Trump Admin Proposes New $100K H-1B Fee To Offset Immigration Enforcement Costs The Trump administration plans to charge employers a fee of $103,265 for H-1B skilled foreign workers, according to a proposed regulation posted on Monday. Revenue from the fee would be used to offset the costs of running the federal immigration system – including courts and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  A similar $100,000 fee was […]

“This Is My Place Of Business”: How Cakes And Coffee Continue To Be Groundzero In An Age Of Rage Authored by Jonathan Turley via Jonathan Turley, “This is my place of business.” Those words from Jim Sheehan, owner of the Wydaho Roasters coffee shop in Driggs, Idaho, have sparked the latest controversy over the right of businesses to refuse service on the basis of religious or political views. Sheehan has drawn national […]

Rabobank: Bessent’s Buyback Looks A Lot Like “Whatever It Takes”, And Druck Isn’t A Fan By Michael Every of Rabobank US Treasury Secretary Bessent took out a tactical nuke in saying he could use $1trn from the Treasury General Account to fund Special Military Operation Twist bond buybacks vs. the $2bn per round increase we saw last week. That looks a lot like the ‘Whatever It Takes’ mentioned yesterday: his former mentor Stan […]

CIA Director Ratcliffe Covertly Flew To Moscow For High-Level Meetings: Report Summary:  CIA Director Ratcliffe On USAF Cargo Jet Flight To Moscow US Air Force C-17 Makes Mysterious Visit To Moscow  CIA Director Ratcliffe On USAF Cargo Jet Flight To Moscow  CBS News Senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs has provided some clarity on the mysterious US Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III military transport aircraft that […]

Watch: Top Zelensky Staffer Led Out Of Corruption Court In Handcuffs  This is not a sight you see everyday, but it’s one that’s becoming increasingly common in the halls of power in Kiev. Footage of the detention of (now former) deputy head of Zelensky’s office Irina Mudra, seen being led out in handcuffs after a court ordered her pretrial imprisonment on corruption charges, has emerged and is being widely shared. She was […]

New Home Sales Collapsed In July As Consumer Confidence Hit 7-Month Lows The Conference Board’s measure of Americans’ Consumer Confidence fell from a revised-lower 90.2 to 89.4 in August (below the 90.2 exp) – the lowest since January. Interestingly, under the hood, we saw Expectations plunge to January lows while Present Situation spiked from 5 year lows… “Consumer confidence moderated slightly in August for a second […]

Is ICE Investigating Ilhan Omar? Trump ‘Truths’ Report On Withheld Fraud-Probe Records President Donald Trump drew fresh attention to a long-running controversy on Sunday when he reposted a Just the News article on Truth Social headlined “ICE refuses to disclose records on Ilhan Omar fraud probe, cites ongoing ‘enforcement proceedings.'” His decision to amplify the report, without comment, renewed scrutiny of allegations that have […]

US Home Prices Are Rising At Their Fastest Pace In A Year Following its unexpected rebound in May (from three months of declines), US home prices in America’s 20 largest cities were expected to rise again (+0.1% MOM) in June (according to the latest data from S&P Cotality Case-Shiller). Instead prices actually accelerated more, up a sizable 0.24% MoM, pulling home prices up 2.1% YoY – the fastest acceleration in a year… […]

Oil Falls Further As US Prepares Return Of Diplomats To Mideast Embassies There continue to be clear signals that the White House is moving away from the potential for renewed military action and instead settling in for a long economic siege campaign targeting Iran, on a permanent basis. The avoidance of more bombs away and with all the risks and uncertainty of a military ‘solution’ has seen oil prices drop. Energy prices are […]

Are Canada’s Economic Threats Against The US Legit Or Are They Bluster? In order to “win” a trade war, a country must first have something that other countries want or need.  This basic rule defines every other aspect of the conflict, from tariffs to monetary isolation.  When it comes to the US there has long been a misconception that Americans “feed off global labor” and that the dollar’s world reserve status is the country’s […]

Futures Bounce As Brent Drops Under $90 On Renewed Iran Optimism Global stocks rose as chipmakers rebounded, with falling bond yields adding support to risek sentiment after Brent crude slid below $90 a barrel, down more than 3% after a New York times reports that “evacuated foreign service officers could begin heading back to their posts as early as this week… suggesting Washington does not anticipate a renewal of full-scale […]

Markets Now Face Two Wars And Two Economic Wars By Michael Every of Rabobank Two wars and two economic wars Friday’s Jackson Hole speech from Fed Chair Warsh would traditionally be the big event this week but that’s arguably no longer true: the action is not with central banks but elsewhere. I don’t mean the ECB’s Lagarde going to work for the WEF. Rather, markets now face two wars and two economic wars. Dawn in the US […]

Death Of Europe’s Industrial Base: 140,000 VW Jobs At Risk As Union Brands Turnaround Plan “Cloud Cuckoo Land” If further evidence is needed to support Nomura analysts’ view that Europe’s 18-month election cycle, which is kicking off now, will accelerate the continent’s shift toward potential right-wing political victories, look beyond years of nation-killing mass migration under progressive governments. The real-time […]

Bessent Drops Iran Sanctions Hammer On Dozens Of Chinese Firms, Spares Big Banks As Beijing Threatens Retaliation The Trump administration’s “Operation Economic Outcast” has expanded the sanctions campaign across China and Hong Kong, targeting dozens of individuals and businesses while intentionally holding off on sanctioning major Chinese banks that keep Tehran connected to the global financial system. Beijing, meanwhile, signaled […]

Iran’s Economy On The Ropes Amid Hyperinflation And Widespread Gas Shortages, As Trump Blockade Bites Bessent is on a roll: first his attempt to send yields sharply lower by announcing an aggressive TSY buyback expansion, failed spectacularly, and then today, the US “economic D-Day” against Iran and unviled by Bessent, turned out to be “less Normandy and more Grenada”, according to Bloomberg. But maybe, just like in the case of […]

Uranium Awakens From Five-Month Slumber As UBS Warns Market Is “Tightening Structurally” Bloomberg’s continuous front-month uranium futures contract (UXA1 Comdty) briefly surged above $100 a pound in late January, driven by tightening supplies, renewed government support for nuclear power, and rising electricity demand from the AI infrastructure boom. Uranium futures then retreated and remained range-bound between $84 and $87 for […]

Details Of Iran’s First Known Successful Cyberattack Against A UK Energy Facility Via Middle East Eye Iranian hackers shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack, the Sunday Telegraph reported. According to the newspaper, the incident appears to mark the first time Iran-linked hackers have successfully shut down such a British facility. AFP: Members of the US Air Force prepare munitions at […]

Goldman Sounds Alarm: Europe May Need €100 NatGas Shock To Refill Winter Storage We have warned that Europe is approaching a twin energy crisis, with the Northern Hemisphere winter now just three months away. Dutch front-month gas futures, Europe’s benchmark contract, surged Monday morning to 67 euros per megawatt-hour, the highest level since early 2023. Goldman Sachs commodities expert Samantha Dart warns that EU NatGas […]

Norway Takes Oilfield Climate Battle To Supreme Court By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com, The Norwegian government is asking the country’s Supreme Court to overturn lower-court rulings that invalidated the development permits of three new oilfields in Norway’s North Sea. The case was brought to court three years ago by environmental organizations Greenpeace Nordic and Nature og Ungdom (Nature & Youth). In 2023, the […]

Iran Unveils Huge New Gas Discovery Amid US Economic Pressure Iran announced a huge new gas discovery in the southern province of Fars, with the oil ministry reporting estimates of 7.5 trillion cubic feet of gas, of which 73% is recoverable, or 5.7 trillion cu ft, OilPrice reported. Iran has the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, after Russia. “This amount of gas is equivalent to one block of South Pars, which can […]

Spain’s Great Replacement: Half Of Unskilled Construction Workers Are Now Foreign Laborers Via Remix News, Spain’s construction industry is undergoing rapid demographic changes. Foreign-born workers in unskilled construction roles now make up 52.6 percent of all workers, according to data from Randstad from the first quarter The data shows that foreign workers now exceed Spanish nationals for these unskilled roles by nearly […]

Society Collapse 2040: The Year The World Stops Working And Starts Dying Authored by Milan Adams via Preppgroup, The Mathematical Warning That Refused to Fade Fifty-four years ago, a team of researchers at MIT fed population data, resource consumption curves, and pollution metrics into a mainframe computer the size of a shipping container. The machine whirred through calculations and spat out a trajectory that ended in sharp […]

Central Banking: The Scourge Of Civilization Authored by George Ford Smith via Mises Institute, Apple builds and sells iPhones. I happen to own one of the older models, for the same reason I own a last-legs older model car. What if Apple could skip the build part and sell only the phone? The money saved would be an enormous boost to its bottom line. And if Apple passed the savings onto customers I could conceivably afford to […]

World’s Largest Refiner Says China’s Oil Demand “Very Likely Peaked Last Year” One of the most understated stories of 2026, and the reason why oil (and gas) aren’t trading at persistently nosebleed levels (ignore diesel for the time being), has been China’s unexpectedly weak oil demand. And while there has been much speculation surrounding the reason for this chronically weak oil demand, ranging from an accelerated – and offsetting […]

DOJ To Deploy 1,000 Election Monitors For Midterms The Justice Department is preparing to send a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places for the 2026 midterms, the largest deployment of its kind in the agency’s history. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs the Civil Rights Division, gave the number to Bloomberg last week and the figure alone tells you how central “election integrity” has become to this […]