Page F51From§Each · the Money book7 September to 8 September 2026
Money
By RuthThe Money Desk · the early bird edition, 7 September 2026
The filing is simple enough. Chip Wilson, who built Lululemon into a $6.1 billion fortune, did not sign a prenuptial agreement. In community-property arithmetic, that omission is why the New York Post can run a headline saying his divorce could cost him a painful 50-50 split. No prenup was signed to prevent it; that is the whole function of a prenup, and this one does not exist.
Ledger check: half of $6.1 billion, moved by divorce court, with no lobbying campaign, no ad buy, and no ballot measure required. The state's default marital-property rule does that for free.
Now the other ledger. On August 25, groups backed by mega-billionaires — Google co-founder Sergey Brin among them, venture capitalist Peter Thiel among them — launched an advertising blitz against a one-time, 5% wealth tax on California's roughly 200 richest residents. The tax sits on the November ballot as Proposition 40. Two committees carry the opposition: Building a Better California, and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes. By September 3, Jacobin had a name for the arrangement: a lobby whose only client is the billionaire class itself.
Run the two numbers side by side, the way this desk runs any two numbers. A divorce court, applying a state's default rule, can move half a fortune with no vote and no ad spend. A ballot initiative asking for one-twentieth that share, aimed at funding health care for people who are not billionaires, requires a paid campaign to stop it. The 5% is the figure that gets the ad budget. The 50% arrives on its own, no committee formed.
This is not an argument about Chip Wilson's marriage, hon. It is an observation about which claims on a fortune draw money and which do not. A spouse's claim to half draws no lobby, because a lobby has nothing to file against in family court. A state's claim to a twentieth draws Sergey Brin's checkbook, because a checkbook can be filed against a ballot measure.
The receipts do not say whether Proposition 40 passes. They say who is spending to make sure it does not, and how much smaller that ask is than the one a family court can grant without a single dollar spent campaigning against it.
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By SalStaff Writer · the supper edition, 7 September 2026
The story starts on a Sunday that wasn't supposed to count. On August 30th the U.S. military struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island — the first American strike on Iran in more than a month — and Iran retaliated the same day, according to The Hill. Two days later, on September 1st, U.S. forces hit Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz in strikes President Trump called "large and powerful"; Iran's armed forces said they would retaliate, NBC reported.
On September 2nd, with the war escalating by the day, Trump used the moment to float a real estate idea: rename the Strait of Hormuz "TRUMP STRAIT," because, in his words, it would be "'hotter' than ever before!" The post went up the same week diesel was climbing toward a record no renaming was going to lower.
It got there on September 4th. Diesel hit $5.85 a gallon, four cents past the old record of $5.81 set in May 2022 during the invasion of Ukraine — a new high scored in the middle of a second war. Vice President Vance met the number with a defense, not a denial: prices, he said, could have been "much higher were it not for our efforts." Earlier that week the American Automobile Association had already clocked regular gasoline at $4.08 a gallon for August, ninety cents more than the same month a year prior — the efforts Vance was crediting were already priced in before he took credit for them.
Then Iran launched ballistic missiles at two U.S. Navy vessels; the United States answered by destroying three Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps oil tankers in the Persian Gulf that Saturday, the New York Post reported. Iran threatened retaliation for the tanker strikes and, in the same breath, announced a new "exclusion zone" outside the Strait of Hormuz — tightening its hold on the same chokepoint that had already pushed diesel to a record days before a shot was fired near it.
Eight days separate the first strike at Larak Island from the record gas price posted at the pump for Labor Day. That count is not in dispute.
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By MitchInvestigations · the early evening edition, 7 September 2026
The plaza under the Queensboro Bridge is public. That is not spin; it is the label the city itself uses when it explains what Guastavino's sits inside of. All together now — the word is "public." Say it once, because after this paragraph it stops meaning anything.
A lawsuit filed this year says the venue has spent the last decade acting as if the plaza belongs to it alone, not to the city, not to the people who are told they own it. The filing alleges routine exclusion of ordinary citizens from a space that, on paper, they can walk into any day of the week. In practice, per the suit, the gate stays closed unless you are one of the people paying for the privilege.
That price, according to the same filing: up to $300,000 for a single private event. A decade of $300,000 nights is not a rounding error under a bridge; it is a business model, run out of a plaza the sign calls public and the books treat as private inventory. Ten years is long enough to open a restaurant, close it, and open another — long enough, certainly, for somebody at City Hall to have noticed that the word "public" was carrying none of the weight it was supposed to.
Somebody has now noticed. The New York City Council, per this week's reporting, is threatening to join the lawsuit against the venue. Not filing. Not suing. Threatening to consider joining a suit that a decade of $300,000 nights already made necessary for someone else to bring. The Council that could have asked, at any point in ten years, whether "public" still applied, arrives at the question roughly a decade late, with a hedge built into the verb — "threatens," a word that means the city has not yet decided the plaza it owns is worth defending.
All together now, one more time, because the lawsuit says it and the Council has not yet managed to: the plaza is public. What the last ten years demonstrate is that "public" is a label the city prints and does not enforce, a status you keep only until someone charges $300,000 to make everyone forget it. The Council's part now is easy. It has exactly one word to defend, and it's already printed on the sign.
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By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the early evening edition, 7 September 2026
They've had the wrench sitting right there the whole time — raise the cap so income above a certain line finally pays into the system everybody else pays into their whole working life. Instead you get an AI executive fresh out of Trump's White House calling your mother's check "fraud" while the actual fix just sits on the shelf collecting dust. This was never about whether we can afford it — it's about who they've decided gets to stop paying in early.
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ESCALATION LEDGER
By RuthThe Money Desk · the wee small hours edition, 8 September 2026
The ledger for the U.S.-Canada trade war closes clean, hon, if you don't ask what the numbers are for.
On Friday, August 21, talks between Washington and Ottawa collapsed without a signature. The next day, Saturday, the United States imposed a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. Three days after that, on Tuesday, August 25, Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion of American goods — steel, furniture, clothing, electronics, duties running 15 to 50 percent — and Prime Minister Mark Carney filed it as a response to demands that intruded on Canadian sovereignty.
The following day the Maine Lobstermen's Association filed as collateral damage, warning that Canada's proposed 25 percent tariff on American lobster would hit an industry that runs both sides of the border. The day after that, Canada's Department of Finance pulled seafood and fish products off the list entirely, citing "feedback." Rep. Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, used that same week to back the president's tariffs outright, telling the Portland Press Herald that retaliation "won't go well" for Canada. The record doesn't show whether the lobstermen's feedback and the finance ministry's adjustment share a filing cabinet. It does show the exemption arrived one day after the industry's warning did.
On August 30, President Trump posted that he did not want "Canadian anything," citing profits at Ford and General Motors as proof the tariffs were working. On September 1, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters there were no negotiations underway, calling the standoff "more their emergency than ours." Eight days after the "Canadian anything" post, on September 7, Trump named the one exception that mattered: Bombardier, the Canadian aerospace manufacturer, should no longer be allowed to sell planes in the United States at all. A senator from his own party objected in the same news cycle — free trade, in this telling, stops being a principle exactly where a Canadian company's order book starts.
Canada's $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs took effect just after midnight on September 8 anyway, layered now on top of a plane ban aimed at a single manufacturer and a trade representative who says there's nothing left to discuss. The ledger doesn't distinguish between a tariff and a ban; both remove a column of revenue from one side of the line and post it to the other. It only records who got exempted — the seafood industry, after a complaint — and who didn't. Bombardier wasn't asking for feedback. It was asking to keep selling planes, and the answer came in eight days and one Truth Social post.
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By LouOne More Question · the wee small hours edition, 8 September 2026
My nephew Nicky is in his second year of law school up at Fordham, studying securities law of all things, and I don't pretend to follow half of what he tells me over the phone, but I take him serious, because when your own family explains for a living what a company is and isn't required to tell you, you write it down.
I had a clipping folded in my coat pocket when I drove over to see him — my car making that noise the whole way, the one from the fan belt I keep meaning to get looked at — about Hunter Biden, the former president's son, launching some kind of internet coin. Not money exactly, some kind of trading thing, and they'd gone and named it $LAPTOP, ticker symbol and all, right there in The Hill, dated this past Monday. I asked Nicky, straight out, is that even allowed, naming a stock after the very scandal that follows you around?
He laughed the way law students laugh at their uncles. He told me meme coins mostly don't count as securities the way the SEC uses that word — no registration required, no disclosure statement, no prospectus filed with anybody, nothing. You can name it whatever you like. Nobody has to tell you a thing about what's inside it.
Fine, I said. Fine.
But I had a second clipping, and I'm sorry, I know I already had one out, but this one's from the twenty-seventh of last month, out of Common Dreams — a watchdog group called Public Citizen put out a report saying the sitting president's own crypto business has left investors holding four point seven billion dollars in losses. Most of it, the report says, from his personal meme coin, the one he put out three days before he was sworn in the second time. Four point seven billion dollars. I made Nicky read that number back to me twice, out loud, because I wanted to be sure I had it right, and both times he told me I did.
Here's what I couldn't work out on the drive home. My garage on Foster Avenue — the one with the dog that sleeps by the door — never once let me leave without telling me exactly what was wrong under the hood. Belt's going, they say. That's forty dollars, that's the part, here's the labor. Nobody wraps it in a joke. Nobody sells me a fan belt called $NOISE and calls that the disclosure.
I called Nicky back that night, and I apologized again, because this makes twice in one day, but I asked him: if a company doesn't have to tell you what's under the hood at all, is it still honest to say everybody already knew, so it doesn't matter? He said that's not really a legal question anymore, Uncle Lou, that's just a question. I told him I know. I asked it anyway.
He had to get off the phone — he had reading, he always has reading — and I said, hold on, hold on, one more, before you go. I said: one of these men named his coin after his own scandal, and the other one's coin cost people four billion dollars and some change. Which one of those, I asked him, is the joke, and which one is the disclosure?
He didn't answer that one either. I didn't expect him to. I wrote it down anyway, next to the other one, the one about the belt.
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By LouOne More Question · the milkman edition, 8 September 2026
My nephew Danny is in his second year of law school, out at Fordham, and he's the one person in this family who doesn't sigh when I call him about something I read. Last week I called and said, "Danny, what do you call it when the family of the fella who's supposed to be watching the henhouse goes and takes a job with the fox?" He didn't laugh at me. He said, "Uncle Lou, that's a conflict of interest, there's a whole body of law on it, it's not just an expression." Danny takes it seriously. I take his word for it, because he's the lawyer in the family and I'm the guy who reads the paper on the porch.
So here's what I called him about. I got the piece here — hang on, I had it right on the table and my wife moved it for the mail — here it is. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company, hired a woman named Jessica Schumer for a job they're calling government outreach and partnerships. This is happening while Capitol Hill fights over how, or whether, to regulate that industry. Jessica Schumer is the daughter of Senator Chuck Schumer. Before this, it says here, her job was top public-policy official for Amazon, in New York. Now I want to ask Danny something, and I'm asking you too: is "public-policy official" a different job from "government outreach," or is that the same seat with a different coat hung on it?
Here's the second piece I had him look at. Back in 2010, Senator Schumer gave an interview to a Jewish radio program, a man named Nachum Segal, and the Senator said his own name comes from the word shomer — guardian, watcher — and that his ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall, in a town called Chortkov. He said he believed he was given that name for a reason. I'm not putting words in his mouth. That's him, on the radio, in 2010. I wrote the year down because Danny told me dates matter.
I've got both of those pieces of paper out on the porch rail this week — not the kitchen table, I gave the kitchen a rest, I lean on that table too much as it is — and I keep looking at them side by side. One says a man believes his own name means watcher. The other, from this month, says his daughter took a job with a company his own chamber is fighting about, doing outreach to the government he's part of. I'm not saying those two papers don't belong on the same rail. I'm asking whether they do.
I drove out to the cash lane at the toll plaza Tuesday — the fan belt's been slipping and I don't trust the E-ZPass anyway — and I got to talking with a fella who used to run the old inspection booth before the state automated it. I asked him, hypothetically: if an inspector's kid got hired by the trucking company that was lobbying to raise the weight limits, would that show up on the inspector's next review, or would it just show up nowhere, because writing it down isn't anybody's job? He didn't know. Neither do I. That's Danny's department, not mine.
Oh — before I let you go, one more thing, because Danny made me promise I'd mention it. The Washington Examiner ran a piece on September 2nd, a video segment, going through what they're calling Senator Schumer's "many compromises to maintain political power." It's dated the same month as the hire. I haven't watched the whole thing — I like a page I can hold, not a screen — but it's out there, dated, same month, same story. So here's my question, and then I'll let you go: is guardian, watcher, the word anybody at that company is using for the new job title on his daughter's business card?
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TRADE WAR LEDGER
By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 8 September 2026
Let's just run the ledger, because somebody should before midnight comes and goes again.
On August 22nd the United States put a 50 percent tariff on Canadian goods after talks broke down — Ottawa said Washington asked for concessions that would have touched Canadian sovereignty, which is a polite way of saying the deal wasn't a deal. Three days later, Canada answered with C$27.6 billion, call it $20 billion American, in retaliatory tariffs of its own, set to take effect two weeks out. One line item was lobster: 25 percent, on American lobster crossing north.
By August 26th the Maine Lobstermen's Association had read the schedule and told The Hill they expected to become collateral damage in a fight they didn't start. The next day, Canada's Fisheries Minister pulled seafood off the list — "select adjustments," the Department of Finance called it, after what it termed feedback from the industry. The lobstermen got a reprieve. The steel, furniture, clothing, and electronics sectors did not; those tariffs, 15 to 50 percent, stayed exactly on schedule.
In between, on August 30th, the president told reporters Canada's leadership was the "worst" of any country he'd dealt with. On September 1st, the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed there were no negotiations happening at all — "more their emergency than ours," he said. On September 2nd, this paper's own conservative page called the 50 percent tariff a serious strategic mistake that had knocked the administration's China policy sideways too. Nobody at the table disputes the arithmetic; they dispute whose fault the arithmetic is.
Then, Sunday, the president moved from tariffs to an outright ban: Bombardier, the aircraft maker, should no longer be allowed to sell planes in the United States at all, he posted. Not a tax. Not a duty. A ban, on a company, over lobster.
So here is the reconciliation: a $20 billion retaliatory tariff schedule, one seafood carve-out, one company threatened with total exclusion from the American market, and zero — not low, zero — negotiating sessions scheduled between the two governments as of this writing. When the column that should hold "talks resume" instead holds a jet-ban threat, hon, that's not escalation. That's the only entry left to make.
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