It appears the Trump administration is serious about this proposal, although there are plenty of question marks. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration is “committed to making it happen.”
“We are currently exploring all legal options to get that done,” she said, reiterating that “the president made it clear that he wants to make it happen.”
The rebate would likely be subject to an income cap. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent floated sending checks to families with incomes below $100,000 per year.
The rebate would likely require congressional approval.
The tariffs aren’t generating enough revenue to pay for the rebate. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that if the rebate is structured similarly to the pandemic stimulus, it would cost around $600 billion. That is close to double the projected annual tariff revenue. However, that doesn’t mean the government won’t send out the checks. It would be a politically popular move, and the federal government has shown no hesitation in borrowing more money when it wants to do something.
What to Do With $2,000?
If the checks come through, what should you do with the money?
One thing is certain – you don’t want to hold onto those dollars for very long because they will lose purchasing power every day!
Of course, a lot of people will probably need it to cover bills and pay off debt. However, if you have the option of saving your windfall, you might want to consider putting it in gold or silver.
Just think about where you would be today if you had bought gold or silver with your COVID stimulus.
There were three rounds of pandemic stimulus totaling $3,200 for an individual. You got more if you had kids, but we’ll just stick with the simple number.
The average gold price in 2021 was $1,800 an ounce. (The first round of stimulus was in the spring of 2020, the second in December 2020/January 2021, and the third in March 2021. I’m going to use the 2021 price averages for the sake of simplicity.)
At that gold price, you could have bought 1.7 ounces of gold with your stimmy money.
And how much would that 1.7 ounces of gold be worth today, with gold now at $4,248.30 per ounce?
$7,223.30
That represents a 125.7 percent gain in just four years.
The average silver price in 2021 was $25 an ounce. At that price, your COVID stimmy money would have bought 128 ounces of silver. At today’s price of $54.09, your silver would be worth $6.923.52, a 116.3 percent gain.
Now you understand why I’m suggesting gold and silver might not be a bad way to invest your tariff rebate, should it come to pass.
If the government does gift you with a check, don’t let them steal it back through inflation.
Save it in real money – gold and silver.
Mike Maharrey is a journalist and market analyst for Money Metals with over a decade of experience in precious metals. He holds a BS in accounting from the University of Kentucky and a BA in journalism from the University of South Florida.
In response to a report about the UK suspending intelligence sharing with the US in the Caribbean over the illegal bombing campaign, Petro said in a post on X that he was ordering “all levels of the public security forces’ intelligence to suspend the sending of communications and other dealings with US security agencies.”
“Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists. The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people,” Petro added.
Responding to criticism of his order the following day, Petro said that if communications with the US “only serve to kill fishermen with missiles, it is not only irrational, but a crime against humanity, insofar as the murder of civilians is systematic.”
Petro was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration following his harsh criticism of the US strikes on boats in the region. The administration accused him of allowing drug cartels to “flourish,” allegations the Colombian leader strongly denied.
Petro is also conducting his own military campaign, having ordered airstrikes against an ex-FARC splinter group that’s known for drug trafficking. The Colombian military claimed that the attack on the suspected rebel camp killed 19 fighters.
While Petro has been in a spat with the Trump administration, the US and Colombia are long-time military partners, with Washington designating Bogota as a “major non-NATO ally” in 2022. Several other US allies have distanced themselves from the US strikes on boats in the region, including the UK, Canada, and France.
“We have observed with concern the military operations in the Caribbean region, because they violate international law and because France has a presence in this region through its overseas territories, where more than a million of our compatriots reside,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on Tuesday.
“They could therefore be affected by the instability caused by any escalation, which we obviously want to avoid.”
(José Niño, Headline USA) President Donald Trump defended H-1B skilled worker visas during a Fox News interview on Monday, sparking backlash from his MAGA base while highlighting tensions created by a controversial September ICE raid that detained hundreds of South Korean engineers at a Georgia battery plant.
The contentious exchange between Trump and host Laura Ingraham centered on whether America needs foreign workers to fill specialized technical roles. When Ingraham argued against bringing in “tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” stating “We have plenty of talented people here,” Trump disagreed sharply.
NOW – Trump says that H1B immigrants are necessary since there are not plenty of talented Americans.
Laura: "We have plenty of talented people here!"
Trump: "No, you don't. No, you don't… No, you don't have… You don't have certain talents and you have to… People have to… pic.twitter.com/xEfZRIbKPd
“No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You don’t have certain talents and you have to… People have to learn,” Trump responded. He continued, “You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, I’m gonna put you into a factory. We’re gonna make missiles.”
Trump specifically cited the September 4, 2025 ICE operation at the Hyundai LG Energy Solution battery plant construction site in Ellabell, Georgia. That raid, described as “the largest, single site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations,” resulted in thearrest of approximately 475 workers, including over 300 South Korean nationals who were skilled engineers and technicians.
“In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants. They had people from South Korea that made batteries all their lives. Making batteries are very complicated. It’s not an easy thing and very dangerous. A lot of explosions, a lot of problems,” Trump explained. “They had five or 600 people. Early stages to make batteries and to teach people how to do it well. They wanted them to get out of the country.”
Trump argued against the deportations, stating “You’re gonna need that, Laura. I know you and I disagree on this. You can’t just say, a country’s coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and gonna take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years, and they’re gonna start making the missiles. It doesn’t work that well.”
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) A federal grand jury indicted California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff in a sweeping corruption and fraud scheme spanning 23 counts, according to court records.
Dana Williamson, a self-described political consultant, worked for Newsom from January 2023 to December 2024. Prosecutors claimed she conspired to divert $225,000 from then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s campaign after then-President Joe Biden tapped him to serve as health secretary.
Williamson and Becerra’s former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie, allegedly funneled the funds by billing the dormant campaign for fake consulting work through Williamson’s firm. These payments were for a job that was never performed, prosecutors alleged.
🚨🚨🚨 WHOA: Gavin Newsom's former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was arrested today after a three-year joint FBI-IRS investigation and charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct justice.
The indictment also accused Williamson of conspiring to seek fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loans and to backdate fake contracts after receiving a civil subpoena from a U.S. Attorney’s Office in California in 2024.
Prosecutors also alleged that Williamson filed false tax returns by claiming over $1 million in fabricated business deductions, including jet travel, luxury hotels, home furnishings and designer bags. Other dubious deductions included payments to friends and allies for no-show jobs.
According to the FBI, Williamson lied to agents about the diverted campaign funds, the backdated PPP contracts, and other aspects of the probe.
The case is being led by the FBI and the IRS Criminal Investigation Division.
If convicted, Williamson faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine per count of bank or wire fraud.
She could also be hit with five years for each obstruction and false statement count, and up to three years in prison and a $100,000 fine per count of filing false tax returns.
McCluskie entered a plea deal with prosecutors on Oct. 30, agreeing to pay $225,000 in restitution to Becerra.
In response to the indictment, Newsom said, “Ms. Williamson no longer serves in this administration. While we are still learning details of the allegations, the Governor expects all public servants to uphold the highest standards of integrity.”
The lens is simple and unsettling: when the mass of debt grows large enough, it distorts everything around it, and escaping the pull requires doing more of what created it in the first place.
The Set-Up
Public debt eclipsed $38 trillion last month, rising 64.6% in just six years and arriving years ahead of the Congressional Budget Office’s 2020 projection that $37 trillion wouldn’t appear until 2030.
Washington still spent roughly $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025, a 4.1% increase from the prior year, with September alone registering $446 billion in outlays even as calendar effects made it the lightest month.
Against that scale, tariff math collapses. Fiscal 2025 brought in about $22 billion from tariffs, up 42% year over year, with September’s $30 billion reflecting the post–“Liberation Day” surge.
Even a generous annualized run-rate of $400–$500 billion barely covers one month of federal spending and could fade if “negotiated” deals lower rates. The deficit still ran about $1.8 trillion, and interest costs crossed $1 trillion, now the second-largest budget item.
Politics, Incentives, and Why Cuts Don’t Come
Maharrey notes that every president since Grover Cleveland has left office with more debt than he inherited. Incentives favor spending because programs buy votes while cuts assign blame.
Only about 27% of the budget is truly discretionary; the rest is bound up in mandatory programs and interest payments that are politically or mechanically difficult to trim. Tariff rebates sound appealing on social media, but the arithmetic shows they require more borrowing and serve mostly as theater.
The conclusion is blunt. You cannot solve a spending problem without cutting spending. Without confronting Social Security, Medicare, national defense, and the ever-rising interest tab, the gravitational mass of the debt black hole continues to increase, pulling policy choices along with it.
Households at the Edge
American households are also stretched. Total household debt stands at a record $18.59 trillion. Even setting mortgages aside, consumer balances sit near $5.08 trillion, almost $1 trillion higher than in 2020.
The cheap-money era and pandemic stimulus briefly reduced balances and boosted savings, but post-pandemic price inflation chewed through cash cushions and pushed families onto Visa and Mastercard.
The card channel is now strained.
The average APR sits near 19.98%, with many accounts charging 26% to 28%, only a touch below the record 20.79% average set recently.
Revolving credit growth slowed throughout the year, contracted in May and June, fell 5.5% in August, and barely grew in September—signals that cards are maxing out and borrowers are wary.
LegalShield’s Consumer Stress Index rose three points in the third quarter, up 8.2% in 2025 and now the highest since March 2020.
The New York Fed reports 4.5% of all debt is somewhere in delinquency and a 3.03% flow into serious delinquency, up from 1.68% a year earlier, with VantageScore noting a 47% jump in late payments even among prime borrowers.
Corporate Cracks
Corporate balance sheets aren’t immune.
2024 produced a 14-year high in bankruptcies, and the first seven months of 2025 saw 446 corporate filings—the most for any comparable span since 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession.
When rates rise even modestly from an abnormally low base, debt-service costs expose weak cash flows and over-extended capital structures.
The picture that emerges is comprehensive. Government, households, and corporations all contribute to the mass of the black hole, and each reacts to the pull in ways that reinforce it—more borrowing to bridge gaps, more policy contortions to avoid short-term pain, and less resilience when shocks arrive.
The Policy Trap
Maharrey traces the origin of the trap to nearly 15 years of engineered cheap money.
After 2008, the Federal Reserve held rates at zero for seven years, only reaching 2.5% by 2018 before cutting three times in 2019 and returning to zero in 2020.
Hikes didn’t begin until March 2022, when “transitory” inflation claims finally collapsed.
An entire professional cohort has grown up believing zero to two percent is normal, which explains the political and market pressure to ease whenever the economy wobbles.
That pressure persists even with CPI hovering near 3%, still a full percentage point above the official target. The debt-saturated system strains under “normal” rates, so the impulse is to cut policy rates, halt balance-sheet reduction, and tip back toward quantitative easing. Each step supports activity in the short run while simultaneously weakening the currency and inflating new bubbles.
As Weldon frames it, escaping the pull requires more thrust—printing, monetizing, debasing—that only increases the mass.
By the Numbers, Without the Window Dressing
The government spent about $7 trillion in fiscal 2025 and ran a deficit near $1.8 trillion.
Tariff revenue around $22 billion for the year, and an optimistic $400–$500 billion annual run-rate, does not change the math when September alone cost $446 billion.
Interest on the national debt exceeded $1 trillion.
Households carry $18.59 trillion in total debt, with $5.08 trillion in consumer balances and card APRs around 19.98%, while serious delinquencies climbed to a 3.03% flow from 1.68% a year ago.
Corporate bankruptcies hit 446 in the first seven months of 2025, the most since 2010, after a 14-year high in 2024.
CPI near 3% meets easing tendencies anyway, because the alternative threatens a system whose growth already requires more than $1 in new debt for each $1 of GDP.
Numbers tell a consistent story. Incomes adjusted for inflation are roughly flat compared with five years ago, according to JPMorgan, which means many workers are losing ground even with nominal raises.
In a fiat system where two percent devaluation “on a good day” is policy, purchasing power erosion is not a bug; it is the plan.
What It Means for Gold and Silver
Maharrey’s conclusion follows from the trap.
If rates stay high, the burden of interest costs threatens growth and solvency across sectors. If rates fall and the balance sheet expands, the currency weakens and purchasing power erodes.
Either path is supportive of sound money, precious metals that carry no counterparty risk, and historically perform as policy turns back toward stimulus.
For savers who feel squeezed, he points to a practical path: an installment approach starting around $100 a month that accumulates fractional positions into full ounces over time.
When lump-sum buying is hard and inflation is persistent, systematic accumulation offers a way to hedge without overreaching.
Closing Notes and Next Steps
Maharrey invites listeners to read Greg Weldon’s debt black hole report, packed with charts that deepen the analysis. He also flags the Friday Market Wrap and an upcoming conversation with analyst Michael Pinto.
The thrust of the episode remains clear. In a world pulled by a growing debt singularity, policymakers will keep reaching for the same tools, and those tools will keep weakening cash.
“Got gold?” is more than a tagline; it is a strategy for living outside the event horizon. Help secure your future, buy gold from Money Metals.
(Headline USA) A two-decade pattern of alleged sex trafficking by two luxury real estate brokers and their brother wasn’t “just men behaving badly,” a federal judge said as she left their indictment largely intact and rejected defense efforts to minimize the gravity of crimes involving dozens of women.
In an Oct. 17 opinion unsealed Wednesday, Judge Valerie E. Caproni expressed skepticism about some of the arguments defense lawyers offered as they tried to get the charges thrown out.
“As much as Defendants want to characterize the charged conduct as just men behaving badly, that is not what the Indictment charged,” she wrote.
She said the charges allege “that three grown men conspired to entice women and girls” to travel domestically and sometimes internationally to luxury hotels where they were drugged and sometimes physically restrained before they were raped or sexually assaulted.
Caproni did dismiss one attempted sex trafficking count, finding that the five-year statute of limitations had expired.
The three brothers — Oren, Tal and Alon Alexander — remain held without bail after pleading not guilty to charges in Manhattan federal court.
Oren Alexander and Tal Alexander sold high-end properties in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles before the charges were filed alleging that they used their wealth and influence to attack women from 2002 to 2021.
A defense lawyer said last week that the defense plans to show a jury that witnesses are lying at a trial scheduled for early January. The judge has said she might postpone the trial until May.
Caproni rejected defense assertions that the alleged crimes by the brothers were more like “date rape” allegations more normally prosecuted in state courts.
“That badly misrepresents the nature of the charges,” the judge wrote.
She said the allegations make clear that the alleged crimes were not “sexual assaults that serendipitously occurred” when a group of people in their 20s or 30s went on vacation, or during dates or at parties.
At a hearing last week, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo said the jury will hear evidence at trial of group sex, threesomes and promiscuity.
“The case is about sex and sexuality,” he said.
In court papers, defense lawyers wrote that among the accusers they expect to testify at trial, they’d located evidence “that undermines nearly every aspect of the alleged victims’ narratives.”
They said they believe “that many witnesses are going to testify untruthfully on direct examination — whether it be because of their own current situation, their motive to lie for monetary gain, or their situation at the time.”
These witnesses “do not want to admit to the world that they consensually engaged in sexual activity with any of the Alexander brothers,” the lawyers said.
But Caproni wrote that she fails to understand how certain categories of information cited by the defense are likely to disprove the charges, such as proof that victims continued to contact or interact with the brothers or that they initiated contact with them.
She noted that a handful of messages cited by the defense regarding one accuser are contradicted by other messages, including one in which she expressed how she did not know how someone could so dislike her that they would harm her.
(Headline USA) A jury has found a man with links to white supremacists guilty of murder in a brutal killing at a southwestern Montana campsite last year that was initially reported as a possible bear attack.
Daren Christopher Abbey attacked Dustin Kjersem with a block of wood, an axe and a screwdriver after they met at Kjersem’s campsite near Big Sky, Montana, in October 2024, according to prosecutors.
The defendant later admitted to taking Kjersem’s guns, cooler, cellphones and other belongings and concealing evidence.
Abbey was linked to the murder scene by DNA found on a beer can inside the tent. He claimed the killing was in self-defense after Kjersem threatened him. Authorities said there were inconsistencies in his story, and pointed to multiple chop wounds in the attack.
The victim’s girlfriend and another friend found his body and reported it as a possible bear attack. It turned into a homicide investigation after wildlife agents found no sign of a bear in the area.
Kjersem had two children and worked as a self-employed contractor, building homes and learning other trades, according to his sister. Abbey told authorities that he arrived at the campsite intending to stay the night and was welcomed by Kjersem, who didn’t know him, according to Gallatin County Sheriff Dan Springer.
Following a six-day trial the jury found Abbey guilty on Monday of deliberate homicide and tampering with evidence, court records show. He did not testify during the trial.
Abbey’s defense attorney, Sarah Kottke, said Wednesday that he will decide whether to appeal after he’s sentenced on Dec. 30 before state District Judge Peter Ohman.
“This was a tough case and asserting an affirmative defense comes with multiple hurdles, especially when it happens in such a remote area with no witnesses to the events that took place,” Kottke said in an email.
An inmate information document from Gallatin County last year said the defendant listed an organizational affiliation with white supremacists. State Department of Corrections records said his tattoos included an iron cross with a swastika.
Deliberate homicide is a capital offense in Montana but prosecutors will not seek the death penalty in the case, said Jack Veil with the Gallatin County Attorney’s Office.
(Brett Rowland,The Center Square) The White House is exploring all of its options for sending Americans $2,000 tariff rebate checks, even as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a legal challenge to the president’s use of tariffs.
“The White House is committed to making that happen,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday. “We are currently exploring all legal options to get that done.”
However, Leavitt said she didn’t have a timeline for mailing the checks, something that would likely require congressional approval.
“The president made it clear that he wants to make it happen, so his team of economic advisers is looking into it,” Leavitt said. “When we have an update, we’ll provide one.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told “Fox & Friends” the checks could be subject to an income cap.
“Well, there are a lot of options here that the president’s talking about a $2,000 rebate and those – that would be for families making less than, say, $100,000,” Bessent said.
During the same interview, Bessent said that no decision has been made regarding income caps.
This comes after Bessent told ABC’s “This Week” that the tariff rebate “could come in lots of forms.”
“You know, it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda,” he said. “You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. So, you know, those are substantial deductions.”
Donald Trump brought up the tariff rebate idea over the weekend and again on Monday.
“All money left over from the $2,000 payments made to low and middle income USA Citizens, from the massive Tariff Income pouring into our Country from foreign countries, which will be substantial, will be used to SUBSTANTIALLY PAY DOWN NATIONAL DEBT,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
Trump provided no details, but at least one group has already worked up an estimate.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the math doesn’t work for Trump’s proposal, according to its analysis. The group said that if the payments were structured like the COVID-19 stimulus payments, the $2,000 dividend would cost about $600 billion, which is about twice as much as tariffs are expected to generate this year.
“Current tariffs have raised about $100 billion so far, and will raise about $300 billion per year in the steady state,” CRFB noted. “If paid annually, dividends would be twice as expensive as tariffs.”
CRFB also said the nation’s $38 trillion in debt must be addressed.
“Under no circumstances is the government doing enough to pay down debt, despite the claims to the contrary,” it noted.
Erica York, vice president of Federal Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation, said the proposed rebate checks would add to the nation’s debt.
“The U.S. has not actually taken care of its deficit problem, and sending out $2,000 checks to millions of Americans would make the deficit problem worse,” she wrote on X.
She also noted that Trump’s estimates of how much money tariffs will generate have varied wildly.
“Someone asked me today where the President is getting his various ‘tariff income’ numbers: $2 trillion, $3 trillion, $8 trillion, $17 trillion, and $19 trillion have all been used recently,” she wrote on X. “I honestly have no earthly idea.”
Trump’s rebate idea comes as he seeks to convince voters that he has made things more affordable for working Americans.
Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs have been challenged in federal courts as unconstitutional by some business groups and Blue states, who argue that only Congress has the authority to enact tariffs. Last Wednesday, Supreme Court justices questioned attorneys on both sides of a case challenging Trump’s tariff authority.
Twelve states, five small businesses and two Illinois-based toymakers have challenged Trump’s authority to impose tariffs under a 1977 law without Congressional approval. That law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, doesn’t mention the word “tariff” and has never been used to impose tariffs. Trump’s legal team argues that the law is a clear delegation of emergency power, granting the president broad authority to act in times of crisis.
The Supreme Court is expected to decide the case before the end of June, if not sooner.
Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families and pay down the national debt. Economists, businesses and some public companies have warned that tariffs will raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.
A Congressional Budget Office report from August estimated tariffs could bring in $4 trillion over the next decade. That CBO report came with caveats and noted that tariffs will raise consumer prices and reduce the purchasing power of U.S. families.
Earlier in his second administration, Trump and former adviser Elon Musk floated the idea of returning money to taxpayers through the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk’s DOGE initially expected to find $2 trillion in savings by cutting waste fraud and abuse. However, Musk has since left the White House and DOGE was on track to save about $150 billion as of an April cabinet meeting. Those checks never materialized.
(Kenneth Schrupp, The Center Square) Since 2022, California’s main state pension fund has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to a Chinese venture capital firm that has been investigated by Congress for its close ties with the Chinese Communist Party.
Experts warn these investments are not only risky, given China’s record on property rights and growing economic challenges, but undermine the security of the United States and its allies.
“CalPERS should not be investing in China because in China, the Communist Party takes a stake in every major company,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who is director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Climate, Energy, and the Environment, in an interview with The Center Square.
Since 2022, the California Public Employee Retirement System has committed $282 million to HongShan, a Chinese venture capital firm that was formerly the Chinese branch of American venture capital titan Sequoia, state records show. $59.3 million of that has been invested, with an estimated loss of $7.7 million as of March 31, 2025. Management fees paid to HongShan for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2024, the first and latest year for which data is available, were $3.3 million.
HongShan was investigated by the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, with a 2024 report detailing the high volume of now-HongShan investments linked to the Chinese military and human rights abuses.
These include investments in Bytedance, which owns TikTok, and Yitu, a facial recognition software firm used by the Chinese government and blacklisted by the United States Treasury Department in 2021 for its involvement in human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority. It also includes Qihoo 360, a “military-civilian PRC enterprise focused on cybersecurity that has been blacklisted by the Commerce Department and Defense Department over its support for the [People’s Liberation Army].”
The report also noted that while Sequoia split its China business into HongShan in 2023, the split “may insulate some types of capital flows from regulatory scrutiny they would have otherwise been subject to.”
The report details that while many kinds of technology transfers from the United States to China were and are banned, American funding of Chinese companies generally was legal, at least until a 2023 executive order from President Joe Biden started to place some limits on outbound American investment in “countries of concern” regarding “national security technologies” and related products.
CalPERS responded to financial and geopolitical concerns by stating it actively monitors investment regulations and chooses responsible investment managers.
“CalPERS is a global investor that looks for opportunities across national boundaries and business sectors to deliver the returns needed to provide retirement security to our more than 2 million members,” said CalPERS information officer Abram Arredondo to The Center Square in an email. “We closely monitor discussions in Washington D.C. to comply with government requirements on investments overseas. CalPERS also conducts a rigorous selection process for managers and regularly engages with them to ensure our investments are being responsibly overseen.”
Beyond national security, Furchtgott-Roth says investing in China exposes foreign investors like CalPERS to undue risks.
“It’s possible that CalPERS thinks they can get a greater return than in other areas, but it’s very risky, investing in these Chinese companies, because who knows what China is going to do, and who knows what President Trump is going to do about China, which would send the value of these investments down,” said Furchtgott-Roth. “Already last month, Chinese exports were diminishing, which is going to hurt the Chinese economy — President Trump is already harming the Chinese economy with these tariff threats.”
Furchtgott-Roth also pointed to China’s inverted demographic pyramid — in which an aging population is supported by fewer and fewer young people due to the nation’s one-child policy — as a long-term economic challenge.
Other experts pointed to the aftermath of the financial implosion of Chinese real estate developer Evergrande as evidence that American investors could end up at a significant disadvantage compared to Chinese investors when companies run into financial difficulty.
“Foreign bond investors lost more money than domestic creditors, and that’s the kind of thing that can happen both with debt investments and equity investments — the government can arbitrarily decide to discriminate against foreign investors,” said Marc Joffe, a public finance expert and visiting fellow at the California Policy Center, in an interview with The Center Square.
Joffe also said that in addition to the transparency, liquidity, and high management fee concerns typical of public pension investments in private equity, “the additional dimension in investing in Chinese startups and private companies is the government can just say, hey, you, CalPERS … you’ve made too much money and this is not good for the Chinese people, so we’re going to expropriate you.”
The Center Square recently reported CalPERS’ private equity Clean Energy & Technology Fund lost 71% of the nearly half a billion dollars it invested in the fund, as private equity fund managers raked in tens of millions of dollars, highlighting the risks of public pension investments in private equity.
HongShan did not respond to The Center Square’s requests for comment.
(Thérèse Boudreaux, The Center Square) With Congress on track to end the ongoing government shutdown, the mass flight delays and cancellations Americans have experienced could soon abate, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Tuesday.
But aviation groups said it will take time to resolve the issues even after the government reopens.
“Airlines’ reduced flight schedules cannot immediately bounce back to full capacity right after the government opens. It will take time, and there will be residual effects for days,” Airlines for America, a lobbying group for major airlines, said in a statement posted on its website Monday.
Duffy projected cautious optimism on the 42nd day of the record-long government shutdown, noting that the U.S. House could pass a funding deal as soon as Wednesday. The U.S. Senate approved a deal on Monday to end the shutdown.
Air traffic controllers and other federal employees deemed “essential” have been forced to work without pay for over a month. Many have not returned and have found odd jobs while the shutdown dragged on.
If air traffic controllers return to work quickly, Duffy told reporters, “I think we’re going to be back to regular flight schedules” in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush.
“I want you all to travel on time, I want your flights to not be delayed or canceled, but that is not the primary concern. The primary concern is safety,” Duffy added. “We’re trying to manage risk in the system so that people fly, and fly safely.”
Millions of U.S. travelers have already faced thousands of flight delays and cancellations since Nov. 5, when the Federal Aviation Administration ordered 40 major U.S. airports to incrementally reduce flight volumes by 10% as a safety measure.
Airports have faced increasingly severe staffing shortages since federal funding ran dry on Oct.1, after Senate Democrats filibustered Republicans’ bill to keep the government open.
Even before the shutdown, a shortage of air traffic controllers and an aging system caused delays at major airports across the nation, prompting Congress to approve $12.5 billion to modernize it.
Duffy said the FAA will alleviate its flight restrictions “only when the data says we should.” In the meantime, passengers whose flights are cancelled due to the FAA’s order are entitled to refunds from airlines.
President Trump on Monday demanded that all air traffic controllers return to work or face a substantial dock to their pay. He also said controllers who work through the entire shutdown should receive a $10,000 bonus.
Duffy said he “couldn’t agree more” with Trump about the bonus but took a softer stance on how to deal with absent employees.
“I think what we have to realize is, we have some controllers who are put in a very difficult position,” Duffy said. “They were confronted with a real problem: ‘Do I not feed my family, or do I try to find another pathway to put food on the table?’ And that was very real. And I’m cognizant of that; I don’t want to be unfair to people.”
The FAA will investigate any “continual bad actors,” such as those who skipped work before their first missed paycheck and used the shutdown as an excuse not to return, Duffy said.
