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Congress Quietly Moves To Intertwine US, Israeli Militaries On Formal Level
There are some stealth moves afoot by the Trump administration and Congress, which are poised to formalize the long-standing close US-Israel relationship, on the level of a formal defense pact.
A sweeping new legislative proposal in Congress is moving to more deeply intertwine and combine the two countries' military arsenals. The House of Representatives' version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released this past week contains Section 224, devoted to military integration with the name "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative."
The section lays out that the Untied States has already historically contributed an inflation-adjusted $200 billion in military assistance to Israel since 1948, and seeks to more permanently solidify this relationship on a legal basis.
Responsible Statecraft has reported that "Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation."
via FlickrThe report said the new congressional provision "would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech" while further proposing "network integration" and "data fusion."
Crucially, this would in effect combine both countries' military data, and further formalize intelligence-sharing. While all of these things already happen to a large degree, it is at the moment still subject to the policies and direction of whatever US administration happens to be in office.
If passed, the new legislation would make this automatic and basically irreversible - again, akin to a formal defense pact or treaty.
What follows is some fuller reporting from Responsible Statecraft, which warms that "the result could well be a US political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East"...
Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.
If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the US has with any other country in the world. To be sure, the US has worked closely with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan. And, as the number one arms dealer in the world, the US provides weapons to militaries across the globe. But that is mostly a one-way street, with the US providing weapons to foreign buyers who only occasionally make parts for those weapons themselves, as in the case of the F-35’s global supply chain.
Section 224 would be a different beast entirely. It would fuse the US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber. It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the US beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics: jobs in the US By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.
The ambitious scheme is unlikely to be met with much resistance from either the mainstream of the Republican or Democratic parties; however, the Dems have tended to vote against giving President Trump free reign regarding Operation Epic Fury. War Powers votes tend to break down along party lines, with the GOP typically shooting down these efforts of Congressional oversight.
But this could sail through with little or nothing in the way of public debate, or even knowledge, at all. It means future generations of taxpayers could find themselves even more deeply on the hook for the permanent defense of a foreign nation.
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Gold Waits As Global Markets Tempt The Unprepared
Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,
2026 is screaming “Uh-Oh” signals from nearly every sector and asset class with alarming yet eerily ignored clarity. This explains why the longer-term case for gold couldn’t be more obvious, regardless of natural price retracements in the near-term.
In fact, if global financial conditions were not otherwise so disturbing, this historical moment in time would be fascinating.
But rather than just say this, let me show you.
Rising Yields: The Most Misunderstood/Important Signal of 2026?For example, the $145T global bond market, which is $20T greater in size than the global stock market, remains less understood yet far more significant as an indicator.
Specifically, this “boring” bond market is foretelling an historical sovereign debt crisis which is already playing out before way too many closed eyes.
Yields on sovereign IOUs (British, American, German, Italian, Japanese, etc.) are climbing to the highest levels seen in decades.
Three Reasons/Warnings for Rising YieldsThese yields rise when demand, price and, of course, TRUST in government bonds tank.
This dying trust has a lot to do with global debt levels at over $360T and U.S. public debt levels reaching an embarrassing $40T marker, which effectively makes America one big “bad credit.”
(1) Lenders Demand a Risk PremiumThose with bad credit, of course, are charged a higher risk premium or “yield” by lenders, which explains why the yield on the U.S. 10Y has risen by 75 basis points in a matter of months despite a Fed which has yet to raise rates in 2026.
The Fed, alas, is openly losing control of its bond market. This matters, because rising yields mean rising debt costs, which debt-addicted and debt-driven nations like the USA simply can’t control or afford anymore.
(2) More Buyers than Sellers of USTsIn addition to its fall from credit grace, the home of the world reserve currency and once sacred “return-free-risk” 10Y UST is watching helplessly as former buyers of its critical IOUs are rapidly becoming sellers—a force which just sends those fatal yields even higher.
China, for example, once held over $1.3T in USTs. Today it holds less than $650B. Japan, the world’s largest holder of U.S. debt, just sold more USTs in Q1 of 2026 than it has sold in the last four years.
(3) The Brutal Math of DebtBut the most obvious reason for the dumping of American bonds boils down to just brutal math.
Uncle Sam, which is now running an unsustainable 7% current account deficit, is adding $2.5T of new debt to its banana republic balance sheet per year. America spends 50% of its annual tax revenue just to pay interest on its outstanding debt.
Trillions more in unfunded liabilities are also owed, for which the USA simply does not have the funds.
To fill this income vs expense “gap,” it’s no great mystery that this can only be done with trillions more debased, “mouse-clicked” fiat dollars.
This extraordinary (and increasing) dollar-dilution direction explains why the DXY can’t break 100 despite spiking yields.
Gold and a Little Bit of History Repeating ItselfThe slow yet steadily increasing death spiral of fiat currencies is fascinating, obvious and yet totally ignored by current stock chasers—at least for now.
It is also a perfect set-up for gold, which the world continues to ignore based on recent and short-term price action rather than longer-term preparation or historical understanding.
The fake liquidity now and to come to “solve” the above bond crisis is an almost mirror image of the 1970-1980 era, when the Dollar lost 50% of its purchasing power, and gold went from $35 to $850 an ounce.
But like the current bull run in gold, the template of the 1970s didn’t happen in a straight line, as midway through that infamous decade, gold saw sell-offs which shook out speculators yet made longer-term investors generational wealth.
The recent price declines in gold are thus no surprise within a secular bull cycle.
As explained elsewhere, gold’s value, liquidity and prominence have been confirmed by forced sales (from sovereigns to fund managers) to create needed liquidity in times of stress.
Such behavior confirms rather than detracts from gold’s rising profile and prominence in the years and cycles to come.
Nevertheless, many are understandably following traditional thinking that a “yield-less pet rock” is less impressive than a high-yielding sovereign bond.
But bonds are only “high-yielding” because they are unloved, distrusted and broken; the only way to “fix” them, moreover, is by debasing the very currency used to measure their so-called “higher” yields.
Such logic misses the currency-weak forest for the higher-yielding trees.
But as figures like Charles Mackay or John Hussman have so often reminded us, “logic” goes out the window when tech stocks and market meme manias replace basic common sense, sound valuation or even a mediocre grasp of history.
Meanwhile: Stocks Defy Sanity, Valuation and Common SenseLooking at the current U.S. stock market is like looking at a bad, surrealist film with a cheap laugh-track.
By literally every metric, the S&P is grotesquely overvalued:
Investors are currently paying maximum prices for unprecedented valuation risk and historically minimal dividend income.
That’s not logic. It’s madness. As consumer sentiment tanks to the lowest levels recorded at the University of Michigan, and as U.S. credit card delinquency rates climb past 12%, the S&P smiles…
Lead to TemptationAs usual, the Wall Street whales and their Sirens on the rocky shores of the equity and credit trap are seducing the retail plankton to their cyclical doom—pumping stocks on the backs of suckers before the big boys take profits on the eve of a fall.
Of course, the infamous “Buffett Indicator”, which measures equity market cap against GDP, has never been clearer (or higher) in confirming such risk:
But the far more telling “Buffett Indicator,” in my mind, lies in the simple fact that Berkshire Hathaway is sitting wisely in nearly $400B in cash.
Alas, the Oracle of Omaha is openly getting out of harm’s way as legions of retail investors march toward an equity cliff.
The tragedy of the so-called S&P 500 (led by 10 stocks) is that it is really no stock market at all. Instead, it lives and breathes off the moral hazard notion that bad news is good news, as there is always a firehose of Fed liquidity (printed dollars) waiting to “accommodate it.”
Every dip is now perceived as a prelude to a V-shaped recovery compliments of the Federal Reserve, which is neither “Federal” nor a “reserve.”
From Temptation to LyingBut such a dishonest title is no match for the dishonest wordsmithing for which the Fed is now so infamous, whether in denying a “non-recessionary recession,” a growing rather “transitory” inflation trend, “non-QE QE” or just flat out lying about actual vs “reported” inflation.
In fact, the Fed’s desperate yet consistent policy of using dishonest words to buy time, markets and votes while hiding honest math will only continue under Kevin Warsh, a trend which he has all but openly confessed.
In case you haven’t noticed, Warsh intends to measure PCE inflation under a new metric called “trimmed mean PCE,” which effectively removes all the bad inflationary data to create a fictitious notion that inflation is under control.
This is duplicity at its finest. After all, even a witch can look pretty if you take away the warts, which is all Warsh’s new Fed policy boils down to.
In fact, what Warsh is doing is nothing surprising nor anything new.
The Oldest & Only Trick Left: Inflate Away DebtWhile the rest of us endure the invisible theft of compounding inflation, the policy makers in DC will secretly welcome it as a means to inflate away their sovereign bar tab on the backs of your purchasing power and wealth.
This is called “negative real rates” or “financial repression,” and it’s the oldest trick in the book of desperately broke nations, namely: Let inflation rip higher than interest rates, but then lie about the embarrassing inflation.
When Even the Official Math is BadWhat’s as disturbing, however, is that even the “official” inflation data, as dishonest and downplayed as it is, is still alarming evidence of open monetary policy failure.
Current U.S. CPI inflation (the cost of consumer goods) is racing past 3.8%, and current U.S. PPI inflation (the business cost of making goods) is already at an embarrassing 6%–well beyond the Fed’s 2% “targets.”
But this is just the beginning. Since the Strait of Hormuz closed, the cost of fertilizer has risen by 20%, gasoline by 52%, European natural gas by 54%, jet fuel by 58%, and WTI crude oil by 60%.
Yet how can U.S. CPI and PPI inflation be in the single digits when everything else has risen by massive double digits?
Well, be patient, because the inflationary lag effect of this “conflict” in Iran (whatever you think of it) is racing toward your shores at an increasing wave height.
From Inflation to Gold: Keep it SimpleThese inflation signals, as well as the bond signals above, and the stock mania already covered, are all just flashing neon-indicators of surreal “Uh-Oh” in the risk asset markets and an historical moment of currency debasement in your wallets and homes.
This is not fable but tragic fact.
Gold, whatever its current price, is positioning itself for a lengthy, secular and historical move north. It has a finite supply and infinite duration and is thus far more honest than the unlimited supply and finite duration of sovereign bonds and paper currencies.
For those who still think gold has not done enough, compare its recent history here:
…to the same history of global paper currencies here:
It’s really just that simple.
Gold will continue to climb because a global paper currency system distorted by decades of debt, dishonesty, desperation and debasement has nowhere to go but down.
For wealth preservation investors who understand the math of bonds and the history of debt, this simplicity provides for clarity in a time of fog, sanity in a time of madness, and wealth protection in a time of wealth destruction.
Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2026 - 11:40