In 2011, when Governor Rick Perry was trying to convince the American people he should be president, he famously could not, for the life of him, recall the three federal agencies he had been proposing on the campaign trail to eliminate. “It’s three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone—Commerce, Education and the, um, what’s the third one there? Let’s see,” Perry said during an agonizing series of minutes during a Republican presidential debate. “But you can’t name the third one?” moderator John Harwood pressed. “The third agency of government I would do away with—the education, uh, the, uh, commerce and let’s see. I can’t—the third one. Sorry. Oops,” Perry answered, after looking to Senator Ron Paul to save him. As it turned out, the third agency was the Department of Energy. And now, because of the grand Trump experiment we’re all living in, he’s running that agency. How’s that working out for him? After an initial “learning curve” that involved finding out what the department actually does (surprise: it’s not about the oil and gas industry), things are going, well . . . pretty good if we’re grading on a Rick Perry curve, less good if we’re coming into this with the expectation a cabinet official should have a grasp of basic economic concepts, particularly the ones he decides to brag about understanding in public.

During a visit to a coal plant in West Virginia on Thursday, Perry, now five months into the job and feeling confident of his knowledge base, decided to wow onlookers with his book smarts.

“Here’s a little economics lesson,” he reportedly told the group assembled “Supply and demand. You put the supply out there and the demand will follow.”

Unfortunately for Perry, as Twitter users were quick to point out, this is not how supply and demand works, not even a little bit.

Oh, well. It’s not as though he’s got the sort of job that requires an understanding of freshman economics.

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Russian-born “fixer” with ties to Trump cooperates with money-laundering probe

We hope it does not surprise you to learn that the president of the United States has a little bit of a Russia problem. Amidst a special prosecutor’s investigation into whether or not there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, on Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported that a Republican operative who insinuated he was working with then-senior campaign adviser Mike Flynn had attempted to “obtain e-mails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.” In addition, questions have swirled for months about what financial ties Trump may or may not have to Russia and its neighbors, which is why Democratic lawmakers have (unsuccessfully) demanded Deutsche Bank turn over the results of internal reviews of both Trump’s accounts and an alleged “mirror trading“ scheme that allowed $10 billion to flow out of the Eastern European country, an investigation into which the bank paid $630 million to settle. Now, as Trump’s big meeting with Vladimir Putin (and the rest of the G20) approaches, a former colleague’s cooperation with a money-laundering probe is threatening to put the 45th president in a rather uncomfortable light.

According to a report from the Financial Times, a former business associate of Trump’s, Felix Sater, is currently “working with a team of lawyers and private investigators pursuing civil cases across three continents” against the family of former Kazakh minister Viktor Khrapunov. Khrapunov has been accused by Kazakhstan’s leaders of “embezzling government funds and hiding the cash around the world”; according to reporter Tom Burgis, millions have been poured into U.S. real estate through shell companies, with a not-insignificant amount of money going to, wait for it, Trump Soho. (Kazakhstan’s rulers also claim that “the Khrapunovs’ laundering schemes also funneled money from a fellow dissident, Mukhtar Ablyazov, an oligarch accused of stealing billions of dollars from a bank.”) Of the three Trump Soho apartments purchased for $3.1 million by front companies controlled by the Khrapunovs, Alan Garten, a lawyer for Trump told the FT that he had “no doubt . . . every legal requirement” had been satisfied with regard to reviewing “the provenance of the money for the transactions.” Additionally, both Khrapunov and Ablyazov maintain they are the victims of a vendetta by Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, “conducted through a host of western lawyers, propagandists and spies-for-hire under a pretext of alleged financial crime.” Regardless, Trump’s connection to Sater—who a Boies Schiller Flexner lawyer working on the probe said is not the focus of the investigation—seems more than a tad unseemly for the leader of the free world, and we haven’t even gotten to the part about the time that he stabbed a guy in the face with a shard of a margarita glass yet.

Oh, did we not mention that? Sater's brief stint as a stockbroker in the 1990s was followed by 15 months in prison for “stabbing another broker in the face with the broken stem of a margarita glass. Per the FT, he had also been “involved in a mob-related money-laundering and stock-fraud scheme.” Then, in the early 2000s, Sater decided get into the real estate business, which is how he met Donald Trump, who, rebuffed by many a Wall Street bank, had found two new sources of money: licensing deals and “the vast wealth accumulated by the nascent capitalists of the former Soviet Union.”

A company that helped turn both the licensing idea and the inflows from ex-Soviet states into reality was a group called Bayrock, based on the 24th floor of Trump Tower [two floors below Donald’s office]. Bayrock was founded by Tevfik Arif, a businessman of Kazakh origin, who worked in the Soviet administration before coming to the U.S., where he teamed up with Mr. Sater. Bayrock and Mr. Trump made plans for hotel towers branded with the Trump name in New York, Florida, and Arizona. In 2005 Mr. Trump signed a letter giving Bayrock exclusive rights to “create the finest and most luxurious experience in Russia” in the form of a Trump Tower in Moscow. Mr. Sater visited the Russian capital with Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son Donald Jr., and entered negotiations with Russian businessmen to secure a site for the tower, which he said in a subsequent deposition could have been “a mega-financial home run.” Bayrock's Moscow idea came to nothing, but money from the former Soviet Union did start to flow into Trump ventures in copious quantities.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate conference in 2008, adding: “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” It kept flowing. A Reuters tally published in March found that 63 Russians, some with political connections, had spent $100m buying property at seven Trump-branded luxury towers in Florida. Money from the former Soviet Union also arrived through Mr. Sater and Bayrock, whose flagship development with Mr. Trump was the 46-story Trump Soho, a glistening hotel-condominium building in Manhattan.

For his part, Trump has claimed that he “never really understood who owned Bayrock”—which declined to comment about Kazakhs and Trump to the FT—and in 2013 testified that if Sater “were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” Meanwhile, the FT notes, according to one person involved in the investigation, Sater allegedly “brags about Trump all the time.”

Trump congratulates himself for stock market gains, reminds people he’s had to sit out the rally

In Poland today, in between trashing CNN and treating German chancellor Angela Merkel to one of his patented handshakes, Donald Trump took a moment to praise himself for how well the stock market has done since the election.

“The United States is doing very well—very strong,” he said. “We’ve taken off restrictions and people are really moving hard. So when I say that the stock market is at an all-time high, we've picked up in market value almost $4 trillion since November 8, which was the election. Four trillion dollars—it's a lot of money. Personally, I picked up nothing, but that's all right. Everyone else is getting rich. That's O.K. I'm very happy.”

Report: being a richly compensated C.E.O. is hard

Well, it’s hard in the sense that you don’t have complete and total job security and sometimes your board or activist shareholders will demand results, the lack of which can mean being shoved out the door with only a golden parachute to break your fall. The Journal tells the sad story:

In June alone, the chief executives of General Electric Co., Uber Technologies Inc., Whirlpool Corp., Buffalo Wild Wings Inc., Perrigo Co and Pandora Media Inc. resigned or announced their departures. Among those, only Whirlpool’s Jeff Fettig didn’t have to confront investor pressure in the months before announcing he will step down. Their exits follow an especially busy season of C-suite upheaval. In the first five months of 2017, 13 companies with market values of more than $40 billion installed new CEOs—including American International Group Inc., Ford Motor Co., and Caterpillar Inc. —according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by executive-recruitment firm Crist/Kolder Associates. That is more than double the CEO changes at mega-corporations in the same period last year. This chief executive churn reflects a broader reality for the country’s business elite: An array of challenges—from increasing impatience on Wall Street and in boardrooms to a corporate landscape rapidly transformed by new technologies and rival upstarts—has made the top job tougher and more precarious than just a few years ago, top executives say.

Elsewhere!

Gundlach Says the Bond Wipeout Is Just the Beginning (Bloomberg)

Hopes of ‘Trump Bump’ for U.S. Economy Shrink as Growth Forecasts Fade (Dealbook)

U.K. Financial Firms Offered Sweeteners as They Shop for Post-Brexit Homes (W.S.J.)

Martin Shkreli’s lawyer and ‘cowboy’ venture capitalist duel over what horses and investments are worth (CNBC)

Has Power Lunch Returned to Midtown’s Storied Grill Room? (NYM)

CEO-Worker Pay Ratio Generates Outrage—And Some Insight (W.S.J.)

Fed Officials Divided on When to Begin Balance-Sheet Unwind (Bloomberg)

My Very Own Versailles: Homeowners Who Recreate the Palace (W.S.J.)

Tesla Projected to Win U.S. Electric-Car Race (Bloomberg)

The British Open is now awarding its prize in dollars after 154 years of using pounds (CNBC)

Meatballs: An oral history (HWD)