Hello and welcome to the liquid assets edition of Slate Money, your guide to the

business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix salmon of Axios. I'm Xios. I'm joined by Anna Schimmansky.

Hello?

And by Emily Peck, of the Huffington Post.

Hello.

And, oh my God, what a show do we have?

We have a show about water.

That's coming up later.

We're going to talk about a certain large East Coast institution with tens of billions of dollars

who's buying up land in California ostensibly for agriculture but we suspect

that really because they're trying to corner the market in water, which

seems dastardly.

We are going to talk about a different kind of liquid asset, stocks.

If you are a shareholder right now in Uber or Lyft or Slack or one of those multi-billion dollar unicorns, you can't really sell your

shares very easily, but if they're listed on the stock market, then you can.

So that might be happening pretty early on in 2019. We think perhaps. Are we excited

about this Emily? Meh. So let's start with the huge international geopolitical news of the week. There have been arrests. There have been disappearing diplomats. There has been

international intrigue. There has been presidential, what's the word, interference in the Justice Department, not for the first time.

We have a story of high diplomatic stakes coming up on slate money.

Okay, Anna Schmansky.

Yes.

Who is Sabrina Meng?

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