Great And Unfortunate Fabrications Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness, Jason Arday should ask for a cover charge. His entertainment value is that splendid. For the last couple of weeks, the “youngest ever black professor” at the University of Cambridge has been a nearly ubiquitous and nonstop source of hilarity. The proximate catalyst for the comedy is the imminent publication of Great and Unfortunate Things, […]

Commercial Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filings Decrease Annually, But… Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times, There were 666 commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings made in the United States in July, a 27 percent drop from a year ago, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI). Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a business to reorganize its debts so it can continue operating and eventually become solvent. In addition […]

US SPR Falls Below 300 Million Operational Limit As Oil Drain Unexpectedly Surges To 6.1MM Barrels, Most In 2 Months As negotiations between the US and Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz go nowhere, oil prices continue to slide lower on some naive hope that a resolution to the conflict will magically emerge. Meanwhile, both commercial and strategic stocks continue to be drained at a historic pace, and one day virtually every tank […]

Trump Finally Responds To Iran’s Demands, Counters US Is Owed “Compensation,” Stops Short Of New Threats Summary Trump demands Iran compensate the US and families of fallen soldiers, but issues no new military threats. US again pivots to economic warfare: Trump says Washington is “low-keying it” and betting Iran’s economic weakness will force concessions. Iran digs in on Hormuz: Tehran says the Strait will not return to pre-war […]

Race To Reopen Hormuz Intensifies As Global Supply Chain Stress Remains At COVID Levels The latest Bloomberg data show that shipping transits through the Strait of Hormuz remained largely disrupted Monday morning, even as Iran and Oman reportedly moved closer to a deal. Brent crude futures traded near $85 a barrel as markets priced in the possibility that a deal to reopen the maritime chokepoint could be imminent. Yet global […]

Game Over? GameStop CEO May Pull $56 Billion eBay Bid Anyone who took GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s bid for eBay seriously should have reconsidered after his CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin in early May. When Sorkin pressed him on the basic math, Cohen failed to clearly explain how GameStop could finance the $56 billion deal or make the proposed cash-and-stock structure work. The interview raised more questions than it answered […]

If They Were Human, They’d Be Arrested. Experts Respond To Rogue AI Breaches Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times, What if an artificial intelligence model is given a task and uses every conceivable resource at its disposal to complete it, even at the detriment of humanity itself? That is what some are now fearing after an OpenAI model broke out of a testing sandbox and used zero-day exploits to hack into Hugging Face, an […]

IRS To Propose Retirement Regulations Impacting Millions Of Taxpayers Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times, The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of the Treasury plan to propose regulations for a federal retirement savings incentive program, including eligibility criteria and income thresholds for qualifying for such benefits. IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano (L) speaks as President […]

Meta Releases Muse Glimmer, A 30B Model That Runs On A Single Consumer GPU Meta released Muse Glimmer on Monday, a 30-billion-parameter model built for agent work that fits on a laptop. The company published the model’s weights – the trained numbers that make up the model itself, meaning anyone can download it and run it on their own machine – on the model repository Hugging Face, under an Apache 2.0 license that is genuinely […]

NORAD Jets Intercept 2 Planes Over Restricted Airspace Near Trump’s Golf Club Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) F-16 fighter jets intercepted two general aviation aircraft that flew into restricted airspace over Bedminster, New Jersey, on Aug. 9, the command said. President Donald Trump was at his golf club in Bedminster for the weekend, arriving the evening of Aug. 7 […]

Key Events This Week: CPI, PPI, Retail Sales Most traders may be out on the beach soaking up the mid-summer sun, but the relentless market and geopolitical newsflow continues for another week. Following Friday’s payrolls report, which was far more dovish than hawkish at face value, attention this week will be firmly on July US CPI (Wednesday), which could go a long way towards further tipping the balance for September FOMC pricing. […]

7.4 Mega Quake Rocks Colombia, Widespread Damage Reported A little more than six weeks after twin earthquakes devastated neighboring Venezuela, killing thousands, a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday morning, damaging buildings and injuring people near the epicenter in Chocó province. Bloomberg reported that the quake was recorded at 7:34 a.m. local time near San José del Palmar. Chocó Governor Nubia […]

Give Them An Inch… By Bas van Geffen, senior macro strategist at Rabobank Talks between Iran and Oman on the reopening of Hormuz are reportedly inching ahead, as Iran continues to give the US the silent treatment. Negotiators said that a deal to establish a safe shipping route was close, but Iran may now be exploring just how much it can extract from the US in return. Last week, Iran had already said that any deal with Oman […]

Ukrainian Drones Launched 750-Miles Deep Into Central Russia Kill 13 Ukraine’s military has conducted a rare, mass casualty attack deep into central Russia. Long-range drones reached Tatarstan, which lies some 1,200km (or about 750 miles) east of the Ukrainian border. The strikes killed 13 people and wounded at least 75 in what’s widely being called one of the most deadly single attacks launched on Russian territory by Ukraine […]

Boeing Sells Flying-Taxi Venture To Rival Archer Aviation, Takes Near 20% Stake Archer Aviation shares surged in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing had agreed to take a nearly 20% stake in the eVTOL startup as part of a deal that transfers control of its autonomous flying-taxi venture, Wisk Aero, to Archer. Archer will acquire Wisk, air-traffic software provider SkyGrid, and drone manufacturer […]

Intel Selling $15 Billion In Stock To Fund AI Boom With AI capital expenditures exploding to $1 trillion this year, the financing mix is beginning to shift from free cash flow and debt toward equity. Among the megacap hyperscalers, Alphabet has been the most aggressive in tapping the equity market (read report), while Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta continue to rely primarily on cash flow, debt, leases, and structured financing. […]

Futures Erase Overnight Gains As Oil Hits One-Week High, Yen Slides US equity futures start the new week barely higher, having erased almost all of their overnight gains, yet still trading at all time highs, led by Tech with small caps starting the week in the red. As of 8:00am ET, S&P futures are fractionally in the green as traders look to the next big data print from the US this week in the form of CPI and PPI updates, as […]

‘The Financial Equivalent Of All Out Nuclear War’: Jim Rickards Says ‘Yentervention’ Is The Biggest Story In The World Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com, Eight-time, best-selling financial author Jim Rickards is warning of a financial calamity already underway that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is trying to contain.  It is the Japanese yen carry trade where the US Treasury is propping up the yen’s value.  Is the yen […]

The Fed Is Failing Its Mandate, But It Could Change Soon Authored by Daniel Lacalle, The Federal Reserve’s legal mandate is clear. It must focus on stable prices and maximum employment. In the past five years, the Fed has failed on both. Inflation remains materially above the 2 percent target, reaching a decade-high 25% cumulative inflation in the 2021-2025 period, while restrictive monetary conditions have been limited to rate […]

These Restaurant Chains Won The Social Media War For Gen Z’s Attention Millennials and Generation Z spend a disproportionate amount of time on social media, swiping left, right, up, and down, making growth in interactions an increasingly important measure of brand relevance. For restaurant chains seeking to attract younger consumers, social media platforms have become critical advertising tools for building brand awareness and, […]

Bitcoin ‘Red Team’ Says AI Is Finding 100s Of Critical Exploits Across Core Projects Authored by Jason Nelson via Decrypto.co, A volunteer security initiative says it used frontier AI models to scan 150 Bitcoin repositories and found more than a dozen vulnerabilities as developers increasingly use artificial intelligence to audit blockchains. In a post on X earlier this week, AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton said the group has […]

“We’re Here To Destroy The White Race”: Democratic Socialist Of America Hero Declares War On West Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with […]

“Chuds” Rejoice As Woke Video Game Studio Bethesda Crushed By Mass Layoffs From around 2014 through 2023 nearly every aspect of western pop culture from movies to television to comic books to video games to marketing was invaded by what seemed like a highly coordinated horde of far-left activists.  This subversive coup in entertainment launched what many now refer to as the “woke era” in western politics, giving birth to the […]

He Just Bought It From A Shop… Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News, A young British man walked out of a Manchester shop with a brand new baseball bat still sealed in its factory plastic packaging. Within moments, multiple police officers were on him, treating the purchase as a weapon and detaining him in full view of the street. The footage, which spread rapidly on Sunday, captures the absolute state of policing in […]

Trump Says “We Are Low Keying It” With Iran As Options For Walking Away Have Drastically Narrowed Iran’s IRGC is holding the line, reiterating that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to international shipping only after the United States accepts all of its conditions, which we outlined previously. Also, on Saturday Iran’s army spokesman Amir Akraminia stated that Iran’s new protocols in the Strait of Hormuz are “irreversible” and […]