Free Republic

Will blistering populist Steve Bannon replace fiery conservative Sen. Jim DeMint as the next president of the Heritage Foundation? Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham won't say. Asked by Chris Wallace whether Heritage would be Bannon's "safety net as he's forced out of the White House," Needham demurred on "Fox News Sunday." "I can tell you," Needham replied, "there's a lot of speculation in the room and in the media that never misses a chance to divide and attack conservatives." With that non-answer, speculation over the fate of Heritage Foundation will no doubt reach a new fever pitch. News of DeMint's...

@LeadingReport BREAKING: Nebraska senator has introduced a bill that could make Nebraska the first in the country to forbid out-of-state hedge funds and other corporate entities from buying up single-family properties.

The founder of FTX used executives as cut-outs for donations, prosecutors allege... That Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX that recently filed for bankruptcy, was aggressively using campaign donations as part of a campaign to woo Washington toward his vision of cryptocurrency regulation was no secret — nor was it a secret that other FTX executives quickly became some of the country’s biggest political donors to both Republicans and Democrats, especially those who work on financial regulation. But a new federal criminal indictment alleges that things may have been even simpler than they...

I don't think Col Macgregor takes a blow torch to Graham but he does call him out for being part of the problem...

Until now the Pellicano wiretapping case has seemed the kind of down-and-dirty imbroglio that could only happen in Hollywood, where a private eye's underworld patois could impress movie people familiar with noir clichés, allured by real physical danger and accustomed to getting whatever they want. But confidential F.B.I. records show that the scandal's tentacles have extended beyond show-business figures to reach people prominent in the rarified worlds of fine art and classical music. Among the government's most important witnesses, the F.B.I. records suggest, are Adam D. Sender, a prominent collector of contemporary art and a wealthy hedge-fund manager..........hired Anthony Pellicano,...

How corrupt is the United States? The day after the Justice Department launched an investigation into Wall Street short sellers the largest document storage facility, TD Ameritrade Bartlett Warehouse, went up in flames.

According to the politician, Hunter Biden was paid by laundered money for his services for Ukraine's Burisma Holdings energy company IEV, November 20. /TASS/. The Ukrainian Office of the Prosecutor General has drawn up an indictment against the owner of the Burisma Holdings energy company, ex-Ecology Minister Nikolai Zlochevsky, that contains information that the son of former US Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter, as a Burisma board member along with his partners received $16.5 million for their services, Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada MP from the ruling Servant of the People party Alexander Dubinsky told a press conference on Wednesday, citing the...

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is forecasting 'economic meltdown' within hours of the banks opening up on Monday morning following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Ackman is urging for the U.S. government to finally step in and protect all of the bank's depositors, warning inaction could lead to a ripple effect across other smaller banks within the industry. The worry is that customers will rush to withdraw cash from their accounts fearing instability across the banking system with the very real possibility of a domino effect.

As The Federal Reserve continues its assault on inflation by raising their target rate, Blackstone Inc.’s $69 billion real estate fund for wealthy individuals said it will limit redemption requests, one of the most dramatic signs of a pullback at a top profit driver for the firm and a chilling indicator for the property industry. Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust Inc. has been facing withdrawal requests exceeding its quarterly limit, a major test for the one of the private equity firm’s most ambitious efforts to reach individual investors. The news, in a letter Thursday, sent Blackstone stock falling as much...

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk spoke with Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow on Thursday, where he explained why college is a scam. “These are hedge funds with schools attached. These are not colleges,” Kirk affirmed. “I think the de-stigmatization of people that don’t go to college is necessary,” Kirk told Marlow, before offering a few statistics that he reveals in his newly released book, The College Scam. The Turning Point USA founder explained that “forty percent of people that enter a four-year college drop out,” which means that “only 60 percent of people that actually enroll will end...

The discussions are taking place as part of a review of the oil company's five-year spending plan, on which the board is set to vote at the end of this month, the people said. It isn’t clear whether the board will make a final call on the Mozambique or Vietnam projects during the current review, according to the people. As part of the review, Exxon is analyzing the expected carbon emissions from each project and how they would affect the company’s ability to meet pledges to reduce emissions, people familiar with the matter said. The annual projected emissions from the...

Despite recent hedge fund disasters and almost every economic indicator pointing to a potential stock crash, Biden’s administration has completely ignored a potential equities bubble.Since March 2020, $5.9 trillion in so-called relief spending authorized by Congress, as well as $3.3 trillion in quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, has been pumped into the U.S. economy. America’s pandemic response resulted in 22 million jobs lost in a matter of months, and we still have 10 million fewer jobs than before March of last year. The fiscal and economic repercussions of going from stronger than expected job and wage growth in January...

A former hedge fund manager on Friday fought for a chance to get former Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara on the witness stand. David Ganek, founder of Level Global, asked a federal appeals court to keep alive his 2015 lawsuit charging Bharara and the FBI with “fabricating evidence” to raid his $4 billion hedge fund in 2010. Bharara already tried once filed to kill the suit, which a trial judge denied in March. The prosecutor then appealed the ruling. “The notion there is no remedy when an officer of the United States [lies] in an affidavit is extraordinary,” Ganek’s lawyer...

White Square Capital says the shutdown is unrelated, but we're sure Reddit is playing a sad song on the world's most overvalued violin. One of the hedge funds targeted by notorious Reddit investment board r/WallStreetBets is bust, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The r/WallStreetBets subforum shot to fame earlier this year after its members rallied around so-called “meme stocks”—stocks facing what they considered predatory shorts by big investors—causing their prices to surge to unfathomable levels. The first and most famous target was GameStop, but other companies including AMC and Blackberry saw similar boosts. It didn’t take long for the...

Everyday here on Free Republic we see two posts about Steve Bannon's War Room, I've made a point to watch it on the Roku Channel One America News. For over a week now they have been talking about the "Ape Army" which the people on Reddit and elsewhere who drove up the stock of Gamestop costing Wall Street Hedge Funds billions, now they are onto AMC and have driven the price way up cost more Hedge Funds billions..... Today on The War Room they had a member of the Ape Army on, the young lady from Montana with some terrible...

US bishops’ conference denies any wrongdoing in ongoing Peter’s Pence lawsuit, blames parishionersWASHINGTON, April 28, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In an ongoing case regarding the use of Peter’s Pence donations, lawyers for the U.S. bishops have asserted that parishioners were aware (or at least ought to have been) that their money could be used by the Holy See for any purpose, despite their own advertisement to the contrary.The Peter’s Pence lawsuit was originally filed in January 2020 against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) by the Stanley Law Group based in Dallas, Texas, representing a Class Action brought by...

A conversation on Twitter this week resurfaced a Wall Street Journal report from April about big investors getting into real estate, overbidding normal people to do so. “If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund,” the title says. “Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices.” The resulting social media traffic made the article No. 1 on the WSJ website on June 10. “You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house,” real estate consultant John Burns told the Wall Street...

“The real story here is the tension—if not the glaring contradiction—of the Fed’s pursuit of quantitative easing (QE), the aim of which is to lower long-term rates and encourage reach for yield, and their concern that people are indeed reaching for yield,” he told Bloomberg. The tension arises from the fact that while the stated intention of the ultra-low interest rate regime is to promote greater risk-taking through investment in the real economy—the financing of productive activity, real investment in plant, equipment and technology—the vast bulk of the money is being used to fund speculation in increasingly risky financial assets.

GameStop shares surge 100% despite trading halts as Warren Buffett's right-hand man Charlie Munger calls day traders 'gamblers with a racetrack mindset' and warns they will go bust GameStop shares jumped 100% on Wednesday despite two NYSE trading halts It followed the ouster of the struggling retailer's CFO Jim Bell on Tuesday But even fans of the stock on Reddit expressed confusion about the surge Meanwhile Warren Buffett's right-hand man Charlie Munger scolded day traders GameStop shares surged again on Wednesday, as investors piled back into the 'meme stock' in a frenzy that triggered two trading halts late in the...

As the WallStreetBets saga that has so captivated both Wall Street and social media has come to its roller-coaster conclusion, brokerage platforms such as Robinhood and TD Ameritrade now have the legacy of restricting trading of high-volatility stocks. But while brokers are attempting to address the problem on their own platforms, it’s possible that pro-regulation advocates could see the fracas as a mere opportunity to advance the burdensome regulatory agenda they've wanted to advance for years.For the uninitiated, the current situation arose from a popular Reddit forum urging its users to target GameStop (GME), a stock heavily shorted by hedge...