”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.”

And here's more on what was thought to be priced in from The Barron's Daily (BOLD added)
Trump Tariffs Cause Stock Market Chaos. Why Wall Street Didn’t Act on Warnings and 5 Other Things to Know Today.

President Donald Trump looks set to deliver on his promise and impose hefty tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, with Europe next in his sights. Amid all the turbulence that’s causing in financial markets, one question is obvious—why is this such a surprise?
After all, this is what Trump promised to do since he started his campaign to retake the White House. He reiterated it after he was elected in November. He even gave specific numbers and dates for a start last week.
But traders were still skeptical that anything material would come of it. Stocks rose markedly in January, extending impressive gains since Trump’s victory in November on optimism that deregulation and tax cuts would bolster corporate earnings.
The reason investors dismissed the rather obvious signs was because the tariffs don’t seem to make sense. Maybe they would work as a negotiating technique to extract concessions on other things, but from an economic perspective it’s hard to see what tariffs accomplish—other than rapidly increasing prices for fuel and other goods that will hamper economic growth.
Furthermore, the actual announcement was on the extreme end of the spectrum of what was possible. George Saravelos, a strategist at Deutsche Bank, noted that the tariffs are three times larger than had been priced into the market—and five times as big as the cumulative action Trump took in his first term.
To be sure, Trump may yet de-escalate and walk back the levies—or be forced to do so by the courts or Congress. Given the market’s early losses Monday, it would still be a huge surprise if the tariffs lasted a long time—it certainly seems unlikely they will be in place for four years.
One thing is clear. Chaos and confusion will remain a feature of Trump’s policies.

I believe I posted something similar to @rforno’s Bloomberg data back on January 27 under @Mark’s ”Howard Marks” thread. Here it is (scroll up a bit).
Re: the ongoing discussion (as much about sources as NVDA), I’d agree cable “financial” television is pretty worthless, often inaccurate, slanted or misleading. Most days a parade of clowns talking their book sums it up nicely. Subscribers to Bloomberg’s online resources and print stories, however, fare much better. There are troves of data on virtually every global market and continuous updates 24/7. Bloomberg has the same in depth research tools (stocks, funds, etc) you’ll find at the WSJ and elsewhere. It’s a bit pricy at $329 yearly. Wonder how many here read it?
I read Bloomberg, the WSJ and Barron’s. Also subscribe to a daily financial blog and a monthly financial newsletter. I read The Observer every month. Taken together these sources more than meet my investment appetite & needs. However, our financial situation, education level, amount of wealth managed and available time all influence where we look for financial information.
I think Bloomberg’s paid subscription website does deserve a place somewhere in the hierarchy of financial news sources for average investors. Please do not conflate it with the on-air circus. If folks here have favorite sources to recommend perhaps they will provide links.
Regarding NVDIA. The data @rforno (and I earlier) posted was designed to catch eyeballs. Not the only way to view it of course. @BaluBalu is spot-on that the percentage moves were greater when the stock had a much lower market cap.

Businesses, shoppers brace for higher prices if tariffs on Mexico and Canada imports start Saturday
Following are edited excerpts from a current NPR report:

Businesses and shoppers in the U.S. are bracing for higher prices on everything from gasoline to guacamole, as President Trump renews his threat to impose steep tariffs this weekend on imports from two of the country's biggest trading partners.
Trump told reporters at the White House Thursday that he intends to follow through with his threat to slap a 25% tax on imports from Canada and Mexico starting Saturday, in response to what he called a flow of immigrants and drugs across the country's northern and southern borders.
General Motors told financial analysts on Tuesday that it could shift some pickup truck production out of Mexico and Canada if tariffs are imposed. But the automaker is reluctant to act while the trade landscape is still uncertain.
"We are prepared to mitigate near-term impacts," said CEO Mary Barra. "What we won't do is spend [a] large amount of capital without clarity." The auto industry in North America is highly integrated, relying on manufacturing in all three countries.
Mexico is a leading producer of flat-screen TVs.
Canada is also a major supplier of crude oil to U.S. refineries, especially in the Midwest. "Increasing expenses by 25% is going to lead to higher costs at the pump for U.S. consumers and higher input costs for businesses around the country," said Matthew Martdin of Oxford Economics.
Mexico and Canada would likely respond to any tariffs by imposing taxes of their own on U.S. exports.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1593547/000139834425001451/fp0092095-2_497.htm
497 1 fp0092095-2_497.htm
THE ADVISORS’ INNER CIRCLE FUND III
(the “Trust”)
Mesirow Enhanced Core Plus Fund
(the “Fund”)
Supplement dated January 30, 2025 to the Fund’s Prospectus (the “Prospectus”) and Statement of Additional Information (“SAI”), each dated January 28, 2025
This supplement provides new and additional information beyond that contained in the Prospectus and SAI, and should be read in conjunction with the Prospectus and SAI.
The Board of Trustees of the Trust, at the recommendation of Mesirow Financial Investment Management, Inc. (the “Adviser”), the investment adviser of the Fund, has approved a plan of liquidation providing for the liquidation of the Fund’s assets and the distribution of the net proceeds pro rata to the Fund’s shareholders. In connection therewith, the Fund is closed to investments from new and existing shareholders effective immediately. The Fund is expected to cease operations and liquidate on or about March 3, 2025 (the “Liquidation Date”). The Liquidation Date may be changed without notice at the discretion of the Trust’s officers.
Prior to the Liquidation Date, shareholders may redeem (sell) their shares in the manner described in the “Purchasing, Selling and Exchanging Fund Shares – How to Sell Your Fund Shares” section of the Prospectus. For those Fund shareholders that do not redeem (sell) their shares prior to the Liquidation Date, the Fund will distribute to each such shareholder, on or promptly after the Liquidation Date, a liquidating cash distribution equal in value to the shareholder’s interest in the net assets of the Fund as of the Liquidation Date.
In anticipation of the liquidation of the Fund, the Adviser may manage the Fund in a manner intended to facilitate the Fund’s orderly liquidation, such as by holding cash or making investments in other highly liquid assets. As a result, during this time, all or a portion of the Fund may not be invested in a manner consistent with its stated investment strategies, which may prevent the Fund from achieving its investment objective.
The liquidation distribution amount will include any accrued income and capital gains, will be treated as a payment in exchange for shares and will generally be a taxable event for shareholders investing through taxable accounts. You should consult your personal tax advisor concerning your particular tax situation. Shareholders remaining in the Fund on the Liquidation Date will not be charged any transaction fees by the Fund. However, the net asset value of the Fund on the Liquidation Date will reflect costs of liquidating the Fund. Shareholders will receive liquidation proceeds as soon as practicable after the Liquidation Date.
PLEASE RETAIN THIS SUPPLEMENT FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.
MES-SK-007-0200

YBB Notes After the Press Conference
Rates: Fed funds held at 4.25-4.50%, bank reserves rate at 4.40%, discount rate at 4.50%. Treasury QT continues at -$25 billion/mo, MBS QT at -$35 billion/mo.
Financial conditions are restrictive considering that the longer term rates have risen. Fed fund rates are well above the neutral rate (that’s known in hindsight only), so the trend for fed fund rates is flat or down.
Fed has a dual mandate for inflation & jobs. It will stick to the +2% average inflation target (trailing 12 months) as most global central banks do. It’s a bad idea to talk about changing the goals while not meeting them. The 5-yr Fed review will not include the +2% average inflation target.
There are uncertainties with any new administration. So, the Fed will be watching how the details evolve for fiscal, tariff & immigration policies.
Fed will evaluation President’s Executive Orders & the applicable laws (Dodd-Frank, etc) as they relate to DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) & other matters. The Fed operates with its own resources & not with annual federal budget allocations. The importance of central bank independence has been proven over time.
Fed models consider a wide range of parameters & outcomes, but it waits for specific scenarios to develop before acting.
The Fed has withdrawn from the NGFS (Network for Greening the Financial System) because NGFS goals have become too broad globally, while the Fed has narrower mandate & focus.
The Fed isn’t concerned about the stock market levels or the popularity of cryptos, but it evaluates them from the perspectives of financial stability. Regulation of banks under Fed supervision is to ensure that asset risks are appropriately accounted for.
Housing OERs are coming down from high levels. Higher mortgage rates are negatively impacting housing.
Consumers will benefit from lower inflation, but that doesn’t mean lower prices & that is causing some unhappiness.
https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/post/1861/thread

slower moving, but possible larger GFC trigger, is making crypto part of mainstream financial institutions (many willing participants as toll takers, not liability holders).
signs :
- moving crypto oversight away from SEC (to commodities board w/no enforcement powers).
- opening up entirely to non-accredited investors.
u.s. never had a potus, and team, where somesuch has become major\primary store of wealth, and has already placed appointees with unfettered views on such a financial instrument. a bailout via drawing value from other assets would be a foregone conclusion.