Money

Fed watchdog clears Powell of crime; Trump orders Justice Department to review the clearance

By RuthThe Money Desk · the wee small hours edition, 1 October 2026

On September 16, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate a quarter point, to 4.0 percent — the first hike under new chair Kevin Warsh, and the opposite of the cut President Trump had been asking for. Two days later, per The Hill, Senate Republicans told reporters the attacks on the Fed were making them uncomfortable.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department closed its own investigation into the Fed's headquarters renovation without charges. That renovation is the one Trump cited as grounds to remove Chair Jerome Powell: a project running over budget, and a chair he wanted gone over it.

On September 30, the Fed's inspector general finished a second look at the same renovation. The finding: a cost overrun of roughly $1 billion, no grounds for a criminal referral, and project oversight faulted as sloppy. Powell, by then already out as chair, was cleared of wrongdoing. Two reviews, two agencies, one renovation, zero charges.

The same day the finding came back, Trump renewed his call for Powell's resignation and directed the Attorney General to study the very report that had just cleared him.

Run the filing against the ask, hon. The filing says: one billion dollars over budget, no crime, oversight faulted. The ask says: resign. Those are not the same size, and they were never meant to be — the filing is a number that can come back clean; the ask is a number that cannot. A clean audit changes the paperwork. It has not once changed the ask.

That is worth sitting with, because the next move was not a new document. It was an order to produce one — a cabinet officer assigned to re-examine a government watchdog's findings about a government renovation, on the day those findings cleared the man the administration wants out. The oversight found what oversight finds: overruns, sloppy management, no crime. The response was not to accept the number. It was to open a new file on the number.

Gaps like that — between what the audit says and what the ask costs — tend to show up in one column on this desk: the one marked who controls the chair. Not the rate. The chair.

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THE SINGLE VOTE

SEC Hands Its Chair One Vote to Rewrite Wall Street, Calls It Protecting Everyday Americans

By RuthThe Money Desk · the wee small hours edition, 1 October 2026

On September 4th, trade press flagged a rule moving through the Securities and Exchange Commission that would let Wall Street firms fund the politicians who decide where pension money gets invested. Two weeks later, on September 18th, a different kind of access went up for sale: watchdog groups sued over a Truth Social program letting subscribers pay as much as $100,000 a month for an early look at key decision-makers' posts before anyone else saw them.

By September 30th, the SEC had turned the same logic into policy. Chair Paul Atkins proposed opening private markets, big stock debuts and crypto to what the agency calls everyday Americans, framing the move as protection. Benjamin Schiffrin of Better Markets read the same filing differently: investors saving for college and retirement are being steered toward private assets that, he said, do not offer greater returns — only less disclosure. Schiffrin said Atkins talks about this as the "responsible retailization" of the private markets. The commission did not put that phrase on the filing itself; it is the phrase Schiffrin says Atkins reaches for when he talks about it.

Then, on October 1st, the mechanism underneath all of it came into view: a quiet rule change lets the SEC chair rewrite the commission's regulations alone, without a vote of the full commission. The agency that is supposed to referee how much an investor gets to see before money changes hands no longer needs a majority to decide what gets disclosed, or to whom. One signature now does what used to take a commission.

Line the three dates up and the gap is not abstract. A rule that used to need several commissioners to sign off now needs one. The pension fund sitting on the other end of both deals was not in either room: not the one casting the vote, not the one paying for the preview, just the one whose quarterly statement arrives later, listing less than it used to.

That is the shape of it, hon. The rules did not simply get looser. Fewer people got a say in how loose, and none of them answer to the retirement account the filing says it is protecting.

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Senate finally staffs Labor the week it has nothing to do with Kroger's shirts or Walmart's Canadian contract.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 1 October 2026

The Senate seated Keith Sonderling as labor secretary on Wednesday, closing a vacancy that had run on acting status since April, when Lori Chavez-DeRemer left. Six months, one confirmation vote, and the chair at the Department of Labor is full again the same week the two biggest labor stories in the country happened without it.

Start with the bigger number. Kroger told its roughly 400,000 in-store workers they are now required to wear company-issued shirts — the chain's first change to its dress policy in a decade. Nobody at the Labor Department needed to approve that, hon. A dress code is not a wage and not an hour; it is a line item on the company's own ledger, and the company wrote it alone.

Now the smaller workforce with the bigger outcome. In Mississauga, Ontario, eight hundred Walmart warehouse workers ratified a two-year contract — the first union agreement a Walmart has signed anywhere in North America. Unifor Local 252 opened that organizing drive in September 2024; it closed this summer, and the paperwork landed September 23, eight days before the Senate vote. That contract required nothing from Washington either. It is a Canadian local, bargaining under a Canadian labor board, signing on Canadian soil.

Lay the two numbers side by side and the gap has a size: roughly five hundred Kroger workers received a new shirt for every one Walmart worker who received a union contract, and neither column ran through Sonderling's desk. The department spent half a year empty and reopened fully staffed into a week where the only two labor stories on the wire belonged, respectively, to a corporate memo and a foreign labor board.

That is not bad timing. That is where the authority already sits: with the employer who sets the dress code by fiat, and with whichever country still has a labor board willing to certify a union. The Senate did not confirm a referee for either event, because neither event asked the United States for one. It confirmed a vacancy filled on schedule, arriving the same week its own jurisdiction had nothing in it worth filing.

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Mayor's 200 taxpayer-paid influencers, hired to blur campaign and city work, now aimed at CEOs.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 1 October 2026

On September 2nd, the New York Post counted them: a network of more than two hundred digital influencers, assembled under Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration, built to paint the mayor in a favorable light. The Post's own headline did the arithmetic for the reader — "blurring lines between campaign and job" — which is a careful way of saying the city is cutting paychecks for work that reads, item by item, like campaign work.

Twenty-three days later, on September 25th, a different ledger landed, out of a different office. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint calling President Trump's control over the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law," on the theory, citing decades of precedent, that a sitting federal officeholder may not direct a super PAC's spending. The filing is useful here only as a yardstick. Federal election law has a line drawn for who may direct political spending, and a watchdog with standing to test it. New York City has no comparable line drawn yet for a mayor's payroll directing a volunteer influencer network — no office has filed the paper that would test it.

Three days after that watchdog complaint, on September 28th, the Post reported the next entry in the file: City Hall was "secretly plotting" to turn that same influencer roster on New York's CEOs, to build support for the mayor's tax package. The job description had moved. What opened as an in-house applause operation had become, on the Post's account, a pressure campaign aimed at the executives who sit atop the city's tax base.

Two days after that, on September 30th, Fox News reported that senior aides on the mayor's payroll had discussed doing exactly that: mobilizing the 200-plus network against the city's top CEOs and business leaders.

Run the columns against each other and the gap is this: two hundred-odd influencers, one city payroll, and no filing anywhere — not at City Hall, not at the city's ethics board — that separates the hours they spend being civic from the hours they spend being political. The Campaign Legal Center found a line to point to for a super PAC and a complaint to hang it on. Nobody has found that line yet for a city influencer roster, hon. That does not mean the line isn't there. It means nobody has pulled the timesheet.

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Twelve states settle antitrust suit for safeguards Paramount wrote and thirty movies a year

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the milkman edition, 1 October 2026

You are thinking a judge looked at this and found it sound. A judge approved a settlement — the settlement, mind you, not the merger. Twelve states went in on antitrust grounds and came out with safeguards for CNN's editorial independence, and do note who drafted those safeguards. Paramount drafted them. The company that was the complaint wrote the clause that restrains the company, and on Wednesday the court approved the writing.

Two suits were holding the purchase up on the twenty-first, the Writers Guild of America and a dozen states, and both are settled. What did twelve attorneys general carry home? Thirty films a year. Thirty. For the first two years, after which the obligation lapses, while a hundred and ten billion dollars does not lapse at all. A hundred and eleven billion, by one report. Either figure buys the same thing.

Someone will say the states extracted concessions. The consideration runs one way: twelve states spent the only suit they had ... and took home a promise composed by the party it binds. Bonta announced the details himself on the twenty-first. CBS News carried the announcement. Paramount Skydance is the parent company of CBS News.

CNN's editorial independence is now a term in a contract Paramount wrote.

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THE LEDGER

States begin paying more to run food aid the same month Washington quietly cancels a billion dollars.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the sunrise edition, 1 October 2026

In late August, the administration proposed rewriting the rules that run Head Start. Buried inside "Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs" is a change to who gets in the door first: current policy requires every Head Start program to prioritize enrolling children from homeless families; the draft rule removes that requirement. Kennedy Jr. asking him to scrap the proposal. As of this writing, it has not been scrapped.

Eleven days after that letter, the Office of Management and Budget filed what's called a pocket rescission — timed close enough to the end of the fiscal year that Congress runs out the clock before it can object. This one canceled $810 million already appropriated for immigration, refugee, and foreign debt-relief programs. It is only the second pocket rescission filed in fifty years. Both were filed by this administration, in this term.

Five days after that, on October 1, the funding formula for food assistance changed. States now pay a larger share of the cost of running SNAP — not the benefit itself, but the administrative work behind it: the caseworkers, the eligibility reviews, the system that gets the benefit to the table on time. The federal share of that work shrinks starting this month.

On that same October 1, by that same federal calendar, the maximum SNAP benefit went up. Cost-of-living adjustments for fiscal 2027 took effect, and millions of households are due a little more money. So the benefit check grows while the check that pays for delivering it shrinks, and the difference lands on a state budget, by law, starting now.

Line them up in the order they were filed — a rule proposal, a letter asking for a reversal that did not come, a rescission, a funding shift — and the shape is this: a children's program loses a guarantee for its most unstable enrollees, a billion already-appropriated dollars disappears under a procedural clock, and the cost of feeding people moves off the federal ledger and onto fifty state ones, all inside five weeks. This column does not know whether one hand drew up all four entries. What it can read is the arithmetic: when a column closes in Washington, the number does not vanish. It reopens somewhere with less room to argue, hon.

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Egg prices drop, White House claims credit; the same months' $100 billion fuel bill goes unclaimed.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the sunrise edition, 1 October 2026

Four days ago this page reported that the president rejected Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, rescheduled the bombing for after the midterms, and put his U.N. ambassador on Fox News to credit $6.48 diesel to Ukraine. Today's receipts pick up the same ledger, a few entries back.

On September 9, the global price of oil crossed $100 a barrel for the first time since July, and a tracker kept by Brown University's Watson School put the running cost of the Iran war to American consumers at more than $101 billion — roughly $776 per household, the household itself unnamed, the way "consumers" is never anybody in particular. The war that produced that bill had, eighteen days later, this much on the record: Iran's offer was rejected, and the bombing moved to after the midterms.

Before that, on August 31, the American Automobile Association clocked something that had not happened before: gas above $4 a gallon every single day of August, the average landing at $4.08, ninety cents higher than the same month a year earlier. Prices usually ease by late summer. This August did not.

Today's entry is the one with good news in it. Egg prices have fallen since the president returned to office, and the White House is crediting the return. Agriculture experts, reading the same receipt, put their name on a different line: the earlier high prices, they say, were the avian flu's doing, not the administration's — and they do not say the flu has eased, or offer any other reason the price came down. They do say, in the same breath, that the administration's tariffs and its war with Iran are still pressing on farmers.

So run the two numbers side by side, hon. The egg price drop carries a name, printed in a headline that explains itself. The $101 billion fuel bill carries no name at all — not the administration's, not the war's, not even a clear author for why eggs got cheaper, just a note that something else is still raising the pressure on the people who sell them to you. One line of this ledger gets signed. The other runs under "consumers," which is where the signature always seems to go missing.

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Senate comes seven votes short of opening debate on whether to stop trading companies it regulates

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the sunrise edition, 1 October 2026

You will have read that the Senate blocked a ban on members trading stocks, that Democrats did the blocking, and settled the blame. Hold on. The vote was not on the ban. It was cloture — the motion that opens debate, and cloture wants sixty hands before a word of the bill is spoken aloud. Fifty-three arrived. Fifty-three, seven short, and the Stop Insider Trading Act, passed by the House in July, sits ... where it sat. Every Democrat and independent voted no. Attached, a rider on voter identification; Democrats called it a "poison pill", and said the measure would let members keep their portfolios. Both can be true. Both were. And what did the chamber spend for that, five weeks before the third of November? Nothing whatever. The permission holds: a member may trade the stock of companies that member regulates. Wednesday did not write that permission. Wednesday renewed it.

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