It’s turning into a banner year for corporate bankruptcy filings, after years of Easy Money that caused all kinds of excesses, fueled by yield-chasing investors, in an environment where the Fed had repressed yields with all its might. Those yield-chasing investors kept even the most over-indebted zombies supplied with ever-more fresh money. But that era has ended. Interest rates are much higher, and investors are getting a little more prudent, and Easy Money is gone.

At the peak of the Fed’s yield repression in mid-2021, “BB”-rated companies – so these companies are “junk” rated – could borrow at around 3% (my cheat sheet for corporate credit rating scales by ratings agency). Companies are junk rated because they have too much debt and inadequate cash flow to service that debt. In other words, investors risked life and limb to earn 3%, and now these investors are asked to surrender life and limb, so to speak. But that’s how it goes with yield-chasing.

These “BB” junk bond yields have risen to nearly 7%. This means these companies that had trouble producing enough cash flow to service their 3% or 5% debt, have to refinance this debt when it comes due, or add new debt, at 7%. That 7% may still be low, considering inflation running around near that neighborhood, but it puts a lot more strain on those companies.

Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods has urged companies to stop focusing on certain energy sources, such as renewable energy, to save the climate, warning that it would be a “huge mistake to be picking winners and losers and focusing on specific technologies”.

Instead, “we need to look more broadly and let the markets figure out which solutions deliver the most emissions reductions at the lowest cost," Woods told Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway's Wealth Fund,one of the largest mutual funds in the world, on his podcast.

An attempt to move away from oil and gas immediately, with unchanged global demand, could be disastrous for clean energy, Woods suggested, adding that if we produce less LNG, for example, something else–like coal–would have to step in to fill the demand gap. 

As tensions between the U.S. and China continue to ratchet higher, Sequoia Capital isn't waiting for sanctions or interruptions to its business. Instead, it's taking the proactive step of splitting its China business out on its own. 

The firm is going to run its China business as a “completely independent” entity from its US operation, a new report from FT revealed this week. 

In addition to splitting from the main firm, the China business will spot a new name called "HongShan", which is a version of its previous Chinese name, which meant redwood. 

Similarly, Sequoia will reportedly be splitting off its Indian and south-east Asian businesses into another entity, the report says. 

“It really was a very complicated decision. Over the years, we have reassessed the cost-benefit trade-off of this arrangement and whether it was the right structure for the firm. We realised it was time for this," Roelof Botha, managing partner of Sequoia Capital told FT. 

The former civilian head of the NATO alliance is warning that some Eastern European states are prepared to send their soldiers to Ukraine if the bloc does not make significant pledges to Kiev during an upcoming summit. 

Anders Rasmussen, former NATO Secretary-General and current adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is touring Europe and Washington to gauge the level of support Kiev should expect at the Vilnius Summit in July. “I think the Poles would seriously consider going in and assemble a coalition of the willing if Ukraine doesn’t get anything in Vilnius,” he said. “We shouldn’t underestimate the Polish feelings, the Poles feel that for too long western Europe did not listen to their warnings against the true Russian mentality.”

The manufacturers of “forever chemicals” used in products like nonstick pans and waterproof clothing knew about the dangers their materials posed more than 40 years before the general public, according to previously secret industry documents. By following the same playbook as Big Tobacco, including suppression of their own research, the companies successfully stymied regulation for decades while the cancer-causing chemicals became ubiquitous in the water, air, and soil.

Major manufacturers are already spending billions to settle lawsuits and millions fighting federal regulations, including landmark environmental rules proposed this spring. The revealing industry documents, analyzed in a new study from researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), could bolster efforts to hold the companies accountable for widespread contamination from chemicals that take hundreds of years to break down. The manufacturer 3M is reportedly preparing to pay $10 billion to settle claims that it polluted thousands of public water systems, but the cost of cleaning up the chemicals in drinking water nationwide will likely top $400 billion.

A single judge on the High Court of England and Wales has rejected imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s nearly year-old request to appeal the British decision to extradite him to the United States to stand trial on espionage and computer intrusion charges.

Assange’s legal team has one last recourse in the U.K. and has five days to request a hearing before the court. 

Stella Assange, Assange’s wife, issued this statement on Thursday:

“On Tuesday next week my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court. The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government.”

The single judge on the court, Sir Jonathan Swift, issued the 3-page decision on Tuesday.  It is not yet publicly available on the High Court’s website.  

"President Joe Biden has been slow in providing military resources to Ukraine," former Vice President Mike Pence complained during a CNN town hall Wednesday. He launched his campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination this week.

"We are [still] waiting on F-16s to be transferred from somewhere," he said, arguing there should essentially be no limit to what Kiev receives from the United States.

"I believe the United States of America needs to continue to provide the courageous soldiers in Ukraine with the resources they need to repel … the Russian invasion and restore their territorial integrity," Pence declared just on the heels of his official campaign announcement.

After a-year-and-a-half of wave after wave of anti-Russia sanctions, along with tens of billions pledged and spent for Ukraine, Pence still thinks the real problem is that Biden is not doing "enough". 

So it seems the Neocon foreign policy wing of the GOP will be well-represented in the upcoming 2024 debates, given also presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has been loudly denouncing the positions of Trump and DeSantis on Ukraine...

Haley, the only woman in the race for the Republican nomination, lambasted DeSantis for saying this year that Ukraine was a “territorial dispute”, a comment that drew widespread criticism and that he has since walked back. “For them to sit there and say that this is a territorial dispute – that’s just not the case, or to say that we should stay neutral,” Haley told voters in the early nominating state of Iowa during a televised CNN town hall event.

She said: "It’s in the best interest of our national security for Ukraine to win."

For the sake of solar power, let's hope Canada can bring its rampaging arsonists to heel. That's because the shroud of smoke that covered much of the Eastern US seaboard, has sent solar power generation in parts of the eastern US plummeting by more than 50% as wildfires rage in Canada.

Webmaster addition: There are some satellite animations on social media showing that the fires in Canada erupted from multiple locations at the same time. And the climate nazis are screaming that we all have to give up our cars and such to save the Earth!

The commercial real estate space is experiencing stress following the recent turmoil in the regional bank sector, with the rapid rise in interest rates, tightening lending standards, and structural changes, such as sliding demand for office buildings. 

Some structural factors, such as remote work and hybrid work, have doomed the office space segment. This has left empty office buildings scattered across major US cities as the number of landlords falling behind on repayments due to the difficulty of refinancing and high vacancies has hit a five-year high. 

According to real estate data firm Trepp, more than 4% of office loans packed into commercial mortgage-backed securities were delinquent in the last 30 days as of May, the highest level since 2018. 

After his first episode topped 100 million views, Tucker Carlson is back with Episode 2, exploring how we, as a population, are controlled (or coerced) directly (through laws) or indirectly (through taboos).

Carlson observes the changing societal taboos in America, suggesting that they are being dictated from above rather than evolving organically, focusing explicitly on the shift in attitudes towards race-based attacks, adultery in politics, and child molestation.

"Let's say you wanted to control a country," the former Fox News man begins rather joltingly.

"Well," he explains "you'd want to make sure you had the complete obedience of everybody within your borders who was authorized to use deadly force... you'd start with the military... [and other agencies] like the IRS."

"Controlling the guns would be a top priority for you if ever wanted to go dictatorial."

But, Carlson, asks, what if you wanted more, not simply to control people's behavior, "but to control how they think."

"In that case," he remarks, "you'd need to take charge of its taboos."

A taboo is something that by popular consensus is not allowed, it is not illegal, but it doesn't need to be.

"Over time, social prohibitions are more powerful and more enduring than laws."

Small business owners are calling on Congress to address inflation by easing business regulations and taxes. They say Biden administration policies show disdain for small businesses.

Silvia Lee, executive vice president, and Chief Lending Officer for First Community Bank in Corpus Christi, Texas, said a commercial customer told her he felt targeted.

“He mentioned that he feels our government doesn’t want small businesses to succeed and only wants large companies in business,” she told the House Committee on Small Business at a June 7 hearing.

On Aug. 22, about 2½ months from today, the most significant development in international finance since 1971 will be unveiled.

It involves the rollout of a major new currency that could weaken the role of the dollar in global payments and ultimately displace the U.S. dollar as the leading payment currency and reserve currency.

It could happen in just a few years.

The process by which this will happen is unprecedented, and the world is unprepared for this geopolitical shock wave.

This monetary shock will be delivered by a group called the BRICS.

The acronym BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

This play for global reserve currency status by the BRICS will affect world trade, direct foreign investment and investor portfolios in dramatic and unforeseen ways.

According to sources familiar with the case, the DOJ declined to delay the planned indictment of Trump to investigate allegations that a senior prosecutor on the case tried to influence a key witness by discussing a federal judgeship with the witness' lawyer, Just the News reports.

Ugandan students from at least 13 universities have responded to President Joe Biden’s threat to cut aid to the country over its newly passed anti-homosexuality law. Students took to the streets, singing in front of Parliament, “We don’t want your pro-gay money. We want and love our country more than money.”

The protests come as Biden and the U.S. State Department have threatened to interfere with Uganda’s internal affairs and cut monetary aid to the country. At the same time, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni affirmed he would not be coerced by money. He declared, “If they cut aid, we shall sit down and discipline our expenditure, rearrange our budgets; if they interfere with our trade we shall trade with others.” 

The citizens and lawmakers of Uganda seem to be still keenly aware of the witness of the first Christian martyrs of their country, who were killed in horrific ways following incredible tortures because they refused to accept or consent to the homosexual acts of their king. They chose to suffer death rather than accept as something normal a sexual deviancy that Scripture calls a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. 

The Pentagon is set to unveil another $2 billion in military aid for Ukraine, hoping to bolster the country’s air defenses as Kiev launches its much-touted counteroffensive against Russian forces, Bloomberg News has reported.

The announcement is likely to come later this week, the outlet said on Thursday, citing unnamed US officials. The arms will be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which has furnished billions of dollars in American weapons to Kiev since fighting erupted with Moscow last year. 

The new aid package will include two types of Patriot missiles: the Patriot Advanced Capability Missile-3 (PAC-3) and the Guidance Enhanced Missile. Produced by Raytheon, the latter munitions are said to provide “improved ability to defeat tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or enemy aircraft in complement to the PAC-3 missile,” according to the US weapons-maker.

Webmaster addition: The pattern that is starting to emerge is simple. Burisma paid then VP Joe Biden $5 million to use his influence to get the Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Burisma fired. Biden then threatened Ukraine that unless they fired that prosecutor he would withhold a billion dollars in aid. Ukraine then fired the prosecutor and Biden actually is on video bragging about what he did.

Fast forward to today and Zelensky is clearly in a position to blackmail Resident Biden into send billions of your dollars to Ukraine. So, as long as Biden is in  office, the flow of money will never stop!

Leftist Democrat 'squad' member Cori Bush led the charge in celebrating the imminent second indictment of former President Donald Trump, gloating in a tweet. 

Trump has been indicted for mishandling of classified documents and summoned to appear before a federal judge in Miami, he announced on Thursday. He has been charged with seven counts.  

Bush, member of the left-wing progressive 'squad' started by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, initially tweeted her joy over the potential charges.

'The former white supremacist-in-chief has been indicted, again. He must be held accountable,' she wrote, before deleting just minutes later. 

Webmaster addition: If the documents seized at Mar-a-lago were about CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, they were not classified. President Trump declassified them the day before he left office!

Congressional Republicans unloaded on the Justice Department in the minutes after former President Donald Trump was charged with mishandling classified documents and said he would report to a Miami courthouse Tuesday.

Senior Republicans immediately connected the prosecution to charges House Republicans have leveled at Biden family members based on sealed FBI documents based on tips that have yet to be released or verified.

'If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don't have a republic,' tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), coming to the defense of Trump, who led supporters in chants of 'lock her up' during the 2016 campaign. 

'DOJ indicts former President / candidate Trump SAME DAY DOJ/FBI restricts access to unnecessarily redacted Biden allegations And they wonder why ppl think there r two standards for justice,' fumed Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, a senior Judiciary Committee member, on Twitter.

Webmaster addition:

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) Inc. have questioned the timing of Donald Trump's indictment, pointing out it came on the same day that members of the House were shown a controversial Joe Biden 'bribery' document.

In a tweet they wrote: 'It's not a coincidence that Biden's Justice Department indicts President Trump the same day as this breaks.

'Joe Biden allegedly paid $5M by Burisma executive as part of a bribery scheme, according to FBI document.'

Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump's handling of classified documents, has told Trump's lawyers that the former president is being indicted, Trump announced on Thursday.

More than three-quarters of Princeton students said it was sometimes acceptable to stop a campus speaker by shouting over them, a recent survey revealed.

Some 43 percent said it was acceptable to block other students from attending talks they disagreed with.

Even more disturbingly, 16 percent supported the use of violence to stop a controversial speaker, according to the alumni group Princetonians for Free Speech.

Responding to a separate question, 48 percent of the  250 students asked said a speech that uses discriminatory language or that a group finds offensive should not be allowed.

The debate over free speech in academic institutions has been heated in recent years - in March Stanford Law School made headlines after students berated Kyle Duncan, a federal appeals judge appointed by Trump, who had come to give a talk.

On Thursday The Guardian reported that Joe Biden’s DOJ attempted to bribe the attorney for Trump valet driver in exchange for testimony against Donald Trump.

Clearly, this is an illegal act and it should threaten the case against President Trump.

The only criminal act in this entire case is the actions by the Biden DOJ!

These people are evil.

It is a tight contest over which U.S. regulatory agency is most captured by industry. But leading the pack is surely the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Many of us in the past believed the main problem with the agency was the costs it imposed on industry. The situation turns out to be more complicated. Whatever its past, it’s become an industry-dominated vending machine for drug approvals enacted with a very expensive rubber stamp.

The ordeal of the COVID vaccine proved it. So long as the check cleared, the FDA was ready with committee-based approvals for which no one in particular took responsibility. On Aug. 31, 2021, as the FDA was preparing to approve boosters for a variant that had already been superseded, two top officials resigned in protest: Marion Gruber, director of the Office of Vaccines Research and Review, and her deputy, Phil Krause.

They just couldn’t be part of the unfolding disaster. These were principled decisions. They should have marked a complete upheaval in the agency. But because hardly anyone in the mainstream media cared, and because both the agency and the industry decided to look the other way and pretend like it didn’t matter, the resignations without precedent made no difference at all.

And here we are in mid-2023 and agency capture is more intense than ever. No one doubts it. But it never ends with just financial and regulatory corruption. There is another stage, which is suppressing information and censorship. One might suppose that the FDA would have nothing to do with that end of things. But that would be wrong.

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday night that "the corrupt Biden administration" informed his attorneys that he has been indicted "seemingly over the boxes hoax."

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is "secured" by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.

I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!

Most people watch television simply to relax. After a long day, you have dinner, clean up, then sit down and watch something mildly entertaining before going to bed. But that everyday activity has become nearly impossible to indulge because so much of the content has been created by people who barely hide the fact that they seriously despise you—and by you, I mean white people.

We see this anti-white antipathy most obviously in what one might call Replacement Programming, where established white fictional (or historical!) characters have been updated with minority actors such as Netflix’s Troy: Fall of a City, which features a black Achilles and Patroclus, or Bridgerton, a Regency-era drama where several of the 19th Century British nobility are portrayed by black actors. [Bridgerton’s’ Approach to Race and Casting Has Precedent Onstage, by Matt Wolf, New York Times, May 24, 2021]

(Anyone who has watched British television in recent years knows that the problem is even worse on the other side of the pond: BBC is 'taking political correctness too far' by removing comedy classics like Little Britain from iPlayer over fears of offending modern viewers, culture minister John Whittingdale says, Daily Mail, July 21, 2020.)

Moreover, television commercials routinely depict whites as clueless and morally degenerate while minorities are wiser and morally superior.

Any reader of Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 will instantly recognize Donald J. Trump’s federal indictment today: this politicized prosecution of opponents over spurious technicalities was key to the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. (For reasons that bear analysis, Applebaum [Tweet her] has become a fanatical Never Trumper and doesn’t seem to have noticed this parallel).

I discussed this emerging communist coup in my speech to the 2021 American Renaissance Conference. (Sign up now for the 2023 Conference—Lydia and I will be there!) We’ve been anchor-linking to this section of my speech in subsequent articles, but it seems not to work with some browsers, so we’re reposting the whole thing here. Note that I’m lower-casing “communist” because it’s not really a proper noun—as I explain, it means Left Totalitarian, not card-carrying members of a specific party.

…we have to recognize that we are in the early stages of a communist coup. It just crept upon us.

A few years ago, very few people understood the concept behind color revolutions.

Had Russia and China’s leadership not decided to unite in solidarity in 2012 when they began vetoing the overthrow of Bashar al Assad in Syria- followed by their alliance around the Belt and Road Initiative, then it is doubtful that the color revolution concept would be as well-known as it has become today.

At that time, Russia and China realized that they had no choice but to go on the counter offensive, since the regime change operations and colour revolutions orchestrated by such organizations as the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Soros Open Society Foundations were ultimately designed to target them as those rose, orange, green or yellow revolution efforts in Georgia, Ukraine, Iran or Hong Kong were always recognized as weak points on the periphery of the threatened formation of a great power alliance of sovereign Eurasian nations that would have the collective power to challenge the power of the Anglo-American elite based in London and Wall Street.

Efforts by Biden regime appointees in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Border Patrol to release millions of illegal entrants into local US communities have been blocked by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought against the Biden DHS by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody. https://floridacapitalstar.com/news/florida-ag-moody-defeats-biden-administration-in-court-again/tcsquare/2023/06/07/

Americans do not know what is going on because there is no American media to tell them. The US media–CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC, NPR, NY Times, Washington Post– function as a propaganda ministry for the Biden regime and the elite establishment that the Biden regime fronts for.

The Department of Homeland Security is a George W. Bush regime creation. The name has always bothered me because of its Gestapo connotations. It is more worrisome because the Biden regime associates the security of the homeland with the release of millions of illegal entrants into local communities. In other words, the DHS is providing the opposite of securing the homeland. Biden is giving a pat on the back to illegal entrants who have violated US law.

The Establishment has sent the message via their Democrat henchmen that it is perilous for any politician to attempt to represent the people.

The message is also going out to the alt-media that truth telling is not permitted.

In other words, there has been a coup. Our country has been stolen from us.

The Great Awakening is the third installment of the Plandemic series. This documentary experience assembles forbidden puzzle pieces to reveal the big picture of what’s really happening in the USA and around the world. The Great Awakening is intended to be a lighthouse to guide us out of the current darkness and into a bright future. Psst. Pass it on!

Interesting business values for Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald. The two employees who called the police after three men robbed their store in Georgia are fired. "It's only merchandise," McDonald said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy that we train our educators on around engaging during a theft.”

Webmaster addition: If I were an investor in Lulumon, I would be concerned about the loss of profitability caused by this policy!