Is Lisa Cooked?

This is a wild one. Last night, Donald Trump announced that he was firing Lisa Cook, one of the Federal Reserve Governors, for allegedly committing mortgage fraud.

Quite an interesting decision with rather unpleasant implications for two primary reasons:

1. The structure of the Federal Reserve intends to ensure that the Governors and Chair are not openly influenced by political entities. This decision continues a months-long trend of Donald Trump fighting with the Federal Reserve, firstly by being so openly critical about Jerome Powell's management of monetary policy, and now by directly trying to remove an acting Fed Governor. Skepticism that the Federal Reserve will truly remain independent continue to rise, but as my bankers always tell me, "the US economy continues to show resilience".

2. The current allegations are just that - allegations only. By firing Lisa Cook (or at least trying to) without her having her day in court, Donald Trump is side-stepping due process, a constitutional right, which continues to get overlooked by his supporters.

This decision serves as a reminder of Donald Trump's general approach to politics - move fast & break things. This whole trend seems to continue to rally support from conservatives who have historically complained that politics just moves too fucking slow. And to an extent, I get their perspective on being tired of nothing ever getting done. But when does it go too far? The systems of checks and balances that have been built and revised for ~250 years are breaking down in real-time, and it seems like the folks who support this behavior are those who are (surprise surprise!) best-positioned to handle the potential fallout.

Now to those who will read this and say that I'm obviously biased and would be pissing all over any decision Donald Trump makes - I actually fully agreed with his decision to fire the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When you are responsible for reporting on economic data every month, and you constantly have to rewrite historical data due to inaccuracy, there is a clear breakdown somewhere in the system. There needs to be some standard of ensuring that the data that the world uses to gauge the health of the US economy is of the highest quality and caliber. What I don't agree with, is that Trump just fired them without outlining the rationale, identifying the issues, and ensuring that the BLS is appropriately funded and enabled to drive systematic change in how this data is aggregated and reported on.

So anyways, moving fast & breaking things worked out for the 1% in Silicon Valley, no reason to believe it won't work out for the 1% in the US, right?

Economic data as of Aug 26, 2025:

• The dollar is down 9.5% YTD

• CPI is up from 2.3% to 2.7% from April until July

• Unemployment is up from 4.0% to 4.2% YTD

• The S&P 500 is up ~10% YTD

• The Nasdaq 100 is up ~11% YTD

Read the above information and ask yourself a simple question - who is well-positioned in this environment?