It has been a journey, but I am going to run for State Treasurer of Nevada. By the time you read this, my website will be live. My friend Schayden has been working steadfastly on it as I consistently worked through it with my wife and advisors. He’s been patient, and he is a great designer. I am lucky to have been introduced to him. It’s your front porch, so it is something you want to get right.

One of the things you have to do is fundraise. Everyone detests the money in politics, but no one has figured out how to get rid of it. Money is the fuel and grease that makes the engine run. You can try it without money, but it’s almost impossible to win a larger race without it. Yesterday, fundraising reports came trickling in.

One thing about some fundraising, if you are able to raise, you know you are getting support. Incumbent Governor Joe Lombardo raised a combined $15MM. His opponent raised $2.2MM.

I have been fundraising for a few days, and so far it’s going very well. The most fun part has been connecting with people I haven’t spoken with for a while. We have a lot of laughs. I am receiving a lot of support. Even people whom I supported when no one else would believe in them reached out and helped out. That means a lot to me.

This is the traditional link. If you want to do it the old fashioned way, mail a check to

Jeffrey Carter for Nevada

In Compliance,PO Box 71271, Las Vegas NV 89136

One thing that was very important to me was to recognize innovation in my campaign. There are plenty of things that are innovative in finance. Heck, I invested in a few of them. But the elephant in the room is cryptocurrency.

I decided to have a cryptocurrency link on my website for fundraising, and if you want to donate in crypto, you can. I am putting some of my own money in this race, but it will not be enough. Just like a startup, it is skin in the game. I think it is very important for people to have skin in the game.

Here is the new crypto link.

When we had our venture fund, my partner and I both put an equal amount of capital in the fund. We were the first LPs in our own fund. It would have been hard to ask anyone else to put up their capital unless we put up ours.

The same is true for this campaign.

You can go to this site and see what it’s all about.

They are debating the bill about Crypto in Congress as we speak. I do think it is important to show that this works if you believe in it. When I report, one thing I will try to do is report cash versus crypto donations. Even if it’s not formal, I can share it informally on a percentage basis or something like that.

This race was not on my bingo card for life, but I do feel called to do it.

Also yesterday, I visited the Boulder City Republican Women’s organization. We had a great time. I was able to visit with Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, which was very nice.

For me, it is important that Republicans win up and down the ticket. I want to win my race, of course, but I want to see all Republicans do well, and I will do what I can to support them. There are a lot of fantastic people running that I have met.

Democrats are spending $50MM to register voters in Nevada, which shows they are taking the state very seriously. Republicans are making inroads. It is a purple state, and it is competitive. It’s too bad the Dems gerrymandered in 2020. Gerrymandering hurts everyone.

When I visit Republican clubs, I bring my trading jacket. Here is a photo of me and a young gentleman at the Sun City Anthem Club. He trades some options. Sun City got two donations to its scholarship fund courtesy of my trading jacket and members who bid for a chance to wear it.

Today in Boulder City, I auctioned off the chance to wear my old trading jacket again. We started the bidding at $5, and off it went. All the money went to the club’s scholarship fund. Here is a photo of the winning bidder!

Bridget O Neill owns Bloom: A Curated Boutique. I went to her website, and she has some pretty neat stuff. She has two locations, one in Boulder City and one in Henderson, Nevada. She started the business in 2011. She survived Covid for goodness sakes so she is resilient. How cool is that? She grew up in Wisconsin and is a Packer fan, but I won’t hold that against her. It was great meeting her, and I am glad she was the winning bidder.

You can tweet at her @BloomBoutiques

As I travel around the state, if you want me to bring the jacket to your club meeting, we can have some fun with it and benefit some people.

If you understand prediction markets, you know they could become very valuable. Academics have written papers and modeled them for years. Their time has come. I saw where Polymarket was going to start prediction markets in individual city housing markets.

What a fantastic idea.

A liquid market will help buyers and sellers understand the real pulse of the market. It will help guide realtors. It will help guide developers. Ultimately, it will help guide government officials and boards on zoning and things like that.

Yesterday, the American Gaming Association and Indian Gaming Association sent a letter to Congress urging them to regulate sports gambling as it relates to prediction markets.

Again, the right solution. It’s time to split the baby.

Prediction markets in sports do not do anything to move the ball forward when it comes to micro or macroeconomics. They do not propel society forward, and they don’t help people manage risk. They don’t change the variance, or uncertainty around decision-making. They are pure entertainment. They are fun.

All they are is a different way to structure sports betting. Instead of betting against the house, it’s a marketplace, and you buy and sell with other bettors. It is zero sum game, with the house taking a commission. Again, it is pure entertainment. The only economic benefit that derives from it goes into the participant’s pocket and into the platform offering the marketplace.

I don’t take that position because I am running for office in Nevada. It’s the right position both theoretically and in practice. It’s first principles and hews to the ideas that make America great.

Prediction markets in economic data are very valuable. Prediction markets in politics are better than polls. Prediction markets about when software or a product will be released are great. Prediction markets on how many students will graduate at a grade level reading ability, would be interesting. It might let colleges know what kind of student is coming, and it would let human resources people know what kind of potential employee is in the pipeline. A prediction market on when Jason Calcanis will get a prediction correct would be a great market. I think David Sacks would be a short seller. They allow people to manage risk, and when you can manage risk efficiently, you can provide better value to customers.

But sports, no

I understand why they went after sports. It’s a huge market. It has cheap customer acquisition costs. Broadcasters spread it via word of mouth advertising. It’s much easier to understand if the Browns are going to beat the Packers than what the next producer price index will be. But sports predictions have no tangible benefit to our lives other than entertainment.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should try to set up a prediction market for sports while hewing to existing state regulations. That might be a good idea depending on the economics. But, like insurance, gambling has traditionally been regulated by individual states, not the Feds. It makes the startup and operation of those businesses more expensive because each state can be different, and it is impossible to design a one-size-fits-all software solution.

This whole thing is working its way through the courts, both state and federal, and will become a SCOTUS case someday. That is, unless Congress acts and instructs the CFTC.

It is far better to work through legislation to build consensus and policy than do it in other ways. That is, if they can actually do that.

Follow me on X here. Donate to the campaign here.

If you didn’t believe that Americans were watching two different television programs at the same time, the recent announcement that a grand jury was investigating the Federal Reserve is a textbook example.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell, no fan of Trump, immediately took to the airwaves before the investigation was announced and made a video. In it, he said this was a political vendetta against him personally because of the interest rate policy. Sanctimoniously, he talked about Fed independence and things like that. It was a “holier than thou” video filled with an undercurrent of outrage.

If your confirmation bias and framing are one way, you, too, were pretty mad about it and immediately sided with Powell.

If you are a Trump supporter or at least open to the idea that there is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, you thought that a simple grand jury investigation to uncover waste, fraud, and abuse inside the Fed. Scott Bessent himself wondered why there were so many employees at the Fed. He wondered aloud if the Fed had lost its mission and course by pursuing things like global warming and equality. Trump wondered why the building they are constructing costs as much as it does. Even if you don’t like Trump, you should agree that he knows construction.

If your confirmation bias and framing were the other way, you would think this investigation is justified, especially given the blatant fraud taking place in other places.

Some economists weighed in about Fed independence and how we risk becoming a banana republic. They didn’t weigh in on Trump’s idea to cap credit card rates at 10%.

In my view, we ought to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere in government. While we are at it, we can get rid of all the Keynesian economists in government too. Embrace our inner Milton Friedman.

Two things flashed upon my radar screen. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is restricting people who get public transfer payments from the federal government from sending the money across the US border to other countries.

The other is that California hired a DEI person to make sure California pensions are invested accordingly.

Why is Bessent correct and California wrong?

It’s because it is public money. Both the money for the transfer payments and the money to invest in public pensions are provided by taxpayers. It’s the public’s money, and the public has a general interest in seeing that money isn’t abused or used for fraudulent purposes.

Shouldn’t the transfer payments that the American taxpayer empathetically pays out to recipients who need it be spent in the US? Those payments should never be sent to anyone in other countries. It’s American taxpayer money. If that recipient wants to send money to someone in another country, they can go out and work for it.

Yes, people should be able to make individual allocation and spending decisions with their own money. Here is the key point: that they earned with their labor. When the taxpayer is footing the bill, the taxpayer gets to have a say in how it is spent.

In Ohio, they are taking it one step further. The Ohio experiment, if it happens, will be interesting to see how it plays out.

When it comes to investing as a state on behalf of taxpayers, the one true north star that should guide anyone is to get the best return on investment on behalf of the taxpayer, given the risk and reward of those investments, while paying attention to the liquidity requirements of stakeholders. Sometimes it can be a tricky balance. This is especially true when interest rates are moving and the underlying market forces are volatile.

There is no room for virtue signaling using DEI, ESG, or any other normative metric to guide investment decisions.

Public companies that are listed on stock exchanges can invest in the manner they want to invest, but do so with shareholders looking over their shoulders. There are also best practices guidelines they should hew to if they don’t want to get into trouble. If they don’t get good ROI and ROA, the management team risks losing their jobs. Most companies, public and private, do not have DEI/ESG as an integral part of their investment strategy. At least, not anymore. It was a fad for a while, and thankfully, it has been relegated to the dustbin. Better to have shareholders receive a dividend and decide what to do with the money themselves, since owning shares in a business is a claim on the cash flows of the business.

People can invest in causes or the “current thing” with their own private money that they earned themselves.

This is not a difficult concept. But advocates for DEI/ESG will cite all kinds of corner cases and irrelevant examples to try and muddy the waters.

Yesterday, I blogged about fraud and money and how it raises the costs of all campaigns. You might call it “trickle down costs”. As every campaign at the top of tickets gets more expensive, lower ticket races get more expensive. If there is fraud, like we talked about yesterday, the price gets artificially inflated, but it affects all prices in the entire campaign stack.

When you are a private citizen sitting in your armchair and you make the decision to jump into a race, you are confronted with a huge tableau of rules and laws that I guarantee you don’t understand. In many states, those things are designed to trip you up and stop good people from entering the race. It’s just another barrier to entry.

In some cases, they are there for transparency. Even though there is cheating in some places, no one likes cheating. At least, even if they like cheating, they won’t admit it.

So, if you decide to jump into a race, who should be your first hire?

I thought about that a lot. I asked a lot of questions and got a lot of advice from people very experienced in the game. People who knew told me two things.

Because I networked at different places, I was very lucky to meet a couple of people who were able to make some very good introductions, and now they are continuing to do so, which helps quite a bit. I have told them how appreciative I am of them, but I am doing so publicly now. If you are going to win even a small election, you need a lot of people pulling on the rope.

The first thing you will do if you are a newbie like I am is interview consultants and find one that fits with you. If you don’t know anyone, your local party chairperson will definitely know a few. You need to know that person anyway, not because they will raise money for you, but because they know people. They are amazing resources and fascinating people in their own right. It’s fun to get to know them and listen.

Make sure the consultant has the knowledge and time for you. See what advice they give you in your conversation. Consultants approach things differently, and it is not that there are good ones or bad ones; they are just different. Consultants are worth a blog post on their own. It is a game I had heard of, but truly didn’t understand.

Number two, hire a compliance/treasurer. Since you are dealing with money, you do not want to mess it up. You can hire this person before you hire your consultant. Any good consultant will have a go-to compliance person they work with.

My first real hire was the compliance person. Wherever you live, there are firms dedicated to compliance so you don’t run afoul of any local, state, or national laws. You are trying to go from citizen to public servant and help people. The last thing you want is to do a perp walk in an orange jumpsuit.

When most people start to think about the organization of a campaign, they think in terms of purpose, the way they will deliver their message, and marketing. That is certainly important, but frankly, it’s centered on you. You need to leave “you” out of it. The job you are trying to get isn’t about you anyway; it’s about citizens.

That’s why I find it funny when I see so many career politicians say they want to “serve,” but it is more about “serving themselves”. They are first in the chow line.

Just like any great restaurant, the plumbing is crucial, and it has to work. That’s what the compliance people make effortless, so you can worry about the front of the house.

You cannot do this unless you have the back office set up and organized.