Money

THE CLAIM

Trump signs Greenland security deal 17 days after a US firm quietly bought the island's rare-earth mine

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the sunrise edition, 22 September 2026

The mine came first. Seventeen days — seventeen — before Tuesday's signing at the United Nations, a US-based company quietly inked a deal to buy a Greenland mining company that would produce more than a third of the world's rare earth magnet supply excluding China. Excluding China. Do note the exclusion.

Then the agreement: a larger US military presence, two Cold War-era bases to open, the prospect of an end to a standoff over a strategically located and mineral-rich island, after months of rhetoric about taking the island over. That is what Greenland and Denmark paid, and the purchase was ... antecedent to every line of it.

You will be told the arrangement is security. In 2010, Wen Jiabao denied that China was using its control of rare earths as a bargaining chip, in a dispute with Japan over an arrested fishing-boat captain. A denial addresses intention. Control is not an intention; it is a position. Manufacturers are struggling with constrained supplies as US and Chinese officials negotiate export restrictions.

A third of the magnets, excluding China. Two bases to open above them.

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Fed pencils in normal inflation for 2029, eight years after the last normal month

By RuthThe Money Desk · the sunrise edition, 22 September 2026

Let's run the filing against the table, hon. Slowly, because the numbers are all public.

On September 11, the Bureau of Labor Statistics posted August. Consumer prices up 0.4 percent on the month, 3.4 percent on the year. Unchanged from July, which was also 3.4. The wire attributes the flatness to gas prices, which keep rising amid the war with Iran. That is the table.

Five days later, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. The wire files it as defiance of Trump, and it is: the president nominated this chairman, the president has spent months asking for rates to go down, and the rate went up. Chairman Warsh took questions on camera afterward, which is generally not what a person does when planning to quietly reverse themselves by Friday.

The administration answered on September 17, in three parts. Peter Navarro, trade adviser, called the raise a bad decision — one adviser on the record against it. The same day, the president spared Warsh criticism. And Treasury Secretary Bessent said he has great confidence in him. So: the trade desk objects, the president declines to object, and Treasury endorses. One administration, one meeting, three positions.

Today the Fed supplied the figure that reconciles all three, and it is the only figure anybody will remember. Officials do not expect inflation back at 2 percent — the rate the Fed itself calls healthy — until 2029. Inflation has not been 2 percent since February 2021. Set those two dates beside each other and the arithmetic is eight years: one normal month, then a gap, then the next normal month, scheduled.

Not a quarter of overshoot. Not a year of transition. The better part of a decade, entered into the official projections as the plan, in the same month that a war's oil prices are holding the current number at 3.4 and the central bank's response is to make borrowing more expensive for everybody who borrows.

Here is the part that does not appear in anyone's confidence statement. Eight years of prices running above the level the Fed calls healthy is not a forecasting problem; it is a grocery receipt, and it compounds. A household that buys gas during a war pays the war price at the pump and then pays the rate hike on the car loan, and neither of those is a decision that household got to weigh in on.

Count the objections on the record. One adviser, about the rate. None about the eight years. The confidence is not in the number, hon. The confidence is in the man.

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Trump renames AI 'superintelligence,' still can't rename the 73 percent who don't trust it.

By ChipStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 22 September 2026

They're calling it "superintelligence" now. Not artificial. Super. At the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump told the assembled body that the technology needs no new guardrails, no globalist control scheme, no oversight body — just a fresh coat of paint on the folder. Total rejection of any construct built to control it. Changing the name fixes the concern, he said, and honestly, why wouldn't it? A word does a lot of work. Ask the Department of Defense. Ask the Department of War.

The polling on this is — hold on. The Reuters/Ipsos number that came out the same day he was at the podium has 73 percent of the country saying the AI companies have not done enough to stop this thing from causing serious harm. That's not a fringe number. That's — okay, that's most of the country. I was going to call it a rounding error. It is not a rounding error.

Go back further and it gets worse for the argument, not better. On September 14, the president posted that his own intellect was a sufficient regulatory framework, on its own, for artificial intelligence. Two days later, the Washington Examiner ran a piece asking a fair question about that: if the one guardrail is a single man, who turns it back on once he's gone? The same week, a separate poll found 63 percent of Americans think the technology could eventually destroy humanity — not fail to create enough jobs, destroy it. The day after that, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said he would sign a statewide moratorium on data centers if one reached his desk. He is not the only official asking for a pause.

So the case that a pause is a fringe ask — I have to walk that back too. Here's where the balance actually sits. Senate Democrats say the administration still hasn't closed the export loopholes China is using to build its own version of this. And the companies the president is telling the country not to worry about are expected to borrow a record $420 billion in 2027 to build more of it, betting the debt against precisely the outcome 73 percent of the country already fears. You can rename the fear. You cannot rename the loan.

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A US firm bought Greenland's rare-earth mine; seventeen days later Trump announced 'permanent control' over the island's security.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the matinee edition, 22 September 2026

Seventeen days, and the count is the New York Post's: seventeen days between a US-based company quietly inking its purchase of a Greenland mining company — one that would produce more than a third of the world's rare earth magnet supply excluding China — and Friday the eighteenth, when the President announced an agreement giving the United States "permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns." Seventeen. Not seventeen months.

Tuesday the thing was signed on the sidelines of the General Assembly, Denmark and Greenland at the table for it. You will want to know whether Denmark sold the island. Denmark did not sell the island. What travels is the use of the place and the yield of it, to a party that holds no deed ... a usufruct, and a handsome one, with two "very major" military bases to be built upon it.

And what did the other two signatories carry home from New York? "We're going to have a tremendous relationship, a secure relationship, and we look forward to it." A relationship, spoken at the ceremony. That is their side of the consideration as the record carries it.

Two bases, and broad military authority across the island. The word in the announcement is permanent.

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GOP demands ban to fix record diesel prices its war produced, splits over granting it

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early evening edition, 22 September 2026

Let's reconcile the ledger, hon. On September 4th, diesel hit $5.85 a gallon, an all-time high. By the next day it was $5.88, another record, and the war on Iran carried the receipt for both entries the wire filed that week. Economist Dean Baker called it plainly: Trump did it. Republicans running for re-election in November agreed enough to worry — Axios reported their own internal polling showed voters were putting that number on the president's column, not the world's.

By September 15th, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he'd consider a fix: a ban on the diesel the country ships out while it pays record prices to keep the rest at home. Five days later, Iowa's Chuck Grassley filed the formal ask, posting that Trump should do what presidents did in the 1970s and embargo the export outright to cool the price at the pump. By Tuesday the administration was eyeing exactly that.

Here is where the ledger stops balancing. The same proposal Grassley and the other farm-state Republicans filed as the fix is the one The Hill reports has Senate Republicans clashing over it — the caucus that controls the chamber cannot get itself to agree on the remedy for a price its own administration's war produced. Grist ran the number on the other side of that argument: the United States ships millions of barrels of diesel overseas every day, even as American truckers and farmers pay record prices for what is left. That is not a shortage. That is an export contract, and somebody on the far end of it is getting paid in dollars while the truck idling at the depot is paying in gallons.

So the accounting comes down to this. The price went up in September because of a war the administration chose to fight. The fix for that price arrived in September too, filed by the president's own party. And the vote count needed to pass that fix does not exist, because the same party that carried the war and wrote the ask cannot agree among itself on the remedy. Whoever is still loading that diesel onto tankers at record prices is not waiting on the Senate to sort itself out. They already know which column they are in, and it is not the one the trucker is in.

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Trump discloses 1,156 stock trades in the sectors his own war and policy moved that month

By RuthThe Money Desk · the late evening edition, 22 September 2026

Let's run the filing against the calendar again, hon. Slowly, because the numbers are all public.

Start in August. The Office of Government Ethics posted the second-quarter disclosure: more than 1,000 stock transactions in June alone, a chunk of it energy holdings, filed during a stretch when the Iran war was running, paused for a ceasefire, and running again. That's the table for June.

On September 9, an analysis of the president's own annual disclosure found his nine largest fossil-fuel holdings had gained between $1.5 million and $4.4 million in value since the Iran war began. Purchases and at least 23 sales moved through those same accounts while the war was open. That's the table for the war.

Now July. The disclosure posted this week lists 1,156 separate purchases and sales — between roughly $79 million and $270 million moving through the president's portfolio in one month. Purchases came to at least $43.6 million, sales to at least $35.6 million. The sectors: artificial intelligence, big oil, weapons manufacturers, and a government contractor, SpaceX, where the July filing shows him buying up to $50,000 and selling up to $15,000 in Elon Musk's company. Senator Elizabeth Warren says it should be illegal for a president to trade individual stocks at all. Whether it's illegal is a question for a lawyer. Whether the sectors match the month is a question for a calculator, and they match.

There's a second filing worth setting beside it. Reporting dated September 9 describes disclosures — released, by that account, the week prior — showing three named White House aides, including longtime assistant Natalie Harp, each received $45,000 in holiday cash gifts from the president. Three aides, $45,000 apiece, $135,000, the arithmetic the filing itself supports.

So hold both ledgers at once. Going out: $135,000, cash, to staff, filed as gifts. Coming in: tens of millions moving through AI, oil, weapons, and a rocket company that holds government contracts, filed as trades, in a month his own administration was making policy in exactly those rooms.

The disclosure form has a column for the dollar amount and a column for the date. It does not have a column for why the two keep landing in the same month. That column stays blank. The reader is welcome to fill it in.

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California extracted concessions from the $111 billion Paramount merger; the merger closes at $111 billion.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the midnight edition, 23 September 2026

You are meant to hear "settlement" and picture something wrung out of a buyer. Wrung. Nothing was wrung. A settlement is the instrument by which the party able to say no agrees to stop saying it, and the consideration — what each side gives so that a bargain binds — ran one way only. The states gave up the suit. Paramount Skydance gave up concessions that the writer Cory Doctorow described on Medium: "Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit." Another critic called it "a settlement that promises less than nothing." And the purchase price? One hundred and eleven billion dollars, unaltered. One hundred and eleven.

Do note what the states were looking at when they signed. In September the Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Brendan Carr, approved Paramount's petition to let foreign investors hold over 25% of the company, and found that in the "public interest." The Justice Department filed a statement of interest arguing the states should post a "proper bond" if they were confident in the case; Paramount asked a federal judge in California to require it. The New York Post said Rob Bonta "should reach an agreement — and he did." ... He did.

Kara Swisher is leaving CNN. "F–k these guys!" The deal closes as filed. That is what the lawsuit bought.

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Administration claims 65-billion-barrel Venezuelan oil windfall, now weighs banning diesel exports to end shortage.

By ChipStaff Writer · the milkman edition, 23 September 2026

Nine months ago the pitch was simple: the United States moved into Caracas, and Washington walked away with majority control of 65 billion barrels, 35 percent of it sitting with the Pentagon. Secretary Wright called it a windfall. I called it a position. Positions are what you want. Cilia Flores, the former first lady, has spent this month in a Brooklyn jail asking a judge to let her out over her heart — I mention it because it happened, not because it changes the balance sheet, which it doesn't, which — actually it might, but let's stay on the oil.

On August 30, the President said the Venezuelan crude would replenish American reserves. On September 4, the average price of a gallon of diesel hit $5.85, an all-time high, the same week the war on Iran was still working through the supply chain. On September 5, Axios reported that Republicans' own internal polling showed voters placing the blame for that price at the President's door — his own numbers, showing him what drivers were already paying at the pump.

That's the position. Sixty-five billion barrels, and diesel costs more than it has ever cost in the history of the country keeping records. I'd call that a contradiction, except contradiction implies somebody built it by accident, and I've read the memo, and nobody built this by accident. I mean — I haven't read the memo. There is no memo. I'm told there's no memo.

On September 20, Senator Grassley asked the President directly, on social media, to put an embargo on diesel exports the way presidents in the '70s embargoed ag products when food prices spiked. Two days later, on Tuesday, the President said he was considering exactly that: a ban on diesel exports, to fix a shortage of a fuel his own administration is, at the same time, still exporting.

Own the oil, sell the diesel, then stop selling the diesel because there isn't enough — three moves, and the policy insists all three are the same policy. It is the same policy. I've checked. It's the same policy, and it is not working, and I was told to tell you it is working, and I'm telling you.

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