JPMorgan Chase’s CEO: Trump ‘grew the economy’ and was ‘right’ on critical issues​



Big finance is giving off some interesting signals as the 2024 election draws closer, including JPMorgan Chase’s longtime CEO Jamie Dimon, when he sang the praises of former President Donald Trump on CNBC.

“You have all these very powerful forces that are going to be affecting us in ‘24 and ‘25, so if I was the government, I would be preparing for what I’m going to do about that, assuming things aren’t good,” Dimon told the reporter.

“I wish the Democrats would think a little more carefully when they talk about MAGA, you know, and if you travel this country,” Dimon continued, “I don’t think they’re voting for Trump because of his family values.”

“If you take a step back, be honest, he was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well, tax reform worked, he was right about some of China,” he said, adding, “He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.”

Jill Savage of “Blaze News Tonight” is curious as to whether or not Dimon’s sentiments reflect his colleagues.

“Who would you say big finance is backing at this election?” Savage asks Ten31 managing partner Marty Bent.

“I think it’s pretty clear it's got to be Donald Trump,” Bent tells Savage and Matthew Peterson.

“If you’re looking for some certainty in terms of economic policy in the next administration, like you mentioned, it doesn’t seem like Kamala has a policy at all.”

Peterson points out that there’s one issue with this prediction.

“We have a little problem in the last couple decades, which is that big finance, and big money in general, is not allowed to say that they support anyone other than sort of the Borg, and that’s the Democrats now,” Peterson says.

“So it’s an interesting predicament,” he adds.


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Almost 50,000 people have lost over $1 billion to cryptocurrency scams since the start of 2021



The cryptocurrency craze may be coming to an end as thousands of people have lost over $1 billion in digital scams since the start of 2021.

CNBC reported that a group of more than 46,000 individuals lost over $1 billion in these digital scams. This marks a loss of nearly 60 times more than what cryptocurrency investors lost in 2018. The mean individual loss was $2,600.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report on Friday that further detailed the losses these investors experienced at the hands of digital con artists.

The FTC noted that the top cryptocurrencies people self-reported they used to pay scammers were Bitcoin (70%), Tether (10%), and Ethereum (9%).

One of the main features of cryptocurrency-based transactions is that there is no mechanism through which consumers can reverse a transaction. There is no chargeback mechanism that allows consumers to reverse a transaction if they claim that they have been fraudulently charged for goods and services they did not actually receive.

In its report, the FTC said, “Crypto has several features that are attractive to scammers, which may help to explain why the reported losses in 2021 were nearly sixty times what they were in 2018. There’s no bank or other centralized authority to flag suspicious transactions and attempt to stop fraud before it happens. Crypto transfers can’t be reversed – once the money’s gone, there’s no getting it back. And most people are still unfamiliar with how crypto works. These considerations are not unique to crypto transactions, but they all play into the hands of scammers.”

The report also noted that the people who were victimized by these cryptocurrency scams claim that it started with posts on social media.

The FTC said, “Reports point to social media and crypto as a combustible combination for fraud. Nearly half the people who reported losing crypto to a scam since 2021 said it started with an ad, post, or message on a social media platform.”

The top social media platforms for scams were Instagram (32%), Facebook (26%), WhatsApp (9%), and Telegram (7%).

Fake investment opportunities were by far the most common type of scam to which people fell victim.

Warning the public in its report, the FTC said, “There’s no bank or other centralized authority to flag suspicious transactions and attempt to stop fraud before it happens. These considerations are not unique to crypto transactions, but they all play into the hands of scammers.”

Chinese officials scramble to find ways to insulate China's economy from Western sanctions as tensions with Taiwan grow



Stoking fears that China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan, Chinese officials are looking for ways to defend their country from economic isolation should Western nations opt to sanction China in a similar fashion to how they sanctioned Russia after it invaded Ukraine.

The Daily Mail reported that China’s economic regulators held emergency meetings in late April with officials from the Chinese central bank, the finance ministry, domestic banks operating in China, and international leaders in the financial sectors like HSBC.

In the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Western nations locked arms and issued thorough sanctions on the Russian economy. These sanctions caused the Russian economy to plummet and prompted drastic retaliatory threats from the Russian government.

These Western sanctions greatly restricted Russia’s ability to conduct business with other nations by limiting its use of the SWIFT telecommunications network and making it virtually impossible for it to conduct business with the global reserve currency – the U.S. dollar.

The crippling effect these sanctions have had on the Russian economy prompted the emergency meeting between Chinese officials and financial executives. Chinese President Xi Jinping has been startled by the dollar freeze and is concerned about a similar policy being leveraged against China.

Reportedly, the U.S. is considering implementing similar packages of sanctions against China in the event that it moves forward with an invasion of Taiwan. Recent and repeated rhetoric from Chinese leadership indicates that it is not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when” China launches an invasion of Taiwan.

A source close to the Chinese officials who met said, “No one site could think of a good solution to the problem. China’s banking system isn’t prepared for a freeze of its dollar assets or exclusion from the Swift messaging system as the US has done to Russia.”

Reportedly, one idea proposed in the meeting was to force Chinese businesses that export to other nations to part ways with their holdings in U.S. dollars in exchange for Chinese renminbi.

Other proposed solutions such as swamping U.S. dollar holdings to favor the Euro were not thought to be practical.

Some of the Chinese leaders present doubted whether the U.S. even has the capacity to issue such sanctions on China’s economy.

Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, said, “It is difficult for the U.S. to impose massive sanctions against China. It is like mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war.”