Trump's New Fed Chair Pocketed $100 Million on His Way Into Office and Thinks It’s None of Your Business
Who Wrote the Check, Kevin?
The new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, got paid a hundred million dollars right before he took office, and he will not say who paid him.
That’s it. That’s the story. A hundred million dollars. Days before the oath. And when Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him, on camera, in a Senate hearing, WHO WROTE THE CHECK, Kevin Warsh looked at her and made lawyer noises until her time ran out.
“Who gave you $100 million right before you were sworn in?” she asked. “Was it a billionaire who has business with the Fed? Was it Stanley Druckenmiller, who’s made billions of dollars betting on what the Fed does?”
Simple question. Four-second answer, if you’re innocent. Here’s what she got instead. He has “fully honored his obligations” to the Office of Government Ethics. He has “reached a full agreement” with ethics officials. She asked again. Full agreement. Obligations. Honored. She asked if he’d at least say HOW he divested. More oatmeal. “I’ll take that as a no,” she said, because what the hell else do you say to a man doing a filibuster impression of a photocopier.
Let me walk you through the grift, because it’s beautiful in the way a car crash is beautiful. Warsh owned $100 million-plus in two private investment funds, the Juggernaut Funds and THSDFS LLC, which is not a name, it’s a keyboard smash with a bank account. He refused to tell the Senate what was in them. Then, days before taking office, he “sold his shares.” Sold them. To someone. Someone who wrote him a check for over a hundred million dollars at the exact moment he became the most powerful banker on the planet. And that someone’s name is a secret. From you. The person whose mortgage, rent, credit card, and grocery bill this man now controls.
Oh, and the Druckenmiller thing? Warren didn’t pull that name out of a hat. Warsh WORKED for Druckenmiller. Went straight from the Fed to Druckenmiller’s family office in 2011, and the Juggernaut Fund is linked to Druckenmiller’s shop.
And who appointed this guy? Trump. Of course Trump. The president who ran on draining the swamp appointed a nine-figure Wall Street creature married to an Estée Lauder heiress, a man worth somewhere between $130 and $226 million (the disclosure forms are so vague that the ERROR BAR on his wealth is a hundred million dollars, which should tell you everything about the disclosure forms), and the “Republican” Senate waved him through.
(Not knocking them. You do you. This is America ((for now)). We are simply polar opposites, and frankly they’re more honest about the wig.)
A republic means the public owns the power. What we watched this week was a public official telling the public, through its elected Senator, that the public doesn’t get to know who slipped him a nine figure bribe on his way in the door. Call that whatever you want. Don’t call it a ‘republic’.
Now the big question, the one nobody in Washington will ask out loud, so I will. Why the hell is a man with a hundred million dollars working in government? Why are BILLIONAIRES working in government? These people do not need jobs. They do not need salaries. They will never need anything again for a thousand generations. There is exactly ONE thing a government office offers a man who already has everything, and that thing is POWER. The power to move markets. The power to reward friends. The power to make himself and his buddies EVEN RICHER. That is why they’re there. That is the ONLY reason they’re there. Nobody leaves a beach in the Hamptons to “serve” you. They leave it to farm you.
And I hate to break it to you, America, but that money doesn’t come from nowhere. Every dollar a billionaire scams is a dollar that never lands in the pocket of a nurse, a trucker, a waitress, a guy fixing transmissions in February with busted knuckles. The working class and the poor outnumber these vampires 100,000 to one. Hell, probably closer to a million to one. And yet the money only ever flows one way. Up. Away from the million, toward the one. You are not in an economy. You are on a menu.
This is crony capitalist corruption, naked, in daylight, with a Senate stenographer typing it all down, and it is happening under the most corrupt government in the history of the United States. Right now. This one. These are men and women who care NOTHING about the United States beyond the fact that a dollar bill has “United States” printed on it. And people like that always, ALWAYS have a price.
A man who won’t tell the Senate who paid him $100 million will absolutely sell this country to whatever foreign power backs the biggest truck of money up to his door, because he has already shown you his one governing principle, and it folds in half and fits in a wallet.
That’s the part that should keep you up at night. Not Warsh specifically. The lesson. Because every crook in Washington watched that hearing and learned it. You can take the money. You can get caught. You can sit in front of a United States Senator, get asked point blank about a nine-figure payday, weasel your way through it with “I complied with the ethics office,” and NOTHING HAPPENS. No follow-up. No subpoena. No consequences. Warren told him the tone he’s setting “seems to invite corruption.” Senator, with respect, corruption isn’t invited. Corruption is sitting in the chairman’s seat.
This is disgusting. I don’t have a smarter word for it and I refuse to go find one. A man took a hundred million dollars from a hidden hand, took control of your money, and told your representatives to pound sand. In any diner in America, we know what you call money you can’t explain. Washington calls it a ‘divestiture’.
(I call it treason…)
Who wrote the check, Kevin?
Meanwhile, down here in reader-funded land, my private investment vehicles are several cheap ebikes from walmart.com, which get stolen at a remarkably consistent interval of about three months, always while I’m in the grocery store. Unlike Kevin, I will happily disclose everything about these transactions, including my sincere hope that whoever keeps taking them enjoys eternity in hell. By my math I’m about 15 days out from the next one vanishing, and I honestly don’t know if Lily is going to sign off on the Wise Wolf petty cash fund covering another one this time.
So if this reporting matters to you, a paid subscription keeps the lights on, keeps the questions coming, and keeps me pedaling to the corner store, at least until August.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
For readers who want the full discography of this man’s career, here is the bonus material. Every track verified, every track real.
Track One, “The Epstein Files.” When the DOJ released the Epstein documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, guess whose name was in them. Kevin Warsh appears in an email to Epstein titled “St. Barth’s Christmas 2010,” on a list of “everyone I know that’s coming down so far.”
At his confirmation hearing, Warren asked point blank whether his secret funds invest in companies tied to Trump’s family, money laundering, Chinese-controlled companies, or “financing vehicles established by Jeffrey Epstein.” He would not answer the question directly. Only later, in written responses, once the cameras were off, did he deny any personal or financial ties to Epstein or Maxwell. To be clear, he has been accused of no crime. He was just apparently on the Christmas list.
Track Two, “The Bear Stearns Sessions.” Warsh is a lawyer, not an economist, who did mergers at Morgan Stanley before Bush made him the youngest Fed governor in history at 35. When 2008 hit, this Morgan Stanley alum sat inside the Fed helping negotiate the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns, and worked to make sure his former firm, Morgan Stanley, survived the meltdown. The bank he came from got saved by the institution he sat in. Your house got a foreclosure notice.
Track Three, “Wrong (The Extended Remix).” He warned in 2008 that rate cuts would ignite inflation. They didn’t. He warned in 2010 that stimulus would ignite inflation. It didn’t. He was the lone Fed official to fight the 2011 recovery efforts. When his predicted inflation never showed up, he didn’t apologize, he just invented new reasons to keep being wrong, producing work Larry Summers called “the single most confused analysis of monetary policy that I have read this year.” That man now runs the money supply.
Track Four, “The Weathervane.” After a career spent screaming that easy money is poison, Warsh discovered, the moment Trump dangled the chairmanship, that Trump is right and rates should come down. Amazing what a job offer does for a man’s economics.
Track Five, “The Family Business.” His wife is worth an estimated $1.9 billion. His father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, the $4.9 billion Trump classmate and donor credited with planting the Greenland idea in Trump’s head. His decade-long patron is Stanley Druckenmiller. The chairman of your central bank is a group project by billionaires.
Track Six, “Don’t Ask, Won’t Tell.” At his hearing he refused to state that Trump lost the 2020 election. In July, asked whether he’d even QUESTIONED his own vice chair about reportedly dining privately with bankers during a Fed blackout period, he stonewalled that too. Warren’s verdict from the dais was that his tone “seems to invite corruption.” The Senate confirmed him anyway, 54 to 45, right down the party line.
That’s the record. It’s still spinning.
Strong piece. The detail that should be everywhere: those Juggernaut holdings are illiquid venture positions industry people say take years to divest. A $100M “sale” in 90 days of assets that can’t actually be sold in 90 days isn’t a divestiture — it’s a transfer. Warren was asking the right question.
Kind of weird that they know the amount but they don’t know the account it came from.