Steve Cohen Tops Hedge Fund Rich List With $3.4 Billion Haul Steve Cohen spent last fall doing something few billionaire owners enjoy: apologizing. As the New York Mets staggered through a bruising 2025 campaign, he took to social media to tell fans he was sorry for the disappointment at Citi Field. Yet even as the baseball season fizzled, Cohen was clinching a very different kind of pennant, according to Bloomberg. The founder of […]

Ford Carrier Group Enters Mediterranean To Join Biggest US Build-Up Since 2003 Iraq War Open source monitors as well as US and Middle East media have confirmed that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has entered the Mediterranean Sea, having sailed passed the Strait of Gibraltar on Friday. This is the second carrier strike group expected to soon operate directly in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, […]

Judge Temporarily Blocks Democrat-Backed Referendum To Redraw Virginia’s Congressional Map Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times, A county judge in Virginia issued an emergency restraining order on Feb. 19, pausing a referendum backed by Democrats that aims to redraw the state’s congressional maps. Tazewell County Circuit Judge Jack Hurley issued the order following a Feb. 18 motion by the National Republican […]

Oakland Mayor, Who Supported ‘Defund The Police’ Has Her Car Stolen Authored by Luis Cornelio via Headline USA, An alleged thief stole Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee’s city-owned vehicle after breaking into her office just two days earlier, according to the California edition of the New York Post.  The Oakland Police Department recovered the vehicle within hours, two days after somebody tampered with […]

“We Saw It. We Passed”: Blue Owl Fails To Secure Third Party Funding For $4 Billion Data Center As we discussed extensively yesterday, Blue Owl already has huge headaches with its software exposure, being forced to dump a substantial amount of its SaaS-linked loans (to related parties among others) as it gates retail investors in its private credit fund amid a tsunami of redemption requests. We now learn that the massive private […]

Goldman’s Meeting With Top Memory Supplier Points To Higher Prices As Crunch Worsens The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) shortage is already pressuring the margins of consumer electronics companies, disrupting product launches, and pushing up the prices of TVs and computers. The latest development is Valve’s handheld gaming PC, which is reportedly out of stock in select regions as the memory crunch now filters into retail […]

Meta’s AI Would Like To Keep You Posting After You’re Dead Ever since social media became a fixture of daily life, an uncomfortable question has lingered: what should happen to someone’s account after they die? Leave it frozen in time? Hand it to family members as a memorial? Or quietly let it fade into the algorithm? A few years ago, Meta Platforms explored a far more ambitious possibility, according to Futurism. In 2023, the […]

Inflation Fears Plummet As UMich’s Democratic Bias Is Exposed After rebounding strongly in preliminary February data (as Democrats came to their senses over the fearmongered Trump tariff-flation), the final UMich sentiment survey print slipped lower with the headline lowered from 57.3 to 56.6. Both Current Conditions and Expectations were lower than the flash print with the latter falling to 2 month lows and the former holding at […]

London Mayor Khan Under Fire As BBC Exposes Scale Of Grooming Gangs Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News, London Mayor Sadiq Khan is facing renewed criticism after a major BBC investigation found that vulnerable girls as young as 14 are being lured into forced sex by gangs operating across the capital. The investigation, based on weeks of reporting and interviews with dozens of people, including five survivors of […]

Watch: School Kids Chant “F**k ICE” In Disturbing Classroom Presentation Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, A disturbing video has surfaced showing middle school students delivering a classroom presentation that openly attacks U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and promotes unchecked immigration. Dressed in black hoodies, the boys stand before their peers, chanting profanities and gesturing defiantly […]

2025 New Home Sales Highest Since 2021 US New Home Sales dipped 1.7% MoM in December (after a 15.5% MoM surge in November)… …but ended the year at 745k – the highest SAAR since 2021… “New” home sales have notably decoupled from “used” home sales in the last few years as homebuilders incentivize buyers (reducing margins) and lower prices (reducing revenues)… Lower mortgage rates support modest further improvements in […]

Matt Taibbi: Epstein Files Are “Uniquely Destructive” To Both Political Parties Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance This week I interviewed Matt Taibbi at a moment when, as he put it, “this is a pretty weird time.” He had just learned that his outlet, Racket News, had been investigated by the British government using what he described as “human intelligence sources and all kinds of crazy stuff.” “It’s been pretty […]

Weather & Weak Demand Drive US PMIs Down To 10-Month Lows In February, But… While ‘hard’ data has been fading modestly in recent weeks, ‘soft’ survey data has bounced back but today we get a first glimpse at February’s PMIs from S&P Global to see if that survey-based confidence is continuing. It is not as both Manufacturing and Services PMIs dropped notably., Flash US Services PMI Business Activity Index: 52.3 […]

Nvidia Favors $30 Billion OpenAI Investment, Retreating From Prior $100 Billion Commitment Update (Friday):  Bloomberg reported earlier this week that OpenAI is nearing completion of a new funding round that could raise more than $100 billion. Separately, the Financial Times reported on Thursday that Nvidia is close to finalizing an investment of about $30 billion in OpenAI, a significantly smaller amount than the $100 billion […]

With Shaky Reasoning, Trump Weighs Limited Initial Strike On Iran To Force A Deal Having amassed the heaviest US air power in the Middle East since the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion, President Trump is now considering an initial, limited strike on Iran to force it to bow to the maximalist demands of Israel and the United States. The idea is based on two deeply questionable premises: that air strikes alone will compel Iran to give […]

US & Chinese Fighter Jets In Rare Brief Face-Off Near Korea US and Chinese fighter jets engaged in a brief aerial standoff over waters near the Korean Peninsula this week, according to South Korean media, in a rare and dangerous incident that underscores ongoing simmering tensions between Washington and Beijing. Yonhap, citing military sources, reported that China scrambled aircraft on Wednesday after roughly 10 US jets took […]

Agentic AI Isn’t Eating Software – It’s Feeding Market Volatility Authored by David Parsons via BondVigilantes.com, The sharp sell‑off across software names in recent weeks has prompted questions from investors, many centred on whether the rapid rise of agentic artificial intelligence marks the beginning of a deeper structural shift in enterprise technology. The catalyst was the latest demonstration from Anthropic’s Claude […]

Q4 GDP Unexpectedly Grows At 1.4%, Half Expected Pace, As Government Shutdown Slams Growth There was a big surprise at 8:30am ET when the BEA reported the (delayed) GDP print for the last quarter of 2025: With consensus expecting a 2.8% print  (and the Atlanta Fed GDPNow model even higher) which would already be a big drop from the 4.4% in Q3, the BEA instead reported that the US economy grew at just 1.4% in the fourth quarter, the […]

FBI Director Kash Patel Says Bureau Uncovered Antifa Funding Sources Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), FBI Director Kash Patel said on Feb. 18 that the law enforcement agency uncovered what he said are funding sources tied to antifa organizations, suggesting that more enforcement actions could come against the left-wing movement. FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during a news conference at the Department […]

Savings Rate Tumbles To 4 Year Lows As Fed’s Favorite Inflation Indicator Comes In Hot The Fed’s favorite inflation indicator – Core PCE (a measure of price changes in consumer goods and services that excludes volatile food and energy costs) – rose 0.4% in December (the latest data released today), slightly hotter than expected (+0.3% MoM). That lifted YoY inflation up 3.0% (above the prior month and hotter than expected) – the […]

ECB Quietly Prepares Global Liquidity Backstop As Euro Debt Wave Builds Submitted by Thomas Kolbe Starting in the third quarter of 2026, new rules will apply to the so-called euro repo facility. Central banks worldwide will be able to post up to €50 billion in euro-denominated collateral, such as government bonds, with the ECB in order to obtain euro liquidity from the central bank in cases of acute need. The goal is to guarantee […]

Futures Drop As Iran Tensions Rise, Data Deluge Looms US equity futures are lower, sliding from session highs around the European open to session low just before 8am E as traders assessed the potential market impact of war with Iran, and awaited a firehose of US economic data including GDP and core PCE. As of 8:15am ET, S&P and Nasdaq futures are down 0.1% having traded in the green for much of the overnight session. […]

EssilorLuxottica Logs Worst Week In Nearly Four Years As Apple Eyes AI Smart Glasses Shares of EssilorLuxottica SA are on track for their worst weekly decline in nearly four years, as competition in the smart-glasses market intensified this week following reports that Apple plans to launch AI-powered smart glasses in 2027. EssilorLuxottica manufactures the smart glasses that Meta sells under the Ray-Ban partnership. These glasses […]

Europe’s Civilizational War Will Be Bloody Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker, It seems as if every month a new story comes out of Britain warning about the likelihood of future civil war.  Retired colonel Richard Kemp recently gave a television interview during which he warned that the “Islamification” of the United Kingdom would lead to “inevitable conflict.”   Several British academics specializing in […]

VW’s 20% Cost-Cutting Plan Exposes Germany’s Industrial Crisis Submitted by Thomas Kolbe For too long, Germany’s economy has watched political developments from the sidelines – perhaps far too long. The cost pressures triggered by the energy transition and Brussels’ extensive regulatory policies are now reflected in business results. Following Stellantis and Opel, Volkswagen on Monday announced sweeping measures to confront […]