I don't see how rates can go down now that we see Warsh as a serious practitioner, the president unable to stop the war, the allies in the region depending almost entirely on us, and oil stocks headed back up quickly. Unholy developments

Old flu shot: $269.50 for a box of 10. New (mRNA) flu shot: $1407.50 for a box of 10.

BREAKING: Donald Trump has finally admitted that the Strait of Hormuz is not safe, vessels remain vulnerable to Iranian fire and mines, and shippers are unwilling to risk billions of dollars in assets, per White House press release. "They can send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are," Trump said, acknowledging Iran's ability to strike at will. He also conceded that "people don't want" to risk their ships. "They don't want it," he said of vessels worth billions of dollars, exposing them to the possibility of hitting a mine in the Strait of Hormuz.

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham will go on his first holiday as Prime Minister tomorrow

🇪🇺 The EU just passed Chat Control 1.0 in Brussels. Platforms can now scan your private messages again, officially "voluntary," in practice blanket surveillance. Here's the democratic scandal: 314 MEPs voted against it. Only 276 voted for it. It passed anyway... because an absolute majority of all MEPs was required to reject it, not just a majority of those present. More people voted no than yes. It still passed. Pushed through on an urgent procedure just before summer recess, when absences are highest and attention is lowest. This is how rights disappear folks. Not in one dramatic moment, but in procedural fine print, on a slow news day, while everyone's looking at Tehran. Source: @Fidias0 / Writer: Oliver

China's central bank has now bought gold for 19 months straight, the largest official buyer on earth. And this week, as gold broke 4,000 dollars, China's biggest banks moved to push ordinary Chinese out of leveraged gold trading, with at least one warning it will liquidate any position not closed by month-end. Both are true at once, and together they explain what this crash really is. Start with what is being banned, because the words matter. ICBC and a string of other banks are shutting down retail trading in what the Chinese themselves call paper gold, the margined, leveraged contracts where you bet on the price without ever owning a bar. Some banks lifted the margin requirement to 140 percent to choke the leverage off before closing the products outright. Physical gold, meanwhile, stays wide open. Coins, bars, savings plans, ETFs, all fine. It is only the paper, the leverage, the casino, that is being shut, the last step in a five-year retreat that the crash just finished. Officially this is about protecting small investors, and that part is real. The same kind of leverage wiped out a wave of Chinese retail in a 2020 commodity blowup. But set the ban beside what the state is doing and something larger comes into view. While its citizens are pushed out of the paper, the People's Bank of China has spent those same 19 months buying the physical metal, more than two thousand three hundred tonnes of it now, accumulating straight through a 28 percent crash that scared everyone else out. Beijing is not trading gold. It is hoarding it. That is the strategy in one frame. China looked at the two things both called gold, the paper bet and the physical bar, and made a choice no Western government would make. It is taking the metal for the state and closing the casino for everyone else. The reason sits in a single date. 2022, when Russia's reserves were frozen with a keystroke. That taught every country outside the Western system one lesson: dollars in an account can be switched off, gold in your own vault cannot. So China is building its monetary independence out of the one asset nobody can freeze, and it does not want that foundation in the hands of leveraged traders who panic-sell in a crash, or priced by a paper market it does not control. Watch this month and the two worlds split in real time. Western investors were forced out of their gold by margin calls and a rate scare. China's central bank bought that exact dip with both hands. One side treats gold as a trade. The other treats it as the floor under a currency. The West is selling paper gold and calling it a crash. China is buying physical gold and calling it a foundation. In ten years, only one of them will look like it understood what gold was for. The metal is already moving to that side.

Andy Burnham not even warmed the seat in Parliament & already its come out he gave his wife a 4 million contract for EV vehicles. How much more corruption do we have to put up with?