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By Mark Goodwin December 02, 2024 Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is poised to further facilitate the now long-standing, commandeered use of the Department of Commerce to engineer the rise of a global financial control system in private hands that runs on dollar-denominated debt. On November 19, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of his transition team, would be his nominee for Commerce Secretary. Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries are multinational in scope, promote the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (which have major implications for debt politics and economic activity), and are even directly partnered with foreign state-owned firms that recently came under scrutiny following the release of the contents of the laptop of the current (and recently pardoned) First Son, Hunter Biden. Lutnick had previously been angling for a job as incoming Treasury Secretary, an unsurprising ambition given Cantor Fitzgerald’s outsized role in the U.S. Treasury market (i.e. the U.S. government debt market) and its relationship to dollar stablecoins, which are rapidly becoming one of the main purchasers of U.S. debt. It is unknown currently why Lutnick was passed over for Treasury, despite endorsement for the position from Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and appointed to Commerce instead. However, Trump’s previous Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was widely believed to have been given the role to repay a past favor of major significance. In Ross’s case, it was his assistance in rescuing Trump from bankruptcy in the early 1990s. At the time, Ross worked for Rothschild Inc., and when clarifying why the European banking dynasty had bailed out the future President, Ross stated “the Trump name is still very much an asset.” Shortly before, Rothschild Inc. had been bankrolling the entry of Robert Maxwell, intelligence asset for Israel and arguably the Soviet Union, into the American economy, with a specific focus on New York City.

Mises Wire Mises Institute 12/01/2024 Dr. Gary Schlarbaum, one of our generous supporters, has again offered to match donations received through December 9. That means your $10 donation becomes $20, your $25 donation becomes $50, and so on. For the last ten years, Gary has kickstarted our year-end campaign with his matching gift. He’s ready to match your gift today! With a donation of $25 or more, you’ll receive a copy of Tom DiLorenzo‘s newest booklet, The Axis of Evil: America’s Three Worst Presidents. And, thanks to Gary, your donation doubles. Please donate today. Your gift allows the Mises Institute, in this critical moment, to carry on publishing our books and videos, aiding scholars and teachers of Austrian economics; promoting the Austrian School to the public, and training tomorrow’s champions of the economics of freedom.

1 gallon of gasoline is $2.79 today. I will be curious what the average market price will be after January 2025, and what, if any, "factors" will affect it.

Mises.org David Gordon 11/29/2024 Andrew Puzder, who is both a leading business executive—he was the CEO of a restaurant chain that owns Carl’s Jr.—and an experienced attorney, tells a dramatic tale. The free market is by far the best economic system and has made possible, since the Industrial Revolution, a historically unprecedented rate of economic growth. The free market is an economic democracy in which entrepreneurs vie to do the bidding of consumers, who, in most cases, want the most money possible. In corporations, the consumers are the corporations’ owners, the shareholders, and officers of corporations have a fiduciary duty to them. In recent decades, a new conception of the free market—“stakeholder capitalism”—has become influential, although a resistance movement has arisen that has been able to thwart the most drastic ideas of the stakeholder advocates. According to them, the managers of companies should take into account the interests and values of all of those affected by the company. The stakeholder advocates do not deny that managers have a fiduciary duty to the owners of their business, but they claim that other things must be considered as well. Two of these other concerns—encapsulated in the acronyms ESG and DEI—especially concern our author. I will not explain what these acronyms stand for—readers who want to know can easily find out. Suffice it for our purposes to say that they call for more “diversity,” by which is meant hiring more women and members of ethnic minorities and putting them on the company’s board of directors, and also greatly decreasing the use of fossil fuels in order to deal with “climate change.” Puzder, to say the least, is not sympathetic to “diversity” as it is currently understood, although he does not reject it altogether. He thinks it is desirable to have women and members of ethnic minorities on company boards of directors, because this promotes “cognitive diversity,” but he thinks that this will come about as a side effect if everyone elected to the board is committed to putting their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders above other considerations, and he opposes mandating these other considerations by government agencies that have been taken over by the “woke” left.