1) Mortgage Fraud Caused the 2008 Housing Collapse

Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook is suing the Trump administration for wrongful termination.

Trump fired Cook based on findings by the Federal Housing Finance Agency that she lied on her mortgage applications when she claimed that two homes she bought just two weeks apart would both be her principal residency.

We don't know whether Trump has the right to remove Cook - that's for the courts to decide - but what shocks us about this story is that so many liberals insist Cook did nothing wrong.

One of them is Senator Elizabeth Warren, the self-righteous loudmouth who made a name for herself in the aftermath of the 2008 mortgage meltdown by attacking the fraudsters in the mortgage industry who helped send the U.S. economy into a mini-depression.

Now, suddenly mortgage fraud is no big deal when it’s her political allies who commit it.  She has taken to the airwaves ardently defending Cook and treating her like a victim. Paul Krugman likened her potential fraud to a grade school student "violating hall pass privileges."  Cook’s latest defense is she committed a mere "clerical error.”

Yes. Sure it was.

Sorry. Lying on a mortgage application - if she did - is a serious crime and warrants her removal from the Fed. Period.

Just to refresh everyone's memory, these headlines from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia explain the origins of the housing crisis:

Here is how a famous study in The Review of Financial Studies summarized the housing collapse:

This paper examines apparent fraud among securitized nonagency loans using three indicators: unreported second liens, owner occupancy misreporting, and appraisal overstatements. We find that around 48% of loans exhibited at least one indicator of misrepresentation. Surprisingly, misreporting is similar in both low and full documentation loans and is associated with a 51% higher likelihood of delinquency

Now, imagine for a moment that Ms. Cook were a conservative nominee to serve on the Fed Board of Governors.  Senator Warren and her squad would be bloviating on every TV channel every night about putting a mortgage cheat in charge of the housing market. But they have no problem with one staying on the board.

Hypocritical?

2) So Much for Trump  Causing a “Second Great Depression”

Yesterday's GDP revisions were very positive. Not only did the headline number improve from 3.0% in the advance estimate to 3.3% but government purchases were simultaneously revised down from growth to contraction, while consumer spending was revised higher. That means private growth was above the headline number.

Best of all was the surge in real gross domestic income, which rose 4.8% last quarter. The average growth rate of real GDP and real GDI was a healthy 4.0%. Low inflation raised real growth.

Real private nonresidential fixed investment--the driver of long-run economic growth--was also revised higher to 5.7% and that's on top of a 10.3% increase in the first quarter. The decline in overall investment was due to nonfarm inventories being sold off, after those inventories were imported in the first quarter to front run tariffs.

Caution: The latest GDP NOW forecast for quarter 3 growth is 2.2%, and we think tariffs are the biggest pullback on maintaining 3%+ growth.

3) Bye-Bye to the UN's "Net-Zero Banking Alliance"

For five years we at UP have been on a search and destroy mission to revere the absurd and nefarious idea of zero fossil fuel commitments made by hundreds of cowardly American corporations - even energy companies. The banks took the lead with dangerous implications for the financing of coal, oil, and natural gas projects. The idea of net zero fossil fuels (80% of our energy source today) would be the economic equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb.

So it's very good news for American prosperity that this deranged climate change idea is now on pause. Our ongoing mission at UP is to get every Fortune 100 company to renounce Net Zero idiocy.

4) Bill Gates Stops Funding Left-Wing Mothership Arabella

Bill Gates is the Big Kahuna. His Gates Foundation is the nation's largest charitable foundation with an endowment of $77 billion.

So it's big news that Gates is no longer contributing money to Arabella Advisors, a $1 billion a year left-wing "dark money" network that the New York Times describes as having "funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and progressive causes."  Gates was one of Arabella's earliest backers when it was formed in 2005 and has since directed or given over $450 million to nonprofit funds that Arabella administers.

Arabella itself doesn't make grants or engage in explicit political activity, but it's the mothership for funding climate change and big government initiatives worldwide. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly given $350 million to Arabella.

Elon Musk claims that Arabella is a key funder of a "left-wing NGO cabal" that was behind anti-Tesla protests after he was made head of the DOGE cost-cutting effort by President Trump.

This good news from Bill Gates comes at a time when Trump has issued a long-overdue executive order authorizing the Attorney General to investigate political use of federal grants. If you want to read a good book on Arabella, we suggest a great book Arabella by Scott Walter.

5) Trump and Big Tech – A Separate Peace

This remarkable Truth Social post from Donald Trump is spot on, and hopefully marks a pivot point with Republicans recognizing the spectacular economic and scientific achievement of America’s global dominance in the digital age:

We’ve noted over and over on these pages that the tech companies have become globally dominant because we have let them flourish without excessive taxes, regulations, lawsuits and subsidies.  This now $20 trillion American industry is one of the greatest testaments to the power of laissez faire economics in world history. And no: Al Gore did NOT Invent the Internet.

Mr. President, this is exactly why giving a $10 billion federal handout to Intel is a really, really bad idea. It will kill our domestic microchip industry.

6) Three-Dimensional Chess?

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