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Authored by Elad Vaida via Campus Reform,

A parental rights group published a report showing that the Department of Education has spent enormous sums to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Parents Defending Education works to “reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.”

It published its report on Dec. 12 demonstrating that, since 2021, the Department of Education has spent $1,002,522,304.81 to promote DEI at “universities, school districts, and nonprofits.”

That sum includes $489,883,797.81 for “DEI Hiring,” $343,337,286 for “DEI Programming,” and $169,301,221 for “Based Mental health/Social Emotional Learning.” 

Some of the report’s “key findings” include a $1,261,718 to the University of Iowa to “train 40 elementary teachers to ‘enact equity-centered education’ in partner K-12 districts.’”

The report also highlights a $4 million grant to the Regents of the University of California, U.C. San Diego for a program to “directly engage high school youth from low-income, racial minoritized groups.”

The federal government routinely pours great sums into promoting DEI in higher education. 

In October, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revealed it would hand out more than $7 million to six different universities to “grow initiatives in engineering-related disciplines and fields for learners who have historically been underrepresented and underserved in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.”

NASA’s senior advisor for engagement and equity Shahra Lambert said the grants would help pave “the way for greater diversity in engineering and STEM.”

The National Institutes of Health also granted more than $19 million to The City University of New York to found a new “Center for Minority Health, Equity and Social Justice.”

Campus Reform reached out to Parents Defending Education for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.

Chinese TP-Link routers, the best-selling ones on Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, have been intensely scrutinized by US investigators due to links to multiple Chinese cyberattacks. This has prompted US officials to consider a potential ban on these routers, citing national security concerns. 

Sources familiar with investigations at the Commerce, Defense, and Justice departments told the Wall Street Journal that a nationwide ban on TP-Link routers could come as soon as next year. 

WSJ noted that the Shenzhen-based router manufacturer accounts for an alarming 65% of the US router market in homes and small businesses, adding, “It is also the top choice on Amazon.com, and powers internet communications for the Defense Department and other federal government agencies.”

Sources told WSJ that some TP-Link routers shipped to the US have security flaws, and the company has resisted cooperating with security researchers to address the identified issues. 

In October, Microsoft published a report that revealed a Chinese hacking group had access to thousands of compromised TP-Link routers. 

“CovertNetwork-1658 specifically refers to a collection of egress IPs that may be used by one or more Chinese threat actors and is wholly comprised of compromised devices. Microsoft assesses that a threat actor located in China established and maintains this network. The threat actor exploits a vulnerability in the routers to gain remote code execution capability,” the report explained.

When Microsoft published the report, TP-Link was already under scrutiny. In August, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for an investigation into TP-Link routers. 

In the letter to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, the lawmakers wrote, “TP-Link’s unusual degree of vulnerabilities and required compliance with PRC law are in and of themselves disconcerting. When combined with the PRC government’s common use of SOHO [small office/home office] routers like TP-Link to perpetrate extensive cyberattacks in the United States, it becomes significantly alarming.” 

WSJ reported that Biden-Harris officials are exploring potential action against TP-Link in response to recent cyberattacks connected with China. The likely action could come during Trump’s second term. 

The potential ban on TP-Link routers could mark the largest removal of Chinese tech from the US market since the Trump admin removed Huawei tech from America’s infrastructure.

It might be a good time to check what type of router or mesh network you have before Trump takes office next month.

Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com,

Hailey Welch, the influencer behind the viral ‘Hawk Tuah’ TikTok video, has released a statement after a memecoin bearing her handle pumped and dumped quickly after its December launch.

In a Dec. 20 X post, Welch said she was “fully cooperating” with lawyers who represented investors in the Hawk Tuah (HAWK) token.

The crypto users filed a lawsuit against the project’s creators and partners – Welch herself was not named as a defendant in the suit – alleging they engaged in the promotion and sale of an unregistered securities offering.

A statement posted to X on Dec. 20. Source: Hailey Welch

On Dec. 4, the HAWK token launched, rising to a market capitalization of roughly $500 million before quickly dropping by 90%, prompting many users to speculate there had been a rug pull.

Welch called on anyone affected to contact lawyers, adding she took the situation “extremely seriously.”  

From TikTok stardom to memecoin promoter?

Welch, who rose to internet fame after a June clip of her describing a sexual act went viral on TikTok, has parlayed the incident into her Hawk Tuah nickname and brand.

Her likeness was used on the HAWK token, and she promoted the memecoin on social media.

According to blockchain data, one wallet sniped HAWK tokens shortly after the project launched, purchasing roughly 18% of the memecoin supply and then selling it for more than $1 million in profit.

Many of the memecoin’s investors, however, reported massive losses after the price pumped and dumped.

It’s unclear whether Welch or the project’s founders could face criminal or regulatory lawsuits in the United States as a result of the memecoin launch.

Under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler, the regulator has treated the majority of tokens as securities under its purview. However, the SEC is set to change hands to Republican control beginning in January.

New retail price data shows supermarket prices of a dozen eggs have soared to record highs. The surge comes amid an ever-expanding bird flu outbreak that has led to the culling of millions of birds, denting the size of the nation’s egg-laying hen population. 

Bloomberg cited Expana data showing that a dozen eggs in the Midwest cost about $5.67 this week, exceeding the record high of $5.46 set in December 2022. 

Expana’s managing editor for eggs in the Americas, Karyn Rispoli, explained that a “potent combination of avian flu-related production losses and heightened retail demand throughout the holiday baking season” catapulted prices to record highs. 

She said 17 million egg-laying hens and younger birds known as pullets had been culled since mid-October amid a surge in bird flu cases, adding that was one of the worst stretches in the current bird-flu outbreak since the virus first emerged in the nation’s flock in February 2022. 

“The virus also jumped to other species including dairy cattle, while a person was hospitalized with a severe case of H5N1 bird flu in Louisiana this week,” Bloomberg noted. 

Wholesale egg prices via the Urner Barry Egg Index are nearing record highs (again) …. 

Last month, we noted. 

Egg Prices Surge Again As Grocers Face Shortages Amid Bird Flu Outbreak https://t.co/8oikLTnryy

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 22, 2024

And pointed out in the November CPI print: “A quarter of the November rise in prices for final demand goods is attributable to a 54.6-percent jump in the index for chicken eggs.” 

This comes as global food inflation has entered a dangerous phase of re-acceleration.

The best way cash-strapped households can hedge over the elevated food inflation storm is to produce their own food. Whether it’s setting up a chicken coop, planting a garden, installing honeybee hives, or creating pastures for a few cows, now is the time to hedge against rising prices. It’s not just about prices – it’s also about health and security. Become ungovernable by taking back the food supply chain from the corrupt food industrial complex that heavily influences federal policy-making.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

For all our lives, we’ve been subjected to forced seasonal time change. Spring forward, fall back. That’s how we learn from childhood how to remember this.

We are also told the reason early on. We are extending daylight hours. But only a moment’s thought reveals this to be untrue. The light you gain from a one-hour change is borrowed from later in the day.

Government cannot magically make the day longer.

It’s like the old joke, supposedly from an “old Indian” who points out that you cannot make a blanket longer by cutting off one end and sewing it on the other.

I’ve never met anyone who approves of this massive disruption in our sense of time. Some people prefer Standard Time, while others prefer Daylight Saving Time, depending on their area within a given zone. But regardless, it seems as if everyone agrees that we should stick to one version of time and not change it so brutally in the middle of a year.

To be sure, all this became mechanically easier once time became digital. We don’t have to have friends, family, neighbors, and the TV yelling at us to turn back the clock or bump it forward. But it seems as if there are always a few clocks around that do not automatically change, such as the kitchen clock with the battery or the oven clock. Then we have to figure out how the stupid thing works and fuss with it, twice per year.

Every study shows that this disruption is terrible for health, as it disrupts sleep patterns and contributes to mental fatigue and even depression. It is associated with increased hospital admissions and even car crashes. This should not shock us. Our bodies are regulated by patterns of the sun, more so than we know.

Then there are the missed appointments.

If everyone hates it so much, why does it persist? It keeps happening simply because it keeps happening. No one knows how to get rid of it. While there is widespread public hatred of the practice, there is no real lobbying force to do anything about it.

Forced seasonal time disruptions are the paradigmatic case of a system that just keeps going on because no one really knows how to stop it, even though no one really likes it.

Fortunately, President-elect Donald Trump has an uncanny sense of the public mood. He is the first political figure in my lifetime who has openly blasted Daylight Saving Time and sworn to end it on the federal level. If states want to keep it, fine. My prediction is that it will go away completely. That’s a good thing.

Oddly, I find myself thrilled by this! It thoroughly confuses children, dogs, and adults, too. The whole crazy business began during World War I as a way to conserve energy and cause the daylight to arrive earlier in the day for purposes of munitions manufacturing. Others say there were some agricultural reasons, too.

The reason that this all began had plenty to do with a fashionable scientism of the time. Elites had come to enjoy toying with all things under the general belief that mechanized schemes could override nature itself. This affected so much along with the rise of indoor lighting, flight, steel bridges, internal combustion, telegraphic communications, the telephone, and recorded sound. It seemed as if there was nothing that could not be engineered to perfection, even the rotations of the sun.

Remember that a few decades earlier, there was already a huge controversy over time in the United States. When the railroads came along and gained political power, they pushed hard for unified schedules in zones so that people would not arrive at an earlier time at their destination than when they left.

It was common before about 1885 that every town kept its own version of local time. How was that determined? Very simply: When the sun is overhead, that is noon. Surrounding areas generally deferred to the time on the city and town clocks. This also fits with the sundial. There were no time zones, but rather just normal time. Everyone knew what it was.

Once the railroads came along, they lobbied mayors to adopt a more unified system. As a result, many acquiesced, much to the annoyance of many people who simply could not understand how it was that an industrial power could presume the right to define time in its own profitability interests.

For some years, clocks in the United States commonly displayed the actual time (or local time) plus what they called railroad time.

The railroads eventually prevailed. The United States was divided into four time zones, regardless of local time. For the first time in the history of the planet, the sundial no longer made any sense. What we called time was completely severed from any measurement of time drawn from natural patterns. We came to be managed by industry rather than reality.

If you think about the sheer intellectual arrogance of that, it is rather shocking. I like to think that I would have been among the resistors to this ridiculous trick from 150 years ago.

If you are curious about this, you can look up your actual time in your area right now. You can go to mysolartime.com and see exactly what time it really is right now, no matter what your smartphone says. From where I am typing right now, the actual time is nine minutes later than the clock says.

I urge you to do this, and think about what this means. If you are really feeling rebellious, you can start adhering to your local time just for the fun of it.

Up with local time and down with railroad time!

In any case, there is something wonderful about how everyone seems to be rethinking everything in our times. It seems like we are getting rid of the fluoride in the water after more than half a century of awful medicalization via public water supplies.

The effort to get rid of Daylight Saving Time is very similar, taking on an annoyance that should have ended long ago, finally through an authoritative voice who can do something about it.

Yay! I’m thrilled. But if it were up to me, I would go further and directly target the time zones themselves. They are the real source of the problem and the reason why some people favor Daylight Saving Time and others favor Standard Time, depending on which side of the zone you live.

The truth is that neither is correct. They are both fake versions of actual time. The actual time from the ancient world until relatively recently is a simple matter of the sun. When it is directly overhead, it is the noon hour or high noon. That’s it and nothing more. The rest follows from that.

Again, we have tools now that can tell you with great precision what time it actually is.

How to schedule meetings across long distances? The easy way is to use Coordinated Universal Time. It would take a day or two to get used to, but life would become so much easier. Just one time for the world for scheduling all things, and then we have local time, which is the time standard by which we live in the course of our lives. It’s what we should have done to begin with.

Nonetheless, scrapping time changes is an obvious beginning. The 150-year history of government/industry intervention in time is the classic case of bad policy imposed to fix previous bad policy. It was never a good idea to replace real time with constructed/imposed time. Repealing Daylight Saving is a good start.

Maybe if all goes well, we won’t be springing forward after all. How merciful that would be!

*  *  *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Florida’s governor and attorney general on Dec. 18 accused the federal government of blocking a state investigation into Ryan Wesley Routh, the man accused of attempting to assassinate then-former President Donald Trump at his Florida golf course.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody alleged that the Department of Justice informed the state that it had to suspend its investigation into Routh, citing a federal law about prosecuting crimes against significant public figures.

“It was made known that they intended to shut down our investigation and invoke federal jurisdiction in doing so,” Moody said Dec. 18 at a press conference.

“We didn’t believe it should be interpreted in the way that they suggested.”

At the same time, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote that the federal government has “stonewalled Florida’s investigation of the Trump assassination attempt at every turn” and that he supports Moody’s attempts to move forward in their case against Routh.

“The tide will turn on January 20th and we fully expect that the federal roadblocks will be removed,” he wrote on social media, referring to the date that Trump will take office.

“The would-be assassin needs to face the full force of justice and the people deserve the truth about the defendant’s history, motivations and plan.”

The Department of Justice did not respond to an Epoch Times request for comment on Dec. 19.

At the same time, Moody’s office obtained a warrant for Routh’s arrest in mid-September, hours after he was allegedly discovered lying in wait for Trump armed with a rifle in Palm Beach County, Florida. After reportedly being shot at by a Secret Service agent, he fled and was arrested on Interstate 95 in Martin County.

After his arrest, a car crash occurred that injured a 6-year-old girl traveling with her family, Moody said during a press conference. The crash occurred in connection with the pursuit of Routh along the interstate, according to officials.

“As a result of that [accident], we felt compelled to seek justice on her behalf and her family that will never be the same as they cope with her injuries,” she said at a press briefing on Dec. 18.

Moody said the crash occurred after officials shut down traffic on I-95 as they tried to apprehend the suspect. A spokesperson for Moody said prosecutors will file the new charge when Routh is in state custody.

The multi-vehicle crash happened about 30 minutes after Routh’s arrest on I-95, according to the state’s investigation, but Moody alleged it was a result of his actions as he was attempting to evade capture. The girl suffered serious injuries, Moody’s office stated.

According to an arrest warrant affidavit for Routh, the accident occurred while authorities were apprehending him, about three or four miles south of where they stopped his vehicle.

Northbound traffic along the major interstate was halted because of the risk of the traffic stop and because it was not clear whether any weapons or explosives were inside Routh’s car, according to the affidavit. Southbound traffic was also halted as officials attempted to investigate his vehicle.

On Sept. 15, the Secret Service stated that one of its agents allegedly discovered Routh with his gun barrel sticking through Trump’s course perimeter fence as the then-former president was playing a round of golf. The agent opened fire on Routh, prompting him to flee in his vehicle before sheriff’s officials and other law enforcement arrested him along I-95 later that day.

Federal prosecutors said that Routh, whose residence is listed in Hawaii, allegedly waited for the president for about 12 hours and that cellphone data revealed he was in the area around Trump’s golf course and Mar-a-Lago for a month before the alleged assassination attempt.

Later, prosecutors said they discovered Routh had written a note that was left with an acquaintance. The note admitted he wanted to assassinate Trump because of the decision by the first Trump administration to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal that was signed by the Obama administration. Social media accounts associated with Routh also showed he was an avid supporter of Ukraine during the Russia–Ukraine conflict and had attempted to recruit people to fight.

Only now after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad does Washington come clean about the actual number of American troops it has in Syria.

On Thursday, the Pentagon revealed it has roughly 2,000 troops occupying northeast Syria, home to the country’s vital supply of oil and gas, which is over twice the number it has been officially disclosing for years.

US military spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said this has been the figure for a “while”—apparently long before the dramatic events of this month. Ryder claimed the he had just “learned” the true troop number.

“As you know, we have been briefing you regularly that there are approximately 900 US troops deployed to Syria. In light of the situation in Syria and the significant interest, we recently learned that those numbers were higher, and so asked to look into it. I learned today that in fact there are approximately 2,000 US troops in Syria,” he said.

He then tried to pass off the discrepancy as merely a distinction between the 900 long term deployments and those forces rotating in on a more temporary basis.

“As I understand it and as it was explained to me, these additional forces are considered temporary rotational forces that deploy to meet shifting mission requirements, whereas the core 900 deployers are on longer-term deployments,” Ryder said.

The Pentagon and CENTCOM have also recently been reviving talk of the ‘counter-ISIS’ mission as justification for keeping the US occupation ongoing. This even as NATO member Turkey has been seeking to drive out the Kurdish-led SDF from northern Syria, which the US backs.

The Biden administration has also this week said it is in direct contact with designated terror organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which holds Damascus and major cities. 

Obviously this is some absurd gaslighting of the American public by the Pentagon. The question remains: why reveal it now?

How does the Pentagon “recently learn” that it has more than double the number of US troops in Syria than it claimed to have a day earlier? pic.twitter.com/fydxpWcNqT

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 20, 2024

The US is likely to use its possession of the oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzor, which was previously vital to meeting the Syrian population’s domestic consumption needs, as leverage to get HTS leadership to fall in line with Washington’s agenda for the region.

The US had long occupied the energy fields in the first place in order to tighten the economic blockade noose around Assad’s neck, but ultimately it is the common people who suffer most.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge has turned down the federal government’s bid to stop Derek Chauvin from examining George Floyd’s heart tissue.

“The Court is not persuaded by the Government’s arguments, which provide no compelling reason that the Court should change its previous determination,” U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson said in a two-page order filed on Dec. 19.

The order granting Chauvin’s motion to examine Floyd’s heart tissue will stand, he said.

Magnuson on Dec. 16 ruled that Chauvin can test substances preserved from Floyd’s autopsy, including his blood and heart tissue. Chauvin is attempting to prove the theory that Floyd’s death was not related to the restraint that Chauvin applied to Floyd in Minnesota in May 2020.

Chauvin, a police officer in Minneapolis at the time, was later charged and convicted of murdering Floyd.

The present development involves Chauvin’s argument that his former attorney did not adequately represent him.

An expert named Dr. William Schaetzel had contacted the attorney and offered his opinion that Floyd’s death stemmed from factors other than the restraint, but the attorney did not pass along the opinion, according to Chauvin.

Schaetzel said the death was caused by a heart attack. Chauvin said the testing could support the opinion.

“Given the significant nature of the criminal case that Mr. Chauvin was convicted of, and given that the discovery that Mr. Chauvin seeks could support Dr. Schaetzel’s opinion of how Mr. Floyd died, the Court finds that there is good cause to allow Mr. Chauvin to take the discovery that he seeks,” Magnuson said in his Dec. 16 order.

The U.S. Department of Justice then filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider. Government lawyers said that Chauvin could not show ineffective counsel, in part because another expert had already offered a similar opinion during Chauvin’s trial.

The lawyers also said that if the judge turned down the Justice Department’s motion, he should enter an amended order granting discovery to the government as well as to Chauvin.

“The government specifically requests access to expert disclosures for any expert Defendant intends to call at a hearing (including each expert’s qualifications and a full explanation of any opinions and the bases therefore), as well as all lab reports and test results generated by any lab to which Defendant submits requests,” they wrote.

Magnuson denied that request, although he said he expects the government will be able to access the test results.

“The Court expects the parties to cooperate in the discovery process, allowing the Government reasonable access to any lab reports, test results, and expert disclosures,” he said. “The Court will not issue a separate order to that end.”

Via SchiffGold.com,

Will the Trump administration’s proposed tariffs on Chinese, Mexican, and Canadian imports could send shockwaves through the already vulnerable U.S. commercial real estate market? With a 10% tariff on goods from China and 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, the additional cost will be passed along to the US builder and consumer — and is a stiff repudiation to the notion of free markets.

The Fed has predictably failed to get inflation under control before starting its rate-cutting bonanza, and tariffs will cause prices to skyrocket for materials like aluminum, steel and wood, all without addressing deficits. The price increases could a wave ripping through everything from food packaging, cars, trucks, ships, aircraft, and electronics to logistics, housing, and commercial construction. Or, in other words, just about everything. As Peter Schiff recently said:

Why doesn’t every country just impose tariffs if it doesn’t cost anything for their own citizens? …A tariff is a tax. It’s a tax on the consumer for buying stuff. 100% of it is paid by consumers. There’s nobody else to pay it!”

Higher packaging and logistics prices means more expensive products for Amercians across the board. Tariff-fueled price rises could also be the straw that breaks the back of the fragile commercial real estate market, which continues to teeter on the brink with high costs, bad loans, empty office buildings, and overexposed banks creating an explosive cocktail just waiting for a match.    

The cost of essential building materials—like steel, aluminum, and wood—is set to rise significantly. Given that these materials form the backbone of construction, Trump tariffs and the price increases they’re guaranteed to cause could have dire implications for developers, lenders, and the broader economy. 

In 2023, Canada was the US’s single steel supplier. As of 2022, it was also at the top of the list for wood, with China in spot number two and Mexico close behind. The US is a top global importer of iron and steel and is Mexico’s primary customer; Mexico accounted for approximately 15% of the total steel imported while China provided 5%. And while China is a minimal steel importer  to the US compared to other countries, it’s a nation that has become a powerful symbol for the broader implosion of US manufacturing. 

It means that with no manufacturing base to make anything domestically, we have nothing to fall back on. Market forces dictate that two things will happen. One, the goods and supplies that do get sent to the US will start to cost much more money. Two, countries that are heavy exporters to the US will reduce the amounts of goods that they sell us to begin with, creating less supply and driving up prices even more. Either way, the tariff plan is a heavy-handed state intervention that has no ability to empower Trump to lower taxes, as promised. Instead, it’s bound to increase the cost of everything as consumers struggle to figure out where all their clothes, toys, and other goods have gone, with whatever’s left on shelves now priced even more hopelessly out of their budget.

U.S. City Average Dollar Purchasing Power Since 1913, St. Louis Fed

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Purchasing Power of the Consumer Dollar in U.S. City Average [CUUR0000SA0R], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R, December 14, 2024.

Meanwhile, iconic American steel producer US Steel is now pushing for a deal to be sold to Nippon Steel, Japan’s largest steelmaker [ZH: which has now been blocked]. The outlook for US manufacturing has gotten so bad that many working-class US Steel workers are celebrating, seeing the deal as the only thing that can save their good old American jobs. The Biden administration appears to be preparing to block the deal on the grounds of preserving “national security.” But they’re damned if they do, and the’re damned if they don’t.

As tariffs on Chinese and Mexican goods and materials significantly increase the cost of building, it will become even harder for CRE loans to be repaid as struggling developers have nowhere to go but back to the bank to borrow more money. Developers relying on Canadian, Chinese, and Mexican building materials, equipment, and supplies will face higher project costs as they juggle already razor-thin margins and risks like zoning complications, permitting issues, unexpected legal costs, and other extremely expensive snags common to their industry. 

The economy can only handle so many powder kegs. As Peter Schiff said about tariffs on his November 27th episode of The Peter Schiff Show:

The best thing to do if a country wants to be dumb enough to try to limit the ability of its own citizens to trade freely is not to do the same thing to your citizens. Let your own citizens trade freely, and you’re going to win.”

According to Trepp, a leading provider of real estate analytics, nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate loans are set to mature by 2025. Distressed loans are reaching a fever pitch for commercial properties like retail, buildings, apartments and other residential developments, and offices across the US. 

Mortgage-backed security delinquencies associated with office properties are nearing a rate not seen since the 2008 financial meltdown. And many office buildings associated with these troubled loans haven’t even come close to finding enough renters to fill them, becoming post-COVID phantom buildings in a zombie market. Now that remote work and Zoom meetings have cemented themselves as the permanent New Normal, developers are pivoting to desperate measures like expensive office-to-apartment conversions as a Hail Mary to save their projects.

Banks, particularly regional lenders, are trapped in a prison of overexposure to CRE. The FDIC’s Q2 2024 report shows that real estate loans account for 40% of the total loan portfolios for many small and mid-sized banks across America. The government and Fed like to pretend that it’s not a big deal since these are “smaller” banks, willfully ignoring the fact that a series of small bank failures often portends the unfolding of a broader crisis. A construction slump triggered by rising material costs and inflation from central bank meddling and the higher costs from import tariffs, could conspire with other factors to trigger a full-blown CRE collapse and banking crisis. 

Having no manufacturing base in the US only makes a bad thing even worse. The catch-22 is that Trump wants to use tariffs to cut taxes and hopes it will somehow bring American companies and manufacturing back. But without manufacturing, you have no choice but to sacrifice consumers and developers and builders at the altar of foreign imports. It’s an economic ouroboros where the problem eats the solution. 

The Fed wants to cut rates more to save CRE and banks, and in desperation, may fire up the money printer in big way. But it’s just adding fuel to a different fire. 

In previous crises, such as the 2008 financial crash and COVID, QE “stabilized” markets with an epic run of money printing. With inflation still too hot as the Fed rushed to cut interest rates, it’s backed into a corner as usual: keep cutting to save the banks and CRE, throwing savers to the wolves as their purchasing power tanks, or stifle inflation with higher rates and let a banking and CRE crisis rip. We know what it will do. The Fed never sacrifices the banks to preserve the dollar’s purchasing power. They’d rather sacrifice savers and taxpayers with low rates and QE than play a game of bank failure dominos. Either way, the outlook is horrifying.

The CRE bomb has been building for quite some time now. The next round of upward price shocks, exacerbated by the shock of heavy tariffs when the US has close to zero manufacturing base left, could be what lights the fuse.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Discount retail store chain Big Lots announced Thursday that it will initiate “going out of business” sales at all its remaining locations after it was unable to reach an agreement with an investment firm.

“In parallel with these efforts, the company is preparing to commence going out of business sales at all remaining Big Lots store locations in the coming days to protect the value of its estate,” the company said in a statement, which added that Big Lots will continue “to serve customers in-store and online, and will provide updates as available.”

Big Lots CEO Bruce Thorn said in a statement that Big Lots attempted to complete a sale of the company to Nexus Capital Management but it fell through. He said the company will, in the meantime, attempt to close the deal with Nexus or another party by early next month.

“We all have worked extremely hard and have taken every step to complete a going concern sale,” he said.

“While we remain hopeful that we can close an alternative going concern transaction, in order to protect the value of the Big Lots estate, we have made the difficult decision to begin the [going-out-of-business] process.”

Big Lots, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, operates more than 1,400 stores across 48 states. The firm has closed a number of locations in recent months after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after having grappled with declining sales over the past few quarters, putting pressure on its balance sheet.

Big Lots had listed its assets and liabilities in the range of $1 billion to $10 billion, according to a filing with the bankruptcy court in Delaware, which showed creditors in the range of 5,001 to 10,000.

Under the previous agreement that fell through, Big Lots said in court that Nexus would serve as a “stalking horse bidder” in a court-supervised auction process, adding that the deal would close in the fourth quarter of 2024 if Nexus was deemed the winning bidder. A stalking horse bid is used as a starting or minimally accepted offer that other interested bidders must surpass if they want to buy the asset or the company.

Earlier this year, when confirming the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Thorn blamed economic factors such as higher-than-normal inflation and other pressure points. Customers have been forced to change their spending behavior due to inflation, which has been sticky since the COVID-19 pandemic, his company said.

“The prevailing economic trends have been particularly challenging to Big Lots, as its core customers curbed their discretionary spending on the home and seasonal product categories that represent a significant portion of the company’s revenue,” the company said in a statement in September.

The company’s stock has declined by more than 98 percent in the past year. As of Thursday, Big Lots’ stock dropped another 7 percent, to about $0.09 per share. A year before, the stock had stood at around $7 per share.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Labor Department released a report showing that U.S. consumer prices increased in November by the most in seven months. The consumer price index rose by 0.3 percent last month, the largest gain since April after advancing 0.2 percent for four straight months, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said.