The MeidasTouch Podcast - Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Evidence of Trump’s Stock Manipulation

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on growing evidence of potential market manipulation by Trump and Meiselas interviews Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. For more Meidas, join us on Substack at MeidasPlus.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and

terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Discover the magic of Bad MGM Casino, where the excitement is always on deck. Pull up a seat and check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer. From roulette to blackjack, watch as a dealer hosts

your table game and live chat with them throughout your experience to feel like you're actually at the casino. The excitement doesn't stop there. With over 3,000 games to choose from, including fan favorites like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, and more. Make deposits instantly

to jump in on the fun and make same day withdrawals if you win. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. You don't want to miss out. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We continue to look into whether or not stock manipulation was at play when at 9.07 a.m. in the morning earlier this week, Donald Trump posted, this is a great time to buy DJT, which also happens to be the stock symbol for Trump media. Then after saying that there was not going to be any pauses on these tariffs against the world, he then in a few hours later announced that there would be a pause, kind of. The announcement was misleading. The tariffs against China went up. Then when you focus on the global tariff rate, it's still actually a blended rate of about 25% when you factor in all of the other tariffs.

But then you started to see videos like this emerge of Donald Trump in the Oval Office with his billionaire buddies talking about how rich they got that day. And he's like, you got 2.5 billion. You got 900 million. Here, let's play this clip. He made $4.5 billion today, and he made $900 million. Also, when you look at the markets, you can kind of identify a very strange kind of surge in the Dow before Trump made the announcement. It's an odd-looking spike right there. You see it spikes right before the 1 p.m. announcement, then the announcement happens, then it spikes. So is that a cohort of people who may have known about it? Then these exchange traded funds like SPI and QQQ and TQQQ that trade alongside some of the

exchanges also had very strange activity right before Trump made this announcement. Lots of people saying, lots of MAGA Republicans also saying now's the time to buy. The person who knows the most about this stuff, both before being a senator and her work in the Senate is Senator Elizabeth Warren. I want to get your take on this, Senator, what you've made of all of this since that's occurred, what you've evaluated. And even on a day like Friday, you've got Trump still dangling things. Oh, I may want to call Xi Jinping. I may not. And all of these things are impacting the markets with volatility we haven't seen before. So you put it together exactly right.

What you've got is somebody who is able to move the markets, who clearly wants to make money off this, wants to admire friends who made money off this. And now the question is, ooh, who had information just a little bit ahead of the public announcement? Did they or did their friends and family get that information and trade on it? Because that one happens to be flatly illegal. So look, the facts are out there. It is time for an independent investigation. Now, normally that would be the job of something called the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department.

But under the Trump regime, they're too busy disappearing people to El Salvador concentration camps and not focusing on this issue. So what do what happens? What does an independent investigation actually look like? Right. So I just want to say here, it is still their job. They may not do their job and we may have to be realistic about that. But damn it, we ought to call them out because it is the job of the SEC. It is the job of the DOJ to investigate exactly this kind of activity, whether it happens on Main Street or in the Oval Office. However, having said that, this happens to be a place

where it's not just the DOJ and SEC who have jurisdiction and power. It's the state attorneys general all across the country. And for that, a group of us, I have just sent out a letter to every state attorney general asking them to make an independent investigation. So, you know, we got 50 different actors out there rubbing their hands together, ready to go. Let's talk about the consumer sentiment right now. Let's just say it's not good or perhaps disastrous. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Report, the lowest since 1981, the second lowest since the 1950s.

The people who were polled and that are surveyed expect inflation to go 6.7%. Even the independents in that poll expect 6.2%. It seems that people are understanding now, finally. I mean, you and others were saying, tariffs bad, tariffs bad, a little bit too late now that they're realizing that. But tell us your assessment, though, of just how disastrous these tariffs are and what it really means for the cost? So it's not that you can never have a good tariff policy and that tariffs can't be one tool in the economic toolbox. It's the way Donald Trump has done this. He has done a big tariff on virtually every country, on virtually every product that they sell to the United States. He's put it in place immediately across the board, you know, a kind of everything, everywhere, all at once.

That creates economic chaos. And economic chaos is the exact opposite of getting investors to come into the United States and say, good place to build a factory or to rehab an old factory. Good time to be able to buy tools and put together a team to have manufacturing here in the United States. The price of the chaos that Donald Trump has created is to drive our economy over a cliff.

Consumer sentiment has collapsed because people on the ground experience this. They know what it means. They're watching it. Prices are going up. They're looking left, looking right, seeing those pink slips start to come out. They know that what Donald Trump is doing is not going to produce jobs for them and it's not going to produce the lower prices, remember, that he promised on day one. You know, we're hearing about treasury yields surging in a way that is very harmful. We're hearing about bond markets being disrupted and these bond auctions not going well. A lot of people are now learning about things that they never focused on under former administrations because you didn't have to wait,

you didn't have to, before you go to sleep, go, I better check the futures market. There's a lot of that happening right now. So can you just explain to us why that's happening and why that's relevant? Sure. So understand this about treasuries, for example. These are treasury bonds, the government issues. Whenever there's a crisis anywhere in the world, terrible things happen. And investors, people who've got money that they can afford to invest in different places, you know what they do? They go to U.S. treasuries. It's called flight to safety. In other words, when there's economic danger in the world, a war has broken out, there have been massive earthquakes that will disrupt the economy, COVID. What happens? Investors go to the United

States government treasuries because, damn, it just doesn't get any safer than that, except with Donald Trump as president. And what we watched happen on Wednesday is that investors around the world for the first time really started easing back out in the middle of chaos, saying, I'm not so sure I want my money in the United States and held by the United States government. I'm not sure I want those treasuries. That is not just a flashing red light. That one now you can hear the sirens going off and you can feel things taking the really sharp dive down. That's part of the cost of the Trump chaos from the tariffs. And it really is a reminder he's driving this economy over a cliff. You know, there was this bizarre cabinet meeting that was held earlier in the week. I've described it as Kim Jong-un meets the apprentice.

And I said, I think the people on the apprentice would do a better job than this cabinet. So then you have Elon Musk gets called on in the cabinet meeting, which even when I say this, it feels like the worst dystopian Mad Libs ever. And he describes the cuts that he's solved, right? And they said it was going to be $2 trillion. That was their number, $2 trillion. And then he slips this in. I'll play it for you. And whole thing is hot it's such a strange scene too but i want you to take a look at it when i think he says and we after all of this the hostile government takeover destroying the services he goes 125 billion and no one's like

what what that that's not what you said here watch this clip and this whole scene as you watch it to me looks like a very strange like very strange version of the apprentice watch this thank you very much great job lovely life well thanks to uh your fantastic leadership this amazing cabinet and the very talented Doge team I'm excited to announce that uh we anticipate savings in fi26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion. And some of it is just absurd. Like people getting unemployment insurance who haven't been born yet.

I mean, I think anyone can appreciate whether, I mean, come on, that's just crazy. So, some of these things, people ask me like, well, how are you going to find ways to move forward in the government? I'm like, well, actually, just go in any direction. That's how you find it. It's very common.

As the military would say, target-rich environment. What do you say? You know, multiple pieces first of all what happened to your two trillion buster i don't even believe the 150 billion i want to see the receipts on that before i'm going to believe elon musk because he does things like cancels a contract and claims it's the full contract price sorry it doesn't work that way you still have to pay for the things people have already done. But you know, for me, the part that really gets me, it's the laughter. It's the yucking it up over the fact that they're trying to close the

Department of Education. So what does that really mean? It means bigger classes for our kids in public schools. It means our kids with serious disabilities, the kids who need an aid with them for part of the day, they lose the aid so they don't get to be in public school anymore. It means ending the after school programs. It means cutting back at the Department of the VA so that those promises we made to the people who put their lives on the line to defend us, we just don't honor those promises anymore. But hey, Doge saved some money on that by firing a bunch of veterans who work at the Veterans Affairs Department. And you just keep going on through it. Sure, cut back on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You save a lot of money by getting rid of the financial cops,

the people who found over the last dozen years, $21 billion, which they returned directly to the American people who got cheated. Yeah, cut those financial cops and claim that that is a savings. Well, it's sure not a savings for the people who get scammed. And that's the whole heart of this, because it's all about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, a handful of billionaires, which is mostly what that cabinet is saying, how can we run this country

to just make the grift work better for the billionaires? And who's going to pay for it? It's going to be our little kids. It's going to going to pay for it? It's going to be our little kids. It's going to be seniors on Social Security. It's going to be our veterans. It's going to be our public school kids. It's going to be people who get scammed. That's what I hear when I watch that cabinet meeting. And it starts to make me sick.

And then it just makes me furious. And finally, Senator, with all this talk about the tariffs, like we shouldn't forget, right, that it's actually not Trump's authority to do this. He's claiming extraordinary emergency war powers, the same types of powers in a different sense, but the same pretext he uses to do this disappearing of migrants without due process. He's doing it here with tariffs. But one of the issues is, is that the Republicans in the Senate, not all of them, and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives, they want to forfeit the co-equal branch of government's authority to control this type of stuff, to control the

tariff. So I know you're working towards legislation and trying on a bipartisan basis to say, hello, this is our role, not the role of a dictator. So we've actually gone further even right now. Remember, the authority that Trump is using has built right into it that all Congress has to do is pass a resolution and say, sorry, no emergency. We are not in an emergency with France or with Canada or with South Korea. We're not in an emergency. And it rolls back Trump's ability to do any of these tariffs, all the ones he's announced and all of his red light, green light with tariffs. All of the Democrats are lined up, ready to go. Ron Wyden and I introduced the resolution yesterday.

It has to be voted on in the floor of the Senate. So we'll be doing that in a couple of weeks. We just need to get the Republicans to join us. We don't have to have all of weeks. We just need to get the Republicans to join us. We don't have to have all of them, but we need some of the Republicans to join us. And when we do that, Donald Trump will lose the ability to create the chaos, at least with the tariffs. And Congress will reassert its rightful role over its job in setting tariff policy, excuse me, as the Constitution of the United States anticipates.

Senator Warren, we appreciate you as always. And hey, if you ever decide you want to be a podcaster, I'm always looking for co-hosts. All right. I like it. Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's always good to have a chance to visit with you. Let's do it again soon. Absolutely. And everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers. Can't get enough Midas? Check out the Midas

Plus sub stack for ad-free articles, reports, podcasts, daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, and more. Sign up for free now at MidasPlus.com.