Tag: finance

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

It’s all backstage now. This fraught moment, the power-centers locked in the coldest cold of the year, the Spanish language lessons of Bad Bunny behind us, all the real action in the battle to save the country is out of sight, moiling and churning in the deep background. Everybody’s on edge waiting for shoes to drop, praying they don’t drop on their heads.

Bad Bunny’s Superbowl House Party. . . So Long, Been Good to Know Ya!

You should have seen Senator Mark Warner (D-VA; Vice-chair of the Senate Intel Committee) on Face the Nation Sunday, frothing at the mouth over Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

He cannot believe she turned up at the Fulton County, GA, election warehouse last month, where the FBI extracted 700 boxes of ballots and other evidence for what happened there in the 2020 election.

Senator Warner doesn’t want you to find out.

Senator Warner, you understand, is one of the darkest creatures slithering through the cypress knobs of the DC swamp, and his lair, the Senate Intel Committee, is a fetid backwater of seditious intrigue. Senator Warner is setting the stage for yet another hoax against the country. He’s got a “whistleblower,” ID unknown, who supposedly imputes that last spring “an individual associated with foreign intelligence” made a phone call to “a person close to President Trump” and DNI Gabbard failed to report it to his committee.

DNI Gabbard simply called Sen. Warner a liar, which is exactly and succinctly correct.

Senator Warner is wetting his pants because the Georgia 2020 election tally looks sketchy to an extreme and he knows the case is beyond his control now.

Pulling on that thread will unravel the whole fake tapestry of “Joe Biden’s” election and will reveal the Democratic Party to be a criminal enterprise.

The nation itself has to face some unappetizing reality. Four years were stolen from the people and political devices were aligned to destroy the nation. They almost succeeded.

Over in Minnesota the major players are laying low now.

Governor Tim Walz, a creep of the thirty-second degree, surrendered his career weeks ago but nervously awaits indictment for presiding over massive social service fraud. ICE is still extracting psychopathic alien mutts out of Minneapolis, while the Cluster-B ladies and their mentally-ill Antifa spear-carriers remain out in the streets banging on sauce-pans. But somewhere in an office, away from the deafening whistles, the money trails are getting tracked from taxpayers to the Learing Centers to the state’s politicians and the DNC and then off forever into the Horn of Africa. You just can’t see it now.

The giant poisonous amoeba that Jeffrey Epstein became has not yielded all of its secrets.

Everybody knows that there are darker scenes lurking behind the curtain. The rumors are outlandishly horrifying, worse than anything out of Hollywood’s scare factory, a slaughter of the innocents. Who knows if they are true — well, possibly somebody knows, but these would be things you cannot want to know. One thing I’d like to know: why don’t the dozens of so-called “Epstein Survivors,” grown women supposedly raped and abused by celebrities years ago as children, name their abusers publicly? What’s stopping them as they grandstand around the country? Or is it just another grift?

It’s seven o’clock in the morning as I write (and fifteen-below zero), and World War Three has not started yet, though it seems like the whole US Navy and half the Air Force has deployed in the vicinity of Iran: the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, accompanied by guided-missile destroyers USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., USS Spruance and USS Michael Murphy. . . destroyers USS McFaul and USS Mitscher in the Straits of Hormuz. . . littoral combat ships USS Canberra, USS Tulsa, and USS Santa Barbara in the Persian Gulf. . . at least a dozen F-15E Strike Eagles relocated to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan (from RAF base Lakenheath, UK). Additional aircraft like A-10C Thunderbolts noted at regional bases. . . support aircraft, KC-135 Stratotankers for refueling (active at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar), P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and transport/refueling planes (C-17s, etc.), deployed around the region.

You have to wonder whether the regime running Iran has already selected martyrdom rather than yielding anything to forces who are sick of them, including many Iranians.

Iranian missiles are targeted for Tel Aviv, US bases in the Emirates, and possibly even Saudi Arabia. Could be all bluff. The truth of the situation remains hidden, like everything else right now in the global arena.

Down in Fort Pierce, Florida, today, a grand jury will hear more witnesses in the sedition and treason conspiracy carried out by our own government officials since 2016. And being a grand jury, it is all secret, you will not be hearing about it in the news. Like so much else now, the action there is behind the curtain. Too many cynics believe that nothing will come of it. Yet, the blast zone from it, when it comes, will blow at us like a second American Revolution in the 250thanniversary year of the first one.

Different dynamics are aligning now, forces better structured to the survival of our nation. The only thing we know for sure: Bad Bunny has had his fifteen minutes of fame.

Who’s next and what’s next?

Patience, please.

Russia warned Monday that the United States is “strangling” Cuba through long-running sanctions, as well as the current de facto oil blockade on the Latin American island-nation in full force.

As a result the Kremlin is exploring ways to get urgent assistance to the Cuban people, as the economic situation and national infrastructure worsens after Havana’s number one energy source, nearby Venezuela, has cut off supplies in the wake of Maduro’s ouster by US military intervention.

“The situation in Cuba is indeed critical… We are aware of this, and we maintain close contact with our Cuban friends through diplomatic and other channels,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a Monday press briefing.

He added that “the stranglehold imposed by the United States is already causing a lot of difficulties for Cuba” and this has resulted in the two allies discussing “possible ways to resolve these problems or at least provide all possible assistance.”

Blackouts across various parts of Cuba have persisted and even grown worse in the last weeks, given power plants are struggling to keep the lights on, as The Associated Press recently described:

The smell of sulfur hits hard in this coastal town that produces petroleum and is home to one of Cuba’s largest thermoelectric plants. Yet, even as the plant cranks back to life, residents remain in the dark, surrounded by energy sources they cannot use.

As tensions deepen between Cuba and the U.S. after it attacked Venezuela and disrupted oil shipments, so have the woes of Santa Cruz del Norte.

People in this town east of Havana are plunged into darkness daily and forced to cook with coal and firewood, but not everyone can afford this new reality.

This is after President Trump in mid-January vowed there will be “zero” oil and outside money going to Cuba, and threatened that its leaders must “make a deal, before it is too late.” Washington has labeled the island a “national security threat” to the US – a viewpoint hearkening back to the Cold War.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla has lashed out, saying Cuba faces “a total blockade of energy supplies” by the US, which violates “all principles of international trade,” creating “extreme life conditions” for the Cuban population.

The crisis is rapidly impacting various industries, and most recently “Cuba has warned airlines it is suspending jet fuel supplies for a month, an official at a European carrier said Sunday.”

BREAKING Cuba has warned airlines it is suspending jet fuel supplies for a month because of an energy crisis, an official at a European carrier says pic.twitter.com/gc7SOVgXVA

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) February 9, 2026

Russia isn’t the only one rushing aid to the island. Mexico has been pressured to also cut energy supplies, but at the same time President Claudia Sheinbaum has reportedly ordered two Mexican naval vessels to transport over 800 tons of aid, including food and hygiene items, to Cuba.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The director of the National Institutes of Health said in a new interview that there’s a dearth of high-quality research into vaccines and autism and that the health agency is funding research that will determine the causes of autism.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview released on Feb. 10 that he has read studies that have found no connection between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism. Bhattacharya sees the studies as robust.

“For other vaccines, there actually isn’t this kind of rich literature,” he said.

“‘Do vaccines cause autism’ is a poorly formed question,” Bhattacharya added later.

“Do I believe that we know that there are some vaccines that cause autism? The answer—I don’t think that’s true. Do we know for a fact that every single vaccine in the combination it is given doesn’t cause autism? Also, I don’t know that we know that. These are things that are worthy of research.”

A small number of studies have found indications that autism can be caused by vaccines, while others have identified no increased risk in autism following receipt of the measles shot.

Bhattacharya, during a Senate Health Committee hearing on Feb. 3, told Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that he does not believe autism is caused by the measles vaccine. Sanders pressed for a broader answer.

“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.

President Donald Trump has directed health officials to study autism, noting that more kids than ever are being diagnosed with the disorder. One of the efforts, led by the NIH, is called the Autism Data Science Initiative and involves investing more than $50 million in projects aimed at pinpointing autism causes.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also said that the government is looking into potential links between autism and vaccines.

“We’ve invested a tremendous amount of money in trying to understand the etiology of autism, because there’s millions of families around the country that have children that … they would love to be able to help, but we don’t really have great answers, both for the cause and how to sort of reverse whatever problems there are. And of course, there’s a whole range of phenotypes … ranging from very, very severe autism to much milder, and so you can have different answers and different biology,” Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times.

“We need to have better science underlying all of these conditions, and that’s something I’m investing in to make sure that the next generation of folks who have these conditions will have better answers provided to them.”

A baby after receiving a vaccine for hepatitis B and other diseases, in an undated illustration photograph. Riccardo Milani/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Bhattacharya also said he views the NIH’s role as funding research that will provide answers to key questions.

“Even if some people think that the question is already settled, if there’s a lot of the population that doesn’t agree, then, in my view, the right, respectful thing to do is to—rather than just to censor them or argue with them to marginalize them—is to provide more, better, scientific answers to the questions that they have,” he said.

Some organizations, such as the American Medical Association, say existing literature makes clear that vaccines do not cause autism. Certain groups maintain that all or many autism cases are caused by genetic factors.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which for years said that vaccines do not cause autism, said in 2025 that the available evidence does not support that stance.

Kennedy has said multiple times that the available studies are poorly designed and do not disprove a vaccine-autism link.

Some parents of children with autism say that their children were harmed by vaccines, and the government vaccine injury program has paid families who suffered problems associated with autism following vaccination. Researchers with Children’s Health Defense, founded by Kennedy, said in a Jan. 31 paper that epidemiological and other evidence demonstrate that aluminum in vaccines can trigger autism in certain people.

“I don’t know the answer,” Bhattacharya said in the new interview.

“I don’t understand how people can so confidently say they know what the answer [is] for a biological condition that is so heterogeneous and [has] so many different hypotheses. That’s the way I’ve been approaching it.”

The CDC recently downgraded recommendations for six vaccines to shared clinical-decision making, or advising parents to consult with doctors before having their children vaccinated, while keeping in place routine recommendations for the measles vaccine and seven other shots. Bhattacharya said that he favors vaccinating children with most of the vaccines recommended by the government, because they protect against infectious diseases.

“Now it may be that for some kids with different kinds of susceptibility in different areas, there’s going to be some risk, and you have to take that into account,” he said. “And so there should be a sort of a shared decision-making kind of thing for vaccinations.”

Authored by Sean Tsang via The Epoch Times,

Two senators are urging the Pentagon to find out whether investors tied to China hold stakes in SpaceX, one of America’s most important defense contractors and a key provider of military launch services.

In a Feb. 5 letter to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said recently unsealed court records and media reports raise concern about whether Chinese money reached SpaceX through intermediaries and offshore entities.

“These [alleged] ties could pose a national security threat, potentially jeopardizing key military, intelligence, and civilian infrastructure,” they wrote.

The senators argue it could trigger U.S. safeguards meant to keep foreign adversaries from gaining leverage over companies that handle sensitive national security work.

Warren and Kim cited media reports describing a market for SpaceX shares that allegedly included Chinese investors, sometimes using middlemen and structures in places such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands.

A Delaware court last year backed a fund manager’s decision to remove a Chinese investor from a fund set up to buy SpaceX shares, according to court filings.

Iqbaljit Kahlon, who managed the fund, had admitted Leo Investments, a publicly traded Chinese company, as a limited partner.

SpaceX told Kahlon the fund could not purchase shares if Leo remained involved, prompting him to remove the investor and return its $50 million. The fund was structured as a special-purpose vehicle (SPV), a common way for investors to pool money to buy shares in private companies like SpaceX. SPVs let multiple investors combine capital into a single ownership stake, making it easier to trade smaller slices of stock without the company having to deal with a large number of individual shareholders.

In the letter, the senators said that as SpaceX is privately held, the public can’t see how much of the company is owned by China-linked investors or whether any such holdings are large enough to influence the company.

In April 2025, the U.S. Space Force awarded SpaceX a National Security Space Launch Phase 3 “Lane 2 contract” with an anticipated value of about $5.9 billion, and it projected SpaceX would receive 28 missions—around 60 percent of those Phase 3 Lane 2 missions over fiscal years 2025 through 2029.

Space Force’s “Lane 2” missions are its highest-priority launches, carrying the most demanding, least risk-tolerant national security payloads—often major military and intelligence satellites—into harder-to-reach or higher-energy orbits with complex security and integration requirements.

The senators warned that Chinese investors could “potentially gain access to nonpublic information about the company, including ‘details on its contracts or supply chain,’ giving China access to information and technology that could undermine US national security.”

The Epoch Times reached out to SpaceX and the Department of Defense for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Review

The senators said their concerns merit the Pentagon to conduct a Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence (FOCI) mitigation review.

The Pentagon’s security arm, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), defines a company as operating under FOCI when a foreign interest has the power—directly or indirectly—to shape management or operations in a way that could enable unauthorized access to classified information or harm performance on classified contracts.

SpaceX launches the Falcon 9 Fram2 Mission from Launch Complex 39A of NASAÕs Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 31, 2025. Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images

The DCSA says it evaluates factors such as the extent of foreign ownership—including “substantial minority” positions—and the foreign government’s record on espionage and technology transfer.

The senators also asked the War Department to coordinate with the Treasury to consider whether any China-linked investments should be reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the interagency panel authorized to review certain foreign investment transactions for national security risk.

They requested a response by Feb. 20, and asked the War Department to answer questions such as: how many SpaceX shares are owned by China-linked and other adversary-linked investors, whether any such investors have access to nonpublic information, and whether SpaceX is subject to FOCI mitigation requirements.

Policy Backdrop

The lawmakers framed the request against the Trump administration’s “America First Investment Policy.”

The policy explicitly calls China a foreign adversary and warns that the country can use both visible and concealed investment routes—sometimes via third-country funds—to pursue sensitive technologies and strategic leverage.

The Chinese investment ties are “at odds with the administration’s policies on foreign investment from countries of concern in strategic industries,” the senators wrote.

They also said that the matter became “even more salient” after SpaceX announced it had acquired xAI, expanding the combined company’s footprint across AI, rockets, and satellite connectivity.

The Kremlin has lashed out at the Trump administration in a rare moment, revealing its impatience and dissatisfaction with the way trilateral talks focused on ending the Ukraine war are going. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a fresh interview also accused Washington of sabotaging efforts to improve bilateral relations while undermining negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. The charge is ironic, given it is typically the West which mounts the same accusation at Moscow.

“Despite all the statements by the Trump administration about the need to end the war… it does not challenge all the laws that Joe Biden passed to punish Russia after the start of the special military operation,” Lavrov said in an interview with TV BRICS.

“In practice, the opposite is happening: new sanctions are being imposed, a war is being waged against tankers on the high seas, in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,” he said in reference to recent actions involving the US seizing shadow fleet tankers.

The Trump administration also slapped sanctions on the two Russian oil giants Lukoil and Rosneft – in a controversial action last fall.

Moscow is also likely disappointed that President Trump hasn’t pressured Zelensky into making serious territorial concessions using the significant leverage Washington has over Kiev.

Lavrov asserted that Trump reneged on certain “understandings” reached directly with President Putin at the Anchorage summit in August.

“Beyond what they claimed to offer on Ukraine … we also see no positive outlook on the economic front,” Lavrov said in the interview. “Washington, in our view, is seeking control over global energy supply routes serving major economies across multiple continents.”

Russia wants to cooperate with the US toward achieving peace, Lavrov continued, but he went on to say that “the Americans themselves are creating artificial obstacles on this path” – or in essence, sabotaging peace.

This kind of criticism by Russia has typically been reserved only for Europe. EU leaders have remained much more out in the open in terms of imposing extra ‘obstacles’ and conditions on US-proposed peace measures. So this kind of directly taking aim at Trump is a break from past rhetoric. 

On Europe and its newly investing in defense, Lavrov has said, “We have no intention of attacking Europe. There is no reason to do so.”

“If Europe acts on its threats to prepare for war against us and initiates an attack on the Russian Federation, it will face a full-fledged military response from our side, with all available military capabilities,” the Russian top diplomat added.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

For nearly two years, markets were driven by the same speculative narrative that “this time is different.” Bitcoin, precious metals, and AI-linked equities rose not only because of robust fundamentals, but also because investors clung to powerful narratives about inflation, disruption, and monetary collapse. Those speculative narratives are not only seductive but also contribute to investment behaviors that obscure reality.

Bitcoin was cast as “digital gold,” a hedge against a largely false tale of a weakening dollar and fiscal instability. Gold and silver were likewise falsely elevated as defensive stores of value in a monetary regime supposedly at risk of losing purchasing power. AI stocks became shorthand for a new productivity supercycle where profits would follow indefinitely rising valuations. These speculative narratives are fine and drive bull markets in the near term. As John Maynard Keynes once quipped: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” and those narratives are potent as they frame expectations and justify positions.

However, these speculative narratives have little to do with economic or fundamental realities that will ultimately drive outcomes. In markets, stories don’t replace valuation. As I noted previously, when “valuation metrics are excessive… it is a better measure of investor psychology than fundamentals.” That means price becomes more about sentiment than business results, and we see that in the relationship between consumer sentiment about stock prices over the next 12 months and valuations.

“This broad wave of bullish behavior isn’t isolated to sentiment surveys. Positioning data, equity fund inflows, and trading behavior confirm the lack of bears in the market. Markets are rising not because of strong earnings or economic acceleration, but because of optimism about future prices. In this environment, price momentum drives buying, not fundamentals. We see that in the overlay of consumer sentiment about higher prices versus valuations. Simply, investors are willing to overpay on expectations that things will continue to improve.”

This shift from fundamentals to “belief-based investing” creates a market lubricated by emotion, especially in risk assets with no tangible earnings or cash flow drivers. In AI equities, some names traded on lofty price-to-sales ratios divorced from earnings prospects. In crypto, price discovery was often based on sentiment momentum rather than adoption metrics or utility. Even the spike in gold and silver prices did not reflect changes in industrial demand or monetary policy fundamentals, but the false narrative of a coming “currency collapse.”

These speculative narratives are classic hallmarks of a mania: the story, not the data, becomes the primary driver of price.

Leverage: The Hidden Engine of Mania

Of course, it is not just faulty speculative narratives that move markets. The narratives only motivate investor behavior, but for that behavior to have an impact, investors must have the capital to invest. Notably, as the narratives take hold, investors put their capital to work. However, as the narratives gain momentum, leverage accelerates those behaviors into extremes. As we noted recently:

“However, this surge in allocations has also been accompanied by a massive expansion in leverage. Currently, margin debt as a percentage of real DPI has been reported at around 6.23 %, the highest on record. This ratio also suggests that for every $100 of real DPI, roughly $6 of margin debt is outstanding, a substantial amount. But that number doesn’t include the additional leverage taken on by investors through speculative option trading and 2x and 3x leveraged ETFs, which are also being bought on margin.”

However, it is crucial to remember that “margin debt is not a technical indicator… it represents the amount of speculation in the market.” When speculative narratives take hold, margin buying gives investors more purchasing power, driving prices higher, amplifying gains, and leading to further leverage. Unfortunately, the eventual and inevitable unwind also works in reverse, amplifying losses when prices decline.

But leverage did not stop at margin balances. Investors embraced:

• Ultra‑short dated options strategies that carry outsized leverage.

• Leveraged ETFs offering 2x or 3x exposure to narrow segments of the market.

• Futures and crypto margin accounts that magnified directional bets.

All these instruments enabled investors, particularly vastly inexperienced and unwitting retail traders, to assume exposures far beyond what cash capital would normally permit. The result was, and is always, an increasingly unstable structure in which valuations rose not because of business performance, but because leverage and sentiment chased headlines higher.

Unfortunately, in the end, fundamental and economic realities take hold, and speculative narratives fail to hold.

The Inevitable Reversal: When Narratives Don’t Hold

There is an old saying that “Markets don’t die of old age—they die of excess.” That statement doesn’t only apply to the stock market; it applies to every market, asset class, and investment. For example, over the last few years, there has been a mad rush by high-net-worth investors to enter private credit markets. As the assets under management for these funds rose, the managers increasingly invested in weaker deals, pushed credit risk limits, and overlooked fundamentals. As we warned last year, the redemptions of private credit are now accelerating as concerns over stability and illiquidity rise.

What triggered the reversal last week was not some dramatic policy shift, economic upheaval, or credit-related event, but a gradual shift in conditions that exposed the overextension. Softening economic signals, slowing earnings growth in tech sectors, and fading headline narratives removed the justification for trend extrapolation.

As we often discuss with our readers, when speculation is the driver, these reversals are a feature, not a bug, of the system.

What we saw last week started in Bitcoin, spread to precious metals, and then jumped into the equities market. As prices fall, margin calls force deleveraging, requiring liquidations to cover positions. Crucially, margin calls force the liquidation of positions regardless of investors’ desire to hold. That’s why downturns in highly leveraged markets tend to be sharp and fast.

“When lenders fear they may not recoup their credit lines, they force the borrower to sell assets to cover the debt … margin calls generally happen simultaneously, as falling asset prices impact all lenders at once.”

This sequence flips the entire narrative-driven rally. What was once perceived as a hedge or growth trend becomes a crowded trade that unwinds in chaos. Prices can and often do detach from valuation pressures as forced selling begets further selling.

The investor lesson is that speculative behavior always rewards the buyer on the way up, but punishes brutally on the way down.

The Real Lessons for Investors—Especially Younger Ones

What happened should wake up investors, but especially younger ones who have known only bull markets or narrative-driven rallies.

• Narratives are not strategies.

• Leverage is not risk management.

• Volatility is not optional.

Valuation matters. Yes, markets move on liquidity and leverage in the short term, but in the long term, prices must align with earnings, cash flows, and economic reality. Investing based on stories of doom, disruption, or currency collapse, without a grounding in fundamentals, eventually leads to capital destruction.

Speculation disguised as investing is a losing proposition. Excessive trading, especially in leveraged instruments, turns portfolio management into a directional bet rather than a systematic allocation. When speculative bets in the markets via options, leveraged assets, and margin surge, that is a warning, not a reassurance.

For younger investors watching this unfold, there are several enduring principles:

• Don’t confuse confidence with experience. High conviction during a rally is a natural byproduct. But that conviction often precedes drawdowns, particularly when leverage and risk tolerance are high.

• Diversification is real only when exposures are uncorrelated. Owning Bitcoin, gold, and AI stocks doesn’t diversify if they all behave like leveraged growth bets driven by the same sentiment.

• Manage risk first. Heavy allocation to speculative positions without defensive hedges is not investing—it’s gambling.

• Leverage amplifies outcomes in both directions. You may win big for a time, but the downside can be catastrophic.

• Accept corrections as necessary. Pullbacks purify excesses and restore market health. Markets that seem like they will never correct often suffer the worst crashes later, think dot‑com and housing bubbles.

The lure of quick gains is powerful. However, real wealth accumulates through disciplined risk management, valuation awareness, and systematic portfolio construction. If you are a younger investor, market speculation is a powerful drug when you are successful. However, if you can limit your urges and transition from short‑term performance chasing to a long‑term mindset that prioritizes capital preservation, your ability to accumulate and maintain vast wealth expands.

This isn’t bearishness for its own sake. It’s an empirical recognition that markets are cyclical and leverage is structural.

The most successful investors are those who prepare for both runs and reversals, not just the runs. Therefore, the next time you scoff at those not “chasing the latest speculative fad,” maybe ask yourself, “Why aren’t they chasing it?”

It might just save you from heartache.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has filed a lawsuit against two out-of-state companies and more than 100 individuals, accusing them of distributing computer code that lets people 3D-print their own firearms – a case critics say pits the right to bear arms and free speech against Sacramento’s latest gun-control crusade.

In a San Francisco Superior Court filing on Feb. 6, Bonta and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu allege Florida-based Gatalog Foundation Inc. and CTRLPew LLC unlawfully distributed digital blueprints and computer code used to manufacture hundreds of “ghost guns” and banned accessories like Glock switches and illegal high-capacity magazines.

The complaint claims defendants made available over 150 designs for weapons and components that can be 3D printed at home – including frames, receivers, and suppressors – without serial numbers or background checks. California law already bars unlicensed firearm manufacture, background check-skipping schemes, and, more recently, distributing the code that makes it all possible.

According to the complaint, California laws “specifically prohibit 3D printing firearms and prohibited firearm accessories without a license to manufacture firearms, and since 2023, has also prohibited the distribution of computer code for printing them to those without a license.”

“Dangerous Untraceables,” Says Bonta

Bonta claims that people making their own guns constitutes a “public safety crisis,” as law enforcement seizures of ghost guns in the state skyrocketed from 26 in 2015 to an average of 11,000 per year since 2021. Prosecutors argue ghost guns bypass serials, background checks and traditional gun-safety measures, making them a magnet for people prohibited from possessing guns.

“These defendants’ conduct enables unlicensed people who are too young or too dangerous to pass firearm background checks to illegally print deadly weapons without a background check and without a trace,” Bonta said in the press release.

But gun-rights advocates argue there’s more to the story.

“The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms – and that right does not disappear because California dislikes how a firearm is made,” Gun Owners of America Senior VP Erich Pratt told ZeroHedge. “For generations, Americans have lawfully built firearms for personal use. This lawsuit doesn’t target criminals; it targets constitutionally protected conduct and even speech itself. You don’t defend public safety by gutting the Second Amendment and criminalizing law-abiding citizens. Criminals will continue to ignore the law, as they always have.”:

Hobbyists or Criminal Enablers?

Among the named defendants is gun-rights attorney Matthew Larosiere – long a voice for hobbyists who argue it’s been legal for Americans to build firearms for personal use so long as they obey federal law. Critics of the lawsuit, including analysts in the gun-rights community, say this latest action blurs the line between hobby and crime and could chill lawful expression and innovation.

Indeed, the complaint’s own exhibits show some files are labeled with names like FGC-9 – shorthand for “F** Gun Control”* – and include detailed step-by-step instructions with shopping lists and recommended printer settings that make it easy even for beginners to produce frames compatible with common commercial parts.

To opponents, the lawsuit isn’t just about public safety – it’s about free speech and the right to arms. The digital codes at issue are arguably analogous to protected technical speech, and their suppression raises alarms in a state already notorious for some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.

A Patchwork of Law Meets Cutting-Edge Tech

California has been tightening its grip on ghost guns for years, adding prohibitions on 3D-printed firearms and the distribution of associated digital files only in the past few election cycles. At the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld regulations on ghost guns in 2025, underscoring the legal complexity around homemade weapons.

Elsewhere, courts have diverged. In Minnesota, for example, a state Supreme Court ruled that older firearms lacking serial numbers aren’t automatically criminal — a nod to common-sense recoil against overbroad interpretation of serialization laws.

What’s Next?

California is seeking an injunction to halt distribution of the files and other relief. Gatalog and CTRLPew didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, but gun-rights groups are already lining up to challenge this on constitutional grounds.

Whether you see DIY firearm blueprints as a dangerous loophole or a legitimate exercise of liberty, one thing is clear: this lawsuit marks a high-stakes test of how far states can go in regulating code, guns, and the rights of citizens in the digital age.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The end-game of debt-debasement is already visible. The only thing that’s still up in the air is our response.

The unspoken foundation of the US dollar debasement narrative is TINA: There Is No Alternative to debasing the USD to zero because reversing course by reversing the expansion of debt and the money supply (i.e. monetary inflation) are impossible in a debt-dependent economy.

Without a steady expansion of debt and a steady debasement of the dollar so debtors have an easier time paying existing debts, the economy would crash, and so doing more of what leads to collapse is the status quo “solution.”

The second assumption of the US dollar debasement narrative is that those who own crypto, precious metals and other tangible assets will not just survive the eventual crisis but emerge wealthy, as the value of their assets is not dependent on fiat currencies.

This suggests the following thought experiment: since those holding the levers of power “know” the end-game of debasement is the collapse of the currency and the economy, and they “know” the economic devastation that this collapse will deliver not just to the majority but to the wealthy whose wealth ultimately depends on a functioning economy, wouldn’t they consider pursuing a still-painful but less apocalyptic option that steers clear of the death-spiral?

Let’s also consider that history hasn’t been kind to governments that let their currency collapse. Those in power who “know” this would be wise to seek a way to escape the debasement death-spiral simply out of self-preservation, as their power would not survive the (entirely avoidable) destruction of the currency and economy.

Put another way: is there a way to escape the debasement death-spiral that actually re-sets the economy for legitimate advances in the quality of life after a painful excising of the fatal dependence on ever-soaring debt and debasement to prop up the illusion of “prosperity”?

There is a way to reverse the death-spiral, and the key for those in power is to distribute the unavoidable pain evenly enough that no one class reaches the point where they have nothing to lose in seeking to dismantle the entire status quo.

For the past 50 years, the status quo has slowly bled the bottom 80% while channeling all the gains to the top 10%. There were sufficient crumbs left by those feasting on capital gains to give the bottom 80% a reason to comply rather than revolt, but the pain of reversing debasement could make revolt more appealing than compliance.

Note that this redistribution was the result of policy decisions that benefited those reaping the gains of financialization and globalization. It was a choice, not fate.

Those in power must even out the distribution of pain so those who reaped the gains (the top 10%) bear the brunt of the financial damage while funneling enough of life’s essentials to the bottom 80% to avoid revolt.

Recall that the top 10% own the vast majority of financial assets, with the bottom 50% owning a wafer-thin 2.5% of financial assets, a 28% decline from their 3.5% share in 1990. The share owned by the top 1%, meanwhile, rose by 42% to 35.6%.

The only way to reverse the debasement death spiral is to end the economy’s dependence on ever-rising debt to fund consumption and an ever-expanding money supply to inflate the asset bubbles that fuel both soaring wealth inequality and the outsized spending of the top 10%–spending that generates a lopsided illusion of “growth.”

The most effective way to defend the dollar and suppress debt expansion is to influence supply and demand by jacking up Treasury yields / interest rates. Global capital will flow into US Treasury bonds to reap the higher rates while demand for new loans declines as rates rise. The federal government’s borrowing costs will jump, squeezing spending while debt-based consumption falls off a cliff.

This is the recession that’s necessary to clear the dependence on debt, inflation and speculative excesses, the recession that’s been put off for 45 years by excessive money / debt expansion.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve lets the resulting bankruptcies and defaults reduce private-sector debt by refusing to bail out Wall Street and the “too big to fail” banks. Overleveraged banks will fail as the necessary step to re-establish some semblance of market discipline rather than backstop the biggest gamblers (i.e. Moral Hazard).

As when the Savings and Loan debacle wiped out (often fraudulent) lenders, the appropriate public agencies will liquidate assets and spread the losses borne by the public over enough time to manage the pain.

Note that federal debt (i.e. the national debt) of $38 trillion is about a third of total debt, with 2/3 being private-sector.

Recall that private-sector lenders create most of the new currency: when a bank issues a new mortgage, that origination creates new currency. When the mortgage is paid off, that currency goes to Money Heaven–the money supply declines accordingly. Paying down debt or writedowns of debt both reduce the quantity of dollars.

Concurrently, the Federal Reserve tightens liquidity / ceases creating USD out of thin air, reducing the money supply, which induces a scarcity of dollars globally as investors seeking to lock in the higher yields of Treasuries (see above) are in effect bidding for dollars, as Treasury bonds / bills / notes are denominated in US dollars.

The dollar rises due to this shift in supply and demand, and while this punishes exporters, it increases the purchasing power of the dollar for workers and employers alike. Again, any reversal / re-set will generate extreme pain, and the only management strategy with any hope of success is to distribute the pain widely enough, and fairly enough, so that no one class absorbs all the pain.

The long-avoided rebalancing of federal obligations and revenues is finally undertaken, reversing the past 50 years of policies that benefited owners of capital (the top 10%) at the expense of wage earners (the bottom 90%).

Here’s an example of such a policy change: apply the 15.3% social-welfare tax paid by self-employed workers to all unearned income: capital gains, stock option compensation, etc. As with self-employed workers, income tax is on top of this 15.3% social-welfare tax.

On the expense side, ending the perverse incentives built into SickCare and the no-limits funding of all the sacred cows (Big Ag, Big Processed Food, Big Pharma, Big Defense, Big Banks, SickCare, Higher Education, etc.) would spread the pain to those elites and sectors that have enjoyed unimpaired federal largesse for decades.

As recession cuts consumption and employment, mass defaults will wipe out trillions in debt. You can’t get blood from a stone, and the owners of all this debt–auto loans, student loans, credit cards, mortgages, etc.–will eat the writedowns. All the currency created by the debt issuance disappears, and the quantity of dollars in circulation plummets, reversing the debt-debasement-inflation death-spiral.

This is a chart of M2 Money Supply, which shows the expansion of the money supply in relation to the GDP generated by the money. (Note that M2 and GDP are imperfect / misleading measures, but everyone uses them anyway.)

Yes, I get it, every one of these steps is “impossible” because some entrenched concentration of wealth / power would suffer. The point here is the suffering that will be inflicted on the elites and sacred cows by the collapse of the currency will be far greater than the pain they will suffer in a re-set that actually changes the nation’s course from a debt-debasement death-spiral to an economy with market discipline and a dynamic balance of social and financial interests.

As I explain in my new book Investing In Revolution, the extreme imbalances generated by the current death-spiral policies will get rebalanced one way or the other, and those influencing policy have a stark choice: leave the status quo as-is and guarantee a non-linear (i.e. uncontrolled, chaotic) collapse, or reverse course now while some control of the re-set is still available.

The end-game of debt-debasement is already visible. The only thing that’s still up in the air is our response. Don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet.

*  *  *

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Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In an age of rage, it is often difficult to stand out in the mob as so many pander to the perpetually irate.

However, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has found a way to win the race to the bottom.

In a posting on Bluesky, Bouie mocked the account of the addiction of the mother of Vice President J.D. Vance, saying that she should have sold her son for drugs.

Bouie used Bluesky (the digital safe zone for the viewpoint intolerant on the left) to post one of the most reprehensible attacks on Vance. Bouie wrote that “this is a wicked man who knows he is being wicked and does it anyway.”

That is hardly notable on today’s rage scale.

However, he then decided to use the painful addiction history of Beverly Aikins against her son: “No wonder his mom tried to sell him for Percocets. [I] can’t imagine a parent who wouldn’t sell little JD for percocet if they knew he would turn out like this.’

Vance wrote a celebrated bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his difficult childhood with a mother who became addicted to pain medication and eventually found herself stealing drugs from her patients. It was a tragic account of how addiction tore their family apart, but also a tale of redemption: “I knew that a mother could love her son despite the grip of addiction. I knew that my family loved me, even when they struggled to take care of themselves.”

In April of last year, Vance celebrated his mother’s decade of sobriety.

As I discuss in my new book “Rage and the Republic,”  a common element to past radical movements has been the dehumanization of political opponents. In calling others “Gestapo,” “fascists,” and “Nazis,” you achieve a certain license to say and do things that you would ordinarily never say or do. By stripping them of any humanity or right to empathy, you are free to discard the limitations of decency and civility.

Rage is itself a type of drug. It is addictive and, while they never admit it, they like it.

Bouie shows the lack of self-awareness in his hateful posts. It is the ultimate example of transference; a self-description ascribed to those you hate.

On his New York Times bio, Bouie insists that “I come from a left-leaning, social democratic perspective, but I strive for honesty, fairness and good faith in my writing.” He adds that “I abide by the same rigorous ethical standards as all Times journalists.”

If using Vance’s tragic childhood and his mother’s addiction is an example of the “fairness and good faith” of the New York Times, it is a chilling prospect.

In his book, Vance observes that the children of broken and impoverished homes often give up hope, as he did: “Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.”

He found that choices do matter in shaping your life. We all make such choices, as did Bouie in becoming another voice of rage and the New York Times in giving him a platform to amplify his views.

It is the same choice that the Times makes in barring a U.S. senator and firing editors for exposing readers to alternative viewpoints while publishing those who advocate repression or rationalize political violence.  To the obvious appeal of its readers, the paper now peddles in hate to feed a national addiction.

In the end, Vance and his mother have overcome far greater challenges than this vicious columnist or the hatefest at Bluesky. From adversity, they found a strength and a bond that has inspired many who are struggling with such addictions and poverty.

It is clear who is “wicked” in these postings. Perhaps it is even strangely edifying and self-condemning. As Victor Hugo observed, “the wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

Shares in Kyndryl, an IBM spinoff and IT infrastructure services provider, crashed on Monday after the company warned investors that it is reviewing certain accounting practices amid an inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company also posted third-quarter results that missed Bloomberg Consensus estimates and disclosed what JPMorgan analysts described as a “surprise” departure of its CFO.

Kyndryl stock crashed as much as 57%, its biggest one-day drop on record. Shares traded at their lowest level since November 2022 after the company disclosed an SEC inquiry into certain accounting practices.

In a filing, Kyndryl said it “anticipates reporting material weaknesses in the Company’s internal control over financial reporting for the period covered in the Quarterly Report, as well as for the full fiscal year ended March 31, 2025, and the first two fiscal quarters of fiscal year 2026.”

This is “expected to include, but may not be limited to, the effectiveness and strength of certain functions at the Company, including with respect to controls related to information and communication and tone at the top,” the filing noted.

The information technology services provider that works with hyperscalers also announced that CFO David Wysher and general counsel Edward Sebold had left the company.

On top of that, third-quarter results missed Bloomberg consensus estimates, and the company lowered its full-year outlook for both adjusted EBITDA margin and adjusted pretax profit.

Here’s a snapshot of the third-quarter (courtesy of Bloomberg):

Adjusted EPS 52c vs. 51c y/y, estimate 61c (Bloomberg Consensus)

Revenue $3.86 billion, +3.1% y/y, estimate $3.89 billion

• US revenue $958 million, estimate $982.3 million
• Japan revenue $568 million, estimate $588.8 million

Adjusted Ebitda $696 million, -1.1% y/y, estimate $701.2 million

Adjusted Ebitda margin 18%, estimate 18%

Adjusted pretax profit $168 million, estimate $192.4 million

Full-Year Forecast:

• Sees adjusted Ebitda margin 17.5%, saw about 18%

• Sees adjusted pretax profit $575 million to $600 million, saw at least $725 million

Kyndryl CEO Martin Schroeter declined to comment during the earnings call:

“The fact is we just can’t comment until the examination is complete. The teams are working expeditiously so we can share a remediation plan.”

Kyndryl said it needs additional time to finalize its fiscal third-quarter report and noted that it is preparing a remediation plan, which will be detailed in the upcoming filing.

Analysts at JPMorgan downgraded Kyndryl to Underweight from Overweight and slashed their price target to $16 from $40. They told clients the downgrade was due to cuts to sales and profit guidance, the CFO’s surprise departure, and the delayed quarterly filing.

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts said, “Kyndryl faces secular pressure in infrastructure services and new guidance is for a revenue decline in fiscal 2026, raising doubts about the durability of its turnaround.”

“KD was a disaster, with a miss-and-cut report, several mgmt. changes, and a delayed 10Q filing,” Vital Knowledge analysts wrote in a note.