Yen Tumbles After Japan’s PM Voices Concerns About Further Rate Hikes To BOJ The yen was already sliding on Monday after Nikkei Asia reported that the sharp swing we saw in USDJPY in January was initiated by FX intervention from US Treasury Secretary Bessent not Tokyo, even if Washington, D.C. is open to coordinated forex moves if requested by Japan. FX traders took this as evidence that, contrary to previous conventional wisdom, […]

After Four Years Of War, Zelensky Wants All Land Back Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, Tuesday marks four years since Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, and, despite President Trump promising to end the war quickly, there’s no end in sight to the conflict as Russian and Ukrainian leadership haven’t budged on their core demands for a peace deal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reaffirmed in an interview […]

Former Norway PM Attempts Suicide After Epstein-Linked Raid, Corruption Charges: Report Norway’s former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland was hospitalized a week ago after a failed suicide attempt, days after he was charged with “gross corruption” after a police probe into his ties with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, local outlet iNyheter reports.  Thorbjorn Jagland, a former prime minister of Norway, in Oslo February […]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 And 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 By Michael Every of Rabobank Depressingly, today marks the start of the fifth year of the Ukraine War: a battered Ukraine is still standing against a bruised Russia; the US is still aiming for a peace deal so it can pivot to Asia; and Europe –even as it knows it has to look after both Ukraine and its own conventional defenses after decades of having this provided for it– is still trying to get its […]

Despite Crazy Revisions, Consumer Confidence Rebounds From January’s Doom After Boomers and Gen X dragged The Conference Board Confidence measure down to eight month lows to end 2025, expectations were for a rebound to start 2026. Instead, January was a bloodbath with all the cohorts tumbling. Today sees February’s data released with expectations for a rebound, particularly in expectations… and the consensus was right. The […]

Watch Live: The Anthropic Enterprise Agents Event That’s Moving The Market Update 1030AM EST: Anthropic rolled out new AI capabilities for its Claude Cowork agent, designed to automate tasks in areas like human resources, investment banking, and design. Developed with partners including FactSet Research Systems Inc., the tools also allow business customers to customize plug-ins to fit their internal standards. The move is part of a […]

Moscow Claims NATO Nuke Smuggling Plot Into Ukraine – UK Denounces ‘Heinous’ Charge It’s hard to know what’s true amid the fog of war, but when Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) comes out with whatever new accusation it lodges against Ukraine it usually ‘goes big’. That’s true of the latest statement Tuesday, which happens to mark the fourth anniversary of the full-scale Ukraine invasion of 2022. The SVR is newly […]

Novo Nordisk Extends Slide After Announcing Price-Cuts For Blockbuster Obesity Drugs Novo Nordisk shares in Copenhagen can’t catch a bid. The liquidation is accelerating again after a Bloomberg headline on Tuesday morning: the Danish drugmaker will slash U.S. list prices for Wegovy and Ozempic next year. The move suggests that the new CEO is pursuing market share amid intensifying competition in the GLP-1 space. Jamey Millar, […]

Despite Rise In December, US Home Prices Saw Weakest Full-Year Gain Since 2011 For the fifth straight month, US home prices across its 20 largest cities rose in December (according to the admittedly lagged and smoothed Case-Shiller data released today). The 0.47% MoM rise is down very mopdestly from the upwardly revised +0.53% MoM in November Source: Bloomberg However, “national home prices grew just 1.3% for the year – the […]

Female British Cop Defends Freedom Of Speech In “Muslim Area” Of London Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, The Metropolitan Police has so far not commented on the viral video of a female police officer defending freedom of speech surrounded by a crowd of angry Muslim men in Whitechapel but it has questions to answer. The Mail ran the video yesterday. This is fundamentally a Christian country. We will not […]

Jittery Futures Erase Gains Amid AI Doomsday Fears A short rebound in stocks fizzled after Monday’s drop, as worries about the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence continued to unsettle markets which digested yesterday’s AI scare, and await today’s Claude / Anthropic presentation, while preparing for tonight’s State of the Union address (“SOTU”). Some have suggested that Trump may attack power generation risks […]

Early Tax Refunds Are Showing A 14% Increase, IRS Says Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times, The average tax refund for American taxpayers has increased on a year-over-year basis, the IRS said in a Feb. 20 update. The average refund amount increased 14.2 percent in 2026 to $2,476 as of Feb. 13, according to the agency. Last year, the average refund for the same time period was $2,169. Meanwhile, the average direct […]

Jane Street Sued For Crypto Insider Trading That Accelerated Terraform Collapse For years – literally – we have been pounding the table and pointing out market rigging and manipulation irregularities in the crypto markets which, for reasons of our own, we attributed to one of the world’s foremost HFT shops and most profitable “market makers” in the world (if not India), Jane Street. Below is an example from 2023, and here are […]

Moscow Police Targeted In Deadly Car Bombing On 4th Anniversary Of Russian Invasion There’s been another killing by explosive device in the heart of Moscow – this time coming on the fourth anniversary of the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. The Russian Interior Ministry has confirmed that a culprit detonated powerful bomb beside a police patrol car in central Moscow early Tuesday, near a public transport hub, which killed one […]

AMD Shares Soar After Meta Chip Deal Worth More Than $100 Billion Shares of Advanced Micro Devices surged the most in five months in premarket trading, after Meta disclosed a multi-year deal to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs to power its next-generation AI data centers. Meta will begin deploying these AMD chips in the second half of 2026. The first phase will support the deployment of 1 gigawatt. AMD stated: This […]

Cartel Kingpin “El Mencho” Dead. Here’s A Shortlist Of Possible Successors Mexico’s most wanted cartel boss was killed Sunday in a Mexican military operation reportedly supported by U.S. intelligence; however, the emergence of potential successors indicates the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) is not at the end of its road, only suggesting the decapitation strike is more likely to drive short-term fragmentation and retaliatory […]

Lamborghini EV Lanzador Bites The Dust As Electrified Supercar Demand Hits “Close To Zero” Big legacy U.S. and European automakers are frantically dialing back their electric vehicle bets, scaling back once-hyped roadmaps to full electrification as demand for these vehicles implodes. The latest automaker to reverse course is not a mass-market sedan or SUV maker, but a luxury supercar brand: Lamborghini. CEO Stephan Winkelmann told […]

Trump’s Board Of Peace Mulling Stablecoin For Gaza Efforts: FT Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com, The Board of Peace established by US President Donald Trump, which requires a $1 billion contribution for membership, is reportedly exploring a stablecoin for use in rebuilding Gaza’s economy following two years of war triggered by a Hamas terror attack in October 2023. According to a Monday Financial Times report, […]

80% Of The World’s Population Will Use Social Media By 2028 Launched in 2004 as an experiment at Harvard, Facebook is often regarded as the defining social media platform of its era, the one that brought such platforms into the mainstream. Facebook reached one million users just ten months after its launch; it took Mark Zuckerberg’s social network around eight years to reach one billion users. That milestone was reached in […]

‘Out Of Africa’: Beijing Slashes Investment Up To 85% Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times, For more than a decade, China’s footprint across Africa has expanded at a phenomenal pace. Railways in Kenya, ports in Tanzania, energy projects across sub-Saharan Africa, and militarized infrastructure in various places have meant billions in state-backed loans. For decades, Beijing has positioned itself as Africa’s largest […]

Critical Part Of Hungary & Slovakia’s Russian Oil Flows Has Just Been Blown Up Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has reportedly once again struck at the heart of Russia’s energy artery, igniting a fire at a key Transneft oil pumping station in the republic of Tatarstan early Monday. Regional officials confirmed the incident after local media and Telegram channels first reported explosions near the strategic facility, with […]

These Are The World’s 10 Deadliest Viruses Some viruses infect millions but kill relatively few. Others spread less widely yet prove far more lethal once contracted. This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks 10 of the world’s deadliest viruses by case fatality rate: the percentage of infected people who die from the disease. Rabies tops the list, with a fatality rate approaching 100% once symptoms appear. […]

Despite Deportation Order Dating Back 23 Years, Bosnian Criminal Migrant Gets €7,250 Every Month In Welfare From German Taxpayers Via Remix News, A Bosnian national, identified as Huso B., is being labeled one of the worst cases of a foreigner taking advantage of Germany’s generous welfare system. The man, who has numerous criminal offenses on his record, remains in Germany despite being under a mandatory order to leave the […]

Escobar: The Discombobulated West Authored by Pepe Escobar, Neo-Caligula – a.k.a. The Undisputed Tariff Champion of the World – seems to be surprised that Iran has not capitulated. No wonder. No clueless sycophant amongst his astonishingly mediocre inner circle is intellectually equipped to explain to neo-Caligula, in soundbites, the basics of Shi’ism. It gets worse. What’s actually on the imperial table is the return […]

Is Privacy Entirely Gone? Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots. […]