YouTube has the video The REAL Reason This CORRUPT Senator Flip-Flopped On Trump’s Tax Cut Bill.

Corker claimed not to understand whether or not as a real estate investor he would benefit from this.

As an investor who is a pipsqueak compared to Corker, even I know what this provision is for. When I was invested in Real Estate Investment Trusts, I knew that these organization’s dividends that that they paid me were critically dependent on these loopholes. Apparently the tax code revision must have taken these loopholes out, and someone must have pointed out that they needed to be put back in.

I should point out that I had these REITs in an IRA so that I did not pay taxes on the dividends that were passed on to me.

Paste Magazine has the article The Destruction of Matt Taibbi.

“These claims that Matt would do this stuff are ridiculous,” she said. “I left The eXile because we started dating, and Matt was worried about impropriety. He didn’t even ask me out at work! Matt is a fundamentally decent and kind person.”

I never knew that this had been done to Matt Taibbi. I was wondering why he seemed to have disappeared.

The right has found a new weapon that seems to have been first wielded by Democrats. When I first listened to the Trump tape, I was reminded of some of the stories guys would tell to boost their images. One never knew if any of it was true. In Taibbi’s case all the indentifiable women involved say that it was not true and was never meant to be taken as true.

This is why I have taken to using <sarcasm></sarcasm> or <satire></satire> flags around everything that I write that might not be recognized for what it is by some readers. It sort of spoils the joke to label it that flagrantly, but better to be safe than sorry.

Pragmatic Capitalism has the article IDGAF > FOMO.

We’re now entering silly season in the markets. People are buying cryptocurrencies that no one understands and have very little actual utility. People are chasing stocks higher on a daily basis. Emerging market stocks, tech stocks and all the other riskiest parts of the stock markets are the biggest winners of the year. And a large part of this is due to FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out. After 8 years of straight up stock market gains, rising home prices and now a crypto boom like the world has never seen, there is a palpable feeling of irrational exuberance overtaking the markets.

This is the thinking that kept me safe while others were going crazy over the tech bubble of the 1990s and the real estate bubble of the 2000s. I am trying like heck to keep myself safe in the current bubble. Only time will tell if I will succeed. Another name for what I try to do is called value investing.

Pragmatic Capitalism has the article Elasticity of Money is a Feature, not a Bug.

…this idea that a fixed money supply is good is not consistent with the history of money or even the basic facts about how modern money works. Worse, it constrains our economy in ways that make us worse off in the long-run.

Here is yet another way to explain what seems to me ought to be obvious.

It’s not that an artificially fixed money supply could not work. Deflation could offset the problem of a currency that does not grow with the economy. The trouble is that deflation is so far removed from our everyday experience of money that it would require major adaptations. Whereas inflation favors borrowers over lenders, deflation does the exact opposite. This has economic consequences that hinder the growth possibilities of an economy. They don’t prevent growth, but they do make it harder rather than easier.