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State Seizes Girl After Catholic Parents Refuse To Call Her A Boy

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A Massachusetts family has spent nearly two years fighting the state for custody of their daughter after a public school socially transitioned her behind their backs and child-welfare officials treated the parents' refusal to play along as the crime.

Joseph and Arlene Kutzko, devout Catholics, say staff at Algonquin Regional High School began treating their daughter Sophie as a boy without telling them. In December 2024, when Sophie was 15, the Department of Children and Families removed her from the home because her parents would not recognize her as male.

Physical-abuse claims against Joseph were later deemed unfounded. That did not stop a permanent restraining order or DCF cutting off contact after the couple still would not use a male name and pronouns.

? OMG. In a terrifying case, these Catholic parents in Massachusetts had their daughter TAKEN AWAY by the state because they refused to let her transition and affirm her as a BOY

The school went behind their back to teach her gender ideology, and the counselor did it without... pic.twitter.com/HC4kGYPdMD

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 14, 2026

Sophie is now 17. The family says the state housed her in a boys' dormitory, denied her Sunday Mass, and put her on birth control and psychiatric drugs. Officials are now seeking court approval for high-dose testosterone.

The Kutzkos want her home and a full psychological evaluation first. Their attorney, Vernadette Broyles, is also pressing Congress so that a parent's refusal to medically or socially transition a child is never branded "child abuse."

The pattern is not unique to one Massachusetts high school. In Ludlow, parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri alleged Baird Middle School socially transitioned their children in secret, used opposite-sex names and pronouns at school, and used legal names when speaking to mom and dad. The First Circuit sided with the district. The Supreme Court declined the case in April 2026.

IDENTITY CRISIS: Parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri claim their child was encouraged by Ludlow Public School officials to adopt a new name and different gendered pronouns. https://t.co/oo5jLS0ifw pic.twitter.com/EBUeyZ1q8n

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 17, 2022

That pipeline - school secrecy, then state power - is the same one Trump's Justice Department has been chasing in Illinois. In May, the DOJ opened investigations into 36 Illinois districts accused of helping children change genders without telling parents and of pushing sexual-orientation and gender ideology without opt-out notices.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said: "This Department of Justice is determined to put an end to local school authorities keeping parents in the dark about how sexuality and gender ideology are being pushed in classrooms." She added: "Supreme Court precedent leaves no doubt: parents have the fundamental right and primary authority to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children."

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker called the probe "a sham aimed at punishing states President Trump does not like."

Illinois Democrats had already shown where they wanted the law to go. House Bill 4876 would have redefined an "abused child" to include a minor denied "gender-affirming services" - puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery - and allowed DCFS to take children from parents who objected. Doctors who treated minors without parental consent would have been shielded from liability.

Shannon Adcock of Awake Illinois warned: "In Illinois, parents who are considered child abusers can lose custody of their children if in this case they do not affirm transgender drugs, surgical procedures such as penis and breast removal." She added: "If a minor opts for this, and you as a parent deny that, that means that you are considered an abuser of a child."

Child abuse in Illinois can carry a $25,000 fine and 15 years in prison. On Joe Rogan's podcast, Dr. Phil McGraw said of the medical associations backing youth transition: "I have never seen those organisations sign off on anything with less information as to whether or not it does long-term harm of anything in my life. And when I ask about that, when I bring that up, then they immediately label you as transphobic."

Oregon shows what happens when the policy is affirmation-first and parental consent is optional. A study of insurance records found Oregon minors far more likely than the national average to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and put on cross-sex hormones.

Roughly 1 in 240 girls and 1 in 630 boys received those hormones by age 17 - about three times the national rate for girls and twice for boys, higher still at ages 14 and 15. Oregon adopted WPATH standards, expanded Medicaid coverage with little or no age floor, and passed shield laws letting 15-year-olds consent without parental notification.

There was no matching collapse in youth suicide to justify the surge. The White House under Trump has called changing a minor's gender "child abuse" and "medical malpractice." CMS has since moved to cut federal Medicaid and CHIP dollars for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and related surgeries for minors.

Over the pond in the UK, a draft ban on "conversion practices" threatens parents, teachers, and doctors with unlimited fines and five years in prison. Equalities Minister Olivia Bailey said: "Conversion practices are driven by the false belief that being LGBT+ is shameful and can be forcibly changed. No-one should face abuse just because of who they are."

Critics say ordinary parental caution - telling a daughter she is a girl, or citing the Cass Review's finding that the evidence for puberty blockers is "remarkably weak" - could be recast as a crime. Official school guidance still allows social transition for children as young as four.

Helen Joyce of Sex Matters said schools have "indoctrinated children" for a decade and that officials "actually need to de-radicalise a whole generation of teachers." Maya Forstater called the idea that a child can start school as a girl and leave as a boy "a dangerous fairytale."

Taxpayer-funded groups have written the playbook. LGBT Youth Scotland, which has taken nearly £1 million a year in public money, advised Scottish schools that "it is best to not disclose information to parents or carers without the young person's permission." Coming-out templates taught children how to change their name at school. Teachers were told not to "deny their identity."

Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute said: "The idea that a teacher can just decide on the spot, the first time a kid speaks to them about gender confusion, to socially transition them by using whatever pronouns or name the child wants, is clearly wrong." He added: "The idea that they can try to keep their parents - and therefore their doctors - out of the decision is not just wrong, it is unprofessional."

The Kutzkos are still in court. A school started a secret social transition. The state took the girl, isolated her from her faith, and now wants to inject testosterone. That is not safeguarding. It is the state substituting itself for the family.

Any district that hides name and pronoun changes from parents should lose federal dollars until the policy is reversed. Parents - not counselors, not DCF, not activist charities - direct the upbringing of their children.

* * *

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 17:00

Lindsay Clancy Juror Admits To Feminist Motives Behind Trial

It's not surprising, but it is discouraging how accurate the conservative analysis of the Lindsay Clancy trial has become.  Every suspicion has proven correct about the jury and every fear about their motives is proving more substantial.  The trial itself symbolizes a disastrous miscarriage of justice in favor of ideology; it offers proof that in an age of social media and political cultism, finding an impartial jury is increasingly impossible. 

Thanks to the "rogue juror" the deliberations did not lead to a calculating child killer going free (in Massachusetts, patients incarcerated in mental health facilities get a review and the possibility of release every six months). However, that juror has come under relentless attack from the media, from Clancy's defense team and from the other jurors involved in the case. 

Their primary argument?  That the rogue juror was "not following the rules of reasonable doubt" and was not acting impartially.  As more information has been released in regards to jury proceedings, it's becoming clear that there was a large group of jurors who came into the case with an agenda and these jurors pressured the others to conform. 

One anonymous female juror insinuated as much during an interview with local media. 

  

As many critics predicted, there was an ideological push behind the jury's refusal to view Clancy as a criminal, despite ample evidence indicating she had planned the murders in advance.  They ignored this evidence in favor of claims that she had been struck with a temporary "postpartum psychosis" and was completely unaware of her actions.  In other words, Clancy was immediately held up as a victim; perhaps more of a victim than the three children she killed.  

Women killers often use the postpartum claim as a defense because, at bottom, it's impossible to disprove.  In the state of MA the prosecution has the added difficulty of presenting "reasonable doubt" that Clancy is lying about going momentarily insane; a state of mind which is ultimately up for broad interpretation by the jury.  And, if the jury already has an agenda, then making such a case regardless of the evidence is pointless.

Juror Paula Devlin, who has been making the rounds in mainstream media and the same juror who helped to dox the rogue juror, indicates that she and other jurors viewed the case through a feminist lens.  Their goal?  To use Lindsay Clancy's trial as a "turning point" to further the aims of women in general. 

During her next media tour stop, juror Paula Devlin says the mostly female jury knew the Lindsay Clancy trial could create change to “make it better for other women.”

“We knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it… pic.twitter.com/4aBlCDzeUx

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 13, 2026

“Even though we didn’t know what was going on outside of our little bubble that we were in, we knew that this was a turning point and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women in the future for other families. You know, justice for those children. Is this never happening again?” 

It should be noted that jurors are required to decide a case based only on the evidence in front of them, not on their personal feelings or ideological leanings.  This language is an echo of the language used by feminist groups rallying in Clancy's defense online and in protests.  The idea that the case is about "all women" rather than a single child murderer, has poisoned public discourse. 

Devlin's claim that the jurors "didn't know what was going on outside of their little bubble" is also a misrepresentation of reality.  The jury was not sequestered.  They went home every night to speak with their friends, family and go online.  There is little chance they were not being influenced by the political circus surrounding the trial.

How do 11 jurors ignore evidence showing that Lindsay Clancy sent her husband on errands, used online apps to calculate how long his drive would take, then she killed each child one by one in the basement, then she took a call from her husband in the middle of the murders and faked as if everything was fine?  All of this was due to a perfectly timed psychotic break, which psychologists argue is not possible?

The truth is, feminist movements have decided to exploit Clancy's case, to use it as a weapon to further their political aims.  One of these aims is to create a two-tier legal system in which women avoid all punishment and accountability, because men are either directly or indirectly to blame for every crime committed by a woman. 

Not to spoil the fun and everything, but if we lived in a patriarchy, and the patriarchy is so awful and evil and to blame for everything…..wouldn’t Lindsay be in prison? 😬 pic.twitter.com/5Mw6Wek40L

— Natalie Jean Beisner (@NJBeisner) September 13, 2026

This might seem like low IQ insanity, but this is all part of a highly organized effort to destroy the western world.  The plan?  To undermine the morals and principles of the west through relativism - And women are particularly easy to target and brainwash. because of their propensity for group-think.  

The Clancy trial represents a turning point, yes, but not in the way feminists believe.  Rather, it is an event that has shocked western men and caused many to reconsider ideas of "equality" and liberal society.  After the trial, "Repeal the 19th" was trending on social media for days.  Americans are starting to think maybe abandoning "patriarchy" and putting women on a pedestal was a bad idea.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 16:40

"Everyone Is Retarded And Nothing Works...": Kunstler's Theory Of Everything

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

A Theory Of Everything

"The Thing That Never Happens Keeps Happening."

- Kyle Becker on X

"Everyone is retarded and nothing Works."

Turns out that's the key to unlock the mystery of this particular Fourth Turning, the one here and now, of our own time. It's an excellent theory of everything happening these days, formulated by a close colleague of mine. And as far as I know, it's the only theory that makes sense. It explains, for example how and why consulting US attorney Joe DiGenova quit the grand jury investigation, as conducted by the DOJ in the Southern District of Florida (SDFL), of the treasonous conspiracy against the people of the USA running since 2016.

The most amazing part is that apparently no one in the country seems to give a shit about it. No politician has issued a statement. The blog-o-sphere, Twitter-sphere are mute. The President himself - the main target of the coup - was busy in Ireland this weekend. But let's face it: he has a duty to steer clear of interfering in juridical proceedings involving himself and his office.

The most diligent investigator of all, Dan Bongino, the podcaster who spent years documenting the serial turpitudes of RussiaGate, ImpeachmentGate, the 2020 election, the J-6 operation, and so on, who wrote several books about these crimes - and then became Deputy FBI director for a year, with access to the entire trove of evidence about all of it - says nothing now about the DiGenova affair. How is that possible? Instead, for months he's just played an insipid cheerleader on his daily podcast. Just imagine what Bongino really knows. Months ago, when he resigned from the FBI job, he stated publicly that what he saw in the J. Edgar Hoover building shocked him to his core.

I say all this because it looks like the case (or cases) in the SDFL will now go nowhere with diGenova out of the picture. Altogether, it was the gravest set of treasonous crimes against the Republic in our history, and nobody will be held accountable for it, a monumental insult following a possibly fatal injury to the country.

A certain amount of informed scuttlebutt comes my way, and the story I hear is that Joe DiGenova was of a mind to indict former president Barack Obama for his role in many phases of the ongoing coup, and that Todd Blanche blanched at that, in fear of provoking an even hotter civil war than the Red / Blue one currently raging from sea to shining sea (and especially in the three branches of government). Not just a civil war but, in effect, a civil race war, for fear of painting America's only black president a criminal.

Mr. Obama enjoys certain immunities against criminal prosecution for official actions he took as president - as determined in the SCOTUS decision Trump v. the United States, July, 2024 - but the parameters of what, exactly, official means remains squishy. The boundaries would have to be tested case-by-case in the lower courts. Which is what the grand juries sitting now in Florida might have done (or might yet somehow manage to do).

Was it an official act for Mr. Obama to turn Hillary Clinton's Russian Collusion campaign stunt into a seditious operation to run Mr. Trump out of office? Once Mr. Obama was out of office in 2017, did he direct continuing seditions through FBI director Wray and CIA directors Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel? Does a record of correspondence exist, classified or otherwise? We know that the intel apparatus captures everything. Tulsi Gabbard might know what's in there. Perhaps the same things that shocked Dan Bongino to his core.

Once "Joe Biden" was installed in the Oval Office, did Barack Obama direct the cabal that actually ran the executive branch from Jan., 2021, to Jan., 2025 - did he act as a shadow president? What would the law say about that? And is he responsible for "Joe Biden's" ruinous policies such as the wide-open border and all it has entailed. One of Mr. Obama's closest insiders, John Podesta (also Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign chairman), became "senior advisor for climate policy" in the final months of "Joe Biden's" term. He was given $370-billion from the fraudulently-named "Inflation Reduction Act" to distribute as he saw fit, and an awful lot of it landed in Democratic Party adjacent NGOs. Was private citizen Obama involved in arranging any of that?

Is Barack Obama, the 44th President of the US, a true villain? He was a very slick performer during the eight years he was president. But now, the political faction he led - maybe still leads because, look around, who else is there? - has gone batshit crazy since his second term ended. His party beat a path straight into the overt advocacy of communism with a jihad cherry on top, and you don't hear him complaining about any of it.

What I hear is that Joe DiGenova intended to subpoena Barack Obama to give testimony to that Florida federal grand jury and that Todd Blanche nixed it, so Joe quit. The next day, diGenova told the media that if the Florida team is "allowed to do their jobs" they will "succeed supremely" and that the U.S. Attorney's office there was doing a "phenomenal job under the worst of circumstances." He later added, there was "plenty of evidence" but it "just takes time."

Whatever that means.

Yet everybody knows what went down in our country the past ten years, that a vicious blob called the Deep State has been running a continuous coup, just as everybody with half-a-brain knows exactly what Covid-19 was about.

The question that remains: does having half-a-brain mean you're retarded, and does that explain why nothing works in the USA, including the ability to manage the nation's justice apparatus?

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 16:20

"Dead Mall" Era Ends As Shoppers Return, Values Surge And Sector Leads CRE Revival

The "malls are dead" narrative gained traction in corporate media coverage in 2016 and 2017 and lasted until 2022.

Those headlines reflected the strain across the sector as excess retail space, department-store closures, and shifting consumer habits led to widespread low occupancy and cratering property values.

But now, new data suggest that the "dead mall" narrative has not just reversed: that part of the CRE market is thriving, with a Wall Street Journal report saying it's outperforming every other major CRE sector.

CRE research firm Green Street released a new report showing that mall values across the US rose 13% over the past year, leading all 10 sectors it tracks and more than doubling the increase in overall CRE prices. That recovery has attracted investors who are souring on weak performance across office and multifamily properties.

Simon Property Group, the largest US mall owner, saw its shares surpass their 2016 peak in July. That earlier peak came just as the "dead mall" narrative began to erupt in MSM headlines. The stock is up nearly 11% this year.

WSJ cited Vincent Rouget, CEO of Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a Paris-based CRE company, who explained that US tenant sales and net operating income growth are exceeding the company's broader portfolio average, with rent growth at levels unseen since the early 2010s.

"We see the type of rent growth that we haven't seen since the beginning of the 2010s," Rouget told the outlet.

Morgan Stanley real estate research chief Ronald Kamdem said, "In terms of how we think about the malls today fundamentally, this is probably the best it's felt post-Covid."

The tailwinds extend beyond trophy malls. CBL Properties, which entered bankruptcy protection during the Covid pandemic, reports rising traffic and sales. Its shares have climbed 48% this year, and it has acquired five properties since July 2025 after shrinking its portfolio footprint for years. 

CBL's West County Center near St. Louis couldn't refinance its debt in 2022, and the property was in decline but has since seen tenant sales increase by 13% since 2023. 

Oversupply conditions have likely abated, as Green Street said about an estimated 200 malls have closed since 2008, leaving about 900 operating nationwide. 

Resilient consumer spending has put the remaining malls on some of their strongest footing in years, and many have shifted from a department-store-led business model toward destinations built around shopping, dining, and entertainment.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 15:45

Here's What's Happening Inside Convenience Stores As Gas And Diesel Spike

We continue to track convenience store trends as an indicator of working-class sentiment, building on our coverage of the spending pullback that emerged early in the US-Iran conflict. That weakness persisted into late summer as August's fuel-price spike put further pressure on household budgets.

The Gulf conflict and a global refining squeeze pushed regular gasoline above $4.50 a gallon and diesel above $5.50 in August, leaving consumers with less room for discretionary purchases.

Jefferies food analyst Scott Marks published a note on Monday morning providing new insight into consumer trends at the convenience store level in August, as elevated fuel prices appeared to renew pressure on consumers.

Marks and his team found that visits fell 2% from a year earlier, a 1.25-percentage-point deterioration in the annual growth rate compared with July. The reversal largely erased July's improvement, he said, adding that higher fuel prices in late August and early September suggest traffic could remain under pressure.

The squeeze is showing up both at the pump and inside the store. Across tracked convenience store food categories, volumes declined roughly 9% from a year earlier during the three months ended Aug. 22, compared with a 7.5% decline over the six-month period. Dollar sales fell about 3%, even as pricing growth accelerated to approximately 6% from 5%.

Marks added more color:

What We C: Traffic Takes a Step Back in August

Convenience store traffic stepped back down in August, with rising fuel prices appearing to renew pressure on the consumer. A vast majority of top food categories saw sales worsen L3M vs. L6M, with volume trends similarly worsening in most. Performance nutrition shakes were the clear standout on strong DD% growth, underscoring consumer demand for protein, while chocolate inflected negative and energy continues to lead in beverages.

Convenience channel traffic steps back down. C-store foot traffic fell ~2% y/y in August, representing a 125 bps sequential decline vs. July. This decline follows a 150 bps sequential improvement in July, with rising fuel prices in the back half of the month that remained elevated through August likely driving the reversal in trends. Notably, with fuel prices rising further in late August and early September, c-store traffic is likely to remain under pressure. Nielsen data showed broad-based softening across top food categories, with a majority experiencing weaker sales trends in the L3M versus L6M period. Volumes also deteriorated across most categories, while pricing accelerated in the majority.

CASY results underscore trade-down, low-end more pressured. CASY FQ1 pointed to a consumer still spending on food/bevs while trading down elsewhere, with inside comps +3.2% and PFDB +4.8% driven by traffic and units. All income cohorts grew, though lower-income shoppers were more pressured, and higher fuel prices drove fewer gallons per trip but more trips. Grocery softness was category-led, as national brand pricing pushed snack buyers into private label and beer stayed weak, while nicotine alts and energy outperformed. With expectations elevated into the print, shares traded off on multiple compression rather than deteriorating fundamentals.

Performance nutrition shakes lead as chocolate inflects negative. U.S. tracked channel convenience store sales and volume trends deteriorated in the L3M vs. L6M ending Aug. 22, with total convenience volumes worsening to down ~9% from ~7.5% and sales worsening to down ~3% from ~2.7%. Performance nutrition shakes were the clear standout, with sales up ~13.5% L3M (vs. ~9% L6M) on ~13% volume growth and ~15% TDP growth, underscoring consumer demand for protein. Chocolate inflected negative on sales (down ~1% L3M vs. up ~1% L6M) as volumes worsened to down ~10% from ~8.5%. Multi serve (down ~17.5%), ice cream (down ~11.5%), meat snacks (down ~11%) and confection (down ~10.5%) led volume declines, with multi serve, frozen novelty, and sandwiches deteriorating most sharply L3M vs. L6M. On a sales basis, multi serve (down ~12.5%), confection (down ~6.5%), doughnuts (down ~6%) and meat snacks (down ~6%) were the steepest decliners. Price realization remained positive for most categories, led by chocolate (+8.5%), with total convenience food pricing accelerating to +6% L3M from +5% L6M.

Energy Remains a Standout in Beverages. Non-Alc Beverages declined 0.5% y/y over the L3M (-0.2% L6M) in the convenience channel, while Energy's outperformance continues, up 4.7%. Pricing is sticking, innovation is working, and new consumers are entering the category as consumers prioritize functional beverages. Meanwhile, soft drinks declined on both a dollar (down 3.4%) and a volume basis (units down 7.5%) over the L3M. Beer did, too, with sales down 5.0% L3M.

The report draws on Placer.AI foot-traffic data and NielsenIQ data from major convenience store chains and fuel retailers, including 7-Eleven, Casey's, Circle K, QuikTrip, Royal Farms and Wawa, providing a broad view of spending behavior across the channel.

Marks' findings suggest consumers are becoming more defensive with their spending, trading down and reducing purchase volumes as fuel and food costs squeeze household budgets. Strength in select categories shows that consumers remain willing to spend. This consumer pressure story at the convenience store level doesn't bode well for the Trump administration ahead of the midterm elections, as folks usually vote with their pocketbooks. 

Professional subscribers can read more about consumer trends here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 15:27

NATO Vows More Ukraine Support After Boris Johnson & David Petraeus Train Attack Near-Miss

More escalation, NATO says. The Western military alliance's Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Monday that Russian drone strikes near the Ukraine-Poland border hit "close to NATO territory".

He said the Sunday attack, which occurred merely hundreds of meters from Poland's border, smacked of Putin's "desperation and also his desire to sow fear and terror." Western media outlets reported early Sunday that a Russian attack drone struck a civilian locomotive on the Kiev-to-Warsaw route with just two kilometers from the border.

Rutte pledged even more support for Ukraine in the wake of the attack. "He thinks that he can stop us from supporting Ukraine and that he can undermine our unity. He is wrong," the NATO chief said of the Russian leader.

via Epoch Times

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has indicated greatly stepped-up border security, and has newly stated: "These coming weeks and months will be a time of very intensified actions on the Russian side, and unfortunately we cannot rule out that this escalation will also affect our territory."

European media reports suggested that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other top officials may have been targeted. A train full of NATO security officials had reportedly just departed the station before the rare daytime strike.

And the former CIA director was on board, and commented:

Former CIA Director David Petraeus was at a Ukrainian train station Sunday when a Russian drone struck a Poland-bound train there.

Petraeus, a retired U.S. Army general, was aboard a separate passenger train at Yahodyn station near the Polish border when a jet-powered Russian drone struck the locomotive of a nearby train, according to multiple reports.

Petraeus said passengers on his train heard drones overhead and were evacuated after passing through Ukrainian customs. A large explosion followed.

According to the NY Times: "David Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, could hear the Russian drones above his train, which had just passed through Ukrainian customs on its way to Poland on Sunday morning. He and other passengers were quickly evacuated. Not long after, he heard a huge explosion."

Petraeus told the outlet, "For those who have not been under fire, this was terrifying."

Russia struck the locomotive of a passenger train in Ukraine’s Volyn region, just 2 km from the Polish border, according to Ukrainian Railways.

A monitoring group had warned the train crew of the threat in advance, and no injuries were reported. pic.twitter.com/XE1V1tkKej

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 13, 2026

As for former UK PM Johnson, he condemned the attack but did not indicate that he thought he was being targeted. "What we can say for sure is that this is the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day – even on civilian railways," Johnson wrote on X. The particular train that he and other Western security officials were on was issued an evacuation order, but then soon after was allowed to proceed on its destination. 

Some pundits are pointing to a possible false flag scenario. It also could just be a strong 'warning' for from Moscow, after moving forward with strikes on 'decision-making centers' in Ukraine.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 14:25

Jeffries Refuses To Rule Out Trump Impeachment If Democrats Win House

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday that Democrats have not ruled out another impeachment of President Donald Trump if they capture control of the House in November's midterm elections.

During an appearance on ABC's "This Week," host George Stephanopoulos asked the New York Democrat whether his party would pursue impeachment immediately after taking control of the chamber.

"No, we haven't ruled anything in and we haven't ruled anything out in terms of impeachment," Jeffries said.

Jeffries said Democrats would instead begin by investigating allegations of wrongdoing and allow the evidence to determine what action Congress should take.

"We've got to follow the facts, apply the law, be guided by the Constitution, and then let the chips fall where they may, in the best interests of the American people," he said.

Jeffries pointed to Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., who would be positioned to lead the powerful House Judiciary and Oversight committees if Democrats win the majority.

Trump has already predicted that Democrats would attempt to impeach him again if they take control of the House.

The House impeached Trump twice during his first term. The first impeachment came in 2019 over his dealings with Ukraine. The second followed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Senate acquitted Trump in both cases.

Democrats would gain significantly expanded investigative authority if they capture the House, including control of committee hearings and subpoenas.

Jeffries also outlined several legislative priorities Democrats would pursue if they take control, including efforts to reverse Trump's tariffs, end U.S. involvement in the war with Iran and restore enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.

"These are some of the things that I think we can begin to do," Jeffries said, adding that Democrats would pursue an aggressive legislative agenda throughout the next Congress.

Control of the House will be decided in the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Republicans currently hold the majority, while Democrats are seeking the net gain of seats necessary to take control in January.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 14:10

Trump Says Meeting With Chinese Leader Will Cover 'Almost Everything'

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sept. 13 that he would discuss almost everything with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a planned meeting at the White House later this month.

Trump did not provide specifics but said his tariffs had kept Chinese vehicles out of the U.S. market.

"The tariff kept them out. I have a 100 percent tariff. From 100 to 150 percent," he told reporters aboard Air Force One, comparing the U.S. move with Europe, which he said was being decimated by Chinese cars.

Trump last week dismissed the possibility of allowing Chinese cars to be imported into the United States but indicated that he may be open to Chinese automakers building cars in the country, provided they hire American workers.

Earlier this month, a group representing most of the major automakers urged Congress to quickly pass legislation permanently barring Chinese vehicles from the U.S. market.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Honda, Stellantis, and others, called for passage of the bill by the end of December.

"Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world," the group's CEO, John Bozzella, said in a letter to congressional leaders. "China is capturing market share in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Mexico and South America with vehicles capable of collecting, processing and transmitting sensitive vehicle and consumer data to the Chinese Communist Party."

Trump also told reporters on Sept. 13 that he expects to reach an agreement for China to purchase Boeing aircraft during Xi's visit. China has previously agreed to buy 200 Boeing planes after the two leaders met in Beijing in May, but the deal has yet to be finalized.

"I get every deal," the president said.

When asked about reports alleging that Chinese entities may have supplied Iran with satellite imagery of U.S. airbases in Jordan, Trump said, "They basically do what we do."

It is unclear whether he plans to raise the issue during his meeting with Xi, but Trump said the Chinese leader has "behaved reasonably well."

"You know when they say that China spies on us, I say, you're right, and we spy on them, too," he said.

Xi was scheduled to visit the United States on Sept. 24. Trump formally invited Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, to the White House during his May visit to Beijing. The president said in July that he plans to discuss artificial intelligence with the Chinese leader.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on July 22 that he met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Manila, the Philippines, to lay the groundwork for Xi's upcoming visit to the United States.

Rubio acknowledged the major differences between Washington and Beijing and emphasized that it is their job to manage them to ensure "they never get out of control."

"We're, obviously, always going to defend our national interest," he said at the time. "And I expect they'll do the same, as they define it. But I think there are some areas of potential cooperation."

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 13:35

Trump Says US Could Remain In Iran And Keep Oil, Similar To Deal With Venezuela

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Sept. 13 said the United States could ultimately remain in Iran and "keep the oil" in a similar manner to his administration's move to control some of Venezuela's oil reserves.

"We'll ultimately get out [of Iran], unless we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela," Trump said at the Trump International Golf Course in Ireland, adding that the U.S. revenue from Venezuela has "paid for the war many times."

The president did not elaborate on a possible oil agreement with Iran or whether he would be willing to deploy troops in the country. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sept. 13.

Just over six months ago, the United States began strikes against Iran in a bid to end the country's nuclear aspirations as Trump has repeatedly said Tehran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Iran has launched strikes on commercial oil vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which a significant portion of the world's traded oil passes, leading to spikes in gasoline and energy prices worldwide and in the United States.

On Sept. 12, the British military's UK Maritime Trade Organization said it received a report of an "incident" in the Hormuz Strait as a "vessel has been struck by an unknown projectile while transiting" the waterway. A fire broke out on the ship and local officials are moving to evacuate crew members, it said.

Speaking at the Irish Open golf championship, Trump also said that the price of gas would "drop like a rock" once the Iran war ended. He added that he believes the Iran war will end this year.

Trump said that he would only make the "right deal" and wouldn't do one that he believes wouldn't be good for U.S. interests while asserting that Iran was "calling constantly" for peace talks.

Earlier this year, the U.S. military launched an operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro before extraditing him to the United States. He faces felony drug charges and pleaded not guilty in January.

The White House in August announced a deal with Venezuela under which the United States takes control of 65 billion barrels from the South American country's vast oil reserves.

"This deal is a huge win for both the American and Venezuelan people," Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a post on X in late August. "It demonstrates how President Trump's bold foreign policy is driving America First wins: securing stable reserves and low-cost oil in our Hemisphere and lowering gas prices here at home."

Oil prices have remained relatively elevated in recent days amid strikes in Saudi Arabia. The price for both Brent crude and West Texas International barrels remained above $100 as of Sept. 13.

According to the American Automobile Association, the average gasoline price in the United States increased roughly 17 cents to $4.31 per gallon in the past seven days.

Saudi Arabia's energy ministry last week announced it was shutting down its East-West oil pipeline after it was attacked and as the Yemeni-based Houthi terrorist organization moved to capture cities closer to the Red Sea in recent days. The Houthis in the past week also launched strikes inside Saudi Arabia.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 12:40

Ukraine Pummels Black Sea Resort Near Putin's Villa With Air & Sea Drones

Ukraine sent some 400 drones across various parts of Russia and Crimea overnight, with UAV attacks having long been a nightly thing.

In this latest instance, the Black Sea resort city of Sochi suffered the most casualties, with five people - including a child - wounded in a drone attack. Several homes were also damaged in the assault.

The injuries in Sochi were due to "falling UAV debris" - local officials indicated Monday on Telegram. Sochi Mayor Andrei Proshunin later confirmed firefighters extinguished fires that resulted, with citizens being warned not to approach drone debris left from the attack.

Sochi has long been where President Putin has a sprawling vacation resort. He also used to frequently host foreign heads of state at the house.

Massive fire erupts at Sochi port, Russia, following reported Ukrainian drone attacks. pic.twitter.com/cm2WsiA4jS

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 9, 2026

The Telegraph reports that Putin's vacation residence may have been targeted in the overnight drone attack:

Ukraine launched strikes near Vladimir Putin’s seaside villa in the Black Sea resort of Sochi overnight, injuring five people. Footage posted online purported to show Ukrainian drones descending on the city, with large explosions and the thud of local air defence audible.

...Local Telegram channels reported strikes on an S-400 anti-aircraft missile system, many of which have come under fire in recent weeks after military intelligence found that the defensive systems were being repurposed to strike ground targets in Ukraine.

One channel claimed that drones had targeted Putin’s Bocharov Ruchey summer dacha, a coastal compound in a busy area of the city. The Russian president is believed to have largely stopped visiting the residence since it came within range of Kyiv’s drones.

The city mayor has ordered a temporary beach closure, also after last week sea drones unleashed even greater casualties and mayhem.

It is reported that Russia's Krasnodar Krai was attacked overnight. Ukrainian drones targeted Sochi and other localities. Local residents reported a series of explosions and air defense activity. Due to the attack, restrictions were introduced at the Sochi airport. pic.twitter.com/JdPuodaDsO

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) September 14, 2026

"Proshunin later announced the closure of Sochis beache’s due to the ongoing risk of drone strikes," Moscow Times writes.

The prior incident saw seaside resorts and nightlife venues specifically targeted. One regional outlet details:

Ukrainian sea drones — which Russia’s Defense Ministry calls “uncrewed boats” — struck the waterfront in Sochi on the evening of September 9. Twenty-eight people were injured, including two children, Krasnodar Krai’s operational headquarters reported. All those injured have received medical treatment; three adults and one child remain hospitalized.

The attack began around 9 p.m., just as singer Tatiana Bulanova was performing a concert at the Festivalny House of Culture on the waterfront. The concert was halted and the audience evacuated.

One local resident recounted what happened: “My wife was at the concert. During the evacuation, people were falling, running in panic. Explosions could be heard all around. She fell while running to the car. She was knocked down by the blast wave. You could really feel the shock wave after each explosion. They were very close.”

Ukraine has been seeking to impose a steep cost on the Russian population of late, hoping that it puts enough pressure on President Putin to come to the negotiating table while willing to compromise.

#BREAKING

Ukrainian is attacking former Olympic city Sochi, Russia pic.twitter.com/XGVPQiysmn

— Brian’s Breaking News and Intel (@intelFromBrian) September 14, 2026

However, Russia's own ballistic missile and drone attacks have only intensified in response, with the southern port city of Odessa getting severely hit of late. Recently, a shopping center in Ukraine came under attack, resulting in a mass casualty event.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 12:20

Willy Wonka And The Compute Factories

By Benjamin Picton, Senior Market Strategist at Rabobank

Oil prices are rising again on news of the shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline following drone strikes, and the Houthis’ seizure of strategic locations on the Red Sea coast.

Bond yields surged late last week on rising oil and inflation (and debt) concerns, while Asian equity indices and US equity futures are broadly in the red today. Geopolitical friction remains at the forefront of investor concerns as the Middle East and Eastern Europe simmer away, leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland plot the dissolution of the United Kingdom, and Canada hatches a cunning plan to avoid becoming the 51st US state by (in effect) becoming the 28th EU member state.

So, another quiet week ahead.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei caused a sensation over the weekend by publishing an essay arguing “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”. Amodei’s call quickly found support from Elon Musk and Sam Altman, erstwhile Arthur Slugworths to Amodei’s Willy Wonka. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Amodei opens his essay by extoling the transformational potential of AI to create a Utopian world of superabundance where most major diseases are a thing of the past, economic growth is greatly accelerated, and a new renaissance of democracy and freedom is forthcoming. Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.

The vision then turns darker with Amodei arguing that AI capabilities are advancing too quickly for society to appropriately manage the risks. That’s a sentiment that his fellow tech leaders apparently share, with Musk in particular previously arguing that AI could prove more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Curiously, this places founders in the unusual position of not only agreeing with each other but also favoring tighter regulation for their own businesses with future growth throttled.

Amodei points particularly to the recent emergence of ‘recursive self-improvement’ –AI building AI – as a source of potential risk, particularly following the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident whereby swarms of AI agents went rogue and began conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets that no human had asked them to attack. For anyone that has seen the Terminator or Matrix films, or read Frankenstein, or the Bible, the idea of Creation rebelling against Creator with disastrous consequences is a well-worn fear.

Fear is a great motivator, but any good markets person knows that greed is too. It didn’t take long for the cynics to emerge with alternative theories as to why founders might like to see tighter regulation, international coordination, and a slower pace of development. One commentator translated Amodei’s call as an admission that open source models are competing AI margins to zero while CAPEX burn rates threaten viability. The solution: regulatory intervention to limit competition and maintain margins.

Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.

Let’s maintain our margins with regulatory capture, ban open source models, and slow down the capex arms race. All with a virtue signaling cherry on top. https://t.co/70pusgSX8o

— Grant Hummer (@gphummer) September 12, 2026

Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, David Sacks, said that “if the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down. I support your decision to be responsible.” However, he then went on to suggest that the founders’ motivations were less than altruistic, that China was unlikely to join any agreement to slow the pace of AI development, and that founders were effectively lobbying for regulatory capture. His message: if you want to slow the pace of development, just do it yourselves.

The point about China is an important one. In a world of geopolitical competition, games that require coordination for humanity to come out a winner are hard and suboptimal outcomes can be Nash equilibriums (just look at Javier Blas’s recent tweet about soaring coal demand).

CHART OF THE DAY: Global coal demand has surprised the @IEA massively to the upside: it’s running ~1 billion tonnes higher (~9%) than the agency had expected only five years ago.

The forecasting error equals to the anual demand of the EU, Japan and the US — combined! pic.twitter.com/BfCHlV0DQ1

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) September 12, 2026

AI is national security, and China’s regular provision of Sputnik moments like the release of DeepSeek’s R1 model in January 2025 and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model in July this year have raised concerns that China is closing the gap in terms of the capabilities of frontier AI, at lower cost, and with open source models. Effectively, another Arthur Slugworth’s almost-as-good recipes (the model) have been made public, and that is a big problem for Willy Wonka (and also for Arthur Slugworth).

While calls from CEOs for regulation might be viewed as self-serving, the imperative for national governments to control AI should be sufficiently underscored by recent revelations from Anthropic that users in northern Yemen – home to the Houthis – tried to use Claude AI to develop advanced missiles, and that Iran had tried to use Claude to target American warships. There is a sense that a Pandora’s Box has been opened and that both the United States and China have an interest in forcing the lid back down to control access to such a potentially dangerous technology.

Izabella Kaminska argues that AI safety concerns are being proffered as a “credible off ramp from the hyper scaling narrative”, which she views as defunct since the release of Kimi K3. Emphasis shifts from the models themselves to the compute, power and chips used to run them. If AI models are Wonka and Slugworth’s increasingly commoditised recipes, the datacentres, energy sources and semiconductors are the factories used to convert recipe into product – and are the real strategic assets. Turns out real production can matter more than IP, who knew?

Kaminska argues that hyper scaling was never driven by expected demand, but by an arms race of sorts. The financial firepower to fund AI investments was determinative, but if the raison d’etre for hyperscaling disappeared in July, so did the need for immense private capital flows. Could we be approaching a scenario where US AI capabilities are brought under a kind of Manhattan Project where freed-up liquidity flows constitute the asymmetric information that Scott ‘I am the House’ Bessent has been warning markets about?

This, plus the fact that the AI cycle will need $1.5 trillion in private credit funding, is why the US will have to throw private credit in the bailout bucket too.

Yes, a lot of things will need a bailout to win the AI wars. That's why the $ is reserve for now. https://t.co/ozlvzvD98K

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 18, 2025

This week might provide some clues in that respect as the FOMC meets to set the Fed Funds rate. Following last week’s firmer than expected core CPI reading and two weeks of rising oil prices the markets are 87% priced for a hike. RaboResearch’s Fed watcher Philip Marey has recently updated our forecast to also predict a hike at this week’s meeting. Meanwhile, the FT reports that hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller (mentor to both Bessent and Fed Chair Warsh) recently told a closed audience that “given what’s going on in the economy and the capital spending boom and the war for capital, if anything, [bond yields seem] a little low”. Any indication that the war for capital might de-escalate would be a signal to pay close attention to!

Druckenmiller says that his fund has cut its AI investments to around 20% of previous levels, saying that “it has been an incredible ride on the whole AI thing... I think we’re getting late enough in the build-out that one has to start to worry a little”.

For his part, President Trump says that the pace of AI development should not slow down. Equity investors may be relieved to hear that, but given the geopolitical and bond market imperatives, and the increased prevalence of economic statecraft, perhaps they should pay some heed to other orange men with unusual hairstyles:

Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-da
If you're not greedy, you will go far
You will live in happiness too
Like the Oompa, Loompa, doompa-dee-do

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 12:00

Costco Begins Rationing Kirkland Signature Motor Oil As Refined Crisis Spreads

Costco's Kirkland Signature motor oil has doubled in price, and customers now reportedly face a purchase limit as the Gulf energy conflict, combined with the Russia-Ukraine war, has sent the global refining market into a tailspin.

Auto news website The Auto Wire reports that a 10-quart package of Kirkland full-synthetic oil now costs about $58, up from around $30, with a new purchase limit of two packages per week.

Costco's online sales platform confirms an order limit: when attempting to order three packs, an alert message reads, "Item 997930 has a maximum order quantity of 2."

Another auto blog, MotorBiscuit, provided more detail on the refining crisis and its impact on the global liquids market:

The ongoing military entanglement with Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have effectively choked off these crucial exports. To compound the supply chain disaster, the massive Pearl GTL facility in Qatar sustained heavy damage from Iranian airstrikes in March 2026, instantly crippling a major portion of global production for at least a year.

Refineries Chase 40-Year Profit Highs

Typically, when Middle Eastern supply lines fracture, South Korean refiners step in to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, those refiners are currently struggling to secure raw crude oil themselves.

Furthermore, the petroleum industry is aggressively shifting its manufacturing priorities. Right now, global profit margins for diesel and jet fuel have hit staggering 40-year highs. Motor oil, diesel, and aviation fuel all originate from the same barrels of raw crude. Given the choice between producing essential base oils for passenger cars or cashing in on incredibly lucrative aviation and commercial diesel markets, refiners are overwhelmingly choosing the latter.

This geopolitical squeeze is hitting at the exact worst time for everyday drivers. Today's highly stressed, turbocharged, small-displacement engines require incredibly sophisticated oil chemistries to prevent catastrophic failure and comply with strict environmental standards.

Because modern engines are so sensitive, automakers demand rigorous chemical testing and licensing. General Motors, for example, requires vendors to pay double licensing fees (both per product and per unit sold) just to print the "Dexos-approved" badge on their packaging. This certification appears directly on Costco's Kirkland brand.

Combine a fractured Middle Eastern supply chain, international refiners chasing diesel profits, and the expensive licensing fees required for modern engines, and you have the perfect storm for empty shelves.

It's not just motor oil. Households relying on heating oil face the risk of sharply higher bills as the Northern Hemisphere winter approaches. With the national average retail diesel at a record $6.23 a gallon Monday morning, the squeeze on distillate fuels and other refined fuels is causing a shock. However, electric vehicle owners are just sitting back, watching this all unfold. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:45

Trump Declares Ukraine, Russia Have Agreed To Halt All Attacks On Energy Targets

Update(11:19)ET: Amid soaring national diesel products and painfully high prices at the pump, President Trump on Monday announced the Zelensky government has acceded to the US president's prior call to abstain from attacking diesel infrastructure in Russia. He has unveiled what he's presenting as a new Russia-Ukraine energy ceasefire.

Trump says "Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise! The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/ Ukraine War, not Iran." Clearly high fuel prices are creating immense pressure within the GOP, and Trump is trying to essentially tweet his way out of this war-related mess...

DIESEL FUTURES PARE GAINS, TRADE NEAR $5.04/GAL

Diesel responded immediately...

And also crude...

*  *  *

The Kremlin has welcomed President Trump's weekend call for Ukraine to stop attacking Russian diesel supply and infrastructure sites. The somewhat surprise remarks which will only serve to further pressure the Zelensky government came when pressed by a reporter on Sunday. Trump responded by saying Zelensky "has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia."

The US president said at the sidelines of the Irish Open on Sunday, "There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit diesel fuel, because that’s hurting, that’s hurting the world" - adding that he indeed had spoken to the Ukrainian president about it.

"I've asked Zelensky not to hit the Russian refineries. Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it’s having a hard time coming out of Russia," Trump additionally stated. "That’s a case that hurts the world, and we’ve got to stop it."

On Monday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Trump's words. "Of course, one can only welcome any call on the Kiev regime to stop strikes on civilian economic infrastructure," Peskov told a press briefing.

via Associated Press

The Kremlin official had been questioned on whether Putin views the US call to refrain from strikes on Russia's diesel-producing infrastructure a positive step toward a settlement of the Ukrainian conflict.

"Any countries can contribute to a settlement in Ukraine by influencing Kiev and pushing it toward flexibility," Peskov said, leaving things somewhat vague. He said that disabling of Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline, which has reportedly knocked more than 4% of global supplies off the market, is cause of serious concern.

"The deterioration of the situation in oil markets cannot but cause concern among global economies," he emphasized. On that front, the Associated Press newly reports Monday:

A crucial Saudi oil pipeline hit in strikes will be mostly out of service for several weeks for repairs, reports AP citing officials

Specifically concerning the status of the 'special military operation' in Ukraine, the Putin spokesman described, "It is becoming increasingly clear to professionals, based on the dynamics at the front lines, that Russia is consistently moving toward achieving its goals in the special military operation."

He vowed: "The dynamics of advances at the front lines of the special military operation will continue; no one should have any doubts about that."

And he explained of the weekend New Delhi-hosted major BRICS summit, "Putin reacted positively to the readiness of the leaders of China and India to contribute to the Ukrainian settlement."

.@POTUS: "I've asked President Zelensky not to hit the diesel plants — refineries... Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it's having a hard time coming out of Russia." pic.twitter.com/G9P3tbsNMQ

— Scott Adams (@scottadamsshow) September 14, 2026

As for Ukraine, President Zelensky over the weekend pointed out that the country's own energy infrastructure has also subject of frequent attack by Russia.

"The Russians are burning warehouses with food and gas stations, pharmaceutical facilities and ordinary passenger trains, residential buildings and civilian businesses," Zelensky stated in a Sept.12 X post.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:19

Beijing Rejects Pause, Slams Dario's 'Fearmongering, Cold War Playbook'

China's Foreign Ministry and state press had rejected the China provisions of Dario Amodei's essay calling for a 'pause' in AI development, while state security minister and President Xi Jinping laid out what Beijing wants instead.

On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, an essay arguing that the industry must slow the rate at which it improves frontier models and asking Washington to help it do so. By Monday afternoon in Beijing, China's Foreign Ministry responded. 

The essay's three steps, are third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access inside the labs, which Anthropic committed to unilaterally; coordination among labs in democratic countries on safety standards and the pace of progress, which Amodei concedes needs a narrow antitrust waiver from the U.S. government; and, eventually, agreements with various governments, including China. It also asks Washington to keep the ban on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, enforce it against smuggling and remote access to overseas data centers, crack down on distillation, prevent model-weight theft, and use the resulting three-to-five-year window to widen America's lead before any bargain is struck. Sam Altman said OpenAI would match the evaluator commitment. Elon Musk's reaction was three words: "Dario is right."

Amodei himself acknowledged the problem. On CBS on Sunday he called the possibility that China and other adversaries would not slow down the "toughest dilemma" in his proposal.

According to Xinhua, Beijing's Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Monday that the development of AI bears on the well-being of all humanity and that all parties should jointly promote its open and inclusive development for good and for all. He added: "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest."

On Sunday evening Beijing time, a Global Times editorial admitted that sure - on the surface the essay appears to be a "rational statement" about global AI security. A closer reading, the paper said, showed it "packed with containment provisions targeting China" and, in essence, a "Cold War playbook" for the AI sector - and that excluding China from the global innovation system would increase, rather than reduce, the "trial-and-error costs and risks of loss of control" in global AI development. China's AI capabilities "have long ceased to be a variable that can be excluded," reads the editorial. 

Other Chinese notables chimed in as well. Xiang Ligang, a telecom and technology policy commentator, called Amodei's rhetoric inappropriate, groundless and hostile. After all, the 'pacing' would ultimately require China's cooperation while advocating restrictions on chips, computing power and models to slow China down. Xiao Qian, vice dean of Tsinghua's Institute for AI International Governance, attributed the China provisions to commercial pressure: Anthropic's closed-model approach is competing with Chinese open-source models on cost, performance and the developer ecosystem, and restrictions would protect its position. Liu Shaoshan of the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, who the paper says previously worked with Amodei, added that framing AI as decisive for national security turns an AI company into "strategic infrastructure," which raises barriers to entry and valuations at the same time.

On Wednesday, Beijing's commerce ministry rejected a joint FBI, NSA and CISA advisory that accused Chinese developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to distill capabilities from Claude and GPT, calling the accusation "groundless in fact and without basis in law," distillation a normal technical and commercial practice, and the advisory further proof that Washington is "seeking to monopolize computing power."

Amodei's essay, published three days later, asks the U.S. government to crack down on the same practice in the same document that asks the industry to slow down for the sake of humanity. 

Trump Responds

Asked on Thursday in Dallas whether he had any concern about existential risk from AI, Trump said, "No, I don't have any." On Sunday, speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg resort during the Irish Open, he said the United States is "leading China in AI" and intends to stay there because "whoever wins AI, wins." Guardrails were possible, he said; the dire warnings came from "negative forces" raising things he insists will not happen. And on Monday, Trump slammed "perfect little angel" Dario over his screed.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same argument in institutional form: an emergency session to regulate AI would cost the United States the race with China.

The American Split

The domestic disagreement was already on the record. Barack Obama, at a Manhattan fundraiser on Thursday whose transcript his office released to the New York Times on Sunday, told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to make AI a governing issue if Democrats take the House. The technology, he said, is "moving very fast in private hands," and he positioned himself as neither an accelerationist nor a doomer.

David Sacks, the former White House AI czar, told Amodei and Altman in a Saturday-night post to go ahead and slow down if their unreleased models warrant it, but without the antitrust waiver, the regulatory approval process or METR, which he called intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff. Demanding a preferred framework as the price of restraint, he wrote, "will look like blackmail of the public and the political system." China, he added, was "very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know." Beijing confirmed the point two days later.

Beijing's Own Concerns

The most revealing document out of China this weekend wasn't the response to Dario. State Security Minister Chen Yixin's article, published Sunday in China Cyberspace, the Cyberspace Administration's journal, lists six categories of AI risk and, per Bloomberg, makes no mention of the Anthropic and OpenAI calls to slow down.

The first risk is regime security: "hostile forces" using deepfakes and bot networks to wage "cognitive warfare." The second is cyber offense, and here Chen named Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber as systems that sharply raise the efficiency of vulnerability discovery and malware development and threaten China's critical information infrastructure.

Chen describes AI as "a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers," warns that countries with an AI advantage may invoke national security to impose technology controls and build closed ecosystems, and calls for powers to "resolutely resist hegemonism, technological barriers, and exclusive blocs." None of this means Beijing dismisses loss-of-control risk: its cyberspace regulator has carried an explicit loss-of-control scenario in its safety framework since 2024, and Xi said at the World AI Conference in July that AI should "always remain under human control."

Chen's focus is on who controls the systems, who can weaponize them, and who is denied the hardware to build them, not about whether the frontier should move more slowly.

Then There's Xi

Xi's own contribution came at the BRICS summit in New Delhi on Sunday. China will take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI Open Source Zone to promote cooperation on large language models, AI training and an open AI ecosystem, he said. The logic is to build with the Global South and resist a ruleset written in San Francisco and enforced through American export licenses.

Trump and Xi are due to meet in Washington on September 24, with AI governance expected on the agenda.

Reuters reported that officials were preparing a separate mid-September AI-safety dialogue led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, covering AI-directed cyberattacks, distillation and the prospect of a Chinese model with Mythos-level cyber capabilities; a White House official said "there is currently no planned AI-related meeting in mid-September." Lizzi Lee of the Asia Society Policy Institute framed Beijing's question: if Washington wants cooperation on frontier safety while restricting China's access to frontier compute, "what exactly does that cooperation look like?"

As we laid out Saturday: Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax and Zhipu are downloadable, forkable and far cheaper to run, with cumulative downloads the Global Times puts above 10 billion. Export controls and evaluator regimes govern American labs and American hardware. They do not retrieve weights that have already been distributed. Amodei's essay does not pretend otherwise; it is why the proposal climbs to a negotiation with Beijing, and why he ranks a treaty-style limit on recursive self-improvement as "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." That third step requires a partner. As of Monday, the partner has said what it thinks of the first two.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:15

Another Judge Blocks USPS From Implementing New Mail-In Ballot Rule

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Sept. 13 that blocks the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from enforcing its requirements to tighten mail-in voting rules.

Under the rule, states must supply the agency with lists of mail ballot recipients, and all outbound and return ballot envelopes must bear unique barcodes. It also allows the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply with the new standards.

In a 24-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the Postal Service had likely exceeded the authority granted by Congress when issuing the rule. He said that the government had failed to provide any evidence that halting the USPS mail-in voting rule would result in significant fraud in the upcoming elections.

"The key portions of the rule exceed any conception of the outer bounds of these authorities," Nichols said in the ruling.

"Nothing in the Postal Reorganization Act authorizes the Postal Service to impose new election procedures on state election officials, to create a data collection system for mail-in and absentee voters, or to refuse the transmission of lawful mail because it fails to meet these data collection requirements."

The Postal Service issued the final rule on Aug. 21 to implement an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March. In the order, Trump wrote that the federal government had a duty to maintain public confidence in election outcomes and that additional measures were needed to enhance election integrity through U.S. mail.

The Trump administration previously said the executive order would help to keep federal elections honest.

The Department of Justice argued on Aug. 31 that the USPS rule is "a regulation of the U.S. mail, and a modest one at that - not a federal takeover of election administration by the Postal Service."

The judge on Sunday also found that the rule would increase the risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots would not be counted in the upcoming elections.

"The harm of untransmitted ballots - both to voters and candidates - is irreversible, because 'once the election occurs, there can be no do-over and no redress,'" Nichols said.

The Epoch Times reached out to USPS for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

A federal appeals court on Sept. 10 declined to pause an injunction issued Sept. 4 by Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which extended a temporary restraining order issued on Aug. 27 that halted key parts of the Postal Service's final rule.

The Supreme Court is currently considering the government's appeal of the order.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:00

$6 Diesel Flashes 2008 Warning As Energy Shock, AI Slowdown Fears Fuel Perfect Storm

As of Monday morning, AAA's national average retail diesel price topped $6.23 a gallon as a global refining crisis sparked by the Russia-Ukraine war and compounded by the Gulf conflict sent the price of the most critical fuel powering the industrial world skyrocketing.

Bloomberg Intelligence senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone warned Monday that "$6 diesel echoes 2008 gasoline shock."

"Commodity spikes tend to sow the seeds of their own reversal, and diesel's first-ever surge above $6 a gallon may echo gasoline's 2008 experience. The US daily average gasoline price, at roughly $4.30 on Sept. 11, is only about 4% above its 2008 peak, which helped fuel the Great Recession," McGlone wrote in a note.

He added, "Elevated stock market valuations could add to the vulnerability."

On top of a fuel price shock, tech is sliding Monday morning amid fears of an AI slowdown (read the morning note). 

McGlone's warning comes as Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, pointed out at the end of last week that some gas pumps across California hit a record $9.99 per gallon for the industrial fuel.

MAXXED OUT at $9.999!! GasBuddy data showing 5 stations in California that have hit the limit and are selling diesel at the dispensers highest possible price: $9.999/gal

— Patrick De Haan (@GasBuddyGuy) September 10, 2026

Any sustained diesel price shock can push inflation higher while slowing economic growth, creating a stagflationary squeeze. Higher energy costs raise production expenses and reduce households' purchasing power, also denting consumer sentiment. 

The global refining crisis has drawn the White House's attention. President Trump on Sunday called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt strikes on Russian diesel infrastructure.

"Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia," Trump told reporters at the Irish Open yesterday.

"We spoke to Mr. Zelenskyy about it. There are plenty of other targets. Don't hit diesel fuel, because that's hurting, that's hurting the world," the president said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering how to use the Defense Production Act to expand US oil refining capacity as the Iran conflict drives up fuel prices.

Brent crude traded around $109 a barrel this morning. Last week, the IEA published a report warning of potential demand destruction for industrial fuels. US diesel crack spread remains above $110 a barrel. 

S&P Global Energy warned Thursday that it does not forecast Middle East crude production to return to prewar levels by the end of 2027.

Citi analysts warned Friday that soaring commodity costs and diesel prices will weigh on many of the companies in their coverage universe through the first half of next year:

In 2025, commodity costs were mildly inflationary except for select inputs such as coffee, gas, and tallow which up meaningful +DD%. However, in 2026, commodity inflation has reaccelerated with acute pressure on direct and indirect energy-based products driven by the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East including oil, resins, and diesel/freight costs. Additionally, prices for commodities impacted by tariffs and the global trade dynamics have also increased in 2026 including in aluminum and steel. Many of our companies have highlighted these input cost headwinds, which are pressuring margins this year and which we suspect will remain headwinds into at least 1H'27.

In March, JPMorgan's head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, outlined six policy levers the Trump administration could pull to contain oil prices. Some, including Jones Act waivers and Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases, have already been used. Other options include export restrictions and waiving federal fuel taxes.  

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 10:40

Trump Says He Might Release More 9/11 Records

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said on Sept. 13 he might release records related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"I'm going to look at it when I get back," he told reporters in Ireland, after being asked about recent requests from families of people who perished in the attacks.

A nephew of Lisa Marie Terry, who was in the North Tower at the World Trade Center when it was struck by one of the planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists, was among those who recently called on Trump to declassify records related to the attacks on the center and the Pentagon.

"For 25 years, the deep state has hidden the truth about what happened that day 25 years ago," he said during a reading of the names of the victims in New York City on Sept. 11.

"President Trump, you are our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what's left of the victims' families are still alive to see it."

Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom Strada, died in the attacks, said during the same event that past administrations have chosen "to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families" and urged Trump to take action.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, according to the FBI. Some of the families have sued Saudi Arabia, alleging it is liable because officials supported Al Qaeda in the time leading up to the attacks.

A federal judge in 2025 rejected Saudi Arabia's motion to dismiss the case, concluding there was evidence at that stage that two Saudi Arabian officials assisted the hijackers and that the employees were acting within the scope of their employment.

Lawyers for Saudi Arabia argued that the nation was partnered with the United States against terrorism, Al Qaeda, and its founder, Osama bin Laden, in the 1990s. They disputed allegations that the two Saudi officials knowingly assisted the hijackers as part of a government effort.

President Joe Biden, while in office, ordered the declassification of some records related to 9/11, including a summary of an FBI report from 2016 that listed some Saudi nationals as having connections to 9/11 hijackers.

The Trump administration on Sept. 11 released declassified records showing multiple presidents were warned that Bin Laden was plotting to hijack aircraft and carry out an attack inside the United States, as well as interviews conducted by the 9/11 Commission with top officials, including former President Bill Clinton.

New York City officials also recently made public thousands of documents related to 9/11, including memoranda from city officials discussing their worries about air quality in lower Manhattan in the wake of the attacks.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 10:25

Key Events This Week: Fed, BOJ And BOE; Also Retail Sales, Import Prices And Bessent

It's a bumper week for central bank decisions, with the Fed (Wednesday), BoE (Thursday) and BoJ (Friday) all meeting. Central banks aside, key data releases include US retail sales (Wednesday) and industrial production (Friday), UK inflation (Wednesday) and labor market data (Tuesday), economic activity in China (tomorrow), and inflation and trade in Japan (Friday and Wednesday respectively). Other events include the annual testimony of the US Treasury Secretary namely Bessent (tomorrow), and the State of the Union address in Europe (Wednesday).

Delving into more detail now, DB's Jim Reid writes that the main event for markets will be the Fed’s decision on Wednesday. Deutsche economists have long expected a 25bp rate hike with the market now at 87% this morning up from around 35% two Friday's ago just before Warsh's Jackson Hole speech. Such a move would take the target range to 3.75%-4.00%. DB economists believe the accompanying projections are likely to show a somewhat stronger growth outlook alongside still-elevated inflation. They have also added an extra hike in March to their forecast which now makes it 75bps of hikes over the next 7 months. A big focus will be Warsh's press conference and how he squares the circle between a dislike of forward guidance and calming markets which are baying for more info.  

Friday’s inflation data strengthened the case for action this week. Core CPI rose by 0.29% in August, a touch above expectations and up from 0.22% in July. The details were also firm, with notable strength in wireless services, airfares and lodging-away-from-home prices. Meanwhile, last Thursday’s PPI report contained hawkish elements, including stronger hospital and international airfare prices. Combining the latest CPI and PPI data, DB economists estimate August core PCE increased by 0.27%, a pace they do not view as consistent with sufficient progress back towards the Fed’s inflation target.

Attention will now turn to incoming US activity data. Tomorrow, markets will receive Treasury Secretary Bessent’s annual testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. On Wednesday, August US retail sales are released and economists expect a rebound to +0.8% month-on-month, following July’s -0.6% decline. They also forecast ex-auto sales at +0.5% and retail control sales at +0.4%, arguing that July’s weakness looked more like a temporary pause in consumer spending than the start of a broader slowdown. On Friday, industrial production is due and economists expect growth to edge up to +0.3% from +0.2% previously.

Looking beyond the US, the BoE announces its latest policy decision on Thursday. DB economists expect Bank Rate to remain unchanged at 3.75%, with a 6-3 voting split, and continue to see the MPC remaining relatively cautious compared with some other major central banks. However, the bond market and energy moves at the end of the week make it a closer call than it was, with futures pricing in a 23% probability of a move, up from under 10% early last Thursday. Before that, UK labor market data are released tomorrow, while August CPI is due on Wednesday. Economists expect headline inflation to rise to 3.04% YoY, while core CPI eases slightly to 2.53% YoY. UK retail sales, together with the GfK consumer confidence survey, follow on Friday.

In Asia, the BoJ concludes its meeting on Friday. DB's economists expect a 25bp rate hike (futures price in a 98% probability now), and argue that external considerations, including pressure for greater FX stability, are likely to be at least as important as domestic economic fundamentals in driving the decision. Japan also releases trade data and core machine orders on Wednesday, followed by national CPI on Friday, where DB economists expect core inflation excluding fresh food to remain at 1.8% YoY.

China’s August activity indicators are released tomorrow. DB economists expect industrial production growth to accelerate to 5.0% YoY from 4.5%, while retail sales and fixed-asset investment should also improve. Elsewhere, Germany’s ZEW survey is due tomorrow, while the ECB publishes its consumer expectations survey on Friday.

On the political front, the European Commission President delivers the annual State of the Union address on Wednesday, setting out priorities for the year ahead. Finally, the NATO’s Military Committee Conference takes place in Copenhagen at the end of the week.

Courtesy of DB, here is a day by day recap of the week's main events:

Monday September 14

• Data: Japan July capacity utilisation, Canada August CPI, July manufacturing sales
• Central banks: ECB’s Lagarde, Schnabel and Cipollone speak

Tuesday September 15

• Data: US September Empire manufacturing index, China August retail sales, industrial production, home prices, investment, UK July average weekly earnings, unemployment rate, August jobless claims change, Germany August wholesale price index, September Zew survey, Italy July trade balance, general government debt, Eurozone September Zew survey, July trade balance, Canada August existing home sales, July wholesale sales ex petroleum
• Central banks: ECB’s Cipollone and Reinesch speak
• Auctions: US 20-yr Bond (reopening, $13bn)
• Other: Annual testimony of the Secretary of the Treasury on the state of the international financial system before the House Financial Services Committee

Wednesday September 16

• Data: US September NAHB housing market index, New York Fed services business activity, August retail sales, import price index, export price index, July business inventories, total net TIC flows, UK August CPI, RPI, PPI, July house price index, Japan August trade balance, July core machine orders, Eurozone July industrial production, Canada August housing starts, July building permits
• Central banks: Fed’s decision, ECB’s Vujcic speaks, BoC’s summary of deliberations
• Other: European Commission President von der Leyen President delivers the State of the Union address to the European Parliament

Thursday September 17

• Data: US September Philadelphia Fed business outlook, August housing starts, building permits, pending home sales, initial jobless, Canada August industrial product price index, raw materials price index, July international securities transactions, New Zealand Q2 GDP
• Central banks: BoE’s decision, ECB’s Lane and Rehn speak
• Auctions: US 10-yr TIPS (reopening, $19bn)

Friday September 18

• Data: US August industrial production, capacity utilisation, leading index, UK September GfK consumer confidence, August retail sales, Japan August national CPI, Germany August PPI, Italy July current account balance, Eurozone July ECB current account, construction output
• Central banks: BoJ’s decision, ECB’s consumer expectations survey
• Other: NATO’s Military Committee Conference (Sep. 18-19)

Finally, looking at just the US, the key economic data releases this week are the import prices report — because of its potential implications for core PCE — and the retail sales report on Wednesday. The September FOMC meeting is on Wednesday. The post-meeting statement will be released at 2:00 PM ET, followed by Chairman Warsh's press conference at 2:30 PM.

 Monday, September 14 

• There are no major economic data releases scheduled. 

Tuesday, September 15 

• 08:30 AM Empire State manufacturing survey, September (consensus 15.0, last 20.6)

Wednesday, September 16 

• 08:30 AM Retail sales, August (GS +0.6%, consensus +0.8%, last -0.6%); Retail sales ex-auto, August (GS +0.6%, consensus +0.5%, last -0.3%); Retail sales ex-auto & gas, August (GS +0.5%, consensus +0.4%, last -0.2%); Core retail sales, August (GS +0.6%, consensus +0.4%, last -0.4%): We estimate nominal core retail sales increased 0.6% in August (ex-autos, gasoline, and building materials; month-over-month SA). Our forecast in part reflects a 0.4pp boost from a rebound in the nonstore retailers category, which was depressed in July by an earlier-than-usual Amazon Prime Day. (Amazon Prime Day is normally conducted in July—and the seasonal factors expect high July sales as a result—but was held in June this year). We estimate nominal headline retail sales increased 0.6%, reflecting higher gasoline prices and auto sales but limited growth in food services and building materials sales.
• 08:30 AM Import price index, August (consensus +0.5%, last -0.4%): The import prices report contains the remaining source data relevant to estimating August core PCE: the import price index for air passenger fares. Based on the details of last week’s CPI and PPI reports, we currently estimate that the core PCE price index rose 0.26% in August, corresponding to a year-over-year rate of +3.16% after accounting for our forecast of the revisions that will result from the methodological changes that will be implemented with the August PCE report.
• 10:00 AM Business inventories, July (consensus +0.8%, last flat)
• 10:00 AM NAHB housing market index, September (consensus 34, last 35)
• 02:00 PM FOMC statement, September 15-16 meeting: As discussed in our FOMC preview, the FOMC is likely to raise the funds rate to 3.75-4.00%. Although the August CPI report had little impact on our inflation view, it pushed market pricing of a hike to nearly 90%, high enough that the FOMC will likely want to avoid the market reaction that would likely follow from remaining on hold. We continue to expect two cuts in 2027 but now expect them in September and December (vs. June and December previously) and have raised our forecast for the terminal rate to 3.25-3.5% (vs. 3-3.25% previously). We suspect that the FOMC will want to nudge the market away from pricing an October hike too confidently but will not do it in the statement. Instead, Chairman Warsh would likely hint in his press conference at waiting a bit longer to collect more information before deciding on further steps. The key question for the meeting is whether the median dot will show one hike or two in 2026. We expect a 10-8 majority to show one hike because some participants might be ambivalent about the first hike and some might want to avoid pushing market expectations any higher. 

Thursday, September 17 

• 08:30 AM Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index, September (GS 30.0, consensus 32.1, last 47.4)
• 08:30 AM Initial jobless claims, week ended September 12 (GS 195k, consensus 208k, last 206k); Continuing jobless claims, week ended September 5 (consensus 1,780k, last 1,774k): We estimate that initial claims declined by 11k to 195k in the week ended September 12, reflecting difficulties seasonally adjusting around the Labor Day holiday, which occurred relatively late this year.
• 08:30 AM Housing starts, August (GS +8.9%, consensus +6.9%, last -12.4%); Building permits, August (consensus -1.5%, last +4.3%):  We forecast that housing starts increased by 8.9%, primarily reflecting significant increases in building permits last month. 
• 10:00 AM Pending home sales, August (GS -2.0%, consensus flat, last -2.3%)

Friday, September 18 

• 09:15 AM Industrial production, August (GS +0.4%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.2%); Manufacturing production, August (GS +0.4%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.2%); Capacity utilization, August (GS 76.4%, consensus 76.4%, last 76.3%): We estimate industrial production increased by 0.4% in August, largely reflecting strong auto and electricity production. We estimate capacity utilization edged up to 76.4%.
• 09:30 AM Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle W. Bowman speaks: Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle W. Bowman will deliver a speech on stress testing in London. Speech text and Q&A are expected.
• 11:45 AM Kansas City Fed President Schmid (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmid will speak on payments and banking at the Independent Community Bankers of Colorado Annual Convention. Speech text and Q&A are expected. On August 4, Schmid said that “inflation has been too high across a broad-based and growing cross-section of goods and services.” He further explained on August 27 that he believes interest rates “might be accommodative on the short end” and that he likely would have dissented at the July FOMC meeting.

Source: DB, Goldman, BOfA

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 10:15

We Can't Afford $5,000 "Dividend" Checks

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

While the stock market implodes on or ahead of schedule, as predicted, I had another revelation last night that anyone with a first-grade understanding of math could have also arrived yet. We can’t afford this $5,000 dividend check idea.

I mean, we can’t really afford anything as a country right now, but it is arguably the worst moment in history to randomly hand out $5,000 to citizens for no reason.

I would love $5,000. You would love $5,000. I have yet to encounter the American who opens his mailbox, finds a check for five grand from the United States Treasury and screams, “Goddammit, not this again.”

But unfortunately, there is a very small problem with President Trump’s latest proposal to send every adult American a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress in November: we don’t have the f*cking money.

Trump unveiled the idea at the Republican convention in Dallas, promising a $5,000 payment to every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans win the House and Senate. With roughly 240 million adult citizens, Reuters estimates the program would cost approximately $1.2 trillion. Trump’s explanation for how we can afford this is essentially that America is now swimming in money. “We’re taking in trillions, trillions of dollars,” he said while discussing the proposal.

And while tariff revenue has increased substantially, it isn’t remotely close to producing the trillions of dollars necessary to fund something like this. The federal government is already spending considerably more than it collects.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal deficit reached roughly $1.8 trillion during the first ten months of fiscal 2026, about $169 billion more than during the same period last year. CBO estimates the full-year deficit will be roughly $2.1 trillion.

Think about what that means. We aren’t discussing what to do with a surplus. There isn’t some giant extra pile of money sitting in Washington. We’re already borrowing roughly $2 trillion a year to cover what the government spends, and now we’re contemplating borrowing another $1.2 trillion so Washington can mail everybody a check.

We’re calling it a “dividend” but that’s not generally how dividends work. If a company loses $2 trillion a year, borrows another $1.2 trillion and then distributes the borrowed money to shareholders, CNBC does not call it an exciting new capital return program. Eventually somebody from the SEC starts asking questions.

Meanwhile, the gross national debt has now blown through $40 trillion. Debt held by the public is roughly $32 trillion and, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget outlook, will equal about 101% of GDP this year. CBO projects that it will surpass the post World War II record of 106% of GDP around the end of this decade and reach approximately 120% by 2036.

This seems like a peculiar moment to find a new direction to spray cash we don’t have. And as if the existing fiscal situation weren’t sufficiently hilarious, America has simultaneously found itself with another extremely expensive item on its shopping list: weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.

The Pentagon has proposed a $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal 2027, versus roughly $900 billion approved for 2026, the largest year-over-year increase in defense spending in the postwar era and a budget I think could massively benefit one sector of the stock market. The administration says the increase includes major spending on missiles, drones, ships, aircraft, missile defense and rebuilding the defense industrial base. Iran-related costs would require additional funding.

And as we’re finding out now, the war with Iran has burned through significant quantities of expensive American munitions, and defense contractors are already anticipating years of replenishment orders. Reuters reported in July that conflicts including Iran and Ukraine have depleted Pentagon inventories that will have to be rebuilt.

So let me get this straight: our current financial plan appears to be to run a roughly $2 trillion deficit, fight an expensive war, replace a gigantic pile of missiles, dramatically increase defense spending and then mail everybody $5,000.

I am beginning to understand why the bond market has questions.

There is also the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has been drawn down enormously from its historical peak and remains far below the levels of only a few years ago. That’s particularly relevant when America is simultaneously dealing with a Middle Eastern war that has helped send oil back above $100 per barrel.

Emergency reserves exist to provide flexibility when bad things happen, but using them means eventually replenishing them. That costs money too.

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The Treasury market isn’t exactly celebrating the fiscal situation either. The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield has recently approached 5% and higher yields are especially nasty when you’re carrying tens of trillions of dollars in debt because old securities eventually mature and have to be refinanced at higher rates.

And interest expense is already becoming one of the biggest problems in the federal budget. The CBO projects that persistent primary deficits and rising interest costs will push the annual federal deficit from roughly $2 trillion today toward $3.1 trillion by 2036. So the ultimate cost of another $1.2 trillion giveaway isn’t necessarily $1.2 trillion. If we borrow the money, it’s $1.2 trillion plus the interest required to carry that debt indefinitely.

Trump has explicitly tied the $5,000 payments to Republicans retaining control of Congress in the November midterms. Whatever one thinks of the policy itself, attaching a four-figure government payment directly to an election outcome inevitably makes the proposal look at least partly like campaign politics, though it isn’t much different than Zohran Mamdani promising free everything for New York City to get elected.

The depressing answer to all of this is the one nobody wants to hear. America probably needs fewer promises of free money, not more of them. There is nothing particularly exciting about cutting spending, narrowing deficits, paying down debt and restoring some semblance of discipline to the federal balance sheet. Nobody wins a standing ovation by walking onto a stage and announcing, “Good news everybody, you’re getting nothing, but let me explain why that makes sense given the last half century of gross overconsumption and money printing.”

Eventually somebody has to pay the bill. We have more than $40 trillion in gross federal debt, annual deficits running around $2 trillion, debt held by the public roughly equal to the entire annual output of the American economy, rapidly rising interest costs, enormous new defense requirements and a bond market increasingly demanding more compensation to finance all of it.

The CBO’s long-term projections make the basic problem difficult to avoid: under current policy, debt keeps rising faster than the economy and deficits continue widening. Eventually stabilizing that trajectory requires some combination of lower spending and higher revenues, and waiting makes the necessary adjustment larger.

I certainly prefer the version of reality where somebody gives me $5,000, trust me. A $5,000 check would feel fantastic when it arrived. But dividends generally come from profits, and Uncle Sam isn’t turning a profit. He’s trying to put his bar tab on a fifth credit card that has been declined and has turned to looking for change under the barstools to pony up for one last beer. And the bartender is starting to look nervous.

Now read:

• Brace For Impact, The AI Trade Just Hit A Wall At Full Speed
• A Dark Horse Way To Short The Market
• Congress Could Kill AI Stocks Before AI Kills Us
• We May Only Get One Chance To Stop AI
• Japan’s Life Insurers Look Like Silicon Valley Bank And 2008 AIG Combined
• The Pentagon Just Confirmed One Of My Biggest Investment Theses

--

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and very often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning, meaning if I’m long I could sell or if I’m short I could cover at any time.

Contributor posts, guest posts and curated posts have been hand selected by me, but have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author or reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

I cannot guarantee the accuracy of any or all facts and figures included in this article though I made an effort to get them right. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again, and encourage you to always double check, do your own research and speak to a licensed financial professional, which I am not.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things I’m bearish on. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

Starting in 2026, I have been attempting to no longer actively trade as much as I once did (read my story here). My goal is for my investing/saving to be done by recurring contributions mostly to sector ETFs and a few select equities, trusted third parties who oversee my accounts, and advisors. Such advisors or funds, through individual equities, options, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, or other securities, may have positions in, exposure to, or holdings of names mentioned herein that I know nothing about. It is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything, at any point. In an attempt to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve also excluded myself from fantasy sports, sports betting, online and in-person casinos and prediction markets.

Any of my positions can change immediately as soon as I publish, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier. Hence, why I am a writer.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Many times I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour.

Also, again I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 09:45

US Energy Sec. Wright Says Saudi's Critical East-West Oil Pipeline Will Restart "Very Soon"

Summary:

• AP News Says East-West Pipeline Fix 3-5 Weeks 
• US Energy Sec. Wright Tells BBG TV East-West Pipeline Will Be Online "Very Soon"
• Oil Surges As Saudi Pipeline Crisis Puts 4% Of Global Supply At Risk; Bernstein Warns Of $150 Crude

Wright Tries To Calm Energy Markets 

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined Bloomberg TV to calm energy markets after last week's drone attack hit a pumping station on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, prompting its immediate shutdown. The pipeline bypasses the Strait of Hormuz and transports crude to Saudi Arabia's Red Sea export terminal.

Wright said the pipeline could resume operations "very soon" and that he had been in close contact with his Saudi counterpart.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline will be back up and running “very soon.” pic.twitter.com/vengmvxLG7

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 14, 2026

"I might have more of a timeframe tomorrow," Wright said, adding that further clarity would emerge in the days ahead.

Wright also said more than 12 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz last night, putting the seven-day average above 10 million barrels a day.

AP News reported that flows through the pipeline could resume in three to five weeks.

Oil Surges As Saudi Pipeline Crisis Puts 4% Of Global Supply At Risk; Bernstein Warns Of $150 Crude

Brent crude futures jumped overnight after Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline following drone attacks last week, threatening a critical route for bypassing the highly contested Strait of Hormuz chokepoint and a loss of what could amount to 4% of global supply. 

The global oil benchmark rose as much as 3.7% to above $108 a barrel before trimming gains to $107.70 by 6:00 a.m. ET, while WTI futures traded around $103.

Riyadh described the shutdown as precautionary but gave no timetable for restarting the pipeline, which can transport upwards of 7 million barrels a day.

New geospatial intelligence shows what appears to be high-resolution satellite imagery of the aftermath of the drone attack that destroyed pumping infrastructure. Vantor produced this satellite imagery and shared it on X via The Hormuz Letter.

BREAKING: New high-resolution satellite imagery shows the pumping station on Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline burned out end to end, with the entire process area blackened and crude oil that escaped the site pooled across the desert beyond the perimeter, per Vantor imagery. https://t.co/DFJAplGNcC pic.twitter.com/uQEdn2YVFe

— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) September 14, 2026

UBS energy expert Dominic Ellis summarized the weekend and overnight events unfolding across the Gulf region:

Brent has risen over $107/b on reports planned talks between Iran and GCC leaders on establishing a safe route through the Strait of Hormuz have been postponed indefinitely, and following reports Saudi Arabia closed its East-West pipeline following attacks late last week.

The pipeline, with capacity of 7mb/d, had played an important role in re-routing oil away from the Strait of Hormuz, and the impact of the pipeline's closure on Red Sea exports (combined with recent Houthi efforts to disrupt Red Sea flows) will continue to support oil prices for the foreseeable future.

Near-term impact on energy equities is positive – the UBS team flagged 40% upside to consensus 3Q earnings earlier this month (with refining-leveraged names like Repsol, Galp and OMV having 80-90% upside), and while buy-side numbers have likely responded to rapidly-changing macro conditions more frequently than those on the sell-side, I still believe market-wide caution on the sector means there is upside to expectations. 

Saudi oil traders told Reuters on Sunday that if the East-West pipeline is not restarted promptly, then Saudi Arabia will run out of oil stocks for Red Sea exports. 

More color per the outlet:

Sources that spoke to Reuters gave varying estimates, with ​one saying the damage could take as long as five to six weeks to repair, while another said it could be fixed sooner ​and could resume pumping partially while repairs are ongoing.

Saudi Arabia's government media office and energy ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.For the past six months, the pipeline running through the desert across the Arabian Peninsula has spared Saudi Arabia from the brunt of the impact of the ​wartime shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz that has crippled exports from its neighbours.

The world's biggest exporter has used the pipeline to ​reroute around 4 million barrels per day — around 4% of global supply — to the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea.But with the pipeline out ‌of service, ⁠Yanbu now has stocks to maintain exports for just five to seven days, according to three industry sources familiar with Saudi exports.Saudi Arabia also has stocks to supply customers for several days from Egypt's ports of Ain Sukhna on the Red Sea and Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean, a fourth source said.

Yanbu storage capacity stands at around 35 million barrels, according to industry estimates, with Ain Sukhna and ​Sidi Kerir able to store 18 ​million and 20 million barrels ⁠respectively.Stocks are not full and will ultimately run out without the east-west pipeline resuming operations, the four sources said.Saudi oil supply has already fallen to a more than three-decade low in August on reduced ​flows via Hormuz and the Red Sea, the International Energy Agency said on Friday.World oil supply ​will decline this year by ⁠5.7 million bpd, or about 6%, the IEA, which coordinates Western energy policies, said.In addition to the attack on the pipeline, Houthi fighters in Yemen who have threatened Saudi oil shipments seized an island on Friday in the mouth of the Red Sea

Gulf developments over the weekend prompted Bernstein analysts Neil Beveridge and Brian Ho to warn that Brent could rally to between $120 and $150 a barrel as East-West pipeline disruptions collide with ongoing troubles along the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the southern Red Sea.

Beveridge described the market as "chronically undersupplied" and said their existing $90 Brent forecast for 2026 had been "overtaken by events."

Combined flows through Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal remain below 7 million barrels a day, compared with roughly 20 million before the conflict, according to Bloomberg.

One of the biggest restraints on crude prices this summer has been the 5 million-barrel-a-day reduction in Chinese imports. But analysts said that decline partly reflects Beijing tapping its estimated 1.5 billion barrels of SPR. Imports are now recovering and bidding up oil prices around the world.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 09:36