Politics

Last August, we introduced readers to the hedge fund that we dubbed the "puppe master behind the US presidential election", which also happened to be the most successful hedge fund in history : Setauket-based Renaissance Technologies (a recent analysis by LCH found that Ray Dalio's Bridgewater, with $45 billion in absolute profits since inception, was the most successful but the ranking ignored Renaissance, which has return $10 billion more).

Shortly before the market close on Thursday, retailers stumbled on one single Reuters headline: Trump says he supports "some form" of border tax.

As Reuters elaborated, President Donald Trump on Thursday spoke favorably about an export-boosting border adjustment tax proposal being pushed by Republicans in the U.S. Congress, but did not specifically  endorse it. Trump had previously sent mixed signals on the proposal at the heart of a Republican plan to overhaul the U.S. tax code for the first time in more than 30 years.

Senator John McCain secretly visited Syria last weekend to meet with American military officials and discuss the campaign against ISIS. On Wednesday a spokeswoman for the Republican Senator confirmed that McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, made a visit to the Syrian town of Kobani. She said: “Senator McCain traveled to northern Syria last week to visit U.S. forces deployed there and to discuss the counter-ISIS campaign and ongoing operations to retake Raqqa” His trip comes as the Trump administration debates plans for an increased military campaign against ISIS.

Confirming the Republican Chair of the House Committee on Oversight, Jason Chaffetz's comments last week, that protesters were an organized mob:

The Washington Post has announced that John Podesta will be joining them as a contributing columnist Podesta became a household name after emails from his personal account were dumped by WikiLeaks before the US presidential election and he is also the central character in the pizzagate scandal, which he recently claimed was fake news. The former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign has already written two op-eds for the paper, slamming the Trump administration on Russia and the president’s war with the media.