All posts tagged "Treasury Department"

An economist sounded the alarm on the Trump administration's "desperate attempt" to avoid "blaring warnings" from financial markets.

In a Thursday opinion column published by The New York Times, economist Eswar Prasad explained why President Donald Trump and the U.S. Treasury were interested in buying billions of dollars' worth of Japanese yen and intervening in the country's currency policy.

"But they are tied together by one big problem: unsustainably high levels of government debt," Prasad wrote. "Currency market intervention is a desperate attempt by Tokyo and Washington to evade the blaring warnings from financial markets."...

The Trump administration's ouster of a top Internal Revenue Service attorney might have created a "new potential whistleblower" who could reveal "what is really going on in the White House," a legal expert warned Saturday.

Legal AF analyst Michael Popok, responding the Wall Street Journal report that top Treasury Department tax policy official Kenneth Kies had been forced out of his job, noted he "used to be Donald Trump's personal tax lawyer and lobbyist."

Kies had since become an assistant Treasury secretary and acting chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, who, according to Popok, resigned "rather than allow the White House to violate a federal criminal statute."...

A Reuters photographer Evan Vucci zeroed in on a Trump Cabinet secretary's notes scribbled with a message to himself.

"Resilience," read the top of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's notes during an eventful meeting on Wednesday.

Bessent was sitting in a meeting that featured Trump threatening to bomb U.S. allies and Department of Homeland Security Sec. Markwayne Mullin saying Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) deserved to be pepper-sprayed. ...

Two Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Judy Chu (D-CA) and Gwen Moore (D-WI) — found House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to be "alarmingly" ignorant of Elon Musk's intentions as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rampaged its way through the federal government, according to a new report.

The congresswomen are members of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the Treasury Department. They wrote in an opinion piece for MSNBC that they "marched" to Johnson's office in an attempt to question Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was scheduled to meet with the House speaker.

Chu and Moore wanted answers to the following questions: "Does no one outside of Musk and his team know how this data is being handled and used? Is it being manipulated? Are back doors into the system being added? Where is any extracted data being maintained?"...

CNN anchor Kate Bolduan asked former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to weigh in on the fatalistic views held by some Republicans when it comes to Elon Musk having access to sensitive government information.

On Tuesday's News Central, Bolduan began, "Just earlier in the show, Secretary, I had the former Republican Governor of New Hampshire on, Chris Sununu, and he campaigned against Donald Trump ... he was for Nikki Haley. So, he says he doesn't like him, but he now says that this does not worry him at all.

"He actually applauds Elon Musk's move going into the Treasury and going into this payment system." ...

A former Twitter executive is dishing out advice to federal workers thrown off balance by the Elon Musk/Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) takeover of agencies like USAID and the Treasury Department.

Musk has been criticized for his slash and burn tactics that are eerily similar to how he handled his takeover at Twitter, now rebranded as X.

Rumman Chowdhury, who served as director for the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team,at X, told MSNBC's Jen Psaki Sunday that Musk's strategy of "shock and awe" is meant to "constantly keep people scared, uninformed, keep changing things up on them, make demands that are impossible, make new hoops to jump through." ...