⚖️ Situational awareness: Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook today sued President Trump, after Trump fired her from the Fed board.

Today's column didn't quite come together in time, exacerbated by getting E off to her first day of high school. In other words, let's dig into the notebook:

When Bain Capital founder Mitt Romney ran for president, critics would sometimes snipe about how you can't run the U.S. government like a private equity fund.

• Fast forward 13 years and the U.S. government is being run like a private equity fund.

National security is no longer paramount, or reason alone to spend taxpayer money. There also must be the potential for financial gain.

• We sort of saw it with U.S. Steel. We definitely saw it with Intel, and with the kickbacks from Nvidia and AMD.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick this week made several comments about how this is a new fiduciary feature, not a bug.

• First, he floated the idea of the government taking stakes in U.S. defense contractors. Then in the Oval Office he said: "If we are going to buy two billion COVID vaccines, maybe we should have some warrants and some equity in these companies and have that grow for the health of the American people."
• In other words, profit is as much a piece of "health" as is preventing illness.

The private equity analogy isn't perfect, but it is apt.