Summary:
For years, left-wing political violence in the US was often treated as isolated and/or a non-issue. The Trump administration is now calling it a domestic terrorism threat.
FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Barnacle described the incident outside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan earlier today as an "anti-government attack on a federal facility."
Watch the suspected left-wing radical attack the federal building, which houses offices for agencies including DHS, ICE, USCIS, the FBI, and the Social Security Administration.
A low IQ suspected left-wing terrorist attempted to set a federal government building on fire before being apprehended. pic.twitter.com/rWTctxtRQd
— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) July 20, 2026Suspect identified as Andrew Arrabaca ...
The suspect detained in connection with the incendiary device outside 26 Federal Plaza has been identified as 43-year-old Andrew Arrabaca. pic.twitter.com/r7ZAzX0EUj
— Roberto Gil (@RbtGil) July 20, 2026Barnacle also said the suspect carried a sign reading "ICE Off Our Streets," which suggests an association with left-wing groups.
Members of the FBI Evidence Response Team collected evidence at the scene where an incendiary device was detonated outside of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, New York, United States on July 20, 2026. Monday morning the incident occurred and federal authorities are investigating… pic.twitter.com/RiXBlvbxop
— Kyle Mazza (@KyleMazzaWUNF) July 20, 2026Even The Atlantic had to recently admit there was a troubling rise in left-wing terror...
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed delegations from 65 nations about the alarming rise of far-left terrorism across the West.
Socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the incident "deeply disturbing." Yet Mamdani and his unhinged anti-American DSA-ers have pushed an increasingly hostile climate toward federal law enforcement.
Suspect ArrestedBREAKING: Suspect apprehended after incendiary device deployed outside 26 Federal Plaza in NYC, FBI reports pic.twitter.com/7sZxyan0XV
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 20, 2026 FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force InvestigatingThe FBI tells Fox News' Bill Melugin:
"This morning an individual deployed an incendiary device outside of 26 Federal Plaza. The individual has been taken into custody and the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the incident."
Melugin continued:
NYPD tells FOX there was a "found firearm" in relation to this event, but couldn't confirm if it was found on the suspect.
FBI statement to @FoxNews:
"This morning an individual deployed an incendiary device outside of 26 Federal Plaza. The individual has been taken into custody and the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the incident."
NYPD tells FOX there was a "found… https://t.co/bUdDbryRxC
The attack at 26 Federal Plaza, which houses offices for agencies including DHS, ICE, USCIS, the FBI, and the Social Security Administration, comes days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned of far-left terrorism across the West.
Another view:
From outside my apartment. Saw what looked like a shotgun and people running for cover behind walls. Scary sights pic.twitter.com/geMnremrKD
— DoubleDash_DigitalDash (@DoubleDash_H) July 20, 2026 Explosion Reported Outside 26 Federal Plaza In Lower ManhattanNew footage shows what appears to be a fire and a person being arrested outside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan.
"Moment of EXPLOSION that went off outside of the 26 Federal Plaza in NYC around 8:30am this morning, with Immigration agents and FBI Rushing out guns drawn and FPS apprehending the suspect. Sidewalk has been shut down and building evacuated," FreedomNews wrote on X.
NOW: Moment of EXPLOSION that went off outside of the 26 Federal Plaza in NYC around 8:30am this morning, with Immigration agents and FBI Rushing out guns drawn and FPS apprehending the suspect. Sidewalk has been shut down and building evacuated.
NYPD on scene confirmed it was… pic.twitter.com/aihTqsFpcN
Notably, the building houses several federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Social Security Administration, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
There is no additional information at this time.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2026 - 13:45Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Assholes who wear Vineyard Vines all summer on Wall Street have once again put those Wharton PhD’s to good use by again “discovering” that assets so toxic and illiquid they make drinking cement taste like Fiji water apparently become safe when you rearrange them, rename them, and place an insurance company between the losses and the people buying them. Sound familiar?
According to Bloomberg, UBS and other firms have been exploring structures that package stakes in private-credit funds into bonds. Because perpetual private-credit vehicles do not fit neatly into conventional ratings models, bankers are looking to add insurance “wrappers” that allow portions of the deals to inherit the insurer’s stronger credit profile. The resulting paper can then be marketed as investment grade, even though the assets underneath remain opaque, illiquid private-market investments.
This is apparently considered innovation. I just hear Anthony Bourdain explaining CDOs during The Big Short over and over again.
An insurer guarantees a tranche against losses, the tranche receives a better rating, and other insurers can buy it while setting aside dramatically less capital. In the example described, an A2-rated tranche could require less than 1% in regulatory capital, compared with a charge that could reach 30% for a direct investment in a private-credit fund.
Nothing says “rock-solid asset” quite like needing several lawyers, a ratings agency, an insurance guarantee and a regulatory-capital loophole to explain why it is safe.
The comparison with 2008 is not merely rhetorical. Before the financial crisis, Wall Street packaged mortgages into residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Those securities were divided into tranches, and ratings agencies assigned extremely high grades to senior portions based on assumptions that nationwide housing losses would remain limited and geographically dispersed.
Then Wall Street added another layer of genius: credit-default swaps.
Insurer AIG’s Financial Products division sold enormous amounts of CDS protection on mortgage-related securities. These contracts operated much like insurance, promising payment if the protected securities suffered specified credit losses. AIG collected fees up front and initially posted little collateral because everyone treated the company’s high credit rating as a substitute for cash.
The crucial clarification is that AIG’s traditional state-regulated insurance subsidiaries were not simply writing ordinary homeowners policies and accidentally destroying civilization. The catastrophe grew largely inside AIG Financial Products, an inadequately regulated derivatives business that used the broader AIG organization’s pristine rating to guarantee complex financial bets.
But that rating was the magic wand.
As mortgage values deteriorated and AIG was downgraded, its counterparties demanded tens of billions of dollars in collateral. AIG did not have enough readily available cash to meet those calls. Suddenly, the institution that had promised to insure everyone else’s balance sheet needed the federal government to insure its own. The same rating that had made the contracts appear safe became the trigger for the liquidity crisis once it disappeared.
On September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve authorized an initial loan of up to $85 billion to keep AIG from collapsing. The government received a 79.9% equity interest in exchange. The support was later expanded and restructured through Treasury investments, additional facilities and special vehicles created to remove mortgage securities and CDO exposures from AIG’s balance sheet.
Total commitments commonly associated with the rescue eventually reached roughly $180 billion. The CFTC later described the intervention as about $600 for every American alive at the time.
AIG had more than $1 trillion in consolidated assets in mid-2008 and sat at the center of a sprawling network involving major banks, retirement plans, commercial-paper markets, municipalities and other insurers. Federal Reserve officials concluded that a disorderly failure could have caused severe losses across financial institutions and further reduced the availability of credit to households and businesses.
In other words, AIG did not merely make bad investments. It sold protection so broadly that its own failure threatened to detonate the institutions that believed they were protected. The insurer had become the bomb.
And now, less than two decades later, Wall Street is again using insurance guarantees to turn difficult-to-rate credit exposure into highly rated securities.
What could possibly go wrong besides the exact thing that already went wrong?
🔥 50% OFF FOR LIFE: Using this coupon entitles you to 50% off an annual subscription to Fringe Finance for life: Get 50% off forever
The modern structures are not identical to AIG’s CDS book. Today’s private-credit wrappers may be smaller, more collateralized and subject to different contractual and regulatory safeguards. There is no evidence that the current market has already created an AIG-sized hole.
But the rhyme is deafening. The underlying private credit assets are dogshit, as I’ve written about on this blog non-stop. The engineering is complicated. Ratings play a central role. Capital requirements become lighter after the transaction is rearranged. Risk migrates from the original lender to insurers, annuity providers, pensions and other institutions promising money to ordinary people decades from now.
The fund-finance market is estimated at somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.75 trillion, up from only a few hundred billion roughly a decade ago. That puts its expansion in the same broad neighborhood as the pre-2008 boom in structured subprime finance.
Private-credit managers need liquidity because exits have slowed, old investments remain stuck, and some borrowers are repaying existing loans with still more debt. Meanwhile, insurers and annuity companies are hungry for yield and attracted to structures that turn higher-risk fund exposure into favorably treated investment-grade paper.
It is a beautiful ecosystem. Private funds need money. Insurers need yield. Banks need fees. Ratings agencies need business. Regulators need to remain comatose. Everyone gets exactly what they want until the whole thing winds up bending over the average taxpayer, saver or retail investor somehow.
One particularly obvious danger is concentration. When an insurer wraps multiple securities, every buyer begins relying on the same corporate balance sheet. A downgrade of that insurer could cause many wrapped tranches to be downgraded simultaneously, potentially triggering forced selling across portfolios at precisely the moment markets are least able to absorb it. It’s like a high school test where everyone copies off of the same person who fails the test, causing the rest of the class to.
The structures also make it increasingly difficult for regulators to trace where the final losses reside. Researchers have warned that repackaging risk adds “structural complexity and opacity” and can amplify contagion when one link fails, as the Bloomberg report notes.
Once again, Wall Street is not eliminating risk. It is relocating it, obscuring it and reducing the amount of capital held against it. And once again, the entire arrangement is encouraged by the understanding that the Federal Reserve will respond to a sufficiently large accident with emergency lending, asset purchases, liquidity facilities and whatever alphabet soup is necessary to keep asset prices from discovering consequences.
This is the lesson Wall Street learned from 2008: not that leverage and opacity are dangerous, but that they should be spread widely enough to qualify for federal protection.
Make a reckless bet by yourself and you go bankrupt. Make the same bet through enough banks, insurers, pensions and retirement accounts and you become systemically important.
The Fed has spent years turning moral hazard from an embarrassing side effect into a rational business model. Every rescue lowers the perceived cost of the next gamble. Every emergency facility teaches markets that liquidity risk is temporary. Every rapid intervention tells executives that the real objective is not avoiding catastrophe, but making sure a catastrophe would be too politically expensive to tolerate.
So the structures get larger. The collateral gets murkier. The ratings get friendlier. The capital cushions get thinner. The chains of counterparties get longer.
Then everyone acts stunned when one downgrade causes twelve institutions to discover they were all holding the same risk.
We are not preventing the next crash. We are steadily assembling the mother of all crashes while congratulating ourselves for distributing the explosives more efficiently. And when it finally happens, the people who designed it will explain that nobody could possibly have seen it coming.
Except, of course, anyone who remembers 2008…or who is unlucky enough to sit next to me at an airport bar when I have 3 hours to kill and feel talkative.
--
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 often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.
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. 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.
As of May 20, 2026 I am attempting to no longer actively trade (read my story here). My investing/saving is mostly 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. Basically, via index funds, ETFs and individual equities it is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything at any point. As of the same date, May 20, 2026, 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.
And all positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, 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.
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. 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, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2026 - 13:25
A federal judge just threw a wrench into one of the biggest media shake-ups in years. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin (Biden) temporarily blocked Paramount Skydance's $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, giving a coalition of 12 state attorneys general a short-term win in their fight to kill the deal.
The temporary restraining order lasts 14 days - half the 28 days the states had requested - and prevents Paramount from closing the transaction that would combine two historic Hollywood studios, two major streaming services (Paramount+ and Max), and significant news assets under David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, leading the charge, argues the merger would "extinguish competition" in key areas: wide theatrical film releases, big blockbuster distribution, and the market for basic cable channels. The states put numbers on it, alleging the combined company would control 27 percent of wide-release theatrical distribution, 30 percent of anticipated blockbusters, and 27 percent of the basic cable bundle. In plain terms, they say it would mean higher prices, lower quality, and less choice for theaters, cable providers, and viewers everywhere. The states claim it violates Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the classic law aimed at stopping deals that substantially lessen competition. All 12 attorneys general are Democrats.
Paramount is firing back hard. The company calls the lawsuit one of the weakest merger challenges in modern antitrust history, notes it already has DOJ clearance plus approvals from places like Australia and China, and vows to fight vigorously. They argue the states are ignoring the brutal competitive realities of today's media landscape, where streaming giants, tech platforms, and cord-cutting have upended everything.
The DOJ signoff came after its antitrust division closed an eight-month review that examined more than two million documents - concluding the deal could strengthen competition across streaming, traditional television, and theatrical distribution. State attorneys general retain independent authority to sue regardless.
There's real urgency for Paramount: they're on the hook for a "ticking fee" of 25 cents per Warner Bros. share every quarter if the deal doesn't close by September 30. That works out to roughly $7 million a day, or more than $600 million per quarter - serious money.
If it goes through, David Ellison would control an entertainment behemoth spanning film, TV, streaming, and news.
This state lawsuit is the biggest threat so far, but it's not the only one. The EU is reviewing it, the UK culture secretary is considering intervention over media concentration worries, the Writers Guild has its own antitrust suit over wages and jobs, and consumers have challenged the streaming combination (though that effort was denied an injunction).
There's also a political undercurrent. Larry Ellison has been an ally of President Trump, who has publicly pushed for new ownership of CNN and recently praised the family. David Ellison has already started shaking things up at CBS News, bringing in Bari Weiss to revamp "60 Minutes" and the evening broadcast.
For now, the merger is in limbo. Expect intense legal wrangling over the next couple of weeks as Paramount pushes to get it back on track and the states try to build their case for a longer block. In an industry already disrupted by streaming wars and cord-cutting, this battle is about who gets to dominate the next era of Hollywood and media.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2026 - 13:10While it seems like common sense that living in a state should be a prerequisite to voting there, the Republican National Committee is suing six states to stop them from doing so.
Fresh off a court win in North Carolina, the RNC has filed lawsuits against Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, and Nebraska, each targeting a version of the same loophole. In these states, a person who has never set foot as a resident within their borders can still cast an absentee ballot there, often because a parent or legal guardian once lived in the state decades ago.
"If you've never lived in a state, you shouldn't be voting in its elections," RNC Chairman Joe Gruters told the Daily Signal.
"The RNC already put a stop to this unconstitutional loophole in North Carolina, and we're taking Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey to court to do the same," Gruters added,
"We'll keep fighting to ensure elections are only decided by legal residents."
The mechanism behind this quirk traces back to federal guidance for overseas voting. According to the Federal Voting Assistance Program website, "In some states, U.S. citizens who were born abroad—and have never resided in the United States—are eligible to vote absentee." Several states extended that logic further than Congress likely intended, allowing people who were born overseas and never lived stateside at all to vote based on a parent's old address.
The RNC is not coming after military voters or diplomats. The committee says it firmly supports the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), the decades-old law that lets service members and foreign service officers vote from wherever the government has stationed them. To secure legal standing in each state, the RNC is partnering with the relevant state party, a candidate, or both.
The North Carolina case set the template. In June, the Wake County Superior Court struck down a state law permitting people born overseas who had never lived in North Carolina to vote there anyway, handing the RNC a win over the state elections board and establishing that these arrangements are vulnerable to a straightforward constitutional challenge.
Nevada is shaping up as the marquee fight of the current round. The RNC has joined the state Republican Party and Republican secretary of state nominee Jim Marchant in challenging a law that allows people who never lived in Nevada, and in some cases never lived in the United States at all, to vote there based solely on a parent's or guardian's past residency. The plaintiffs argue the arrangement violates Nevada's constitution, which requires voters to have "actually, as opposed to constructively" resided in the state. Constructive residency is a fittingly bureaucratic term for a system built on the honor of an ancestor's zip code.
Despite the commonsense nature of the lawsuit, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, called it "an attack on the voting rights of eligible U.S. citizens living abroad" and warned that unwinding the law could hurt military families, even though the RNC made it clear that’s not who their lawsuit is about. "They risk everything to defend our freedoms, including the fundamental right to vote, and Nevada has a responsibility to protect their access to the ballot and the rights of the families who serve alongside them,” he added.
"Children born overseas should not be punished because their parents served, worked, or were stationed outside the United States," Aguilar continued, saying, "Nevada will not turn its back on military families simply because their service took them away from home."
Despite Aguilar’s claims, the lawsuits actually target civilians with no service record and no residency claim beyond a relative's former mailing address, not the men and women stationed abroad under UOCAVA.
“People should have full faith and confidence in the system,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said last week. “What we want is to have elections be safe and secure. We want everybody who's eligible to vote to be able to vote. But I don't know why it's so hard. The question is, why do we have 150 lawsuits trying to make sure we protect democracy and try to make sure these elections are safe and secure? It's because the other side knows they'll do everything in their ability to hold on to power and control.”
Gruters added, “And that's why they're allowing tens of millions of illegals into the country, they want them to be able to eventually have voting rights, and so we've stopped, you know, non-citizens from voting. Some of our biggest wins is knocking them off the voting rules. But the work never ends.”
Democrats will do ANYTHING to gain power, including cheating.
That's why the RNC is fighting on the ground and in the courts across the country to secure our elections. pic.twitter.com/AuF7LR7HoC