Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and a passionate advocate of its wars in the region, has told the people of Lebanon to be grateful for Israeli contributions to its society.
Video of Huckabee speaking at the Atlas Awards in Tel Aviv on May 12 has only recently emerged and is being shared online after it was picked up by Chris Menahan of the news site Information Liberation.
In the speech, Huckabee extolls the various purported Israeli contributions to society, including USB drives, cherry tomatoes and seedless watermelons.
“I wonder if everyone in Lebanon understands that if there were no Israel, they wouldn’t have a cell phone,” Huckabee said.
“I wonder if they understand that every time they use a USB, every time they use car navigation, that every time they eat a cherry tomato or have a delicious bite of seedless watermelon, instead of saying, ‘I can’t talk to those people,’ they should step across the border, shake their hands and say, ‘Thank you’.”
Lebanon’s southern border is currently subject to intense bombardment, and scores of displaced residents who have attempted to return to their homes in the south have been targeted by Israel
Lebanon’s Health Ministry says Israeli air strikes have killed 3,151 people and wounded 9,571 since March 2. The dead include 123 medics, at least 210 children and nearly 300 women.
Huckabee is an outspoken and unapologetic Christian Zionist who has frequently expressed strong backing for Israeli government policies.
In an interview with US podcast host Tucker Carlson, Huckabee supported Israel’s right to take over all of the Middle East to form “Greater Israel”, and said the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament gives the modern-day state of Israel the right to expand its borders.
Israel did not ‘invent’ cherry tomatoes…
Ambassador Mike Huckabee: Everyone in Lebanon should be thanking Israel for making their lives easier by inventing cherry tomatoes. pic.twitter.com/mkBiENYktA
“It would be fine if they took it all,“ Huckabee said when Carlson asked him whether Israel had the right, according to the Bible, to occupy the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.
Huckabee has also been an advocate of the US-Israeli war on Iran, which is currently at a stalemate, with Iran blocking off the critical energy chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz.
OnlyFans “Hack” Hoax Likely Used To Push Malware-Laced Leak Checkers
A cyber threat actor advertised a purported database of 340 million OnlyFans-linked user records on a well-known cybercrime forum, asking for 0.313 BTC, or roughly $76,000, according to U.K.-based cybersecurity news site HackRead.
The alleged “340 million OnlyFans user mega leak” narrative ran rampant on X this past holiday weekend, garnering millions of views from several accounts, which were described as nothing more than an engagement trap.
HackRead pointed out that “conversations with the seller and a review of sample data suggest that the collection did not result from a direct breach or scraping of OnlyFans systems.”
HackRead noted that:
The seller advertised the database as containing usernames, names, email addresses, phone numbers, follower counts, likes, uploaded content statistics, account types, and linked social media profiles. The claims initially gave the impression of a direct platform breach or scraping incident.
However, the story changed after Hackread.com contacted the threat actor directly on Telegram. In private messages, the seller clarified they did not hack or breach OnlyFans. Instead, they claimed the database was built using information collected from previous data leaks and public sources, including breached records from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify.
“We didn’t breach or hack OnlyFans,” the seller said in a message shared with Hackread.com. “We used existing breaches and leaks databases and matched with users of the OnlyFans platform.”
But that didn’t stop some X users from pushing the “OnlyFans is hacked” narrative.
OnlyFans is Hacked 🚨
Apparently OnlyFans has been hacked and they’re selling the complete database of 340 million users
As one X user pointed out, the hack story is “100% fake news,” and the “manufactured hoax is a masterclass in clickbait.”
The person said the “real trap” is that “hackers spreading these fake leaks are trying to panic you into downloading ‘leak checkers.’ The second you run those tools, they install infostealer malware, like Lumma Stealer, to steal your actual passwords.”
OnlyFans did not get hacked. The timeline just fell for another engagement trap.
Over the last 24 hours, viral accounts have been farming millions of views claiming a “mega leak” is selling a database of 340 million OnlyFans users.
The timing of the alleged OnlyFans “hack” narrative is notable. The panic cyber campaign comes just weeks after the Financial Times reported that the platform, widely used by sex workers, is selling a minority stake to San Francisco-based Architect Capital.
From an information operations view, this creates a window for threat actors to exploit and leverage privacy fears to drive users to malware-laced leak-checker tools under the guise of helping them verify exposure.
After three decades of watching market cycles play out from both sides of the trade, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: Wall Street’s love of simple rules is one of the most dangerous aspects of investing. When stocks fall 10%, it’s just a “correction.” However, if they decline 20%, it’s a “bear market.” Simple, clean, repeatable, and printed on every financial media graphic from here to Tokyo. The problem is that the definitions of a correction and bear market have not been updated since Alan Shaw developed them at Smith Barney in the 1960s. Moreover, the market those definitions were designed to describe no longer exists.
Currently, the S&P 500 index is roughly 83% above its long-term trend line, with the Shiller CAPE (cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio) hovering near 40. That valuation level was only exceeded once in the history of American financial markets. The Fed’s balance sheet, still at $6.7 trillion, is more than eight times its pre-2008 level. Under these conditions, the old bear-market definition no longer measures what it was built to measure. A 20% decline from here doesn’t signal either a regime or price trend change. In other words, it would be only a “correction” within an ongoing bullish trend. That understanding is key to today’s discussion.
The Current Bear Market Definition Is Arbitrary
As noted, the “20% rule” traces to Alan Shaw, a technical analyst at Smith Barney in the mid-20th century. His framework was simple. Anything up to 10% was noise. A decline of 10% to 20% was a correction. Anything beyond 20% was a bear market. Shaw’s colleague Louise Yamada, who took over Smith Barney’s technical analysis practice in 2000, later described its staying power with characteristic directness: “It’s just so easy and simple to remember.”
Shaw’s framework made sense in its time. Markets in those decades lived much closer to a gravitational center of fair value. When prices fell by 20%, they often broke the market’s longer-term trend. A decline of that magnitude carried real information. It told you that selling pressure had overwhelmed buying, the market’s price trend had reversed, and the market’s direction of travel had changed from up to down. That’s precisely what the bear market definition was supposed to capture. A change in regime, not just a number.
The question is: after a 17-year-long bull market that stretched prices well beyond long-term trends, is Mr. Shaw’s measure still valid?
To answer that question, let’s clarify the premise.
A bull market is when the market price is trending higher over a long-term period.
A bear market is when the previous advance breaks, and prices begin totrend lower.
The chart below provides a visual of the distinction. When you look at price “trends,” the difference becomes both apparent and useful.
The distinction is essential.
“Corrections”generally occur over short time frames, do not break the prevailing trend in prices, and are quickly resolved by markets reversing to new highs.
“Bear Markets” tend to be longer-term affairs in which prices grind sideways or lower over several months as valuations revert.
What a Real Bear Market Actually Looks Like
The two genuine bear markets of this century make the definition’s original intent clear. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the S&P 500 lost nearly 49% of its value. It didn’t recover to its prior peak until 2007. Seven years lost. The bullish trend didn’t pause; it broke, and investors who sat through it got years of negative real returns with no policy rescue from Washington or the Fed.
The 2008 crisis was worse. From October 2007 to March 2009, the S&P fell about 57%. It didn’t return to its prior highs until early 2013. The price structure didn’t just dip below an arbitrary threshold. It collapsed, stayed down for years, and required one of the most aggressive monetary policy responses in the Fed’s history to eventually stabilize. That’s a bear market in the original sense of the word. A sustained, structural reversal of the prior bullish trend.
Now compare that to 2022. The S&P peaked on January 3 of that year, fell 25.4% to its October trough, and technically satisfied every condition of a bear market under the standard definition. By July 2023, every point of that decline had been recovered. By early 2024, the index was making new all-time highs. The 2022 decline was painful, but it did not reverse the underlying trend. Yes, prices fell, but found support well above any reasonable measure of long-term fair value, and resumed their climb. Putting the 2022 episode in the same category as 2000 or 2008 doesn’t just mislead investors; it tells the story exactly backward.
How the Fed Rewired the Market
To understand why the bear market definition needs to be revised, you have to reckon honestly with what the Federal Reserve has done to the market’s structural foundation. Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed’s balance sheet sat at roughly $800 billion. Modest. Stable. Largely inconsequential to equity prices on any given day.
Then came the crisis. The Fed launched three rounds of quantitative easing between 2009 and 2014, pushing its balance sheet to roughly $4.5 trillion. It tried to normalize beginning in 2018, then COVID hit. In two years, the balance sheet more than doubled again, from $4.3 trillion to nearly $9 trillion. As of April, 2026, it still sits at $6.7 trillion, even after years of several years of quantitative tightening.
That liquidity didn’t evaporate. It repriced every financial asset upward. It suppressed yields, starved investors of income alternatives, and effectively forced capital into equities regardless of underlying valuation. The market didn’t reach these levels because corporate America suddenly became dramatically more profitable. It reached them because the price of money was artificially held low for over a decade, which changed the math in every valuation model investors use. The result is a market structure with no historical precedent for its distance from the long-term trend.
What the P/Es Actually Tell You
The more bearish crowd consistently points to the Shiller CAPE ratio as a measure of impending doom. However, investors should understand that the CAPE ratio measures the market’s current price relative to 10 years of inflation-adjusted earnings. At 40, investors are currently paying 40 times that earnings figure for every dollar of S&P 500 exposure. That’s a lot by any historical measure, considering the historical median is 16x. The bear’s argument, and rightly so, is that the market has traded above 40 on the CAPE ratio only once before in its history, and that was at the dot-com peak. We know how that ended.
But this is important, as we have discussed many times, the problem is that valuation measures are just that – a measure of current valuation. More importantly, when valuations are excessive, it is a better measure of “investor psychology” and the manifestation of the “greater fool theory.”
Notably, valuation models are not, and were never meant to be, “market timing indicators.” There are many articles penned suggesting that if a measure of valuation (P/E, P/S, P/B, etc.) reaches some specific level, it means that:
The market is about to crash, and
Investors should be in 100% cash.
Such is incorrect.
What valuations provide is a reasonable estimate of long-term investment returns. It is logical that if you overpay for a stream of future cash flows today, your future return will be low. We can see this evidence by comparing the 10-year total return of a $1000 investment in the stock market to Shiller’s CAPE ratio, as noted above.
However, here’s where it gets interesting. Even if you don’t use the long-term median as your target, the math of mean reversion is sobering at any reasonable level. At the time of this writing, we can map each scenario from the S&P close of 7,399 (May 10, 2026), and the picture becomes clear.
Notice what that table shows. A 20% decline from current levels leaves the market at roughly 32x cyclically adjusted earnings. That’s twice the historical median. The market doesn’t even begin to approach a valuation floor that has historically supported the start of a new secular bull market until you’re down 50% to 60% from here.
That’s not a prediction; that’s arithmetic, and the difference between a correction and a bear market in today’s financial markets.
The recovery math compounds the problem. A 30% loss requires a 43% gain just to break even, before accounting for the time lost while recovering. A 50% loss demands a full 100% return to get back to where you started. For investors in or near retirement, that’s not a temporary setback. That’s a structural threat to financial security.
“A 20% decline from a market that’s 83% above trend doesn’t reach trend. It barely dents the excess. The old bear market definition was built for a different world, and that world no longer exists.”
Two Halves To A Full Cycle
I wrote about this in August 2020, right after the COVID crash had recovered, and everyone was declaring it the shortest bear market in history. My argument then was the same one I’m making now: March 2020 was a correction, not a bear market, because it never broke the long-term bullish price trend that started in 2009. The same is true of 2022. And of the Iran-related correction we saw in early 2026. Those were all pressure releases within an ongoing bull market. None of them completed the cycle.
Because that’s the part Wall Street glosses over. Every bull market is only half of a full market cycle. The second half, the bear, is when the excesses accumulated during the upswing, the overvaluation, the leverage, the speculative positioning, get wrung out through a sustained decline that resets prices back toward fundamental value. That process has played out after every major bull market in the historical record. From the 1929 collapse to the 1970s grind, the dot-com bust, and the financial crisis. None of them was optional; they were just the structural corrections of prior excesses.
The bull market that started at S&P 683 in March 2009 is now 17 years old. It’s the longest on record and has been sustained by:
Three rounds of QE,
A zero-interest rate policy for most of a decade,
$5 trillion in pandemic stimulus, and
A generational AI investment cycle that’s still in its early innings.
All of that is real. But none of it changes the underlying valuation math, and eventually, prices will reflect fundamentals. They always do. The problem for investors, however, isn’t whether a real bear market will happen; it’s when, and more practically, whether your portfolio is built to survive the transition.
As noted, the 2020 and 2022 declines share one critical feature: both recovered before prices touched the long-term trend line shown above. They were corrections in an ongoing bullish trend, and both required a significant Fed or fiscal response to stabilize. A genuine bear market, one that resets valuations toward historical norms, would require neither a quick recovery nor a policy rescue. It would require a decline large enough to reach that trend line.
The bottom line is that the 20% threshold isn’t wrong. It’s just not calibrated for a market that’s trading 83% above its long-term trend. In a world where markets lived near fair value, a 20% decline carried information about the trend. Today, it carries sentiment information. That’s a meaningful difference, and it changes how you should think about both potential corrections and portfolio risk.
Stop anchoring your risk budget to the 20% number.
The relevant question isn’t “how far has this fallen?” It’s “how far is this from where prices would need to be for the bull market trend to genuinely reverse?”
Right now, that gap is enormous. A real bear market, in the structural sense, would likely need to be a 30% to 50% decline, and possibly deeper, before prices would reach the kind of valuation support that has historically ended bear markets and started new secular bulls.
That doesn’t mean panic. It means position sizing, risk management, and stop-loss disciplines need to account for a potential drawdown far larger than the 20% threshold Wall Street treats as the danger zone.
We continue to suggest that investors maintain appropriate hedges, keep risk allocations proportional to their time horizon and income needs, and resist the “buy the dip” impulse when the dip doesn’t actually bring you closer to value.
Make no mistake, the trend is still up. The AI investment cycle is real, earnings are growing, and the tape remains technically constructive at current levels. But the distance between current prices and genuine long-term fair value is wider today than at any point outside the dot-com peak. That’s not a reason to be out of the market. It is a reason to know exactly what you own, why you own it, and what your exit plan looks like if the second half of this cycle finally arrives.
Pope Sounds Alarm On AI “Slavery” While Church Aligns With Lefty Anthropic
Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday, entitled Magnifica Humanitas (The Magnificence of the Human Person).
The roughly 42,300-word declaration, issued as a papal encyclical, warned, “The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation.”
“If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity,” the pontiff explained in the encyclical, while urging governments to regulate the private companies driving AI advances and warning that the pursuit of profit cannot justify mass job losses.
The pontiff called for retraining and protections for working-class folks threatened by AI-related job loss, stronger education to help students understand AI risks, and safeguards against violent, sexualized, or fake AI-generated content targeting children.
His strongest warning came on the military use of AI. Leo said AI risks making life-and-death decisions faster, more impersonal, and easier to justify, especially as cyberattacks, influence campaigns, AI kill chains, and hybrid warfare blur the line between defense and aggression.
At the event earlier today, where the pontiff unveiled the encyclical, attendees included prominent cardinals and theologians, as well as Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the left-leaning AI startup Anthropic, who leads its interpretability team.
The pope said the church and Anthropic will cooperate to “find a path for humanity in the age of artificial intelligence” …
Pope Leo XIV, during the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas — the first papal encyclical in history dedicated to artificial intelligence — stated that the Church and Anthropic will cooperate to “find a path for humanity in the age of artificial intelligence.
For most people, the price of gasoline is the most obvious consequence of the war in the Middle East. As I write this article, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is $4.56. Of course, in some parts of the country, consumers are paying much more than that. This is a big story, and the truth is that gasoline prices are going to go even higher in the months ahead.
But if you think that the price of gasoline is bad, just wait until you see what eventually happens to food prices. The price of diesel has been rising even faster than the price of regular gasoline, and fertilizer prices have been absolutely skyrocketing. Those costs will get passed along to the rest of us. It is just a matter of time. Meanwhile, our farmers are dealing with drought conditions that are unprecedented, and now a “Super El Niño” is coming.
What all of this means is that food prices will rise to very painful levels.
So even though everyone is complaining about rising gasoline prices at the moment, one prominent economist is warning that “the next story is food”…
The cost of food in the U.S. appears poised to rise sharply alongside oil prices, as war-related supply disruptions put pressure on the companies and farmers who keep the country’s shelves stocked.
“The big story right now is oil,” economist Justin Wolfers told MS NOW on Tuesday. “The next story is food.”
Oil prices have risen over 50 percent since the conflict began on February 28, pushing gas prices to a nationwide average of over $4.50 for the first time since 2022.
Can you imagine what would happen if food prices were to rise another 50 percent from current levels?
When compared to the same time last year, fruits and vegetables have seen some of the biggest price hikes. Tomatoes are 40% more expensive now than they were this time last year. Bad growing weather, tariffs, and rising fuel prices have all contributed to the huge change in tomato prices, reports the New York Times.
Coffee, another imported product, is 19% more expensive than it was last spring.
You’re also likely seeing inflated prices at the butcher counter. Meat is up 9% overall, but beef has grown even more expensive. Ground beef is about 15% pricier, beef roasts are 18% more, and steak is up 16%.
We can blame the war with Iran for the recent price hikes that we have been experiencing, because the war has made diesel much more expensive.
What’s contributing to the price spikes? Fuel prices have soared while the Iran war prevents cargo ships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital corridor for global oil supplies. Diesel fuel powers fishing boats, tractors and the trucks that ship 83% of U.S. agricultural products.
Just as you’re paying more at the pump, so are truckers who transport goods all around the country. Some vendors and suppliers are adding fuel surcharges to make up for the increased cost of transporting and delivering their goods.
In addition, fertilizer prices have gone absolutely haywire, and those costs will be passed along to us once harvest season arrives.
The solution to this crisis would be for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen.
But Iran isn’t willing to do that.
Instead, Iran intends to make the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz permanent…
Iran and Oman are actively discussing a permanent security mechanism for the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is pushing to institutionalize and normalize a transit fee or toll on commercial shipping vessels navigating the narrow waterway. According to an Iranian diplomatic envoy, the proposed system is designed to secure the long-term positioning of Iran and Oman as the primary regulators of the strait, effectively transforming a temporary leverage point from the recent military conflict into a permanent sovereign right.
To formalize its grip, Iran’s newly established Persian Gulf Straits Authority began applying conditional rules and hefty transit tolls, in some cases exceeding one million dollars per vessel, while granting selective exemptions to friendly nations like Russia or China. By engaging Oman, which shares territorial jurisdiction over the Strait, Iran is seeking to build a coalition that validates these tolls under the guise of funding localized maritime security.
The US maintains an opposing view on the matter, viewing the permanent toll as a non-negotiable barrier to reaching a sustainable peace deal. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, international straits are governed by transit passage protocols that guarantee the uninterrupted flow of global commercial shipping, a principle the US insists must be restored without conditions.
This is one of the reasons why there is not going to be an agreement to end the war.
“A toll collection system in the Strait of Hormuz will make a diplomatic deal impossible.”
“We are very disappointed with NATO allies, we will discuss the issue of troop deployment at the upcoming meeting.”
If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, a global inflation crisis is guaranteed.
And on top of everything else, now a “Super El Niño” is rapidly approaching.
We are being warned that it could potentially be the most powerful “Super El Niño” in recorded history…
Scientists have warned that an imminent ‘super El Niño’ could be even more powerful than a previous event which caused over 50 million deaths.
The 1877 El Niño was one of the most severe climate events in recorded history, triggering a global humanitarian disaster known as The Great Famine.
Climate reconstructions suggest water temperatures in a key region of the Pacific Ocean rose by 2.7°C (4.86°F), which caused disruption to rainfall patterns around the world.
If the Super El Niño of 1877-1878 killed 50 million people when the global population was just a fraction of what it is today, what would an even more powerful Super El Niño do?
Estimates indicate the resulting scarcity of food and disease outbreaks killed up to four per cent of the Earth’s population at the time.
That would be the equivalent of at least 250 million people if it happened today.
Now, forecasts suggest water temperatures could potentially exceed 3°C (5.4°F) above average later this year – making the upcoming super El Niño even more powerful than the one nearly 150 years ago.
‘Simultaneous multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again,’ Deepti Singh, associate professor at Washington State University, told the Washington Post.
Worldwide food production was already going to be way down this year due to the global fertilizer crisis.
Now an immensely powerful “Super El Niño” is being added to the equation.
What do you think that all of this is going to do to food prices?
Needless to say, the answer is obvious.
We are in far more trouble than most people realize, but for now, most of the population just continues to party.
In 2024, climate activists in New York City protested alongside anti-Israel protesters at a rally headlined “Climate Justice Means Free Palestine.”
Last year, climate change celebrity icon Greta Thunberg tried to storm Israel by sea on a flotilla protesting the country’s war in Gaza, yelling “Free! Free! Palestine!” when she was refused entry.
And, last week, activists from CodePink, a far-left feminist activist group that has received funds from an American expatriate, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai, took a break from their rallies supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cuba Communist Party to circulate a video on Instagram, attacking a Utah data center project backed by investor Kevin O’Leary.
That’s a busy bunch protesting against the West.
Maybe someone should tell them that the clean air in Cuba is due to a collapse of industrial activity.
Or we can always remind them of how they treat gays in Palestine or women in general.
As the article points out, these marches were always about hating the West and what we stand for.
So don’t be fooled by the slogans or some well-meaning people showing up to protest.
The root of all of this is hatred of the West and our individual freedoms.
The widening wealth inequality gap is the political third rail nobody in power truly ever wants to touch.
Politicians will scream at each other all day over taxes, healthcare, immigration, tariffs, student loans, climate policy, or whatever outrage is currently driving engagement on cable news and social media. But the second the conversation turns toward monetary policy, toward the machinery of money creation itself, the room suddenly gets very quiet.
That’s because monetary policy has quietly become the single most powerful force reshaping wealth distribution in modern America. And unlike the endless partisan theater surrounding fiscal policy, monetary intervention oddly enjoys remarkable bipartisan support.
Republicans and Democrats may pretend to be existential enemies on television, but when it comes to flooding the financial system with dollars, both parties reliably fall into line. And that support is precisely why this topic is politically radioactive: once people understand how the system works, the illusion of two competing economic ideologies starts to collapse. Republicans want less spending, Democrats want higher taxes…but both parties want the Fed to keep printing dollars.
Since the early 2000s, and especially after 2008 and the COVID era, America has effectively entered a permanent regime of monetary intervention. Quantitative easing, near-zero interest rates, endless debt monetization, emergency lending facilities, and the mainstream acceptance of Modern Monetary Theory-adjacent thinking have fundamentally altered the structure of markets beyond recognition.
When Ben Bernanke first rolled out quantitative easing during the 2008 financial crisis, Americans were repeatedly assured it was a temporary emergency measure. Bernanke described the programs as targeted interventions designed to stabilize markets and support recovery, not permanently redefine the financial system.
QE1 was supposed to calm panic. Then came QE2. Then Operation Twist. Then QE3 became effectively open-ended, with the Fed purchasing tens of billions in bonds every month indefinitely. What began as a supposedly temporary crisis tool metastasized into a permanent feature of the modern economy. And every subsequent crisis only justified bigger interventions: larger balance sheets, lower rates, more liquidity, more market dependence on central bank support.
The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet exploded from under $1 trillion before 2008 to nearly $9 trillion after the pandemic era. Like nearly every government “emergency” program in history, the temporary measure never truly disappeared, it simply normalized, expanded, and embedded itself deeper into the system. It culminated in Neel Kashkari taking to national television to let the world know the Fed has “infinite” cash.
Which is to say…the old rules are dead.
Historical valuation metrics increasingly feel meaningless because markets are no longer functioning inside anything resembling a closed system governed by organic price discovery and economic fundamentals. Investors used to rely on earnings multiples, historical averages, bond yields, and economic cycles because those metrics assumed markets were constrained by actual capital and relatively stable money supply growth.
Now we operate inside a permanently distorted financial system where trillions of dollars can be electronically created and injected into markets whenever instability appears. The market is no longer primarily driven by productivity or efficient allocation of capital. It is driven by liquidity. Price discovery has been replaced by intervention dependency and risk has been socialized while gains remain privatized.
And every time markets threaten to correct naturally, policymakers intervene to ensure asset prices do not fall far enough to inflict meaningful pain on the people who own the overwhelming majority of financial assets. And the consequences of this have been staggering.
While both parties bitch and moan about affordability, protecting the middle and lower class, and “equity”, one of the clearest signs of this Fed-created distortion is the explosive growth of the ultrawealthy class. According to The Wall Street Journal, there are now roughly 430,000 American households worth more than $30 million, including approximately 74,000 households worth over $100 million. The growth of these groups has dramatically outpaced overall population growth over the past several decades.
In other words, Fed policy, blessed by both political parties, is widening the wealth inequality gap both political parties claim to fighting against. This staggering chart shows the result of endless QE: the rich get richer…which would normally be fine with me, I’m a capitalist…except the top 1% are getting richer faster and at the expense of the middle and lower class’ loss purchashing power.When it comes to purchasing power, we are literally taking from the poor, and giving to the rich.
And this is the direct mathematical outcome of an economic system designed to inflate asset prices continuously. The Wall Street Journalcited research showing that the inflation-adjusted wealth of the top 0.1% has increased more than thirteenfold over the past fifty years. Meanwhile, the bottom half of the country spent decades struggling merely to maintain positive net worth.
Think about how insane that divergence really is. Fed policy has caused the wealth of the rich to escape into another dimension entirely while much of the country got buried under inflated housing costs, inflated healthcare, inflated tuition, inflated insurance, inflated food prices, and stagnant purchasing power. It’s a policy that directly benefits the “haves” and disproportionately burdens the “have nots” (think about owning a house while prices rise, versus trying to a buyer of your first house while prices rise).
Nearly 72% of the wealth held by the top 0.1% consists of stocks, mutual funds, and private businesses — precisely the assets supercharged by quantitative easing and artificially suppressed interest rates, the piece notes.
This is the hidden engine underneath modern inequality.
When central banks flood the system with liquidity, the money does not magically disperse evenly across society. It enters through banks, financial institutions, government spending channels, debt markets, and asset purchases. The first recipients of newly created money benefit before inflation fully spreads through the broader economy.
By the time ordinary people feel the effects, prices have already risen. The wealthy own appreciating assets. The middle and lower classes primarily own wages and cash. And wages are always the last thing to adjust.
So while asset holders watch their net worth explode upward, ordinary families experience the opposite reality: homes become unattainable, groceries spike, savings accounts become meaningless, and generations are pushed further away from financial stability.
And the most inconvenient truth for all of Washington is that politicians love pretending to be horrified by affordability crises while continuing to support the exact monetary regime producing them.
They complain about housing costs after years of suppressing rates and inflating real estate prices. They complain about inequality after engineering one of the largest asset booms in modern history. They talk endlessly about helping “working families” while simultaneously creating trillions of dollars that overwhelmingly benefit the people who already own the overwhelming majority of financial assets.
And both parties are complicit, which is what makes the entire charade so grotesque. Both parties scream about fiscal deficits when politically convenient. Yet both become remarkably comfortable with monetary expansion so long as markets remain elevated and the reckoning gets delayed beyond the next election cycle.
Consider the rhetoric around interest rates over the past several years.
President Trump has repeatedly pressured the Federal Reserve for lower rates and easier monetary conditions, arguing that tighter policy threatened markets and growth. Elizabeth Warren has also pushed for looser monetary policy from the opposite ideological direction, warning that higher rates could weaken the labor market and hurt workers.
Different rhetoric, same addiction. The right frames easy money as pro-growth, the left frames easy money as compassionate.But both roads lead to the same destination: more liquidity, higher asset prices, and widening wealth inequality. What’s the last thing President Trump and Elizabeth Warren agreed on?
This is why the supposed economic divide between the parties increasingly feels performative. Beneath the culture war circus exists a deeper bipartisan consensus: financial markets must remain inflated at all costs.
And the lower and middle class gets absolutely brutalized in this arrangement.
Historically, middle-class wealth accumulation depended on disciplined saving, stable employment, affordable housing, and gradual investment appreciation over time. But inflationary monetary regimes destroy the reliability of all of those pathways. Savings become punishment, cash becomes a melting ice cube, young people are forced into speculative assets (or outright becoming gambling addicts) simply to attempt to preserve purchasing power. Conservative investing gets punished while reckless leverage gets rewarded.
Entire generations now feel compelled to try and make quick money in markets not because they are greedy, but because monetary debasement has made traditional financial prudence nonviable. This creates an economy built less on productivity and innovation and more on asset inflation, debt expansion and outright speculation.
And inflation itself is particularly nefarious because it operates invisibly. It steals purchasing power quietly, gradually, and often incomprehensibly. Most people do not connect central bank balance sheets to why they suddenly cannot afford the same standard of living they had five years earlier. They simply feel squeezed. They work harder, save less, delay families, postpone homeownership, drown in debt, and wonder why prosperity always seems permanently out of reach.
The theft of their purchasing power happens in the darkness. Unlike direct taxation, monetary debasement allows everyone involved to avoid accountability. Instead of openly taxing citizens to fund endless spending and bailouts, the system simply dilutes the value of everyone’s currency. And the people causing the inflation are usually insulated from its consequences because they own the very assets inflated by the policy itself.
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That is why luxury demand continues exploding even while ordinary consumers struggle. The Wall Street Journal recently noted booming demand for Ferrari, Hermès, luxury Manhattan real estate, and private aviation among the ultrawealthy even as many middle-class consumers pull back spending elsewhere. That is not a healthy economy, that is a bifurcated economy.
And Modern Monetary Theory only pushes this logic to its most dangerous extreme. MMT advocates often speak in sanitized academic language about sovereign currency issuance and functional finance, but the real-world result is painfully simple: endless money creation distorts prices, rewards asset holders, punishes savers, and accelerates inequality. A society cannot print its way to genuine prosperity forever, it can only redistribute claims on existing prosperity while weakening the currency denominator underneath the entire system.
The defenders of perpetual intervention always insist the alternative would be catastrophic…markets would crash, unemployment would rise, and recession would follow. There is truth in that argument. The system has become so addicted to liquidity that withdrawal now threatens immense instability.
But that only exposes the deeper problem. A market that cannot survive without permanent monetary life support is no longer a healthy market, it is a managed dependency system. A patient on hospice care. And every bailout pushes the reckoning further into the future while making the eventual consequences even worse.
That is why so many people feel like the game is rigged even when official economic statistics appear healthy. GDP can rise. Stock indices can hit all-time highs. Unemployment can remain low. Yet millions of people still feel poorer because the underlying structure increasingly funnels gains upward while socializing losses downward. If the bond market eventually needs a bailout, which I have speculated it may, this would be a great lesson for us to remember and empower ourselves with.
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Semiconductor Manufacturing International soared to a record high in China after Huawei unveiled what it described as a breakthrough pathway for advanced semiconductor production at the IEEE ISCAS conference, without relying on the West’s most advanced chipmaking equipment.
Huawei’s semiconductor chief, He Tingbo, told the audience earlier today that the company has developed a “New Semiconductor Path in Practice” that replaces traditional Moore’s Law-style geometric scaling with time scaling and reducing signal propagation delay across devices, circuits, chips, and systems.
In her speech, she presented the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, a new principle for guiding the future development of the semiconductor industry. This law proposes replacing geometric scaling with time (τ) scaling as a new guiding principle for the evolution of both semiconductors and electronic systems. Based on this principle, innovative technologies such as LogicFolding can be used to continuously compress signal propagation delay and steadily improve transistor density, which will drive the ongoing evolution of semiconductors and electronic systems.
Tingbo said Huawei plans to make 1.4-nanometer chips by 2031 using its own “LogicFolding” architecture. TSMC has said it expects to begin mass production of 1.4nm chips in 2028, leaving Huawei about five years behind the global leader, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
Tingbo claims LogicFolding can boost chip performance and will be used in upcoming Kirin mobile chips expected this fall.
This comes as U.S. sanctions on advanced chipmaking equipment and high-end semiconductors have been aimed at slowing China’s push into cutting-edge chip production.
Shares of Chinese chip stocks surged, with SMIC jumping more than 18% and Hua Hong Semiconductor hitting daily limits.
The view is that this is a potential breakthrough in China’s effort to bypass U.S.-led export controls and reduce dependence on Western semiconductor equipment.
We suspect someone in the Trump team will likely weigh in on this development in the coming days, if not weeks.
Spencer Pratt is running a campaign unlike anything seen in Los Angeles politics. The former reality star turned mayoral candidate isn’t just talking about the city’s collapse into filth, crime, and decay – he’s making the evidence work for him.
His team has taken to the streets with power washers and stencils, blasting clean messages like “IMAGINE IF THE STREETS WERE THIS CLEAN” and “SPENCER PRATT FOR MAYOR” directly into the grime accumulated under Democrat leadership.
The tactic is as simple as it is devastating. The cleaned sections stand out starkly against the surrounding trash and dirt, creating a living advertisement for change.
Spencer Pratt has launched a campaign where filthy Los Angeles streets are power washed using a stencil reading “imagine if the streets were this clean.”
Imagine letting the streets get so dirty under your leadership that your opponent can use them as a billboard.
– Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) May 24, 2026
If Democrat Mayor Karen Bass wants the signs gone, her administration has to actually clean the streets – something residents say hasn’t happened consistently for years.
? NOW: Socialists are FURIOUS that Spencer Pratt’s campaign is now POWER WASHING the streets clean spelling the words “IMAGINE IF THE STREETS WERE THIS CLEAN”
“SPENCER PRATT FOR MAYOR” ???
Karen Bass has allowed FILTH to become an ad against her ?
Pratt’s approach highlights the stark reality Los Angeles faces.
Recent reports and viral videos paint a picture of a once-great city reduced to dystopian conditions: massive homeless encampments overrun by rats, open-air drug markets operating brazenly, and public spaces buried under tents, trash, and human waste.
One video shows entire networks of makeshift homes under bridges tapping into city power.
Another resident-driven idea gaining traction involves marking potholes and blighted areas with pro-Pratt messages, forcing city crews to respond faster to erase political opposition than to basic maintenance.
Pratt has been vocal about the root causes. In campaign videos, he stresses that Los Angeles doesn’t have a homelessness problem so much as a drug addiction and failed leadership crisis. He points to billions spent with little visible improvement, calling out the “Homeless Industrial Complex” of nonprofits and bureaucrats who profit from perpetuating the cycle rather than solving it.
His five-step plan focuses on mandatory treatment, clearing encampments, cracking down on crime and drug use, and prioritizing public safety. “If that addict on your street were your own son, what would you do?” he asks, framing the issue as a moral and practical emergency.
The establishment is not amused. As Pratt surges in polls and fundraising – recent figures show him closing the gap on incumbent Karen Bass – the attacks have intensified. Hollywood figures and metropolitan leftists have lashed out, with “Price is Right” host Drew Carey calling Pratt a “serial scammer” and telling voters to reject him in a foul-mouthed rant.
? NOW: LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is surging SO MUCH in the race against Karen Bass that the Democrat machine is lashing out, launching desperate attacks
Pratt is SEIZING on anger regarding homelessness, fires, crime and dilapidation
Pratt’s organic, creative tactics, and direct appeals – have rattled the machine. Supporters see it as a masterclass in connecting with frustrated residents tired of excuses.
Decades of progressive policies prioritizing open borders, soft-on-crime approaches, and massive unchecked spending have produced predictable results. California has funneled enormous sums into homelessness programs, yet streets remain filthy and unsafe. Residents navigate urine-soaked doorways and blocked infrastructure daily while officials tout statistics that don’t match lived experience.
Pratt’s personal stake adds weight. His home in Pacific Palisades was lost in the fires, an event he ties directly to leadership failures. He frames his run as fighting for his family and the city he loves, rejecting the decline as inevitable.
This isn’t just another election cycle in LA. Pratt’s campaign forces a confrontation with reality: voters can continue down the path of managed decay or demand basic competence – clean streets, safe neighborhoods, and accountability. The power-washed messages make the choice literal. As the June primary approaches, Angelenos are paying attention.
The broader lesson extends beyond one city. When leadership prioritizes ideology over results, everyday life suffers. Pratt’s unorthodox push represents a rejection of that status quo in favor of practical restoration. Whether it translates to victory remains to be seen, but the conversation he has sparked is long overdue. Los Angeles deserves better than managed decline.
Pentagon Conducts First Military Drill In Venezuela Since Maduro Overthrow
On Saturday, the US military conducted a highly visible drill right in the heart of Caracas, marking the first known American military exercise on Venezuelan soil since the chaotic January 3rd operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The show of force involved two US Marine Corps Osprey aircraft touching down near the recently reopened US Embassy in Caracas, which went operational only two months ago, in March.
“The drill, which the Venezuelan government said it had authorized as an evacuation drill for possible medical emergencies or disasters, included two MV-22B Osprey aircraft that landed near the U.S. embassy and vessels that entered Venezuelan waters in the Caribbean Sea,” Reuters detailed.
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil had announced and previewed the drill to the local population, and dubbed the action a ‘rapid response’ exercise in the heart of the capital.
There were reports of protests in the capital, by those who reject their country being used for American military drills:
While some Caracas residents gathered to observe the aircraft, a group of protesters elsewhere in the city displayed a Venezuelan flag with the message ‘No to the Yankee drill’ to express their opposition.
However, other crowds reportedly gathered just the watch the large Marine Corps Ospreys sweep in low to the city.
The US Embassy later revealed that Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of US Southern Command, was personally on board one of the Ospreys.
This marks Donovan’s second high-profile visit to Caracas since the January raid, which left a bloody trail of at least 83 dead – mostly Venezuelan military forces, Cuban presidential guards, but also reportedly four civilians.
According to an official post on X by the US Embassy, Donovan’s itinerary made for a busy day: “[Donovan] participated in bilateral talks with high-ranking representatives of the interim government, met with the leadership and staff of the United States Embassy, and observed the joint force conducting a military response exercise,” it said.
Trump and Rubio posters TORCHED in Caracas streets
The current Venezuelan government, now helmed by Acting President Delcy Rodriguez (Maduro’s own former vice president), has been moving quickly to manage domestic optics.
The irony is that there has not in the end actually been ‘regime change’ in Venezuela – only government ‘decapitation’ – with Maduro on US soil and in federal custody. Rodriguez is a socialist as Latin American leaders have come, and she presides over the same government – only this time while serving Washington oil and business interests.
