Mar 02

Today’s News 2nd March 2025

  • Trump, Vance, & The New New World Order
    Trump, Vance, & The New New World Order

    Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

    This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

    The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

    To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

    What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.

    More ironies are found in Wolf’s praise of the now-dying postwar order and his citation of FDR as the architect of that order. While Wolf is correct that Roosevelt was one of two Americans most responsible for the creation of the postwar order, he is wrong in believing that the order was virtuous by design and that it played out precisely as Roosevelt intended. Indeed, he couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

    Almost from the moment the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt was planning how best to achieve the goal he inherited from his former boss and Progressive predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s goal, of course, was “global governance” under the League of Nations, a goal that the U.S. Senate, mercifully, denied him. Regrettably, Roosevelt shared Wilson’s dream. The political scientist and historian of the Cold War, Amos Perlmutter, wrote that Roosevelt’s “vision for a postwar world was neo-Wilsonian, totally at odds with reality. He would help create a new international order, presided over in an equal partnership by the two emerging superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and buttressed by the newly created world organization, the United Nations.” Like Wilson, Roosevelt sought to fix the world by bringing the whole of it under the control of a handful of its most benevolent and brilliant men—himself included, naturally.

    The catch, of course, was that in order to believe that he could effectuate his plan for the postwar global order, Roosevelt also had to believe that it would be received positively by the man who turned out to be the most proficient mass murderer in the war, Josef Stalin. Remarkably, Roosevelt did, in fact, believe just that. He repeatedly told his staff and others that he was convinced that the man he affectionately called “Uncle Joe” would eagerly welcome his friendship and American entreaties to share governance of the world jointly. They would, he believed, be the closest of allies and the best of friends. In 1943, before ever even meeting Stalin, FDR told his first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullit, that “I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world democracy and peace.”

    Roosevelt approached the end of the war and Yalta in the same state of delusion. He went, hat in hand, to beg Stalin to join him in his plan to rule the world together as the benevolent co-victors and co-representatives of the triumphant political left. As history shows, Roosevelt gave Stalin everything he wanted at Yalta, in the vain hope that the two could be friends and work together. History also shows that FDR was never disabused of this fantasy and, as a result, set about trying to put it in place.

    To this end, Roosevelt put his best men on the job of ensuring the creation—and the successful ratification by the Senate—of the United Nations. Among these best men were his Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and an aide on whom Roosevelt relied heavily while at Yalta, the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a man named Alger Hiss.

    Many years of work went into creating the United Nations and planning its charter, and many prominent Americans—including Stettinius and Dulles—had tremendous input into the documents.  In the end, though, it was Hiss, the Soviet spy, who ensured that the United Nations was born. Hiss was the primary author of the United Nations Charter and attended the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco as part of the official American delegation headed by Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Among other things, Hiss was tasked with ensuring Vandenberg’s support and compliance—both in endorsing the U.N. Charter at the conference in San Francisco and then shepherding it successfully through the Senate ratification process.

    The United Nations was the most critical step in transforming the world at the end of the war. But it was only the first step. For the better part of a century, the leftist secular intellectuals and the Utopian pietists colluded to push the notion of “global governance” on an unwilling and uninterested globe. In 1945, however, with the Utopians victorious in the West and murderous but canny cynics victorious in the East, the Wilsonian-pietist dream at last became a reality. The entire postwar period—from Roosevelt’s attempts to court Stalin at Yalta and beyond to the establishment of the United Nations, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund; from Truman’s speech on the Greek crisis to the formulation of the policy of containment; from the war in Korea to the Marshall Plan—is perhaps best understood as the story the American Left’s attempts to nurture and encourage world government, and to consolidate power under beneficent American leadership.

    This world order—which inarguably produced the wars in Korea and Vietnam and arguably contributed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—is the world order Trump and Vance are supposedly abandoning and which Martin Wolf wishes so desperately to preserve.

    I can’t say with any degree of certainty that any new, new world order will be particularly grand, but I can say that the old, new world order was, at best, a happy accident that only nearly resulted in the nuclear destruction of the entire planet – and which might not be so lucky next time.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 23:20

  • Federal Employees Hate DOGE Because They Fear Meritocracy
    Federal Employees Hate DOGE Because They Fear Meritocracy

    Not all people who are attracted to government employment are searching for a cushy job with limited work load and even less oversight, but most aren’t working for agencies like the IRS, ATF or USAID because of patriotic duty.  In reality, federal bureaucrats act as if they’ve found a cheat code to life.  And until the arrival of Elon Musk’s DOGE audits, that assumption was generally true.   

    As Dan Aykroyd’s character Ray Stantz notes in the movie Ghostbusters: 

    “Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector … they expect results!”

    For decades it’s been a running joke that government employees do very little while collecting a generous paycheck.  For American taxpayers, however, the joke’s not so funny.  DOGE audits have exposed considerable waste and fraud within the system.  Apologist in the media argue that most of this information was available to anyone willing to look, but this is a misrepresentation of the bigger problem. 

    Until recently no one had collated spending data in way that is easy for the average American to reference and track.  In fact, digging up this information is made as frustrating as possible, likely to dissuade people from investigating for themselves.  The Government Accountability Office doesn’t do it; if anything they pretend to scrutinize various agencies while covering for their mismanagement.  When it comes to government waste the phrase that leaps to mind is “hidden in plain sight”.  

    “Waste” and “fraud” are the only words to describe the situation with federal employment – In 2024 there were over 3 million workers, the most since 1994, collecting around $270 billion annually (including benefits).  Federal supervisors are incentivized to give average to outstanding employee performance reviews in order to avoid employee and union backlash, as well as negative attention for their department.  It is often noted that government work has bred a culture of “conflict avoidance”.  In other words, merit is not their top priority.

    In the past various establishment media outlets have admitted to this trend.  The Washington Post in 2016 noted that only 0.1% of federal employees ever get a negative performance review.

    In 2013 the Government Accountability Office was tasked to review federal performance management systems across the 24 CFO Act agencies. After reviewing OPM data for calendar year, the GAO reported that more than 99% of non-Senior Executive Service employees received a rating of fully successful or higher.  This is simply not credible.

    If anything, federal workers should be subject to more scrutiny and should have to present tangible results on a regular basis.  The GAO’s data was ignored because that’s how the GAO works, and the easy security of federal employment continued without disruption.  This is why the actions of DOGE are triggering government workers so hard – They have never faced true meritocracy before. 

    Many of them have never worked in the private sector and don’t understand that they are in fact subject to review and to firing if they don’t meet the standards of their employers (the American people).  They think they are untouchable.  They think performance reviews are tyranny.  They think they shouldn’t have to answer to anyone.

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    The level of panic and indignant behavior among fed workers over a simple email from DOGE asking “what they accomplished last week” tells us everything we need to know about the bureaucrat culture.  The email, which should take anyone 10 minutes to answer, is treated as “harassment” and a “distraction” from their work.

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    Keep in mind, the email was not necessarily meant to act as a performance indicator; it was a test to see who responds and who does not.  The people who refused to respond simply outed themselves as a potential problem to be removed later.  For those that are being fired for poor performance the claim of “outstanding reviews” under the previous administration don’t hold water.  As noted, it’s proven that the government maintains a participation trophy culture – Everyone is a winner no matter how incompetent. 

    The concept of meritocracy is so alien to the federal system that basic job requirements common to almost every company in the country are seen as acts of abuse.  Add in the freak show of DEI hiring and you have a recipe for financial disaster. 

    It’s not unfair to compare the waste within the government to the waste at the original Twitter.  Musk eliminated 80% of twitter staff after purchasing the platform and the company actually functioned better without them.  We will probably see the same results with the federal system over time. 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 22:45

  • The Turnaround…
    The Turnaround…

    Authored by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,

    The best way to understand Trump is also the simplest: he’s a businessman. From that perspective, little of what he’s doing is as inexplicable or surprising as many make it out to be. The inexplicability arises from general ignorance of business. Most Americans have little knowledge or understanding of how private American businesses work, although they generates the majority of the U.S.’s $29 trillion GDP and employ many of them.

    Trump is now CEO of the federal government. That enterprise has over $36 trillion in direct liabilities and unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of trillions. Its cost of credit is rising and debt service is taking an ever-expanding share of its revenues. Self evidently, it cannot continue on its present course.

    The common element of successful business turnarounds is that they don’t emerge from slow, incremental changes from within the system. Somebody comes in and administers shock therapy. Turnaround artists are never popular. Lots of people are fired, unprofitable operations discarded, finances tightened, business philosophies rethought, and the company’s direction radically reset. Because the company’s situation is dire, this all has to be done quickly, with shareholders howling and creditors pounding at the door.

    It begins with the numbers. In failing enterprises, they often reek of falsification, self-dealing, and corruption. You analyze the numbers and you keep asking questions until you uncover the real answers. What Musk and DOGE are doing would be standard operating procedure in a comparable business situation; indeed Musk did the same thing when he took over Twitter. Applied to government, it’s considered revolutionary, but how many politicians or bureaucrats have ever run a business?

    That the Department of Defense has never passed an audit and the Federal Reserve tenaciously resists one tells you all you need to know about the government’s numbers. Finding the “anomalies” is like shooting fish in a barrel. Resolving them invariably uncovers sordid secrets. Secrecy is the decaying dreck that feeds swamp corruption. Publicly, swamp creatures are screaming about “democracy” and DOGE access to the government’s sacred information. Privately, they’re checking into overseas bank accounts, defense attorneys, and realtors while updating their LinkedIn profiles.

    There are valid security, cybersecurity, and legal, even Constitutional, concerns about the way DOGE is operating that would not be present in a business situation. DOGE’s victims can be counted on to litigate these issues and courts may well impose restrictions. There will also be pushback from within the bureaucracy, even from Trump appointees. Kash Patel has already told FBI employees not to file Musk’s what-I-did-last-week emails. Courts and pushback could derail the project, in which case, revolution would be the only avenue left to defeat the Blob.

    At Twitter, Musk fired 80 percent of the workforce, reflecting business wisdom that 20 percent of any workforce does 80 percent of the work. For government, those figures should be revised to 10 and 90. However, is any of the work useful? It’s often counterproductive, producing results contrary to its stated purpose. Government-declared wars on poverty, drugs, and terror produced more impoverishment, drug-addiction, and terrorists, wasting billions. Those “war fighting” agencies and many others should be terminated.

    Trump has decided that Operation Ukraine must be terminated. The sunk cost fallacy—throwing good money after bad—has cost the U.S. government trillions, particularly in its military endeavors. The fallacy justifies future spending, and in the case of the military, more destruction and death, on a failing project (like Afghanistan) by citing money already spent and lives already lost—sunk costs. Those costs are irrelevant in deciding whether to continue a project; only the probability of future success matters.

    Businesspeople who throw good money after bad go bankrupt. They don’t have fiat money or tax dollars to perpetuate their mistakes. Trump’s not going to throw more money down the Ukrainian rathole. He’s talking about cutting the military budget in half, and the only way to do that is to forego these forever fiascos. The money already spent on Ukraine cries out for an illuminating line-by-line audit. If it happens, watch the cockroaches scatter, including the Bidens and the Clintons.

    It appears that Trump and team have decided that unipolarity—the foreign affairs equivalent of monopoly—must give way to multipolarity—the foreign affairs equivalent of oligopoly. As a businessman, Trump undoubtedly prefers monopoly, but reality requires recognition of competitors who are too big to eliminate.

    Trump now acknowledges Russia as a peer oligopolist, and obviously, so, too, is China (see “Russia and China Are Facts of Life,” SLL, 1/28/25). It’s always a risk trying to guess Trump’s thinking. However, he apparently wants to settle the ugly Ukraine business quickly and get on with the three-party oligopoly in which the oligopolists sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete—hopefully economically and diplomatically, not militarily. Blood, as businessman Virgil Sollozzo noted in The Godfather, is a big expense. Oligopoly may well have been Trump’s thinking back in his first term (see “The Eagle, the Dragon, and the Bear,” SLL, 6/21/18). However, the Russiagate hoax prevented him from even making overtures in that direction.

    Everyone else, including Europe, will be second- or third-tier, although jockeying for markets and securing favorable arrangements for extracting resources will be important aspects of oligopolistic competition. Like many oligopolies, there will be a territorial dimension. Without admitting it, Trump will cede Eurasia to China and Russia while shoring up the U.S. base in North and South America. That may be the thinking behind Trump’s rhetoric concerning Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. Africa and the poles will be open territory over which the oligopolists will compete.

    The Middle East and Israel have bedeviled presidents since Truman. If it had no oil, the Middle East would be a desert backwater, an oxymoron. The U.S. has plenty of oil and natural gas. It could buy Middle East oil when prices were favorable and otherwise stay out of the region. However, there is the relationship with Israel, which gets far more from it than the U.S. That’s intolerable from a business perspective, but it’s a political necessity for Trump. The relationship could destroy Trump’s presidency if the two countries wage war on Iran. Given Iran’s ties with Russia and China, such a war could escalate to World War III.

    While Trump’s business perspective brings fresh thinking and some honesty to government, there are times when it’s grossly inappropriate. Since 1948, Palestinians have been squeezed into ever-smaller areas in the land formerly known as Palestine, and it’s clear that Netanyahu and Trump want them completely evicted. Getting rid of them and turning Gaza into a luxury beach resort may have a cold-blooded business logic to it, but it’s a patently unjust solution for the Palestinian “problem.” The Trump Gaza video recently released on Truth Social is beyond grotesque.

    Back at home, Trump and many Americans understand that the U.S. government is a rathole. Indeed, it’s been common knowledge since Roosevelt’s New Deal, which turned a recession into a Great Depression on the moronic mantras that government bureaucrats are omniscient and government spending is the key to prosperity. Unfortunately, the average American has no power to force the government to disclose information or change its ways. Turnarounds are top-down affairs, which is why so much hope rests on Trump, Musk, and DOGE.

    You can’t cut costs to prosperity; successful turnarounds require new revenues. In the case of a government turnaround that doesn’t mean government finds new ways to soak the productive private economy. It means government gets out of the way and lets entrepreneurs, capitalism, and markets do their revenue- and wealth-generating thing. Laws, regulations, and bureaucratic extortion are barnacles encrusting the U.S.S. Economy, stopping it dead in the water. Neither inflation-adjusted private-sector incomes nor the real economy have grown in years. (The public sector has made out nicely, though.)

    If Trump and Musk fire government employees, but thousands of laws and regulations aren’t blowtorched, their efforts will come to naught. Legislation drafted by the ignorant stifles industries they don’t understand. Many businesspeople have to “politely” explain to regulators the business they presume to regulate.

    That their taxes pay the salaries of these parasites, often with additional “taxes” levied under the table, compounds the absurd injustice. Large, connected, crony-socialistic enterprises can absorb the costs, gaming the system to subsidize themselves and stifle the competition. Ultimately, it’s the much-heralded but much-abused entrepreneurs and small businesses who are crushed. Europe has snuffed out its innovation and economic dynamism almost entirely. The U.S. is well down the same path.

    Unfortunately, Trump wants the government to “help” business instead of simply getting out of its way. Business will supposedly thrive behind tariff walls, but its going to be the large, crony-socialistic enterprises that benefit. Trump’s Stargate project will throw half a trillion dollars at well-heeled Silicon Valley outfits to develop AI. China’s DeepSeek and Musk’s latest iteration of Grok has made Stargate obsolete before it spends its first dollar. The one thing Trump and team can do that will help all business is slash spending, reducing the government’s drain on the economy and the national debt’s upward pressure on interest rates.

    Honest, successful businesspeople—and the U.S. still has plenty—must deal with reality. They have to produce a good or service at a cost less than what the market will pay for it. The miracle of profit propels production and progress. Yet, it’s the villain in the unreal worlds of government, academia, and mainstream media and entertainment, none of which would survive a day if somebody out there wasn’t generating profit. America is built on profit, not politics. General recognition of that fact would restore some sanity in what’s loftily called the “national discourse.”

    The business of America has been and must be business. Trump can’t elucidate an Ayn Rand-type defense for the morality of free enterprise, production, and profit. However, he realizes that the productive element of society is supporting its own parasitic destroyers. Nor can he elucidate a John Quincy Adams-type defense of a foreign policy in which America minds its own business. However, he apparently recognizes that the empire cannot be sustained.

    It remains to be seen if Trump and team can turn around America at home and abroad. They’re taking on a powerful Overclass that produces far less than it takes, destroys far more than it creates, and will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve its sinecures. One thing is clear. Without recognition of hard realities and a dramatic turnaround, America’s government will go the way of other failing enterprises that couldn’t change course, sooner rather than later.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 22:10

  • Pentagon Purge Resumes: 3-Star Defense Health Commander Forced Into Retirement
    Pentagon Purge Resumes: 3-Star Defense Health Commander Forced Into Retirement

    A week after the Trump administration fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and five more senior Pentagon officers, another head rolled on Friday as the three-star commander of the Defense Health Agency (DHA) retired — with sources telling Reuters that retirement was forced on her. 

    As DHA commander, US Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland oversaw a vast medical system serving more than 9.5 million service members, retirees and family members around the world via more than 700 hospitals and clinics with a staff of more than 130,000 service members, civilian employees and contractors.  

    Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland had commanded the Defense Health Agency since January 2023 (Mike Morones/MOAA) 

    News of her sudden retirement broke Friday morning, with acting Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Stephen Ferrara notifying DHA service members and civilian employees. In an email obtained by ZeroHedge, he wrote:  

    “This morning, Army Lieutenant General (LTG) Dr. Telita Crosland, the fourth Director of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), is beginning her retirement. I want to thank LTG Crosland for her dedication to the nation, to the Military Health System, and to Army Medicine for the past 32 years. I have designated Dr. David Smith, the Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, as the Acting Director of the DHA while the Department conducts the normal nomination process.”

    On Friday evening, Reuters was first to confirm universal suspicions that Crosland’s sudden retirement wasn’t her idea, with both a current and former official saying she was ordered to retire. The officials, spoke to the news agency on condition of anonymity, said she was not given a reason for being pushed out of the military after a career spanning more than 30 years. A West Point graduate who started her Army service as a Medical Corps officer in 1993, Crosland was given the DHA command after serving as the Army’s Deputy Surgeon General. 

    The Defense Health Agency has more than 700 hospitals and clinics, including Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio 

    While specific reasons for Crosland’s retirement have yet to surface, leftists were quick to race to their own predictable, knee-jerk conclusions. Here’s a sampling from the r/fednews subreddit, which is the center of the universe for federal employees wailing about Trump’s shrinking and restructuring of the US government workforce: 

    • “She had too much honor and integrity for this administration, so they shoved her aside for a nice, obedient white man.”
    •  “She is far too not a white man.”
    • “Anyone still pretending these aren’t racist fascists are fools.”
    • “One more racially-motivated dismissal.”
    • She definitely was removed for being a POC and a female.” 

    Crosland’s forced resignation capped a week of momentous moves by the Trump administration vis-a-vis the Pentagon.

    *  *  *

    You can support ZeroHedge with the purchase of a high-quality, sharp, kickass ZeroHedge Multitool.

    Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 21:35

  • Gun Owners Take DC Magazine Restrictions To Supreme Court
    Gun Owners Take DC Magazine Restrictions To Supreme Court

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

    Gun owners in the nation’s capital are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the District of Columbia’s ban on magazines with more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

    The petition in Hanson v. District of Columbia was docketed, or officially accepted for filing, by the court on Feb. 28. The respondent, the District of Columbia, was directed to file a response by March 31.

    The district enacted the Firearms Registration Amendment Act of 2008 after the Supreme Court invalidated the city’s sweeping restrictions on gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). In Heller, the nation’s highest court determined that individuals have a right to possess firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense at home.

    The statute made it a felony-level offense to have a magazine that could hold more than 10 rounds. A violation can result in a prison term of three years and a fine of $12,500. District officials say the law is needed to protect the public.

    Lead petitioner Andrew Hanson and co-petitioners Tyler Yzaguirre, Nathan Chaney, and Eric Klun, who all have concealed carry pistol licenses in the District of Columbia, possessed magazines holding more than 10 rounds outside D.C. and said they would use their magazines for lawful purposes in the district if the 10-round limit did not apply.

    Hanson argues in the petition that the district’s magazine cap is unconstitutional according to a test the Supreme Court articulated in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which recognized a right to bear arms in public for self-defense.

    Weeks after Bruen was decided, the petitioners sued the District of Columbia, asking for a declaration from a federal district court that the magazine cap ran afoul of the Second and Fifth Amendments.

    U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras issued an April 2023 decision that denied Hanson’s request to block the law on constitutional grounds. Contreras found that the local law adheres to the U.S. Constitution.

    The judge found that the District’s ammo limitation, which was aimed at promoting public safety, was justified. The ban constituted “an attempt to mitigate the carnage of mass shootings in this country.”

    “Just as states and the District enacted sweeping laws restricting possession of high-capacity weapons in an attempt to reduce violence during the Prohibition era, so can the District now,” Contreras said.

    Hanson appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which on Oct. 29, 2024, voted 2-1 to deny a request for a preliminary injunction against the statute.

    “For 15 years, District law enforcement has operated and been resourced with the magazine cap in place,” and an “‘erroneously issued’ preliminary injunction suspending its law could drastically compromise the District’s ability to enforce its magazine cap far into the future” and allow the district to be inundated with large-capacity magazines during the life of the injunction, the court said.

    Circuit Judge Justin Walker dissented.

    In Heller, Walker said, the Supreme Court determined “that the government cannot categorically ban an arm in common use for lawful purposes.”

    “Magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition are arms in common use for lawful purposes. Therefore, the government cannot ban them,” Walker wrote.

    The Supreme Court should take up the case because the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling is inconsistent with Heller, which “protects the possession and use of weapons that are ‘in common use at the time,’” according to the petition.

    Even though the panel acknowledged that magazines containing 10 or more rounds are “in common use,” it found they were “particularly dangerous” and compared them to fully automatic machine guns.

    The petitioners asked the Supreme Court to consider if the Second Amendment “allows a categorical ban on arms that are indisputably common throughout the United States and overwhelmingly used for lawful purposes (generally) and self-defense (specifically).”

    Petitioner Yzaguirre, who is president of the Second Amendment Institute, said he’s optimistic about the petition’s prospects.

    “It’s time for the Supreme Court to take its next landmark Second Amendment case,” he told The Epoch Times.

    “The days of tyrannical elites restricting ‘We the People’ from exercising our God-given rights to self-defense must come to an end,” Yzaguirre said.

    The Epoch Times reached out for comment to District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb. No reply was received by publication time.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 21:00

  • How Modern Monetary Theory Advocates View Money & The State
    How Modern Monetary Theory Advocates View Money & The State

    Authored by Frank Shostack via Mises.org,

    According to the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), money is something decided by the state. The MMT regards money as a token. For instance, when an individual places a coat in the cloakroom of a theater, he receives a tin disc or a paper receipt. This receipt or a disc is a proof that the individual is entitled to demand the return of his coat.

    According to the MMT, the material used to manufacture the tokens is irrelevant—it can be gold, silver, or any other metal or it can even be paper. Hence, the definition of money, according to the MMT, is what the state decides it is going to be. MMT posits that the value of money is the outcome of the state that forces people to pay taxes with the money tokens that the state has decided upon. The state taxes have to be paid with the money tokens issued by it. The state also has the ability to control the value of money through its declaration of how much it is willing to pay for a certain commodity produced by the private sector.

    In the MMT framework, the token money is seen as a receipt on the economy’s resources. A token money held by an individual is regarded as his claim on a portion of resources. Individuals have exchanged goods and services for a receipt given to them by the government. Individuals who have generated goods and services are acknowledged for this by the tokens issued to them by the government.

    However, could the sovereign state effectively require individuals to use tokens in the transactions among themselves? Why would anyone accept a fiat-token as a payment simply because the government accepts these tokens as tax payments? To answer these questions, we have to define money.

    Defining Money

    To establish the definition of money, we have to ascertain how a money-using economy evolved. Money emerged as a result of the fact that barter could not support a complex, modern market economy. The distinguishing characteristic of money is that it functions as the general medium of exchange. It has evolved from the most marketable commodity. On this Rothbard wrote,

    “… just as in nature there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over large distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange. As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as general media—in almost all exchanges—and these are called money.”

    Money is the thing that all other goods and services are traded for. This fundamental characteristic of money must be contrasted with other goods. For instance, food’s characteristic is that it supplies the necessary sustenance to human beings and people may like the taste. Capital goods’ characteristics is that it permits the expansion of the infrastructure that, in turn, permits the production of a larger quantity of goods and services. Contrary to the MMT, the essence of money has nothing to do with tax payments to the government.

    Money functions as a general means of exchange. People pay with goods and services for other goods and services with the help of money. Money facilitates the payments of one good for another good. Also, contrary to the MMT, money is not a claim on resources, but the general medium of the exchange. In his writings Carl Menger raised doubts about the soundness of the view that the origin of money is government proclamation. According to Menger,

    “An event of such high and universal significance and of notoriety so inevitable, as the establishment by law or convention of a universal medium of exchange, would certainly have been retained in the memory of man, the more certainly inasmuch as it would have had to be performed in a great number of places. Yet no historical monument gives us trustworthy tidings of any transactions either conferring distinct recognition on media of exchange already in use, or referring to their adoption by peoples of comparatively recent culture, much less testifying to an initiation of the earliest ages of economic civilization in the use of money.”

    Mises similarly explains the acceptance of money. In his writings, Mises had shown how the value of money is established. Mises began his analysis by noting that today’s demand for money is determined by yesterday’s purchasing power of money. Consequently, for a given supply of money, today’s purchasing power is established. Yesterday’s demand for money was fixed by the prior day’s purchasing power of money. So, for a given supply of money, yesterday’s price of money was set. The same procedure applies to past periods.

    By regressing through time, we will eventually arrive at a point in time when money was just an ordinary commodity where demand and supply set its price. The commodity had an exchange value in terms of other commodities (i.e., its exchange value was established in barter). On the day a commodity becomes money, it already has an established purchasing power or price in terms of other goods. This purchasing power enables us to set the demand for this commodity as money. This process sets its purchasing power on the day the commodity starts to function as money. Once the price of money is established, it serves as input for the establishment of tomorrow’s price of money. It follows then that, without yesterday’s information about the price of money, today’s purchasing power of money cannot be established.

    With regards to other goods and services, history is not required to ascertain present prices. A demand for these goods arises on account of the perceived benefits from consuming them. The benefit that money provides is that it can be exchanged for goods and services. Consequently, one needs to know the past purchasing power of money in order to establish today’s demand for it.

    Applying the Mises’s framework—also known as the regression theorem—we can infer that it is not possible that money could have emerged as a result of a government decree, government endorsement, or social convention. The theorem shows that money must have emerged as a commodity. According to Rothbard,

    “Money is not an abstract unit of account, divorceable from a concrete good; it is not a useless token only good for exchanging; it is not a ‘claim on society’; it is not a guarantee of a fixed price level. It is simply a commodity.”

    MMT and Wealth Generation

    In the MMT world, where money is generated by the government and—given that the government is able to inflate freely as much money as it requires—then, by implication, the government has command over unlimited amounts of wealth. If the government determines what should be regarded as money and what its value is, this also means that the government dictates the rate of exchanges between money and goods and services. This means that prices are set by the government and bypasses the free market forces. Economic theory shows that such conduct leads to the inefficient use of resources and, in turn, to economic instability and impoverishment.

    MMT holds that the role of government policies should be to prevent the emergence of a situation where “idle resources” and unemployment emerge. According to MMT, the key here is to boost the overall demand for goods and services to lift economic growth, eliminate unemployment, and make the full use of resources. This can be achieved by running large budget deficits financed by printing plenty of money. In the MMT world, money printing is not a problem as long as there is unemployment and unutilized resources.

    Conclusions

    In MMT, money is what the government decides it is. MMT believes that because people are forced to pay taxes with the government’s token money, that the government establishes the value of money. This, in turn, makes it a medium of exchange in the private sector also. Without a freely-established money, it is impossible to form the free rate of exchanges between money and goods and services. Consequently, this makes it impossible to have an efficient allocation of scarce resources. This sets the foundation for economic misery.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 19:50

  • House Republicans Plan To Scrub Anti-American BLM Plaza In DC
    House Republicans Plan To Scrub Anti-American BLM Plaza In DC

    Washington, DC, painted “BLACK LIVES MATTER” across two blocks of 16th Street, near the White House, during the 2020 color revolution riots, fueled by radical leftist, taxpayer-funded NGOs. Each of the 16 bold yellow letters spans the width of the two-lane Street, creating a massive display of toxic wokeness—one that House Republicans may soon move to scrub.

    “The House Oversight Committee and the Trump Administration are working on delivering a number of reforms to make our nation’s capital safe and end left-wing pet projects. This includes addressing partisan abuses by the District government such as Black Lives Matter Plaza,” House Oversight Committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky) stated, quoted by the New York Post. 

    In 2020, painters were contacted by far-left Mayor Muriel Bowser … 

    … a few months after BLM riots unleashed color revolution chaos nationwide.

    “President Trump has made rooting out woke ideology from the federal government a top priority. The committee declined to say which other projects could be on the chopping block,” NYPost said. 

    Let’s not forget that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation once trumpeted its Marxist desire to dismantle America and war on the nuclear family by saying on its website: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.” 

    “Mayor Bowser and Democrat-run Washington, D.C. are focused on virtue signaling and spending taxpayer money to paint Black Lives Matter instead of the record spike in homicides, carjackings, and other violent crimes,” said Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, adding, “Washington DC’s failures are a reminder why the city must never become a state.” 

    How Congress plans to override decisions from the local government may fall under the Home Rule Act of 1973. This act was invoked in 2023 when Congress struck down a law passed by the far-left DC city council, which would have weakened maximum penalties for violent crime in the crime-ridden metro area.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 19:15

  • The Press Falls To Another Record Low In Public Trust
    The Press Falls To Another Record Low In Public Trust

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    We have previously discussed polling showing the media at record lows in public trust. Well, the latest survey from Gallup shows that the media hit another all-time low. What is most impressive is that plummeting readers, revenues, and layoffs have done little to convince the mainstream media that the problem is not the public but themselves. The only institution with a  lower level of public trust is Congress, and that says a lot. It is like beating Ebola as the preferred communicable disease. Some 69 percent of Americans now say that they have no or little trust in the media. 

    Only 31 percent say that they have a great deal or fair amount of trust. The trending line looks like the sales of buggy whips after the introduction of the Model T Ford. Gallop put it into sharp terms:

    “About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly.” By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53%, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003. Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.”

    In my book, The Indispensable Right, I discuss how journalists and journalism schools have destroyed their own profession by rejecting objectivity and engaging in open advocacy journalism. The mainstream media has long echoed the talking points of the left and the Democratic Party, particularly in its one-sided coverage of the last three elections.

    While Bob Woodward and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.

    We have been discussing the rise of advocacy journalism and the rejection of objectivity in journalism schools. Writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. This movement includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy.

    Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll decried how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.”  Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

    The Washington Post’s former executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

    Lauren Wolfe, the fired freelance editor for the New York Times, has not only gone public to defend her pro-Biden tweet but published a piece titled “I’m a Biased Journalist and I’m Okay With That.” 

    Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones is a leading voice for advocacy journalism. Indeed, Hannah-Jones has declared “all journalism is activism.”

    This is why the whole “Let’s Go Brandon” chant was as much a criticism of the media as President Biden.

    There is clearly an effort by owners like Jeff Bezos to change this culture rather than bankroll newspapers like the Washington Post vanity projects for the left.

    Robert Lewis, a British media executive who joined the Post earlier this year, reportedly got into a “heated exchange” with a staffer. Lewis explained that, while reporters were protesting measures to expand readership, the very survival of the paper was now at stake:

    “We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,” Lewis said. 

    “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

    The response from staffers was to call for the new editors to be fired.  One staffer complained, “We now have four White men running three newsrooms.” The Post has been buying out staff to avoid mass layoffs, but reporters are up in arms over the effort to turn the newspaper around.

    The question is whether viewers and readers can still be brought back into the fold. New media is expanding as citizens have looked elsewhere for news. In the meantime, some media outlets and organizations seem to have doubled down on the bias. Just last year, Washington Post reporter Cleve Wootson Jr. appeared to call upon the White House to censor the interview of Elon Musk with former President Donald Trump. The newspaper did not say a thing about the incongruity of one of its leading reporters calling for censorship.

    After Trump was elected, NBC selected Yamiche Alcindor to return to the White House despite a history of alleged bias.  Alcindor, who also worked for PBS, was criticized for often preceding questions with attacks on conservatives or over-the-top praise for Joe Biden or Democrats. While others saw raw political bias, Alcindor explained that it was her job to use journalism to bend the “moral arc toward justice.”

    Recently, the White House Correspondent’s Association picked an anti-Trump comedian who promptly encouraged Trump not to come to the dinner, saying that no one wants to be in the same room with him.

    In the meantime, “J schools” continue to dismiss objectivity and crank out journalists who are told to embrace activism as the public flees legacy media for new media.

    For the moment, it seems like journalists are content to write for each other and about 30 percent of the public. The echo chamber is getting smaller and smaller. So are the staffs on the outlets. Without public trust, the media is just talking to itself as the public turns to citizen journalists and new media on blogs and social media.

    As someone who has worked for three networks and written as a columnist for three decades, the decline of American media has been painful to watch. The industry has operated like a ship of fools with no regard for their viewers or readers. However, we need the media. The press plays a central role in our democracy as reflected in the press protections afforded under the First Amendment.

    The effort to break this culture at outlets like the Post and L.A. Times is encouraging, but these polls indicate that time is of the essence.

    *  *  *

    Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 18:40

  • FBI Returns 33 Boxes Of Trump Property Seized During Mar-a-Lago Raid
    FBI Returns 33 Boxes Of Trump Property Seized During Mar-a-Lago Raid

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

    President Donald Trump said on Friday that the Justice Department (DOJ) has returned to him boxes of documents seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago home during an investigation in 2022.

    Trump stated that the DOJ has “just returned the boxes that Deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about,” referring to the former special counsel who led the investigations into Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents from his first presidential term and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

    “They are being brought down to Florida and will someday be part of the Trump Presidential Library. Justice finally won out,” Trump stated on his Truth Social platform.

    Trump reiterated his stance that the FBI investigation against him was politically motivated.

    “I did absolutely nothing wrong. This was merely an attack on a political opponent that, obviously, did not work well. Justice in our Country will now be restored,” the president stated.

    Alina Habba, the president’s counselor, said that she personally loaded some of the “infamous boxes” onto Air Force One before Trump’s flight back to Florida on Friday.

    “Justice has been and will continue to be restored in this country under President Trump. Truth and justice always win in the end. God Bless America,” Habba stated on the social media platform X.

    In August 2022, the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office during his first term in 2021.

    During the raid, FBI agents seized over 11,000 documents and photographs without classified markings, along with more than 100 documents marked classified. Some of these documents were labeled “top secret.” The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) also retrieved 15 boxes of government documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in January 2022.

    The raid followed a warrant issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, which enabled agents to seize any documents with classification markings, as well as containers in which the documents were located and any containers stored or found together with the documents.

    In 2023, Smith indicted Trump with felony charges over his alleged unlawful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and concealing a document in a federal investigation.

    Trump had denied any wrongdoing in the cases and called the investigation politically motivated. In a June 2023 interview with Fox News, Trump defended his handling of the documents and said he believes that he had rights to the retained documents.

    “Everything was declassified because I have the right to declassify,“ he told the news host. “This is purely a Presidential Records Act [thing]. This is not a criminal thing.”

    Smith dropped both cases after Trump won a second presidential term in the 2024 election, citing the DOJ’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president. The special counsel resigned from the DOJ ahead of Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

    Prior to his resignation, Smith completed a final report on his investigations into Trump’s criminal cases. Former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed Smith in the investigation, told congressional leaders in January that the report would be made public after gaining approval by the courts.

    Trump’s lawyers told Garland in a Jan. 6 letter that they had reviewed a draft of the report and identified some issues. They argued that releasing the report would be “imprudent and unlawful.”

    “The Draft Report violates fundamental norms regarding the presumption of innocence, including with respect to third parties unnecessarily impugned by Smith’s false claims,” the lawyers said.

    They stated that releasing the report would violate the Presidential Transition Act and the doctrine of presidential immunity. Trump’s lawyers also argued that Smith lacked authority to issue the report due to his alleged invalid appointment.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 17:30

  • Deranged Leftists Storm Manhattan Tesla Showroom, Chant "Zelenskyy Is Hero"
    Deranged Leftists Storm Manhattan Tesla Showroom, Chant “Zelenskyy Is Hero”

    Deranged leftists, suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, stormed the Tesla showroom at 860 Washington St. in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District early afternoon, chatting “Zelenskyy is a hero,” along with anti-DOGE and anti-Trump slogans. Protest turnout was notably weak, as DOGE-era swamp draining in Washington, DC, has curbed USAID’s ability to funnel taxpayer funds to corrupt NGOs that bankroll leftist protests. 

    Footage shows unhinged liberals taking over the Tesla showroom. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Dozens gathered outside, holding anti-Elon Musk, anti-Trump, and anti-DOGE signs. The radicals, seemingly oblivious to basic statecraft, chanted, “Zelenskyy is a hero.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    This is the left’s hero. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    NYPD has arrived. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Perhaps the era of Soros and other leftist billionaires using taxpayer funds through their NGOs to unleash color revolutions ‘rent a riot’ is over. The turnout at today’s Tesla showroom was pathetic.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 16:55

  • Vance Responds To Pope's Criticism Of Trump Administration
    Vance Responds To Pope’s Criticism Of Trump Administration

    Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times,

    Vice President JD Vance said he was surprised to hear of Pope Francis’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy while speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Feb. 28.

    Despite that disagreement, Vance prayed for Pope Francis at the event, as the pope remained in critical condition on Feb. 28 after suffering a bronchospasm that caused vomiting and the need for non-invasive mechanical ventilation, the Holy See announced.

    Vance also said he believes that the pontiff is a man who deeply cares about the spiritual direction of the faith and the world’s Christians.

    “I will always remember the Holy Father as a great pastor, as a man who can speak the truth, the faith, in a very profound way at a moment of great crisis,” Vance said. 

    He recalled a sermon of hope that the pope delivered in March 2020 at the height of the pandemic in an empty St. Peter’s Square, likening it to the gospel in which Jesus calmed the sea after his terrified disciples awakened him during a storm.

    Vance, the first Catholic convert to serve as vice president, asked fellow Catholics to say a prayer that he and his family had been praying daily for the pope ever since he was admitted to the hospital.

    Pope Francis has criticized President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and condemned mass deportations.

    “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he said in a Feb. 10 letter.

    Vance had argued that his administration’s immigration policy was aligned with his Catholic faith, citing “Ordo Amoris,” a centuries-old teaching that suggests a hierarchy of how one is supposed to love, justifying the needs and concerns of the immediate family before those of strangers.

    Pope Francis appeared to correct Vance’s understanding of the concept in his letter.

    “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” he wrote. 

    “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

    Vance’s address also came as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken the Trump administration to court over the cut-off of millions of dollars in funding for refugee programs in the United States.

    The vice president also discussed using social media to respond to messages and criticism from the pope, bishops, and other religious leaders.

    “Sometimes the bishops don’t like what I say,” Vance said. 

    “I’m sure, by the way, sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. My goal is not to litigate when I’m right and when they’re wrong or vice versa. My goal is to maybe articulate the way that I think about being a Christian in public life.”

    Vance said that he believes Christians are not called to obsess over social media controversies involving the Catholic Church, clergy, “or the Holy Father himself,” he said.

    “I think that we should frankly take a page out of the books of our grandparents who respected our clergy, who looked to them for guidance, but didn’t obsess and fight over every single word that came out of their mouth.”

    Vance said that the clergy are important spiritual leaders with a 2,000-year-old duty to speak on the issues of the day, but that they are now faced with the challenges of social media, and it is just as important for the Church’s clergy to recognize that as it is for lay people.

    “I think it’s incumbent upon our religious leaders to recognize that in the era of social media, people will hang on every single word that they utter, even if that wasn’t their intention, and even if a given declaration wasn’t meant for consumption in the social media age,” he said.

    The vice president’s speech touched upon his conversion to the faith and the emotional declaration that his 7-year-old son’s baptism was far more significant than winning the election in November 2024.

    He stated that the administration’s door was open to feedback from the nation’s faithful.

    “I’ll make this commitment to you in front of God, and in front of all those television cameras back there, that we will always listen to people of faith and people of conscience in the United States of America,” Vance said. “You have an open door to the Trump administration, even and especially, maybe, when you disagree with us.

    “So, please use that opportunity to communicate with us when we get things right, but also when we get things wrong.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 16:20

  • "Why Is Everything Locked Up At CVS?": Rahm Emanuel, Fareed Zakaria Admit Democrat Cities Are "Terribly Run"
    “Why Is Everything Locked Up At CVS?”: Rahm Emanuel, Fareed Zakaria Admit Democrat Cities Are “Terribly Run”

    As Democrats struggle with reality – namely, that they’ve allowed crime, illegal immigration, and inflation to run rampant due to disastrous, anti-American policies – at least a few seem to be willing to acknowledge what’s going on.

    During a Friday appearance on ‘Realtime With Bill Maher,’ former Chicago Mayor and US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, an CNN‘s Fareed Sakaria slammed progressive policies that have resulted in a populist backlash. 

    “I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6%. What’s going on in Chicago?” asked Maher.

    Rahm Emanuel: “We’ve gone through 5 years where people became way too permissive as a culture. Which is why everything is locked up at CVS and Walgreens, that’s a disaster.

    “I don’t want to hear another word about the locker room, I don’t want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom. In 7th grade if I had known I could have said ‘they’ and got in the girls bathroom, I would have done it.”

    Zakaria then chimed in, “This is a huge Democrat party problem. Democrat cities are terribly run. Cost of housing is crazy.

    “The budget of New York state is twice that of Florida. Lots of taxes, lots of regulation, but nothing gets done. Democrats have to own this: The answer to everything is not more taxes, more regulations. People are fed up with it, and feel that it isn’t working.

    Watch (via @EricAbbenante);

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    *  *  *

    Anza Knives are back In Stock! We just got a huge delivery.

    Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, lifetime guarantee. If you’re looking for a great daily carry, check this one out.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 15:45

  • Trump To Host First White House Crypto Summit On March 7
    Trump To Host First White House Crypto Summit On March 7

    Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com,

    US President Donald Trump will host the first White House Crypto Summit on March 7, bringing together industry leaders to discuss regulatory policies, stablecoin oversight, and the potential role of Bitcoin in the US financial system.

    The attendees will include “prominent founders, CEOs, and investors from the crypto industry,” along with members of the President’s Working Group on Digital Assets, according to an announcement shared by the White House “AI and crypto czar,” David Sacks, in a March 1 X post.

    The summit will be chaired by Sacks and administered by Bo Hines, the executive director of the Working Group.

    Source: David Sacks

    Sacks was appointed White House Crypto and AI and Czar on Dec. 6, 2024, to “work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S.,” Trump wrote in the announcement. 

    Part of Sacks’ role will be to “safeguard” online speech and “steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship,” Trump added.

    Source: Donald Trump

    Trump has previously signaled that he intends to make crypto policy a national priority and make the US a global hub for blockchain innovation. The upcoming summit may set the tone for crypto regulations over the next four years.

    Sacks only has two years to push through pro-crypto policies before the 2026 midterm elections in the US, Joe Doll, the general counsel for NFT marketplace Magic Eden, told Cointelegraph in an interview.

    According to Doll, the threat of a gridlocked government could stifle regulations, and the current administration must push through pro-crypto policies while still in control of both chambers of Congress.

    Stablecoin, Bitcoin reserve regulation remain focus

    While there are no additional details about the summit’s agenda, stablecoin regulation and legislation related to a potential strategic Bitcoin reserve have been at the forefront of regulatory discussions in the US.

    The White House announcement came days after Jeremy Allaire, co-founder of Circle, the company behind the world’s second-largest stablecoin, said that stablecoin issuers worldwide should be required to register with US authorities.

    Citing consumer protection, Allaire argued that US dollar-based stablecoin issuers should not get a “free pass,” enabling them to “ignore the US law and go do whatever the hell you want wherever and sell into the United States.” Allaire told Bloomberg:

    “Whether you are an offshore company or based in Hong Kong, if you want to offer your US dollar stablecoin in the US, you should need to register in the US just like we have to go register everywhere else.”

    The upcoming summit may shed more light on upcoming stablecoin legislation, considering Sacks previously stated that stablecoins could “extend the dollar’s dominance internationally.”

    Interest in a US-based strategic Bitcoin reserve is also on the rise. So far, at least 24 states have introduced legislation related to a potential Bitcoin reserve, Bitcoinlaws data shows.

    US states with Bitcoin reserve bill propositions. Source: Bitcoinlaws

    However, the state-level Bitcoin reserve initiatives may not represent a pivotal moment for Bitcoin; they are only a “symbolic move” unless a significant purchase is announced, according to Iliya Kalchev, dispatch analyst at Nexo.

    “Unless the hearing unveils a near-term purchase plan or a major policy shift, the market’s response will likely be mild, as Texas’ pro-crypto stance is already well known,” Kalchev told Cointelegraph.

    Bitcoin has averaged over 1,077% returns over the past five years, showing the lucrative potential of a long-term holding strategy.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 15:10

  • Rubio Demands Apology From Zelensky, Who Attempts Belated 'Gratefulness' For All The Billions
    Rubio Demands Apology From Zelensky, Who Attempts Belated ‘Gratefulness’ For All The Billions

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio is demanding an apology from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after Friday’s Oval Office fireworks and heated exchange. Trump had sarcastically quipped the whole scene will make for “great television” before he shut it down and kicked Zelensky out of the White House, prior to a planned lunch.

    Rubio told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the Ukrainian leader should “apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became. There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic. Look, this thing went off the rails.”

    “When you start talking about that aggressively, and the President’s a deal maker. He’s made deals his entire life, you’re not going to get people to the table,” the US top diplomat added.

    Rubio looking uncomfortable at Zelensky’s outbursts. via Getty Images

    Many sources say that before the blow-up which started when Zelensky specifically called out Vance to ‘answer’ a question (after which the vice president appropriately unleashed on Zelensky), a final minerals deal was all but assured and ready to be signed.

    But Rubio in his Saturday comments said he’s unsure whether Zelensky actually wants to see any kind of peace agreement at all.

    “And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t, and that active, open undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone who’s been involved in communications with them leading up to today,” Rubio explained.

    Zelensky just prior to these fresh remarks of Rubio’s expressed what perhaps came close to regret, but something far short of an apology…

    “No, I respect the president, and I respect the American people and if, I don’t know, I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I’m not sure that we did something bad,” Zelensky responded when asked by Fox News’s Bret Baier if he would apologize for the meeting. 

    “This is not good for both sides, anyway, and I was very open, but I can’t change our Ukrainian attitude toward Russia,” he said. 

    Still, on the same day Zelensky issued a very lengthy thread on X, at over a dozen full posts, which many will see as reeking of desperation.

    He wrote that he knows that the US is on ‘our’ side and that “America’s help has been vital in helping us survive, and I want to acknowledge that.” This appears a response to Vance the day prior noting that he had not once said “thank you” during Friday’s meetings. “Peace can only come when we know we have security guarantees, when our army is strong, and our partners are with us,” Zelensky also said.

    “It will be difficult without the U.S. support. But we can’t lose our will, our freedom, or our people. We’ve seen how Russians came to our homes and killed many people,” he continued in the long message.

    At one point he further expressed: “I want the U.S. to stand more firmly on our side. This is not just a war between our two countries; Russia brought this war onto our territory and into our homes.”

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    And again, more after-the-fact efforts to salvage that disaster of an Oval Office meeting: “Our relationship with the American President is more than just two leaders; it’s a historic and solid bond between our peoples. That’s why I always begin with words of gratitude from our nation to the American nation.”

    …though that’s not what President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are saying. All of this from Zelensky is likely too little, too late.

    Below is Zelensky’s full thread on X…

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 14:35

  • Yosemite Employees Hang US Flag Upside Down In Budget Cut Backlash
    Yosemite Employees Hang US Flag Upside Down In Budget Cut Backlash

    Authored by Jennifer Torres via The Epoch Times,

    On Feb. 22, a large group of outdoor enthusiasts gathered at El Capitan, one of the world’s most iconic rock formations, in California’s Yosemite National Park to witness the “Firefall”—a natural phenomenon that occurs when the setting sun hits the park’s Horsetail Fall at just the right angle, causing it to resemble a flow of lava. 

    However, the moment was marked by the presence of an upside-down American flag draped over the side of the granite monolith near the fall.

    According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Flag Code determines that when the U.S. national flag is displayed, the union should be uppermost and to the observer’s left. Furthermore, “it should never be displayed upside down unless trying to convey a sign of distress or great danger.” However, the code does not specify any legal penalties for violations.

    Yosemite employees reportedly positioned the upside-down flag to protest recent budget cuts, hiring freezes, and federal layoffs, all components of President Donald Trump’s budgetary package, which was narrowly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday—authorizing at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.

    A spokesperson for the National Park Service told NTD that the agency “is aware of the unauthorized and inappropriate display that occurred at Yosemite National Park over the weekend.”

    “The NPS does not condone such actions, and the flag was removed as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said. “We take the protection of our national parks seriously and will not tolerate behavior that undermines their integrity. At this time, we have nothing further to add.”

    The flag appeared on the same day that an email was sent to thousands of federal employees by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), requiring them to submit a report within 48 hours detailing five specific achievements they had made at work in the previous week.

    Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk warned in a social media post that failure to meet the deadline would result in termination.

    On Monday, Trump told reporters that Musk’s agency has already found “hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.”

    “A  lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist. That’s how badly various parts of our government were run,” Trump said, “So, by asking the question, ‘Tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’”

    A new poll by Harvard CAPS-Harris reveals that 76 percent of those surveyed support a “full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government” and that 77 percent support a “full examination of all government expenditures.”

    According to a statement from the National Parks Conservation Association, more than 700 National Park Service staff across the country have submitted resignations as part of the Trump administration’s buyout offer, while another 1,000 employees are at risk of termination—and more than 2,000 seasonal and permanent parks positions across the country have been eliminated.

    Responding to the upside-down flag incident, Connecticut State Sen. Bob Duff (D-Norwalk) shared a quote in an Instagram post this week, purportedly from Gavin Carpenter, a Yosemite maintenance mechanic Duff identified as a “disabled military veteran.” Carpenter allegedly admitted he had supplied the flag and helped position it.

    “We’re bringing attention to what’s happening to the parks, which are every American’s properties,” the quote read.

    In his post, Duff asked his followers, “Are we listening to one of our veterans?”

    The photo Duff used in the Instagram post was from the San Francisco Chronicle with the caption indicating that the flag was intended to “protest the thousands of federal job cuts made by President Donald Trump’s administration.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 14:00

  • Ukraine Lost More Villages On The Battlefield During The Zelensky-Trump Showdown In The Oval
    Ukraine Lost More Villages On The Battlefield During The Zelensky-Trump Showdown In The Oval

    Many geopolitical pundits who are of the realism camp said from the start of the Ukraine war that it would be settled on the battlefield. Russia’s military superiority has been evident to all – especially in the last two years of the conflict – which is of course why Kiev has remained totally reliant on military arms and aid from US-NATO countries.

    This week as international press was focused on a flurry of diplomatic activity, which saw President Trump host France’s Macron, the UK’s Starmer, and Ukraine’s Zelensky – all in quick succession, there hasn’t been enough attention paid to developments on the battlefield in Ukraine’s east.

    While Zelensky was readying to make his last stand and ‘confront’ Trump at the White House – which of course did not go well at all – Ukrainian forces were steadily losing ground on the eastern frontline. Indeed Kiev forces were being beaten back at the very moment Zelensky and VP Vance were arguing in the Oval.

    Illustrative, Donetsk file image via Reuters

    Russia’s Defense Ministry said at the moment all eyes were on Trump-Zelensky meeting that its forces were busy seizing two more villages along the eastern frontlines.

    “Moscow on Saturday said it had seized two more villages in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv officials said Russian strikes had killed one person and wounded 19,” AFP reports.

    “The Russian defense ministry said its forces had captured Skudne and Burlatske in the south of the eastern Donetsk region,” the report continues. This is just outside the town of Velyka Novossilka, which Russia captured at the end of January.

    The Ukrainians have been steadily losing ground for months in Donetsk, but have continued efforts to strike Russian oil and gas facilities inside Russian territory, which hasn’t made any level of a strategic difference in the war. Russia too has been sending drones on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, with at least 150 launched overnight. Ukraine said it was able to down at least 100 of these inbound UAVs.

    The Russian military and security services are also reportedly taking back ground in southern Kursk region, which has been occupied by Ukrainian forces since last August.

    Russia’s Defense Ministry said Friday that four villages have been taken back in the Kursk region over the last week, with the village of Novaya Sorochina being the latest to be liberated.

    And days ago the military announced it had recaptured the nearby villages of Pogrebki and Gorlovka, near Novaya Sorochina, and also the village of Nikolsky, toward the Sudzha direction.

    This steady Russian progress has been well understood by the Trump White House, which is why during the Friday meeting Trump kept telling Zelensky that he has no more cards to play.

    “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people,” Trump said. “You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    In essence, everyone but Zelensky (and some European leaders, apparently), understands that there’s no military solution to the conflict, and that greater Western military intervention seems a sure path to WW3. The ‘solution’ at this point is for Ukraine to negotiate and cede territory, or face total military defeat. Trump is now making crystal clear to all allies that any kind of US-NATO military intervention simply will never happen.

    *  *  *

    Anza Knives are back In Stock! We just got a huge delivery.

    Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, lifetime guarantee. If you’re looking for a great daily carry, check this one out.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 13:25

  • CIA Proxy Agency Confirms Its Funding Has Been Suspended, Forcing It To "Halt All Partner Support"
    CIA Proxy Agency Confirms Its Funding Has Been Suspended, Forcing It To “Halt All Partner Support”

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US-funded organization that meddles in elections and pushes regime change around the world in the name of spreading democracy, has confirmed reports that its funding from the US government has been frozen, forcing it to suspend operations.

    “The [NED] is currently unable to access its Congressionally appropriated funds, which sustain nearly all of its grantmaking and operations. As a result, for the first time in the organization’s four-decade history, it has been unable to meet its obligations and has been forced to suspend support for nearly 2,000 partners worldwide,” the NED said in a statement on Tuesday.

    While the NED presents itself as an “independent” organization, it is nearly entirely funded by the US government, which it acknowledged in the statement. The NED claimed that its funding should have been exempt from the Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid.

    “Ninety-five percent of NED’s funding is directly appropriated by Congress and is not considered foreign assistance. This funding therefore was not subject to the executive order freezing foreign assistance for a ninety-day review. However, despite being exempt, access to these funds has been inexplicably cut off, forcing NED to halt all partner support and furlough the majority of its staff,” the NED said.

    The NED, which was founded during the Cold War in 1983, received $315 million from the US government for the 2025 fiscal year. In 1991, Allen Weinstein, a co-founder of NED, acknowledged to The Washington Post that a lot of what the organization did was done “covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

    In the 1991 article, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius listed some examples of the NED’s “overt” action that was previously done by the CIA, including “providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule.”

    The NED has been targeted by Elon Musk, who asked his followers in a recent post on X to list “all the evil things that NED has done.” Jim Bovard, a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, replied with an article about how he has been critical of the organization for 40 years.

    In a 2009 article for the Future Freedom Foundation, Bovard said the NED is “based on the notion that its meddling in foreign elections is automatically pro-democracy because the US government is the incarnation of democracy. 

    NED has always operated on the principle that ‘what’s good for the US government is good for democracy.’”

    In a 2006 piece for The American Conservative, Bovard detailed NED’s efforts to push for regime change in Latin America.

    “In 2001, NED quadrupled its aid to Venezuelan opponents of elected president Hugo Chavez, and NED heavily funded some organizations involved in a bloody military coup that temporarily removed Chavez from power in April 2002. After Chavez retook control, NED and the State Department responded by pouring even more money into groups seeking his ouster,” he wrote.

    Bovard continued, “The International Republican Institute, one of the largest NED grant recipients, played a key role both in the Chavez coup and also in the overthrow of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In February 2004, an array of NED-aided groups and individuals helped spur an uprising that left 100 people dead and toppled Aristide.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 12:50

  • Next Gold Move Will Surprise The World
    Next Gold Move Will Surprise The World

    Authored by Egon von Greyerz via vongreyerz.gold,

    Trump would not be surprised if there is no gold in Fort Knox.

    There should be 4,600 tons there, at a value of $430 billion. 

    The U.S. allegedly holds 8,100 tons of gold in Fort Knox, with most remaining reserves stored at the New York Fed.

    TRUMP: “Elon and I are going to Fort Knox to see if there is any gold there. If there are only 27 tons, we would be happy. Would not be surprised if there is nothing here – they stole this too!”

    So, is Trump preparing the world that there is no gold in Fort Knox?

    In a recent Tweet, I said:

    So, the time has now arrived for the U.S. to show the world their gold hand.

    Will Trump suppress the news, if it is bad? Very likely.

    GOLD IN FORT KNOX A SIDESHOW

    Whether the gold is or is not in Fort Knox, it could be seen as a sideshow.

    After all, it accounts for only 2% of all the gold ever mined in history.

    But on the other hand, either little or no gold there, results in no confidence in the U.S. or in the dollar.

    GOLD PRICE IS RIDICULOUS

    At $2,920, all the gold officially held by Central Banks is $3 trillion.

    Just one US stock – Microsoft – has a market cap of $3 trillion. 

    How can the value of a SINGLE AMERICAN COMPANY equal the total central bank gold holdings?

    It tells us, how overvalued stocks are; and that the gold price is ridiculously low.

    EXPONENTIAL GOLD MOVE IS STARTING 

    Gold is just starting another massive UP-MOVE. This is the acceleration or exponential phase, as explained below.

    This is when gold will again go up by multiples, just as it always has when currencies collapse.

    Stocks will also fall rapidly, and a bit later, bonds will fall (interest rates up).

    Any major correction in gold is unlikely until it has reached much, much higher prices.

    Thus, anyone watching conventional overbought indicators will miss the Gold Wagon. 

    And don’t forget, the next very big silver move hasn’t started yet. Paper-short positions in silver by bullion banks are temporarily keeping silver down. 

    When, or even before, the gold-silver ratio falls below 75 (now 91), silver will explode.

    Silver will then move 2-3 X as fast as gold.

    But remember that silver is very volatile and not for widows and orphans. So if you want to sleep at night, hold no more than 25% in silver and 75% in gold.

    And remember, it must only be physical. There is an unlimited supply of paper, gold, and silver. One day, these paper contracts will be worthless.

    SO WHY SHOULD ANYONE BUY GOLD?

    As a matter of fact, virtually no one does as gold is only 0.5% of global financial assets.

    Still, gold is up 10X, or more, in most currencies in this century.

    When Nixon went off The Gold Standard in 1971, few understood that this would be the start of the biggest global debt creation in history, leading to gold going up 84 X. More accurately – paper money losing 99%.

    This is not meant to be sensational – I am a conservative Swiss born in Sweden. 

    My message has been consistent for the last 25 years of advising High-Net-Worth Investors to preserve wealth in physical gold and silver stored outside the banking system. 

    WE HAVE HAD SKIN IN THE GAME SINCE 2002. 

    That’s when we and our HNW clients put the majority of their liquid assets in physical gold at $300. I had been fortunate to advise some of them in successful corporate deals in 1999, like selling tech businesses at a valuation of multiples of sales (no profits, of course) in 1999. So, these investors trusted me and put major amounts into gold 23 years ago.

    Why is physical gold the only money in history that hasn’t gone to ZERO?

    Simple – GOLD IS NATURE’S MONEY!

    It is the only money not made by man.

    So it can’t be printed or manufactured.

    It can’t be debased.

    It can’t be hacked – North Korea just stole $1.5 billion from the world’s second-largest crypto exchange. 4›

    It is not dependent on a computer (like crypto or paper money).

    It is unlikely to be confiscated (if you hold it in the right jurisdiction), thus not in the U.S.

    It is unlikely to be stolen if you hold it in the safest vaults.

    GOLD IS VIRTUALLY INDESTRUCTIBLE.

    It is the only money that has maintained its purchasing power for thousands of years. 

    All other money has gone to ZERO, without fail. 

    With such a fantastic record, why is only 0.5% of global assets invested in gold?

    Why doesn’t anyone buy gold? They have been spoiled by a stock market fuelled by printed money. 

    That is about to change. When stock markets start falling in earnest and the era of “stocks-always-go-up” is finished, a stock collapse is very likely. 

    At that time, some investors will realise that they need protection in the form of physical gold. The problem is that gold will not be available at current prices. 

    So, gold will go up by multiples.

    And remember, there will be major bank failures and exponential money printing. 

    As my previous article stated – PRINT BABY PRINT.

    Please, please jump on the Gold (and Silver) Wagon now, before it is too late. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 11:40

  • Citigroup Accidentally Credited $81 Trillion To Account In Colossal 'Near Miss' Event
    Citigroup Accidentally Credited $81 Trillion To Account In Colossal ‘Near Miss’ Event

    A Citigroup attempt to credit a client’s account with just $280 went wildly wrong, with the financial services giant crediting it with $81 trillion instead, the Financial Times has reported. The colossal error undermines the company’s drive to convince regulators that it has rectified operational shortcomings that have plagued it for years. 

    The error went undetected by a payments worker, and a bank official responsible for checking the payment before it was approved for processing as the next business day began. It was only 90 minutes after posting that a third Citigroup employee saw something terribly wrong with the bank’s cash balances, the Times reports, citing an internal summary of the incident it obtained, along with the recollection of two people knowledgable of the mega-mistake. No money actually left the bank. 

    Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser has described the firm’s regulatory woes as her “top priority” (Lam Yik/Bloomberg)

    The “near miss” was kept secret from the public and investors for nearly a year, as it happened last April. Citi did disclose it to both the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). In its defense, Citi said “detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry,” adding that those controls “would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank.” 

    A near miss is defined as the processing of a wrong-amount transaction in which the institution eventually recovers the funds. Citi may well be the near-miss king, with 10 near misses of $1 billion or more in 2024 alone, after racking up 13 in 2023, the Times reports. 

    “While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating control,” said Citi. 

    The Times’ sources say the trouble started with a computer-screen that blocked four transactions heading for an escrow account in Brazil. That screen flagged the payments as potential violations of the US government’s sprawling sanctions regime. To bypass that obstacle, Citi’s tech team told a processor to manually input the $280 credit with a rarely-used workaround process in which the amount field defaults to 15 zeroes that have to be manually deleted. In this case, some of those zeroes clearly weren’t. It’s not clear why the numerals of the intended $280 don’t align with the erroneous $81 trillion credit.  

    To put the $81 trillion in perspective, consider that the current M2 measure of US money supply is “only” $21.5 trillion. The Times‘ revelation of that error comes almost five years after Citi accidentally sent $900 million to creditors involved in a fight over Revlon debt. Rather than making a $7.8 million interest payment on behalf of Revlon, Citi paid off the entire loan balance. Several creditors refused to return the money. Despite intense litigation, Citi was unable to recover $500 million. 

    That debacle toppled then-CEO Michael Corbat, and the firm was showered with fines and served with consent orders under which regulatory agencies demanded the firm address its operational shortcomings under the agencies’ tight, intrusive supervision.

    In a memorable 2022 incident, a Citi employee singlehandedly triggered a flash crash in European equity markets with a keying error that initiated the unintended sale of a massive $444 billion basket of stocks from 13 different countries. UK regulators last year fined Citi the equivalent of $78 million for the disaster. 

    Citigroup is still plagued by problems — and paying a dear price. Last year the Fed and OCC hammered the firm with $136 million in fines for its inability to rectify risk control and data management issues. Corbat successor Jane Fraser says that remedying the rolling regulatory clusterf*ck is her “top priority.” The Times report will do little to bolster the confidence of regulators or customers. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/01/2025 – 11:05

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