Feeling Ill on the Investments Rollercoaster; Trump Says Yes to Logging, No to Pollution Reporting–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: April 10, 2025

Indy Digest: April 10, 2025

I had an investment committee meeting for a nonprofit with which I am involved earlier today. The topic of investment strategies came up, and that entire discussion can be summed up in three letters: LOL.

Here’s CNBC’s Dow Jones graph for the last three months:

Long term, it’s always said it’s a safe bet that stocks, 401(k)s, etc. will continue to rise. (But given the global economic chaos President Trump’s on-and-off tariff declarations are causing, there’s a good chance some longer-term damage is being done.) As for the short to immediate term, who the hell knows?

Actually … is it possible that some people do know? The timing of some of the president’s social-media posts is making folks wonder. NBC News explains:

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s announcement Wednesday afternoon that he was pausing country-by-country tariffs by 90 days, some experts—as well as critics of Trump and social media users—are raising questions about a statement he posted earlier in the day that may have indicated the massive sell-off in stocks in recent days was coming to an end. 

Not long after trading opened at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform and wrote:

“BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!”

Four minutes later, he wrote:

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”

Just before 1:30 p.m., Trump announced the pause, sending stocks soaring. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index had its biggest one-day gain since 2008, rising nearly 12%, while the S&P 500 climbed 9.5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 8%, or about 2,800 points.

Trump could have been generally urging people to buy into the market while prices were relatively low. That was the response Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gave when he was asked about the posts Wednesday evening on CNBC. …

But on social media, some users raised the prospect—without evidence—of market manipulation, while others began referring to the market’s sharp turn upward as the “Trump Pump.”

“Trump Pump.” That reminds me of a storyline in the comic strip “Bloom County” around 1989-1990. For reasons that don’t really make any sense, Donald Trump’s brain was transplanted into Bill the Cat’s body after an accident. Anyway, this is what happened when Opus showed Donald/Bill his, uh, bathroom facilities.

1989: Trump Dump. 2025: Trump Pump.

So, where were we? Ah, yes, the president’s social media posts yesterday. I should point out the NBC goes on to state: “There is no evidence to suggest that Trump was seeking to manipulate markets or that he or any of his advisers acted on inside information.”

Nonetheless, Democrats in Congress have started calling for a look-see into possible insider trading or market manipulation. Time magazine reports:

(California) Sen. Adam Schiff and other Democrats in Congress argue that the timing of Trump’s post raises “legal and (ethical) concerns,” and that Trump should make clear who knew about his tariff reversal decision before he announced it, and if any of those people let others know about Trump’s decision. When asked about the timing of his decision to pause most tariffs, and when he had settled on that, Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he had been considering it “for a period of time.” He explained: “I wouldn’t say this morning. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about it. … I think it probably came together early this morning.”

A letter sent to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Jamieson Greer, Acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, on Thursday by Schiff and Sen. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, addressed a number of concerns. They called for a review of “any communications between White House and executive branch agency employees… and external parties, including financial institutions, brokers, dealers… that may have included non-public information.” As a Senator, Schiff can investigate these claims, but lacks the subpoena power that a Congressional committee might employ in such an investigation.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, also spoke out, calling for all members of Congress to disclose any stocks they had bought in the past 24 hours. “I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor,” she wrote on X on Wednesday night. “Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”

Meanwhile, the stock market rollercoaster zooms on. As the graph above shows, the Dow Jones index fell 2.5 percent today. NASDAQ fell 4.3 percent.

As far as investments are concerned, the best thing for many folks to do right now is simply: LOL. It’s either that or cry. Or perhaps both. Your call.

—Jimmy Boegle

From the Independent

More News

• Well this is an interesting headline from Wired magazine: “Elon Musk’s DOGE Is Getting Audited.” The story says: “The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is auditing Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The probe, which has been ongoing since March, covers DOGE’s handling of data at several cabinet-level agencies, including the Departments of Labor, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the Treasury, and the Social Security Administration, as well as the US DOGE Service (USDS) itself, according to sources and records reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the GAO—an independent auditing, research, and investigative agency for Congress—appears to be requesting comprehensive information from the agencies in question, including incident reports on ‘potential or actual misuse of agency systems or data’ and documentation of policies and procedures relating to systems DOGE operatives have accessed, as well as documentation of policies for the agency’s risk assessments, audit logs, insider threat programs, and more.”

• The Trump administration is revoking the visas of hundreds of college students across the country. The Hill, rather disturbingly, explains: “Hundreds of foreign students at dozens of colleges across the country have had their higher education experience turned upside down as the Trump administration has expanded its immigration crackdown beyond those involved in the pro-Palestinian protests. International students are seeing their visas revoked for infractions as minor as traffic violations, while colleges are having to check immigration databases to find out whether their students are still allowed to be in the country. … The visa revocations began at big-name schools, such as Columbia University, and at least at first targeted students who were involved in pro-Palestinian protests. But it has expanded beyond that, with one University of Florida student detained by ICE after he was arrested for traffic violations. The American Council on Education, along with 16 other groups representing a broad swath of higher education institutions, wrote a letter on April 4 requesting a briefing with the State Department on these actions.”

• State Farm may be poised to significantly raise premiums in the state following a hearing. Our partners at Calmatters explain: “In early February, State Farm asked California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to approve emergency interim rate increases, saying the Los Angeles Country fires had worsened its financial situation as it awaited the Insurance Department’s decision on rate requests it submitted last summer. State Farm said it expects to pay more than $7 billion worth of claims from those fires. Lara’s department and State Farm reached an agreement ahead of this week’s hearing. The outcome of an unusual rate hearing in Oakland over the past three days, overseen by administrative law judge Karl-Fredric Seligman, would make it official. If the judge approves, starting in June the company’s customers will see average increases of 17% for homeowners—down from the 22% the insurer originally requested after it reached a deal with the California Insurance Department; 15% for renters and condos; and 38% for rental dwellings.”

• Trump has cleared the way for logging to occur in many of the country’s national forests—including those in California. SFGate reports: “A month after President Donald Trump released an executive order calling for the ‘immediate expansion of American Timber Production,’ USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has laid out what steps the U.S. Forest Service will take to do so. This includes lifting protections on more than half of the land managed by the U.S. Forest Service, expediting the process for logging in these areas. ‘The United States has an abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs, but heavy-handed federal policies have prevented full utilization of these resources,’ Rollins wrote in the memo, dated April 3. The memo serves as an emergency situation declaration that designates 112,646,000 acres, or 59% of all national forest lands, as a priority for immediate logging. … The declaration could have big implications for California’s forests, some of which haven’t seen commercial-scale logging in decades.”

• Meanwhile, ProPublica reports that, as the headline says, “Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters.” The story details: “The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica. … Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from. ‘This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,’ said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. ‘This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road.’”

• And finally … allergies suck, and climate change is only making things like hay fever worse. Ugh. Time magazine says: “If you suffer from hay fever—or allergic rhinitis (AR)—and have found your symptoms growing worse in recent years, you’re not alone. Increasingly, health care professionals are concluding that as global heat increases so too do allergy symptoms. In industrialized countries, hay fever diagnoses are rising by 2% to 3% per year, costing billions of dollars in health care and lost productivity. Spring pollen season, which typically begins in late February or early March and ends in early summer, is now arriving as much as 20 days early in North America. Now, a new study in the journal The Laryngoscope has taken a deep dive into the research surrounding the link and has found that not only is it a real phenomenon, it’s been going on at least since the turn of the millennium.”

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