What's Causing Wall Street's Secret Boom?
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Today, Wall Street complex debt has continued to increase in value. Donald Trump gives an interview to NBC and China's maritime deployment is the largest it's been in decades. From TLDR News, this is your daily briefing for Tuesday 10th December 2024.

In our main story today, we're heading to Wall Street to explain how complex financial products have started to increase in value significantly recently, with largest returns since the lead-up to the financial crisis in 2007 being reported.

This shows that investors are looking increasingly at more unusual financial products in order to get better returns, especially at a time when other parts of the market appear to be somewhat muted. In total, according to data from LSEG, the global volume of these structured financial transactions, which are effectively these complex financial products, has hit $380 billion this year. This

This is up about a fifth from the same period last year and up about $1 billion since 2021, which was the last post-2007 peak. Now, without getting too much into detail of these complex financial products, many of them are backed by income but are tied to revenue from certain industries.

The FT has reported that some of the transactions in recent weeks have been tied to franchisee fee revenue from the restaurant chain Wingstop, oil sales from ExxonMobil-backed Wells, and demand for computing power provided by CloudHQ. We'll have to see whether this trend continues over the coming weeks and months.

Now, before we continue, I just wanted to quickly thank everyone who continues to watch and like The Daily Briefing every single day. Making these videos requires a lot of research and hard work to make sure we bring you the most up-to-date and accurate news every day. And that's also an expensive process. If you want to support our journalism in 2025 and make sure we can keep doing The Daily Briefing, then there's no better way to do this than by purchasing a copy of our magazine, Too Long.

Moving to the US now, where President-elect Donald Trump has stated that he can't guarantee that his trade tariffs won't raise prices domestically and made some interesting comments around the idea of seeking retribution for his political opponents. He made these comments in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press programme. In the election campaign, Trump typically argued that raising tariffs would be a way to counter inflation in the US.

While he defended the tariffs in the same interview with NBC by saying that they're going to make us rich, he stopped short of pledging that US households won't pay more as they shop, with him adding that I can't guarantee anything, I can't guarantee tomorrow. In the same interview, the President-elect also stated that members of Congress who investigated the Capitol riot should go to jail. He

He did, though, somewhat temper this statement by adding, I have the absolute right. I'm the chief law enforcement officer. You do know that. I'm the president. But I'm not interested in that. Related to this, Trump confirmed that he would press ahead with a pardon for those involved in the Capitol riots on his first day in office.

Moving to Taiwan now, where China's maritime deployment is the largest it's been in decades. This is according to Taiwan's Defense Ministry. This is in reaction to Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te's unofficial recent visits to Hawaii and Guam earlier this month, something that clearly provoked anger in Beijing, who claim the self-governing territory of Taiwan as its own. Beijing has not yet announced military drills or confirmed the deployment.

The deputy chief of the General Staff for Intelligence in Taiwan explained on Tuesday that an astonishing number of Chinese ships have been deployed. They added that the scale was so large that it could block external forces and that the PLA's recent activities not only exerted military pressure on Taiwan, its naval forces specifically have significantly raised its posture around Taiwan and the Western Pacific.

For their part, Taiwan has been on high alert since Monday for expected military drills, with them expecting some kind of retaliation to Lai Ching-te's visits.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stand in his corruption trial today for the first time, testifying in the case that sees him charged with bribery, fraud and breaches of trust, charges he denies as a political witch hunt. 75-year-old Netanyahu became the first sitting Prime Minister of Israel to be charged with a crime when he was indicted back in 2019. Specifically, the charges relate to three criminal cases.

WOD involves Netanyahu allegedly wrongfully receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts, while the others involve Netanyahu allegedly promoting advantageous regulation for media tycoons in exchange for favorable coverage.

Under Israeli law, Netanyahu is under no obligation to step down while on trial and is able to remain in post throughout the trial and the appeals process. While Netanyahu reportedly smiled confidently when entering the Tel Aviv district court, the trial may well interfere with his political diary. His testimony is due to take place six hours a day, three days a week for several weeks, all at a time when Israel has been fighting a war on multiple fronts.

Nevertheless, he says he thinks the two can be done in parallel. Following Netanyahu's return to power at the 2022 election, his government launched a judicial overhaul campaign to curb the judiciary's power, a move that polarised Israel, but which has largely been put on hold since the outbreak of war in October 2023.

A suspect has been arrested and charged with the murder of a United Health Group executive following a five-day manhunt for the suspected killer. The suspect has been identified as 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, from Maryland, who was detained in Altoona, Pennsylvania, reportedly while in possession of a so-called ghost gun, a suppressor and fake New Jersey ID card, as well as a handwritten document that police say expressed some ill will towards corporate America.

The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week, as well as sparking a manhunt, has also sparked much speculation over the potential motive of what the police called a premeditated, pre-planned targeted attack.

Investigators say shell casings found at the murder scene had the words 'deny', 'defend' and 'depose' written on them. These three words are what critics of big American health insurance companies call the 'three Ds of insurance'. In other words, tactics used by companies to deny payment claims made by patients.

As for the detained suspect, Luigi Mangione, he has no prior arrests and media reports say he was from a prominent Baltimore family, was valedictorian of his high school class and graduated with a master's degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. From social media profiles understood to belong to Mangione, it appeared that he had fallen out of touch with friends and family in recent months. His ex-account's banner image has an x-ray of a spine with surgical screws and plates in it.

and US media cites his friends as saying he had surgery on his back. At time of writing, it remains unclear if or how much his experience of the US healthcare system contributed to his views.

Now obviously all of that is pretty complicated, but hopefully our analysis has made it a little clearer. Making videos like this requires a lot of effort and research to uncover what's really going on, before then summarising it into something that makes sense to everyone. But that's an expensive process. Running TL;DR this year has cost just under £800,000, which when your main product is free YouTube videos is quite a lot of money.

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