Home Blog Page 39

RTX Investor Deck Lists ‘World Peace’ as Principal Risk, ‘Sustained Conflict’ as Forward-Looking Tailwind

Cody Thompson
-
0
RTX Investor Deck Lists ‘World Peace’ as Principal Risk, ‘Sustained Conflict’ as Forward-Looking Tailwind

ARLINGTON, VA — Slide 14 of RTX Corporation’s Monday investor presentation listed “outbreak of durable global peace” as a principal risk factor and “sustained multi-theater conflict” as a forward-looking tailwind, a juxtaposition that drew no questions from analysts until roughly the forty-fifth minute of Q&A, and even then only because someone wanted clarification on whether Taiwan was modeled separately or folded into the broader Indo-Pacific assumption.

The presentation, delivered ahead of formal Q1 results next week, came as the White House’s pause on Ukraine aid disbursements entered its sixth week, a development the deck classified as “transitory” in 11-point font and footnoted to a McKinsey study nobody asked to see.

“We feel very good about our positioning regardless of what shape any individual conflict ultimately takes,” said RTX EVP and Chief Financial Officer Margaret Voss, walking analysts through a chart titled Conflict-Agnostic Revenue Diversification. “Whether Ukraine continues, pauses, restarts, freezes, partitions, or somehow concludes, our exposure is structured to remain flat to slightly positive. We’re a backlog story, not a headlines story.”

A subsequent slide offered scenario modeling for a hypothetical Ukrainian ceasefire, projecting it as a “moderate near-term headwind” of approximately 3% to consolidated revenue, “more than offset by replenishment cycles, Taiwan readiness expenditures, and what we’re internally calling Generalized Middle East.”

Pete Donegan of Talcott Capital, who initiated coverage at Buy in February, said the deck reflected “exactly the kind of all-weather operational discipline” the sector has been waiting for, and that RTX’s willingness to publicly characterize peace as an 8-K-worthy event “shows real maturity from a company that, ten years ago, would have buried this in the appendix between the pension footnote and the auditor’s letter.”

Asked at a midday press gaggle whether the language risked appearing tone-deaf, Voss said the company’s investor relations team had run the deck past a values consultant who flagged only one slide — a footnote thanking the Houthis for “sustained relevance of the destroyer platform” — which was subsequently moved to the appendix without further edits.

Pressed on whether RTX had a contingency in place should multiple conflicts resolve simultaneously, Voss called the scenario “mathematically possible but not something we’re underwriting,” and noted that the company’s five-year strategic plan assumes “a baseline of human nature.”

The presentation closed with a single slide reading Thank You superimposed over an F-35 catching golden-hour light, and a Q&A in which the only ESG-related question concerned whether the company’s munitions were now classified, technically, as transitional fuels.

Man Scales Fence, Breaks Window, Lobs Molotov Into Governor’s Residence; Pennsylvania State Police Praised for Arriving Eventually

Nash Grayson
-
0
Man Scales Fence, Breaks Window, Lobs Molotov Into Governor’s Residence; Pennsylvania State Police Praised for Arriving Eventually

HARRISBURG, PA — At approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, a man hopped a fence, smashed a window, and hurled an incendiary device into the official residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro while the governor, his wife, his four children, and his dog slept upstairs, an episode authorities are now describing as ‘a wake-up call,’ which it was, in the most literal possible sense.

The Pennsylvania State Police, charged with protecting the residence around the clock, confirmed that the suspect successfully cleared the perimeter, traversed the grounds, breached the building, started a fire, and then exited the same way he came in before being apprehended later, a sequence of events the agency characterized as ‘an active and ongoing investigation,’ the standard phrasing for ‘we have questions too.’

‘The perimeter held in the sense that it is still there, physically,’ said Bram Doloway, director of the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Executive Residence Security, an organization he founded after concluding that no one else was going to. ‘The fence is intact. The cameras recorded the entire incident in beautiful 4K. At every stage of this event, the relevant equipment performed exactly as designed. The man simply walked past it.’

Officials confirmed the suspect scaled an iron fence in plain view of the residence, carried what investigators described as a ‘gas-can-and-bottle-based homemade arrangement’ across the lawn, and ignited the first floor of a building with a permanent state-funded protective detail, all without triggering any response from said detail until after the fire was already in progress and a smoke alarm — purchased, like the ones in everyone’s apartment, at a hardware store — had done the job the State Police were technically being paid to do.

Governor Shapiro, addressing reporters Sunday morning while standing in front of a charred section of his own dining room, said his family was safe and thanked first responders, an act of public grace that was almost immediately undercut by the dawning realization, visible on his face, that ‘first responders’ had in this case included him, personally, waking his children up and walking them out of a house that was on fire.

‘We are taking this very seriously,’ said a spokesperson for the State Police, deploying the phrase that institutions reach for when ‘we noticed’ is unavailable. The agency declined to specify how a man with a duffel bag full of accelerant cleared a guarded residence in the state capital, citing the integrity of the investigation, which now appears to consist primarily of asking the cameras what they saw.

The suspect, who turned himself in hours later, reportedly told investigators he was motivated by a list of grievances which authorities are still reviewing, parsing, and trying to fit into any recognizable ideological category, a process complicated by the document apparently containing several. The list, sources said, will eventually be assigned to whichever agency is least busy.

Asked whether the breach would prompt a review of executive residence protocols nationwide, the governor’s office said it expected ‘a thorough conversation’ in the coming weeks, a timeline that puts the formal hardening of the nation’s governors’ mansions somewhere on the calendar between now and the next time someone walks into one carrying a gas can.

Memecoin Day Trader Realizes Saturday Morning That Each of His 8,400 Trades Was, Technically, Its Own Taxable Event

Cody Thompson
-
0
Memecoin Day Trader Realizes Saturday Morning That Each of His 8,400 Trades Was, Technically, Its Own Taxable Event

HOBOKEN, NJ — Three days before the federal filing deadline, 28-year-old retail investor Brendan Mosley sat down at his kitchen table Saturday with a cold brew, a printout from Coinbase, and the dawning realization that the IRS does not, in fact, view his year of frantic memecoin swapping as ‘basically one big thing.’

According to the spreadsheet Mosley generated at 9:14 a.m. and immediately closed at 9:14 a.m., he executed 8,431 separate trades in 2024, each one a discrete capital gains event requiring its own cost basis, holding period, and disposition value, a fact he learned from a Reddit comment titled ‘lol you’re cooked.’

‘The thing he doesn’t understand,’ said Eliza Hartwick, a CPA at Manhattan tax boutique Linnaker & Voss who specializes in distressed crypto returns, ‘is that swapping FartCoin for ToiletCoin and then ToiletCoin back into Solana an hour later is, from the agency’s perspective, three taxable events. He thinks it’s vibes. It is not vibes. It has never been vibes.’

Mosley’s situation is reportedly complicated by the fact that roughly 1,200 of the trades occurred on a decentralized exchange that issued no 1099, exists on a blockchain he can no longer remember the name of, and was last seen in November 2024 announcing a ‘strategic pivot’ before the website became a single GIF of a frog.

‘He keeps asking me if he can just put down a number,’ said Hartwick, who has now received 14 voice memos from Mosley, the most recent of which is 41 seconds of him saying the word ‘okay’ at increasing volume. ‘I told him the IRS would prefer the correct number. He asked if there was a range. There is not a range.’

Mosley, who netted approximately $312 in actual profit for the year after fees, gas, and one rug pull involving a token that promised to ‘tokenize friendship,’ is expected to spend roughly 60 hours reconstructing wallet histories in order to report a tax liability his accountant estimates at $84.

As of press time, Mosley had filed for a six-month extension, opened a second cold brew, and was staring at a browser tab containing IRS Form 8949 with the expression of a man who has just been told the ocean is, technically, also paperwork.

JPMorgan Posts Record Q1 Trading Revenue, Asks Staff to Please Stop Mailing the White House Edible Arrangements

Cody Thompson
-
0
JPMorgan Posts Record Q1 Trading Revenue, Asks Staff to Please Stop Mailing the White House Edible Arrangements

NEW YORK, NY — JPMorgan Chase reported its highest quarterly trading revenue in company history Friday morning, prompting an internal compliance memo politely reminding employees that gratitude toward the current administration’s tariff policy must, under no circumstances, be expressed in writing, on social media, or via the gift-basket vendor whose order volume has reportedly tripled since February.

The bank pulled in $9.7 billion from its markets division, a figure executives credited to what CFO Jeremy Barnum described as “unprecedented client engagement,” a phrase Wall Street uses when retail investors are panic-selling into a bid the trading desk is happy to provide.

“Volatility is, technically, our product,” said Hollis Reaver, a senior markets strategist at Cohen-Bergmann Advisory, speaking from a desk that visibly contained three monitors and one bottle of champagne still in its box. “When the tape moves four percent in either direction because someone tweeted at 6:42 a.m., we don’t applaud. We bill.”

Internal documents reviewed by associates of associates suggest that JPMorgan’s equity derivatives team has begun referring to the April 2 tariff announcement as “the gift,” the April 9 pause as “the gift that keeps on giving,” and the subsequent China escalation as “please, sir, we couldn’t possibly.” One trader has reportedly named his second boat “Reciprocal.”

The compliance memo, distributed Thursday, asked employees to refrain from any public expression of enthusiasm regarding U.S. trade policy, including but not limited to LinkedIn posts, charitable donations made in the name of the United States Trade Representative, and the catered fruit arrangements that have, per building security, been arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with return addresses traced to a Midtown floor that does not officially exist on the building directory.

Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, which also reported Friday, posted similarly strong trading numbers and similarly muted public commentary, with Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick describing the quarter as “constructive” — a word that, in banking, can mean anything from “fine” to “we made so much money the legal team asked us to pick a different word.”

Reached for comment, a small-business owner in Ohio who manufactures auto components and has spent the last week trying to figure out whether his March order from a supplier in Ontario is now subject to a 10%, 25%, or ‘pending clarification’ tariff said he was “glad somebody’s having a good quarter.” He then asked if this reporter knew anyone at JPMorgan, because his line of credit was up for review.

At a small ceremony Friday afternoon, the JPMorgan trading floor reportedly observed a moment of silence for the 60/40 portfolio, followed by a moment of much louder noise for everything else.

BlackRock’s Sustainable Energy ETF Quietly Rebranded ‘Real American Energy ETF,’ Top Holding Remains Microsoft

Cody Thompson
-
0
BlackRock’s Sustainable Energy ETF Quietly Rebranded ‘Real American Energy ETF,’ Top Holding Remains Microsoft

NEW YORK, NY — BlackRock announced Wednesday that its $4.2 billion U.S. Sustainable Energy ETF will be rebranded effective immediately as the BlackRock Real American Energy ETF, a change the firm described in regulatory filings as “a refresh” and which involved no movement whatsoever in the fund’s actual holdings, the top of which remains, as it has for six years, Microsoft.

The reshuffle, timed to the week before Earth Day, follows similar moves by Vanguard and State Street, who have collectively scrubbed the words “sustainable,” “climate,” “ESG,” “responsible,” and in one case “future” from 84 fund names since January, replacing them with combinations of “American,” “Strategic,” “Liberty,” and “Core.”

“We listened to our clients, and our clients told us they wanted the same exposure to large-cap technology stocks, just under a name that wouldn’t get them yelled at on a podcast,” said Brennan Whitlock, BlackRock’s newly created Head of Portfolio Nomenclature, a position that did not exist on March 1. “Nothing about the fund has changed except the part of the fund people read.”

Internal documents reviewed by industry analysts indicate that the fund’s second-largest holding, Apple, has been reclassified from “low-emissions enabler” to “American manufacturing partner,” despite assembling roughly nothing in America. Nvidia, the third holding, has been moved out of “clean computing” and into a new internal category called “energy-adjacent,” a designation a BlackRock spokeswoman defined as “uses energy, broadly speaking.”

The fund’s actual energy holdings, at 3.1%, were not adjusted, though the prospectus now refers to them as “the heart of the portfolio.”

A spokesperson for the Sierra Club called the rebrand “shameful” and “a textbook greenwashing reversal,” before being asked whether the Sierra Club’s own pension fund was, by any chance, invested in the ETF. The spokesperson declined further comment, citing a meeting.

Under SEC guidance issued last month, funds may no longer use the word “green” unless at least 12% of holdings are demonstrably green, a threshold the BlackRock fund cleared in 2023 only after counting John Deere as agriculture and Costco as “bulk efficiency.”

Reached by phone, one retail investor in Tampa said he had purchased the fund in 2021 specifically because it was sustainable, and would now be selling it because it was no longer sustainable, and would likely be buying it back in six weeks under whichever name it had at that point.

At press time, Whitlock confirmed the firm was already drafting its 2026 product, the BlackRock Liberty Patriot Eagle Energy Fund, which he described as “essentially the S&P 500, but with a flag.”

Bond Vigilantes, Dormant Since 1994, Reactivated Tuesday Like a Cold War Sleeper Cell

Cody Thompson
-
0
Bond Vigilantes, Dormant Since 1994, Reactivated Tuesday Like a Cold War Sleeper Cell

NEW YORK — A loose network of fixed-income traders who had been quietly running gardening businesses, coaching youth lacrosse, and finishing partially built decks since the Clinton administration was abruptly reactivated Tuesday afternoon, emerging from suburban basements across Greenwich and Short Hills to ask, with some confusion, whether their old Bloomberg logins still worked.

The signal, according to multiple sources, was a 60-basis-point move in the 10-year Treasury yield over two trading sessions, which the so-called bond vigilantes had been instructed to wait for in a 1994 farewell memo most of them had taped to the inside of a filing cabinet. Within hours, men in suspenders that no longer entirely fit were photographed walking purposefully into Manhattan office buildings where they no longer had badges.

“We were told there would be a moment,” said Mortimer Vance, 71, a Senior Fixed Income Strategist who had spent the last nineteen years restoring a single 1967 Mustang. “The moment came Tuesday around two-fifteen. I put the wrench down. My wife asked where I was going. I said, ‘The yield curve needs me.’ She did not seem surprised.”

Sources close to the reactivation say the returning vigilantes have struggled with certain modern conventions, including the absence of physical ticker tape, the existence of Slack, and the fact that one cannot simply walk into the Eccles Building and hand a sell order to a man named Bill. One vigilante reportedly attempted to short the long bond by yelling at a Charles Schwab kiosk in a Westchester train station for eleven minutes.

Treasury officials, reached for comment, said they were “absolutely thrilled to have the old gang back in the saddle” while several aides were observed in the background quietly Googling “what is a bond vigilante” and “can you fire a bond vigilante.” A junior staffer was overheard asking whether the vigilantes were a federal agency, a hedge fund, or “like, a band.”

The White House responded to the bond market disturbance Wednesday by abruptly pausing most reciprocal tariffs for 90 days, at which point the reactivated vigilantes reportedly placed their phones face-down on their desks, nodded to one another, and began drifting back toward the parking garage. By 4 p.m., several were back in their basements. One was already at Home Depot buying a pressure washer.

Asked what he planned to do with the rest of his afternoon, Vance shrugged and said his wife had been hoping he’d finally stain the deck before Easter, and that the bond market, in his professional opinion, could probably handle itself for another thirty years.

I Felt the Exact Moment the AI Switched to Coal and My Sourdough Starter Has Not Been the Same Since

Brooke Ellery
-
0
I Felt the Exact Moment the AI Switched to Coal and My Sourdough Starter Has Not Been the Same Since

It was 4:14 on Tuesday afternoon and I was elbow-deep in a discard loaf when Bessie went flat. Not slow-flat. Not she’s-tired-from-the-weekend flat. Flat the way a balloon goes flat when a toddler sits on it — sudden, personal, and a little accusatory. I have been feeding this starter since Ember was in the Moby wrap. Bessie does not just give up on a Tuesday.

I washed my hands, opened my phone, and there it was at the top of the news app I do not trust but check anyway: the President had signed an executive order directing federal AI data centers to run on coal. Coal. The black rock from the sad mountain documentaries. I stood there in my apron and I said out loud, to no one, “Bessie knew.”

I want to be careful here because I am not a scientist. I am a mother of four with a working knowledge of fermentation and what my grandmother called “the listening.” But I will tell you what I know. Every appliance in my kitchen runs on the same grid as whatever server farm is currently writing a fifth-grader’s book report in Virginia, and when you change the fuel feeding that grid, the whole frequency of the house shifts. My friend Cassidy felt it in her knees before I felt it in my dough. Her knees are usually three to four hours ahead of the news cycle.

I posted about Bessie in a Facebook group called Frequencies, Fermentation, and the Quiet Grid (it is invite-only, but if you message me I can probably get you in) and within forty minutes there were eighty-three comments from women whose kombucha had gone listless on the same afternoon. One woman in Tulsa said her kefir grains had separated into what she described as “two distinct political parties.” I am not making this up. I would not make this up.

My sister-in-law Marlee, who works the front desk at a pediatric ENT office and has been studying for her phlebotomy certificate for going on six years, called me that night and confirmed what I already suspected. “Coal AI and solar AI do not have the same energetic signature, Brooke,” she said, while her toddler screamed about a sticker in the background. “Solar AI is a spring. Coal AI is a basement.” She said when she ran the office’s scheduling software that morning it suggested a 7 a.m. appointment for a four-month-old, which she said was “the kind of thing only a tired machine does.”

I will admit I tested it. I went to ChatGPT and asked it the same banana bread question I asked it in February — three overripe bananas, no refined sugar, what would it do — and the answer that came back was clipped. Shorter. It used the word “utilize” twice. In February it had called me “friend.” On Tuesday it called me nothing. My husband Garrett says I am projecting and that the chatbot does not know what state the grid is in, and I told him that is exactly what a man married to a woman with intuition would say.

The kids notice too, by the way. Linnea said her math tutor app was “being mean” in a way she could not articulate, which is how a nine-year-old describes a vibe shift. Beckett, who is six and largely nonverbal about feelings, walked past the smart speaker in the hallway and said, “It smells like Papaw’s truck.” Papaw’s truck ran on diesel and grief. He has not been in that truck since 2019. Children know.

So here is what we are doing in our house until further notice. The Alexa is unplugged and wrapped in a clean dish towel. I am only using AI through the laptop, and only after sundown, when Garrett’s cousin who works in solar in Charlotte says the Carolinas grid is on its “cleaner shift.” I am rebuilding Bessie from a backup discard I keep frozen in a labeled jar for exactly this kind of national emergency. I have ordered an EMF meter from a woman on Telegram who used to be a dental hygienist and now lives off-grid in Sevier County, and when it gets here I will report back.

In the meantime, if your starter is sluggish this week, I do not need you to believe me. I just need you to consider that Bessie has been right about a lot of things, and the President has, historically, been right about fewer.

Retiree Who Hadn’t Checked 401(k) Since Christmas Logs In Monday, Has Old Job Back by Noon

Cody Thompson
-
0
Retiree Who Hadn’t Checked 401(k) Since Christmas Logs In Monday, Has Old Job Back by Noon

NAPERVILLE, IL — Gary Voss, a 67-year-old retired logistics manager who had not opened his Fidelity account since wishing his grandchildren a Merry Christmas over Zoom, sat down at his kitchen table Monday morning, entered his password on the third try, looked at the screen for approximately eleven seconds, and then dialed the direct line of the man who replaced him at Midwest Pallet & Crate.

Voss, who retired in October on what his financial planner had described as ‘a very comfortable glide path,’ was reportedly informed by his Target Retirement 2025 Fund that the glide path now ended in a ravine. According to family members, he did not say anything for a full minute, then asked his wife where his old steel-toed boots were, then asked if she remembered the password to LinkedIn.

‘A lot of recent retirees are entering what we call the re-entry phase,’ said Marcy Linden, a certified financial planner with Greatwater Advisory Group in Schaumburg. ‘They open the app, they see the number, they close the app, they open the app again to make sure the number is still the number, and then they call somebody named Doug.’

By 11:47 a.m. Central, Voss had reportedly accepted a part-time consulting role at his former employer at roughly 60% of his old salary, agreed to drive to a warehouse in Bolingbrook on Wednesday, and asked Doug whether the company still did the Friday lunch order from Portillo’s. He was informed that they did, but that the company now only covered the sandwich.

Linden noted that Voss’s situation is increasingly common across the Midwest, where target-date funds designed to gradually reduce risk as retirement approaches have been credited with successfully reducing the risk that anyone retires at all. She added that her firm had spent the morning fielding calls from clients who wanted to know whether their portfolios were ‘diversified enough,’ a question she described as ‘extremely retrospective.’

Voss’s wife, Janet, told reporters her husband seemed ‘energized’ by the prospect of returning to work, though she noted he had also spent twenty minutes in the garage staring at a snowblower without moving. She said she planned to cancel their May trip to Branson, the cabin deposit on Lake Geneva, and a standing 9 a.m. tee time he had been looking forward to since 1998.

Reached for comment, Voss declined to discuss his portfolio specifically but did say that the phrase ‘sequence of returns risk,’ which his advisor had explained to him in 2023 using a laminated chart, had finally clicked. He added that he was looking forward to once again having somewhere to be, and to once again not knowing what the S&P 500 was doing on any given Monday.

At press time, Voss was attempting to remember which drawer contained his reading glasses, his old badge, and the will to begin again.

Private Equity Firm That Bought Stake in MLB Team Holds First Internal Review, Has Several Questions About Why the Bullpen Exists

Cody Thompson
-
0
Private Equity Firm That Bought Stake in MLB Team Holds First Internal Review, Has Several Questions About Why the Bullpen Exists

GREENWICH, CT — Sentinel Ridge Capital Partners, the private equity firm that closed on a $390 million minority stake in an unnamed National League franchise last week, convened its first internal review of the asset Saturday and emerged with what one partner described as “several immediate questions about why this organization is paying twenty-six grown men to stand in a field.”

The firm, which manages roughly $14 billion across consumer products, regional logistics, and now apparently shortstops, opened the meeting with a deck titled “Path to EBITDA: Year One.” Slide three reportedly identified “the entire bullpen” as a cost center with “unclear ROI and significant chewing-related overhead.”

“What we’re seeing is an organization with material labor redundancy,” said Sentinel managing partner Drew Halverson, MBA, who has never attended a baseball game but has read extensively about the movie Moneyball. “There are nine players on the field at any given time. We are paying for forty. I would like someone to walk me through the gap.”

By Sunday morning, the firm had circulated a follow-up memo proposing that the designated hitter role be eliminated as duplicative, that pinch runners be retained on a 1099 basis with no benefits, and that the third-base coach’s primary function — described in internal documents as “waving arms in apparent code” — be automated by Q3 using a system Halverson referred to as “basically a traffic light.”

The team’s actual baseball operations staff, reached for comment, said they had spent most of the morning explaining to a 28-year-old associate that you cannot, in fact, trade a starting pitcher for “two interns and a bag of cash to be named later,” that the strike zone is not “open to renegotiation,” and that no, the seventh inning cannot be cut for time.

Halverson confirmed the firm remains “very excited” about the investment and is already exploring a sale-leaseback on the stadium, a refinancing of payroll obligations through a Cayman Islands SPV, and a rebrand of the seventh-inning stretch as “presented by Sentinel Ridge, where capital meets community.” The team’s mascot, an associate clarified, is being evaluated separately and may be “rightsized into a part-time engagement model.”

Sentinel’s investment committee has reportedly flagged one further concern about the asset, which is that the team is, by every available metric, not very good. A note attached to the deck suggests this is “a known issue” but should not affect the valuation, since “performance and price have been functionally decoupled in this asset class for approximately thirty years.”

The firm’s exit strategy, per the deck’s final slide, is to hold the asset for five to seven years and then sell it to a slightly less informed private equity firm.

Manhattan Wealth Advisor Informs Clients That April 15 Is Now ‘More of a Vibe,’ Like a Yield Sign in East Hampton

Cody Thompson
-
0
Manhattan Wealth Advisor Informs Clients That April 15 Is Now ‘More of a Vibe,’ Like a Yield Sign in East Hampton

MANHATTAN, NY — Greeting a packed conference room of clients who collectively earned $1.4 billion last year and reported considerably less, Park Avenue wealth advisor Nolan Frost opened his annual tax season briefing Friday by clicking to a single slide that read ‘April 15: Take It Or Leave It,’ before assuring the room that the deadline is now ‘more of a vibe, honestly, like a yield sign in East Hampton.’

Frost, a managing partner at Frost Halloran Wealth, told attendees that with the IRS down roughly a third of its enforcement staff and the agency’s audit division reportedly operating out of ‘whoever’s still answering the phone in Ogden,’ clients should consider this filing season ‘a kind of gentleman’s agreement we are no longer obligated to honor.’

‘Look, I’m not telling you not to file,’ Frost said, sipping a green juice that cost more than the median American refund. ‘I’m telling you the building is empty. You can walk in. You can walk out. Nobody’s at the desk. Whether you leave a tip is between you and your conscience, and I’ve met your consciences.’

The mood in the room was reportedly euphoric. One private equity partner described filing an honest return this year as ‘a kind of performance art piece,’ while another client, a crypto fund manager who has not filed since 2019, asked whether he was legally required to keep pretending the previous six years had happened. Frost told him to ‘just start fresh, like a Peloton.’

The presentation escalated when Frost unveiled what he called the ‘Three Tiers of 2025 Compliance’: Tier One, file accurately; Tier Two, file something; and Tier Three, described on the slide only as a smiling face emoji. He noted that 84% of his clients were already operating at Tier Two and that the firm’s projections for Tier Three adoption were ‘extremely encouraging, assuming current staffing trends at Treasury hold.’

Not all attendees were comfortable. Junior associate Marcus Kim, the firm’s most recent CPA hire, raised his hand to ask whether the strategy carried any long-term legal exposure and was met with what witnesses described as ‘the kind of silence usually reserved for someone bringing up climate change at a yacht christening.’ Frost reportedly thanked Kim for his question, asked the room to give him a round of applause for his ‘rookie energy,’ and then moved on.

Reached for comment, an IRS spokesperson confirmed the agency is ‘absolutely still processing returns’ before a long pause during which a second voice could be heard asking whether anyone had the password to the mainframe. The spokesperson then said she had to take another call and hung up.

Frost concluded the briefing by reminding clients that the firm’s new motto, embroidered on complimentary fleece vests handed out at the door, reads simply: ‘You First.’

1...383940...52Page 39 of 52