Look up the term channel stuffing. That’s the part that can be accused of fraud under certain conditions and is related but separate from the circular financing situation. There was a better article around here a few days ago that outlined it a bit more than this one.
The former CEO basically admitted to channel stuffing I misremembered but whether this scenario meets the bar for fraud is up to the courts. (More supporting details in my reply below)
Important to note here, he didn’t exit prediction markets. Still invested in Polymarket.
But I agree it will be interesting to see. I am particularly curious about whether bets and payouts from Kalshi will carry a meaningful difference from Polymarket after this, potentially pointing to something peculiar happening behind the scenes.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. Sure, they are representatives of the people, but they were elected because of a platform they communicated. Their mandate (not legally, but aspirationally) is to adhere to that platform and work towards delivering on it for the people that elected them. “Campaign promises”.
Where their platform deviates from what their constituents want is where there needs to be more pressure. Where representatives fail to act on their platform, there needs to be more pressure.
Sometimes it isn’t for a lack of desire, but of knowledge or ability. There may not be enough awareness of their constituents’ will on the matter, or support from others in legislature to maintain the votes (because of lack of pressure from their constituents).
All these areas are where the work continues to remain for the people. Voting was only step one. More action must follow. Engaging reps by phone, email, letter, meeting, protest, etc. must follow. Politically sleepwalking through the next few years because someone voted and thinks the work is over is not going to cut it to drive real change.
This is what impeachment is for. In fact, impeachment for withholding funds was already successful but the votes weren’t there in the Senate for removal the first time round.
The problem is with reps having blind loyalty to a party and not to their oath of upholding the Constitution or providing a check on executive overreach.
How about now?
And if those people with hope maintain that energy and convert it into action beyond simply voting, maybe they will. At least the enthusiasm has the potential to be productive.
Which is why preferential access to presidential communications is straight up unconstitutional and a violation of the first amendment (equal access to public announcements).
Of course trading firms are going to look for any edge they can. It’ll still be an advantage until (or if) it gets struck down by the courts.
Congress needs to identify a legitimate purpose underlying its investigative acts? Per usual, just throwing nonsense out hoping the soundbytes do the work.
The oversight committee has broad powers to investigate instances of government operations for waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement for programs under their jurisdiction. In fact, they are obligated to do so.
Can’t be helped that guilty people tend to have fear instilled when being investigated. Maybe they should try doing fewer things that make them look like they need to be.
Anyone can go and look at the S-1 filing to see under the hood or check out what financial analysts say about it. Total collapse is not likely (right now) for various reasons within it.
The article has the ultimate answer to your question: if they don’t build revenue to match the massive investments they’ve committed through 2045, they go bankrupt.
Long term bubble or not, everyone involved in (selling during) this IPO is going to have made off like a bandit well before that. This includes earlier investors like Amazon, if the stock price goes above $59 per share and their convertible notes can be exchanged for equity.
The full S-1 is over 300 pages. Here’s a summary example that appears to be free if you’re interested in some details: https://sec-api.io/insights/anthropic-ant-s-1-ipo-sec-filing-analysis (fair warning: this one reads like AI was involved)
Not even calls to fix it, because they wouldn’t want to even imply their opponents could. Instead it will once again be a way to frame opposition to spending on programs that are positioned to improve lives, or to distract, with it being a “more important” topic than whatever initiative is being floated.
It’s mostly because of stock awards as part of compensation packages.
If you get $50,000 in equity each year and the shares are worth $20 when you were awarded them, then they balloon to $160, you just earned $400,000 for each year you held on to them. These numbers are all made up and just for reference, but this is what some of these hardware company employees experienced.
I hope you know I’m agreeing with you. I want to see change too and it’s why I advocate for people to reach out to their representatives right now. We are already hearing reporting of hundreds if not thousands of calls per day asking reps to not back current Dem leaders.
Change can’t happen if we refuse to acknowledge the the systems in play and how different parts of the government function, which is where I started with all this.
More than anything I want engaged people to continue to be engaged but meaningfully and with purpose. Simply being upset over lack of progress or the speed of it happening aren’t enough, despite our desire for that to be true.
There are millions of dollars and hundreds of legal experts involved in plans to dismantle the parts of government they don’t agree with and they talk about it loudly. They celebrate their wins, regardless of how small or even true they are, loudly, and the uninformed notice. By refusing to acknowledge the small wins or even the path to this being realistic, you build no message of support to chase bigger wins. It actually does the opposite - you crush interest in change and in action, both because it builds a perception that there is no political win large enough to satisfy and because others will also hear this lack of celebration as a lack of outcome.
This is why I’ve spent all this time replying. We agree on it not being enough and that something must be done. We agree that this group of leaders hasn’t earned trust. Where we disagree is in how it is being framed. Change of this magnitude needs to snowball. Win people over with quick wins within their political control and continue to press forward for more, with renewed support from the electorate.
Change of this magnitude will require sustained support over time to be successful and it doesn’t happen if we won’t even acknowledge when things did go right, however small it may be to start.
Not having trust is warranted, I’ve said elsewhere that they’ve not done anything to earn it.
However you seem to be ignoring that investigations did happen during both of those Presidencies and there were criminal charges brought as a result. There is proof of people involved being held accountable that you could go and read about if you cared to. Corruption scandals involving Halliburton and Blackwater during the Bush era also did result in prosecution, as did various investigations during Biden’s term. Both Epstein and Maxwell were arrested, with the latter being tried and convicted.
I’ll concede that I can’t be certain that an investigation will actually take place and shouldn’t have said that, however history has shown that these investigations do routinely happen by this committee.
I’ll also concede that minor politicians, staffers, and private sector participants were primarily the ones that had charges brought against them, not Presidents. But you’re exaggerating when you say there is never accountability and that AGs during Democratic Presidencies don’t prosecute criminal charges around corruption.
I know you were. Doesn’t change what I said.
You seemed to agree with me that prosecution in this environment isn’t realistic and that you wanted investigations for when it can be. I shared a website highlighting that there is a commitment by the incoming head of the oversight committee to perform those investigations. It’s going to happen.
I don’t see why you’re concerned with a politician politicking and trying to give soundbytes saying that he wants to focus on something with broader appeal across both parties to the media. This guy wants to be speaker and needs both parties to support him right now. Has no bearing on what the oversight committee will do.
The incoming head of the oversight committee told them to start finding lawyers and made a statement about how there will be investigations. That doesn’t seem like steering away from accountability at all.
You seem to be mixing two topics. One appears to be a complaint about purchasing power between tourists and locals, and the other about US domestic purchasing power on minimum wage.
You’ve got lots of great answers by others on the latter and how it is unsustainable as a living wage. Why Americans (and likely other Western tourists in general) consider certain countries “cheaper” is because of exchange rates. That would be a whole post on it’s own.
A single US Dollar (USD) can be used to buy about 93 Indian Rupees (INR), as an example. The average monthly wage is something like 25,000 INR, so even minimum US federal wage would be 5x more monthly buying power (but as explained by others, minimum wage earners are not the ones traveling). “Cheap” is used to compare against a similar purchase in their home country and what it would have cost there. It is not an insult but a way to describe the difference in cost relative to income.
This is a really great question! You’ve already got the underlying reason down too - all the various executive departments were created to distribute the enormous administrative burden of figuring out how to enforce laws that have been passed.
Interestingly, Congress is actually in charge of creating the various departments. The President is not authorized to abolish or create new ones, or to expand their jurisdiction or invent new powers, however they are responsible for proposing leaders to each and soliciting their guidance for topics within their domain. How this currently gets enforced is part of the issue however.
Independent agencies also exist that do not explicitly fall under the authority of the President. While the President can remove heads of departments for any reason, there is a much higher bar for removal of independent agency board members.
As the office of the attorney general is one of the government’s oldest, established during the first Congress, this may be a matter of combatting tradition more than anything else! This predates independent agencies by something like 100 years.
I should also edit in a clarification that the DOJ not being an independent agency is what allows it to be more partisan than something like the FTC. Also that an independent agency does not in and of itself entirely mitigate partisan politics from its decision making.
Whether it is referred to the DOJ or not is not my point. What I describe is how this process works. Congress having a simple majority of one party with an adversarial president is unlikely to result in prosecution or impeachment/removal by the Senate because of the systems in play.
For the president, what you say is true. But there are others who are not the president and have participated in illegal activities. This is also being blocked currently by the DOJ or by pardons.
Democrats alone do not have the ability for removal via impeachment. They’d need Republicans to cross the aisle on it and recent history has shown that this is unlikely.
Voters want accountability but there are more obstacles to overcome within our existing legal framework before that is realistically possible. This is why there may be a focus on other more easily altered areas in the short term.
As much as I agree that criminals and corrupt politicians have no business being in government, prosecution is unlikely to be successful in the next 2 years. Congress only has the authority to investigate then makes a referral to the DOJ, but the president controls the DOJ.
The recourse after a referral like that falls flat would be to impeach and remove (until someone is in place that will honor an independent DOJ) but they’d need the opposing party to cooperate and reach the 2/3 threshold needed for removal. Prosecution may need to wait for the next president to unblock the DOJ and empower them to do their job.
Some of the ideas being floated might be more attainable in the short term, especially in the cases of regaining control over responsibilities enumerated in the Constitution as belonging to Congress, such as passing budgets and declarations of war.
To be clear, I’m not talking about investing in your customers, which was the circular financing connection.
You asked why people were talking about fraud all of a sudden and I am suggesting it’s due to channel stuffing accusations. I don’t know that these agreements necessarily meet the bar for fraud, but Ed Zitron threw it out there so people talk.
Also this one which points to Ed Zitron’s post here (as the analyst referenced)
You’ll see channel stuffing referenced in both.