BABA Shares Crash Most In Six Months As Net Income Plunge Overshadows AI Progress Alibaba ADRs suffered their sharpest drop in six months during the US cash session after quarterly results revealed a massive tumble in net income and sluggish top-line growth, overshadowing yet another quarter of triple-digit expansion across its cloud and AI businesses. Third-quarter results showed that Alibaba’s core retail business remained […]

Watch Live: Trump Meets With Japanese PM On Iran, Economic Security President Donald Trump is expected to use today’s White House meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi at 11:15 ET to press Tokyo for naval support in the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran – specifically requesting minesweepers and escorts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, tapping their oil reserves, developing missiles, and in non-Iran news, […]

WTI Crude Bursts Back Above $100 After US Export Ban Hopes Crushed Having diverged significantly overnight from Brent crude prices, WTI is now exploding higher, breaking back above $100, after hopes of a US export ban were crushed by Politico’s sources. Sophia Cai (@SophiaCai99) posted on X that: NEW: The White House will not implement a crude export ban, and told oil executives as much at this morning’s meeting with API, per […]

US F-35 Damaged By Iranian Fire In First of War; Israeli Refinery Targeted, Iran’s Caspian Fleet Destroyed Summary F-35 stealth jet takes on Iranian fire, emergency landing: CNN Trump dials up threat, seeking leverage, denies approving Israeli Pars strikes: however, reports from The Wall Street Journal and Axios say the White House was aware. US sending more troops to region. Energy war hits breaking point: tit-for-tat […]

CBS News Investigation Uncovers Massive Medicare Hospice Fraud In L.A. County Authored by Bryan Hyde via American Greatness, An investigation by CBS News has discovered massive Medicare fraud at more than 700 out of 1,800 licensed hospice providers in Los Angeles County. The scam utilizes stolen Medicare numbers to fraudulently enroll healthy seniors in hospice with fake terminal diagnoses, billing Medicare an average of […]

MMT Vs Austrian Economics: Deficits, War, & Markets The Keynesian-Austrian debate has raged for over a century. Questions of deficits, taxes, money printing, and their impact on inflation are at the center of the disagreement. War breaking out in the Middle East means we will see more of these three inputs, so how will they show up as inflation: in assets, consumer goods, everywhere? Tonight, two opposing economists will […]

Another Depraved Leftist: Many Such Cases… Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, An Oregon high school principal placed on leave for celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been sentenced to five years in prison for possession of child abuse material. Jeremy P. Williams, former head of Rainier Junior-Senior High School, now joins a disturbing list of leftists in education and politics whose public […]

US New Home Sales Collapse By Most In 13 Years In January Despite falling mortgage rates, analysts expected December’s drop in new home sales to accelerate in January… and accelerate they did… crashing a stunning 17.6% MoM (-2.7% MoM exp) – the biggest MoM drop since July 2013. This huge MoM drop dragged sales down 11.3% YoY – the worst slide in three years… Source: Bloomberg This huge drop dragged the new home sales SAAR […]

Escalate To Immolate? By Michael Every of Rabobank Escalate To Immolate? It takes a pretty big development to push the BOC, the FOMC, and the upcoming BOJ, BOE, and ECB meetings off the financial front pages – but yesterday’s and this morning’s news does in some eyes and headlines.  We’ve warned the Iran War would ‘escalate to de-escalate’, and crucial regional desalination plants had briefly looked to become targets. […]

Trump Eyes Boots On The Ground Along Hormuz Shoreline Several reports this week into Thursday say the Trump administration is quietly weighing a major escalation – potentially deploying thousands of additional troops to the Middle East as the White House struggles to map out an end game in Iran, according to Reuters. Interestingly, the Reuters report doesn’t include the phrase that Trump strongly campaigned against: ‘boots on the […]

Euro, Bunds Slide After ECB Warns Of Stagflation The European Central Bank kept interest rates unchanged, warning that the war in Iran could shift its expectations for inflation and the economy. The deposit rate was left at 2% on Thursday – as predicted by all analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Officials said that leaves them well positioned, reiterating in a statement that they’ll act one meeting at a time. “The war in the […]

Ukraine Peace Talks Are Suspended, Likely Indefinitely, Thanks To The Iran War Since the opening of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury and America’s escalating war in Iran, now soon to reach three weeks, Moscow and Kiev have several times confirmed there’s been a pause in peace talks. The last instance the three parties met was in February in Geneva, soon before the Iran conflict began. Days into US-Israeli Iran operations, a new round […]

Civil Rights Icon Cesar Chavez’s Family, Officials React To Sexual Assault Accusations Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times, The family of Cesar Chavez said they were devastated by allegations of sexual abuse that surfaced against the American civil rights icon in a report published March 18, as officials began canceling celebrations and holidays in honor of him. “This is deeply painful for our family,” the Chavez […]

US Stock Futures, Global Markets Plunge As Energy Prices Explode Global stocks are in freefall after a fresh surge in oil and gas prices deepened concerns that the war in the Middle East will fuel inflation and hit growth. We saw clear escalation in Iran conflicts yesterday given the South Pars gas field strike and Qatar LNG facilities strike, both of which have effectively shut down all hope for a quick resumption of LNG flows […]

‘No Hire, No Fire’ Economy Rolls On With Jobless Claims Back Near Record Lows The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time fell to just 205k last week (well below the 215k expected and down from 213k prior). This is back near the lowest reading for initial claims ever having gone nowhere for five years… Continuing jobless claims also remain below the 1.9 million Maginot Line, showing no sign of […]

UK Gilt Yields Explode Higher On Surprise BoE Rate-Hike Threat The Bank of England shocked markets this morning, signaling that it is prepared to raise rates to counter a pickup in inflation driven by the conflict in the Middle East. Specifically,t he BoE said it would act to counter the pickup in inflation if it threatened to become persistent, but faced high levels of uncertainty about the outlook and would seek greater clarity […]

WTI-Brent Spread Explodes As Trump Mulls Export Ban; Iran’s Attack On Qatar’s LNG “Worse Than Nord Stream” Summary:  WTI-Brent Spread Blows Out as Traders Price In U.S. Export Restrictions Iran Targets Qatar LNG Plant, Saudi Red Sea Refinery Trump Urges De-Escalation After Iranian Strikes on Qatari Energy Assets Middle East Conflict Escalates Dangerously Overnight Into Direct Strikes on Upstream Energy Assets […]

US Naval Escort Won’t “100% Guarantee” Tanker Safety In Hormuz Chokepoint: Report The paralyzed Hormuz chokepoint is becoming the worst disruption to global energy flows ever, as actual barrels quickly disappear from oil markets, driving prices sharply higher in Asia toward $150 per barrel and potentially setting the stage for demand destruction in the weeks ahead. The oil market has fragmented: Oil is now trading for $150/bbl in […]

Why Credit Creates Bubbles That Break The Economy Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, The asymmetric scaling of credit has inflated The Everything Bubble that will burst with devastating consequences for the real economy. When credit scales faster than it can be absorbed by productive investments, the resulting credit-asset bubbles break the economy. This is the result of asymmetric scaling: credit (i.e. […]

UK Lawmakers Seek Moratorium On Crypto Donations To Political Parties Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com, A cross-party parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom has urged the government to impose an immediate moratorium on cryptocurrency donations to political parties until stronger safeguards are in place. In a report published on Wednesday, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy said the […]

Owner Of Failed UK-Based Private Lender MFS Hit With Worldwide Asset Freeze When we reported on the collapse of the first major UK-based private credit lender, Market Financial Solutions (or MFS), the UK mortgage lender that borrowed more than £2 billion ($2.7 billion) from Wall Street backers, and which collapse in spectacular fashion, we pointed out that the mastermind behind the operation, Paresh Raja, may have […]

‘Restore Britain’ Vows To Execute Pedophiles, Deport Millions Of Migrants, Outlaw “Incompatible Cultural And Religious Practices” Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, A new force in British politics is making waves with an uncompromising vision for national restoration. Just weeks after its launch as a full political party in February, Restore Britain has already overtaken the Conservative Party in membership numbers, […]

2020s: The Billionaires’ Decade? Billionaires’ wealth remains undeterred by global crises, rising by 25 percent between early 2025 and early 2026, a Forbes World’s Billionaires List release showed yesterday. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when tech stocks soared, it took an even bigger step up, rising 64 percent between 2020 and 2021. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz shows in the chart below, the number of […]

“We Can’t Live Like This Anymore!” – Residents Demand Action As Migrant-Linked Violence Spirals In Rome Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News, Residents in Rome’s San Lorenzo district are sounding the alarm over a surge in violence they say is increasingly driven by homeless migrants, after another brutal street attack left a man hospitalized and renewed calls for urgent security measures. The latest incident unfolded in […]

17 Veterans Kill Themselves A Day Waiting 17 Days For Help Authored by Sean O’Connor via RealClearDefense, Every day, roughly 17 veterans take their own lives. For two decades, that number hasn’t budged.  VA Secretary Doug Collins said that despite spending billions of dollars, we’re losing the same number of veterans every year. For veterans under the age of 45, a recent report shows suicide is the second-leading cause […]