That is probably a good thing. Most people are not going to beat the market by dabbling in individual stocks. For the Americans who do own stocks, the majority of their exposure to the stock market tends to come in the form of some type of index fund owned through retirement accounts like 401(k)s.

One of the reasons most normal people cannot beat the market is because they are on a level playing field. Members of the public generally cannot find out more about any given company than other members of the public, and when new information does come out about a particular company, they cannot act upon it any faster than their peers.

Having knowledge that is not available to other people, or gaining relevant knowledge more quickly than others, gives someone a district advantage when trading stocks. That is why insider trading is illegal.

But, while the big federal laws governing insider trading for the rest of us have been on the books since the 1980s, there is one group of people who have conveniently dodged serious scrutiny regarding their stock trades: lawmakers.

There is not much at all stopping people in Congress, within the framework of a limited amount of oversight, from trading stocks based on knowledge they gained from their positions.

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 — or the “STOCK Act” (really Congress, enough with the cute legislation names) — was meant to put the brakes on congressional stock trading abuses.

Although the STOCK Act helped address the problem in some ways, it lacked teeth, and led to way too many judgment calls (all of them subject to the whims of partisan decisionmakers) about whether lawmakers were trading stocks incorrectly.

Just back in February of 2020, shortly after attending congressional intelligence briefings and relevant committee sessions, several senators sold off stock holdings in companies destined to be hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. Some of these lawmakers also quickly plowed money into things like telework stocks, which suddenly had a huge upside.

That was, of course, just days before the broader stock market took a gigantic Covid-related dive. None of these lawmakers had to face any major consequences directly related to their stock trades (although Kelly Loeffler did lose her election).

Other than the members of Congress making a killing off it, there is not a huge constituency for letting lawmakers profit off of the ignorance of the rest of us. More than three-fourths of voters support a ban on members of Congress trading stocks while in office. Still, it’s a complicated and highly partisan world. Very few people are going to base their vote solely on whether a particular candidate supports closing the congressional insider trading loophole.

Soon, however, they might not have to. There is reportedly renewed bipartisan support in Congress for a ban on congresspeople trading stocks. Belatedly, there seems to be concern in Congress about those suspiciously timed pre-pandemic stock trades by congresspeople, and the resulting investigations and public scrutiny.

There are several bills floating around at the moment. One of the most stringent was introduced in the Senate by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, and would prohibit not only legislators, but also lawmakers’ spouses and their dependent children (probably children shouldn’t be trading stocks regardless of parentage) from trading stocks. Congresspeople would have to put their investments into independently managed blind trusts for the duration of their tenures.

Under this bill, the penalty for an infraction would be a fine equivalent to the violator’s total congressional salary — some real teeth (albeit shy of the prison time the rest of us might face for insider trading, and perhaps not a terror-inducing potential consequence in a chamber populated mostly by millionaires).

Could it really happen this time? A stock trading ban for top government officials has been proposed many times before. But when you have Matt Gaetz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broadly agreeing on an issue, our system would really have to be broken to not see some kind of movement.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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“Brokers are now ‘protecting’ customers as a facade so that they can appease their institutional backers,” one individual trader told Bloomberg. “The entire community is outraged….”

An unlikely mix of lawmakers — including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ted Cruz — accused Robinhood of imposing trading limits to help out hedge funds caught out by the retail trading frenzy. The heads of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee called for hearings.

The SEC issued a rare joint statement from its acting chair and commissioners that said it was working closely with other regulators and stock exchanges “to protect investors and to identify and pursue potential wrongdoing” and would “closely review actions ... that may disadvantage investors” or hinder their ability to trade stocks…. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued 13 civil investigative demands, the civil equivalent of a subpoena, on Friday to Robinhood and others that put curbs on stock trading, calling it “shockingly unprecedented and wrong.”

“Robinhood? Nah y’all ROBBING the HOOD,” tweeted one user. “Crazy how you guys would rather watch your company burn to the ground than live up to your promise to provide users with free trade,” commented another.

Twitter users also complained that Robinhood appeared to be selling their shares without authorization….

A Robinhood customer filed a class-action lawsuit against the stock-trading app Thursday after the company barred traders from buying shares of GameStop promoted by WallStreetBets, a popular Reddit group for investors…. "Robinhood's actions were done purposefully and knowingly to manipulate the market for the benefit of people and financial institutions who were not Robinhood's customers," the lawsuit states….

Following Robinhood's decision earlier Thursday morning, Redditors stood up a new forum, r/ClassActionRobinHood, to coordinate efforts for a lawsuit. It collected more than 31,000 users Thursday.

One law firm that Redditors have engaged with is ChapmanAlbin LLC, based in Cleveland, Ohio, which specializes in investments and financial fraud. The firm's homepage currently has a prompt titled, "Are you a Robinhood user who has suffered losses?" along with a way for people to submit information.

The firm has collected information from more than 6,000 people as it investigates Robinhood, attorney Philip Vujanov told CNN.

The decades-old Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system buckled under extreme pressure on Thursday as thousands of end users frantically attempted to download lawsuits filed against online stock trading application Robinhood.

Customers flooded Google’s Play Store with angry, one-star reviews about the restrictions, tanking its average rating to 1 star out of 5.

Oof. Given the level of anger towards both Robinhood and the hedge funds its users apparently believe it’s protecting, it doesn’t seem likely that its “we had no choice” argument will carry much sway, however much evidence it has for its veracity.

In its update on Thursday afternoon, Robinhood defended itself against accusations of favoring big traders, saying it had made the decision to limit trades because of “financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits.”

“To be clear, this was a risk-management decision, and was not made on the direction of the market makers we route to,” the company said.

“We understand our customers are upset, we’re doing what we can to re-enable buying in these names,” [CEO Vlad Tenev] said. “We want to be clear in the communications, and I own that we should have been out there a little bit sooner.”

“It’s not really Robinhood doing nefarious stuff,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Larry Tabb. “It’s the DTCC saying ‘This stuff is just too risky. We don’t trust that these guys have the cash to be able to withstand settling these things two days from now, because in two days, who knows what the price could be, it could be zero.’”

Robinhood, the online trading app, said on Thursday that it was raising an infusion of more than $1 billion from its existing investors…. To continue operating, it drew on a line of credit from six banks amounting to between $500 million and $600 million to meet higher margin, or lending, requirements from its central clearing facility for stock trades, known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.

Robinhood still needed more cash quickly to ensure that it didn’t have to place further limits on customer trading, said two people briefed on the situation, who asked to remain anonymous because the negotiations were confidential.

Robinhood, which is privately held, contacted several of its investors, including the venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital, which came together on Thursday night to offer the emergency funding, five people involved in the negotiations said.

Brokers that route investors’ orders to Susquehanna International Group LLP and Wolverine Trading LLC had difficulty connecting to the firms on Wednesday and routed their trades elsewhere, people familiar with the matter said…. Two Sigma Securities LLC, which also fills orders for individual investors, faced technical difficulties because of the heavy load, a person familiar with the matter said…. Online brokerages themselves have struggled to keep up with the flood of trading activity. In recent days, clients of Fidelity, E*Trade Financial Corp., Charles Schwab Corp. and Vanguard Group have experienced various levels of service disruptions.

And, given the anger evident above, and also directed towards some other big players in the unfolding drama, Ken Griffin wants his name kept out of it.

“Citadel is not involved in, or responsible for, any retail brokers’ decision to stop trading in any way,” a spokesperson for the hedge fund said in a statement.

“Citadel Securities has not instructed or otherwise caused any brokerage firm to stop, suspend, or limit trading or otherwise refuse to do business,” the statement added. “Citadel Securities remains focused on continuously providing liquidity to our clients across all market conditions.”

GameStop rallies back as U.S. regulators eye wild trading [Reuters]
Robinhood Says it Will Reallow GameStop Trades [NYT]
Why Robinhood Had to Risk Infuriating Its Customers [DealBook]
Robinhood, in Need of Cash, Raises $1 Billion From Its Investors [NYT]
Robinhood Fallout Sweeps Market After $1 Billion Lifeline [Bloomberg]
Robinhood is new eye of GameStop storm as outrage grows [Reuters]
Class-action lawsuit filed against Robinhood following outrage over GameStop stock restriction [CNN Business]
PACER Crashed Because Too Many People Tried to Read Lawsuits Against Robinhood [Law & Crime]
Citadel shoots down Robinhood link [Fox Business]
GameStop Frenzy Causes Glitches for High-Speed Traders [WSJ]

It’s like a modified pump and dump, because at the end of the day it will most certainly go back down.

This guy thinks so, too.

“If they are all egging each other on using a social-media platform, they are effectively engaged in a crowdsourced pump-and-dump scheme,” said Daniel Hawke, a partner at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP.

The traders “are making no effort to conceal their apparent intent to manipulate the price of the stock,” added Mr. Hawke, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s market abuse unit.

As Belfort’s nearly two years in prison will tell you, pump-and-dumps are illegal. So are 4.4 million Redditors about to go to jail? Uh, probably not.

“Our team is of course -- our economic team including Secretary Yellen and others -- are monitoring the situation,” [White House Press Secretary Jen] Psaki told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.

The SEC said late Wednesday that it is monitoring the “volatility in the options and equities markets” and “working with our fellow regulators to assess the situation….” Suing hundreds of defendants who likely traded in small increments probably isn’t practical for the agency, according to securities lawyers, while a case that alleged a few key individuals instigated any problematic trading could be feasible….

Some investors, though, said the trading talked about in Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum isn’t manipulative and reflects an earnest effort by individual investors to seize on opportunities that have always been available to establishment players…. “This is the ultimate triumph of the newbies over the old pros,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. “But what’s frustrating to the old pros is that they can’t engage in the sort of behavior that the newbies can do.”

Pity, because it doesn’t look like they’ll be getting any help from Congress.

“For years, the same hedge funds, private equity firms, and wealthy investors dismayed by the GameStop trades have treated the stock market like their own personal casino while everyone else pays the price,” [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren said.

“Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message board of posters also treating the market as a casino,” [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] tweeted…. “AOC got our backs,” read a post on the forum, along with a screenshot of Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter thread.

[Tucker] Carlson then slammed the Wall Street establishment for crying foul on a game insiders are usually the ones playing. "That's a crime only people who work for hedge funds are allowed to manipulate the market often with the help of CNBC. Normal people are not allowed to do that already. The people in charge of our system are outraged that anyone without an official position at a hedge fund would dare manipulate the market to their benefit."

Well, those are some delightfully strange bedfellows, but if the powers that be aren’t going to do what the hedge funds pay them to do, someone else will, it seems.

TD Ameritrade said it placed restrictions on certain types of trading activity on the companies “in the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients….” Charles Schwab said shares of GameStop could no longer be traded on margin, meaning trades cannot be placed with money borrowed from the company. And Robinhood, the trading app that has made it easier for inexperienced traders to enter the market, said it wouldn’t allow margin trading of shares of both GameStop and AMC.

GameStop Stock Surge Tests Scope of SEC’s Manipulation Rules [WSJ]
SEC ‘Monitoring’ GameStop Frenzy as Warren Pressures Regulators [Bloomberg]
Trading platforms are limiting trades of GameStop and other companies. [NYT]
AOC mocks Wall Street outrage over GameStop surge [N.Y. Post]
Progressives Slam Hedge Funds Irked By GameStop Stock Boom As SEC Says It’s Monitoring The Situation [Forbes]
Tucker slams hedge funds as he explains GameStop stock market saga [The Post Millennial]
Jordan Belfort: GameStop frenzy is a ‘modified pump and dump’ [CNN]

Steve Schwarzman never gives to Democratic candidates. Literally never, according to OpenSecrets.org. Druckenmiller hasn’t given much to that side recently, either, and when he did, it tended to go to the likes of Tulsi Gabbard.

So what’s so special about this Democratic candidate? This Michelle Caruso-Cabrera from New York’s 14th congressional district, covering some seriously unglamorous stretches of Queens and the Bronx?

Oh, right: There’s nothing special about Michelle Caruso-Cabrera other than the fact that she isn’t the current representative for the 14th: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Well, that’s not entirely fair, at least as far as the aforementioned donors and the others who gave this first-time candidate a $2 million (and counting!) war chest that would be the envy of most first-time candidates, to say nothing of, like, 350 sitting members of Congress. After all, she used to be on CNBC, and is married to one of them, which is to say an investment banker who’s also a big-time Republican donor. Oh, yea, and she’s not really a Democrat: She was a registered Republican until 2015, five years after writing a book (with foreword by Larry Kudlow!) with the tremendously original title of You Know I’m Right, pushing such traditional Democratic positions as an end to Medicare and Social Security.

Not that any of that was mentioned in the fliers overstuffing my mailbox or the television ads blanketing the tristate area over the last couple of weeks, all paid for by Druckenmiller & co. They instead focused on the allegation that Ocasio-Cortez, who after all was elected to a job in Washington, was an absentee congresswoman who didn’t really grow up in the Bronx but in leafy Westchester and who in D.C. lives in a “luxury apartment with a Whole Foods in the lobby,” accusations with a spectacular degree of chutzpah from a candidate born in Ohio and raised in New Hampshire who moved to one of the leafiest, whitest and most affluent corners of an overwhelmingly working-class and immigrant district all the way back in, uh, December, seemingly for the expressed purpose of running for the seat, having spent most of Ocasio-Cortez’s first year in Congress, and the 19 before that, living in Manhattan (at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, no less). Still, they got all the people usually interested in New York City Democratic congressional primaries very excited indeed.

Alas, for Caruso-Cabrera and her donors, if only she had as much success as she has disingenuousness.

That’s about $4.13 of Stan Druckenmiller’s money alone per vote, although surely that ratio should fall below $4 once the absentee ballots are counted next week. Probably. Anyway, he’s getting used to bad investments and humbling experiences, such as having to see these tweets.

Wall Street CEOs, from Goldman Sachs to Blackstone, poured in millions to defeat our grassroots campaign tonight.

But their money couldn’t buy a movement.

Thank you #NY14, and every person who pitched in for tonight’s victory.

Here’s to speaking truth to power. pic.twitter.com/g9aRV3Cu1B

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 24, 2020

When I won in 2018, many dismissed our victory as a “fluke.”

Our win was treated as an aberration, or bc my opponent “didn’t try.”

So from the start, tonight’s race was important to me.

Tonight we are proving that the people’s movement in NY isn’t an accident. It‘s a mandate.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 24, 2020

Of course, if Druckenmiller, Asness & co. would like some additional humbling, there’s good news: Caruso-Cabrera has secured the ballot line of something called the Serve America Movement party, which has all of 349 registered members in New York, for November, so there’s an opportunity to throw some more good money after bad.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez triumphs over Wall Street-backed Democratic primary opponent Michelle Caruso-Cabrera and all but secures a 2nd term [BI]

He said that socialist governments traditionally have done a poor job allocating capital and end up backing politically popular endeavors and “bridge to nowhere” projects.

“Once you do that, you will have an eroding society,” he said.

Note the future tense in his renewed assault on socialism, and also this shot at millennials, delivered, as it would have to be, from the slopes of Switzerland, otherwise echoing with potshots at 17-year-olds.

“I honestly don’t think they understand what socialism is,” Dimon told CNBC during a “Squawk Box” interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Be that as it may, it’s clear their understanding of—and growing distaste for—capitalism is defined by the financial crisis bailouts, like the $25 billion in taxpayer money taken by one JPMorgan Chase, and their aftermath, a fact of which Dimon appears at least distantly aware. And while those bailouts and all they’ve wrought may be pushing the youngs towards socialism, they’re a not-insubstantial factor in pushing the olds (the much-hand-wringing-inducing “white working-class voter”) into the arms of Trump.

Dimon was careful not to make the mistakes of certain peers (and his own previous missteps) in naming names. Still, two people are pretty sure they can read between those lines, and they have things to say about it.

That's funny. Jamie Dimon seemed fine with corporate socialism when his bank got a $416 billion bailout from American taxpayers. https://t.co/KYhvG2kVvt

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 22, 2020

Saving this comment for the next time Wall Street asks for a $700 billion bailout from the federal government. https://t.co/5GuSTwcvQV

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 23, 2020

And those were before they heard about these 31.5 million other reasons Dimon, who’s already got 1.7 billion-plus, might be a little gun-shy about socialism.

JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon got a half-million-dollar raise for 2019, bringing his total compensation for the year to $31.5 million, the company said in a filing on Thursday…. The bank said it was based on its strong performance last year and “over the long term,” according to the filing. The bank said its board of directors considered the bank’s business results, risk controls and conduct, client, customer and stakeholder focus and teamwork and leadership when determining Dimon’s pay.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon takes on socialism, says it will lead to an ‘eroding society’ [CNBC]
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez hit back at JPMorgan CEO over comments on socialism: ‘That’s funny’ [The Hill]
JPMorgan board raises CEO Dimon’s pay to $31.5 million [Reuters]

Like an archconservative 71-year-old man watching CSPAN and realizing that young liberals talking inflation makes him feel funny all over...

President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser praised left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after the political rivals found common ground in urging the Federal Reserve not to worry about low unemployment triggering inflation.“

I’ve got to give her high marks for that,” Larry Kudlow told Fox News on Thursday, referring to Ocasio-Cortez’s quizzing of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in Congress the previous day.

Are Larry Kudlow and AOC about to be modern DC's "West Side Story"? 

Kudlow, who’s also criticized the ideas behind the Phillips Curve, told Fox that he hoped to sit down with “Ms. AOC” and discuss supply-side economics very soon.

This is a fun meeting that will almost certainly never happen.

Larry Kudlow Praises AOC, Wants to Meet With Her on Fed Policy [Bloomberg]

Lampert said whether he reimburses Old Sears for those costs has nothing to do with whether employees get paid, an event he says has already occurred….

“To our knowledge, the eligible employees whose employment was terminated by Old Sears prior to our acquisition have received all severance due to them.”

“You have made harsh charges on the basis of allegations made in lawsuits and other court filings that have not been adjudicated and have accepted at face value claims that have been thrown about in years of slanted media coverage.”

Billionaire Eddie Lampert to Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Severance to workers has been paid. Singling out Sears is ‘unfair’ [CNBC]

“The failure to make those payments would amount to a broken promise on your part, and a betrayal of hard-working Sears employees — some of whom have worked at the company for decades — who are relying on the severance that they have been promised to pay rent, care for children, and put food on the table,” they said.

The two referred to a written exchange between Lampert and Warren earlier this year in which the senator inquired about Lampert’s plan to buy Sears’ out of bankruptcy and the retailers’ viability under his ownership. In Lampert’s response, dated Feb. 19, he defended his management of Sears and assured Warren that his deal to buy the retailer would guarantee severance payments to employees who lost their job after it filed bankruptcy on Oct. 15 and did not rejoin the company.

“But for the sale to ESL, these employees would be getting nothing,” Lampert wrote.

If any of those laid-off employees are hoping that the Sears estate will take some of the money it’s allegedly saved by not giving Lampert what he’s allegedly owed, uh, they probably shouldn’t.

Lawyers for the retired workers say the bankrupt retailer has wrongly terminated the life insurance policies for tens of thousands of former employees. They believe the spouses of some Sears retirees who recently died have been deprived of the life insurance payment earned from years of work at the iconic department store, according to a court filing…. “It came as really a shock that they would do that, because that was the last benefit we had,” said Ronald Olbrysh, one of the Sears retirees asking for the committee. Olbrysh said that many Sears retirees dropped their existing life insurance policies in favor of a company policy. “That was a mistake, but they relied on Sears.”

Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eddie Lampert: Billionaire’s effort to avoid paying $43 million in worker severance is a ‘betrayal’ [CNBC]
Sears Retirees Fight Life Insurance Termination as Heirs Get Zip [Bloomberg]

Before @StevenMnuchin1 became Treasury Secretary, he was on the board of @Sears, where he helped gut the company and fire thousands of employees. Now, @AOC and I have some tough questions for him. pic.twitter.com/hS25rPOsYa

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 23, 2019

Warren and Ocasio-Cortez also asked whether Mnuchin had sought to waive an ethics agreement in which he promised to “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties” where Sears was involved. That January 2017 agreement, which applied for one year, has expired….

Mnuchin said in his confirmation hearing that he would recuse himself from PBGC’s actions related to Sears, but Warren and Ocasio-Cortez wrote that “the current status of your recusal requirements — and the exact types of decision you are recused from — are unclear.”

This latest bit of unwanted correspondence follows hot on the heels of both another unpleasant letter from Warren and a lawsuit filed by the dried husk of Sears, also wondering what, exactly, Mnuchin was up to during his time on the Sears board from 2005 until his nomination to serve as Treasury Secretary. We’re sure he’ll have lots to say about it.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the letter from Warren and Ocasio-Cortez.

Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez target Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over Sears Bankruptcy [CNBC]

The world was reminded of the golf course on Wednesday, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) mentioned it during her questioning of Michael Cohen, specifically referencing the 2016 Washington Post article about it, and saying, “That article is where many New Yorkers and people in the country learned that taxpayers spent $127 million to build Trump Links in a ‘generous deal allowing President Trump to keep almost every dollar that flows in on a golf course built with public funds.’”

Annoying as this may be, the mention of Trump Links was but an entrée into discussing actual malfeasance in the form of various tax dodges over the years by Trump. The deal for Trump Links is on the up-and-up, just a standard kind of thing in America where the public pays a bunch of money to build a sporting facility that becomes a cash cow for some already rich dude. Just this week, Long Beach, Calif., was talking about building a stadium for the Angels, because sure, why not?

Speaking of new stadium projects, the Buffalo Bills are trying to figure out whether to start one, or whether they should renovate their current home. How much public money will go to that? Well, in October, Pegula Sports and Entertainment – which owns the Bills and the NHL’s Sabres – hired Christopher Schoepfin, who had been Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top economic development official in the western part of New York State.

However much the Pegulas contribute out of pocket on whatever stadium project they pursue, you know it will work out great for them in the long run, because that’s how this game works. And how did the Pegulas come to own the Bills, anyway? Right, that would be a highly-ridiculed sale process five years ago following the death of Ralph Wilson, a sale process that included a bid from Donald Trump. We all got to remember that on Wednesday, too, because part of the Cohen hearing included tell of how Trump’s effort to buy the Bills included inflating his net worth by $4 billion as he attempted to get a loan from Deutsche Bank.

While the idea that the NFL would welcome Trump as an owner was far-fetched even at the time, given how Trump’s time with the USFL went, it’s worth considering why he was so interested, even if he claimed after the sale that he wasn’t interested in meeting the sale price in the first place. Obviously, being an NFL owner is glamorous, powerful, and an extremely profitable enterprise even if you’re a complete dullard, to the point where bootlicking sociopaths will make t-shirts glorifying you after you’re busted for solicitation in what turns out to be a human-trafficking sting. But what would really make Trump’s eyes pop is an NFL team playing in a stadium built in 1973, and the real estate opportunity that would eventually create.

The Cohen hearing brought light to a lot of criminal activity. The way that sports facilities get built is perfectly legal, but when you think about it, and who benefits from it above anyone else, maybe it shouldn’t be.

The notion of a 70% tax rate on people making more than $10 million a year has taken on more existential importance, becoming constant fodder for partisan talking points and emerging as the first partisan Rohrshach test of the 2020 election cycle. It's impossible to be a player in this political moment and not weigh in on AOC's tax plan. So everyone who's running is making it part of their stump in some way, and every billionaire who's been near a microphone in the last week has been put in the uncomfortable position of having to answer questions about it without seeming greedy. On the flip side, there is no other reason for a famously wealthy and powerful person to address the 70% marginal rate publicly unless forced to do so in public or in furtherance of a political.

So, we guess we're done here...

Billionaire CEO Jamie Dimon is OK with tax hikes on the rich, as long as the revenue goes where he thinks it’ll do the most good.

“Individuals earning the most can afford to pay more, and I have no problem paying higher taxes to address some of the fundamental challenges and inequities in our society,” the 62-year-old chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Wednesday in an emailed statement. He singled out expanding the earned income tax credit as a way to help those who “really need it.”

Oh, thanks for that unsolicited thought, "non-presidential candidate" Jamie Dimon. 

What? It's not a totally normal thing for a guy who's not running for political office to just release statements on policy? That's weird, you say? What motive do you think he could possibly have?

It's happening.

“Name a country where that’s worked – ever,” Dell said.

Replied Brynjolfsson: “The United States.”

The top tax rate in the U.S. was 70% or higher from 1936 through 1980, a time during which – at least once the Depression ended – the American economy did do rather well. For most of that time, the threshold for the highest bracket was $200,000, or $400,000 from 1948-64.

If you were a professional athlete in the days of the high-rate top brackets, this hardly came into play for you at all. Exactly zero Major League Baseball players cracked a $200,000 salary until Dick Allen in 1973 was appropriately compensated for his ability to smoke while juggling. The next year, when his wages went up to $250,000, Allen became the first player to pay the IRS at the maximum rate.

These days, pretty much every major leaguer pays the top rate of 37%, as the league minimum last year was $545,000 and the top bracket starts at $500,000 for single filers and $600,000 for married couples. What that means, though, is that Michael Conforto, making $605,094 with the Mets last year, paid the same tax rate as his teammate Yoenis Cespedes, who made $29 million.

If and when Ocasio-Cortez gets her way, it will have the effect of re-stratifying the tax rates paid by ballplayers, harkening back to the days when Allen was at the top of the heap and the minimum MLB salary was $15,000, or $80,000 today adjusted for inflation.

The proposal to restore top tax rates on eight-figure earners to pre-Reagan levels is popular enough to believe that it has a future, if not for a couple of years. What that means is that things are going to get more complex at the top of the free agent market in baseball, as well as other sports.

“The guys who will be really affected are those in the $20M+ range which are only a handful per offseason,” Rafael Nieves, vice president for baseball at the Wasserman agency, told Dealbreaker in an email. “It will impact those guys, but not the rest.”

As far as their own contracts go, that is true, but it certainly is possible to see how changes at the top of the market could reverberate through the rest of free agency, and really to all player salaries. That especially is true if changes to the tax code lead to changes in the way those top players do their contracts, impacting team budgets long after their careers are over.

“You will see guys deferring money for many years,” Nieves said.

That already happens, most famously with the million-dollar payments Bobby Bonilla gets every July 1 from the Mets, and will continue to get until 2035. But starting in 2022, Bonilla’s cash-in at the start of July will be dwarfed by Max Scherzer, whose contract calls for him to receive $35 million from the Washington Nationals for each of the next three seasons – all of which will be deferred to 2022-28, with $15 million due each summer. (Don’t worry about Scherzer’s short-term finances, he’s already banked $60 million on his current deal, and gets $15 million of his $50 million signing bonus each of the next three years after getting the first $5 million up front.)

If deferrals become more common, it’s a dangerous game for players as a group, because teams will have a built-in excuse to keep salaries lower, seeing all the money they already have budgeted for years down the line. At the same time, a much higher top tax rate could have a dampening effect on top salaries – when the difference between $20 million and $25 million is only effectively $1.5 million, chasing every last dollar becomes somewhat less important. If that becomes the case, it should mean more money for players lower on the salary spectrum, right? Not if the owners have anything to say about it, of course, but that part of the distribution of wealth in the sport could be another wrinkle in what figures to be a very tense round of collective bargaining in 2021.

“It’s probably unpredictable as you just never know how the market is going to react and what other factors will be in the air,” Nieves said. “I do think that if we see lower salaries at the top, we won’t see an increase of pay at the bottom. Unless clubs have a spending floor, they will never be motivated to really allocate their money into the lower classes.”

The only way to a spending floor is a salary cap, long anathema to the MLBPA, but given that players’ share of league revenues has gone down in the current “free” market in which the luxury tax acts as a pseudo-cap, and players in sports with salary caps are earning more on a percentage basis, it might just be their best way forward.