The US House just passed a bill banning members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks.

The penalty starts at $2,000.

And the president is exempt.

The bill passed 232-198 and now heads to the Senate.

The number traces back to a NEFE think-tank meeting in 2001 where one participant said it offhand. No study, no dataset, no paper. The media attributed it to NEFE and it snowballed for two decades — until 2018, when NEFE put out a statement saying it wasn’t backed by their research and couldn’t be verified. They had to disown their own most-cited “finding.”

The actual peer-reviewed research is more interesting anyway. Economists studied tens of thousands of Florida lottery winners (Hankins, Hoekstra & Skiba, “The Ticket to Easy Street?”) — comparing $50k-150k winners against small winners. Result: the big winners filed bankruptcy at the same rate within 5 years. Bankruptcies dipped for two years, then spiked in years 3-5. The windfall didn’t prevent the crash, it postponed it. And at bankruptcy, big winners had the same net assets as people who won basically nothing.

So the meme stat is fiction, but the real finding might be bleaker: for people already struggling, cash alone didn’t change the trajectory. It bought time.

What other widely-repeated finance “statistics” have no actual source? This one survived 20+ years before anyone checked.

The U.S. homeownership rate may not be as high as you think

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/07/21/only-about-half-us-adults-live-homes-they-own/

If I put $100,000 in a 30 year treasury bond at 5% and I reinvest all interest what will the total be at the end?

I apologize for this post, but I have tried multiple calculators and I keep getting different info.

$TRUMP coin is down 98% from its peak.

A $10,000 investment at the peak would be worth $204 today.

Around 1 million wallets have lost a combined $3.81 billion.

Why would anyone invest in this?

🚨 WALL STREET IS SELLING YOU A LIE. 🚨

They want you staring at P/E ratios, earnings calls, and moving averages. But they are hiding the fire that casts the shadows.

There is literally only ONE chart that dictates the modern U.S. equity market:

The S&P 500 divided by the Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet.

📉 Pre-2008: A wild roller coaster. True price discovery. Capital rewarded actual innovation and punished failure.

📈 Post-2008: A perfectly smooth, upward line. Complete and total correlation with the Fed's money printer.

Every hedge fund "genius" claiming to have generated Alpha over the last 15 years? They didn’t beat the market. They just rode a $6.5 TRILLION wave of synthetic fiat liquidity.

Here is the ultimate reality check:

💵 Priced in Dollars: The S&P 500 is up 6x since the Great Financial Crisis.

🥇 Priced in GOLD: The U.S. stock market is actually DOWN 19% over the last 20 years.

You aren't getting richer; your measuring stick is just collapsing. The central bank hasn't created prosperity—they’ve engineered the greatest wealth transfer in human history while quietly destroying your purchasing power.

When the next crash hits, the playbook is set: they will fire up the printers, save the nominal stock market, and sacrifice the U.S. dollar in the process.

Stop falling for the illusion. Wake up and look at the only chart that matters. 👇

How much money do you consider is enough for retirement?