Back in April, money managers were given the fright of their lives when the president’s then chief of staff, Reince Priebus, suggested on ABC’s This Week that the “carried interest” loophole, used by many to minimize their tax bills, might not be long for this world. “That balloon is going to get popped pretty quick,” Priebus said. “Carried interest is on the table. The president wants to get rid of [it] so that balloon is not going to stay inflated very long, I assure you of that.” Carried interest income, of course, refers to the share of profits that investment managers siphon from their clients’ funds, rain or shine. That income is currently taxed at the capital gains rate of 20 percent, a fact that has riled certain people, given that said income is often very substantial. So ditching the loophole strikes many—like say, the people paying 39.6 percent on their salary, or anything north of 20 percent, really—as patently reasonable. But to people, like, for instance, Stephen Schwarzman, it’s a proposition analogous to genocide. Thankfully, the Blackstone co-founder and his peers can rest easy knowing that Donald Trump would never do something so cruel as to subject them to the tax rates paid by teachers and nurses and other unproductive Takers.

Speaking at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Andrew Ross Sorkin that the “carried interest deduction” would end for hedge-fund managers. To the naked ear, this might have sounded like the Trump administration was actually following through on the populist rhetoric it used on the campaign trail, but in reality it was more of a P.R. move considering that hedge-fund managers rarely use the loophole. Meanwhile, Mnuchin said nothing about getting rid of the loophole for private equity. And as Axios’s Dan Primack notes, whereas Mnuchin might’ve used “hedge funds” as a catchall term for a general audience, specifically using it when speaking to a group of finance people suggest he was sending a very clear message to all his non-hedge fund buddies that they have nothing to worry about. (In addition to private equity, others industries that will likely continue to benefit from the loophole include venture capital, oil and gas, and real-estate partnerships—obviously.)

Meanwhile, on Wednesday Trump finally dropped the charade that he’s going to raise taxes on the rich. “I think the wealthy will be pretty much where they are, pretty much where they are,” he said when asked by a reporter where top earners could expect their tax rate to fall, before adding that they could conceivably go up, though his heart wasn’t in the claim. “If they have to go higher, they’ll go higher,” he said. (Based on the last plan the administration released, they will do the opposite.)

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Senator wants jail time for Equifax execs who dumped shares

Of the many gripes the American people currently have with credit-reporting company Equifax—that its lack of cyber security led to as many as 143 million individuals’ data being compromised in a massive security breach; that it chose to wait more than a month before mentioning it to anyone; that the Web site it set up for people to ascertain if their personal information was compromised was not only wildly unhelpful but included a clause that barred anyone using it from taking part in a class-action lawsuit—one of the big ones is that three senior executives decided to sell nearly $2 million worth of shares of the company three days after the leak was discovered and several weeks before Equifax disclosed it to the public. According to a spokesperson for the company, the sellers—which included Equifax’s chief financial officer—“had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred” at the time they sold their shares. According to Senator Heidi Heitkamp, the whole thing sounds a lot like something that rhymes with sminsider smading.