Let me guess.
Dems=great. GOP=Terrible. Until the next election we will see daily articles like thism
The only problem is that great Dems used to be Kennedy and Clinton. Something to ponder.

Instead of posting this poppycock, as difficult as it is for you, try explaining how Americans benefit by the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Show us where anybody has written that the "Dems = great", or anything to that effect. You can't.
Taking away protections removes stability in the markets and in society. The end result is not desirable. How does this MAGA? It doesn't - it's mainly political, and likely for the self-enrichment of a select few at the top of the chain. The dark side of the finance sector - i.e. con men (not naming any in particular) also gain an advantage.
Consumers are left exposed.
As @davidmoran summarized...." the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.... is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again."

Gosh, why would Dump want to remove consumer protections????
https://www.thedailybeast.com/more-than-800k-have-lost-2b-on-trumps-meme-coin/
"President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency, called $Trump, has cost investors billions. Trump announced the launch of his meme coin—a type of cryptocurrency that features Internet memes or celebrity mascots—just three days before his inauguration. [... ]Meanwhile, the Trumps have raked in over $100 million in trading fees as Trump makes moves to curb government efforts to regulate cryptocurrencies.
“The president is participating in shady crypto schemes that harm investors while at the same time appointing financial regulators who will roll back protections for victims and who may insulate him and his family from enforcement,” Corey Frayer, who recently left his job as a crypto adviser to the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the New York Times."

Danielle R. Sassoon, the US attorney who prosecuted Sam Bankman-Fried for fraud involving the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, just resigned as interim head of the SDNY office. Though not because Trump didn't like her (he had just named her interim head), nor because of a lack of the "right" credentials (she had clerked for Scalia and is a member of the Federalist Society).
Rather because she refused to drop the prosecution against (soon to be former?) Mayor Adams.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/nyregion/danielle-sassoon-quit-eric-adams.html

Thanks.
FYI - if your TD account was transitioned over to Schwab, I am told by Schwab rep that both of your consolidated 1099s will appear on the 1099 Dashboard under the new Schwab account number (and not in a separate, clearly identified subsection).
My dashboard says I will receive them on Feb 28.
Has anyone received their’s.

An update. The above information is incorrect. (Now you know why I keep checking with you guys about answers I receive from brokerage Reps.)
If your TD account was transitioned over to Schwab, under the 1099 Dashboard section (in the Statements and Tax Forms tab) the TD 1099s will appear under a separate heading "TD Ameritrade Tax Forms" below the group of Schwab 1099s which would be under "Charles Schwab Brokerage Tax Forms." If you have a few accounts in the Dashboard, you may have to scroll down a bit to get to the TD Ameritrade Tax Forms sub section (right above the Statements and Documents section). (In my linked accounts, the TD Ameritrade Tax Forms sub section or heading was not there as of yesterday, which prompted me to call Schwab yesterday to find out how I would locate the TD 1099s when they become available.)
You can also get to all your tax forms by going to the Statements and Documents section (make sure the Tax Forms option is selected). However, know that this feature can be glitchy sometimes and may not display properly (like right now it shows zero documents for me but when I started drafting this post, it was fully populated). My suggestion is to use 1099 Dashboard as your primary access for 1099s.
Yesterday, when I spoke with the Rep, I suggested to him that they put all the TD tax forms in a separate subsection but he insisted it is too late for that suggestion and that for each account, TD 1099 will be labeled with TDA and placed below the Schwab 1099 (which does not have a Schwab label and that is how you know what is available). I can not imagine Schwab redesigned the webpage presentation overnight based on my suggestion - may be other customers too already made similar suggestions or the Rep I spoke with was simply wrong. I must say Schwab, as a company, has acted on more of my suggestions than all other financial institutions combined. TDA made Schwab a better company for me and I am happy with the merger /acquisition.
P.S.: my legacy Schwab account 1099 was available on Jan 24. My transitioned TD 1099 became available today. My transitioned Schwab 1099 is still pending. For the accounts I baby sit, all the legacy and transitioned 1099s became available today. I personally am not in a hurry to get the 1099s as I would rather Schwab does not have to issue Corrected forms. Only letting the forum members know that many of the previously "available 2/28/2025" tax forms already became available. So, keep checking your account if you are anxious to get your tax return going.
(Not necessarily useful information to this post - As much as I love the new Schwab, one thing I would like Schwab Reps to learn is to assess the customer's level of sophistication before opening their mouth to make the conversation productive (short and sweet) - TDA Reps were very good at this and I could till today tell which Schwab Rep is a legacy TDA Rep and which one was hired by Schwab.)

"So the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
as I see it, is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again."
This isn't surprising when we have a money-grubbing grifter par excellence in the Oval Office!

relatedly:
Springtime for Scammers
Financial predation now has friends in high places
Paul Krugman
Feb 11
Just over two years ago Wells Fargo agreed to pay $3.7 billion — $1.7 billion in penalties and $2 billion in damages — to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the New York Times report put it, the payments were
to settle claims that it engaged in an array of banking violations over the last decade that harmed millions of consumers
The Times went on to explain:
The consumer protection bureau said Wells Fargo did not record customer payments on home and auto loans properly, wrongfully repossessed some borrowers’ cars and homes and charged overdraft fees even when customers had enough money to cover purchases they made with their bank cards.
This settlement followed earlier scandals at Wells Fargo, notably the “cross-selling scandal” in which, among other things, bank employees opened as many as 2 million accounts in customers’ names without their authorization. Altogether the bank has paid $6.2 billion in penalties since 2016.
Overall, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who conceived of CFPB, the bureau “has returned over $21 billion to families cheated by Wall Street.”
But now the agency that won those settlements has been effectively abolished. On Monday Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget and now CFPB’s acting head, sent the email above to all of the agency’s staff telling them to stay away from the office and do no work.
What’s this about? Let’s start by asking why CFPB was created.
The truth is that defending oneself against financial fraud is hard work. Do you carefully go through your bank statement every month, looking for possible unjustified fees? I know a few people who do, but most of us have too much else going on in our lives. When you take out a car loan, or invest for your retirement, do you go over the fine print with a magnifying glass, making sure you understand everything? Probably not. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live. Cognitive overload is a real thing, and it’s worse the further down the income scale you go — the cognitive burden of poverty has been extensively documented.
So what we do, most of the time, is trust financial institutions to be relatively honest, if only to protect their reputations. And we expect government regulators to step in when financial players abuse that trust.
What we learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was that much of this trust had been misplaced. Corporate cultures in the financial industry came to prioritize short-run profits over long-term reputation. Deregulation and lax regulation permitted widespread abuses. Most notably, the boom in subprime lending led to many families being sold financial products they didn’t understand, with lower-income borrowers receiving the worst treatment. As the late Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to warn his colleagues about the dangers, wrote:
Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.
But why create a new agency to limit these abuses? Don’t we already have bank regulators? Yes, but these regulators are primarily focused on securing the stability of the financial system. Protecting consumers from fraud is at best an afterthought.
Warren’s insight was that protecting consumers required creating a separate agency with its own institutional imperatives. And she was right: By any reasonable standard, CFPB has been an outstanding success story.
Why, then, rush to shutter the agency? By the way, this action, like much of what the Trump administration is doing, is almost surely illegal. It probably also won’t surprise you to learn that DOGE appears to have illegally been given access to much of the agency’s data.
Well, it’s illuminating to read the section on abolishing CFPB in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. According to the Mandate,
the agency has been assailed by critics as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits
Notice the careful wording: The document doesn’t assert that CFPB actually is a “shakedown mechanism” (which might have led to a lawsuit) but merely that “critics” have made that accusation. And if you follow the footnotes, the assault by critics appears to consist solely of three opinion pieces, one in the New York Post, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in Investors’ Business Daily.
Incidentally, that Investors’ Business Daily article accuses CFPB of funneling money to “radical Acorn-style pressure groups.” Does anyone not deeply mired in the fever swamps of right-wing conspiracy theory even remember what Acorn — a political association that was disbanded in 2010 — was?
Overall, Project 2025’s attack on the CFPB bears a family resemblance to Elon Musk’s claim that USAID is a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” It’s a bit milder, but equally absurd, and is clearly not the real reason for killing the agency.
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.
And let’s not forget that crypto, which has gained a lot of influence with this administration, has yet to find a real-world use case other than money laundering.
So the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as I see it, is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again.

”President Trump, who has lent his name to everything from steaks and wine to cryptocurrencies, now wants to sell you investment funds. Trump's social-media company, Trump Media & Technology DJT V V, said Thursday that it has applied for trademarks on a series of exchange-traded funds and separately managed accounts. The financial products, which include funds labeled "Made in America" and "Energy Independence," will launch later this year, Trump Media said.”
Excerpted from: “Trump Wants to Manage Your Investment Portfolio”
The Wall Street Journal - February 9, 2025

who would have suspected ayn rand's free market libertarian views were just pseudo-intellectual cover for white collar financial crime (and its re-definition as capitalism) ?

Part IV: There is a more striking contrast: in Why Globalization Works, he argued that most of the charges of the antimarket critics—whom he called, quoting the economist David Henderson, “new millennium collectivists” and who included people ranging from the British philosopher John Gray to the journalist Naomi Klein to the right-wing demagogue Pat Buchanan—were the result of too little rather than too much globalization. In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, he finds that the many problems of today’s rentier economy are “principally the outcome of failures of liberalization—above all, a failure to think through the institutional context for markets. The prevailing assumption was that the free pursuit of self-interest is enough on its own: it is not.” Wolf does not say that any of his earlier critics have been proved right by subsequent events. He was not wrong; “the prevailing assumption” was.
In these moments, Wolf uses the distinctive elite construction that the journalist William Schneider named the “past exonerative.” It’s that unmistakable mix of passive voice and past tense that people with power use to say things like “mistakes were made” or that extrajudicial drone murders “have been authorized.” Wolf does this both when his side has done something horrible that he cannot admit and when the other side has done something undeniably good that he cannot acknowledge. Thus we find that “colonial empires disappeared,” “trade unions have greatly weakened,” and “the factories disappeared in the old industrial locations.” The revolutionary struggles for power that these phrases embody are thus rendered invisible.
Wolf’s favored method of historical investigation is to begin with a reference to the ancient world free of any contextual background, followed by an ideological generalization about the nineteenth or twentieth century. Here’s one:
The principal answer [to the crisis of democratic capitalism] is the hollowing out of the middle classes, identified by Aristotle almost twenty-five hundred years ago as the core constituency for a constitutional democracy.
Or another, but in reverse order:
The idea of the perfectly ecological human is quite as much a delusion as Trotsky’s communist superman. Just consider the mass extinctions that followed humanity’s first arrival in Eurasia and the Americas back in prehistoric times.
These adventures in historical analogy and the frequent absence of any human agent serve to make Wolf’s highly ideological opinions appear to be timeless facts. Policies that might otherwise seem to be expressions of ruthless class interest are reframed as basic truths known or prevailing assumptions held by competent, reasonable people, who served to implement and safeguard them from dreamers and despots. But if they are reasonable truths, Wolf is left unable to explain how they have led to such unreasonable ends and empowered such unreasonable people.
Our elites have not suddenly become morally abhorrent; the financial globalization that Wolf championed has allowed them to remove themselves from democratic accountability, state regulation, and communities of obligation. It has also decimated countervailing powers such as organized labor, working-class political parties, and capital controls. The market never was “permeated” by the values of duty, fairness, and decency: it was constrained by nonmarket forces. Wolf has spent his career arguing that reason and freedom demanded the removal of those constraints. And here we are.
The epigraph to chapter 8 of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is Warren Buffett’s famous quote that “there’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” In the twenty years since the publication of Why Globalization Works, the rich have won their war on the working class, and as Polybius famously did not write about the Romans at Carthage, they have sown the fields with salt so that nothing can grow. Now their tribune wanders the desert they have made, and urges moderation.

Part III: The deeper possibility, unthinkable to Wolf, is that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy may have nothing to do with each other—or may even contradict each other. Wolf calls economics and politics “symbiotic twins,” which shows a poor grasp of both symbiosis and zygosity; he goes on to describe capitalism and democracy—specific versions of economics and politics—as inhabiting a “difficult marriage.” But they proceed from entirely different premises. Democracy is predicated on formal, substantive equality: one person, one vote. Capitalism is not, and is incompatible with substantive equality, because it is composed of workers and owners, success and failure, rich and poor. Capitalism is about self-interest and private gain; democracy is about public interest and civic responsibility. Capitalism’s moral justifications revolve around deservedness, efficiency, and individual risk-taking, none of which are important justifications for democracy. Capitalism is predicated on atomized individuals, democracy on shared publics.
Even the idea of freedom, which Wolf takes as essential to both, is radically different in each case. Private property, which is at the core of capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to unfettered freedom, because property involves the ability to exclude all other human beings from some part of the world. I am not free to live in your house, or even perhaps to walk across your land. I am not free to eat your dinner, even if I am starving and you intend to throw it away—even if I cooked it. Hence the basic insight of Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze that famines can take place without anyone’s property rights being violated. Freedom in capitalist markets entails the freedom of property owners to use and dispose of their property, including the freedom of business owners to run their businesses as little dictatorships, not as representative polities. You do not elect your boss, let alone vote on your wages or working hours. The political scientists Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch have argued that workplaces are fundamentally places of unfreedom—many workers do not even have enough individual liberty to decide when to go to the bathroom without their bosses’ permission.
The notion that capitalism and democracy are mutually harmonious is a relic of cold war ideology. Contrary to Wolf’s belief, nineteenth-century capitalism did not widely overlap with democracy: the British Empire and the United States were not places with egalitarian universal suffrage. Proponents of market liberalism from John Locke onward worried constantly that universal suffrage would simply mean poor people voting to expropriate the property of the wealthy. Little wonder that nineteenth-century opponents of capitalism referred to themselves as “social democrats.” They understood socialism as a project for expanding democracy beyond the artificially curtailed political sphere to the social and the economic. The enthusiasm with which the United States overthrew democratically elected leaders with even moderately socialist leanings in places like Guatemala, Iran, and Chile in the cold war era also seems to suggest that free markets were quite compatible with political dictatorship well into the recent past.
The marketization and globalization of the world since the 1970s is often referred to as the era of neoliberalism. The word “neoliberalism” appears once in Wolf’s book, to refer to how “freer markets” are described by their opponents. Scholars like Quinn Slobodian, Dara Orenstein, Amy Offner, Sam Wetherell, and Laleh Khalili have detailed at length the ways that neoliberal economic policies have worked to insulate property ownership from democratic politics in the postcolonial age. They have shown the reliance of globalized production on a variety of economic zones with laws, regulations, and systems of accountability different from those of their host polities and separated from democratic accountability. They have also followed the enthusiasm that free-market fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had for apartheid South Africa, colonial Hong Kong, Singapore, and other places that had little relationship to democracy or individual freedom.
If capitalism and democracy are not fundamentally dependent on each other, then there is no crisis “of” them as a coherent system. The capitalism part seems to be doing just fine. The problem is the threat that unfettered capitalism poses to democracy, and specifically, the inability of the ideology of political liberalism to contain that threat.
As the political theorist Brian Judge argues in his superb book Democracy in Default (2024), modern liberalism has constituted itself around a denial of the need for distributive conflicts. Instead of open conflict over resources and rewards (which is common to other forms of political ideology), liberalism puts its faith in things like education, technology, expertise, and, ultimately, market forces to indefinitely postpone those conflicts. As he puts it, “‘The market’ is a discursive construct operating within liberalism that reconciles the inherent tension between private property and universal consent.”
For decades now, the ideology of free-market liberalism has obfuscated the ongoing distributive conflicts of the world, but it has not blunted the material suffering of the people on the losing end. Since the 2008 crisis, the reality of ruthless distributive conflict has become impossible to ignore, but the failure of market liberalism to reconcile political equality and economic inequality has produced a global crisis of legitimacy and a growing constituency amenable to antiliberal figures like Trump, Orbán, Modi, and Bolsonaro. In his inability or unwillingness to see these contradictions, Wolf cannot reason his way out of the exact set of ideologies and policies that produced the crisis in the first place.
The substance of this book demands one kind of review, but it is not just any book on the predicaments of our moment. It was written by Martin Wolf, one of the most prominent advocates for the neoliberal transformation of the world. The book opens with the statement (drawn from his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award) that Wolf’s “opinions have altered as the world has unfolded.”
Rereading Why Globalization Works in light of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism does not reveal many alterations of opinion. Both books have a preface entitled “Why I Wrote This Book,” and both prefaces set the stage with the story of Wolf’s parents fleeing the Nazis, which led them to cherish democracy and individual liberty. Both books maintain that states and markets are necessary for each other, and specifically that liberal democracy and market globalization are symbiotic, albeit also in constant tension. Both rely on a sketchy historical narrative involving canonical figures like Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, and Locke to back up the claim that private property is the fundamental condition for political liberty. Both books conceive of Wolf’s opponents as a broad antimarket constituency of ill-informed utopian dreamers who would immediately become icy Stalinists upon gaining power.
Wolf has changed his mind on three main subjects: corporations, finance, and inequality. In 2004 he described critics of multinational corporate power as engaging in “a collective hysteria” and “a series of paranoid fantasies.” While he still thinks that “the ability and willingness of multinational companies to move their capital and know-how across frontiers” has on balance been a positive thing, he now concedes that it has been disadvantageous to workers. In 2004 he thought the purpose of corporations was to add value by using cheap resources (including people) otherwise outside of the global market economy. He now thinks that corporate liability needs to be strengthened and corporate political influence has gone too far, whereas in 2004 he argued that corporations had far less power than governments and that they merely represented one set of influencing forces among many. In 2004 he agreed that the frequency of financial crises in the preceding decade had imposed large costs and political setbacks on the project of globalization. But despite many blunders and painful experiences, he maintained that “emerging-market economies should ultimately plan to integrate into the global capital markets.” Today he notes that “the financial sector wastes both human and real resources. It is in large part a rent-extraction machine.” In 2004 he acknowledged that inequality had “apparently risen” in high-income countries, but thought that globalization’s contribution to this trend was unclear, and its main consequence had been poverty reduction. Today he notes that from 1993 to 2015 the top one percent captured over half of all increases in real pre-tax incomes, and he concedes that wealth is a source of power, through political influence, media ownership, philanthropy, and so on.

https://nybooks.com/articles/2025/01/16/never-too-much-the-crisis-of-democratic-capitalism-wolf/
Never Too Much’
Trevor Jackson
If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?
January 16, 2025 issue
Reviewed:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Martin Wolf
Penguin Press, 474 pp., $30.00
Illustration by Matt Dorfman
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure.
Most people have accurately realized “that these failings were the result not just of stupidity but of the intellectual and moral corruption of decision-makers and opinion formers at all levels—in the financial sector, regulatory bodies, academia, media, and politics.” And thus his conclusion: “Without ethical elites, democracy becomes a demagogic spectacle hiding a plutocratic reality. That also is its death.” Forty years of the corruption of our plutocratic elites has now led to what he views as an alarming populist reaction. Voters, especially young ones in the core democratic capitalist countries, have lost faith in the power of markets and liberalism. Serious international rivals have also emerged, in the forms of “demagogic authoritarian capitalism” in places like Turkey and Russia, and “bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism” in China, and Wolf views these systems, unlike earlier systemic rivals like communism, as serious threats. Liberal democratic capitalism is in danger both from within and without.
It’s a grim picture, and one that nearly any reader of any political persuasion can agree with. But for Wolf, these epochal global crises do not require radical change. The motto of the book (as he puts it) is “Never too much,” and he maintains that “reform is not revolution, but its opposite.” He is consistently contemptuous of any sort of structural change, quick to invoke despotism as the inevitable outcome of utopian thinking and to cite Edmund Burke on the inhumanity and impossibility of rebuilding society around first principles.
Instead, he prefers “piecemeal social engineering,” an idea that he adopts from the unconventional libertarian philosopher Karl Popper, and that he takes to mean “change targeted at remedying specific ills.” His targeted solutions for the specific ills that constitute the global crisis of democratic capitalism run from the anodyne to the surreal. Examples of the former include the idea that “public sector cash-flow accounts should be complemented with worked-out public sector balance sheets and accrual accounts,” or the need for corporations to have “excellent accounting standards” and diligent, independent auditors. Both are very reasonable proposals, and perhaps, at the margin, they really would erode the grip of plutocracy.
Others are standard repressive-technocrat fare. He rejects free higher education because too many people would go to college, imposing too high a fiscal burden on governments, and he doubts whether taxpayers should have to guarantee tertiary education as a universal right. He thinks there should be “controls on immigration that recognize the potential economic gains while also being politically acceptable and effective.” He thinks that defined-benefit retirement plans should be replaced by large-scale defined-contribution plans run by trustees who “would be allowed to adjust pensions in light of investment performance.” It is difficult to imagine many people democratically choosing a system in which unelected trustees could cut their pensions when the stock market does poorly, and there are good reasons to think that education is advantageous to both capitalism and democracy.

While traditional Republicans (if there are any left) might relish the shuttering of the CFPB on principle (less regulation of financial institutions), Musk has a more immediate objective.
Senator Ed Markey (via X, formerly known as Twitter) writes:

Elon wants the CFPB gone so tech billionaires can profit from apps, like X, that offer bank-like services but don’t follow financial laws that keep people’s money safe. Musk wants to use the government to put more in his pockets. This is a blatant conflict of interest. https://t.co/i3QdKC2Xjj [NPR Feb 7]

”pursues its investment objective by investing under normal circumstances at least 80% of its net assets (plus borrowings for investment purposes) in equity securities of U.S. and non-U.S. companies that Tweedy, Browne Company … believes are undervalued, and where either the company’s “insiders” have been actively purchasing the company’s equity securities and/or the company is conducting “opportunistic share buybacks.” … the Adviser considers a company’s “insiders” to be corporate officers, such as the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President, Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer, and/or directors, or controlling shareholders, who would typically own 10% or more of the company's outstanding shares … “
Amazing the different “strategies” they can come up with. :)

Gosh, why would Dump want to remove consumer protections????
https://www.thedailybeast.com/more-than-800k-have-lost-2b-on-trumps-meme-coin/
"President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency, called $Trump, has cost investors billions. Trump announced the launch of his meme coin—a type of cryptocurrency that features Internet memes or celebrity mascots—just three days before his inauguration. “Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW,” he wrote on TruthSocial. The opening sale for one of the 5,971,750 tokens was just 18 cents, but it quickly surged to $75. Early traders who purchased the meme coins within minutes walked away with profits, with the earliest trader making a two-day profit of $109 million, according to an analysis by the New York Times. But the price of $Trump has since plummeted to about $17, costing a far larger group cumulative losses of $2 billion. As of the middle of the week, more than 810,000 crypto wallets have lost money on the bet, an examination by crypto forensics firm Chainalysis showed. Meanwhile, the Trumps have raked in over $100 million in trading fees as Trump makes moves to curb government efforts to regulate cryptocurrencies.
“The president is participating in shady crypto schemes that harm investors while at the same time appointing financial regulators who will roll back protections for victims and who may insulate him and his family from enforcement,” Corey Frayer, who recently left his job as a crypto adviser to the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the New York Times."

I guess that Hondo doesn't know that Congress authorized the CFPB to try and prevent a repeat of the abuses which caused the 2008 financial disaster. It's pretty obvious that Trump and Musk don't really care about a repeat of 2008.

IMO,
a larger percentage of old MAGA and Hispanics for Trump need more consumer protection than any other group in this country or anyone in this forum. They are probably drunk asleep giddy with their cultural (i.e., non fiscal social) agenda wins while the new MAGA chip away their rights and wealth. As much as I would like a thriving CGPB, I am happy to wait for the ______ for Trump to wake up. Can not fight every fight.
The only one that benefits from gutting the CFPB are the corporations that fleece the consumer. Not going to worry when all this might end badly. You can not thrive if you do not survive. First rule of survival is eliminate "worry" from vocabulary. Hopefully, you own enough financial stocks to reduce / eliminate the drag that you might personally suffer from gutting of the CGPB. If not, pick some up when they are on sale.

"Here is the richest man in the world bragging about eliminating an agency that has delivered $21 billion back to working-class families since its inception," said Democrats on the House Committee on Financial Services, led by Ranking Member Maxine Waters of California. "Even most Republicans want the CFPB to continue protecting them from being ripped off by abusive big banks and predatory lenders."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/musk-cfpb-2671120924
"Here are the FACTS: 81% of voters, both Republicans and Democrats, support the CFPB and want the agency to continue its work," said Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), also a member of the committee. "Even so, Trump has moved to freeze the CFPB to take money out of YOUR pocket to line those of his billionaire friends."

Schwab platform fees for most OEFs:
NTF funds
- OneSource (retail): typically 0.40%, can be as high as 0.45%
- Retirement plans (e.g. 401k): usually 0.10% to 0.50%, can be as high as 1.10%
TF funds: typically 0.10%, can be as high as 0.25%

An increased transaction fee [currently $74.95] applies to purchases made by self-directed retail clients of funds from certain fund families that do not pay Schwab for recordkeeping, shareholder, and other administrative services on fund shares held by self-directed retail clients

Those families are Vanguard, D&C, and Fidelity.
Schwab's automatic investment plan, begun in 2023, allows one to buy additional shares of most mutual funds except those for which Schwab charges "an increased transaction fee". So you can't cheaply buy additional shares of Vanguard, D&C, or Fidelity funds at Schwab.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1539996/000116204425000126/dss497.htm
DSS AmericaFirst Total Return Bond Fund
Class A: DGQAX
Class U: DGQUX
Class I: DGQIX
FEBRUARY 6, 2025
SUPPLEMENT TO THE PROSPECTUS AND SUMMARY PROSPECTUS DATED NOVEMBER 1, 2024
______________________________________________________________________________
The Board of Trustees of DSS AmericaFirst Funds (the “Trust”) has concluded that it is in the best interests of the DSS AmericaFirst Total Return Bond Fund (the “Fund”) and its shareholders that the Fund cease operations. The Board has determined to close the Fund and redeem all outstanding shares no later than the close of business on February 28, 2025.
Effective immediately, the Fund will not accept any new investments. In the near term, the Fund will begin liquidating its portfolio and will invest in cash or cash equivalents (such as money market funds) until all shares have been redeemed. The Fund will not be able to pursue its stated investment objective once it begins liquidating its portfolio. Shares of the Fund are otherwise not available for purchase.
Even though the DSS AmericaFirst Total Return Bond Fund is closing, you may wish to continue your investment with another fund in the DSS AmericaFirst fund family. Prior to February 28, 2025, you may exchange your shares, in accordance with the “How to Exchange Shares” section of the Fund’s Prospectus, which allows shareholders to exchange their shares in the Fund for the same share class of another DSS AmerficaFirst fund, as listed below. The Board is waiving the share exchange minimum so that exchanges may be made with any amount of shares.
DSS AmericaFirst Income Fund
Class A: AFPAX Class U: AFPUX Class I: AFPIX
DSS AmericaFirst Monthly Risk-On Risk-Off Fund
Class A: ABRFX Class U: ABRUX Class I: ABRWX
DSS AmericaFirst Alpha Trends Factor Fund
Class A: SBQAX Class U: SBQUX Class I: SBQIX
You may exchange shares either by telephone by calling 1-877-217-8501, if you have not canceled your telephone privilege, or in writing. Written requests for exchange must provide the following:
·current Fund’s name;
·account names and numbers;
·name of the Fund and share class you wish to exchange your shares into;
·the amount you wish to exchange;
·specify the shareholder privileges you wish to retain (e.g., Telephone Privileges); and
·signatures of all registered owners.
To exchange shares by telephone, you should call 1-877-217-8501 on any day the Funds are open. The Fund will process telephone requests made after the close of business on the next business day. You should notify the Funds in writing of all shareholder service privileges you wish to continue in any new account opened by a telephone exchange request. Please note that the Funds will only accept exchanges if your ownership registrations in both accounts are identical.
Prior to February 28, 2025, you may redeem your shares, in accordance with the “How to Redeem Shares” section of the Fund’s Prospectus. Unless your investment in the Fund is through a tax-deferred retirement account, a redemption is subject to tax on any taxable gains. Please refer to the “Dividends, Distributions and Taxes” section in the Prospectus for general information. You may wish to consult your tax advisor about your particular situation.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR RETIREMENT PLAN INVESTORS
If you are a retirement plan investor, you should consult your tax advisor regarding the consequences of any redemption of Fund shares. If you receive a distribution from an Individual Retirement Account or a Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) IRA, you must roll the proceeds into another Individual Retirement Account within sixty (60) days of the date of the distribution in order to avoid having to include the distribution in your taxable income for the year. If you receive a distribution from a 403(b)(7) Custodian Account (Tax-Sheltered account) or a Keogh Account, you must roll the distribution into a similar type of retirement plan within sixty (60) days in order to avoid disqualification of your plan and the severe tax consequences that it can bring. If you are the trustee of a Qualified Retirement Plan, you may reinvest the money in any way permitted by the plan and trust agreement.
ANY SHAREHOLDERS WHO HAVE NOT REDEEMED THEIR SHARES OF THE FUND PRIOR TO FEBRUARY 28, 2025, WILL HAVE THEIR SHARES AUTOMATICALLY REDEEMED AS OF THAT DATE, AND PROCEEDS WILL BE SENT TO THE ADDRESS OF RECORD. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR NEED ASSISTANCE, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR FINANCIAL ADVISOR DIRECTLY OR THE FUND AT 1-877-217-8501.
________________________
The Prospectus, Summary Prospectus for the Fund and Statement of Additional Information each dated November 1, 2025, and as may be supplemented, each provide information about the Fund and should be retained for future reference. These documents have been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and are incorporated herein by reference. All of these documents are available upon request and without charge by calling toll free 1-877-217-8501.
Please retain this Supplement for future reference.

Following are edited excerpts from a current report in The Washington Post:

The consumer watchdog agency was formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Elon Musk wants to “delete” it.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau halted much of its work to investigate and penalize corporate wrongdoing on Monday, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — tapped to lead the watchdog on an acting basis — ordered an agency-wide review to “promote consistency” with the new Trump administration.
Shortly after assuming the post, Bessent and his aides ordered bureau staff in an email to cease crafting regulations, enforcing rules, conducting probes or providing “public communications of any type,” according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post, which said he had instituted the ban “effective immediately.”
The missive appeared to herald a stark shift for the CFPB, a powerful agency formed in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or predatory financial practices. It came on the same day that President Donald Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio acting administrator of another agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the administration moved to shutter as part of a broad and contested effort to slash government spending and regulation.
The financial watchdog is a longtime target of Republicans’ scorn: Party lawmakers have threatened for years to defund the CFPB or neuter its powers — and tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is advising Trump on his reconfiguration of American government, has called on Congress to “delete” the bureau entirely.
Under President Joe Biden, the CFPB had been active and aggressive: Its leader, Rohit Chopra, issued a wide array of rules to crack down on predatory lending, reduce the burden of medical debt and cut fees that customers pay when they fall behind on their credit card bills or overextend their checking accounts. Chopra also expanded the bureau’s watch over Apple, Google and other tech giants as their digital payment apps grew more popular with consumers.
Trump similarly moved to restrain the CFPB during his first term. His acting director then — former congressman Mick Mulvaney — at one point requested no new money for the agency and settled its pending enforcement actions, sometimes for as little as $1.
This time, Republicans have promised to pursue even more significant changes to the CFPB, targeting its leadership structure, investigative powers and funding source; the bureau gets its money from the Federal Reserve. Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) unveiled the latest bill to curtail its funding, describing the CFPB as an “unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic agency.”