Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has said the security services from both the United States and Lithuania have warned him that his life was in danger, after a Russian plot was discovered which allegedly targeted Kremlin critics living abroad.

Last month the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said five people had been charged with plotting, on behalf of Russian intelligence, to assassinate two opposition figures.

One of the targets was in the United States, and the other in Lithuania.

DOJ did not identify Kasparov – who moved to the United States from Russia in 2013 and lives in New York – but in a Substack post the 63-year-old former chess grandmaster said he had been warned his life was in danger.

He identified the other person as Ivan Tyutrin, the co-founder of the Free Russia Forum, who is based in Lithuania.

“Neither I nor Ivan have been told explicitly that we were the targets whose names are redacted in the indictment of the assassins,” Kasparov said.

“We were, however, warned by security services in Lithuania and the United States that our lives were in danger and that we should take precautions, which I did and will continue to do.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the Free Russia Forum for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

Kasparov – who was born in Baku in what is now Azerbaijan, when it was part of the Soviet Union – became famous when, at the age of 22, he beat Anatoly Karpov to become world chess champion, a title he held until 2000.

Kasparov, an increasingly outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, chairs the Renew Democracy Initiative, a nonprofit that describes itself as an “intellectual home for the pro-democracy movement” globally.

In his The Next Move Substack, Kasparov said his friend and fellow opposition figure, Boris Nemtsov, was “murdered in cold blood in front of the Kremlin” in February 2015.

‘I Will Not Hide’: Kasparov

“But I will not stop, and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so. I believe that the best defense is a good offense,” Kasparov said.

“My family and I will not truly be safe as long as Putin is in power in Russia – a circumstance shared by millions.”

The DOJ only referred to the targets of the alleged Russian intelligence plot as Victim-1, who lived in the United States, and Victim-2, who lived in Lithuania.

They said a U.S. national had been offered $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” Victim-1.

A U.S. citizen was also contacted about surveilling and murdering Victim-2, who was allegedly described by the plotters as a “bad guy” who was “telling lies about Russia.”

The Kremlin said last month it saw no reason to comment on the U.S. allegations, saying there was an absence of credible evidence and facts.

Russia has previously denied conducting such plots on foreign soil.

When West Virginia first announced that they had joined the race to host Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses (NLICs), the central bargain was already clear: nuclear investment comes with responsibility for used fuel. 

We’ve covered this concept a couple times now, highlighting states like Texas and New Mexico that back nuclear investment while fighting storage of out-of-state spent fuel.

Now, West Virginia has joined the club of pro-nuclear pretenders.

Governor Patrick Morrisey signed an exploratory agreement with DOE and announced West Virginia’s entry as the sixth contender in the first week of September. The governor claimed he and his staff went above and beyond to be considered for an NLIC.

It’s not surprising, considering over half the states in the country applied for the program with the knowledge that the campuses could attract up to $50 billion in investment and create nearly 25,000 jobs, each.

The frustrating part is that the expectation to take in used nuclear fuel wasn’t some secret buried in the fine print. West Virginia’s submitted NLIC proposal made temporary used fuel storage a top priority, alongside research into longer-term disposal. Its September agreement explicitly anticipated addressing out-of-state spent fuel and other radioactive waste.

This all only came to light on September 25th when the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported what the administration had actually proposed, using documents obtained through a public-records request. The sales pitch suddenly had an inconveniently readable paper trail.

Multiple lawmakers, even pro-nuclear Republicans, raised concerns about constituents being blindsided. Delegate Josh Holstein said Boone County’s elected representatives had not been informed that the former Hobet mine was among the proposed sites.

By September 27th, Morrisey put out a formal statement declaring a hard flip from his previous posturing: “West Virginia will not be a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Period.“

The Gazette got it wrong. This Friday’s story intentionally misrepresented my administration’s energy plans without giving me a chance to address their claims and slanted coverage. Here’s the truth: We are pursuing nuclear generation and manufacturing to bring high-paying jobs to West Virginia. Our recent application to the U.S. Department of Energy was part of that effort. We want to build on our existing strengths in coal and natural gas to create more jobs and opportunity, stronger communities, and a higher standard of living. But West Virginia will not be a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Period. I have directed my Office of Energy to ensure that every site identified in our final Nuclear Campus application is considered only for nuclear generation or manufacturing – not as a dump. I will keep fighting for investments that can bring thousands of high-paying jobs to our state. I will also protect West Virginia’s beauty and heritage. We can pursue new opportunities without becoming a dumping ground. More energy jobs and manufacturing jobs are on the table. Nuclear waste dumps are not. We’ve had enough fake news.

— Governor Patrick Morrisey (@wvgovernor) September 27, 2026

By September 30th, the NLIC hosting deadline, state energy director Nicholas Preservati told DOE West Virginia was “unable to execute the Hosting Agreement and commit fully to its requirements.” The letter still surprisingly proclaimed support for a national nuclear renaissance.

It’s just somebody else’s responsibility, apparently. As with Texas and New Mexico, the enthusiasm looks considerably thinner once nuclear’s less glamorous obligations enter the conversation.

West Virginia has not banned nuclear development, but it has walked away from this attempt to connect the industry’s benefits with its lifecycle responsibilities.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The Pentagon has raised combat pay for US troops for the first time since 2002, Task & Purpose has reported, as the Iran war continues and another round of escalation between the US and Iran appears to be coming.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the pay increase last week. “Our troops in harm’s way deserve compensation that reflects their risk. For the first time in over two decades, the Department of War is increasing Hostile Fire Pay and Imminent Danger Pay,” he wrote on X.

Parnell said that Hostile Fire Pay, which troops can receive if their base or unit comes under enemy fire, has been increased to $450 per month, double the previous amount.

Imminent Danger Pay, provided to troops “subject to the threat of physical harm or imminent danger,” has increased to a maximum of $275 per month, up $50 from the previous rate. US troops can receive either Hostile Fire Pay or Imminent Danger Pay, but cannot receive both simultaneously.

While increasing combat pay, the Pentagon is also reducing the maximum amount troops can receive in Hardship Duty Pay-Location from $150 to $100 per month. The benefit compensates troops stationed in areas with particularly difficult living conditions, rather than for exposure to combat.

After the Iran war started, the Pentagon expanded the locations that are eligible for Imminent Danger Pay to include Arab states that host US bases, Turkey, Cyprus, the Greek island of Crete, the US base at Diego Garcia, and the waters of the Arabian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Gulf of Oman.

Throughout the war in Iran, US bases across the Middle East have been pounded by Iranian missiles and drones, resulting in a significant number of US casualties, which have been downplayed by the Pentagon.

According to the Pentagon’s official numbers, since the US and Israel started the war with a sneak attack on Iran on February 28, at least 19 US troops have been killed, and 861 have been wounded.

——> Pentagon doubles combat pay for troops under fire • Hostile-fire pay jumps from $225 to $450 a month starting today • Imminent-danger pay rises to $275 as U.S. forces stay in Iran-related danger zones https://t.co/RxEXmaq53p

— Odisus (@Odisus) October 1, 2026

According to a recent report from The Washington Post, the Pentagon has not reported all of the US military deaths in the region since the conflict began. The report put the number of deaths of US service members at up to 23, though it said not all undisclosed deaths were directly tied to the conflict, and it also said that three civilian contractors have died.

Saskatchewan’s recent announcement envisages two large reactors supplying more than 2,000 MW in the northwest, potentially starting in 2042, plus at least 600 MW from small modular reactors near Estevan.

The ambition makes sense. The willingness to acquire more foreign dependencies… does not.

The list of potential vendors for large reactors is short:

• Westinghouse and its AP1000
• AtkinsRealis and Canadian CANDU technology

Will Canada import Westinghouse and their American reactor technology, or keep everything in-house with AtkinsRealis and the CANDU?

In today’s era of national energy security, it’s not exactly clear why Canadian leadership is taking more than 3 seconds to make the logical choice.

Saskatchewan is choosing between building their own homegrown reactor technology with an almost fully domesticated fuel and manufacturing supply chain, or instead, importing American nuclear technology and becoming reliant on US fuel and supply chain support for the next century.

Decisions, decisions…

While Westinghouse does wear a metaphorical red leaf on their collar (given their Canadian company ownership with Cameco and Brookfield), the AP1000 reactor technology is still American-based and is subject to export controls from the US.

On top of that, one of the biggest dependencies Canada will find themselves with is an additional need for uranium enrichment. They’ve already incurred a small amount of this pain with the BWRX-300 project at Darlington, but otherwise, the country runs on natural uranium due to the design of the CANDU reactor fleet.

One of the best features of the CANDU reactor is its heavy water moderator that allows it to use uranium enriched to as low as under 1% U-235, which is similar to the enrichment level of uranium that is pulled straight out of the ground. This allows the Canadian nuclear industry to largely skip the need for uranium enrichment, which is a painful bottleneck which will likely hold back the nuclear renaissance both in the U.S. and abroad.

The majority of the rest of the reactors in the world require the uranium that’s used inside their cores to be enriched to somewhere between 3% and 5% U-235.

Why voluntarily add a strategic bottleneck to a system that already avoids it?

And while it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, the recent history of major nuclear projects in the two countries is painful to look at side by side.

The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia came in tens of billions of dollars over budget and years late. The sister project, VC Summer, wasn’t even finished and was abandoned.

Compare that to the recent nuclear mega project of heavily refurbishing four CANDU reactors at the Darlington site. The project finished 4 months early and CAD$150m under budget. A similar refit at the Bruce site finished 7 months early and also under budget.

There may also be a political calculation here with the ongoing tariff fight. Canadian leaders could see an AP1000 order as a way to keep Trump happy and buy some breathing room. Westinghouse’s Canadian ownership would help sell the decision at home, while its American reactor technology would give Trump an export victory to advertise.

Via The Cradle

Gunmen on motorcycles attacked the Christian town of Suqaylabiyah in the Hama countryside in Syria on Saturday, smashing shops and opening fire on residents, the Syrian Justice Archive (SJA) reported.

Armed men coming from the nearby Sunni town of Qalaat al-Madiq attacked Christian-owned shops and opened fire on residents with Kalashnikov rifles, wounding a woman on Al-Mashwar Road.

The Syrian government’s General Security forces reportedly allowed the armed men to pass through their checkpoints to enter Suqaylabiyah and did not intervene to stop the violence.

Instead, they launched an arrest campaign against local men who gathered to defend the town with sticks and knives. They arrested two local Christian men, Shadi Nassab and Amjad Lyous.
Meanwhile, Al-Ghab District Director Mohammad al-Attal told SANA that Internal Security Forces responded to the scene, brought the situation under control, and restored calm to the city.

Father Fadi Sankari of Saints Peter and Paul Church in Suqaylabiyah issued a statement on Facebook condemning the attacks and calling on residents to defend one another. “My dear children, what is happening in our parish today is unacceptable and condemned, and no one has the right to enter your homes or threaten your security and dignity,” Sankari wrote.

“We don’t want chaos, and we don’t want revenge, but we also won’t accept that our people live in fear, or that the tragedy of destruction we’ve known before repeats itself,” he added.

He called on Syrian authorities to protect the town. “Your responsibility is to protect people, not to stand by watching fear and assault; and loose weapons cannot be a substitute for the rule of law.”

Dozens of gunmen carried out a similar attack on Suqaylabiyah in March after an altercation broke out between local young men and young men from Qalaat al-Madiq. The fighting began after the young men from Qalaat al-Madiq began harassing two local women, causing the local young men to intervene.

Today, October 3, Christians in Syria were once again subjected to violence and attacks against their people and property. Islamist mobs attacked Christians and their property in Al-Suqaylabiyah, in the heart of Syria’s historic Orthodox Christian presence, with members of the General Security participating in the attack instead of protecting the community. This is what Syria’s Christians are enduring today: attacks on people, homes, businesses, churches, and communities that have existed on this land for centuries. What happened today is not something that should pass unnoticed. It must be documented, those responsible must be held accountable, and the involvement of security forces must be investigated. Syria’s Christians are not guests in Syria. This is their ancestral homeland.

— Greco-Levantines World Wide (@GrecoLevantines) October 3, 2026

Shortly after the altercation was broken up, five youths from Qalaat al-Madiq arrived, armed with sticks and knives, and began breaking and smashing shops. They were soon joined by dozens of other armed men who beat residents with sticks and opened fire with weapons at shops, restaurants, and cafes.

General Security personnel refrained from intervening or, at times, accompanied groups of the attackers.

Saturday’s attack on Suqaylabiyah comes days after the brutal killing of eight Alawite men from the town of Al-Fahel in the Hama countryside.

Gunmen opened fire on the men as they traveled by bus near the town of Masyaf on 30 September. All passengers on the bus were engineers and workers from Al-Mateen Company.

In January 2025, Sunni-extremist gunmen linked to Syria’s new government massacred 16 Alawite men in Al-Fahel during a raid and search of the village.

Two months later, on March 7 2025, Sunni extremists and government security forces carried out a massacre across dozens of locations on the Syrian coast, killing over 1,600 Alawite civilians. The same groups carried out a similar massacre of Druze in Suwayda governorate in July of the same year.

✝️🇸🇾Destruction of a Virgin Mary statue and looting of Christian-owned shops in Al-Suqaylabiyah by groups affiliated with transitional authorities in the “New Syria”. https://t.co/yxjqDKbtoy

— ☧ Milad ܝܠܕܐ (@PalCatholic) March 27, 2026

Religious minorities from the Alawite, Christian, and Druze communities have been regularly targeted by Sunni extremists linked to Syrian security forces since Syria’s new government took power in October 2024.

The new government in Damascus is led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former leader of Al-Qaeda in Syria who enjoys strong backing from the US, UK, and Turkey.

Sharaa and members of his previous armed group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), are Sunni extremists who believe that Christians should be discriminated against and that Alawites and Druze should be killed and their property taken, according to the teachings of the medieval religious scholar Ibn Taymiyyah.

The first Guinness brewery to open in the US in more than 60 years, located in the Baltimore metro area, will shutter operations next month as shifting consumer demand and the challenges of operating in the Democrat-run state have made the operation increasingly difficult to sustain.

Diageo, the British alcoholic-beverages company that owns Guinness, operated the brewery for eight years, during which the site attracted more than 2 million visitors.

Local outlet WMAR-TV reported that the shutdown is due to soaring operating costs, shifting consumer tastes and broader economic pressures that made the brewing location unsustainable.

The decision followed a “careful review of our operations and long-term business priorities,” a Diageo spokesperson said.

The shutdown comes three years after Diageo slashed the workforce at the Halethorpe site by 100 jobs and ended most commercial brewing at the plant. Its taproom, restaurant, beer garden and experimental brewery remained open.

This closure leaves Chicago as the brand’s only US brewery and raises a difficult question about whether shifts in consumer demand for beer are only one part of the story.

The other part of the story is easy to understand: Maryland faces competitive pressure from neighboring states. Its negative net migration only suggests that the Democratic kings and queens who control the state under one-party rule are running its economy into the ground.

Neighboring states are cutting taxes or adopting flat-tax systems, while lefty Annapolis lawmakers are hell-bent on a parasitic mission to extract as much tax money as possible from mom-and-pop businesses, medium-sized and large companies, and taxpayers to pay for their progressive experiments. 

The result of lefty activists running the state is negative net migration, and the latest example of these state-killing economic policies is a major brewer shuttering operations.

Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,

When it comes to contextualizing the tech, bond, gold and policy headlines of Q4 2026, it’s easier to foresee their pathway ahead by first looking backwards. Once understood, we mathematically realize that our problems are not in the future, they are right now.

The 1970s

Ah, the 1970s. It was an era of bellbottom jeans, checkered suits, wide ties, the music of ABBA and Saturday morning cartoons.

It was also the decade in which Nixon decoupled the dollar and ended the sound money hopes of America’s founding fathers.

Backed by nothing but “full faith and credit,” the USD began its slow but steady death by a thousand cuts of borrow and spend without limit or concern.

Free a golden chaperone, politicians and Fed Chairs of every political stripe could expand balance sheets and the M2 money supply with almost zero concern for the longer-term financial karma that always follows a bacchanalian debt spree paid for with dollars literally created out of thin air.

Government debt, at $238B in 1971, was no big deal to our so-called “experts.”

Besides, any future debts could be easily paid at this dawn of generational fantasy, which Hemingway described as the “temporary prosperity” of excess money printing masquerading as careful policy.

A Time Without Foresight (or Restraint)

In short, no one in the 1970’s was thinking of what it might be like by 2026 when that same government debt had skyrocketed from a couple hundred billion to over $40T.

Instead, post-1971 leadership, red or blue, focused on the next election cycle rather than the next generation’s purchasing power.

As holder of the world reserve currency, DC enjoyed what the French Finance Minister of 1965 described as the “exorbitant privilege” of simply exporting its reserve currency and inflation to the rest of the world.

This may have been inherently unfair to the rest of that world, but as our then Treasury Secretary, John Connally, famously quipped: “It’s our currency but your problem.”

Buying Time with Funky Policies

To insure that “problem,” we effectively forced OPEC to sell its oil in USD, and even made the producers of this oil spend large chunks of their revenues on our USTs. This made oil a critical sponge to absorb our reckless and inflationary spending.

As Mel Brooks would say, it sure was “good to be the king” – or at least King Dollar.

And just in case a rising gold price might otherwise embarrass our nothing-backed dollar, we also made sure in the mid-70s to create a price-fixing mechanism at the COMEX to legally manipulate the paper price of this far more precious and honest metal.

Yep. That was the 1970’s.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well… just about everything.

Some fifty years later, we now see a world de-dollarizing, a petrodollar fracturing, missiles flying and the dollar emerging no longer as just the world’s problem, but America’s as well.

Back to the Future

Fast-forward to 2026 and the foregoing “exorbitant privilege” and “temporary prosperity” has devolved into what Hemingway also foresaw as this debt-n-spend fantasy’s final endgame, namely the “permanent ruin of currency debasement and war.”

Of course, there are defenders of American Exceptionalism who would take offence to words like “permanent ruin” from gold bugs just “selling their book.”

After all, there’s so much to save us. Just look at the record-high S&P. Look at technology. Look at AI. Look at the milkshake theory’s immortal dollar. Look at all the Fed’s brilliant PhDs and magical task forces. Look at stablecoins.

Ok. Let’s look.

The Great AI Gambit

As for the S&P 500, it’s nearing all-time highs, but 440 of its 500 companies are down more than 20% from their 52-week highs.

Rather than a stock market, we have a concentrated minority of tech monopoly powers holding the rest of the broken pack together with techy duct tape and memes of “this time is different with AI.”

The core and leading big names in tech, namely Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, are part of the biggest AI circular financing and concentration risk gambit in the history of U.S. equity markets.

These hyper-scalers get 70% of their AI revenues from just two players, Anthropic and OpenAI, two profitless companies whose costs are billions greater than their revenues.

These two screaming examples of concentration risk are bleeding money at an historical scale. Even AI’s own search results confirm the same:

From Concentration Risk to Circular Financing

And if you are wondering how Anthropic and OpenAI are funded, it’s not from big VC names.

Actually, the bulk of their equity (over 700B in 2026 AI capex alone) is coming from the very same companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, SoftBank and Nvidia) they sell their un-moted software to…

Even more alarming, these same tech hyper-scalers which keep the two AI ships afloat are themselves burning cash at a record pace on data centers whose costs (and power problems) are killing their cash flows.

Given this circular, financed, uber-concentrated and just massive capex profile and daisy chain, AI is literally becoming too big to fail.

The very survival of our economy and stock market is now being gambled on a single AI play whose profitable future is anything but certain unless the government regulates a duopoly protective measure to keep China out of OpenAI and Anthropic’s backyard, at which point the U.S. won’t be getting rare earths from Asia any more…

NVDA to the Rescue?

But surely Nvidia’s GPU sales will save the day, right? Its earnings are indeed impressive, and it just posted 110% revenue growth. Wow.

But if you look more carefully at Nvidia’s 10Q form (and the notes behind it), you’ll also see that 70% of its accounts receivables come from just five companies (listed above).

Do you see the circular concentration risk? Do you see the massive gambit the S&P is playing on the entire economy if this AI dice-roll (priced for perfection) doesn’t go as planned?

For now, the great AI gambit has yet to play out. But the memory of tech bubbles transitioning from over-bought to over-sold is still very fresh in my dot.com-trading mind…

The Bond Market’s Verdict

But if we move from a profitless AI, circular-financed, and grotesquely concentrated and uncertain U.S. tech bubble to a shattered U.S. sovereign bond market, the suspense is less severe in a nation running $2T in annual deficits.

In fact, when it comes to bonds, the verdict is already obvious.

As the great American bond king, Jeffrey Gundlach, so aptly described it: “We’ve hit peak lunacy” in our sovereign bond market.

With the 10Y UST yield crossing the 5% “uh-oh” Rubicon in a public debt backdrop of $40T, I see a death penalty for the dollar’s purchasing power and a Treasury Secretary with zero parole options.

With Scott Bessent having recently added David Zervos and Judy Shelton to his “dream team,” the set-up is now clear for some major changes – and desperation – ahead.

Meanwhile, DC mouthpieces like Kevin Warsh avoid direct answers as to how Uncle Sam can afford his interest expense or how we got to 5.25% yields by October when they were at 4.4% when he took office in June.

Yields rise as inflation rises, so the war in Iran, which has sent Brent crude to painful highs, is the most common explanation for how our pre-war yields of 3.9% have now crossed above the fatal 5%-handle.

But the real issue (i.e., criminal evidence) behind the rising shark fins of these rising yields lies in U.S. bond issuance at extreme levels at the same time demand for the same has hit extreme lows.

As more deleverage-focused nations dump our debt to support their currencies or buy spiking oil, those Treasury yields just keep rising – and will rise even higher once the USA confesses it’s already in a recession.

The world’s trust in an over-issued, distrusted, debt-soaked, and weaponized UST has fallen from incremental to exponential levels. The premium (i.e., rate) for U.S. IOUs will only continue to climb higher as our deficits do the same.

Signals: This Ain’t Our Father’s Bond Market

The post-2020 Treasury market is not what it used to be since 1980, and it won’t be coming back. The once sacred Treasury market is mathematically broken, which means DC is objectively unhinged.

Between September of 2024 and January of 2026, the Fed, having failed to beat inflation via hawkish rate hikes in 2022 and 2023, then dovishly cut rates by 175 basis points.

In normal bond markets, such cuts are supposed to send yields down. Instead, yields went up across the entire duration range of the yield curve.

Such yield indicators may seem boring to those unfamiliar with bond market lingo while doom-scrolling their iPhones, but it confirms that the Fed has lost control of rates, and hence the cost of his unpayable sovereign bar tab.

And it gets worse.

Since 2000, we’ve seen 13 market corrections. And in the first 12 of those 13 corrections, the dollar always went up (on a DXY basis) by at least 8%. But on the 13th correction last April, when stocks lost 18%, the dollar, rather than go up, went down even as yields spiked.

That’s not normal…

In this new abnormal, USTs sell off as stocks sell off, and the grossly over-produced (i.e., debased) USD, even in a rising yield setting, can’t strengthen.

There is no safe-haven in the so-called “risk-free return” of a U.S. IOU which, when measured against honest rather the Fed-measured inflation, is nothing more than “return-free-risk.”

In short, we are in a different bond regime. The old rules, correlations and tricks no longer apply.

Our bond market is openly broken.

The only way to bring these yields down to a survivable/payable level is either: 1) money printing to the moon; or 2) a massive debt restructuring, either of which option means further dollar destruction and hence screaming tailwinds for gold.

Credit Default Masquerading as a “Re-Structuring”?

As for “restructuring,” the recent addition of Shelton and Dervos is telling.

Shelton, of course, understands the fall from grace of USTs. She knows that a gold-backed long bond has more credibility than a dollar-backed IOU for the simple reason that our debased dollar is now obvious (and embarrassing) to everyone, including those nations not showing up at our Treasury auctions.

But even a gold-backed 50Y UST is not gonna save the Treasury market. Too little, too late.

Like Gundlach, I feel the Fed and Treasury Dept will buy time with some serious YCC by issuing more debt from the short end in a desperate Operation Twist 2.0 attempt to compress yields on the long end.

But that’s not working so well, is it?

And also like Gundlach, I believe the next desperate act could very likely involve a clever “restructuring” of our sovereign IOUs which boils down to little more than a constructive default on our debt.

That is, at some point down the road, and in the oh-so convenient name of “national security” (blamed, of course, on some foreign bad guy or black swan event), DC will simply announce an extension of bond maturities and a capping of bond coupons at 1%.

This, of course, will crush bondholders, foreign and domestic, as well as pension funds, insurance companies, money markets and the man on the street. It will also mean a massive price fall (and riot) in bonds and no global love for Uncle Sam’s IOUs.

But hey, desperate times require desperate actions.

Under such “restructuring,” DC would be forced to stop issuing debt and rebalance its budget. It would also mean a tanking USD, which is precisely what DC needs to inflate away its debt and gain some yardage in its trade deficit.

All Roads (Still) Lead to Gold

Thus, whether we mouse-click more trillions to save (self-fund) the bond market or restructure USTs with capped coupons, the net result either way is a neutered USD and hence a ripping gold price in the years to come, at least for those who can think that far ahead.

This further explains why central banks, which have been stacking the metal at an historical pace in 2026, now hold more gold than USTs.

They see the direction (and desperation) of the USD, and hence the direction of gold.

The Wile E. Coyote Moment is Now

Thus, as we watch the bond market die on a DC respirator while AI stocks gyrate in a profitless circle of over-investment and narrative changes which will most likely require government regulation to mote/protect the hyper-scalers and over-hyped AI providers from another 08-like catastrophe, I’m done warning of a broken U.S. credit and equity disaster on the horizon.

This is because the “Uh-Oh” moment is not coming; it’s already here.

Based on the dispositive yet largely ignored signals from our anemic, concentrated and over-levered stock market; and based on our openly broken, unpayable bond market (not to mention the private credit time bomb) in search of a liquidity miracle or default policy that further debases our Greenback, the picture is clear.

Warsh, Bessent and Shelton are not going to save this credit market. Nor will Santa Claus or any other miracle trick. It’s too late, folks.

In fact, the picture or image I have in mind takes me/us right back to the 1970’s and those Saturday morning cartoons I alluded to above – and watched as a kid while Nixon and his successors set the current disaster in motion decades before I traded my first dot.com stock…

American credits, equities, monetary fantasies and ignored Main Street realities have already passed beyond the cliff. We now stare suspended above a fall that is no longer theoretical, but right below us.

Of course, in such moments, it’s scary to look down, and thus almost no one does.

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to hear a major immigration case challenging the Trump administration’s expanded mandatory detention policy, setting up a consequential ruling on federal immigration enforcement.

The case centers on the administration’s interpretation of a 1996 immigration law requiring mandatory detention for individuals who recently entered the United States illegally. Under previous administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term, the provision generally applied to recent border crossers.

Last year, the administration broadened its interpretation to include illegal immigrants who have lived in the country for years, requiring detention while their immigration proceedings remain pending.

The policy has encountered significant judicial resistance. According to a Politico analysis, “more than 460 federal judges have rejected Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention decisions more than 20,000 times over the past 14 months.”

The administration maintains that its expanded enforcement policy is consistent with federal immigration law. Opponents argue that Congress never intended the 1996 statute to authorize mandatory detention of longtime residents without providing an opportunity to seek release while their cases proceed.

The Supreme Court will review a decision from the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which became the first appellate court to reject the administration’s interpretation. The justices will focus on the statutory meaning of the immigration law rather than the broader constitutional questions raised by the Justice Department.

The decision could have sweeping implications for ICE’s ability to detain illegal immigrants nationwide as the Trump administration continues its immigration enforcement efforts.

The Supreme Court’s new term begins Monday.