In a week overflowing with breaking news related to corruption in the Trump administration, a story by William Cohen in Vanity Fair didn’t get the attention it really should have. www.vanityfair.com/…

Seems there has been some serious ‘Hanky Panky’ in the futures markets this year. Suspicious trades — bets on market direction — where billions of dollars have been made in a number of suspiciously late trades that appear to be based on insider information. The sort of information that in some cases might only be know by Donald Trump and a few of his closest advisors.

Consider

the money made by a trader, or group of traders, who bought 420,000 September e-minis in the last 30 minutes of trading on June 28. That was some 40% of the day’s trading volume in September e-minis—making it a trade that could not easily be ignored. By then, President Trump was already in Osaka, Japan—14 hours ahead of Chicago—and on his way to a roughly hour-long meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping as part of the G20 summit. On Saturday in Osaka, after the market had closed in Chicago, Trump emerged from his meeting with Xi and announced that the intermittent trade talks were “back on track.” The following week was a good one in the stock market, thanks to the Trump announcement. On Thursday, June 27, the S&P 500 index stood at about 2915; a week or so later, it was just below 3000, a gain of 84 points, or $4,200 per e-mini contract. Whoever bought the 420,000 e-minis on June 28 had made a handsome profit of nearly $1.8 billion.

Follow the money. In the end with Trump it’s always about the money. Fame and power for sure, but mostly he now has the chance to finally really get rich. Not by building or making anything, but by manipulation of the markets, goosing them up or down with a tweet or a tariff and then trading on that insider information. Sure its not legal but why would that stop him. Trump thinks he’s untouchable — knows that he can’t be indicted or even investigated while he is pResident, so this is his time. The time to steal big.

Cohen offers 3 other examples of sketchy trades that netted huge windfalls based perhaps on insider information. This is perhaps the most chilling.

In the last 10 minutes of trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday, September 13, someone got very lucky. That’s when he or she, or a group of people, sold short 120,000 “S&P e-minis”—electronically traded futures contracts linked to the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index—when the index was trading around 3010. The time was 3:50 p.m. in New York; it was nearing midnight in Tehran. A few hours later, drones attacked a large swath of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, choking off production in the country and sending oil prices soaring. By the time the CME next opened, for pre-trading on Sunday night, the S&P index had fallen 30 points, giving that very fortunate trader, or traders, a quick $180 million profit.

Who would know that Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure was about to be attacked. I suppose there may have been intelligence reports prior to the attack. Satellite intel or human intel. But that sort of stuff is only available at the highest levels. Maybe Jared Kushner read it in the President’s Daily Brief.

As President, Trump has often declared that he doesn’t care about making money — that he’s actually making huge personal financial sacrifices to serve us — so much so that he is losing between 3 and 5 billion dollars by serving as President.

Briar Rabbit Crimea River of big old salty crocodile tears. Please don’t throw him in the briar patch. He ‘donates’ his salary because it is chump change, compared to the real money to be made from using the power and information he has to earn big bucks by manipulation of the stock and commodity markets. Threaten higher tariffs on China one day — market tanks — friends buy low — then call the tariffs off a few days later and claim that the trade war has been won through brilliant executive negotiation and markets jump up. Does not seem to matter if his proclamations are true or not. As long as the markets move in the desired directions

Bully the Federal Reserve Bank to lower interest rates, market goes up — friends and family sell high and then let the market slip a bit by saying — no need for stimulus — the economy is great. By now we have come to expect Trump to say and do all sorts of crazy stuff — so maybe no one at the SEC will take notice that some traders are profiting bigly by timing the ups and downs of Trump’s Yo Yo play with the sort of things that push the markets.

While the Vanity Fair piece has found little oxygen this week, Marketwatch seems to have caught on. www.marketwatch.com/…

This will eventually end when Trump burns one of his co-conspirators.

During the transition, President-elect Donald Trump accused former New Jersey governor Chris Christie of “stealing from me” and feared that a presidential transition team was “jinxing” his chances of victory during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to journalist Bob Woodward.

In “Fear: Trump in the White House,” Woodward described a scene in which then-candidate Trump summoned Christie to Trump Tower along with campaign CEO Steve Bannon. Trump was angry to learn that Christie, whom he made head of his transition team in May 2016, was raising money for the team’s operations.

“Where the (expletive) is the money?” Trump asked Christie, according to Woodward. “I need money for my campaign. I’m putting money in my campaign and you’re (F expletive) stealing from me.”

Trump’s falling out with his old friend and wingman Jeffrey Epstein — was about money — Trump stole the deal of the century out from under his friend www.vanityfair.com/…

In November 2004, Trump, who was starring in NBC’s The Apprentice at the time, declared himself intent on winning “the finest piece of land in Florida and probably the U.S.,” an estate that had been seized as part of the bankruptcy of nursing home magnate Abe Gosman.… Epstein was also enraptured by the property, which Gosman had purchased in 1988 for about $12 million from Leslie Wexner, the Ohio-based retail executive who was a friend and patron of Epstein’s.

At first Epstein pressed to gain the upper hand in the competition for the estate, according to Joseph Luzinski, the bankruptcy trustee. Epstein agreed on a price and terms that were viewed as favorable for Gosman’s creditors if a higher bid didn’t emerge, he said. As the competition heated up, Trump and Epstein began talking each other down to the trustee, Luzinski said. On November 15, 2004, the bidders, their representatives, and a small cavalry of lawyers representing the creditors and the Gosman family gathered in a courtroom at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in West Palm Beach. Trump was connected by phone.

Ultimately, Trump was the higher bidder at $41.35 million. …. Four years later, Trump would sell the property to—who else?—a Russian businessman named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. (Apropos of nothing at all, Rybolovlev was charged with corruption last year, which he denied.) Trump would later ban Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, though the exact timeline—whether this was before or after Florida police began investigating Epstein in 2005—is unclear. How exactly did the police begin that investigation anyway — did Trump have a hand in calling their attention to his ‘friend’

More recently Trump has had a falling out with his long time friend Tom Barrack over money from the inauguration festivities.

Sooner or later this too will end.