking revenue into the murky depths of oblivion, the big banks knew they had to launch Zelle to let their customers give one another money directly for pizza and rent (and pools) without paying any fees. Today Zelle is by far America's most used P2P payment platform, with twice as many transactions as Venmo.Of course, another thing P2P apps are useful for is perpetrating fraud. The money transfers almost instantly, between people who may know each other only as a cellphone number or an email address. So Zelle, by default, became one of America's most popular platforms for tricking people out of their cash. Zelle isn't very forthcoming about how often that happens. The company told me that "more than 99.9%" of transactions on the network are executed safely. On one hand, that means that the chances you're getting scammed are very low. On the other hand, Zelle reported that it processed 2.3 billion payments last year, and less than 0.1% of that puts us at somewhere less than 2.3 million transactions that maybe were not executed quite so safely. Besides that 99.9% figure, Zelle says it doesn't share fraud numbers "in an effort not to tip off fraudsters," though I'm not sure how telling me how many people are getting scammed would "tip off" anyone.When I asked Chase to discuss Zelle fraud, I received an email saying, "Unfortunately, we don't have anyone available for an interview." Presumably because the 240,000 people who work for JPMorgan Chase were all in the same meeting that day.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she's collected suggests there's probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot. According to Warren's office, US Bank — a single institution in the consortium — reported 45,000 incidents of Zelle scams last year. That's triple the number from 2021. It's certainly possible, if the criminals keep at it, work hard, and show some grit, they can triple the amount of fraud again by next year.The point here isn't that Zelle is worse than all the other places that invented this fun, frictionless way to accidentally transfer your net worth and brittle sense of sense of control in the universe to someone Gary Kruglitz supposedly told you to pay. It's just that Zelle is bigger. And that nobody — not the banks, not the police, not the Feds, not the Association of Pool and Spa Professionals — feels it's their job to go after the criminals when it happens. The bazillion-dollar fraud industry that preys on the likes of me and my wife basically operates with impunity.We were in the kitchen when we hung up with Gary. My wife and I exchanged a look, and in that look was contained a universe of knowledge: The scales fell and the gauze unwound and everything we for some reason couldn't see in the previous two weeks fell into a terrible, humiliating focus. The way we had been goaded every day for two weeks to send the max Zelle amount. The way the email messages from Gary were subliterate in a completely different way from the way a classic Gary email is subliterate. The receipt we'd made him email, which, when we opened it now in our kitchen, we realized didn't really look like the other receipts we'd gotten from Royal Palace Pools and Spas. The letterhead had typos on it.And the email addresses. Jesus, the email addresses.Now is when I need to make some confessions. When Gary Kruglitz told us to Zelle him, he didn't really tell us to Zelle him. He told us to Zelle two people we had never met before. What I'm confessing is that we sent $30,500 of our hard-earned money to sunshineyasmin48@gmail.com and personalbreezy@gmail.com. Yes, someone emailed us and said, "Hey, will you Zelle 30 grand to a perfect stranger who goes by the name Personal Breezy and has no identification except for a Gmail account?" And our response was: Done!Sitting there in the kitchen, we instantly understood our role in this drama: In a world of marks and cons, we were … complete fucking idiots. We were the people who write $10,000 checks to Sri Lankan princes who'd been wrongly imprisoned in Amsterdam but were lucky enough to get your phone number from a friend of your son. We were our own clueless elderly parents whom we make fun of because they are such naive morons, and they were us.In a world of marks and cons, we were complete fucking idiots.So yes, we fell victim to some highly suspect shit. But let me ask you this: If your contractor seems like they're doing something a bit dodgy, would that really surprise you? Don't you kind of assume your contractor has angles? Don't you suspect that every contractor is subtly fleecing you, while also subtly fleecing the people who work for him or her, in a velvet-gloved mafioso kind of way that everyone has tacitly approved? Isn't our national OK-ness with Donald Trump a subconscious admission that we assume everyone in the building trades is on the grift? And isn't what a lot of us actually look for in a contractor someone who's a little suspect? Who can maybe find a way to not have to get the permits? Who's maybe going to pay some folks under the table? Would you bat an eye if your contractor asked you to make your check out to his wife instead of him (which has happened to me)? Or if he told you to just Zelle the money to Personal Breezy? Maybe you would. But we didn't. Because the emails were coming from Gary's actual email account. But there in the kitchen, we understood that there's no guarantee that anything you're doing most of the time in your life is what it seems. There is no assurance that anyone is who they say they are. It became clear just how foundational trust is to the economy of my life, which essentially consists of countless transactions with people I have never seen, every transaction requiring a faith that a set of numbers or letters actually corresponds to a person of pure intention. And now the intentions of even the best of us — even the Gary Kruglitzes, with their bifocal glasses and their shirt-nipples and their loyal contingent of Cheryls — had been called into question. And it made, for us, everything suspicious. Every email in my inbox, every transaction on my credit card, all of it seemed a little infected and evil. And, like lots of victims of crimes of intimacy, we felt like it was somehow our fault. Hadn't we been emailing with these people wantonly, with abandon? Hadn't we kind of asked for it? Our accounts had been in a kind of transactional congress that was consecrated, in some sense, by ourselves. Still, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, even as our faith in holding companies with vague-sounding names owned by giant financial corporations was shaken to its core, we believed we were not without recourse. We knew the only thing you can do in a capitalist society is get after it. We were members of the (relatively) entitled class, after all, the (relatively) most valued customers, the platinum (sadly not diamond) medallion members. The system was built to serve us. It had been only moments since our money had been zapped into the welcoming receptacle of the bank account of Personal Breezy. So we just needed to compel Chase to go in and extract our money and give it back to us. There was no time to waste.Or so we thought. Because actually there was a lot of time to waste.When we called Chase, we were immediately shunted into the black box of voice-operated client sequencing. That is what a bank is now. An app and a dim void filled with a voice-menu system and a three-question survey. Our call was "answered" by a buoyant robot voice that had been engineered to keep us from talking to a person. We did the tricks you do to get to a human. Pressed zero. Said operator. We persevered. Eventually a woman with a Southern accent came online and said thank you for being a client and could she help us with something. Yes, we said, yes you can help us with someone stole $30,000 out of our Chase account and we need you to get it back. There was a pause as she typed something. In the background, I could hear what sounded like a 2-year-old playing close by. When the woman spoke again, she said this wasn't her area and could she give us the number of their fraud team. If this life teaches you one thing, it's that you cannot let a phone agent hang up on you.We said no no no. If this life teaches you one thing, it's that you cannot let a phone agent hang up on you. You have to be vigilant. Because if you've been alive long enough, you understand that you have been pledged to a never-ending battle with customer service. It's right there in the chapter of their training manual titled: "Be nice, call them by their first name, but give them nothing. Unless they get really mad and demand to speak to a manager." It's the most salient truth of our time: The only way to get more SkyMiles or a free gin and tonic on your next flight — or get your money back from a cybercriminal — is to be an insufferable asshole to someone making $13 an hour while also caring for their 2-year-old at home.The phone agent shunted us onward. In a moment, a fraud specialist answered the phone in an indiscernible accent. He sounded very far away. I explained our situation and he told me he was very sorry. He sounded like he was the kind of sorry you are if you have to say sorry to hundreds of people a day. And why should he be more sorry than that? He was probably 6,000 miles away, where it was 3 in the morning, and he had to finish his shift at the call center in time to head over to the university to finish his econ degree. He told us that he would open up a case. The team was on it, and we would hear from them shortly. At some level, I realize now, I expected someone at Chase to say holy shit that's crazy, hey everyone, stop what you're doing because we need to raise this one up to DEFCON 5 and send a drone over to Sunshine Yasmine48's house. But that is not what happened. We didn't hear much in the way of news from the fraud-investigation team for a long time. And when they got in touch it was to tell what by then we already knew: That money was long gone. That money was gone the moment we sent it.Did we confront Gary Kruglitz? Yes we did. We marched right into his office and grilled him hard until he defeated us with a simple and probing question: What's a zelle? It defied belief, we quickly realized, that a man who had been trapped in technological amber since the Nixon era was running a cyberscam designed to come between us and our money out of an AOL account.So what did happen? How does someone steal $30,000 without anyone even looking for them? It actually requires a pretty complex operation, but one that has been industrialized so that anyone with a little moxie and a Tor dark-web browser can do it. It most likely happened like this: We grilled Gary hard until he defeated us with a simple question: What's a zelle?First, Gary was targeted. Not personally, according to an official at the Justice Department who spoke with me on the condition that I not use his name. Whoever did this, the Justice Department guy told me, probably went after the emails of a ton of people who had a Gary-ian profile. Pool guys in the Northeast. Contractors in Massachusetts. Relatively tech-unsophisticated folks who conduct transactions for large sums of money. People who routinely get Zelled $30,000 from relative strangers. Maybe they got Gary to give up his email password via the time-honored scam of phishing. "The guy probably clicked on a link he shouldn't have clicked on," said Evan Kohlmann, a cyber-intelligence expert whose company, Cloudburst Technologies, tries to predict crypto fraud before it happens by monitoring chatter on the dark web. "They send you a text message or an email message. You owe tax money, here's the receipt for the thing you bought at Best Buy. The emails look real, so you open it." Or maybe the scammers got Gary's password the old-fashioned way: They bought it. Hacked credentials are relatively cheap to buy on the dark web. They're part of a vibrant shadow economy built to service a booming subculture of would-be fraudsters. It is precisely what tech has always delivered: the ability for the most average of us to do complicated, seemingly inexplicable stuff with the click of a mouse.It takes a really long time to learn how to hack millions of passwords and only a small group of people can do it, for instance, but if you sell it as a service to the relatively much larger group of people who want to commit cyberfraud but lack the requisite coding skills — well, in capitalism, that's called scale. A former assistant US attorney who specialized in cybercrime told me, for instance, that there's a suite of software called Metasploit that's popular with cybercriminals. The software is designed to test a system's security, but lots of its tools — including its password-cracking feature — come in handy for hacking as well.Once whoever it is was in Gary's email, they could look through correspondence between, say, Gary and my wife, familiarize themselves with our contract, and see exactly how much we owed. They now had everything they needed to ask for money.But if you don't want to get caught perpetrating fraud, it's best not to have victims send you anything directly. So the next step is to hire people to receive the money — your Personal Breezys or your Sunshine Yasmines — folks who are more often than not dupes themselves. Sometimes they're part of a "work from home" scam, people who think they're moving money to and from bank accounts as part of a legitimate business. Or maybe all they know is they get 10% of the money if they forward it to another Zelle account, and they don't ask any questions.Or often they're part of what's called a romance scam. "That's when someone believes they are sending their money to a loved one," the Justice Department official told me. "These people in the middle are often incredibly sympathetic and incredibly non-culpable. Someone who really believes: 'My fiancé is overseas and they were in an oil explosion and if I can send him the money, they can get help. Even though we've never met, even though I've only met them on Instagram or Facebook.' An FBI agent can sit down and show them evidence of fraud, that they are a victim, and they will still continue to talk with the fiancé." But Personal Breezy, whatever his or her motivation, was only the briefest step on the journey. Breezy most likely immediately passed our money on to another account. It may have gone through Paxful, a P2P app out of Estonia that converts money into crypto. Or whoever got the money next used it to buy Target gift cards, which were resold on the dark web, at a discount, for crypto. One way or another, our money was almost certainly converted into crypto, and then, at some point, back into fiat currency, to be spent as the fraudster liked. "Once it's in crypto, it's fucking gone," Kohlmann, the cyber-intelligence expert, told me. "You won't get it back."People have always used anonymous payment methods to conduct illicit business. Historically this payment method was called: lots and lots of cash. But over time, the flow of cash through financial institutions became more regulated. "It's the SWIFT system," Kohlmann explained. "Tracked by banks. Illicit money flows could be tracked, even in cash. Then comes crypto. Anonymous. Guess who looked at this and said, 'Hey, this is for us!' Criminals. North Korea, the Mafia. All these folks jumped into crypto. So now comes the problem. That cannot persist. It's an imbalance in the system. You can't have a form of money where you're totally anonymous to the IRS."And yet, we do.We called the FBI. We called the Massachusetts State Police. We called the Massachusetts attorney general. We called the police department in Monterey, Massachusetts, where we live, population 1,095. We found out it's harder to get someone to answer the phone at the FBI than it is to get someone to answer the phone at Amazon. Especially if you want to find out who to talk to if you were tricked out of money on Zelle. Eventually we learned that we needed to fill out a form online if we wanted to alert the federal authorities of the crime that had been perpetrated against us. So we filled out the form and clicked "submit." It has been two years since we submitted that form, and we have never heard from the FBI.The first person I talked to at the attorney general's office told me the best bet would be to have the state police begin an investigation. After a series of calls I was able to speak with a Massachusetts state police detective who told me his unit once took down a ring of people who had perpetrated internet fraud. Great, I said. Let's get into it. He said that's not how it works. First, as far as he knew, that was the only time it happened. And second, I needed to start with my local police department. They, in turn, could call on the state police to aid in the investigation if they needed it. Monterey has two, maybe three police officers. Thus far, none of them have formed an "internet crimes task force."So that's what we did. The Monterey Police Department was very responsive. The Chief himself showed up at our house and sat at our table. He took a police investigation notebook out of his utility belt, listened to our story. He had an impressive police mustache and his uniform was immaculate, but I do not believe that the Chief of Police in Monterey was quite equipped to deal with this issue. Monterey has two, maybe three, full-time police officers. Thus far none of them have formed an "internet crimes task force."We got in touch with the Chief a couple of days later, and he told us he was planning to call Gary. He did try to get the state police involved. But as far as I know, that never happened. We did not call the Monterey Police Department back. It seemed unkind.We tried calling Zelle, which proved to be harder than calling the FBI. "The banks say go to Zelle," a staff member from Elizabeth Warren's office told me. "And Zelle says go to the banks. But what the banks don't tell you is that the banks own Zelle."The truth is that this was essentially no one's problem. It was not the FBI's problem or the state police's problem or the problem of the local police or Chase or Zelle or Gary Kruglitz, who just went right on yellow-ing through the rest of the summer pool season, because what the fuck else was he supposed to do? This was a crime that no one would investigate. One federal prosecutor told us they lacked the resources to chase down the vast majority of fraud cases. Unless you've had millions of dollars stolen, it's essentially like living in a lawless world."It's a very low-risk crime," Kohlmann says. "It's very popular on the dark web, and the only people who get caught are very greedy. Law enforcement doesn't give a shit. For the Justice Department it has to be millions for them to care. I'm pretty sure Zelle cares. Loss is an issue. It hurts their brand name. They have to engage in some process. But how many employees do you think Zelle has? And how many working on this? I would guess Zelle has fewer than 20 people working on fraud. How are they going to manage this problem with 20 people? Plus Zelle will say: How is it our responsibility to track down criminals?"For the moment, Zelle is right: They have no responsibility for what happens to your money on their platform. That's because, Zelle argues, they're a platform, just like Meta and X and all the other Silicon Valley behemoths who operate by the argument that none of the bad and scary shit that takes place on the frictionless networks they built and maintain and profit from is their problem. Their job is to be iconoclastic technological innovators who facilitate bringing new worlds together, and governments and institutions and everything in the old guard are just trying to slow them down. That we could require Zelle to protect users from fraud is, of course, not exactly an idea without precedent. "The context I use for Zelle is my credit card," the staffer from Senator Warren's office told me. "If someone steals my credit card, I'm protected. If someone fools me to pay with my credit card, the same thing holds. But it's important to remember that when credit cards were introduced, they didn't have those protections. The Fair Credit Billing Act built in those protections." Senator Warren would very much like to have something like the Fair Credit Billing Act for peer-to-peer payments. But because there doesn't seem to be any political will for banking regulation at the moment, and Zelle certainly isn't going to just volunteer, it doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. A few weeks later, after I'd told them I was a reporter writing about Zelle, Chase emailed to let me know they'd found Personal Breezy. In an agreement between the banks, they shut down Breezy's account. There was some money in it, which we would have rights to. In the end, I believe $278 was transferred back into our account, and the case was closed.I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did.This was not a tragedy. Out of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of. I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did. But the fact remains that it was the theft of $30,000. The fact remains that there is a huge river of money flowing out of people's accounts and into the hands of … well, we have no idea. Armies of phishermen and lovelorn mules and crypto exchangers and people who buy Metasploit and passwords on the dark web. It's possible that the government will eventually be moved to safeguard consumers against Zelle fraud. But the greater issue is one that will plague us for a long time: the dilemma of knowing who is real and who is not, and assigning responsibility for the consequences. The arms race between those trying to prove realness — whether through passwords or two-factor authentication or biometric scans — and those trying to evade realness is moving at breakneck speed. Someone at Clear, the identity-protection company that helps people skip the lines at airports, told me they've built technology they call "liveness detection." To prove you're you, you not only have to possess all the information and devices that prove who you are, but also that you are actually alive, in the instant in the place where a transaction is happening, by doing stuff like moving in a humanlike way.This is what security has come to — proving an instant of existence. And while knowing if Gary is Gary or I am me or Breezy is the Breeziest Breezy on the internet is getting harder and harder, the pull to decouple ourselves from any real-world identity — the anonymity of crypto, the maybe-someday-plausibly lifelike simulation of the metaverse, the evolving deepfake of AI — gets even more powerful. Knowing who anyone really is seems like it's going to become a philosophical question, not to mention a practical one. Anything can be true. Nothing is real. The simulation is reaching its singularity. We did get the pool. We saved for another two years and hired Gary, who never apologized, and never seemed even slightly perturbed that someone had stolen our money by pretending to be him. We asked him if he had changed his password, and he looked at us like we were speaking in Romanian. He blinked and said everything was fine. We paid him by check.Devin Friedman is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

In search of a status symbol, I wound up getting ripped off big-time. But the real scam is how America's payment apps treat their customers. A pool could have been evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. But after we Zelle-ed the deposit to our contractor, things started to go very wrong.All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.Illustrations by Madison KetchamI was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth."I'm sorry, Gary is not available right now," said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn't have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary's wife, but I couldn't imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary."Do you know where he is?" I said. "This is urgent.""Um. And who is this?" said Cheryl.I gave her my name and her tone changed a bit. "I see," she said tightly. "Well, I'll tell him that you called. Again." "Please do," I said, trying to sound both grateful and angry. Then I hung up.It's true that my wife and I had been calling Gary a lot. About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard. It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame. And thanks to the support of my friends and family, I was able to bury my feelings deep inside and become invested in the idea of having a pool. A pool could be evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. When I found myself at a party with intimidating people, I would sometimes say to myself, I am a person with a swimming pool, so I could believe I had the same right to exist as anyone else. And people would have to be friends with me, right? Because who doesn't want a friend with a pool? It would be like when Jeff Allen's mom used to let him have pool parties at his house in eighth grade. Sure, after everyone ate all the grilled cheeses his mom had cut into triangles and sneaked shots of vodka and then thrown up in the bushes, they all left and didn't invite him to come along. But wasn't that better than sitting at home alone on a Friday night, which was probably what Jeff would have been doing otherwise? Wasn't that a win?It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame.(Side note: Jeff grew up to be a heavy Facebook poster who writes screeds about how if people are so sure a man has a right to marry a man, then shouldn't a man have the right to marry a dog? He lives in Tennessee now with his wife, Krystal, whom he proposed to by having a trained dolphin swim up to her strapped with an engagement ring. Some people stay true to themselves.)Originally, the pool work was supposed to commence in April 2020. But obviously that didn't happen, because that was when everyone was sealed in their homes rinsing groceries in a solution of three parts water to one part Clorox. But now it was 2021. The construction trade was beginning to lurch back to life. There were delays, of course. We were in the throes of the great pandemic renovation boom, and there weren't enough workers or materials. Container ships were lined up for miles at the ports, and the cost of lumber had become something normal people talked about. The New York Times was publishing hate-reads about people from cities moving to places like the Berkshires and building swimming pools and bringing their obnoxious, demanding, me-first city culture with them.And so that March, we began calling Gary to say me first. Can you ensure we'll be first in line once the ground thaws? He'd try, he said. We took that as a promise.We called him in April. We called him in May. The further into summer we got, the less responsive he became. If you've hired a contractor, this will sound familiar. Why answer the phone just to get yelled at by some people from a New York Times hate-read? June crept along, and Gary went completely dark. We were anxious. We felt wronged. We let our feelings be known: Gary, and here I'm paraphrasing our email, we Karen-ed our way into being first in line to build a pool in the spring and now here it is in the middle of summer and we literally cannot get ahold of you. Finally, on July 5, we received a response. Gary emailed us that he was ready to begin. He said he could start within the week and reminded us that, according to the contract, we owed him $30K-plus before construction commenced. We checked the contract and saw that he was right. He sent another email with instructions for payment. Because a lot of bank branches were still closed, and the crew wanted their money, he requested that we transfer the money via Zelle. But because there are daily Zelle limits, he said, we should just transfer a little bit every day.We Zelle-ed $3,500 on the 6th, $3,500 on the 7th, $5,000 on the 8th and again on the 9th. Now that he was getting his money, Gary was more responsive. Do you have all the materials you were waiting for, we asked in an email. Yep, mostly. Can you start next week? Yes. The emails were strange. We sometimes had to read them aloud: What if you put a period here, would it make sense then? What if there were a verb? But Gary's emails had always been weird. After all, you don't go into the Cheryls business because you care about the syntax in your electronic correspondence. This man ran his company from an AOL account, which I didn't even know you could still have.After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit? We asked him to send us a signed receipt for the $23,000-ish we'd sent. Certainly, he said, I'm on a job, give me a few minutes. A few minutes later we got a signed receipt from Royal Palace Pools and Spas, printed on letterhead and photographed. All we had to do was send another $3,500 on the 12th and another $5,000 the 13th, his start date. If things went our way, the construction would be finished in a few weeks. After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit?And then July 13 arrived. Early that morning we received an email from Gary that he was down the road with his crew and would be there imminently. But hours passed, and he didn't show. That's when we reached Cheryl and she said, "Oh, it's you," and told me she'd get him a message. We started calling every 15 minutes. This guy had taken our money and who knows when — or if — he was ever going to start building us a hate-read-worthy swimming pool.Then, early that afternoon, we got Gary on the phone. Yellllow he said. We asked him where he was. He was confused by that. He was at the office, he said. But you told us you were on your way here, we said. You emailed us and said you were already on the road.Gary was silent for a moment."I haven't emailed you in a month," he said.Then my wife said holy fuck.Like so many things I use to conduct the most critical tasks in my everyday life with a carefree obliviousness, I didn't really know what Zelle was. I now know it's an entity wholly owned by a company called Early Warning Services LLC, which is itself owned by a consortium of America's largest banks: Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, Truist, Capital One, and US Bank. The reason for this byzantine structure is that 1) it's pretty hard for a bunch of enormous banks to own something together without forming a separate company to own that company and 2) it allows the banks to not be liable for losing someone's 30 grand.Perhaps the most significant thing to know about Zelle is the people who own it probably wish they hadn't been forced to invent it. For years, Silicon Valley venture capitalists funded PayPal and other "peer-to-peer" payment apps as a kind of Trojan-horse play to disrupt the extremely lucrative and quasi-oligarchic banking industry. The idea was mostly to lose money on the P2P apps (they're free to use) in order to grow as quickly as possible. It worked: As P2P apps accrued enormous numbers of customers, banks began to view them as an existential threat, and Zelle was born. Just as Disney and NBC and Warner Bros. knew they must chase Netflix on a downward spiral of shrinking revenue into the murky depths of oblivion, the big banks knew they had to launch Zelle to let their customers give one another money directly for pizza and rent (and pools) without paying any fees. Today Zelle is by far America's most used P2P payment platform, with twice as many transactions as Venmo.Of course, another thing P2P apps are useful for is perpetrating fraud. The money transfers almost instantly, between people who may know each other only as a cellphone number or an email address. So Zelle, by default, became one of America's most popular platforms for tricking people out of their cash. Zelle isn't very forthcoming about how often that happens. The company told me that "more than 99.9%" of transactions on the network are executed safely. On one hand, that means that the chances you're getting scammed are very low. On the other hand, Zelle reported that it processed 2.3 billion payments last year, and less than 0.1% of that puts us at somewhere less than 2.3 million transactions that maybe were not executed quite so safely. Besides that 99.9% figure, Zelle says it doesn't share fraud numbers "in an effort not to tip off fraudsters," though I'm not sure how telling me how many people are getting scammed would "tip off" anyone.When I asked Chase to discuss Zelle fraud, I received an email saying, "Unfortunately, we don't have anyone available for an interview." Presumably because the 240,000 people who work for JPMorgan Chase were all in the same meeting that day.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she's collected suggests there's probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot. According to Warren's office, US Bank — a single institution in the consortium — reported 45,000 incidents of Zelle scams last year. That's triple the number from 2021. It's certainly possible, if the criminals keep at it, work hard, and show some grit, they can triple the amount of fraud again by next year.The point here isn't that Zelle is worse than all the other places that invented this fun, frictionless way to accidentally transfer your net worth and brittle sense of sense of control in the universe to someone Gary Kruglitz supposedly told you to pay. It's just that Zelle is bigger. And that nobody — not the banks, not the police, not the Feds, not the Association of Pool and Spa Professionals — feels it's their job to go after the criminals when it happens. The bazillion-dollar fraud industry that preys on the likes of me and my wife basically operates with impunity.We were in the kitchen when we hung up with Gary. My wife and I exchanged a look, and in that look was contained a universe of knowledge: The scales fell and the gauze unwound and everything we for some reason couldn't see in the previous two weeks fell into a terrible, humiliating focus. The way we had been goaded every day for two weeks to send the max Zelle amount. The way the email messages from Gary were subliterate in a completely different way from the way a classic Gary email is subliterate. The receipt we'd made him email, which, when we opened it now in our kitchen, we realized didn't really look like the other receipts we'd gotten from Royal Palace Pools and Spas. The letterhead had typos on it.And the email addresses. Jesus, the email addresses.Now is when I need to make some confessions. When Gary Kruglitz told us to Zelle him, he didn't really tell us to Zelle him. He told us to Zelle two people we had never met before. What I'm confessing is that we sent $30,500 of our hard-earned money to sunshineyasmin48@gmail.com and personalbreezy@gmail.com. Yes, someone emailed us and said, "Hey, will you Zelle 30 grand to a perfect stranger who goes by the name Personal Breezy and has no identification except for a Gmail account?" And our response was: Done!Sitting there in the kitchen, we instantly understood our role in this drama: In a world of marks and cons, we were … complete fucking idiots. We were the people who write $10,000 checks to Sri Lankan princes who'd been wrongly imprisoned in Amsterdam but were lucky enough to get your phone number from a friend of your son. We were our own clueless elderly parents whom we make fun of because they are such naive morons, and they were us.In a world of marks and cons, we were complete fucking idiots.So yes, we fell victim to some highly suspect shit. But let me ask you this: If your contractor seems like they're doing something a bit dodgy, would that really surprise you? Don't you kind of assume your contractor has angles? Don't you suspect that every contractor is subtly fleecing you, while also subtly fleecing the people who work for him or her, in a velvet-gloved mafioso kind of way that everyone has tacitly approved? Isn't our national OK-ness with Donald Trump a subconscious admission that we assume everyone in the building trades is on the grift? And isn't what a lot of us actually look for in a contractor someone who's a little suspect? Who can maybe find a way to not have to get the permits? Who's maybe going to pay some folks under the table? Would you bat an eye if your contractor asked you to make your check out to his wife instead of him (which has happened to me)? Or if he told you to just Zelle the money to Personal Breezy? Maybe you would. But we didn't. Because the emails were coming from Gary's actual email account. But there in the kitchen, we understood that there's no guarantee that anything you're doing most of the time in your life is what it seems. There is no assurance that anyone is who they say they are. It became clear just how foundational trust is to the economy of my life, which essentially consists of countless transactions with people I have never seen, every transaction requiring a faith that a set of numbers or letters actually corresponds to a person of pure intention. And now the intentions of even the best of us — even the Gary Kruglitzes, with their bifocal glasses and their shirt-nipples and their loyal contingent of Cheryls — had been called into question. And it made, for us, everything suspicious. Every email in my inbox, every transaction on my credit card, all of it seemed a little infected and evil. And, like lots of victims of crimes of intimacy, we felt like it was somehow our fault. Hadn't we been emailing with these people wantonly, with abandon? Hadn't we kind of asked for it? Our accounts had been in a kind of transactional congress that was consecrated, in some sense, by ourselves. Still, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, even as our faith in holding companies with vague-sounding names owned by giant financial corporations was shaken to its core, we believed we were not without recourse. We knew the only thing you can do in a capitalist society is get after it. We were members of the (relatively) entitled class, after all, the (relatively) most valued customers, the platinum (sadly not diamond) medallion members. The system was built to serve us. It had been only moments since our money had been zapped into the welcoming receptacle of the bank account of Personal Breezy. So we just needed to compel Chase to go in and extract our money and give it back to us. There was no time to waste.Or so we thought. Because actually there was a lot of time to waste.When we called Chase, we were immediately shunted into the black box of voice-operated client sequencing. That is what a bank is now. An app and a dim void filled with a voice-menu system and a three-question survey. Our call was "answered" by a buoyant robot voice that had been engineered to keep us from talking to a person. We did the tricks you do to get to a human. Pressed zero. Said operator. We persevered. Eventually a woman with a Southern accent came online and said thank you for being a client and could she help us with something. Yes, we said, yes you can help us with someone stole $30,000 out of our Chase account and we need you to get it back. There was a pause as she typed something. In the background, I could hear what sounded like a 2-year-old playing close by. When the woman spoke again, she said this wasn't her area and could she give us the number of their fraud team. If this life teaches you one thing, it's that you cannot let a phone agent hang up on you.We said no no no. If this life teaches you one thing, it's that you cannot let a phone agent hang up on you. You have to be vigilant. Because if you've been alive long enough, you understand that you have been pledged to a never-ending battle with customer service. It's right there in the chapter of their training manual titled: "Be nice, call them by their first name, but give them nothing. Unless they get really mad and demand to speak to a manager." It's the most salient truth of our time: The only way to get more SkyMiles or a free gin and tonic on your next flight — or get your money back from a cybercriminal — is to be an insufferable asshole to someone making $13 an hour while also caring for their 2-year-old at home.The phone agent shunted us onward. In a moment, a fraud specialist answered the phone in an indiscernible accent. He sounded very far away. I explained our situation and he told me he was very sorry. He sounded like he was the kind of sorry you are if you have to say sorry to hundreds of people a day. And why should he be more sorry than that? He was probably 6,000 miles away, where it was 3 in the morning, and he had to finish his shift at the call center in time to head over to the university to finish his econ degree. He told us that he would open up a case. The team was on it, and we would hear from them shortly. At some level, I realize now, I expected someone at Chase to say holy shit that's crazy, hey everyone, stop what you're doing because we need to raise this one up to DEFCON 5 and send a drone over to Sunshine Yasmine48's house. But that is not what happened. We didn't hear much in the way of news from the fraud-investigation team for a long time. And when they got in touch it was to tell what by then we already knew: That money was long gone. That money was gone the moment we sent it.Did we confront Gary Kruglitz? Yes we did. We marched right into his office and grilled him hard until he defeated us with a simple and probing question: What's a zelle? It defied belief, we quickly realized, that a man who had been trapped in technological amber since the Nixon era was running a cyberscam designed to come between us and our money out of an AOL account.So what did happen? How does someone steal $30,000 without anyone even looking for them? It actually requires a pretty complex operation, but one that has been industrialized so that anyone with a little moxie and a Tor dark-web browser can do it. It most likely happened like this: We grilled Gary hard until he defeated us with a simple question: What's a zelle?First, Gary was targeted. Not personally, according to an official at the Justice Department who spoke with me on the condition that I not use his name. Whoever did this, the Justice Department guy told me, probably went after the emails of a ton of people who had a Gary-ian profile. Pool guys in the Northeast. Contractors in Massachusetts. Relatively tech-unsophisticated folks who conduct transactions for large sums of money. People who routinely get Zelled $30,000 from relative strangers. Maybe they got Gary to give up his email password via the time-honored scam of phishing. "The guy probably clicked on a link he shouldn't have clicked on," said Evan Kohlmann, a cyber-intelligence expert whose company, Cloudburst Technologies, tries to predict crypto fraud before it happens by monitoring chatter on the dark web. "They send you a text message or an email message. You owe tax money, here's the receipt for the thing you bought at Best Buy. The emails look real, so you open it." Or maybe the scammers got Gary's password the old-fashioned way: They bought it. Hacked credentials are relatively cheap to buy on the dark web. They're part of a vibrant shadow economy built to service a booming subculture of would-be fraudsters. It is precisely what tech has always delivered: the ability for the most average of us to do complicated, seemingly inexplicable stuff with the click of a mouse.It takes a really long time to learn how to hack millions of passwords and only a small group of people can do it, for instance, but if you sell it as a service to the relatively much larger group of people who want to commit cyberfraud but lack the requisite coding skills — well, in capitalism, that's called scale. A former assistant US attorney who specialized in cybercrime told me, for instance, that there's a suite of software called Metasploit that's popular with cybercriminals. The software is designed to test a system's security, but lots of its tools — including its password-cracking feature — come in handy for hacking as well.Once whoever it is was in Gary's email, they could look through correspondence between, say, Gary and my wife, familiarize themselves with our contract, and see exactly how much we owed. They now had everything they needed to ask for money.But if you don't want to get caught perpetrating fraud, it's best not to have victims send you anything directly. So the next step is to hire people to receive the money — your Personal Breezys or your Sunshine Yasmines — folks who are more often than not dupes themselves. Sometimes they're part of a "work from home" scam, people who think they're moving money to and from bank accounts as part of a legitimate business. Or maybe all they know is they get 10% of the money if they forward it to another Zelle account, and they don't ask any questions.Or often they're part of what's called a romance scam. "That's when someone believes they are sending their money to a loved one," the Justice Department official told me. "These people in the middle are often incredibly sympathetic and incredibly non-culpable. Someone who really believes: 'My fiancé is overseas and they were in an oil explosion and if I can send him the money, they can get help. Even though we've never met, even though I've only met them on Instagram or Facebook.' An FBI agent can sit down and show them evidence of fraud, that they are a victim, and they will still continue to talk with the fiancé." But Personal Breezy, whatever his or her motivation, was only the briefest step on the journey. Breezy most likely immediately passed our money on to another account. It may have gone through Paxful, a P2P app out of Estonia that converts money into crypto. Or whoever got the money next used it to buy Target gift cards, which were resold on the dark web, at a discount, for crypto. One way or another, our money was almost certainly converted into crypto, and then, at some point, back into fiat currency, to be spent as the fraudster liked. "Once it's in crypto, it's fucking gone," Kohlmann, the cyber-intelligence expert, told me. "You won't get it back."People have always used anonymous payment methods to conduct illicit business. Historically this payment method was called: lots and lots of cash. But over time, the flow of cash through financial institutions became more regulated. "It's the SWIFT system," Kohlmann explained. "Tracked by banks. Illicit money flows could be tracked, even in cash. Then comes crypto. Anonymous. Guess who looked at this and said, 'Hey, this is for us!' Criminals. North Korea, the Mafia. All these folks jumped into crypto. So now comes the problem. That cannot persist. It's an imbalance in the system. You can't have a form of money where you're totally anonymous to the IRS."And yet, we do.We called the FBI. We called the Massachusetts State Police. We called the Massachusetts attorney general. We called the police department in Monterey, Massachusetts, where we live, population 1,095. We found out it's harder to get someone to answer the phone at the FBI than it is to get someone to answer the phone at Amazon. Especially if you want to find out who to talk to if you were tricked out of money on Zelle. Eventually we learned that we needed to fill out a form online if we wanted to alert the federal authorities of the crime that had been perpetrated against us. So we filled out the form and clicked "submit." It has been two years since we submitted that form, and we have never heard from the FBI.The first person I talked to at the attorney general's office told me the best bet would be to have the state police begin an investigation. After a series of calls I was able to speak with a Massachusetts state police detective who told me his unit once took down a ring of people who had perpetrated internet fraud. Great, I said. Let's get into it. He said that's not how it works. First, as far as he knew, that was the only time it happened. And second, I needed to start with my local police department. They, in turn, could call on the state police to aid in the investigation if they needed it. Monterey has two, maybe three police officers. Thus far, none of them have formed an "internet crimes task force."So that's what we did. The Monterey Police Department was very responsive. The Chief himself showed up at our house and sat at our table. He took a police investigation notebook out of his utility belt, listened to our story. He had an impressive police mustache and his uniform was immaculate, but I do not believe that the Chief of Police in Monterey was quite equipped to deal with this issue. Monterey has two, maybe three, full-time police officers. Thus far none of them have formed an "internet crimes task force."We got in touch with the Chief a couple of days later, and he told us he was planning to call Gary. He did try to get the state police involved. But as far as I know, that never happened. We did not call the Monterey Police Department back. It seemed unkind.We tried calling Zelle, which proved to be harder than calling the FBI. "The banks say go to Zelle," a staff member from Elizabeth Warren's office told me. "And Zelle says go to the banks. But what the banks don't tell you is that the banks own Zelle."The truth is that this was essentially no one's problem. It was not the FBI's problem or the state police's problem or the problem of the local police or Chase or Zelle or Gary Kruglitz, who just went right on yellow-ing through the rest of the summer pool season, because what the fuck else was he supposed to do? This was a crime that no one would investigate. One federal prosecutor told us they lacked the resources to chase down the vast majority of fraud cases. Unless you've had millions of dollars stolen, it's essentially like living in a lawless world."It's a very low-risk crime," Kohlmann says. "It's very popular on the dark web, and the only people who get caught are very greedy. Law enforcement doesn't give a shit. For the Justice Department it has to be millions for them to care. I'm pretty sure Zelle cares. Loss is an issue. It hurts their brand name. They have to engage in some process. But how many employees do you think Zelle has? And how many working on this? I would guess Zelle has fewer than 20 people working on fraud. How are they going to manage this problem with 20 people? Plus Zelle will say: How is it our responsibility to track down criminals?"For the moment, Zelle is right: They have no responsibility for what happens to your money on their platform. That's because, Zelle argues, they're a platform, just like Meta and X and all the other Silicon Valley behemoths who operate by the argument that none of the bad and scary shit that takes place on the frictionless networks they built and maintain and profit from is their problem. Their job is to be iconoclastic technological innovators who facilitate bringing new worlds together, and governments and institutions and everything in the old guard are just trying to slow them down. That we could require Zelle to protect users from fraud is, of course, not exactly an idea without precedent. "The context I use for Zelle is my credit card," the staffer from Senator Warren's office told me. "If someone steals my credit card, I'm protected. If someone fools me to pay with my credit card, the same thing holds. But it's important to remember that when credit cards were introduced, they didn't have those protections. The Fair Credit Billing Act built in those protections." Senator Warren would very much like to have something like the Fair Credit Billing Act for peer-to-peer payments. But because there doesn't seem to be any political will for banking regulation at the moment, and Zelle certainly isn't going to just volunteer, it doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. A few weeks later, after I'd told them I was a reporter writing about Zelle, Chase emailed to let me know they'd found Personal Breezy. In an agreement between the banks, they shut down Breezy's account. There was some money in it, which we would have rights to. In the end, I believe $278 was transferred back into our account, and the case was closed.I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did.This was not a tragedy. Out of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of. I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did. But the fact remains that it was the theft of $30,000. The fact remains that there is a huge river of money flowing out of people's accounts and into the hands of … well, we have no idea. Armies of phishermen and lovelorn mules and crypto exchangers and people who buy Metasploit and passwords on the dark web. It's possible that the government will eventually be moved to safeguard consumers against Zelle fraud. But the greater issue is one that will plague us for a long time: the dilemma of knowing who is real and who is not, and assigning responsibility for the consequences. The arms race between those trying to prove realness — whether through passwords or two-factor authentication or biometric scans — and those trying to evade realness is moving at breakneck speed. Someone at Clear, the identity-protection company that helps people skip the lines at airports, told me they've built technology they call "liveness detection." To prove you're you, you not only have to possess all the information and devices that prove who you are, but also that you are actually alive, in the instant in the place where a transaction is happening, by doing stuff like moving in a humanlike way.This is what security has come to — proving an instant of existence. And while knowing if Gary is Gary or I am me or Breezy is the Breeziest Breezy on the internet is getting harder and harder, the pull to decouple ourselves from any real-world identity — the anonymity of crypto, the maybe-someday-plausibly lifelike simulation of the metaverse, the evolving deepfake of AI — gets even more powerful. Knowing who anyone really is seems like it's going to become a philosophical question, not to mention a practical one. Anything can be true. Nothing is real. The simulation is reaching its singularity. We did get the pool. We saved for another two years and hired Gary, who never apologized, and never seemed even slightly perturbed that someone had stolen our money by pretending to be him. We asked him if he had changed his password, and he looked at us like we were speaking in Romanian. He blinked and said everything was fine. We paid him by check.Devin Friedman is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps. A pool could have been evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. But after we Zelle-ed the deposit to our contractor, things started to go very wrong.All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.Illustrations by Madison KetchamI was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth."I'm sorry, Gary is not available right now," said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn't have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary's wife, but I couldn't imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary."Do you know where he is?" I said. "This is urgent.""Um. And who is this?" said Cheryl.I gave her my name and her tone changed a bit. "I see," she said tightly. "Well, I'll tell him that you called. Again." "Please do," I said, trying to sound both grateful and angry. Then I hung up.It's true that my wife and I had been calling Gary a lot. About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard. It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame. And thanks to the support of my friends and family, I was able to bury my feelings deep inside and become invested in the idea of having a pool. A pool could be evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. When I found myself at a party with intimidating people, I would sometimes say to myself, I am a person with a swimming pool, so I could believe I had the same right to exist as anyone else. And people would have to be friends with me, right? Because who doesn't want a friend with a pool? It would be like when Jeff Allen's mom used to let him have pool parties at his house in eighth grade. Sure, after everyone ate all the grilled cheeses his mom had cut into triangles and sneaked shots of vodka and then thrown up in the bushes, they all left and didn't invite him to come along. But wasn't that better than sitting at home alone on a Friday night, which was probably what Jeff would have been doing otherwise? Wasn't that a win?It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame.(Side note: Jeff grew up to be a heavy Facebook poster who writes screeds about how if people are so sure a man has a right to marry a man, then shouldn't a man have the right to marry a dog? He lives in Tennessee now with his wife, Krystal, whom he proposed to by having a trained dolphin swim up to her strapped with an engagement ring. Some people stay true to themselves.)Originally, the pool work was supposed to commence in April 2020. But obviously that didn't happen, because that was when everyone was sealed in their homes rinsing groceries in a solution of three parts water to one part Clorox. But now it was 2021. The construction trade was beginning to lurch back to life. There were delays, of course. We were in the throes of the great pandemic renovation boom, and there weren't enough workers or materials. Container ships were lined up for miles at the ports, and the cost of lumber had become something normal people talked about. The New York Times was publishing hate-reads about people from cities moving to places like the Berkshires and building swimming pools and bringing their obnoxious, demanding, me-first city culture with them.And so that March, we began calling Gary to say me first. Can you ensure we'll be first in line once the ground thaws? He'd try, he said. We took that as a promise.We called him in April. We called him in May. The further into summer we got, the less responsive he became. If you've hired a contractor, this will sound familiar. Why answer the phone just to get yelled at by some people from a New York Times hate-read? June crept along, and Gary went completely dark. We were anxious. We felt wronged. We let our feelings be known: Gary, and here I'm paraphrasing our email, we Karen-ed our way into being first in line to build a pool in the spring and now here it is in the middle of summer and we literally cannot get ahold of you. Finally, on July 5, we received a response. Gary emailed us that he was ready to begin. He said he could start within the week and reminded us that, according to the contract, we owed him $30K-plus before construction commenced. We checked the contract and saw that he was right. He sent another email with instructions for payment. Because a lot of bank branches were still closed, and the crew wanted their money, he requested that we transfer the money via Zelle. But because there are daily Zelle limits, he said, we should just transfer a little bit every day.We Zelle-ed $3,500 on the 6th, $3,500 on the 7th, $5,000 on the 8th and again on the 9th. Now that he was getting his money, Gary was more responsive. Do you have all the materials you were waiting for, we asked in an email. Yep, mostly. Can you start next week? Yes. The emails were strange. We sometimes had to read them aloud: What if you put a period here, would it make sense then? What if there were a verb? But Gary's emails had always been weird. After all, you don't go into the Cheryls business because you care about the syntax in your electronic correspondence. This man ran his company from an AOL account, which I didn't even know you could still have.After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit? We asked him to send us a signed receipt for the $23,000-ish we'd sent. Certainly, he said, I'm on a job, give me a few minutes. A few minutes later we got a signed receipt from Royal Palace Pools and Spas, printed on letterhead and photographed. All we had to do was send another $3,500 on the 12th and another $5,000 the 13th, his start date. If things went our way, the construction would be finished in a few weeks. After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit?And then July 13 arrived. Early that morning we received an email from Gary that he was down the road with his crew and would be there imminently. But hours passed, and he didn't show. That's when we reached Cheryl and she said, "Oh, it's you," and told me she'd get him a message. We started calling every 15 minutes. This guy had taken our money and who knows when — or if — he was ever going to start building us a hate-read-worthy swimming pool.Then, early that afternoon, we got Gary on the phone. Yellllow he said. We asked him where he was. He was confused by that. He was at the office, he said. But you told us you were on your way here, we said. You emailed us and said you were already on the road.Gary was silent for a moment."I haven't emailed you in a month," he said.Then my wife said holy fuck.Like so many things I use to conduct the most critical tasks in my everyday life with a carefree obliviousness, I didn't really know what Zelle was. I now know it's an entity wholly owned by a company called Early Warning Services LLC, which is itself owned by a consortium of America's largest banks: Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, Truist, Capital One, and US Bank. The reason for this byzantine structure is that 1) it's pretty hard for a bunch of enormous banks to own something together without forming a separate company to own that company and 2) it allows the banks to not be liable for losing someone's 30 grand.Perhaps the most significant thing to know about Zelle is the people who own it probably wish they hadn't been forced to invent it. For years, Silicon Valley venture capitalists funded PayPal and other "peer-to-peer" payment apps as a kind of Trojan-horse play to disrupt the extremely lucrative and quasi-oligarchic banking industry. The idea was mostly to lose money on the P2P apps (they're free to use) in order to grow as quickly as possible. It worked: As P2P apps accrued enormous numbers of customers, banks began to view them as an existential threat, and Zelle was born. Just as Disney and NBC and Warner Bros. knew they must chase Netflix on a downward spiral of shrinking revenue into the murky depths of oblivion, the big banks knew they had to launch Zelle to let their customers give one another money directly for pizza and rent (and pools) without paying any fees. Today Zelle is by far America's most used P2P payment platform, with twice as many transactions as Venmo.Of course, another thing P2P apps are useful for is perpetrating fraud. The money transfers almost instantly, between people who may know each other only as a cellphone number or an email address. So Zelle, by default, became one of America's most popular platforms for tricking people out of their cash. Zelle isn't very forthcoming about how often that happens. The company told me that "more than 99.9%" of transactions on the network are executed safely. On one hand, that means that the chances you're getting scammed are very low. On the other hand, Zelle reported that it processed 2.3 billion payments last year, and less than 0.1% of that puts us at somewhere less than 2.3 million transactions that maybe were not executed quite so safely. Besides that 99.9% figure, Zelle says it doesn't share fraud numbers "in an effort not to tip off fraudsters," though I'm not sure how telling me how many people are getting scammed would "tip off" anyone.When I asked Chase to discuss Zelle fraud, I received an email saying, "Unfortunately, we don't have anyone available for an interview." Presumably because the 240,000 people who work for JPMorgan Chase were all in the same meeting that day.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she's collected suggests there's probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot. According to Warren's office, US Bank — a single institution in the consortium — reported 45,000 incidents of Zelle scams last year. That's triple the number from 2021. It's certainly possible, if the criminals keep at it, work hard, and show some grit, they can triple the amount of fraud again by next year.The point here isn't that Zelle is worse than all the other places that invented this fun, frictionless way to accidentally transfer your net worth and brittle sense of sense of control in the universe to someone Gary Kruglitz supposedly told you to pay. It's just that Zelle is bigger. And that nobody — not the banks, not the police, not the Feds, not the Association of Pool and Spa Professionals — feels it's their job to go after the criminals when it happens. The bazillion-dollar fraud industry that preys on the likes of me and my wife basically operates with impunity.We were in the kitchen when we hung up with Gary. My wife and I exchanged a look, and in that look was contained a universe of knowledge: The scales fell and the gauze unwound and everything we for some reason couldn't see in the previous two weeks fell into a terrible, humiliating focus. The way we had been goaded every day for two weeks to send the max Zelle amount. The way the email messages from Gary were subliterate in a completely different way from the way a classic Gary email is subliterate. The receipt we'd made him email, which, when we opened it now in our kitchen, we realized didn't really look like the other receipts we'd gotten from Royal Palace Pools and Spas. The letterhead had typos on it.And the email addresses. Jesus, the email addresses.Now is when I need to make some confessions. When Gary Kruglitz told us to Zelle him, he didn't really tell us to Zelle him. He told us to Zelle two people we had never met before. What I'm confessing is that we sent $30,500 of our hard-earned money to sunshineyasmin48@gmail.com and personalbreezy@gmail.com. Yes, someone emailed us and said, "Hey, will you Zelle 30 grand to a perfect stranger who goes by the name Personal Breezy and has no identification except for a Gmail account?" And our response was: Done!Sitting there in the kitchen, we instantly understood our role in this drama: In a world of marks and cons, we were … complete fucking idiots. We were the people who write $10,000 checks to Sri Lankan princes who'd been wrongly imprisoned in Amsterdam but were lucky enough to get your phone number from a friend of your son. We were our own clueless elderly parents whom we make fun of because they are such naive morons, and they were us.In a world of marks and cons, we were complete fucking idiots.So yes, we fell victim to some highly suspect shit. But let me ask you this: If your contractor seems like they're doing something a bit dodgy, would that really surprise you? Don't you kind of assume your contractor has angles? Don't you suspect that every contractor is subtly fleecing you, while also subtly fleecing the people who work for him or her, in a velvet-gloved mafioso kind of way that everyone has tacitly approved? Isn't our national OK-ness with Donald Trump a subconscious admission that we assume everyone in the building trades is on the grift? And isn't what a lot of us actually look for in a contractor someone who's a little suspect? Who can maybe find a way to not have to get the permits? Who's maybe going to pay some folks under the table? Would you bat an eye if your contractor asked you to make your check out to his wife instead of him (which has happened to me)? Or if he told you to just Zelle the money to Personal Breezy? Maybe you would. But we didn't. Because the emails were coming from Gary's actual email account. But there in the kitchen, we understood that there's no guarantee that anything you're doing most of the time in your life is what it seems. There is no assurance that anyone is who they say they are. It became clear just how foundational trust is to the economy of my life, which essentially consists of countless transactions with people I have never seen, every transaction requiring a faith that a set of numbers or letters actually corresponds to a person of pure intention. And now the intentions of even the best of us — even the Gary Kruglitzes, with their bifocal glasses and their shirt-nipples and their loyal contingent of Cheryls — had been called into question. And it made, for us, everything suspicious. Every email in my inbox, every transaction on my credit card, all of it seemed a little infected and evil. And, like lots of victims of crimes of intimacy, we felt like it was somehow our fault. Hadn't we been emailing with these people wantonly, with abandon? Hadn't we kind of asked for it? Our accounts had been in a kind of transactional congress that was consecrated, in some sense, by ourselves. Still, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, even as our faith in holding companies with vague-sounding names owned by giant financial corporations was shaken to its core, we believed we were not without recourse. We knew the only thing you can do in a capitalist society is get after it. We were members of the (relatively) entitled class, after all, the (relatively) most valued customers, the platinum (sadly not diamond) medallion members. The system was built to serve us. It had been only moments since our money had been zapped into the welcoming receptacle of the bank account of Personal Breezy. So we just needed to compel Chase to go in and extract our money and give it back to us. There was no time to waste.Or so we thought. Because actually there was a lot of time to waste.When we called Chase, we were immediately shunted into the black box of voice-operated client sequencing. That is what a bank is now. An app and a dim void filled with a voice-menu system and a three-question survey. Our call was "answered" by a buoyant robot voice that had been engineered to keep us from talking to a person. We did the tricks you do to get to a human. Pressed zero. Said operator. We persevered. Eventually a woman with a Southern accent came online and said thank you for being a client and could she help us with something. Yes, we said, yes you can help us with someone stole $30,000 out of our Chase account and we need you to get it back. There was a pause as she typed something. In the background, I could hear what sounded like a 2-year-old playing close by. When the woman spoke again, she said this wasn't her area and could she give us the number of their fraud team. If this life teaches you one thing, it's that you cannot let a phone agent hang up on you.We said no no no. If this life teaches you one thing, it's that you cannot let a phone agent hang up on you. You have to be vigilant. Because if you've been alive long enough, you understand that you have been pledged to a never-ending battle with customer service. It's right there in the chapter of their training manual titled: "Be nice, call them by their first name, but give them nothing. Unless they get really mad and demand to speak to a manager." It's the most salient truth of our time: The only way to get more SkyMiles or a free gin and tonic on your next flight — or get your money back from a cybercriminal — is to be an insufferable asshole to someone making $13 an hour while also caring for their 2-year-old at home.The phone agent shunted us onward. In a moment, a fraud specialist answered the phone in an indiscernible accent. He sounded very far away. I explained our situation and he told me he was very sorry. He sounded like he was the kind of sorry you are if you have to say sorry to hundreds of people a day. And why should he be more sorry than that? He was probably 6,000 miles away, where it was 3 in the morning, and he had to finish his shift at the call center in time to head over to the university to finish his econ degree. He told us that he would open up a case. The team was on it, and we would hear from them shortly. At some level, I realize now, I expected someone at Chase to say holy shit that's crazy, hey everyone, stop what you're doing because we need to raise this one up to DEFCON 5 and send a drone over to Sunshine Yasmine48's house. But that is not what happened. We didn't hear much in the way of news from the fraud-investigation team for a long time. And when they got in touch it was to tell what by then we already knew: That money was long gone. That money was gone the moment we sent it.Did we confront Gary Kruglitz? Yes we did. We marched right into his office and grilled him hard until he defeated us with a simple and probing question: What's a zelle? It defied belief, we quickly realized, that a man who had been trapped in technological amber since the Nixon era was running a cyberscam designed to come between us and our money out of an AOL account.So what did happen? How does someone steal $30,000 without anyone even looking for them? It actually requires a pretty complex operation, but one that has been industrialized so that anyone with a little moxie and a Tor dark-web browser can do it. It most likely happened like this: We grilled Gary hard until he defeated us with a simple question: What's a zelle?First, Gary was targeted. Not personally, according to an official at the Justice Department who spoke with me on the condition that I not use his name. Whoever did this, the Justice Department guy told me, probably went after the emails of a ton of people who had a Gary-ian profile. Pool guys in the Northeast. Contractors in Massachusetts. Relatively tech-unsophisticated folks who conduct transactions for large sums of money. People who routinely get Zelled $30,000 from relative strangers. Maybe they got Gary to give up his email password via the time-honored scam of phishing. "The guy probably clicked on a link he shouldn't have clicked on," said Evan Kohlmann, a cyber-intelligence expert whose company, Cloudburst Technologies, tries to predict crypto fraud before it happens by monitoring chatter on the dark web. "They send you a text message or an email message. You owe tax money, here's the receipt for the thing you bought at Best Buy. The emails look real, so you open it." Or maybe the scammers got Gary's password the old-fashioned way: They bought it. Hacked credentials are relatively cheap to buy on the dark web. They're part of a vibrant shadow economy built to service a booming subculture of would-be fraudsters. It is precisely what tech has always delivered: the ability for the most average of us to do complicated, seemingly inexplicable stuff with the click of a mouse.It takes a really long time to learn how to hack millions of passwords and only a small group of people can do it, for instance, but if you sell it as a service to the relatively much larger group of people who want to commit cyberfraud but lack the requisite coding skills — well, in capitalism, that's called scale. A former assistant US attorney who specialized in cybercrime told me, for instance, that there's a suite of software called Metasploit that's popular with cybercriminals. The software is designed to test a system's security, but lots of its tools — including its password-cracking feature — come in handy for hacking as well.Once whoever it is was in Gary's email, they could look through correspondence between, say, Gary and my wife, familiarize themselves with our contract, and see exactly how much we owed. They now had everything they needed to ask for money.But if you don't want to get caught perpetrating fraud, it's best not to have victims send you anything directly. So the next step is to hire people to receive the money — your Personal Breezys or your Sunshine Yasmines — folks who are more often than not dupes themselves. Sometimes they're part of a "work from home" scam, people who think they're moving money to and from bank accounts as part of a legitimate business. Or maybe all they know is they get 10% of the money if they forward it to another Zelle account, and they don't ask any questions.Or often they're part of what's called a romance scam. "That's when someone believes they are sending their money to a loved one," the Justice Department official told me. "These people in the middle are often incredibly sympathetic and incredibly non-culpable. Someone who really believes: 'My fiancé is overseas and they were in an oil explosion and if I can send him the money, they can get help. Even though we've never met, even though I've only met them on Instagram or Facebook.' An FBI agent can sit down and show them evidence of fraud, that they are a victim, and they will still continue to talk with the fiancé." But Personal Breezy, whatever his or her motivation, was only the briefest step on the journey. Breezy most likely immediately passed our money on to another account. It may have gone through Paxful, a P2P app out of Estonia that converts money into crypto. Or whoever got the money next used it to buy Target gift cards, which were resold on the dark web, at a discount, for crypto. One way or another, our money was almost certainly converted into crypto, and then, at some point, back into fiat currency, to be spent as the fraudster liked. "Once it's in crypto, it's fucking gone," Kohlmann, the cyber-intelligence expert, told me. "You won't get it back."People have always used anonymous payment methods to conduct illicit business. Historically this payment method was called: lots and lots of cash. But over time, the flow of cash through financial institutions became more regulated. "It's the SWIFT system," Kohlmann explained. "Tracked by banks. Illicit money flows could be tracked, even in cash. Then comes crypto. Anonymous. Guess who looked at this and said, 'Hey, this is for us!' Criminals. North Korea, the Mafia. All these folks jumped into crypto. So now comes the problem. That cannot persist. It's an imbalance in the system. You can't have a form of money where you're totally anonymous to the IRS."And yet, we do.We called the FBI. We called the Massachusetts State Police. We called the Massachusetts attorney general. We called the police department in Monterey, Massachusetts, where we live, population 1,095. We found out it's harder to get someone to answer the phone at the FBI than it is to get someone to answer the phone at Amazon. Especially if you want to find out who to talk to if you were tricked out of money on Zelle. Eventually we learned that we needed to fill out a form online if we wanted to alert the federal authorities of the crime that had been perpetrated against us. So we filled out the form and clicked "submit." It has been two years since we submitted that form, and we have never heard from the FBI.The first person I talked to at the attorney general's office told me the best bet would be to have the state police begin an investigation. After a series of calls I was able to speak with a Massachusetts state police detective who told me his unit once took down a ring of people who had perpetrated internet fraud. Great, I said. Let's get into it. He said that's not how it works. First, as far as he knew, that was the only time it happened. And second, I needed to start with my local police department. They, in turn, could call on the state police to aid in the investigation if they needed it. Monterey has two, maybe three police officers. Thus far, none of them have formed an "internet crimes task force."So that's what we did. The Monterey Police Department was very responsive. The Chief himself showed up at our house and sat at our table. He took a police investigation notebook out of his utility belt, listened to our story. He had an impressive police mustache and his uniform was immaculate, but I do not believe that the Chief of Police in Monterey was quite equipped to deal with this issue. Monterey has two, maybe three, full-time police officers. Thus far none of them have formed an "internet crimes task force."We got in touch with the Chief a couple of days later, and he told us he was planning to call Gary. He did try to get the state police involved. But as far as I know, that never happened. We did not call the Monterey Police Department back. It seemed unkind.We tried calling Zelle, which proved to be harder than calling the FBI. "The banks say go to Zelle," a staff member from Elizabeth Warren's office told me. "And Zelle says go to the banks. But what the banks don't tell you is that the banks own Zelle."The truth is that this was essentially no one's problem. It was not the FBI's problem or the state police's problem or the problem of the local police or Chase or Zelle or Gary Kruglitz, who just went right on yellow-ing through the rest of the summer pool season, because what the fuck else was he supposed to do? This was a crime that no one would investigate. One federal prosecutor told us they lacked the resources to chase down the vast majority of fraud cases. Unless you've had millions of dollars stolen, it's essentially like living in a lawless world."It's a very low-risk crime," Kohlmann says. "It's very popular on the dark web, and the only people who get caught are very greedy. Law enforcement doesn't give a shit. For the Justice Department it has to be millions for them to care. I'm pretty sure Zelle cares. Loss is an issue. It hurts their brand name. They have to engage in some process. But how many employees do you think Zelle has? And how many working on this? I would guess Zelle has fewer than 20 people working on fraud. How are they going to manage this problem with 20 people? Plus Zelle will say: How is it our responsibility to track down criminals?"For the moment, Zelle is right: They have no responsibility for what happens to your money on their platform. That's because, Zelle argues, they're a platform, just like Meta and X and all the other Silicon Valley behemoths who operate by the argument that none of the bad and scary shit that takes place on the frictionless networks they built and maintain and profit from is their problem. Their job is to be iconoclastic technological innovators who facilitate bringing new worlds together, and governments and institutions and everything in the old guard are just trying to slow them down. That we could require Zelle to protect users from fraud is, of course, not exactly an idea without precedent. "The context I use for Zelle is my credit card," the staffer from Senator Warren's office told me. "If someone steals my credit card, I'm protected. If someone fools me to pay with my credit card, the same thing holds. But it's important to remember that when credit cards were introduced, they didn't have those protections. The Fair Credit Billing Act built in those protections." Senator Warren would very much like to have something like the Fair Credit Billing Act for peer-to-peer payments. But because there doesn't seem to be any political will for banking regulation at the moment, and Zelle certainly isn't going to just volunteer, it doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. A few weeks later, after I'd told them I was a reporter writing about Zelle, Chase emailed to let me know they'd found Personal Breezy. In an agreement between the banks, they shut down Breezy's account. There was some money in it, which we would have rights to. In the end, I believe $278 was transferred back into our account, and the case was closed.I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did.This was not a tragedy. Out of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of. I put the likelihood at 100% that the people who stole our money needed it more than we did. But the fact remains that it was the theft of $30,000. The fact remains that there is a huge river of money flowing out of people's accounts and into the hands of … well, we have no idea. Armies of phishermen and lovelorn mules and crypto exchangers and people who buy Metasploit and passwords on the dark web. It's possible that the government will eventually be moved to safeguard consumers against Zelle fraud. But the greater issue is one that will plague us for a long time: the dilemma of knowing who is real and who is not, and assigning responsibility for the consequences. The arms race between those trying to prove realness — whether through passwords or two-factor authentication or biometric scans — and those trying to evade realness is moving at breakneck speed. Someone at Clear, the identity-protection company that helps people skip the lines at airports, told me they've built technology they call "liveness detection." To prove you're you, you not only have to possess all the information and devices that prove who you are, but also that you are actually alive, in the instant in the place where a transaction is happening, by doing stuff like moving in a humanlike way.This is what security has come to — proving an instant of existence. And while knowing if Gary is Gary or I am me or Breezy is the Breeziest Breezy on the internet is getting harder and harder, the pull to decouple ourselves from any real-world identity — the anonymity of crypto, the maybe-someday-plausibly lifelike simulation of the metaverse, the evolving deepfake of AI — gets even more powerful. Knowing who anyone really is seems like it's going to become a philosophical question, not to mention a practical one. Anything can be true. Nothing is real. The simulation is reaching its singularity. We did get the pool. We saved for another two years and hired Gary, who never apologized, and never seemed even slightly perturbed that someone had stolen our money by pretending to be him. We asked him if he had changed his password, and he looked at us like we were speaking in Romanian. He blinked and said everything was fine. We paid him by check.Devin Friedman is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Striking Autoworkers Will Only Harm Their Own Livelihoods Authored by Connor O'Keefe via The Mises Institute, On Friday, September 15, 12,700 members of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) walked off the job at plants owned by the “Big Three” automakers - Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (which owns Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram). The walkout marked the beginning of a series of long-expected targeted strikes aiming to give the UAW leverage as it renegotiates contracts with the three companies. [ZH: And Friday September 22, the situation escalated.] The strike is grounded in frustrations over worker compensation. Union members and their supporters point to high profits and CEO pay at the Big Three and compare them to stagnant wages and rising costs of living among autoworkers. They feel like they’re being ripped off. And they’re right. Like the rest of the working class, autoworkers are being ripped off. Decades of interventionism have built an economic system that harms workers while helping the corporate and political classes. The first reason for this is monetary policy. Ever since President Richard Nixon abolished the gold standard in the early 1970s, a handful of bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve have been charged with determining the value of our currency. And those bureaucrats have decided that the dollar should lose value every year. They aim for a decline of 2 percent annually, but the rate has been higher in recent years. Dollar devaluation is a political choice. And it hurts workers. In an unhampered market, money becomes more valuable as societies grow wealthier. Goods become better and more affordable. And money saved grows in value. Under our current inflationist fiat regime, the opposite happens. Savings shrink in value by design. The result is spelled out by Saifedean Ammous in his book The Fiat Standard: The culture of conspicuous mass consumption that pervades our planet today cannot be understood except through the distorted incentives fiat creates around consumption. With the money constantly losing its value, deferring consumption and saving will likely have a negative expected value. Finding the right investments is difficult, requires active management and supervision, and entails risk. The path of least resistance, the path permeating the entire culture of fiat society, is to consume all your income, living paycheck to paycheck. We can see, then, how monetary policy leads to mass consumption, low savings, and hyperfinancialization—all at the same time. In fact, one of the most notable examples of the financialization of the economy since the 1970s has been the growth of the Big Three automakers’ financial arms—GM Financial, Ford Credit, and Stellantis Financial Services. In fact, as Ryan McMaken highlights: “By the early 2000s, a majority of GM’s profits were coming from its financial operations and not from automobile production.” In other words, the automakers have profited from the very same government policies that devalue their workers’ paychecks and savings. But monetary policy is only one part of the story. Governments at all levels restrict the supply of housing by limiting building. That makes housing less affordable. The federal government also bids up demand for healthcare services while restricting the supply of doctors and hospitals, and it shields drug manufacturers from competition. That makes healthcare much more expensive. Meanwhile, Washington’s agricultural policy aims to prop up crop prices, which impacts the price of many foods. All this artificially drives up the cost of living. That’s bad enough for autoworkers, but the Biden administration is also trying to force a transition to electric vehicles (EVs). For autoworkers building engines, transmissions, and exhaust systems, that’s a threat to their jobs. And because the ramp-up of EV production is driven by politics rather than consumer demand, the transition is set to hurt all workers who rely on cars. Considering all that, it is obvious why autoworkers are frustrated with their financial situation. But unfortunately, their justified anger has been hijacked by another source of their problems, the UAW. Support for labor unions rests on an economic myth from the mid-eighteenth century. In short, it’s the idea that companies make profits by not paying workers the full value of their labor. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk dismantled this socialist exploitation theory 139 years ago when he introduced time into the analysis. Companies pay workers in the present for labor services that may lead to saleable goods in the future. Because of the universal trait of time preference, the certainty of money now is often more appealing than the possibility of more money later, which is why so many people choose to sell their labor services on the job market. Böhm-Bawerk’s insights are easy to see in auto manufacturing, where workers are paid up front to help build cars that will be sold later. Still, the flawed idea that profits signify wage theft caught on, and in 1935, autoworkers founded the UAW. The present strikes speak to the persistence of this myth. Labor unions often appeal to worker solidarity, but in truth, they epitomize the exact opposite. Because as Murray Rothbard has shown, they can only raise wages for some workers by lowering the wages or eliminating the jobs of other workers. At the Big Three automakers, this can be seen in the heavy use of temporary and part-time workers, who are placed on a lower pay tier—the elimination of which is ironically a core demand of the UAW strike. But this situation is just what’s visible. All those who are blocked entirely from the jobs that would be available to them if not for the union remain unseen. America’s autoworkers are right to be angry about their economic situation. But the restrictionist labor demands of the UAW are a distraction that will, at most, help some autoworkers at the expense of others. The real solution lies in ending union practices that unnecessarily pit workers against each other, ending the policies that force companies to produce things consumers don’t even want, ending the multitude of government programs and political privileges that artificially raise the cost of living, and ending the monetary system that destroys the value of workers’ paychecks and savings while propping up the financial class. Abolish all that, and the benefits will extend far beyond the auto industry. Tyler Durden Sat, 09/23/2023 - 13:35.....»»

RFK Jr. Wants His Party Back: The American People "Are Tired Of Being Lied To By The Government & The Media" Authored by Jeff Louderbeck via The Epoch Times, On a steamy summer morning, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. strode into a hotel conference room in Columbia, South Carolina, amid a barnstorming town hall tour of a state where Joe Biden won close to 49 percent of the vote in the 2020 Democratic primary. Mr. Kennedy spoke about his 2024 presidential campaign. Democrat pundits say he is a fringe candidate who spreads conspiracy theories. Polls show him with the highest favorability rating of any presidential candidate. There is no path for Mr. Kennedy to defeat President Biden, critics claim, despite questions about President Joe Biden's age and mental fitness, low approval ratings, and surveys showing that Americans are concerned about the economy. Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee voted to give its full support to the president. Mr. Kennedy agrees that unseating an incumbent president in the same party is a daunting challenge but disagrees with doubters who say he has no chance of securing the nomination. The 2024 presidential nominee will be announced during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next summer. Until then, Mr. Kennedy intends to continue to press his case. “The DNC has around $2 billion, and they're spending that money generously to try to marginalize me in many ways, but I think most Democrats care about one thing more than anything else, which is to beat Donald Trump,” Mr. Kennedy told The Epoch Times. “I think President Biden cannot do that. I can.” President John F. Kennedy saw his nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the Oval Office on March 11, 1961. (Abbie Rowe. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston) Mr. Kennedy is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963; and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot and killed after a campaign speech while running for president in 1968. During his town halls and meet-and-greets, Mr. Kennedy tells stories from time spent with his uncle and father and connects them to his presidential campaign. He wants to continue his father’s legacy of uniting Americans from all economic classes and ethnic backgrounds. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (L) wants to continue his father’s (R) legacy of uniting Americans from all economic classes and ethnic backgrounds. “I think we do that by telling the truth to people. My dad did it that way. He talked about uncomfortable issues but talked about the truth. I think people are tired of being lied to by the government, by the media,” Mr. Kennedy said. “My dad ran against an incumbent president in his own party (Lyndon B. Johnson) during a divisive time. I’m running against a larger challenge because I am facing an entire infrastructure that is against me, from my own party and Big Tech and the pharmaceutical industry.” An environmental attorney and the founder of Children’s Health Defense, Mr. Kennedy is widely known for being outspoken about the health risks of vaccines. His stand on these and other issues has drawn support from voters who are not left-leaning. (Left) Then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaks to a crowd on racial equality outside the Justice Department on June 14, 1963. (Middle) Then-President John F. Kennedy speaks with his brother Robert F. Kennedy in 1963. (Right) (L–R) Brothers John, Robert, Ted Kennedy. (Public Domain) The candidate, however, has said that he won’t do that, reiterating that stance over the last month in town halls and meet-and-greets in South Carolina, Virginia, and New York City. “I’m a Democrat. This is my identity, but I want my party back,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I’m running for president because the Democratic Party has lost its way. I want to remind the Democratic Party of what we are supposed to represent.” “A focus on the middle class and labor, the well-being of minorities, a focus on the environment, civil liberties, and freedom of speech." He frequently talks about "unity" and “healing the divide.” “I intend to bridge this toxic polarization that is really destroying our country and tearing us apart,” Mr. Kennedy said. He called his campaign a “peaceful insurgency” that he hopes will appeal to conservative Republicans, independents, moderates, and liberal Democrats. “During the 35 years I spent as one of the leaders of the environmental movement in our country, I was the only environmentalist who was regularly going on Fox News. I went on Sean Hannity repeatedly—Bill O'Reilly, too,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I want to talk to media members and voters who share differing opinions than mine, because how else are you going to persuade? A supporter of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., awaits his 2024 presidential bid announcement in Boston on April 19, 2023. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images) “I think we have a lot more in common than what the media portrays. What keeps us apart are things that are rather trivial. We let them feed this toxic polarization. We need to talk. We need to have conversations with people from a wide range of views.” Days after a House hearing on censorship in July that saw Democrats attempt to block Mr. Kennedy from testifying, a Harvard-Harris poll showed that he has a higher favorability rating than any other 2024 presidential candidate. Mr. Kennedy saw a favorable rating of 47 percent and an unfavorable mark of 26 percent, according to a survey of 2,068 registered voters, conducted July 19–20 and released on July 23. Former President Trump carried a favorability rating of 45 percent compared with an unfavorability number of 49 percent. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a 40 percent favorable rating and 37 percent unfavorable, and President Biden's rating was 39 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable. Mr. Kennedy also had the highest net favorability of all 2024 presidential candidates in a June poll from The Economist/YouGov. Kennedy campaign manager Dennis Kucinich is a former Democratic congressman from Ohio who ran for president in 2004 and 2008. He believes Mr. Kennedy can "rebuild and save" the country and that there is a path to victory over Biden. “He is the only Democrat who can reach across the political spectrum, which means he can win in 2024,” Mr. Kucinich told The Epoch Times. “Conservatives, liberals, independents, and libertarians are responding to this campaign because of the unique qualities of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and because there is an understanding he stands for unity, freedom, truth, and authenticity. That is what’s resonating with people.” When asked about President Biden and former President Trump, Mr. Kennedy is measured in his responses. “I’m not going to attack other people personally,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I don’t think it’s good for our country. And what I’m trying to do in this race is bring people together, is try to bridge the divide between Americans.” 'Poison, Hatred, and Vitriol' Mr. Kennedy stands for "de-escalating” what he called "poison, hatred, and vitriol." Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly expressed his disapproval of President Biden’s job performance, but he has refrained from personal attacks about the 80-year-old’s mental fitness. “If there’s a policy I disagree with—like the war, like censorship, the lockdowns—I’m going to criticize those, but I’m not going to attack him as a man,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I will say, whether he's up to it or not, whether he's making his own decisions—the decisions that are coming out of the White House are bad decisions.” President Biden is not scheduled to appear in Democrat primary debates, a decision Mr. Kennedy believes the president should reconsider. “I think it would be better if we have a democracy where every candidate debates,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I suppose he is making a strategic decision that's based upon his own interest, but I think we’re living in a period when people have lost faith in the democratic process, and they think the system is rigged.” President Joe Biden and President Trump should take the debate stage as a sign of respect for American voters, Mr. Kennedy said. Then-President Donald Trump and then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden participate in the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 22, 2020. (Jim Bourg/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) “Americans shouldn't feel like we live in the Soviet Union, where the party picks the candidates. I think it would be much better for our democracy, and we'd be a better example for the world and improve our credibility with the American people if we actually allowed democracy to function and all the candidates participated in debates, and town halls, and retail politics. “It is important for the Democratic Party that there is a primary debate. Ultimately, a Democrat will debate a Republican, and the Republican will likely be Trump. He is probably the most successful debater in this country since Lincoln Douglas,” said Mr. Kennedy, noting how President Trump defeated a crowded pool of Republican primary candidates in 2016. “He has his own technique that people like. It’s like going into a prize fight. You need practice, and that usually happens in the primary,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Asking the president to not debate in the primary is like asking a prizefighter to practice by sitting on the couch.” In South Carolina, Virginia, and New York City, Mr. Kennedy talked to voters about the economy and issues on which he disagrees with President Biden. In Charleston, he criticized the president for continued financial support to Ukraine. “One of the big problems we have in our federal government is the addiction to war,” Mr. Kennedy said. “President Biden went to Congress and asked for another $24 billion for the Ukraine War. “We’ve spent $8 trillion dollars on wars since 9/11. If we kept that money home, we would’ve had child care for every American. We would have free college education for every American. We’d be able to pay for our Social Security system.” He believes that he, and not President Biden, is the candidate who will best represent Democrats in 2024 and beyond. “I am the only choice that is going to end the war machine, that is going to really focus on rebuilding the American middle class, taming inflation,” Mr. Kennedy said. (Left) A man shows a Remington 700 hunting rifle and a Remington 1100 shotgun available for sale at Atlantic Outdoors gun shop in Stokesdale, N.C., on March 26, 2018. (Right) Syringes of Moderna COVID-19 vaccines at a vaccination site in Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 2021. (Brian Blanco/Getty Images, Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images) About gun control, Mr. Kennedy said, “I do not believe that, within that Second Amendment, there is anything we can meaningfully do to reduce the trade and the ownership of guns.” “Anybody who tells you that they’re going to reduce gun violence through gun control at this point, I don’t think is being realistic,” he said. “I think we have to think about other ways to reduce that violence.” Mr. Kennedy did note that he would sign an assault weapons ban if he were president and the legislation was placed on his desk. A vocal opponent of the pharmaceutical industry, Mr. Kennedy vowed at a town hall in Brooklyn on Sept. 1 that he would ban pharmaceutical advertising. He is outspoken about the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccine for some in the population who were coerced to take them, but he told the Epoch Times that he is not “anti-vaccine.” “I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” he said. “I’ve said that hundreds and hundreds of times, but it doesn’t matter because that is a way of silencing me. Using that pejorative to describe me is a way of silencing or marginalizing me.” Mr. Kennedy has said that, initially, he was not in favor of former President Trump’s border wall. But after seeing the border firsthand in Arizona in July, he changed his mind. He said there is a need for increased infrastructure and technology at the border, including more segments of a physical wall, and sensors in areas where a wall isn’t feasible. Until the United States can seal the border, he said he doesn’t think it is possible to get an immigration reform package through Congress. Illegal immigrants wait in line to be processed by the U.S. Border Patrol after crossing through a gap in the U.S.–Mexico border barrier in Yuma, Ariz., on May 21, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Mr. Kennedy visited the Arizona–California border with Mexico in early June and met with illegal immigrants, Border Patrol agents, and other stakeholders. “The Democratic Party thinks our function should be welcoming all immigrants into the country no matter what, and to basically open the borders. And the experiment has been a disaster, a humanitarian catastrophe,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I watched it firsthand. I watched 300 people come across the border and then be processed and sent to locations all over the country with court dates seven years down the road.” “There’s now seven million people who have come across illegally and have no legal status in this country. Those people are very vulnerable now to unscrupulous employers who are paying them $5 and $6 an hour,” he said. Mr. Kennedy called the Biden administration’s open border policy “a way of funding a multibillion-dollar drug and human trafficking operation for the Mexican drug cartels.” “As president, I will secure the border, which will end the cartel’s drug trafficking economy. I will build wide doors for those who wish to enter legally so that the U.S. can continue to be a beacon to the world where diversity and culture make us great,” he said. “Immigration is good for our country, but this kind of immigration is unfair to everybody,” he said. Ending the Ukraine War Mr. Kennedy has called for de-escalating the war in Ukraine. He explained that he is sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause and added that Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded the country illegally, but he chastised the United States for its role in the conflict. “We have neglected many, many opportunities to settle this war peacefully,” he said. “We have turned that nation into a proxy war between Russia and the United States.” Ukrainian soldiers preparing U.S.-made MK-19 automatic grenade launcher towards at a front line near Toretsk, Ukraine, on Oct. 12, 2022. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images) Mr. Kennedy has urged President Biden to negotiate a peaceful end to the Russia-Ukraine war, which started when Russia invaded the neighboring nation in February 2022. “Russia is not going to lose this war. Russia can't afford it,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It would be like us losing a war to Mexico.” As part of his reasoning for ending the Ukraine war, Mr. Kennedy referenced his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. "My uncle Jack said that the primary job of an American President of the United States is to keep the country out of war. He kept out of Vietnam. He sent only 16,000 military advisers there—mainly Green Berets,” Mr. Kennedy said. “In October 1963, he learned that one of his Green Berets had died, and he asked his aide to give him a combat casualty list, and the aide came back and said 75 had died so far. He said: 'That's too many.'” The American Dream When it comes to supporting labor unions, Mr. Kennedy's ideas are similar to President Biden's. “In my administration, you can expect vigorous action by the Justice Department and the Department of Labor to enforce laws against union-busting and unfair labor practices,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We will also raise the minimum wage so that unions have a higher floor from which to bargain. We will negotiate trade treaties that don’t pit American workers against low-wage foreign workers in a race to the bottom.” At his campaign stops. Mr. Kennedy likes to talk about the flourishing economic period the nation experienced after World War II. “I grew up during the heyday of American economic prosperity. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that the archetype of the American Dream was born. It was not something available only to a lucky few; it was within the reach of most Americans,” he said. “A single wage-earner with a high school education at that time could own a home, raise a family, have vacations, and save for retirement. That is how it should be. If you work hard, you should have a decent life.” Mr. Kennedy said that, if elected president, he would create a 3 percent mortgage for Americans guaranteed by the government and funded by the sale of tax-free bonds. He would also work to make it less profitable for large corporations to own single-family homes in the United States. “If you have a rich uncle who co-signs your mortgage, you will get a lower interest rate because the bank looks at his credit rating. I’m going to give everyone a rich uncle, and his name is Uncle Sam,” Mr. Kennedy said at a recent town hall in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The first 500,000 of those 3 percent mortgages would be reserved for teachers, he said. “Both President Trump and President Biden are running on platforms that they’ve brought prosperity to this country. But when I travel around South Carolina and other states, I’m not seeing that,” Mr. Kennedy told an audience in Charleston. “I’m seeing people who are living at a level of desperation that I have not seen in this country—ever.” Corporations Killing the Dream Making it easier for Americans to buy single-family homes without competing against institutional investors is a priority, Mr. Kennedy said. A Wall Street Journal report in 2021 showed that 200 corporations were aggressively buying tens of thousands of single-family houses, including entire neighborhoods, and significantly increasing rental prices. According to data reviewed by Stateline, investors purchased 24 percent of the single-family homes bought in 2021. In 2022, the number climbed to 28 percent of single-family home purchases, according to the organization. A MetLife Financial Management study contends that institutional investors could own up to 40 percent of single-family homes by 2030 Calling the issue a "crisis," Mr. Kennedy put the blame on asset management behemoths like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. A 2017 paper published by Cambridge University Press reported that the three firms constitute the largest shareholder in 88 percent of S&P 500 firms. “And now they have a new target, which is to gain ownership of all the single-family residences in this country. And they are on a trajectory to do that,” Mr. Kennedy told an audience in Greenville, South Carolina. “Usually, when a company buys a home with a cash offer, there is an LLC with an ambiguous name. It often can be traced back to one of those big companies,” he said. Mr. Kennedy noted that Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, is a World Economic Forum (WEF) board member. “The WEF is a billionaire boys club that meets in Davos every year and has a plan, which is New World Order and what they have called the Great Reset,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Klaus Schwab, who wrote the book on that agenda, says that you will own nothing and you will be happy. They are well on their way to accomplishing that first part.” At every stop in South Carolina, Mr. Kennedy said that one of his first priorities as president would be to change the tax code so that “it will be less profitable for large corporations to own single-family homes.” Curbing credit card debt is another way to help more Americans achieve home ownership and become more financially comfortable. “Many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The average income in this country is $5,000 less than the average cost of living. What that means is people have to make up the difference by putting those expenses on credit cards,” Mr. Kennedy told a crowd in Richmond, Virginia. “We recently reached a milestone in this country with more than $1 trillion in personal credit card debt,” Mr. Kennedy said, adding that many creditors are charging interest rates of 22 percent and higher. “If it was the mafia, it would be loan sharking, and they would go to jail, but for banks and credit card companies, it is considered the cost of doing business.” Before concluding his remarks about credit card debt, Mr. Kennedy posed a question to the audience. “Who do you think owns many of those companies?" he asked. "BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They are strip mining the wealth of the American public, and their political clout allows them to do that.” Primary Season Under a new format, South Carolina will hold the first Democratic presidential primary on Feb. 3. Earlier this year, encouraged by President Biden, the DNC voted to strip the Iowa caucus of its traditional lead-off spot in the party's presidential nominating process and replace it with South Carolina. In late August, as Mr. Kennedy traveled around South Carolina, he stopped in Orangeburg to officially open a statewide campaign office. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a town hall at a home in Spartanburg, S.C. on Aug. 22, 2023. (Jeff Louderback/The Epoch Times) New Hampshire has long been the country’s—and the GOP's—first primary after the Iowa caucuses. Under the Democrats' new calendar, which differs from the Republicans' primary calendar, it would vote with Nevada on Feb. 6. Because of the move, President Biden’s name might not appear on New Hampshire's Democrat primary ballot. The DNC rules panel gave New Hampshire and Iowa until Sept. 1 to comply with new rules or face possible sanctions. Republican and Democrat legislators in New Hampshire have said that they won't adhere to the schedule change, saying state law prohibits the move. If President Biden's name doesn't appear on the ballot, that would leave Mr. Kennedy to compete with author Marianne Williamson in the New Hampshire primary. New Hampshire’s Democratic party leaders have said that a longtime state law requires that their primary be scheduled ahead of any other primary. In 2020, candidate Joe Biden lost the Democratic caucus in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire before winning decisively in South Carolina. He has said that South Carolina more accurately represents the party’s diverse voting base. “Everyone knows the real reason the DNC made the change. The people of South Carolina didn’t ask for it. No, it is simply another undemocratic attempt to rig the primary process in favor of their anointed candidate, Joe Biden,” he added. "The DNC seems to have forgotten the purpose of the modern primary system to begin with, which was to replace backroom crony politics with a transparent democratic process,” Mr. Kennedy added. "If the Biden campaign thinks they can win with administrative tricks and evasions, they will be in for a rude surprise in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. First Office in New Hampshire Mr. Kennedy opened his first office in New Hampshire in August. “New Hampshire plays an important role in American democracy because they have this history, and they have a cultural affinity for vetting candidates early on in the process, and they do a very good job of it,” Mr. Kennedy told The Epoch Times. “In many other states, politicians can fly over at 30,000 feet and carpet bomb the state with billions of dollars in advertising. It’s kind of a kabuki theater of democracy rather than real democracy,” he said. “In Iowa, you go to the farms and stock sales. In New Hampshire, you have to go to the barber shops and the nail salons and the diners, and you have to shake hands with people, and you have to answer difficult questions and then follow-up questions. You get to know people, and that is important.” Mr. Kennedy recalls campaign trips with his uncle and father in the 1960s. Supporters gather around then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy during one of his campaigns at a shopping center in Maryland on May 12, 1960. (Library of Congress) “I remember the crowds and the enthusiasm. That is what we are seeing at our events. Enthusiasm. Intensity,” he said. “There’s nothing like meeting people face to face and hearing their concerns. When we were in New Hampshire, we had one event in a sparsely populated area in one of the most northern counties, and we drove down a long dirt road. I thought, ‘How is anyone going to show up at this event?’ and we had 500 people there. That is inspiring.” Mr. Kennedy supports abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. “I can argue there's nobody in this country that has worked harder for the rights of medical freedom and personal bodily autonomy than me," Mr. Kennedy said. “That applies to the vaccines and abortion. “I don't think the government should be telling us what to do with our bodies and dictating for Americans what we can and cannot do in the first three months of pregnancy. It’s a woman’s choice.” That stance could cost him potential support from conservatives, he conceded. “I've seen photos of late-term abortions, and they're horrifyingly troubling,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I respect people who have different points of view, and for people who say that ‘it's the only issue that I care about,’ they will likely vote for someone else because of my beliefs. “If you're a one-issue voter, and that's something that you deeply care about, I might not be the right candidate for you,” he added. “But I feel like there's a lot of people now who want authenticity in their political leadership, and they want somebody who's going to tell them the truth.” Censorship Also ranking high among issues Mr. Kennedy feels strongly about is censorship—from the government as well as Big Tech. He has filed legal action against the Biden administration and Google, among other entities, for alleged censorship. He has appeared before Congress to testify about the issue. “I was censored not just by a Democratic administration, I was censored by the Trump administration. I was the first person censored by the Biden administration, two days after he came into office,” Mr. Kennedy told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in July. Robert Kennedy Jr. (R), 2024 Presidential hopeful, is sworn in before testifying at the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 20, 2023. (Jim WATSON / AFP) In February 2021, he was barred from Instagram, for what owner Meta described as breaking its rules regarding COVID-19. At the time, a company spokesperson said Instagram removed Mr. Kennedy's account for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.” In June, Instagram restored the account. “As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States, we have restored access to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, Instagram account,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said in a June 4 statement. Mr. Kennedy’s Facebook account has remained active. Meta removed Instagram and Facebook accounts belonging to Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Mr. Kennedy’s non-profit. CHD, according to its website, advocates to “end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable, and establish safeguards to prevent future harm.” Meta said that the CHD accounts were banned because they repeatedly violated the company’s COVID-19 policies. Mr. Kennedy still bristles at the move. “Silencing a major political candidate is profoundly undemocratic,” he said. “Social media is the modern equivalent of the town square. How can democracy function if only some candidates have access to it?” Allegations of Anti-Semitism What bothers Mr. Kennedy even more are accusations earlier this year that he is “anti-Semitic.” At a gathering in July, a secretly recorded video was leaked to the media where Mr. Kennedy can be heard describing research that reported that the COVID-19 virus disproportionately affected Caucasian and black people while being comparably mild for Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, whom Mr. Kennedy suggested had a stronger immune response to the virus. Democrats and other critics of Mr. Kennedy condemned the comments as “racist” and “anti-Semitic.” Mr. Kennedy has vehemently denied the allegations. At the July 20 House hearing on censorship, Democrats attempted to prevent him from testifying. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) introduced a motion to move the hearing into executive session, which would have closed the hearing from public view. “Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable anti-Semitic and anti-Asian remarks as recently as last week,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said, citing a section of House rules that she said Mr. Kennedy’s comments violated. In a recorded vote, all 10 Republicans present at the hearing voted to shelve Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s motion. All eight Democrats present voted in favor of the motion. Mr. Kennedy testified that he has “never uttered a phrase that was racist or anti-Semitic,” and he continued to defend himself on July 25 in New York at a World Values Network presidential candidate series event. Just as he said in July, Mr. Kennedy pointedly refuted the claims that he is anti-Semitic. “I've been involved in controversial issues for most of my career. Usually, it doesn’t affect me,” he said. “The accusation of anti-Semitism cuts me and hurts me. It hurts Cheryl [Hines, Kennedy's wife]. It hurts our family, and so that was painful. “I've literally never said an anti-Semitic word in my life, but I believe they [Democrats on the House committee] probably thought whatever they were doing was right in one way or another,” he said. “There’s a way to censor people through targeted character assassination. You use vile accusations to marginalize them, and that is the kind of censorship I’m now dealing with,” Mr. Kennedy said. The Democratic contender concluded his comments about censorship with a message that reflects a key component of his campaign platform “If we're going to really heal the divide between Americans—which is one of the things that I'm trying to do with this campaign—we can’t react even to hatred with hatred. We have to react with forgiveness. React with kindness and react with generosity,” Mr. Kennedy stated. “Harboring resentment is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else dies. It corrodes our souls." Tyler Durden Sun, 09/10/2023 - 17:30.....»»

Tucker Carlson Apologizes To Hungary On Behalf Of America, Slams 'Disgusting' US Ambassador Over Lack Of Diplomacy Tucker Carlson flew to Hungary last week where he gave two powerful speeches - apologizing for the United States' lack of diplomacy and its "cultural imperialism." Carlson started by apologizing on behalf of the United States after US Ambassador David Pressman, a gay activist, lectured the Hungarian government over LGBTQ rights. "The point of diplomacy is not to hector other nations for its own sake," said Carlson. "To show up in someone else's country and scream at them because they're different from you." "I'm not in the habit of apologizing for the United States. In fact, I don't think I ever have, but the behavior of the American ambassador to Hungary makes me want to apologize," said Carlson. "It's disgusting and inexcusable. It's also so far from the norms of diplomacy in my country that it's hard for me to believe that David Pressman is actually doing what he's doing. "And so for a creep like David Pressman, who is not a diplomat - who's a political activist and Biden donor - to show up in your country and lecture you about your culture, and threaten you because you do things differently from the way they do things where he lives... hurts the United States and is a grave embarrassment to me as an American, and an outrage to me as someone who pays his salary. It's disgusting." Hungary under Orbán has been tightening laws targeting LGBT propaganda. Currently same-sex couples in Hungary aren't allowed to adopt children, and changing genders is also illegal. Pressman, meanwhile is a gay human rights lawyer and California-born former aide to former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Earlier this year, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto slammed Pressman, saying he was way out of line. Carlson also criticized America's 'cultural imperialism,' insisting that larger countries have a responsibility not to force their ideologies or lifestyles onto smaller ones, and that this behavior undermines the notion of self-determination. "That is not the basis of a successful Empire," he said. "Everybody wants Freedom everyone understands the concept of self-determination," said Carlson, adding "Hungary isn't hassling anybody else; Hungarians have views, your government has views." Tucker Carlson went off in Budapest: "The ruling party is the childless, the unmarried, working for low wages for large corporations and living in tiny apartments in overcrowded cities rife with crime, having food delivered by immigrants, and spending time glued to a screen." pic.twitter.com/Im62rNPShO — Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) August 26, 2023 Carlson then warned: "It's the ones who tell you the 180 degree opposite of the truth who you need to be careful of and they're the ones who will enslave you." He also warned NATO... "The world is reseting completely. The post-war order is collapsing. NATO is going to collapse. NATO cannot stand long term." Tucker in Hungary: "The world is reseting completely. The post-war order is collapsing. NATO is going to collapse. NATO cannot stand long term." pic.twitter.com/QzEla49erc — TheBlaze (@theblaze) August 28, 2023 In closing, he recommended reading books. "The most important thing I ever did other than get married was read books not tweets, not electronic but paper books in traditional form and read them every day," said Carlson, pondering whether the decline in reading is responsible for the clouding of the world's collective wisdom. He then conveyed a message to the West... "What Hungary is saying to the West is we want to be part of the West... maybe don't push your garbage on us so aggressively," he said - in essence, that Hungary doesn't want to be an island, it wants to participate in Western civilization but without the oppressive force of cultural changes that don't align with its values. Watch the entire speech below: Carlson's speech echoes some of what he told a crowd in Esztergom, Hungary two years ago, when he told the crowd that the US media landscape lacks objectivity, and discussed the importance of respecting culture, history, and beauty in society. Carlson views these elements as essential for human happiness and effective governance, something he thinks Hungary has managed better than the U.S. "If you disobey the political orders from the ruling party they'll shut you down," Carlson said (prior to being shut down). Carlson was particularly struck by Hungary's stance on migration. "Hungary stood alone essentially in saying you know no thanks, and that struck me as a totally legitimate thing to do," he said, referring to the Orban's decision to block migrants from entering the country. Flashback: Tyler Durden Tue, 08/29/2023 - 06:55.....»»

The owner of Bang Bang Tattoo, Keith McCurdy, says he's running his shops the "right way." But some ex-employees say working there was a nightmare. Zach Meyer for InsiderKeith McCurdy has inked Justin Bieber on a private jet, Cara Delevingne at the Gansevoort hotel, and Katy Perry while traveling with her on tour. He gave Rihanna the tiny handgun tattoo that some speculated was a message to Chris Brown, her ex whom she'd accused of assault. Vogue has heralded the 37-year-old as "the best in the biz," and The New York Times has described him as having "transformed the body-art industry."McCurdy's signature style — hyperrealistic black-and-gray micro tattoos that require expert precision — has been widely replicated. Clients wait up to two months for an appointment at one of his two New York City shops, where tattoos can cost into the thousands of dollars. At Bang Bang Tattoo, "You're not paying for the tattoo," a former artist's assistant said. "You're paying for the brand."In an industry known for bold ink, edgy imagery, and an anarchist streak, McCurdy has branded himself as someone who does things differently — what he calls the "right way." He offers his staff mental-health support. He's a self-professed "protector of women" who describes his business as a feminist utopia. His shops are bare, modern, and luxurious. In McCurdy's view, he's setting the bar for the industry. "I challenge people out there to do a better job than me," he said. "I'm waiting for who's competing with us. I don't see it."Yet some former Bang Bang employees said that McCurdy's meticulously curated image as a thoughtful progressive in a rough-and-tumble industry wasn't much more than good PR. At Bang Bang, "they just woke-wash everything," one former employee said.McCurdy's shops were rife with old-school issues, ex-employees said — and some new ones, too. Multiple people said it wasn't unusual to hear higher-ups tell inappropriate jokes or share stories about sexual encounters. Several staffers said McCurdy — better known to them as Bang — could be obsessively controlling, monitoring workers through 15 cameras between his two shops, and pressuring them to speak with his "business manager," who also happened to be his former therapist, about their personal problems.Tattoo artists said McCurdy turned cruel and vindictive when they left Bang Bang. One artist who left to start his own shop said McCurdy and a friend shoved him in the street while screaming profanities. In another case, McCurdy went so far as to sue an artist and threaten her immigration status over claims she'd stolen his clients, court documents show. (Many people who spoke with Insider asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from McCurdy.)Rihanna helped launch Keith McCurdy's career, introducing him to her celebrity friends. "He met Rihanna at the street shop, and that was just luck," said East Side Ink's owner, Josh Lord. "And then he rode that as far as he could."Epsilon/Getty ImagesIn a niche industry like tattooing, it's impressive that McCurdy was able to go mainstream. He's name-checked everywhere from GQ to US Weekly. After Rihanna's gun tattoo took off, "I could kind of control what the press would write," he said.But McCurdy's media savvy has camouflaged a different side to the artist and the business he runs, ex-staffers say. If you cross him, "he'll do anything to come for you," the former Bang Bang artist Joice Wang said, adding, "He's actually a monster."For a guy with guns tattooed on each side of his neck (hence the name), McCurdy has a remarkably warm presence. He speaks like a preacher delivering a sermon, ending every story with a moral. He has a red beard and a sturdy frame and likes to wear backward baseball hats and thick-rimmed glasses. He is, by his own admission, "not hip.""I like focusing on me and the tasks I have," he told me at his Grand Street shop in February. "I like answering to the person in the mirror. I like competing with my expectations. It makes me happy."McCurdy worked his way up from a tattoo shop outside a trailer park in tiny-town Delaware to a "super grimy" spot near Washington Square Park when he was 19 to New York City institutions like Last Rites Tattoo Theatre and East Side Ink. Along the way he met Rihanna, who wandered into the shop where he was working in 2007 to get a nipple pierced. McCurdy said the singer asked the piercer, Joe Snake, who the best person for a tattoo was, and Snake walked her over to him. McCurdy gave her a line of Sanskrit on her hip, and the two hit it off.His celebrity roster only grew from there: Swizz Beatz's ex-wife's hairstylist introduced him to Beatz; Beatz introduced him to the soccer star Thierry Henry; Henry introduced him to a whole list of New York Knicks players. And Rihanna hooked him up with her famous friends, including Perry and Delevingne. "He was very intelligent," East Side Ink's owner, Josh Lord, said. "He met Rihanna at the street shop, and that was just luck. And then he rode that as far as he could."McCurdy owns Bang Bang Tattoo and prides himself on doing things "the right way." But former employees say he could be obsessively controlling and vindictive.Susan Watts/NY Daily News via Getty ImagesMeanwhile, McCurdy kept refining his style, cutting his ink with water to give his tattoos a softer, more delicate look. His work appealed to people intimidated by the bold American-traditional designs at some shops. He posted his tattoos on Myspace, Facebook, and eventually Instagram — a novel thing for tattoo artists, who had typically relied on word of mouth. After Delevingne tagged him in a 2013 photo of the lion tattoo he'd done on her index finger, his Instagram following grew to about 200,000."I didn't want to sit in a tattoo shop and goof around and wait for walk-ins," McCurdy said. "I wanted to hustle. I wanted to be proactive." He landed a book deal with HarperCollins for his autobiography, which was published in 2015.The year before his book came out, McCurdy opened Bang Bang on Broome Street. He hired a creative director to design a minimalist space: blank white walls, poured-concrete floors, and flat-screen TVs. McCurdy made it a point not to hang art (tattoo shops are typically covered in flash sheets, or examples of artists' work). "I wanted it to be about the art we're making, not the art that's been made," he said. "The space is a reflection of our brand."Four years later, McCurdy opened another, even more grandiose shop on Grand Street, with a white marble lobby, a 7-foot-long aquarium, and free Fiji water bottles for every client. The renovation, McCurdy estimated, cost close to $1.8 million.Bang Bang's prices matched McCurdy's expensive taste. Even in the early days, some of its artists' rates were double, if not triple, those of most shops in the city, where a custom 4-by-4 inch black-and-gray tattoo ran about $300. Prices went up as McCurdy's A-list clients multiplied: Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, LeBron James. Today, a tattoo by McCurdy starts at about $10,000 for a daylong session and can cost $100,000 for a full sleeve.Several tattoo artists said Bang Bang used its celebrity clientele to price-gouge average customers, some of whom didn't know better than to spend hundreds on a simple design. Paul Booth, who owns Last Rites, said that when McCurdy worked for him, he "was more concerned about making a buck than treating his clients right," and that he ultimately fired McCurdy. (McCurdy said he left on good terms and Booth did not fire him.) Lord, the East Side Ink owner, called McCurdy "the Donald Trump of tattoos," saying he's "only interested in his own tacky brand and making money, no matter who else it hurts."McCurdy hired a creative director to design the minimalist aesthetic of his Bang Bang Tattoo shops. "The space is a reflection of our brand," he said.Anna MorgowiczMcCurdy ran his business like a corporation, complete with performance reviews, a mandatory sexual-harassment course, and blood-borne-pathogen training, which included teaching artists how to properly clean their equipment and change out needles. In its 2018 article, the Times wrote that McCurdy "made hiring women a priority and was clear with his staff that tattoo-world misogyny would not be tolerated beneath his roof.""My daughter is 9," he told the outlet. "She has a feminist button on her backpack and she doesn't really know what it means, but I want her to have the sense that she can do anything she wants with her life."Wang, who was hired full time in 2016 and became one of Bang Bang's most in-demand artists, said McCurdy asked her to sign an artist's agreement, which included a noncompete clause and an NDA — both anomalies in the tattoo world. The most recent version of the agreement, which is dated 2023 and which McCurdy shared with Insider, includes a clause stating that artists cannot speak negatively about the company, or McCurdy, even anonymously.Sara Fabel, who worked at Bang Bang as a guest artist for about a week around 2018, said being asked to sign an NDA would be a "huge red flag" because artists should be able to talk about their negative experiences. That McCurdy "has dozens of artists willing to sign shows the power he has in the industry," she said.Being tapped to work at Bang Bang can make an artist's career, turning them into a minor celebrity and bringing in floods of clients. McCurdy picks his staff meticulously, often trawling Instagram for flawless line work or promising beginners.Wang was an inexperienced 22-year-old tattooer in 2015, when McCurdy first reached out to talk about her work. She was thrilled. At the time, Bang Bang was the "pinnacle" of tattooing, Wang said: "It was a group of eight artists. They ruled the industry."Bang Bang staffers spent much of their time together. McCurdy organized Christmas parties, trips to Disney World, and things like paintballing excursions. He even built a designated room in the shop for staffers and clients to smoke weed. "We all became kind of like family," said Johnny Perez, who worked as an artist's assistant from 2014 to 2016. "Everybody really got along. You felt kind of special."But as they settled in, some former employees said, they started to chafe at the way McCurdy ran things. For instance, if a new hire, like Wang, has fewer than 100,000 Instagram followers, they're required to let Bang Bang make them a separate work account — that McCurdy and managers then run. "We create the page, we take their photography, we post for them," McCurdy said, explaining that they "haven't earned" access to Bang Bang's 2.4 million followers.Wang said not being able to run her own work account made her feel muzzled and resulted in fewer dark-skinned clients being showcased on her page, because Bang Bang's managers thought colored ink didn't look as good on deep skin tones. McCurdy said that while he wanted to showcase diversity, "the fact of the matter is that more people with lighter skin get tattooed than people with very dark skin."McCurdy didn't just oversee employees' online presence — he also kept close tabs on them at his shops. Eleven cameras monitor the Grand Street shop, McCurdy said, and four are installed at Broome Street. McCurdy accesses the footage through an app on his phone. "Every zone is filmed," he said, later adding that the cameras were meant to ensure people were staying on task and to protect his business: "No one's going to be able to say we mistreated them."One former artist's assistant who worked the front desk from 2015 to 2016 said there was a camera pointed directly at her computer screen. "If I wasn't working hard enough, or it looked like I wasn't answering email, or if I looked at my phone for a second, he would yell at me through the camera and say, 'Get back to work,'" she said of McCurdy, adding that this happened at least five times.Perez had similar experiences when he was opening the shop. All of a sudden, he would hear McCurdy's voice coming from a camera near the front desk. "It wasn't in a serious way," Perez said, but "it was like, 'Oh, I'm watching you. Just know that I'm watching.'"A third former assistant, who worked at Bang Bang for about six months in 2018, said that "there were cameras on us at all times" and that she had told managers she felt as if she were living in the dystopian novel "1984." At one point she was pulled into a meeting with McCurdy in which he showed her a video clip of her giggling with another employee. She said McCurdy reprimanded her for not staying on task and fired her. "It was just a really bizarre work environment," she said, adding that McCurdy acted as if she had "done something atrocious."After the model Cara Delevingne tagged McCurdy in a photo of a lion he tattooed on her finger, his Instagram following exploded. He credits social media with making him a household name.Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty ImagesMcCurdy was an intense boss, but he looked out for his employees, people said. Gladys Ko, a former Bang Bang artist who goes by the moniker Ghinko, said McCurdy was "very fatherly" and "protective" after she came to work one day with a black eye, immediately taking her aside to talk about it.After that, Ko said, McCurdy would sometimes "pull me into a meeting to check up on me," or "hang out with me for the entire day just to make sure I was OK." She credits McCurdy with being "her rock" during a hard time.McCurdy has spoken openly about his own emotional struggles. He went through an especially difficult time in 2013, when he opened the first Bang Bang shop on the Lower East Side with his now-estranged father, Vincent Lacava. (McCurdy was raised mostly by his mother, Susan McCurdy, and grandparents in Claymont, Delaware; his parents had him as teenagers and separated when he was young.) Lacava, a video game designer, invested $50,000 in the shop, but McCurdy says he was an "abusive" boss who cursed at employees and drank on the job. McCurdy said he offered to buy Lacava out. "His response was: 'Fuck you. I own your name. I'll run it without you,'" McCurdy recalled. The two took their fight to the trademark office, and McCurdy won. His dad shuttered the shop. (Lacava said he and McCurdy "clashed" over the business and eventually parted ways but had "very different views on what happened at the shop.")Despite the win, McCurdy spiraled. He was tattooing out of his Brooklyn apartment, and his marriage was falling apart. That's when his wife introduced him to Karen Bridbord, a psychologist and former in-house coach for JPMorgan Chase. She helped the couple with their marriage and began working with McCurdy separately as his executive coach. "He's a thought leader," Bridbord said. "That's one of the things that drew me to him."McCurdy ended up hiring Bridbord as Bang Bang's de facto head of HR; he refers to her as his "business manager." She's still his executive coach but is no longer his therapist. Bridbord said she's employed as a consultant and wasn't present at the shops every day.Bridbord said that staffers exhibiting a change in behavior, like showing up late or "looking disheveled," would be flagged and sent her way. After talking to them, she would determine the best course of action, whether that be referring them to an outside therapist or recommending they attend rehab.Bridbord said these one-on-one conversations were confidential. However, three people said a camera monitored the back room where they took place. "Bang has access to these cameras, and something that's supposed to be between me and you can easily be seen by him," Perez said. "So there was no real sense of security."McCurdy confirmed that he could access footage of his employees' conversations with Bridbord. He said he'd sometimes "demand" that people speak with Bridbord, adding that her "recommendation has to be followed through if you want to keep your job."Some staffers felt as though McCurdy foisted Bridbord on them. Georgia Grey, a Bang Bang tattoo artist who's worked there for eight years, said she thought it was smart for McCurdy to have Bridbord available, especially for immigrants adjusting to a new place. But when he and managers "sicced" Bridbord on Grey after learning Grey was pregnant, she said, she felt overwhelmed and upset because she hadn't been ready to share the news.During Wang's annual performance review in 2017, she told McCurdy she was struggling with her dad's imprisonment and having to support her family financially. He insisted she talk to Bridbord six separate times. "I don't know if you realize this, but we aren't just your bosses. We're your family," McCurdy told Wang, according to a transcript of the review he read aloud. "I can see you're sad. I want to help you. So let me, please, and let Karen."Wang pushed back, according to the transcript, telling McCurdy that Bridbord was "a stranger.""No she's not, Joice," McCurdy replied. "She's not trying to figure out what drug to put you on. She's trying to figure out how to help."Several staffers said they were uncomfortable speaking with Bridbord because she'd been McCurdy's therapist and still worked closely with him as his executive coach.When staffers did hear lewd jokes or comments about sex at the shops, there was no formal way for them to address it. Four female ex-employees, who worked at Bang Bang from 2015 to 2017, said that while McCurdy was known for his sarcastic sense of humor, he sometimes went overboard.One of these women, a former artist's assistant, said that on several occasions McCurdy taped a printout of a penis to her back without her knowledge, photos of which were obtained by Insider. He'd "be like, 'Good job,' and pat me on the back, and then I would walk around for however long with that on my back," she said, adding that this happened when the shop was full of clients. Another time, she said, McCurdy taped a penis to her headset "so it looked like a dick was pointing into my mouth." The pranks made the assistant feel belittled and humiliated. (McCurdy said that he had no memory of the first incident and that the second would never happen.)Another artist's assistant, who was 19 when she was hired, said McCurdy once commented that her breasts were "distracting" and said she needed to "put a bra on" under her sweater dress. The remark made her feel distraught and "disgusting," she said. "Looking back, I'm like, 'That is so incredibly wrong.'" Another employee said the assistant told them about the incident right after it happened. ("There is no history or evidence to support this accusation," McCurdy said.)McCurdy spoke openly about his sexual encounters, the women recalled. One said he told her about how a woman's breasts were so big that they were "basically bouncing on top of him" during sex. McCurdy said it was "possible" he'd had a conversation about sex in Bang Bang's early days but had no memory of doing so.This kind of behavior extended to other Bang Bang employees. Three women said that Edward Borew, a Bang Bang manager who's McCurdy's cousin, talked publicly about sleeping with sex workers and made sexual comments at work. (Borew said the statement was "false" and all three women were "disgruntled ex-employees.")JonBoy, a former Bang Bang Tattoo artist, was accused of flashing two female employees at the shop.Bryan Steffy/Getty ImagesTwo of the female employees said a Bang Bang tattoo artist known as JonBoy flashed his penis at them while they were working. (McCurdy fired JonBoy in 2016 for doing something he called "egregious and unacceptable" but rehired him about a year later after JonBoy started seeing a therapist, as recommended by Bridbord. JonBoy left the shop permanently in 2018.)One former assistant said that a manager, Matthew Ganser, made her clean up a condom he said he'd used and left on the couch. She said the incident earned Ganser the nickname Magnum Mac. Wang recalled the incident and said Ganser would frequently talk about hooking up with women at the shop. (Both McCurdy and Ganser said the nickname came from a meme, and McCurdy said he has no memory of a condom-cleaning incident, which Ganser called a "fabricated lie." Ganser added that he never spoke about hooking up with women at the shop.)Three of the women said they didn't speak up about the behavior at the time because they were young and because crude humor was a given in the industry — to the point that putting up with it became a rite of passage. "I don't think he fully understands what it means to respect women," Wang said of McCurdy. "I believe he believes he's an advocate for women. But only because he's so misinformed."Inevitably, artists leave the Bang Bang family. But if they don't do it on McCurdy's terms, there can be consequences. "I'm a carer of people," McCurdy said. "I just am authentically. I give a shit until I don't — until someone crosses the line."Two former employees said McCurdy was known to use a burner Instagram account to troll tattooers, which he denies. Some former employees said they were afraid to speak out against McCurdy, saying it wasn't worth risking their finances or mental health.I believe he believes he's an advocate for women. But only because he's so misinformed. Joice WangIn 2017, Wang asked McCurdy for a raise. He turned her down, she said, so she quit. Soon after, she noticed that every photo on her work Instagram account, which had more than 110,000 followers, had been wiped without her knowledge. Bang Bang then gave the account, with Wang's followers intact, to a different artist. (McCurdy confirmed this practice.)For Wang, losing her followers and her entire body of work was like losing her livelihood. "I felt like the floor had fallen beneath me," she said. "There was no way for these people to find me again."Wang said she took to her personal Instagram — which had some 2,000 followers — to vent her frustrations and ask people to report the work account. McCurdy then sent her a text threatening legal action. "I will remind you that we have a legally binding NDA signed by you that forbids you from speaking negatively about my company," reads the text, which Insider viewed.Wang thought it was fair to honor the appointments clients had booked with her at Bang Bang, offering to tattoo them elsewhere. But McCurdy didn't see it that way. He called a shop in Sweden where Wang was planning to work as a guest artist and told them she was a thief and to cancel her booking. (The Swedish shop owner ultimately allowed Wang to tattoo there.)Ganser, the Bang Bang manager, also sent Wang a text comparing her behavior to her father's, who was in prison. "Just like your dad," he wrote. "Look where he's at."Another artist left Bang Bang in 2016 to open his own shop and offered his coworkers a chance to join him. When McCurdy discovered this, he called the artist and told him to watch his back."I threatened to come and smack him in front of all his employees," McCurdy confirmed to Insider.A few months later, the artist was walking to his new shop, which was near Bang Bang, when someone shoved him from behind. When he turned around, the artist said, he saw McCurdy "screaming at me being like, 'Hey, fuck you, you little piece of shit!'" McCurdy confirmed the run-in but said he "never put my hands on him."In 2019, one of Bang Bang's most sought-after artists, the Turkish tattooer Eva Karabudak, left to start her own shop in Brooklyn. A few days later, McCurdy sued Karabudak, calling her "disloyal" and "dishonest" and accusing her of "surreptitiously" stealing his clients, the suit says. He asked for a minimum of almost $154,000 in damages.McCurdy had hired Karabudak in 2017 and paid nearly $30,000 for her visa and health-insurance costs, according to the complaint. In return, McCurdy alleged, Karabudak signed an agreement to work for him for at least three years. In an affidavit dated May 2019, Karabudak said she'd made no such promise and McCurdy had retaliated against her for not signing an artist's agreement that included a noncompete clause. He "got extremely angry, and in an unprofessional manner, raised his voice, used profanity, threatened to terminate my employment and cancel my Visa," the suit says. "Although I felt intimidated and pressured by him, I did not sign." The case was dismissed in February 2020.Even tattoo artists who've never worked with McCurdy have landed in his crosshairs. In March 2019, a prominent New York City tattooer commented on a meme making fun of Bang Bang's extravagant pricing. McCurdy, through Bang Bang's official account, fired back in the comments, calling her a "bitch" and saying she was a bad tattooer with "shit lines." He also DM'd her, writing, "Holler at me when you learn how to tattoo bitch.""I already knew he was very fragile and had a pretty disturbed ego, but that whole situation proved it," the New York City tattooer said. "I felt like he exposed himself in the most wonderful way."Nearly a decade after opening the first Bang Bang shop, McCurdy still sees himself as a trailblazer. Most recently, he launched a formula called Magic Ink that can turn tattoos "on" and "off." He debuted the ink last September in GQ, where he gushed about the marvels of "tech tattoos." The first vial sold as an NFT for roughly $164,000, according to the magazine. McCurdy spent 26 hours tattooing a religious mural on Justin Bieber's chest in 2017. "I didn't want to sit in a tattoo shop and goof around and wait for walk-ins," he said. "I wanted to hustle."Photo by Gotham/GC ImagesMcCurdy is vigilant about maintaining his reputation, as well as that of his business. In a March 20 Instagram post, he addressed complaints that his famous micro tattoos fade and blur too quickly, packing the caption with phrases like "macrophages" and "particle density" and ending it with a cheeky, "thanks for playing." When I met him in February, he came armed with hundreds of pages of documents — "evidence," he called it — all highlighted and color-coded. I gestured at the pile, wondering aloud what made him so quick to be defensive."I don't know, man," he replied. "Heavy is the head that wears the crown, I guess."The truth is, guys like McCurdy are the norm in tattooing. Because mainstream US tattoo culture largely stems from male-dominated fringe groups like bikers, sailors, and gang members, the industry has been slow to evolve, clinging to the crudeness and bravado that defined it in the first place. "A lot of artists feel concerned about tattooing losing a sense of edginess," a well-known New York City artist said. "I see that being responsible for excusing a lot of bad behavior because it gets written off as being authentic or being tough or being true to some imagined original spirit of tattooing."The difference is that McCurdy says all the right things — at least in public. From his perspective, he's a feminist who cares deeply about his employees' mental health. In a January email to Insider, he told me he respected and safeguarded women. He's doing new things — creating structures, setting rules — that are supposed to protect people.After spending close to eight hours with McCurdy myself, it's clear he believes in his mission. "The background of me being screwed by family, which is something no one ever expects to go through, is why everything here is done the right way," he told me. But even as I spoke with him, it felt as if he was talking to an audience. I could hear him crafting the narrative he wanted to see on the page — a narrative that he's been telling himself, and the world, for at least a decade.McCurdy isn't wrong to believe that tattooing as a whole should evolve. Yet in trying to push things in the right direction, he may have created as many problems as he's solved. That, and he's not exactly open to feedback, despite modeling his business after his own funhouse mirror version of corporate America."I know God picked me to do this job, so I do it," he told me. "I know who we are, I know where we're going. I know what we're doing. And there's nothing anybody can say in the world that's going to stop our progress."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

What Ayn Rand Got Right Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times, There is a tendency in the world of ideas to divide thinkers into saints and witches. Some are singled out for a hagiographic treatment. When others discover issues with their thoughts or lives, the switch is flipped and they become worthy of being burned. They are either valorized or demonized. This has happened to countless intellectuals: Voltaire, Jefferson, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and thousands more. It’s all quite infantile. The better approach is one born of maturity. Read everything and everyone and learn what you can and toss out what’s wrong. Of course this requires work and thought. In fact, the saint/witch dichotomy is merely a mask for laziness. It’s a way of finding a fast track to truth that dispenses with the arduous task of actual research. Few have been victimized by this habit as much as the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. People might encounter her work in high school and decide to adopt it as a personal credo, only to find out later in life that the world is more complicated than she describes and they turn against her. This is all unfortunate. She was a singularly insightful intellectual from whom there is a vast amount to learn. And yes, she is guilty too of ridiculous excesses, as brilliant minds are. That said, there are precise contributions she has made that make her writings an indispensable guide to understanding modern life, both the problems and many of the answers. 1. Economic Freedom.  Have you heard that so much of our times reminds one of “Atlas Shrugged”? Indeed it is uncanny. In the novel, the state exercises overweening power and attempts to centrally manage economic life in all aspects big and small. Rand explains with evocative detail the cascading effects of such bureaucratic control and how it wrecks supply chains, demoralizes workers, puts aside innovations on behalf of incumbent technologies, and puts lives in grave danger. It forces a growing impoverishment on society by curbing the exercise of human ingenuity. Lesser minds rule great ones, spreading ignorance and brutality far and wide. In one of my favorite sections, a leading industrial bureaucrat, Wesley Mouch, frustrated that production and inflation are not under control, issues an edict (Directive 10-289) to force everyone and everything to be exactly this year like it was last year. This included enough exceptions to win the loyalties of select industrialists who could later be blackmailed. Yep, it is all a pretty good approximation. In her book, she imagines that there is a strike by the owners of capital who gather in a sanctuary that they have created to be safe from the crumbling that ensues throughout the society. There they share wisdom about freedom and rights and make plans to rebuild society after the final collapse. The book contains passages of brilliance that take your breath away. It also has many pages that will have you rolling your eyes in frustration. Yes, it is a mix of tremendous insight plus painful pedanticism. Because it includes both, it has uncritical champions on one side and vicious critics on the other. This is all rather silly. It is a brilliant and flawed book in equal measure. Why can’t we live with that tension? 2. Envy.  One of the seven deadly sins that was preached in the Middle Ages was envy. This is not just jealousy of another’s good fortune. It is the desire to plot destruction of the successful. It is taking satisfaction from the ruination of one’s betters. Sounds pretty ghastly, doesn’t it? Surely it is rare in society. Actually, as you age and experience a wide enough range of professional life, you encounter envy everywhere. It is not rare. It is lurking around every corner. With every good fortune, you will recruit killers around you, people who smile to your face while waiting with a knife for you to turn your back. I’m unaware of any author who has such a profound understanding of the personal and social evil of envy in the world. It’s odd because it is hardly written about at all. This is a major reason Rand is so valuable. Her works put a bead on the entire subject and help you prepare for something that you will deal with throughout your entire life. I would say, in fact, that this feature of her work is the most profound and impactful. 3. Moral Courage.  In popular understanding, Rand was a champion of “selfishness.” I’ve always wondered if her deployment of this term was due to her sometimes obtuseness about the subtleties of a language that was not hers by birth. It seems like that really meant a more classical understanding of self-interest: namely that there is no inconsistency between what’s good for the individual and what is good for society. No doubt that if she heard me say that, she would violently disagree. However, when we look at the behavior of her heroes in the book, each of them makes profound personal sacrifices to stand up for moral principles. Indeed, the ethical obligation to exercise painful degrees of moral courage is a major theme in her writings. Similarly, many of her most grotesque villains do only what is in their short-term self-interest regardless of the impact on others. It’s a bit of an odd feature of her writing that we can get a better picture of her true ethical opinions by the actions of her characters than her own attempt to codify an ethical system in her non-fiction work. 4. Personal example.  I’ve heard it said often that she had great writings but her personal life was a disaster. And so they admire her as an intellectual but not as a human being. It’s hardly news that she was flawed. I’m rather tired of the shock that comes when discovering that. Plus, if we are looking for people who exercise profound moral courage in their lives, she certainly qualifies. She was born in Russia and slated to live under the Bolsheviks. Instead, she plotted her way out with a clever scheme to visit the United States to study film. She defected, penniless. She lived for a time with relatives in Chicago but felt stifled so she took a bus to Hollywood where, not knowing anyone, climbed her way up to become an important script writer. Then she started writing wonderful novels and eventually became a best-selling author and one of the biggest intellectual influencers of the century. That strikes me as a heroic life. People who want to deny her credit for her own achievements are mostly to be ranked among the envious. 5. Dystopia.  One of the most brilliant features of her dystopias is just how realistic they truly are. The total state does not create a world of amazing technology but just the opposite. It is a world of material and moral impoverishment that is always going backwards in time. If you don’t have time for “Atlas Shrugged,” consider her beautiful novelette called “Anthem.” It is short but to the point: the state in this book has banned the light bulb. When I first read that, I thought that was impossible. But here we are today with a just-implemented light bulb ban, not to mention electrical outages, and coming restrictions on meat eating and so on. She understood something others miss about the state: it is ultimately a reactionary institution. These are good times to read and understand Ayn Rand. No need to valorize every aspect of her work, much less denounce her for inaccuracies, exaggerations, and excesses. Her aggressive atheism in particular strikes me as a pointless diversion—and she would certainly disagree with me in that judgment. Even given all that, she has so much to offer. Contrary to the usual line that her writings are only compelling for kids in their late teens and early twenties, her contribution is best understood by mature thinkers who can take the good and the brilliant with the mistakes and missteps along the way. She deserves a high place in the canon of mighty literary contributions toward realistically understanding the world around us. Tyler Durden Sun, 08/20/2023 - 11:30.....»»

From great vampire squid to boring cookie-cutter bank, Goldman Sachs is losing its spot as Wall Street's most-feared investment bank. Goldman Sachs has gone from a disciplined force of finance's greatest killers to a humbled and weakened shell of itself.Tyler Le/InsiderI never thought I'd write this but … I miss the old Goldman Sachs.I miss Lucas van Praag. He was Goldman's spokesperson during the 2008 financial crisis, and he became known the world over for his sharp tongue. He regularly eviscerated reporters for being stupid and failing to understand finance. He once described a Wall Street Journal story as "effluent." And when Rolling Stone published its infamous profile of the bank that dubbed Goldman a "vampire squid," van Praag called the story a "hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories … Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F. Kennedy's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing."That was the voice of Goldman Sachs 2009 — the adamantine firm that managed to make its way through the crisis relatively unscathed. The Goldman Sachs of 2023 could never. What in 2009 was a disciplined force of finance's greatest killers has been humbled, weakened.The source of this stagnation is both strategic and cultural. The public outcry and regulatory changes following the crisis forced all of finance to be more transparent. But ultimately the bank's stumbles come down to the leadership of David Solomon — the 61-year-old CEO who thinks it's cool to hang out with The Chainsmokers. When he took power in 2018, Solomon set out to morph the bank into something less highbrow, more ordinary. In 2020, he invited the public to the 154-year-old bank's inaugural Investor Day and announced plans to build the "digital consumer bank of the future." The patricians of Wall Street would extend their reach to the masses.But Solomon's attempt to craft a new image for Goldman did not turn out as he intended. Solomon's bets on consumer banking have turned into a mess, and Goldman Sachs is losing its edge in the bread-and-butter investment banking for which it became famous. The sinister, crisis-era image of Goldman Sachs manipulating the world from rows of flashing computer screens and skyscraping boardrooms has been replaced by a new, much worse picture — a rudderless bank in disarray.These are lean times. As dealmaking has dried up and losses in his pet projects pile up, Solomon has laid off 3,200 employees and slashed partner compensation by about half. "Deal flow is highly correlated to board confidence," one Goldman banker told me, and right now, that's at an all-time low. "The knives are out."Back in the bad old days, van Praag quipped to the Sunday Times of London that "vampire squid are very small and harmless to humans." This sort of dry humor worked back then, but for today's Goldman Sachs, the joke just doesn't hit the same way. The essence of comedy is truth, and right now the truth hurts.When the winning stops Lucas van Praag's Goldman may have been hated by society, but on Wall Street it enjoyed the prestige of being feared. Say what you want about LVP's elitism, his innate condescension, his scorn for the media, and his detachment from the notion that a powerful institution like Goldman Sachs might need to have a dialogue with civil society — he was, at least, a creature of excellence. He was the mouthpiece for a place that fostered a culture of winning, and back then winning meant never having to say "I'm sorry." Goldman is not that place anymore.In July, Goldman was the only one of the six major Wall Street banks to miss earnings estimates. In fact, it was one of the few companies that missed earnings estimates at all — nearly 80% of S&P 500 companies beat their estimates this quarter, FactSet reported. Goldman's headline numbers were ugly: Profit plunged 58% from the same quarter a year before and was down 62% from the previous quarter. And things didn't look any better under the hood. Goldman took a $485 million write-down for its real-estate holdings and a $504 million loss related to its purchase of GreenSky — a fintech company it acquired to move into the consumer-loan business. Return on shareholders' equity fell to 4%, down from 11.6% the quarter before."The knives are out."The bank is also starting to lose its once-unquestioned footing at the top of Wall Street's League Tables — basically the scoreboards for the business of banking. This past quarter, Goldman surrendered its No. 1 spot in mergers-and-acquisitions dealmaking to JP Morgan for the first time in five years, according to tables put out by Bloomberg and Refinitiv. In fact, JP Morgan is wiping the floor with Goldman — it has the top spot for 2023 in 11 of the 13 tracked industries. Goldman has only one. This, undoubtedly, chuffs LVP's cufflinks.In February, Solomon issued as clear an apology for this underperformance as you're going to get on Wall Street. "There were some clear successes, but there were also some clear stumbles," he said. "We learned a lot." And the bank is still learning. Goldman's more recent terrible results in July were "impacted by selected items related to the execution of strategic goals as outlined at Investor Day — in particular, the narrowing of consumer ambitions and the transition of the Asset & Wealth Management business to a less capital-intensive model." In other words, Goldman is losing money because Solomon's strategy has become an albatross around the bank's neck.Heart and DJ SolGiven the maelstrom that followed the financial crisis, it's not hard to see why Solomon might think Goldman needed to enter a kinder, friendlier part of banking. It was already trying to project the image of a kinder, friendlier business.Van Praag — who was once dubbed "Goldman Sachs' Rococo PR prince" by The Observer — left the firm in 2012. He was replaced by Jake Siewert, a former Obama administration Treasury official who effortlessly imbued the bank with a gentler tone for a gentler time. Given new regulatory requirements, Goldman had to seek out new ways to power its business and find new avenues for cash. But even as the bank dipped its toe in consumer banking and asset management, Lloyd Blankfein — who remained CEO until 2018 — maintained Goldman's focus on the kind of ruthless moneymaking and international scandal we've — lamentably — come to expect from investment banks.Ultimately, what dragged Goldman Sachs down from its pedestal was not its attempt to be more transparent or adapt to the new rules of the banking game. What dragged Goldman Sachs down was Solomon's attempt to make it a part of Main Street by pushing aggressively into the consumer-banking space. His vision for Goldman's future required it to be both ordinary and elite at the same time — liked (at least enough for regular people to bank there) and feared (enough to crush Wall Street as usual). Problem is, Goldman never had the range.David Solomon's time as Goldman CEO has been rocky thanks to his bad business bets and management style.Michael Kovac/Getty ImagesTo enter into the consumer business, Solomon invested heavily in growing Marcus — a book of high-yield savings accounts and personal loans started under Blankfein. He also — against the advice of some in Goldman's consumer business — bought the fintech GreenSky for $2.24 billion in 2021. By 2022, people within the bank came to understand that this was an expensive boondoggle that would yield paltry returns of 10% or below over the next decade.Beyond the Main Street missteps, Solomon was also running around trying to be what I can only assume is his understanding of "cool." Years ago, Solomon began DJ'ing under the moniker DJ Sol, playing a raucous Hamptons set during the pandemic and traveling to perform at festivals and silent discos (whatever those are). Inside the firm, Solomon reportedly prefers bankers who have a social life — who go to charity events and post pictures with celebrities on Instagram. Outside the firm, DJ Sol has about as regular a presence in Page Six as a minor Real Housewife of New York City. He has defended this time-consuming, attention-seeking hobby by saying that he's "having fun" and that it makes him "feel good." Beyond the DJ'ing, Solomon raised eyebrows among the other executives at the firm when he bought a set of private jets in 2019. Before that, bankers flew around in rented jets, and that was "cool" enough for them.All of these shifts have rubbed many of Goldman's senior staff the wrong way. According to the WSJ, older partners, including the former CEO Lloyd Blankfein, have griped about Solomon's extracurricular activities. Solomon's use of the private planes — which seem to spend a lot of time going to and from the Bahamas, an investigation by Insider's Dakin Campbell found — has also rankled some leaders. Perhaps not coincidentally, the bank has seen a large exodus of senior-level bankers, with an alarming 90 partners leaving since Solomon took over.Solomon's thirst is a management problem and a real culture problem. Goldman used to be a collective of hard-charging, never-sleeping, workaholic nerd assassins. At the old Goldman, everyone knew work-life balance was for weaklings. If you wanted to have fun and feel good there was always the glorified McDonald's PlayPlace that is Silicon Valley. But Solomon is a man who flaunts his free time by performing at Lollapalooza, going to the same parties as Kim Kardashian, and jetting down to his beach house. Free time used to be something Goldman people enjoyed in secret — a guilty pleasure, like Oprah enjoying bread. Cloudy futureIt is not hard to see why new Goldman and old Goldman's worlds cannot coexist, especially as Solomon's attempt to pivot to the consumer business has turned into a massive money loser for the bank. Without the winning, Goldman's identity and place on Wall Street is unclear. It's too small to be JP Morgan, too rarified to be Bank of America, and becoming Morgan Stanley would, frankly, be a mortifying step down. It's also unclear who would replace Solomon were the situation to come to that. One former Goldman banker I spoke to suggested that had he not debased himself working for the Trump administration, perhaps the bank's former COO Gary Cohn could waltz back in and take the seat. But he did, and so here we are.In the world of finance, the image of Goldman as a giant vampire squid ingesting any capital in its path is far more preferable to the image Goldman has now — that of an Ivy League-bound mathlete who's decided to run for both homecoming king and class president to impress a crush who doesn't even know their name. If Lucas van Praag happens to read this, he should feel free to email me and tell me how stupid this article is. It would be nice to see the old Goldman Sachs ferocity is still out there somewhere, even if it's not on Wall Street.Linette Lopez is a senior correspondent at Insider.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau said they decided to split "after many meaningful and difficult conversations." Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau speak at the 2017 Juno Awards at Canadian Tire Centre on April 2, 2017 in Ottawa, Canada.George Pimentel/Getty Images Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau are separating.  The couple was married for 18 years. They have three children: Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien.  Justin and Sophie, who met as kids, said in a statement that they will "remain a close family." Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau met as kids, but only began a romantic relationship after reconnecting as adults in the early 2000s.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau during the G20 Summit on July 7, 2017, in Hamburg, Germany.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty ImagesSophie, 48, and Justin, 51, first crossed paths growing up in the Mount Royal suburb of Montreal. A few years younger than her future husband, Sophie was a childhood friend and classmate of his younger brother Michel Trudeau, she told the Canadian magazine Maclean. Michel later died in an avalanche in 1998 while skiing with friends at Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park in British Columbia, the Montreal Gazette reported.Sophie told Maclean she recalled having her first kiss with Justin when they were kids in his childhood home. "We would hide in the closet to have our first kiss," she said. Over time, the pair fell out of touch. Sophie went on to become an entertainment journalist. Meanwhile, Justin went into teaching and gradually began carving out a political career, following in the footsteps of his father Pierre Trudeau, who served as Canada's 15th prime minister. But in June 2003, Sophie and Justin ran each other as adults while cohosting a charity event in Montreal. The pair told Vogue in 2016 that they spent the entire evening flirting and chatting, which prompted Sophie to reach out to Justin the next day via email, suggesting they spend time together. Justin didn't respond. "I knew if I responded even slightly," he said, "we'd wind up going for coffee, and that would be the last date I'd ever have in my life."Eventually, they ended up bumping into each other a few months later and Justin said he asked Sophie out to dinner. She told the magazine she was hesitant to say yes, but eventually agreed. "I'm a dreamer and a romantic," Sophie said. "At the end of dinner, he said, 'I'm 31 years old, and I've been waiting for you for 31 years.' And we both cried like babies." 2005: The couple tied the knot in front of friends and family at a church wedding in Montreal.Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau at the Sainte-Madeleine D'Outremont Church, Montreal, after their wedding on May 28, 2005.Bernard Weil/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesAfter two years of dating, Justin, then 33, and Sophie, then 30, got married at the Sainte-Madeleine D'Outremont Church in Montreal. According to Maclean's, the ceremony was attended by around 180 guests, including Justin's mother Margaret Trudeau.She told the publication the happiness surrounding Sophie and Justin's wedding contrasted previous times the family had gathered at Montreal for more somber occasions, such as for the funeral of her ex-husband Pierre in September 2000. "The past two times my family has come to Montreal for family occasions it's been extraordinarily sorrowful," she said. "This time it is joyful, so we're all savouring the fact that we're here to celebrate such happiness in our family."The wedding was also somewhat of an intimate and semi-traditional event, and by choice. Justin told the publication they didn't invite dignitaries or political figures because if they did, the guest list could've ended up in the thousands. "For me, the guest list was either going to be under 200 or over 1,000—and there was no way it was going to be 1,000," he said. Meanwhile, Sophie said they decided to forgo the tradition of having a wedding cake. "I find that people never eat it," she said. "You take this tacky picture cutting the cake. So I said, 'No! Let's do something different!'"2007: As Justin's political career took off, Sophie began transitioning away from entertainment reporting.Justin Trudeau kisses Sophie Grégoire Trudeau at the Liberal nomination meeting in Montreal in April, 2007.REUTERS/Shaun BestIn 2007, Justin won the nomination for the Liberal party candidacy in Montreal's Papineau district, according to CBC. The victory was an early sign of the former drama teacher's political ambitions.In his victory speech, he drew parallels between himself and his father Pierre, who won a similar election in 1965. "You can understand how fiercely proud I am to be able to say that your prime minister was also my dad," Justin said. During the nomination meeting, Justin was photographed with Sophie by his side. And while her husband was carving his career out, Sophie was pivoting her own. Prior to Justin's political career, Sophie was a Quebec correspondent for television network CTV's entertainment show "eTalk Daily" covering celebrities and their philanthropic work, according to a 2005 press release. In her interview with Vogue in 2016, she said she took a step back from reporting. Instead, the magazine reported she focused on becoming a certified yoga instructor as well as a public speaker on topics such as health, women's issues, and eating disorders. October 2007: Justin and Sophie welcome their first child, Xavier.Justin Trudeau, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, and their son Xavier on April 9, 2017, in Vimy, FranceTim Rooke - Pool/Getty ImagesOn what would've been the 88th birthday of Justin's father Pierre, Sophie gave birth to her and Justin's first son, Xavier Trudeau, who was born at 9-pounds, 2-ounces, according to the Toronto Star.Sharing the happy news with, CTV "eTalk" program, Justin said: "Mom and baby are doing wonderfully."February 2009: The couple welcome their second child, Ella-Grace.Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie kiss their daughter Ella-Grace during the Liberal Stampede breakfast during the 100th anniversary of the Calgary Stampede in Calgary on July 7, 2012.REUTERS/Todd KorolElla-Grace Margaret Trudeau, named after her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother, was born on February 5 in Montreal, Canada, according to People.2013: Justin won the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada with Sophie by his side.Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau after he won the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in Ottawa April 14, 2013.REUTERS/Blair GableJustin told voters in his victory speech that he accepted his Liberal party leadership with "great humility," CTV reported at the time."My fellow Liberals, it is with great respect for those who have stood in this place before me and great resolve to do the hard work that is required in front of us that I accept with great humility the confidence you have placed in me," he said. 2013: The couple also celebrated the political win with their children.Justin Trudeau, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, Xavier, and Ella-Grace react after he was named the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in Ottawa on April 14, 2013.REUTERS/Blair GableAfter his landslide victory, in which he won more than 80% of the leadership party votes, Justin also said the work was only getting started, according to the Toronto Star."Let us be clear-eyed about what we have accomplished. We have worked hard and we have had a great campaign. We are united, hopeful and resolute in our purpose," he said. "But know this: we have won nothing more and nothing less than the opportunity to work even harder."February 2014: The couple welcomed their youngest son, Hadrien Trudeau.Justin Trudeau, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and their children Hadrien, Ella-Grace, and Xavier in Montreal on October 19, 2015.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty ImagesAfter announcing Sophie was pregnant for the third time in August 2013, the couple welcomed the birth of their second son Hadrien Trudeau in February 2014. Justin shared the news with a sweet photograph of his newborn clutching onto his finger on Twitter, writing that Xavier and Ella-Grace "couldn't be prouder" of their newest family member. 2014: Justin wrote about Sophie and their marriage in his memoir "Common Ground."Justin Trudeau at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Canada on November 27, 2014.Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images"Our marriage isn't perfect, and we have had difficult ups and downs, yet Sophie remains my best friend, my partner, my love," Justin wrote in his memoir, according to Reuters. "We are honest with each other, even when it hurts."2015: Sophie joined Justin on the campaign trail as he sought election as Canada's prime minister.Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau at a campaign rally in Brampton, Ontario, Canada October 4, 2015.REUTERS/Mark BlinchThe couple were also frequently joined by their three children on the campaign trail, which was Canada's longest ever at 78 days, The Globe and Mail reported at the time.  2015: Sophie said "no marriage is easy" during an interview with Global News.Sopie Grégoire Trudeau at Toronto's Fairmont Royal Hotel on Wednesday April 10, 2013.Tara Walton/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesSpeaking to Global News in 2015, Sophie said she and Justin had experienced "hardship" in their relationship. "No marriage is easy," she said, adding that she was "almost kind of proud of the fact that we've had hardship.""We want authenticity. We want truth," Sophie added. "We want to grow closer as individuals through our lifetime and we're both dreamers and we want to be together for as long as we can."October 2015: Justin and Sophie shared a sweet moment as he gave his victory speech after being elected prime minister of Canada.Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau in Montreal, Quebec, October 19, 2015.REUTERS/Chris WattieIn their joint Vogue interview following Justin's victory, Sophie, who effectively became Canada's First Lady, said she still primarily saw herself as a mother and a wife. "One of my duties is to really stay grounded," she said. Justin added that he regarded him and Sophie as "partners," and more so than his "mother and father were ever able to be." Justin's parents finalized their divorce in 1984 after separating while Pierre was prime minister in 1977, according to People.November 2015: Justin was sworn in as Canada's 23rd prime minister with Sophie by his side.Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire hold hands before he was sworn-in as Canada's 23rd prime minister during a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on November 4, 2015.REUTERS/Chris WattieSophie was among those watching as Justin, who was 43 at the time, became the second youngest prime minister in Canadian history. According to The Guardian, after being sworn in, Justin mouthed "I love you" to his family. March 2016: Sophie and Justin visited the Obamas at the White House, marking the first official visit to the White House made by a Canadian prime minister in nearly 20 years.U.S. President Barack Obama (R), Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau (L) pose from a balcony as they take part in an arrival ceremony for the Trudeau's at the White House in Washington March 10, 2016.REUTERS/Kevin LamarqueJust months into his tenure as prime minister, Justin became the first Canadian prime minister to official visit to Washington DC in 19 years, according to CBC. He made the journey to the US with Sophie.The couple established a close friendship with the Obamas during the state visit. During an event hosted at the Institute of Peace, Michelle Obama called Sophie her "soul mate" and joked that they had "already gotten into trouble," according to a press release."We're going to be in a lot of trouble before this visit is over," she added. Meanwhile, Justin and Barack Obama also appeared to develop a close bond. A few months after the visit during the North American Leaders' Summit in Ottawa, Canada, the pair posed for a selfie shared to the Obama White House Instagram captioned: "True bromance."September 2016: Justin and Sophie also developed a friendship with Prince William and Kate Middleton during the royals' tour of Canada.Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, Britain's Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, react while watching children play during a visit to the Immigrant Services Society in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, September 25, 2016.REUTERS/Chris WattieAccording to a royal press release, William and Kate were "incredibly grateful" to be invited to visit Canada by Justin in 2016. They'd previously visited Canada shortly after tying the knot in 2011. During the tour, the couple were accompanied by their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. Justin greeted the royals upon their arrival in Victoria. A clip of his futile attempts to high five and shake hands with George, who was three at the time, went viral, according to The Guardian.2018: The couple and their children found themselves in hot water during a state visit to India where they faced accusations of cultural appropriation.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, Ella Grace, Hadrien, and Xavier during their visit to Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India, February 19, 2018REUTERS/Amit DaveOn several occasions during the visit, the Trudeau family were photographed appearing to dress in traditional Indian clothing. At the time, it triggered a lot of discussion on social media and among prominent Indian personalities about whether their outfits could be considered cultural appropriation.2019: Sophie once again joined Justin on stage after he was re-elected as Canada's prime minister in 2019.Liberal leader and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kisses his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau after the federal election at the Palais des Congres in Montreal, Quebec, Canada October 22, 2019.REUTERS/Carlo AllegriDuring his victory speech, Justin thanked Sophie and told her he loved her according to a transcript shared by Macleans."First of all, my Sophie. We began this political adventure together ten years ago because we believed in a better future, because we knew that it was worthwhile fighting for a better, more prosperous Canada. Sophie, I love you," he said. Justin also shared praise for all three of his children, whom he said inspire him "to do more and do better.""And everything I do, I do for you and for your generation," he said. "You remind me every single day that I have to take some time to appreciate the life we have and how lucky we are. 2021: The couple held hands as they received their COVID-19 vaccines together.Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds hands with his wife Sophie Gregoire before being inoculated with AstraZeneca's vaccine against coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a pharmacy in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada April 23, 2021.REUTERS/Blair Gable"Can you hold my hand," Justin told Sophie in a 2021 video shared by Global News before receiving his dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.Previously in 2020, Sophie tested positive for the coronavirus and Justin and their children had to isolate. The New York Times reported that Justin took on full parenting duties while Sophie was sick."You could hear the kids running around laughing, and playing in the background, and coming over saying, 'Come on daddy, let's do this,'" Ben Chin, the prime minister's senior adviser, told The New York Times, adding: "You heard the half-muffled reasonable dad voice: 'Daddy's on an important phone call right now. I can't do that.'"2021: Justin spoke out against a protestor who shouted obscenities about him and Sophie before an interview.Canada's Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks as his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau shields her eyes from the sun during an election campaign stop in Montreal, Quebec, Canada September 16, 2021.REUTERS/Carlos OsorioAccording to CBC, the anti COVID-19 vaccination protester began yelling profanities at Justin before an interview with Global News in Burnaby, British Columbia. The interview was supposed to take place outside but moved indoors when the individual began shouting obscenities at Justin and making derogatory remarks about Sophie. In a video of the interaction, Justin responded to the protestor by asking: "Isn't there a hospital you should be going to bother right now?" A day later, Justin defended his comment. "He went after my family. He said hateful, misogynistic things about my wife," he said. "I signed up for this. My family believes deeply in what I'm doing and put up with an awful lot. But everyone has limits," Justin added. "I will always be there to try to push back when someone crosses those lines."November 2022: Sophie appeared on Meghan Markle's "Archetypes" podcast and said women "long to be free in who we are."Sophie Grégoire Trudeau attends World Eating Disorders Action Day Luncheon 2023 National Alliance For Eating Disorders x Mental Health Coalition at United Nations on June 2, 2023, in New York City.Jared Siskin/Getty Images for National Alliance for Eating DisordersSophie appeared on the "Good Wife/Bad Wife, Good Mom/Bad Mom" episode of Archetypes.Introducing Sophie, Meghan called her a "dear friend," a mother, a wife, a humanitarian, and activist who she'd known for roughly seven years. During the podcast, Sophie said women should continue to challenge societal expectations put on them when they become wives and mothers. "We all long to be free in who we are," she said. "We often define freedom as a way to be free from the world, but it's really a way to be free in the world." August 2023: Justin and Sophie announced they are separating after 18 years of marriage.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau attend a Canada Day event in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada July 1, 2023.REUTERS/Blair GableSophie and Justin were last photographed in public for a Canada Day event in Ottawa on July 1. Just over a month later on August 2, the couple shared nearly identical statements in both French and English on Instagram announcing their separation. "Hi everyone, Sophie and I would like to share the fact that after many meaningful and difficult conversations, we have made the decision to separate. As always, we remain a close family with deep love and respect for each other and for everything we have built and will continue to build," the statement posted to Justin's account read."For the well-being of our children, we ask that ou respect our and their privacy. Thank you," it concluded. The couple have not announced if they plan to seek a divorce, through Reuters reported Justin's office said they had signed a legal document and will be focusing on raising their children. A source told the publication that Sophie is set to move out of Rideau Cottage, the official residence of the prime minister where she and Justin's children will remain living. The source said she will continue to spend time there.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, announced their separation on Wednesday after 18 years of marriage. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Trudeau arriving ahead of the coronation ceremony of King Charles III and Queen Camilla at Westminster Abbey on May 6.acob King/PA Images via Getty Images Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife announced their separation on Wednesday. A resurfaced interview shows Trudeau discussing the "difficult ups and downs" in their relationship. The couple were married for 18 years and have three children together.  A video of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discussing the "difficult ups and downs" in his marriage has re-emerged after his split from his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau.In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in October 2014, Trudeau — who was not yet prime minister — talked candidly about his marriage and the demands that politics put on his family."I have a very difficult, high-pressured job," Trudeau said in the interview. "Everyone knows how challenging it is to balance family responsibilities with a job that takes me across the country and working extremely hard.""There are times when she hates my job and she hates me for loving my job," he said about his wife, adding: "There are times ... when she understands how much of an opportunity and a responsibility it is for us to actually serve this country that has given us so much."Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire on their wedding day in 2005.ReutersTrudeau then goes on to say that his marriage "isn't perfect", adding: "We have had difficult ups and downs, yet Sophie remains my best friend, my partner, my love. We are honest with each other, even when it hurts."Asked by the reporter if that's "coded language for extramarital affairs," Trudeau responded: "No."Trudeau and Grégoire Trudeau, a former television presenter, were married in Montreal in 2005 and have three children together, aged 15, 14, and 9 years old.In a 2015 interview, Grégoire Trudeau refused to address allegations of an affair. "Ask if whatever happened in our lives — I'm not saying it did or didn't — as if we would answer that," Grégoire Trudeau told Canada's Globe and Mail.She added:"'I can tell you right away that no marriage is easy. I'm almost kind of proud of the fact that we've had hardship, yes, because we want authenticity. We want truth." The Canadian prime minister announced a split with his wife in a statement uploaded to Instagram on Wednesday."Sophie and I would like to share the fact that after many meaningful and difficult conversations, we have made the decision to separate," the statement said."As always, we remain a close family with deep love and respect for each other and for everything we have built and we will continue to build," it added. "For the well-being of our children, we ask that you respect our and their privacy."The couple were childhood friends but officially started dating in 2003 after crossing paths at a charity event in Montreal. They married in 2005 and Trudeau became Canada's 23rd prime minister 10 years later. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) Chairman & CEO Jamie ... Read more Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) Chairman & CEO Jamie Dimon on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” (M-F, 2PM-3PM ET) today, Wednesday, August 2. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Calls Fitch Downgrade Of U.S. Credit ‘Ridiculous’ LESLIE PICKER: Hey, Kelly, thank you so much. And thank you, Jamie, for being here. So you’ve got a big bus behind you. You are here on your annual bus tour. This year, it comprises, what you will have dubbed expansion markets in the Northwest, in the Rockies. Why here? What do you see as the opportunity here? JAMIE DIMON: First, we love these bus trips. It’s like 12 years, we try to go off the beaten path. And when we do them we see clients – I’m about to have lunch with you know, 100, 150 clients of ours. We go to the branches, we get to talk to our people. On the bus, we sometimes have branch managers and loan officers and small business tellers, and we ask them, what can we do better. We give him immunity and beer. We actually want to know. It makes us a better company. We have a lot of fun. And then we do places we haven’t been before. So we’ve been expanding to Montana, Idaho, Washington state, so we are in Spokane, Boise, and now in Bozeman, and it’s just fun to do and a great time. And we learned a lot. PICKER: What have you learned so far this year? DIMON: Okay, so this is for folks and CNBC. Leave California, New York, come visit Montana, and Idaho. And you know what America is alive and well. The innovation is unbelievable. The people get along. It’s not all about the polarization you read about. The innovation is everywhere. People think Silicon Valley, but I met with a company here called Bridger Photonics run by Peter Roos and all that does monitoring of methane gas and they are doing a lot of work with all the big oil companies about how to improve their emissions and stuff like that. It’s extraordinary. And it’s built here, you know, Gibson guitars are now built here. I met Interstate Cargo in in Boise and they built a whole big business – a Russian immigrant. That’s America. We should be applauding the beauty of America and all the things that it does and free enterprise. PICKER: Well, let’s talk more about America because Fitch you know, big news today, obviously, is the downgrade of US debt down to AA plus. What’s your take on that decision? DIMON: I’ll give you a couple of quick things. It doesn’t really matter that much. You know, the markets decide. It’s not the ratings agencies who make these big decisions. Number two, they point out some issues, which we all knew about, about our debt ceiling crisis and things like that. But number three most important the American public – this is the most prosperous nation on the planet. It is still the most prosperous nation on the planet. It is the most secure nation on the planet. And I would point out to the ratings agencies if I could that they’re a bunch of countries rated higher than us like AAA, but they live under the american enterprise military system. France – have them be AAA not America is kind of ridiculous. PICKER: These are countries like Canada, and others. DIMON: Yeah. PICKER: You know, in terms of the actual decision making behind the downgrade, it had a lot to do with political brinksmanship surrounding the debt ceiling debacle, the deficit itself, I mean, do you agree with any of those – DIMON: Those are issues. This is the most prosperous nation on the planet. North America, we have the Atlantic and the Pacific, the best military, the best economy the world’s ever seen, the most innovation. The credit is sound. It should be the highest rated credit in the world. And yes, there are issues about being raised publicly. I agree with that. We should get rid of the debt ceiling. PICKER: We should get rid of the debt ceiling – DIMON: We should get rid of it. It’s used by both parties. And it’s always used in a way that makes it very difficult. We need certainty in the world, and we should have more of it. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: The Humanitarian Crisis In Ukraine Is ‘Extraordinary’ PICKER: Okay, let’s talk about your thoughts on the economy. Because, you know, you’ve you’ve been conservative with your balance sheet for a while now. You know, you said that a year ago, actually last June at a financial conference that the firm was bracing itself for a hurricane. And then you noted that could be a minor one or Superstorm Sandy. And then you later downgraded that threat to storm clouds. So what’s your macro meteorology telling you right now? DIMON: I actually did not downgrade it. I just used a different phraseology, that gets over treated. So again, the big picture is America is resilient, unbelievable. Etc. We have a little bit of an anomaly a very strong consumer, low unemployment, we are growing as a country, still innovation, the consumers still has more money in their income – in their checking accounts than they had pre Covid, their home prices have gone for 15 years, asset prices go on for 15 years, it’s pretty good. Even if we go into recession, they are going in with a very good balance sheet, not a bad one. And businesses are in good shape. That’s the good part. The storm cloud part is still there, which is things you know, I’m not worried. When I see people are talking about I’m worried about this and worried about that. I don’t worry that much. You know, you can get worried about just about anything you want. I think people do too much of that. And I agree with Warren Buffett about the resilience of America. But there are two things out there, which are – give me heightened concern. One is the fiscal spending and the quantitative tightening. We’ve never had quantitative tightening. And I do think that might bite at one point. And I’m not – don’t want to be surprised about it and the second is Ukraine. The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is extraordinary. The impact in oil and gas and food and migration, it can expand – its nuclear proliferation is nuclear blackmail. This is serious stuff, which we have not really faced since World War II. So I put that in the cautious category. Hopefully that will sort out and everything –the world will be safe again. I hope people learn the world is not that safe, it will never be that safe. And we have to be very, very careful how we do that. And so how that affects the economy is different, but they are out there. And you know, and the consumer is spending their money down. So I don’t know if you have a soft landing and medium landing or hard landing. I’m actually much more concerned about this geopolitical stuff, all things being equal. PICKER: And, of course, you mentioned QT as well. You know, you’ve said previously at investor day that everyone should be prepared for rates as high as 7%. And there’s a narrative out there that June is softer than expected, CPI print is indicative of, you know, kind of this mission accomplished. We’re all good. Inflation is under control. Do you agree with that narrative? DIMON: No. I think people over look at short term data. You know, all that – if you actually dig into the data, you probably wouldn’t pay much credence to it. And so it goes up, it goes down, I think you gotta look at a little bit more. And when I’m saying 7%, I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m saying, as a business person, there are reasons why it might happen, and you should be prepared for it. You never want to be in a position and say, I didn’t expect oil to go to 120 or 130, interest rates go up 500 basis points, and therefore I’m bankrupt. We should all be prepared for those types of things. But there’s been a sea change in capital flows around the world. Governments have to sell more debt than ever before. All governments including the United States. Some say less than down deficits, they’re not down from pre Covid. Debt levels are very high, they are selling more debt, interest rates have gone up. Central banks are selling, they were big buyers, now they have to sell for QT, we’ve never had QT before. And then also this new economy of ours, the green economy $4 trillion a year. IRA ship sacked militaries around the world, almost every country is beefing up its military a little bit. These things may be a sea change, and we’ve seen about capital demand. And I think there’s a good chance that you guys, you know, in six months or nine months when we talk about crowding out, and so we’ll find out, you know, the 10 year bond just went to 410, I think you can easily go to 5%. I’m just saying people should be prepared for it. Don’t be afraid of it. Just be prepared for it. PICKER: Well, how do you see that net/net, you know, playing out? Because you mentioned the fiscal spending side of it. And then that’s concurrent with Qt. So they’re kind of running counter to each other. DIMON: They are. Yeah. There are contradictions in raising short rates, we still have a lot of liquidity, they are taking the liquidity out. But you know, the curve, a natural curve, one day might be, you know, three and a half from the short end and five in the 10 year end. And that’s maybe where we’re going. So what it leads to in the short run economy, I don’t know, I think some of these things can have real, real problems down the road if we don’t deal with them today. You’re really better off deal with them today than just letting them get worse over time. Jamie Dimon: I’m More Worried About China And Cyber Than Bank Stress Tests PICKER: But to your point, the consumer has been more resilient than expected. Some of that – DIMON: Yeah, but because we spent $5 trillion over the two years of Covid. PICKER: Right. DIMON: That is extraordinary money that went into the hands of consumers and small businesses. So the government did the right thing to get us out of this terrible Covid – remember unemployment went from 4% to 15% I remember in like three months. But we continue spending and we continue to QT – QE for too long. And we’re gonna pay – we’re paying a price for that. And hopefully it won’t be too big a price. PICKER: What do you think the price would ultimately be? DIMON: Well I said, there will be higher interest rates. And I don’t know what it’s gonna do to the economy. PICKER: In terms of the consumer, do you think they fully absorb that stimulus yet and absorbed the period of low interest rates we’ve seen for so long? You know, will we ultimately start to see the effect of that, you know, when the tide rolls in? DIMON: Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. The storm clouds down the road – you know, fiscal spending, QT, higher rates. We haven’t had the full effect of that yet. I don’t know what that’s going to do. I don’t want to guess about it. I don’t know and when I think when people spend their time forecasts and TV, they’re mostly wasting their time. PICKER: Do you think the Fed’s done a good job? DIMON: They did a good job early on. I think it is quite obvious it was too much. It was just their job. You know, fiscal spending, monetary spending. I think they they took too long, they’ve kind of said that. They caught up by going to 5%. They made sense to pause for a while. We’re gonna see. They may have to go a little higher. I don’t know. But they’ve caught up. I have enormous respect for Jay Powell. PICKER: Let’s talk about the Fed in terms of regulation. Last week, we saw the Basel three end game, Basel 4. Some people call it increasing capital standards for especially the largest banks – DIMON: Is there some way someone can actually quite that group down over there. Sorry. PICKER: Is that a metaphor – DIMON: I don’t know. PICKER: You know, higher capital requirements for you all, what do you think is the overall impact from these new rules that have been proposed? DIMON: First of all, I just want to be blunt. It is hugely disappointing. I think these rules are, I mean, I’ve always thought – was a joke. Now we have operational risk capital, which I think is equally bad based upon models, which kind of made no sense to me. And if I was the Fed, I’d be very careful about saying their models are perfect. Remember their models didn’t show inflation and they didn’t show 5% interest rates and stuff like that. They lack transparency. I don’t know what they want the outcome to be. But I think they should be saying, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And it can’t be just safe for banks. We have the best financial system in the world. I don’t think there’s a lot of calibration among – you know, we have hundreds rules, lots of very little calibration among the rules and it can have a real effect on – you know, if they want to get push all mortgages and all small business banking in our banks, so be it. They should tell the American public that. And so they’ll have real effect on consumers so just – I’m going to take just mortgages, you know, the way I’ve read it so far in more detail to come, you know it’s gonna make it much harder to make a small mortgage. And a mortgage to a lower FICO person. And I just think that’s a huge mistake from a policy point. You know, if that’s what they want, so be it, but they should tell the American public when we do this , it is going to reduce mortgage affordability and raise the cost – because that is exactly what it’s gonna do. And I could say the same thing about small business and a bunch of other impacts. So we’re going to adjust to it, I’m not sure it’s the right thing for America. And we’ll be –  we are still reading all the details. It’s 1000 pages long. I also want to point out it is 10 years after the crisis. So this has been going on for a long time. We need certainty, policy that you know, the stress test clearly didn’t work. So we – we do 100 a week, they do one and they act like that’s the real stress for the company. I’m far more worried about China and cyber than I am about that stress test. And I just think and then another thing – we don’t have many conversations anymore. We should be having conversations with regulators about what we’re worried about, what they’re worried about. There’s almost none of that. So it’s both lack of transparency, lack of conversation with real practitioners. A lot of people in ivory towers a lot of opinions here. They’ve never been in the real world. I’d like to see them get in the boxing ring one day. PICKER: Speaking of the recent banking turmoil, you said in your letter to shareholders in early April “the current crisis is not yet over. And even when it is behind us, there will be repercussions from it for years to come.” Do you think that these new regulations solve for that? DIMON: No. To some of these folks, you know, to hammer a nail, that’s what this is. A lot of these folks are using every issue that takes place to justify what they already thought. The best advice I ever heard was use your brains to figure out the truth not to justify what you already think. So look, this is will sort out. JPMorgan will be fine. I don’t think there’s a way to run a railroad. But you know, we have no choice. They do it. They – cost benefit analysis, they’re required to do that. They’re also required to adjust things to the size of the economy, the size of the banks, and none of that took place. So none of this calibration. And so I wish we did it. I think we’d have a healthier banking system. And I thought Dodd Frank accomplished a lot of stuff. I think this is way beyond that. PICKER: What do you think are the repercussions from the banking crisis? Because there are reports out there that you all were directly involved in the Bank of California / PacWest deal that was announced last week. You personally received regular briefings as it came together, according to those reports. You advise bank of California, in what some have called the rescue takeover of PacWest, you’re buying about $2 billion of mortgages to facilitate the deal, placement – for $400 million worth of private equity infusion here. Is this the playbook now for you know, potential stress that could arise? DIMON: No, I called it a mini crisis. Only so many banks are offsides on interest rate exposure. Remember this, some of these things were incentivized by county, incentivized by regulators, you know, and we were not completely aware of how quickly deposits were like Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, that didn’t happen anywhere. So we were quite clear, we thought first Republic was the last domino a few others may sort out. PacWest, you know, thank god, it’s good for them. I’m glad they did a public type of transaction. So it’s over for now. But, you know, all the banks, you know, we’re the biggest bank, the community banks, regional banks, I support all of them and they reported the first quarter, they reported the second, most of them did okay. They didn’t have runs in the bank, they earned money, they’ve got plenty of capital, you know, they’re preparing it looks like for potentially higher rates or, you know, maybe higher real estate laws or something like that. But it’s a sound system. You’re going to have failure. We shouldn’t act like every failure is a failure of the whole system. But we should learn from every failure. And I think there are a lot of things we could have learned and done differently and they’re not in the new wrecks. There’s something that that should have been done slightly differently in other maybe potential requirements. PICKER: Well, they did lower the threshold to those with $100 billion or more in assets, which would probably more, be more along the lines of a mid-sized bank. DIMON: I’m not sure that would have made any difference to the Silicon Valley Bank but—   PICKER: You don’t think so? DIMON: I don’t think so. PICKER: What would have made a difference do you think? DIMON: That that you don’t just stress one thing, but you stress multiple things. And then you that you look at other things, that you create liquidity. Liquidity is created in so many ways like we have so much liquidity but when things get bad, I cannot use it because of current rules. I think there are ways that things can be set up and I won’t bore you all, credit facilities and stuff like that, credit facilities with the, you know, the FHLB or the Federal Reserve or something like that, where every bank actually has all liquidity they need to back up a major run in their bank. And so there are things to fix it. They are not in these new rules. PICKER: And obviously the funding costs are higher when you do see some sort of run and so margins for the industry are under pressure as well. DIMON: Yeah but some of that is just they— PICKER: Temporary. DIMON: No, some of that is just people have to pass on more of the, you know, the save, the earnings to their customers. That’s a normal thing. That isn’t because of the crisis. PICKER: I see. You know, you mentioned First Republic, and part of this bus tour is actually, you know, meeting different First Republic legacy places. How’s the integration going? DIMON: Excellent, you know, Jen Piepszak and Jen Roberts and Marianne Lake are doing it, — people are working on but here’s the most important thing. They did a lot of great stuff when we were just in all over Bozeman and all over the place, a lot of great customers they did some things very well, we want to incorporate that in how we do things but the integration itself everything, you know, the systems, technology, risk, audit, compliance, branches. I am going to a branch later today, First Republic branch, they’ve got some great people and and we were able to assimilate it, help the people, save a lot of jobs and hedge literally within two days or three days all the — exposure so we didn’t add anything to our balance sheet by doing that and so the system is safer, we save those jobs and hopefully, we are going to do a great job for the clients. PICKER: Do you have an appetite to do any more deals? DIMON: Not really. I mean they don’t want us to which I think is fine, you know, they don’t, they don’t want big banks to do other deals to make them bigger which I think is fine. If you said again this goes back to regulations but I also don’t think that the FDI—you know, the public should know, we pay for the FDIC, it’s a mutual insurance thing so Silicon Valley Bank is probably going to cost us $2.5 to $3 billion. And you know so I don’t want whatever happens when the next bank comes bid in, I want to make sure that bid is a reasonable bid and not where you know $10 billion extra is being given to a small bank. That is not fair to anybody so I think they need some clear rules about if you want to do resolution, recovery and I also think we made a huge mistakes on Silicon Valley Bank. I hope that regulators are gonna be looking at that one day, with one place, we created a crisis and we created a melting cube that maybe didn’t have to happen. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon: We Don’t Recalibrate Regulations And It Slows Growth PICKER: What do you think needs to be assessed from a regulatory standpoint there? DIMON: I’m not going to go through it now but they should be asking a lot of questions of themselves like whenever we make mistake, we spend a lot of time on what I call the after action report, the post mortem. What did we do wrong, what can we do better? How do we make sure we’re doing it across our company? You know, we know we’re going to make mistakes. I don’t think we should treat every mistake like it’s a violation, morality or something like that but I think they should be doing a little bit of that, a little soul searching PICKER: Do you think there is an appetite among regulators and appetite among the C-Suite to do more consolidation in the industry? DIMON: I think the companies some companies need to and I think again I hear consolidation etc. It’s a dynamic system. It’s not a static system. They say there’s 4,000, they merged all to be bigger. There a lot of big companies that have gotten smaller because they didn’t do a good job. There are a lot of new companies Marcus, Ally Bank, PayPal, Apple basically is a bank today, you know, there are a lot of startups, I just drove by a bank, you know, here. I’m sure it’s a startup bank and some middle sized banks and small banks, one emerged because they can do a better job for their customers or diversify their base more. It’s a dynamic system, let it happen. And it’s a great system America has the best financial system in the world and the other thing I should say about regulation is I really do mean this, hedge funds and private equity are dancing in the streets because they’re just gonna pick up a lot of business because, but we do have the best system in the world including private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, middle market companies. It’s extraordinary. That strength is part of the strength of America and  part of what America free enterprise, the most important part, it’s not the money. It’s the people. It’s people starting things and growing things and moving places and having dreams and be allowed to further your dreams which has risk. You know sometimes we make a loan that has risk. We want to make some risky loans. We want to help Bridger Photonics accomplish their goals and serve their clients and yeah sometimes, you know, we make a mistake or something like that though I think that’s a great company I’m not referring to them so. PICKER, Well, what kind of music do you think they’re going to be dancing to because, you know, that that is the big criticism of increasing capital requirements is that it’s going to send business to the non-bank financials, the unregulated sector of the economy. DIMON: Yeah so that’s not always bad. I’m not against competition but the mortgage business is now 80% outside of banks. Okay and that I don’t know what it’s gonna do with the rest of that. It makes it harder to do a small business loans, it makes it harder to do some risky loans and obviously a lot of that’s gonna go with the non-banking system. That may not be all bad but again people should be analyzing the consequences and saying we want that to happen because it’s better for America and the citizens of America. I’ve never heard that statement. I think a lot of these things are done without any forethought about the ultimate consequences and very little calibration. We really need to be very thorough about how we’re doing things so the banking system has been, you know, this has been going on now for 15 years. You know, and they should take a deep breath and analyze and think about it. If you look at our regulatory systems, not sure, I have this chart. I don’t want to have it, I was going to show it, yeah can you hand it to me? Thank you. PICKER: Thank you. DIMON: I made this chart and people made fun of me about our regulatory systems for banks. I don’t know if you can see it up close, there are so many people involved, there’s cross responsibility, no one’s really responsible and I’m not showing this because the banks. I’m showing this because we’re doing this for building bridges, opening schools, building roads, starting companies, starting small businesses. We shouldn’t be crippling American, we should, we don’t recalibrate regulations all the time. What we really should be doing is what’s the best thing that works, acknowledging flaws, making modifications, we don’t do it. And I believe that some of this stuff is slowing down the growth of America. I wrote in my Chairman’s letter for 20 years we’re going to 1.7%. Had we been going at 3% which is definitely what we could get done, we’d have 15,000 more per person GDP which by the way is the GDP per person of China. Ours is 80, theirs is 15. We would have been 95 today had we done stuff. I think this stuff has really slowed it down, bad policy making, bad regulations, thoughtless type of stuff. You know, it’s easy to pile more stuff on people. George McGovern, the most liberal guy who ever ran for president wrote an op-ed I think in the Wall Street Journal after he ran for president, after he was a senator, he started, he bought a small inn somewhere and I think it was entitled if I’d only known how much these things hurt my ability to do, he spoke about OSHA and litigation and the ability to hire kids. And all these things that you know maybe a bunch of people who should ask that question what do I need to know to understand the impact of these things on on America and the reason you want to grow America is because it is the foundation of helping our lower paid citizens too. You know and so I think we should do a better job of taking care of lower paid individuals. I would double your income tax credit but a healthy economy is the is the foundation of everything including a stronger military and so I think we got to spend a little more time about how do we grow the economy and make it better for everybody and you know unfortunately they are a lot of policy issues in DC have, you know, people could at JPMorgan Chase, we’re not the reason that inner city schools are failing. And I think people should be a little more thoughtful about what they actually want to accomplish and how you can lift up so I think if you fix inner city schools and by that I mean kids who graduate with a livelihood paying $55,000 a year I think that’s doable. If you do that, change the — tax credit, I would tax carried interest too, you could fix America. And we that’s exactly what should be doing. PICKER: I think some people wonder, is policymaker Jamie in the cards for the future? DIMON: No. You know, I think companies should be involved in policymaking. So we do a lot of things to lift up society, which I’m very, very proud of. But getting policy right in DC is more important than individual corporate efforts. So say education, immigration, regulation, healthcare, affordable housing, mortgages. If we get those policies right, that will lift up society far more than any one company can possibly do. PICKER: What about the deal environment? We talked a bit about consolidation. What about the overall picture for dealmaking right now? Are you seeing any green shoots on that front? DIMON: Yes, but I could care less about that. You know that those things kind of, they’re like accordions, they open and close. For, you know, sediment people, opportunities, regulations, the FTC, it’ll be fine in the long run. Companies will find a million ways to grow and expand and do deals. And yes, it’s getting better today than it was six months ago, but I’m not. We don’t run the company that way. We run the company, we know there’s going to be bad weather. We know there’s going to be a mild recession or a hard recession, I call that the weather. We try to run the company that we serve those clients over there day in and day out regardless of the weather. We want to be a fortress for you and including NBCUniversal and Comcast. That’s what we try to do. You know, earnings go up and down. PICKER: I have to ask you because there have been some headlines recently regarding Jeffrey Epstein and the ongoing litigation there. Has it impacted your brand equity at all? DIMON: A little bit sometimes but we banked Jeffrey Epstein and I’m so sorry that we did. I wish we hadn’t. Had we known then what we know today, we obviously wouldn’t have. And so. PICKER: Have you changed the vetting of potential clients? DIMON: There are, we’re going to, yes, because, you know, we have to be very careful, can’t kick out people based on allegations so but yes, I think we can do more particularly around a whole bunch of things. And I think the banking system by the way sets the highest standard of, you know, know your customers, AML, protecting people and yes, we make terrible mistake sometimes and we apologize for it. PICKER: I want to ask you about artificial intelligence because going back to that letter, you said you already have 300 use cases in production today for the firm and your Chief Information Officer Lori Beer said AI delivered over $320 million in benefit through personalization and deepening client relationships. Are you, are you positive about this technology? Are you worried about some of the, the unintended consequences that could arise from such a powerful technology? DIMON: Yeah, so first of all we’ve put a person on the management committee reporting to Daniel Pinto and me who does data analytics an ML. That’s how important we think it is. It is a game changer. Now, doesn’t mean it’s going to change it tomorrow, it may take a while to build in and it can do wonderful things and we also just so that your public knows, we have an AI ethics department — we have to explain it to regulators, political leaders and stuff like that in addition to running it through programs and there’s machine learning, there’s AI, there’s large language models, we can do all those various things. It is a game changer. And yes it needs to be done right and it can be hard to regulate. I do worry about it because bad guys are going to use it too. You’ve had people like Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt where I have deep respect for worrying about if it’s ever used in military, you know, it can lose control but so yeah there could be downsides but remember there are downsides to cars, pharmaceuticals, airplanes, but you live a lot longer and you have a far better life. And the other thing I think in society I’m not you know people we went from working six and a half days a week 60, 70 years ago to five now. You know, my view is in 30 years, your kids are probably going to work three and a half days a week. They’ll probably live to 100 and they probably won’t have cancer. Those are, so technology drives all that that’s fabulous if it causes too much, you know, job loss and stuff like that then we society can step in with relocation, retraining, income assistance all those various things so there are a lot of solutions again if we get policy right. PICKER: If we get policy right. Jamie Dimon, thank you so much for sitting down, wide ranging discussion today, an important day for the markets, the economy and the banking industry as a whole. We really appreciate it. DIMON: Leslie, thank you. Everyone out there keep the faith this wonderful country of ours, support for the enterprise. Thank you......»»

Robert Malone: You Are The Population They Want To Control Authored by Robert Malone via The Brownstone Institute, Worldwide birthrate per 1,000 people follows a very predictable trend. In “developed” and/or wealthy nations, the birthrate is low and in nations at the lower end of the economic development scale, the birthrate is high. Nothing new there. Many countries, including the US, have birthrates that either are too low to sustain current population levels or are stable. Since 1970, the population of people born in the US has been stable at below 300 million. In fact, some estimates show a decline in population. All of the population growth in the US during this time period has been due to immigration. That is why the USA has grown to 336 million people in 50 years. This trend has only increased in recent years. There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the US in 2018, making up 13.7 percent of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the US, accounting for 5.4 percent of the total US population. For Jill and I growing up in a blue state, we were indoctrinated at an early age by the public school system that having two children was the responsible thing to do to save the planet from overpopulation. That careers were more important than having a large family. That women would find more fulfillment in a education and career, as opposed to staying at home. That women should defer motherhood until college and a career were firmed established. That this was the responsible path to take. Today, young women receive the same messaging from our government, our schools systems, and mainstream corporate media.  This messaging by the US government is still as strident as when I was in my youth 50 to 60 years ago. The truth is that UN’s Agenda 2030 asserts that migration is a human right. What this means in practicality is that persons born in countries with high birthrates have a right to migrate into wealthy countries with low birth rates.  To begin – migration is not a “human right.” Property laws and nation states exist for a reason. To assert otherwise is to assert that there is a one-world government which is in control of migration. Another usurpation of authority by the UN and the WEF.  This nation’s rules and regulations, our very Constitution do not apply to non-citizens. This is by design. Let’s abide by our Constitution and Bill or Rights, not UN agreements, such as Agenda 2030, which was signed by a US president and never ratified by the Senate. Our country has done a fine job of convincing the American populace that large family size hurts families and individuals in aggregate. We were told that the reward of that, for better or worse, would be a stabilized population over time and preservation of the American way of life, environment, cultural heritage and associated economic opportunities for US citizens. And yet still they persist. This week, Kamala Harris specifically stated that a reduced population was key to children being able to breath and drink clean water. This is not the first time she has asserted this false narrative. “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breath clean air and drink clean water.” – Kamala Harris Yet, the Biden border crisis grows ever more urgent and the rate of illegal immigration continues to surge. It is a no brainer to think that an option to reduce population might be as simple as reducing immigration, if that was their true intent.  The truth is that the US has a vibrant and amazing culture. A heritage built on independence, free speech, shared values, and strong work ethic. This heritage can easily be diluted by too much immigration. Just look what is happening France right now. Open migration policies have worked to cause a vast instability within the nation. France literally can no longer integrate so many people, with such different sets of cultural norms into their core national culture. This is not progress.  Under globalism, the heterogeneous cultures throughout the world are being weaponized as a way to destroy diversity; a path towards enabling a single, globalized government controlled by the UN and the WEF. Which is precisely what open borders, the immigration policies of the UN and even Kamala Harris’ statements seem to be working towards. It is time to end this nonsense and get back to a closed and orderly immigration system. There are over 8 billion people in the world. The US can not take all those that wish to immigrate. To think otherwise is foolish. America has to be an independent and free nation. We need to rely on Americans for our goods and services. A strong economy is one that meets its own needs internally. Whereby goods, services, medical care, and energy are produced domestically. A strong nation doesn’t need to import low-wage earners to do its dirty work. The bizarre directive of reducing the naturally born population while importing new immigrants serves no functional purpose except to further globalize the USA. By accepting large numbers of immigrants while reducing our own American population, we further regress as a nation, and we will continue to accelerate economic devastation of both middle class and urban poor citizens. A new world order where migration is a right, borders are open and the UN controls the ebb and flow of populations is ceding American nationalism and will destroy the American experiment in self-governance.  Our government needs to stay out of the business of enforcing population measures. Which brings me to the mRNA genetic shots. People worry that the mRNA jabs have some sequence or component, such as the lipid nano-particle or genetic code, which are causing sterility. And that these were intentionally designed to cause a decrease in fertility worldwide. This is not a completely unrealistic fear. For years, there have been rumors of abortion vaccines and anti-fertility vaccines being developed in India and Africa. With evidence being presented for and against these rumors. But we do know for sure that China used forced sterilizations and forced abortions on its own citizens. Now, China worries that their population levels are crumbling rapidly. Government controls on family choices are immoral. The idea of a vaccine to control population is repugnant. Which brings me to a newly published Nature paper that shows that using adeno-associated viral vectored techniques, cats can be permanently sterilized. In this essay, I don’t want to get into the science behind this (let’s defer that to a later essay) but I do want to discuss the ethics of developing “gene therapy” techniques that rely on viral vectors for sterilization. To begin with, such a fertility gene therapy technique using adeno-associated virus (AAV) “gene therapy” vectors could be accidentally or purposefully modified to be infectious. This requires a recombination event (rescue) of another related adenovirus, which could be a wild type. Once that happens, the viral vector could be replication competent: ergo infectious. Although AAV “gene therapy” vectors are not a full replicating virus; the truth is that in a research setting, using the full virus to create infectious products is relatively simple. It could be as simple as missing a purification step or a recombination event. If such a product were to escape or be released into the general cat population, it would be a disaster. If such a vector had a rescue event in an injected animal, it could literally create a new virus. What happens if it were to infect on other feline species, such as cheetahs, big cats, cougars or bobcats? There is a scenario whereby it could decimate the population of an endangered species or all the cats . Furthermore, there is a possibility that such a virus could jump species – even into humans. Adeno-associated viruses are respiratory viruses, so can spread easily. What happens then?  Not to mention, we already know that NGOs and governments are willing to consider reducing population via vaccination or forced sterilization. Who is to say whether an organization, perhaps even one with the “best of intentions” in mind (or believing that “the ends justify the means”), would be willing to go there. After what we have experienced over the past three years, I would consider it in the realm of possibility. Kamala Harris, Bill Gates and the WEF and UN all have made their positions crystal clear. Population reduction is imperative.  There must be more regulatory controls on biological research for both animals and humans.  But in the meantime, we have to consider that the government doesn’t really care about population control. You can know them by their actions, not their words. Their words endorse low birthrate as a pathway to population stabilization, but their actions enable rampant population growth due to immigration. The DATA indicate that what they really are striving for is a New World Order, whereby the UN becomes the dominant force of the world, with nation states nestled under their organizational structure. One in which out-migration combined with regional population control via government-enabled birth control (via both pharmaceuticals and deployed propaganda) is designed to augment that process of enabling populations born in economically disadvantaged regions to gain control of more economically advanced nations and infrastructure while destroying the cultures and politico/economic structures which have historically enabled the economic development of these more advanced regions. *  *  * Republished from Substack Tyler Durden Thu, 07/20/2023 - 20:20.....»»

In his podcast addressing the markets today, Louis Navellier offered the following commentary. NASDAQ 100 Rebalancing NASDAQ announced this week ... Read more In his podcast addressing the markets today, Louis Navellier offered the following commentary. NASDAQ 100 Rebalancing NASDAQ announced this week that it will rebalance its popular NASDAQ 100 index to “address over concentration in the index by redistributing the weights” of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Meta (NASDAQ:META), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA). The changes will be announced on Friday, July 14th. There will be no additions or deletions. So the NASDAQ 100 stocks outside of the top 7 stocks should benefit from persistent institutional buying pressure.  This rebalance is actually intended to allow the NASDAQ 100 to stay in compliance with the SEC diversification rule that limits the aggregate weight of the largest stocks with 5% or more weights to 50%.  On June 3rd, these 7 companies accounted for 50.9% of the NASDAQ 100, which trigged NASDAQ to announce a “special rebalance” for the first time ever to comply with the SEC diversification rules. Opposing NATO-Ukraine President Biden is at a NATO conference in Lithuania this week and the mood was buoyed by Sweden becoming a new NATO member after Turkey dropped its opposition.  Other NATO members wanted to provide Ukraine with a roadmap to join NATO, but President Biden has emerged as the leading opponent to granting Ukraine a speedy path to become a NATO member.  So even though NATO is effectively funding a proxy war with Russia by providing military aid to Ukraine, the Biden Administration is apparently afraid of an escalating war with Russia if Ukraine joins NATO.  The truth of the matter is there are a lot of disagreements within NATO, so Ukraine would be wise to convince NATO that a ceasefire and eventual peace agreement with Russia is necessary, because the war has become more futile as well as devasting for both Russia and Ukraine. Endorsement Striking Interestingly, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has not endorsed Joe Biden’s re-election, apparently because they are going increasingly uncomfortable with the Biden Administration’s big EV push.  EVs have fewer parts than vehicles with internal combustion engines, so they require fewer UAW workers.  Complicating matters further is that Tesla does not have UAW workers.  The UAW’s contract with Ford, GM and Stellantis expires in the next couple of months, so the uneasiness concerning EVs and inflation may cause the UAW to strike for more job security and higher wages. President Biden’s approval rating now stands near an all-time low of 41%.  Even worse, 54% of Americans disapprove of how President Biden is doing his job.  According to the Labor Department, black workers made up about 267,000 of the 300,000 new unemployment cases this spring, so the Biden Administration is losing a key constituency.  Furthermore, the Fed reported that credit card debt officially hit a record high of over $1 trillion, so many households are clearly struggling with inflation. Biden’s EV Quest Hits A Glitch In the middle of America, especially flyover country where Americans tend to drive more, the Biden Administration’s quest to get consumers to switch to electric vehicles (EVs) has hit a glitch, despite Tesla’s 30% annual sales growth in the U.S. that was boosted by recent price cuts.  There is currently a 92-day supply of EVs sitting on dealer lots, compared to a 54-day supply for vehicles with internal combustion engines.  Specifically, the weekly inventory of EVs for sale rose 342% in the past year to 90,000 in the second quarter. Approximately 8% of U.S. vehicle sales are forecasted to be EVs this year, but affordability remains a big problem. Hyundai/Kia just passed GM for the #2 in U.S. sales, while Ford slipped to #5 in sales behind VW Group (Audi, Porsche and VW).  What Ford and GM are finding out is that the buyers of their EVs are not repeat buyers and are not loyal to their brands.  As a result, the goodwill that Ford and GM built with their vast pickup and SUV sales is not apparently transferable to their EV models. Ford is retooling its EV manufacturing plants to switch to iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, since it only sold 4,466 F-150 Lightning models in the second quarter with expensive lithium-ion batteries.  VW Group has also curtailed production of its ID.4 EV, since it is apparently too expensive for most VW buyers due to expensive lithium-ion batteries.  I should add that VW Group has invested in a Chinese company, Gotion High Tech, which recently announced an LFP manganese (LMFP) battery that had 240 kwh of energy density, that is far superior to current LFP batteries and is significantly cheaper than lithium-ion batteries.  The ultimate winner of the EV race will likely be the manufacturer that makes affordable EVs with cheaper LFP or LMFP batteries, just like BYD has broken out as the market leader in China with its affordable EVs. The manufacturing sector continues to sputter after eight horrible months and is now at its lowest level in three years. A year ago, Ford was #2 in U.S. EV sales, but has slipped to #5 after its core customers expressed reluctance to switch to expensive EVs.  The problem is related to expensive lithium-ion batteries as well as Tesla’s price cuts. As a result, all these battery plants that are being built in the U.S. may not be successful, unless they make more affordable LFP or LMFP batteries, simply because lithium-ion batteries are too expensive for many potential buyers. In America, many folks like their pickup trucks, SUVs as well as their gas stoves, so any pressure from the government to make them switch to EVs as well as electric vs. gas appliances, is receiving a big pushback and hurts the Biden Administration’s approval rating.  Probably the best example of a pushback is occurring when New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) proposed rules that would order restaurants to reduce their carbon emissions by 75%.  This would require restaurant owners to buy expensive emission control devices on their pizza ovens, which also require expensive maintenance.  DEP Spokesman, Ted Timbers, said “All New Yorkers deserve to breathe healthy air and wood and coal-fired stoves are among the largest contributors of harmful pollutants in neighborhoods with poor air quality.” This brewing DEP war against iconic Italian restaurants and pizza joints in New York City is not going over well, where pizza fans are now chanting “Give us pizza or give us death.” Obviously, many consumers do not like change, whether it has to do with vehicles, gas stoves or pizza is irrelevant. However, consumer sentiment has more to do with the cash in their pockets than their political beliefs. All I can foresee is that change is coming as the Biden Administration struggles with convincing Americans that they are doing a good job.  Consumer sentiment has more to do with the cash in their pockets and fortunately, many baby boomers have cash to spend. The Biden Administration recently dispatched its cabinet secretaries around the U.S. to convince voters that Biden economics is working. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that onshoring efforts are causing the manufacturing sector to improve, so ADP reported that there were 42,000 manufacturing layoffs in June. Rolling Recovery We are effectively in a “rolling recovery” where many Americans are being left behind.  Thanks to Baby Boomers with cash to spend, the U.S. economy is still recovering.  Specifically, economic growth has picked up due to an improving service sector as well as strong consumer confidence.  So all that can go wrong is if the Fed to continues to raise key interest rates, despite ample evidence of inflation cooling.  However, I am more confident than ever that after this week the Fed will decisively hit the “pause button” due to favorable inflation evidence as well as the Labor Department’s lackluster payroll data. It is very unfortunate that the Fed relies on unreliable economic data that is tainted by wild seasonal adjustments as well as seemingly endless revisions.  The good news is the Fed likes to stay out of the political spotlight, so I expect that they will commence cutting key interest rates in December and continue to cut in the first half of 2024 to stimulate overall economic growth. Coffee Beans: Under the Sea Hundreds of divers and snorkelers listened to an underwater concert that advocated coral reef protection last Saturday in the Florida Keys. The oceanic playlist included the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Fins” and the theme from “The Little Mermaid.” The music was piped undersea through waterproof speakers suspended beneath boats above the reef. Source: AP News. See the full story here. .....»»

The Cost Of Bravado: Why Trump Defense To The Audiotape Could Come At A Cost Authored by Jonathan Turley, Since the arraignment, much of the talk about the federal indictment of Donald Trump has focused on the audiotape on which the former president refers to what he said were classified plans to attack Iran. When it was first reported, I noted that the only cognizable defense would be “bravado,” an admission that Trump was exaggerating but that the document was not what he claimed. Trump has now adopted that defense in an interview with Semafor and with ABC News. The problem is that bravado can come at a cost. On the audiotape, Trump is apparently motioning to material on his desk and tells two interviewers: “I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t it amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this. This is off the record, but they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This wasn’t done by me. All sorts of stuff, pages long, look. Let’s see here. It’s that amazing. This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is, like, highly confidential, secret. This is secret information. But look, look at this. You attack.” When asked about the audiotape by Fox News’ Bret Baier, Trump insisted that “there was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else, talking about Iran and other things.” He has now admitted that he was engaging in “bravado,” declaring: “I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado. I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.” The admission was notable, given what Trump once wrote about in his book The Art of the Deal: “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do. That is why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest, the greatest and the most spectacular.” Trump’s past embrace of bravado as a signature style will help him in arguing that, while he may have been braggadocious, he was not careless with a document that did not exist. Notably, Merriam-Webster defines “bravado” as both “blustering, swaggering conduct” (as Trump described in his book) but also “the quality or state of being foolhardy.” The Justice Department, in its case against the former president, is likely to focus on the second meaning. Even if the Justice Department cannot establish that the Iran attack plans were actually on Trump’s desk, it can use the audiotape against him. The most immediate impact is that any possibility that Trump might take the stand likely just vanished. In a case about the mishandling of classified material, “bravado” is hardly a positive defense. It is perfectly believable that there was no classified document being waived around — but it also shows a “foolhardy” attitude that could further taint the defense over the pictures of boxes stored in a bathroom and ballroom. Waiving around documents while bragging that you kept classified material undermines claims that you took such documents seriously. The greatest impact, however, is that it demolishes Trump’s defense that he declassified all of the documents. At the end of the audiotape, Trump states: “When I was president, I could have declassified it, now I can’t.” That also could be bravado — but it is clearly baffling for a president who insisted that he could declassify material with a thought. It effectively means that Trump is left with threshold challenges against the use of the Espionage Act, arguing that fights over presidential papers are supposed to be addressed under the civil provisions of the Presidential Records Act. Trump repeated that defense this week. The odds are against Trump on ultimately prevailing with that argument in the courts. However, even if he did, it still could leave false-statement and obstruction charges on the table. And, at age 77, Trump cannot leave one count remaining if he wants to avoid the threat of a potentially terminal prison sentence. Trump, however, is not without a strategy, albeit a high-risk one. The bravado defense is likely to play better with the public than a court. According to one recent poll, a majority of the public views the indictment as politically motivated or even as election interference. Some Republican presidential candidates have stated already that they will (or would consider) pardons for Trump if they are elected in 2024. As I have previously argued, Trump could give himself a self-pardon, too — including a prospective pardon before any conviction. Thus, if Trump can delay the trial until after the election, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith may never see a jury in the case. Trump also knows that while he cannot afford to lose one felony count, Smith cannot afford to lose one juror. With the trial’s transfer to Fort Pierce, Fla., Trump will have a far better jury pool than he would face in New York or, potentially, Atlanta. If the jury hangs, Smith would have to retry the case — a very uncertain prospect with a public losing its patience for the prosecution. So, “a little hyperbole,” to quote The Art of the Deal, could go a long way where bravado works the best: in the court of public opinion. Tyler Durden Fri, 06/30/2023 - 15:00.....»»

"Moscow is becoming a frontline city," read the headline of an article in a popular Russian newspaper. The country is finally waking up to the war in Ukraine. Residents of the Shebekinsky district of Russia's Belgorod region, who were evacuated following recent attacks on settlements near the Russia-Ukraine border in the course of a military conflict, queue outside an office of the Russian Red Cross office to receive financial aid in the city of Belgorod, Russia, June 7, 2023.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters For weeks now, attacks by Ukraine within Russia have been increasing. As a result, Russian society is becoming more aware of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Infighting among Russian leadership is also starting to have an impact on the war effort. This is a translation of an article in Welt that originally appeared in June 2023.Dead civilians, villages cleared out, and a seemingly overworked government: Moscow's war on Ukraine has finally hit home in Russian society. Almost no one's neutral anymore, and that's having a big effect on Putin.Pictures of the chaos, like from the flooded city of Kherson after a dam was destroyed in South Ukraine, are still getting through to Russian folks, despite censorship. But people don't have to look over the border to see the effects of the Russian invasion anymore.For weeks now, attacks within Russia are piling up: the region of Belgorod can't catch a break, and drone attacks just keep happening.Sunday morning, a drone went down near the village of Strelkovka in the Kaluga region. "No injuries as of the preliminary report," the governor of the region, Wladislaw Schapscha, said on Telegram. Kaluga is just north of the greater Moscow area.On Friday, Russian media reported an attack on a residential building in the city of Voronezh where two people were injured. Less than ten days before that, drones hit three houses in Moscow. "Moscow's entered a new world," Kremlin-aligned political analyst Sergej Markow wrote on Telegram, calling the events the "first massive air raid on Moscow" since World War II.For many Russians, the "special operation" seemed far away for a long time. If you just turned off the TV, you could ignore what was happening in Ukraine. But now the war is really sinking in."Moscow is becoming a frontline city," read the headline of an article in the popular newspaper "Moskovski Komsomolets." The author of the story, Michail Rostowski, wrote about the "far-reaching psychological consequences." Russia is "not just in a serious, but a very serious military conflict" - and there's no guarantee for the safety of its citizens.Some people see a silver lining in the current situation. Patriotic ideologue Alexander Dugin, whose daughter was killed in an attack intended for him, called the attacks "psychologically very important." He said society's awareness is changing because Russia needs unity now more than ever.A woman waits at a bus stop next to a poster promoting Russian army service, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues, in Moscow, Russia April 12, 2023.REUTERS/Yulia Morozova/File PhotoBut these attacks on Russian territory are unlikely to bring unity. Instead, society is becoming more divided, as Russia expert Jens Siegert describes in an article for the academic journal "Russland-Analysen."Both war supporters and opponents feel more confirmed in their views. Siegert, who's lived in Moscow for 30 years, sees a "growing apocalyptic mood", especially among Putin's supporters.A Kremlin-friendly Russian Orthodox bishop, Savva Tutunow, tried to comfort Russians with a quote from the Gospel of Mark: "When you hear about wars and war rumors, don't be alarmed: it has to happen. But the end is not yet there," he wrote on his Telegram channel.But many Russians aren't turning to religion on social media, they're resorting to gallows humor. "Everything's good, we just need to ban the word 'Moscow' in public," one user commented under a report about the drone attacks. A now infamous quote from Putin that "Everything is going according to plan" has become a cynically used running gag to share bad news.And there's plenty of bad news. Just in the month of May, Russian territory was attacked 281 times, reported the banned newspaper "Novaya Gazeta." The paper estimates that 52 civilians in Russia have been killed since the war started. According to the newspaper "Kommersant", over 3,500 residential buildings were damaged in the border region of Belgorod.Opposition media report on chaos, missing evacuations, looting, and quote locals who feel abandoned by the Russian government."The attacks in Belgorod are busting the myth of Putin's military being invincible," said political scientist Abbas Galljamow to the DPA news agency. He noted that nothing diminishes the government's credibility as much as its inability to protect its people.There's also infighting in Russia's leadership, at least in the second rung of power. Wagner Group boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, again blasted the military leadership and even offered to place his own mercenaries in Belgorod. Statements by Duma member Konstantin Satulin also made waves. In a panel discussion, he publicly admitted that Russia hasn't achieved any of its declared goals.He predicted that Ukraine would survive as a state because Russia isn't strong enough to change that. According to media reports, the ruling party "United Russia" is currently discussing how to handle this dissenter – publicly sanctioning him would be like admitting they're trying to suppress the truth, bloggers speculate.Publicly, Putin's still playing it cool. Through his spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, he said that the situation in the Belgorod region is "alarming,"  but under control.They're not discussing martial law or new mobilization. Russia will achieve all war goals. Millions of Russians are behind Putin and the "military special operation," Peskov claimed.And that statement isn't even a lie. Because these attacks within Russia are making even initially neutral Russians care about the war – and they're starting to approve of it. "Alarmism contributes, at least for now, more to the consolidation of Putin's political system than it disturbs it," writes expert Jens Siegert.Many Russians, even those who think the attack on Ukraine was a mistake, fear that a Russian defeat would have even worse consequences for the country – so they believe the country needs to keep going and endure, even if it hurts.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

"Moscow is becoming a frontline city," read the headline of an article in a popular Russian newspaper. The country is finally waking up to the war in Ukraine. Residents of the Shebekinsky district of Russia's Belgorod region, who were evacuated following recent attacks on settlements near the Russia-Ukraine border in the course of a military conflict, queue outside an office of the Russian Red Cross office to receive financial aid in the city of Belgorod, Russia, June 7, 2023.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters For weeks now, attacks by Ukraine within Russia have been increasing. As a result, Russian society is becoming more aware of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Infighting among Russian leadership is also starting to have an impact on the war effort. This is a translation of an article in Welt that originally appeared in June 2023.Dead civilians, villages cleared out, and a seemingly overworked government: Moscow's war on Ukraine has finally hit home in Russian society. Almost no one's neutral anymore, and that's having a big effect on Putin.Pictures of the chaos, like from the flooded city of Kherson after a dam was destroyed in South Ukraine, are still getting through to Russian folks, despite censorship. But people don't have to look over the border to see the effects of the Russian invasion anymore.For weeks now, attacks within Russia are piling up: the region of Belgorod can't catch a break, and drone attacks just keep happening.Sunday morning, a drone went down near the village of Strelkovka in the Kaluga region. "No injuries as of the preliminary report," the governor of the region, Wladislaw Schapscha, said on Telegram. Kaluga is just north of the greater Moscow area.On Friday, Russian media reported an attack on a residential building in the city of Voronezh where two people were injured. Less than ten days before that, drones hit three houses in Moscow. "Moscow's entered a new world," Kremlin-aligned political analyst Sergej Markow wrote on Telegram, calling the events the "first massive air raid on Moscow" since World War II.For many Russians, the "special operation" seemed far away for a long time. If you just turned off the TV, you could ignore what was happening in Ukraine. But now the war is really sinking in."Moscow is becoming a frontline city," read the headline of an article in the popular newspaper "Moskovski Komsomolets." The author of the story, Michail Rostowski, wrote about the "far-reaching psychological consequences." Russia is "not just in a serious, but a very serious military conflict" - and there's no guarantee for the safety of its citizens.Some people see a silver lining in the current situation. Patriotic ideologue Alexander Dugin, whose daughter was killed in an attack intended for him, called the attacks "psychologically very important." He said society's awareness is changing because Russia needs unity now more than ever.A woman waits at a bus stop next to a poster promoting Russian army service, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues, in Moscow, Russia April 12, 2023.REUTERS/Yulia Morozova/File PhotoBut these attacks on Russian territory are unlikely to bring unity. Instead, society is becoming more divided, as Russia expert Jens Siegert describes in an article for the academic journal "Russland-Analysen."Both war supporters and opponents feel more confirmed in their views. Siegert, who's lived in Moscow for 30 years, sees a "growing apocalyptic mood", especially among Putin's supporters.A Kremlin-friendly Russian Orthodox bishop, Savva Tutunow, tried to comfort Russians with a quote from the Gospel of Mark: "When you hear about wars and war rumors, don't be alarmed: it has to happen. But the end is not yet there," he wrote on his Telegram channel.But many Russians aren't turning to religion on social media, they're resorting to gallows humor. "Everything's good, we just need to ban the word 'Moscow' in public," one user commented under a report about the drone attacks. A now infamous quote from Putin that "Everything is going according to plan" has become a cynically used running gag to share bad news.And there's plenty of bad news. Just in the month of May, Russian territory was attacked 281 times, reported the banned newspaper "Novaya Gazeta." The paper estimates that 52 civilians in Russia have been killed since the war started. According to the newspaper "Kommersant", over 3,500 residential buildings were damaged in the border region of Belgorod.Opposition media report on chaos, missing evacuations, looting, and quote locals who feel abandoned by the Russian government."The attacks in Belgorod are busting the myth of Putin's military being invincible," said political scientist Abbas Galljamow to the DPA news agency. He noted that nothing diminishes the government's credibility as much as its inability to protect its people.There's also infighting in Russia's leadership, at least in the second rung of power. Wagner Group boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, again blasted the military leadership and even offered to place his own mercenaries in Belgorod. Statements by Duma member Konstantin Satulin also made waves. In a panel discussion, he publicly admitted that Russia hasn't achieved any of its declared goals.He predicted that Ukraine would survive as a state because Russia isn't strong enough to change that. According to media reports, the ruling party "United Russia" is currently discussing how to handle this dissenter – publicly sanctioning him would be like admitting they're trying to suppress the truth, bloggers speculate.Publicly, Putin's still playing it cool. Through his spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, he said that the situation in the Belgorod region is "alarming,"  but under control.They're not discussing martial law or new mobilization. Russia will achieve all war goals. Millions of Russians are behind Putin and the "military special operation," Peskov claimed.And that statement isn't even a lie. Because these attacks within Russia are making even initially neutral Russians care about the war – and they're starting to approve of it. "Alarmism contributes, at least for now, more to the consolidation of Putin's political system than it disturbs it," writes expert Jens Siegert.Many Russians, even those who think the attack on Ukraine was a mistake, fear that a Russian defeat would have even worse consequences for the country – so they believe the country needs to keep going and endure, even if it hurts.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Sherlock Holmes On The Jobs Report By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities A Quirky Report Last week was not that exciting (except for the last bullet point). The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 finished roughly where they started (while the Russell 2000 did well). Credit spreads did very little (CDX tightened a smidge while bonds widened a touch). Bond yields drifted a little higher (9 bps on 2s and 4 bps on 10s), while the 2s vs 10s inverted further to -86 bps (a topic discussed last weekend in Markets Heat Up as Global Relations Cool). Oil sank 2%, but “Dr.” copper rose almost 2% as each marched to the beat of their own drum, as opposed to “recession on or off” trading. Bitcoin slumped again, but like the proverbial tree falling in a forest when no one is watching, it really didn’t make a sound as so few look to bitcoin for any signal at all at this stage. The VIX and MOVE (Treasury vol) indices continued to decline, though the MOVE index seems high relative to VIX. However, it could well be that VIX doesn’t do a particularly good job of assessing options interest in a world dominated by 0DTE options. Academy had the opportunity to guest host Bloomberg Surveillance for an hour on Monday morning. While much like the rest of the week, it might be boring to you, but it was fun for us! Academy starts at the 0:49 mark and ends at 1:37. We get to interview experts on oil, rates, and travel and also get to discuss Academy’s unique capabilities including analyzing geopolitical risk for companies and markets. This week has the potential to be a little more exciting with the Fed meeting taking place, but I wanted to focus on a few “quirky” things. However, with FOMC week coming up, we have to address the Fed before moving on to the “quirks” that I really want to write about. What Can the Fed Do? We get CPI on Tuesday which has the potential to move markets as expectations are for improvement across the board. However, I’m of the view that it will take weeks of consistent data to shift us away from this pause/skip narrative. Also, on Tuesday, Academy will be hosting drinks in Boston with General (ret.) Spider Marks. While not market moving, it should be fun and informative. The only thing that I think the Fed could do to really move markets would be to adjust their dots. They could add a hike or two to this year’s projection. However, I’m not sure that would do much for markets as one more hike is already largely priced in. The median for the end of 2024 is for 4.25%, though Fed Fund futures are significantly lower. So maybe raising those dots to closer to 5% would do something, but since markets already doubt the existing dots, I’m not sure that will do much. It is 2025 and beyond that get more interesting. The last dot plot had 3.125% for the “end of 2025” level, which markets actually think is too low. So, they could bump that up and “lock-in” expectations. The “longer-term” projection is 2.5%, which also seems low. If I see the potential for a sell-off in stocks and bonds, it will likely result from a change in tone on the “terminal rate” as opposed to anything else. Skip/pause is baked in and is likely the message that we will get (with a heavy dose of data dependency and warnings that inflation is still priority #1, which no one really believes). They are unlikely to back down on balance sheet reduction (if they did, that would be a positive). They are also unlikely to discuss accepting a higher average level of inflation than the current 2% target (they probably are going to accept this, but it is just too early to admit it). So, I’ll be keeping an eye out to see if they adjust the terminal rate. In any case, I continue to believe (hope) that at least for a little while, we have a respite from the Fed being the main/only driver of markets! The meeting is important, but it should largely be a non-event. What Are the Odds? Let’s start with the one thing that is puzzling me more than almost anything else - how did the economists botch last month’s job numbers so badly? Seriously, what are the odds of 76 estimates on the Bloomberg terminal ALL being lower than the actual published number? This has been bothering me so much because the main argument against a recession is the strength of the job market. Job Market Strong = No Recession. I understand that, I’m just perplexed about how the industry (collectively) missed it so badly! These are very smart people. They have resources. They also have many different ways to calculate their estimates. Academy doesn’t have an official estimate of our own, I just look at consensus and what some people that I respect and trust have to say on the data. So, if you have a number of animals typing away for long enough, one will randomly produce a work of Shakespeare. The odds of it happening are incredibly low, but with enough letters being typed, it will likely happen. Yet, with so many smart humans (some of which presumably use AI in their forecasts), not a single one was higher than the “official” data. Is that really likely? The first question that I have is what are they predicting? At first blush, that seems like a stupid question because the obvious answer is that “they are predicting jobs data”, but it is actually far more nuanced than that. Are they trying to predict the Establishment Survey jobs number or are they trying to predict the number of jobs created? Those are not quite the same thing. ADP, for example, changed their methodology to try to produce a job number that would be more predictive of the NFP data. Why they would take their own unique payroll data (and manipulate it) to try to estimate the official government data is beyond me, but they did it. So, ADP isn’t really trying to analyze how many jobs were created, it is trying to produce data that helps people predict NFP (at least the Establishment Survey). So, how many people in the Bloomberg consensus are trying to report the number of jobs created versus predicting what NFP will be (before the inevitably large revisions)? My working assumption is that people are trying to estimate the number of jobs (not predict NFP), but that could be a flaw in my logic. I feel incredibly sorry for those who apparently miss it on the initial report (which is how they will be remembered by traders) only to have been proven accurate once the final revisions are reported (which aren’t very market moving). “Hey, it turns out that you were right and we were wrong”, but that admission is only in the “fine print” and few will pay attention to it. The Household Survey showed a loss of 310k! Why does no one seem to care about that? The Household Survey is used to calculate unemployment rates, so clearly someone at the BLS must think that it is useful. We largely refer to the NFP data in terms of jobs (Establishment Survey) when discussing the unemployment rate (Household Survey). These key numbers do not come from the same data series! The margin of error on the data (according to the BLS) is 130,000 for the Establishment and 600,000 for the Household! 600,000 for the Household! So real job creation in the Household would not be statistically significant if it were anywhere from -900,000 to +300,000! Seems insane. Even on the Establishment Survey, job creation of “only” 210,000 would be inside of the margin of error. This means that 20 estimates would have been spot on or a bit high (or the “real” number would have been an even higher print of 469k). It strikes me as so odd that we publish 339k as such an exact number, but a +/- 130k deviation would not be statistically significant. By the way, response rates are slipping. BLS tracks response rates. In April 2013, the jobs data had a response rate of 64% (a C- even under a generous grading system). It is down to 42.7% (a level even Blutarsky might be embarrassed by). Why have survey response rates dropped so much? Is there any “selection” bias in those who respond to the survey, versus those who don’t? Is there anyone at the BLS asking what they are doing wrong since less than 50% of people respond? I would be shocked if there isn’t, yet here we are, publishing numbers down to 1,000 people. JOLTS is even worse - from 69% down to 31%. The takeaway is that if we are predicting NFP (rather than jobs), that task has become more difficult as the survey response rate is reduced and more numbers must be “fudged” at the official level to produce a report. All of that “fudging” or “smoothing” or “seasonality” (which is always tricky) must be almost impossible to track in an economy that went through COVID, COVID shutdowns, and various stages of “re-openings” etc. I’m back to where I started, what are the odds that so many smart people got it so wrong? ADP versus NFP ADP also came in higher than every single estimate, but only 31 people chose to submit estimates on ADP and at 278k versus a high estimate of 250k, at least some were “in the ballpark”. So, let’s explore how the 31 who submitted estimates for both behaved. The biggest differences were that one person had 55k more for NFP than ADP and one had a -30k differential. The average was 17k. So clearly, they are trying to pick up differences in how ADP calculates things versus NFP. If you were trying to estimate jobs created in May, wouldn’t you have the same submission for both? Apparently not. I’m not really sure why, unless they really are trying to understand the nuances of the two reports. The other thing that I found surprising (though maybe this is indicative of how little people care about responding even to the Bloomberg surveys for estimates) was that 28 submissions for ADP and NFP were on the same date, and for the 3 that were different, ADP was actually the more recent of the submissions. Maybe it was because this month the data came out on Thursday (and then again on Friday) so no one had time to change their official estimates of NFP. However, I would have expected to see at least one person try to increase their estimate after the surprising beat by ADP. On the NFP estimates, 4 firms submitted on June 2nd (presumably before the release) and they had an average estimate of 221k with a high of 241k (which was the 2nd highest estimate). Presumably they learned something from ADP, as they came in closer to the number (and some are within the margin of error). I am not sure what to make of the difference in estimates between ADP and NFP. However, I was surprised by how few seemed to incorporate ADP results into revised forecasts (narrow window of time might explain that). In addition, I was surprised by indications that people tried to predict ADP separate from NFP. Is this a possible indication that they are trying to predict the specific data releases rather than predicting the number of jobs created? Sherlock Holmes on Jobs The fictional detective is credited with saying the following: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” What if the “impossible” is that many smart people, working independently with ample resources (including some harnessing AI), got it so wrong? We know that response rates are low. We know that “smoothing” data is difficult after the massive COVID disruptions. We know that the acknowledged margin of error is large. Then why is it so difficult to believe that the official data (which doesn’t even agree with itself) is wrong? I am going to bet on the economists who can be fluid, rather than the rigid nature of official data. I’m not all doom and gloom, but the assertion that jobs are extremely strong and therefore recession risk is low might be built on a shaky foundation (at least a foundation that Sherlock would question). The Rule of 3 I might as well go “all-in” on quirky today. In a world where we hear consensus this/consensus that, contrarian this/contrarian that, etc., I keep thinking about the Rule of 3. The Rule of 3 is loosely related to the “by the time my mother knows” rule. By the time my mother is asking me about something in the financial world, the trade is played out. The Rule of 3 is quirky, but perhaps useful. Something happens that very few people pay attention to. Then people start talking about this “thing” and it happens. The “thing” could be as simple as “stocks rise from 3:50 to 4:00” every day. Only some people are talking about it and few are betting on it Then more and more people start talking about something that “always” happens. This time there is lots of “chatter” about “stocks go up from 3:50 to 4:00” and more people bet on it. Then “everyone” is talking about how stocks have to go up from 3:50 to 4:00. All sorts of reasons are provided, and people bet on this. Then, guess what, it doesn’t happen. Loosely the “Rule of 3” says that by the 3rd time something is supposed to happen (and “everyone” agrees that it will happen”), it doesn’t happen. As quirky as it sounds, when trying to be contrarian, I find that thinking about this helps. What is “everyone” saying happens “after the FOMC” for example? Do we always sell-off on the announcement and rally hard after Powell is done with the press conference? I don’t know, but I think that this is an interesting way to think about positioning around things like this. Though, does the “Rule of 3” apply to the “Rule of 3”? This to me is similar to asking, “if the consensus is always wrong” and that is consensus, isn’t it wrong too? If “the consensus is always wrong” is completely accurate, then every contrarian would be a zillionaire (and finding consensus should be easier than ever using AI). It would also violate its own rule of “something that is consensus cannot always be right”, so betting against the consensus will sometimes be wrong. Or, in the “Rule of 3”, every third application of the “Rule of 3” will be wrong (so the 3rd time will work as well as the previous 2 times). But, every 3rd time that this is applied, it too should be wrong I guess that is a long and somewhat colorful way of saying that figuring out what is consensus is difficult and figuring out how markets will respond to consensus is trickier than it seems. This might be really relevant as we head into a week with more relevant data than last week, a long weekend coming up, and the FOMC. I do currently believe that “good news is good and bad news is bad” for markets, but that might be too consensus. However, that might not matter (and yes, my head hurts). As quirky as this might seem, I think that this is a useful exercise. Tyler Durden Sun, 06/11/2023 - 12:30.....»»

The founder of Bang Bang Tattoo, Keith McCurdy, says he's running his shops the "right way." But some ex-employees say working there was a nightmare. Zach Meyer for InsiderKeith McCurdy has inked Justin Bieber on a private jet, Cara Delevingne at the Gansevoort hotel, and Katy Perry while traveling with her on tour. He gave Rihanna the tiny handgun tattoo that some speculated was a message to Chris Brown, her ex whom she'd accused of assault. Vogue has heralded the 37-year-old as "the best in the biz," and The New York Times has described him as having "transformed the body-art industry."McCurdy's signature style — hyperrealistic black-and-gray micro tattoos that require expert precision — has been widely replicated. Clients wait up to two months for an appointment at one of his two New York City shops, where tattoos can cost into the thousands of dollars. At Bang Bang Tattoo, "You're not paying for the tattoo," a former artist's assistant said. "You're paying for the brand."In an industry known for bold ink, edgy imagery, and an anarchist streak, McCurdy has branded himself as someone who does things differently — what he calls the "right way." He offers his staff mental-health support. He's a self-professed "protector of women" who describes his business as a feminist utopia. His shops are bare, modern, and luxurious. In McCurdy's view, he's setting the bar for the industry. "I challenge people out there to do a better job than me," he said. "I'm waiting for who's competing with us. I don't see it."Yet some former Bang Bang employees said that McCurdy's meticulously curated image as a thoughtful progressive in a rough-and-tumble industry wasn't much more than good PR. At Bang Bang, "they just woke-wash everything," one former employee said.McCurdy's shops were rife with old-school issues, ex-employees said — and some new ones, too. Multiple people said it wasn't unusual to hear higher-ups tell inappropriate jokes or share stories about sexual encounters. Several staffers said McCurdy — better known to them as Bang — could be obsessively controlling, monitoring workers through 15 cameras between his two shops, and pressuring them to speak with his "business manager," who also happened to be his former therapist, about their personal problems.Tattoo artists said McCurdy turned cruel and vindictive when they left Bang Bang. One artist who left to start his own shop said McCurdy and a friend shoved him in the street while screaming profanities. In another case, McCurdy went so far as to sue an artist and threaten her immigration status over claims she'd stolen his clients, court documents show. (Many people who spoke with Insider asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from McCurdy.)Rihanna helped launch Keith McCurdy's career, introducing him to her celebrity friends. "He met Rihanna at the street shop, and that was just luck," said East Side Ink's owner, Josh Lord. "And then he rode that as far as he could."Epsilon/Getty ImagesIn a niche industry like tattooing, it's impressive that McCurdy was able to go mainstream. He's name-checked everywhere from GQ to US Weekly. After Rihanna's gun tattoo took off, "I could kind of control what the press would write," he said.But McCurdy's media savvy has camouflaged a different side to the artist and the business he runs, ex-staffers say. If you cross him, "he'll do anything to come for you," the former Bang Bang artist Joice Wang said, adding, "He's actually a monster."For a guy with guns tattooed on each side of his neck (hence the name), McCurdy has a remarkably warm presence. He speaks like a preacher delivering a sermon, ending every story with a moral. He has a red beard and a sturdy frame and likes to wear backward baseball hats and thick-rimmed glasses. He is, by his own admission, "not hip.""I like focusing on me and the tasks I have," he told me at his Grand Street shop in February. "I like answering to the person in the mirror. I like competing with my expectations. It makes me happy."McCurdy worked his way up from a tattoo shop outside a trailer park in tiny-town Delaware to a "super grimy" spot near Washington Square Park when he was 19 to New York City institutions like Last Rites Tattoo Theatre and East Side Ink. Along the way he met Rihanna, who wandered into the shop where he was working in 2007 to get a nipple pierced. McCurdy said the singer asked the piercer, Joe Snake, who the best person for a tattoo was, and Snake walked her over to him. McCurdy gave her a line of Sanskrit on her hip, and the two hit it off.His celebrity roster only grew from there: Swizz Beatz's ex-wife's hairstylist introduced him to Beatz; Beatz introduced him to the soccer star Thierry Henry; Henry introduced him to a whole list of New York Knicks players. And Rihanna hooked him up with her famous friends, including Perry and Delevingne. "He was very intelligent," East Side Ink's owner, Josh Lord, said. "He met Rihanna at the street shop, and that was just luck. And then he rode that as far as he could."McCurdy owns Bang Bang Tattoo and prides himself on doing things "the right way." But former employees say he could be obsessively controlling and vindictive.Susan Watts/NY Daily News via Getty ImagesMeanwhile, McCurdy kept refining his style, cutting his ink with water to give his tattoos a softer, more delicate look. His work appealed to people intimidated by the bold American-traditional designs at some shops. He posted his tattoos on Myspace, Facebook, and eventually Instagram — a novel thing for tattoo artists, who had typically relied on word of mouth. After Delevingne tagged him in a 2013 photo of the lion tattoo he'd done on her index finger, his Instagram following grew to about 200,000."I didn't want to sit in a tattoo shop and goof around and wait for walk-ins," McCurdy said. "I wanted to hustle. I wanted to be proactive." He landed a book deal with HarperCollins for his autobiography, which was published in 2015.The year before his book came out, McCurdy opened Bang Bang on Broome Street. He hired a creative director to design a minimalist space: blank white walls, poured-concrete floors, and flat-screen TVs. McCurdy made it a point not to hang art (tattoo shops are typically covered in flash sheets, or examples of artists' work)."I wanted it to be about the art we're making, not the art that's been made," he said. "The space is a reflection of our brand."Four years later, McCurdy opened another, even more grandiose shop on Grand Street, with a white marble lobby, a 7-foot-long aquarium, and free Fiji water bottles for every client. The renovation, McCurdy estimated, cost close to $1.8 million.Bang Bang's prices matched McCurdy's expensive taste. Even in the early days, some of its artists' rates were double, if not triple, those of most shops in the city, where a custom 4-by-4 inch black-and-gray tattoo ran about $300. Prices went up as McCurdy's A-list clients multiplied: Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, LeBron James. Today, a tattoo by McCurdy starts at about $10,000 for a daylong session and can cost $100,000 for a full sleeve.Several tattoo artists said Bang Bang used its celebrity clientele to price-gouge average customers, some of whom didn't know better than to spend hundreds on a simple design. Paul Booth, who owns Last Rites, said that when McCurdy worked for him, he "was more concerned about making a buck than treating his clients right," and that he ultimately fired McCurdy. (McCurdy said he left on good terms and Booth did not fire him.) Lord, the East Side Ink owner, called McCurdy "the Donald Trump of tattoos," saying he's "only interested in his own tacky brand and making money, no matter who else it hurts."McCurdy hired a creative director to design the minimalist aesthetic of his Bang Bang Tattoo shops. "The space is a reflection of our brand," he said.Anna MorgowiczMcCurdy ran his business like a corporation, complete with performance reviews, a mandatory sexual-harassment course, and blood-borne-pathogen training, which included teaching artists how to properly clean their equipment and change out needles. In its 2018 article, the Times wrote that McCurdy "made hiring women a priority and was clear with his staff that tattoo-world misogyny would not be tolerated beneath his roof.""My daughter is 9," he told the outlet. "She has a feminist button on her backpack and she doesn't really know what it means, but I want her to have the sense that she can do anything she wants with her life."Wang, who was hired full time in 2016 and became one of Bang Bang's most in-demand artists, said McCurdy asked her to sign an artist's agreement, which included a noncompete clause and an NDA — both anomalies in the tattoo world. The most recent version of the agreement, which is dated 2023 and which McCurdy shared with Insider, includes a clause stating that artists cannot speak negatively about the company, or McCurdy, even anonymously.Sara Fabel, who worked at Bang Bang as a guest artist for about a week around 2018, said being asked to sign an NDA would be a "huge red flag" because artists should be able to talk about their negative experiences. That McCurdy "has dozens of artists willing to sign shows the power he has in the industry," she said.Being tapped to work at Bang Bang can make an artist's career, turning them into a minor celebrity and bringing in floods of clients. McCurdy picks his staff meticulously, often trawling Instagram for flawless line work or promising beginners.Wang was an inexperienced 22-year-old tattooer in 2015, when McCurdy first reached out to talk about her work. She was thrilled. At the time, Bang Bang was the "pinnacle" of tattooing, Wang said: "It was a group of eight artists. They ruled the industry."Bang Bang staffers spent much of their time together. McCurdy organized Christmas parties, trips to Disney World, and things like paintballing excursions. He even built a designated room in the shop for staffers and clients to smoke weed. "We all became kind of like family," said Johnny Perez, who worked as an artist's assistant from 2014 to 2016. "Everybody really got along. You felt kind of special."But as they settled in, some former employees said, they started to chafe at the way McCurdy ran things. For instance, if a new hire, like Wang, has fewer than 100,000 Instagram followers, they're required to let Bang Bang make them a separate work account — that McCurdy and managers then run. "We create the page, we take their photography, we post for them," McCurdy said, explaining that they "haven't earned" access to Bang Bang's 2.4 million followers.Wang said not being able to run her own work account made her feel muzzled and resulted in fewer dark-skinned clients being showcased on her page, because Bang Bang's managers thought colored ink didn't look as good on deep skin tones. McCurdy said that while he wanted to showcase diversity, "the fact of the matter is that more people with lighter skin get tattooed than people with very dark skin."McCurdy didn't just oversee employees' online presence — he also kept close tabs on them at his shops. Eleven cameras monitor the Grand Street shop, McCurdy said, and four are installed at Broome Street. McCurdy accesses the footage through an app on his phone. "Every zone is filmed," he said, later adding that the cameras were meant to ensure people were staying on task and to protect his business: "No one's going to be able to say we mistreated them."One former artist's assistant who worked the front desk from 2015 to 2016 said there was a camera pointed directly at her computer screen. "If I wasn't working hard enough, or it looked like I wasn't answering email, or if I looked at my phone for a second, he would yell at me through the camera and say, 'Get back to work,'" she said of McCurdy, adding that this happened at least five times.Perez had similar experiences when he was opening the shop. All of a sudden, he would hear McCurdy's voice coming from a camera near the front desk. "It wasn't in a serious way," Perez said, but "it was like, 'Oh, I'm watching you. Just know that I'm watching.'"A third former assistant, who worked at Bang Bang for about six months in 2018, said that "there were cameras on us at all times" and that she had told managers she felt as if she were living in the dystopian novel "1984." At one point she was pulled into a meeting with McCurdy in which he showed her a video clip of her giggling with another employee. She said McCurdy reprimanded her for not staying on task and fired her. "It was just a really bizarre work environment," she said, adding that McCurdy acted as if she had "done something atrocious."After the model Cara Delevingne tagged McCurdy in a photo of a lion he tattooed on her finger, his Instagram following exploded. He credits social media with making him a household name.Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty ImagesMcCurdy was an intense boss, but he looked out for his employees, people said. Gladys Ko, a former Bang Bang artist who goes by the moniker Ghinko, said McCurdy was "very fatherly" and "protective" after she came to work one day with a black eye, immediately taking her aside to talk about it.After that, Ko said, McCurdy would sometimes "pull me into a meeting to check up on me," or "hang out with me for the entire day just to make sure I was OK." She credits McCurdy with being "her rock" during a hard time.McCurdy has spoken openly about his own emotional struggles. He went through an especially difficult time in 2013, when he opened the first Bang Bang shop on the Lower East Side with his now-estranged father, Vincent Lacava. (McCurdy was raised mostly by his mother, Susan McCurdy, and grandparents in Claymont, Delaware; his parents had him as teenagers and separated when he was young.) Lacava, a video game designer, invested $50,000 in the shop, but McCurdy says he was an "abusive" boss who cursed at employees and drank on the job. McCurdy said he offered to buy Lacava out. "His response was: 'Fuck you. I own your name. I'll run it without you,'" McCurdy recalled. The two took their fight to the trademark office, and McCurdy won. His dad shuttered the shop. (Lacava said he and McCurdy "clashed" over the business and eventually parted ways but had "very different views on what happened at the shop.")Despite the win, McCurdy spiraled. He was tattooing out of his Brooklyn apartment, and his marriage was falling apart. That's when his wife introduced him to Karen Bridbord, a psychologist and former in-house coach for JPMorgan Chase. She helped the couple with their marriage and began working with McCurdy separately as his executive coach. "He's a thought leader," Bridbord said. "That's one of the things that drew me to him."McCurdy ended up hiring Bridbord as Bang Bang's de facto head of HR; he refers to her as his "business manager." She's still his executive coach but is no longer his therapist. Bridbord said she's employed as a consultant and wasn't present at the shops every day.Bridbord said that staffers exhibiting a change in behavior, like showing up late or "looking disheveled," would be flagged and sent her way. After talking to them, she would determine the best course of action, whether that be referring them to an outside therapist or recommending they attend rehab.Bridbord said these one-on-one conversations were confidential. However, three people said a camera monitored the back room where they took place. "Bang has access to these cameras, and something that's supposed to be between me and you can easily be seen by him," Perez said. "So there was no real sense of security."McCurdy confirmed that he could access footage of his employees' conversations with Bridbord. He said he'd sometimes "demand" that people speak with Bridbord, adding that her "recommendation has to be followed through if you want to keep your job."Some staffers felt as though McCurdy foisted Bridbord on them. Georgia Grey, a Bang Bang tattoo artist who's worked there for eight years, said she thought it was smart for McCurdy to have Bridbord available, especially for immigrants adjusting to a new place. But when he and managers "sicced" Bridbord on Grey after learning Grey was pregnant, she said, she felt overwhelmed and upset because she hadn't been ready to share the news.During Wang's annual performance review in 2017, she told McCurdy she was struggling with her dad's imprisonment and having to support her family financially. He insisted she talk to Bridbord six separate times. "I don't know if you realize this, but we aren't just your bosses. We're your family," McCurdy told Wang, according to a transcript of the review he read aloud. "I can see you're sad. I want to help you. So let me, please, and let Karen."Wang pushed back, according to the transcript, telling McCurdy that Bridbord was "a stranger.""No she's not, Joice," McCurdy replied. "She's not trying to figure out what drug to put you on. She's trying to figure out how to help."Several staffers said they were uncomfortable speaking with Bridbord because she'd been McCurdy's therapist and still worked closely with him as his executive coach.When staffers did hear lewd jokes or comments about sex at the shops, there was no formal way for them to address it. Four female ex-employees, who worked at Bang Bang from 2015 to 2017, said that while McCurdy was known for his sarcastic sense of humor, he sometimes went overboard.One of these women, a former artist's assistant, said that on several occasions McCurdy taped a printout of a penis to her back without her knowledge, photos of which were obtained by Insider. He'd "be like, 'Good job,' and pat me on the back, and then I would walk around for however long with that on my back," she said, adding that this happened when the shop was full of clients. Another time, she said, McCurdy taped a penis to her headset "so it looked like a dick was pointing into my mouth." The pranks made the assistant feel belittled and humiliated. (McCurdy said that he had no memory of the first incident and that the second would never happen.)Another artist's assistant, who was 19 when she was hired, said McCurdy once commented that her breasts were "distracting" and said she needed to "put a bra on" under her sweater dress. The remark made her feel distraught and "disgusting," she said. "Looking back, I'm like, 'That is so incredibly wrong.'" Another employee said the assistant told them about the incident right after it happened. ("There is no history or evidence to support this accusation," McCurdy said.)McCurdy spoke openly about his sexual encounters, the women recalled. One said he told her about how a woman's breasts were so big that they were "basically bouncing on top of him" during sex. McCurdy said it was "possible" he'd had a conversation about sex in Bang Bang's early days but had no memory of doing so.This kind of behavior extended to other Bang Bang employees. Three women said that Edward Borew, a Bang Bang manager who's McCurdy's cousin, talked publicly about sleeping with sex workers and made sexual comments at work. (Borew said the statement was "false" and all three women were "disgruntled ex-employees.")JonBoy, a former Bang Bang Tattoo artist, was accused of flashing two female employees at the shop.Bryan Steffy/Getty ImagesTwo of the female employees said a Bang Bang tattoo artist known as JonBoy flashed his penis at them while they were working. (McCurdy fired JonBoy in 2016 for doing something he called "egregious and unacceptable" but rehired him about a year later after JonBoy started seeing a therapist, as recommended by Bridbord. JonBoy left the shop permanently in 2018.)One former assistant said that a manager, Matthew Ganser, made her clean up a condom he said he'd used and left on the couch. She said the incident earned Ganser the nickname Magnum Mac. Wang recalled the incident and said Ganser would frequently talk about hooking up with women at the shop. (Both McCurdy and Ganser said the nickname came from a meme, and McCurdy said he has no memory of a condom-cleaning incident, which Ganser called a "fabricated lie." Ganser added that he never spoke about hooking up with women at the shop.)Three of the women said they didn't speak up about the behavior at the time because they were young and because crude humor was a given in the industry — to the point that putting up with it became a rite of passage. "I don't think he fully understands what it means to respect women," Wang said of McCurdy. "I believe he believes he's an advocate for women. But only because he's so misinformed."Inevitably, artists leave the Bang Bang family. But if they don't do it on McCurdy's terms, there can be consequences. "I'm a carer of people," McCurdy said. "I just am authentically. I give a shit until I don't — until someone crosses the line."Two former employees said McCurdy was known to use a burner Instagram account to troll tattooers, which he denies. Some former employees said they were afraid to speak out against McCurdy, saying it wasn't worth risking their finances or mental health.I believe he believes he's an advocate for women. But only because he's so misinformed. Joice WangIn 2017, Wang asked McCurdy for a raise. He turned her down, she said, so she quit. Soon after, she noticed that every photo on her work Instagram account, which had more than 110,000 followers, had been wiped without her knowledge. Bang Bang then gave the account, with Wang's followers intact, to a different artist. (McCurdy confirmed this practice.)For Wang, losing her followers and her entire body of work was like losing her livelihood. "I felt like the floor had fallen beneath me," she said. "There was no way for these people to find me again."Wang said she took to her personal Instagram — which had some 2,000 followers — to vent her frustrations and ask people to report the work account. McCurdy then sent her a text threatening legal action. "I will remind you that we have a legally binding NDA signed by you that forbids you from speaking negatively about my company," reads the text, which Insider viewed.Wang thought it was fair to honor the appointments clients had booked with her at Bang Bang, offering to tattoo them elsewhere. But McCurdy didn't see it that way. He called a shop in Sweden where Wang was planning to work as a guest artist and told them she was a thief and to cancel her booking. (The Swedish shop owner ultimately allowed Wang to tattoo there.)Ganser, the Bang Bang manager, also sent Wang a text comparing her behavior to her father's, who was in prison. "Just like your dad," he wrote. "Look where he's at."Another artist left Bang Bang in 2016 to open his own shop and offered his coworkers a chance to join him. When McCurdy discovered this, he called the artist and told him to watch his back."I threatened to come and smack him in front of all his employees," McCurdy confirmed to Insider.A few months later, the artist was walking to his new shop, which was near Bang Bang, when someone shoved him from behind. When he turned around, the artist said, he saw McCurdy "screaming at me being like, 'Hey, fuck you, you little piece of shit!'" McCurdy confirmed the run-in but said he "never put my hands on him."In 2019, one of Bang Bang's most sought-after artists, the Turkish tattooer Eva Karabudak, left to start her own shop in Brooklyn. A few days later, McCurdy sued Karabudak, calling her "disloyal" and "dishonest" and accusing her of "surreptitiously" stealing his clients, the suit says. He asked for a minimum of almost $154,000 in damages.McCurdy had hired Karabudak in 2017 and paid nearly $30,000 for her visa and health-insurance costs, according to the complaint. In return, McCurdy alleged, Karabudak signed an agreement to work for him for at least three years. In an affidavit dated May 2019, Karabudak said she'd made no such promise and McCurdy had retaliated against her for not signing an artist's agreement that included a noncompete clause. He "got extremely angry, and in an unprofessional manner, raised his voice, used profanity, threatened to terminate my employment and cancel my Visa," the suit says. "Although I felt intimidated and pressured by him, I did not sign." The case was dismissed in February 2020.Even tattoo artists who've never worked with McCurdy have landed in his crosshairs. In March 2019, a prominent New York City tattooer commented on a meme making fun of Bang Bang's extravagant pricing. McCurdy, through Bang Bang's official account, fired back in the comments, calling her a "bitch" and saying she was a bad tattooer with "shit lines." He also DM'd her, writing, "Holler at me when you learn how to tattoo bitch.""I already knew he was very fragile and had a pretty disturbed ego, but that whole situation proved it," the New York City tattooer said. "I felt like he exposed himself in the most wonderful way."Nearly a decade after opening the first Bang Bang shop, McCurdy still sees himself as a trailblazer. Most recently, he launched a formula called Magic Ink that can turn tattoos "on" and "off." He debuted the ink last September in GQ, where he gushed about the marvels of "tech tattoos." The first vial sold as an NFT for roughly $164,000, according to the magazine. McCurdy spent 26 hours tattooing a religious mural on Justin Bieber's chest in 2017. "I didn't want to sit in a tattoo shop and goof around and wait for walk-ins," he said. "I wanted to hustle."Photo by Gotham/GC ImagesMcCurdy is vigilant about maintaining his reputation, as well as that of his business. In a March 20 Instagram post, he addressed complaints that his famous micro tattoos fade and blur too quickly, packing the caption with phrases like "macrophages" and "particle density" and ending it with a cheeky, "thanks for playing." When I met him in February, he came armed with hundreds of pages of documents — "evidence," he called it — all highlighted and color-coded. I gestured at the pile, wondering aloud what made him so quick to be defensive."I don't know, man," he replied. "Heavy is the head that wears the crown, I guess."The truth is, guys like McCurdy are the norm in tattooing. Because mainstream US tattoo culture largely stems from male-dominated fringe groups like bikers, sailors, and gang members, the industry has been slow to evolve, clinging to the crudeness and bravado that defined it in the first place. "A lot of artists feel concerned about tattooing losing a sense of edginess," a well-known New York City artist said. "I see that being responsible for excusing a lot of bad behavior because it gets written off as being authentic or being tough or being true to some imagined original spirit of tattooing."The difference is that McCurdy says all the right things — at least in public. From his perspective, he's a feminist who cares deeply about his employees' mental health. In a January email to Insider, he told me he respected and safeguarded women. He's doing new things — creating structures, setting rules — that are supposed to protect people.After spending close to eight hours with McCurdy myself, it's clear he believes in his mission. "The background of me being screwed by family, which is something no one ever expects to go through, is why everything here is done the right way," he told me. But even as I spoke with him, it felt as if he was talking to an audience. I could hear him crafting the narrative he wanted to see on the page — a narrative that he's been telling himself, and the world, for at least a decade.McCurdy isn't wrong to believe that tattooing as a whole should evolve. Yet in trying to push things in the right direction, he may have created as many problems as he's solved. That, and he's not exactly open to feedback, despite modeling his business after his own funhouse mirror version of corporate America."I know God picked me to do this job, so I do it," he told me. "I know who we are, I know where we're going. I know what we're doing. And there's nothing anybody can say in the world that's going to stop our progress."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»