TRUTH News Review

New York Times: Man’s Body, Feet Encased in Concrete, Washes Ashore in Brooklyn

The classics never go out of style...

WSAV: Movers, hired on Craigslist, steal Georgia family’s belongings

On the bright side, they weren't billed for the move, so they broke even on the deal!


Los Angeles Times: San Andreas fault 'locked, loaded and ready to roll' with big earthquake, expert says

You mean the illegal immigrants, high taxes, and obscene traffic weren't enough? We needed another reason NOT to live in California?

CNN: Donald Trump names new finance chairman

Just when you think Donald Trump has "jumped the shark", he finds a bigger shark:

Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump announced Thursday a national finance chairman for his campaign -- a move aimed at creating a fundraising operation the candidate has long eschewed as he pivots to the general election. 

Trump tapped Steven Mnuchin to lead the effort, he said in a statement. Mnuchin is a long-time investment executive who chairs Dune Entertainment Partners, was founder and CEO of OneWest Bank Group and spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs.

"Shark" is the right word for Mr. Mnuchin. He led a group of investors which bought out IndyMac, the third largest bank failure in U.S. history. From a 2012 Bloomberg article:

Eight bidders who met the FDIC’s guidelines performed due diligence on IndyMac’s assets and liabilities. Mnuchin and his group made a $1.55 billion bid for the bank, valuing its assets—loans minus deposits—at $13.9 billion. (Mnuchin, who at the time was running Dune Capital Management, a $3 billion hedge fund, made what he describes as a “significant personal investment.”) The FDIC had agreed to hold some of the more problematic assets; it also wrote into the deal a loss-sharing agreement in which the FDIC would absorb 95 percent of the losses on a portion of IndyMac’s loan portfolio once total losses exceeded 30 percent. “There was no price certainty at that point,” says William Isaac, a former chairman of the FDIC. “The financial markets had ceased functioning, nobody wanted to buy anything. The FDIC had to do a loss-sharing arrangement, but that doesn’t change the fact that this investor group was taking a substantial risk.”

I question how big a risk that really was. Mnuchin CYA'd himself and his investment group very well in his negotiations with the FDIC. I give Mnuchin all the credit in the world for what he did. To be honest, he strikes me as a better investor than Trump, who should be working for Mnuchin.