Last week we showed four China-linked charts which made it very clear that, laughable flatlined 5% GDP notwithstanding, China's economy appears to be on the verge of yet another collapse (explaining the unprecedented drop in both Chinese oil imports and refining output): between autos, real estate, banks and overall consumption, the economy - as seen by the market - was in freefall.
China is fine pic.twitter.com/PFJzVCz9Ba
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 26, 2026With sentiment collapsing, and amid growing speculation that Beijing will have no choice but to unleash another firehose of fiscal and monetary stimulus, it came as little surprise overnight when China’s central bank set the interest rate on its new overnight liquidity tool at a level that was below expectations, in what some economists see as a de facto rate cut that could push down market borrowing costs.
As Bloomberg reports, the People’s Bank of China said it conducted 300 billion yuan ($44 billion) of overnight reverse repo agreements in open market operations on Monday, according to a statement that didn’t disclose the rate of interest it charged on its new instrument. To avoid confusion, readers should always remember that a reverse repo in China is a repo in the US. And vice versa. The central bank uses the operation to funnel short-term funds to the market to influence borrowing costs, and it accepts eligible bonds as collateral.
The official rate of the facility - the first such overnight facility unlike the bank's traditional 7-day operations - came in at 1.25%, Reuters reported. Unlike other liquidity instruments, the PBOC did not announce the borrowing cost for the overnight reverse repos. That compared with the median forecast of 1.35% in a Bloomberg survey.
The PBOC’s benchmark remained at 1.4%, 15bps higher than the facility rate, as it provided 157.5 billion yuan of seven-day reverse repo.
The decision, which intentionally came in below well telegraphed estimates, now sets the stage for looser monetary policy including a possible cut in loan prime rates — China’s lending benchmarks — as early as next month, according to Citigroup and Standard Chartered.
"Today’s move is not an outright easing, in our view — but it likely opens the door to one,” Citigroup economists led by Xiangrong Yu said in a note. “The asymmetric move likely signals an easing bias, without a formal cut.”
That will come next.
The operation marked the first time that the PBOC deployed the tool to manage liquidity, and many traders said the move is a first step in a gradual shift toward a benchmark overnight rate. Such a transition is likely to bring China closer to the practice of its global peers such as the Federal Reserve, which relies heavily on its overnight target rate to manage the US economy.
“The People’s Bank of China appeared to signal that it wants borrowing costs to fall by setting the rate on its new overnight reverse repo 10 basis points lower than markets had expected. This backs our view that the PBOC will trim its policy rate to reduce financial burdens on businesses and households and support demand”, said Bloomberg's David Qu.
The new facility is expected to give the PBOC better control over short-end borrowing costs and allow it to smooth out any big swings in market liquidity. The cost of overnight borrowing in the interbank market has become more volatile since May, as the central bank sought to ease a glut of money in the financial system, with demand for cash typically rising at the end of each quarter.
The yield on China’s 10-year government bonds slipped one basis point to 1.71% after the announcement, extending its drop into a third session. Both the overnight and seven-day repo rates eased.
Still, despite the strong hint of easing policy, some analysts still believe the PBOC will be looking to maintain the policy status quo, for now, by keeping the seven-day benchmark steady while publicly omitting details about the new overnight rate.
“The overnight reverse repo is primarily a liquidity tool aimed at smoothing seasonal funding stress, rather than a tool to signal a particular policy stance,” said Frances Cheung, head of foreign exchange and rates strategy at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. “The timing of the operations today and tomorrow ahead of the half-year end — and the amount bigger than the seven-day reverse repo — both support this notion.”
Talk of a rate cut in China gained substantial traction as the Chinese economy slowed dramatically in the second quarter, with retail sales and investment falling at a pace unseen since the pandemic.
Still, most economists expect the PBOC to keep its policy rate unchanged throughout 2026, although Huang Yiping, an adviser to the central bank, said a rate cut still remains a possibility.
“The next step is to lower de facto lending rates, including a possible reduction of LPR rates” across both one- and five-year durations “to support a stabilization of credit growth,” said Becky Liu, head of Greater China macro strategy at Standard Chartered.
“We had long argued that China is firmly staying on an easing path, and will likely to take advantage of the interest rate framework reform to lower de facto rates,” she said.
Lynn Song, China economist at ING, said it’s possible the new rate may have been kept undisclosed to avoid “diluting” the significance of the seven-day benchmark.
“Given the overnight rate is still the most liquid and important rate for trading activity, it makes sense this will eventually be the level that policymakers seek to control,” Song said. “However, it probably will take some time. We probably need some track record and maturity for the overnight repo facility and how it affects market overnight rates before this shift is made.”
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 18:00Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
“. . . there is no saving the Left. Whatever happens to them, it will have to happen without people like you or me trying to get them to return to any place of sanity.”
- Sasha Stone on Substack
A punishing heat-dome creeps over the eastern half of the country just in time for the gala Fourth of July week.
The days are brutal, but anything and everything crawls out of the woodwork when that blazing sun goes down and the moon comes out.
Everyone’s on edge, but the edge of what?
I will tell you.
First, could there be a richer (or more obvious) target for bloody mischief than this year’s national holiday, the 250th birthday of a nation that millions lucky enough to live here have been trained-up to hate on?
Even the sons and daughters (including pretend “daughters”) of millionaires have gone mad-dog on America, the poster-boy being Marxist-jihadi New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Left’s new avatar-general.
Since no one is more hated than the, ahem, Celebrator-in-Chief, you might want to steer clear of conspicuous public celebrations this week. Antifa and even worse gangs are out there right now, making plans and laying traps. Maybe not so much in places like Texas, where eight Antifas were just sentenced collectively to 450 years in the slammer for shooting up the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado. . . but here in the Empire State and other Blue-ish jurisdictions, all bets are off. Be careful ‘out there’ among the smokin’ ribs, the fireworks shows, and big music venues.
You can see how this summer, and the nauseating slide down to the midterm elections, are shaping up. The party of “Our Democracy” is desperate to an extreme now, all disfigured by a communist leprosy eating away at its public face (and a cancer of fraud metastasizing through its innards). It has become such an obvious monster, raging with its hair lit-up, that anyone with half a functioning brain is shying away, stealing off into the gloaming. The party has nothing left but chaos and, in the weeks ahead, anything that might be disrupted probably will be.
The objective is to create so much havoc and distress throughout the country - especially the big cities - that Mr. Trump will have to invoke the Insurrection Act, and by doing so, the Lefty-left hope to create conditions so adverse that an orderly Election Day cannot happen.
The Insurrection Act would be the Left’s cue to declare Mr. Trump the very “king” whose coronation they have busily rehearsed all year, and then, voila, you get a new French-style American Revolution 2.0, complete with guillotine and transgender Jacobins turning the country upside-down.
You might consider the theory that the nation actually needs to suffer a genuine nightmare to wake up from.
The Revolution 1.0 we celebrate this week was, after all, a nightmarish struggle rife with hardship and loss. Nine signers of the Declaration of Independence died from war-related tribulations. Five were imprisoned and tortured. Twelve had homes ransacked and burned. And then, of course, the military action itself, including travails such as the winter at Valley Forge, the disastrous New York Campaign, and the never-ending logistics crisis, no food, no clothing, no munitions.
In the present summer of travail we face, you can expect at least some major wake-up calls issued by the bloc in the country that has not gone insane — which happens to include many in Mr. Trump’s executive branch. I’m serenely confident that real evidence of 2020 election fraud will finally emerge, coincidental with indictments. Do you think that the Fulton County, GA, election records were seized last winter for no reason? Say goodbye to that old “baseless” talking point.
There are, of course, a whole lot of other seditious and treasonous Beltway villains nervously awaiting administration of the law. You know their names. It appears that the new supervising US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Joseph DiGenova, is reorganizing the so-called “grand conspiracy” case against this large cadre of coupsters into a folio of discrete cases — RussiaGate, Fake Impeachment #1, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc. — to make them more manageable and move them more speedily forward. Don’t be surprised if one or more of these cases happens to drop before the midterms. (Democratic Party true-blue loyalists could be surprised, even shocked to their socks, since these indictments will refute everything that has become essential to their identities as the good and righteous people of this land.)
Just one more item for now in the wake-up folder, coming a little out of left-field: things are looking eerie in the region of the San Andreas fault that runs through California, and perhaps the Seattle fault as well.
The earth’s geology even seems to be manifesting a degree of chaos.
It’s been shaky along the Pacific Rim “Ring of Fire” for many months.
Significant earthquakes have struck Japan (7.4 offshore Honshu/Miyako area), Indonesia (7.4 near Bitung), the Philippines, Tonga, Vanuatu, Chile, Papua New Guinea.
The Venezuela “doublet” (June 24, Mag 7.2) occurred in a separate tectonic zone, but all zones are essentially connected by the movements of magma deep in the earth, solar activity (flares, etc), gravitational tidal forces, and so on.
On June 24, a Mag 5.6 shook Redwood Valley, in Mendocino California, a Mag 5.8 near Pistol River, Oregon, and a Mag 5.1 struck 40 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County, CA.
The east side of the Pacific rim (America’s West Coast) has been unusually quiet for some years now. Be alert. Things seem to be livening-up. Just sayin’.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 17:40Iconic chicken-wing chain Hooters, famous for buxom waitresses wearing skimpy orange and white uniforms, appears to be throwing in the towel on its 35-year struggle to stay politically incorrect.
As Ben Sellers writes for HeadlineUSA.com, while some restaurants, like Cracker Barrel, have successfully fought off the takeover of corporate wokeness, Hooters recently announced the closure of its last New York location, the New York Post reported.
“Thanks for the mammaries,” the paper wrote in a nod to the voluptuous waitresses who became a prominent marketing gimmick and, ultimately, a business model for the franchise.
In addition to shuttering its holdout location in Colonie, N.Y., just outside Albany, Hooters also recently closed its final three Massachusetts locations in Dedham, Saugus and West Springfield.
And in March it said goodbye to its final locations in Connecticut and Minnesota, the latter of which was located in the Mall of America.
Technically, it was not the prescriptive mandates of virtue-signaling womynists that drove the chain under, but rather a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last year.
It cited inflation and other issues as the reason for sagging sales.
However, after closing around 40 company-owned restaurants, the final nail in the coffin may have been a “family friendly” rebranding, with the company focused on retaining its beach-bar motif—along with more modest server outfits, the Post reported.
“I don’t think you’re going to see a bunch of butt cheeks hanging out,” said Neil Kiefer, the 73-year-old lawyer who took control of the brand after its default, according to the Wall Street Journal.
For decades, Hooters fought off outside attempts to reign in its “delightfully tacky” image, including a four-year fight with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its refusal to hire men as servers.
In a 1997 case, the restaurant argued that it was safeguarding women’s rights under Title VII by designating womanhood a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification, meaning it was a necessity to the operation of the business.
(Hooters made no such distinction for its chefs and kitchen staff, who disproportionately were men.)
As the Obama era gave way to #MeToo grievances, the restaurant continued to weather a barrage of complaints including allegations of sexual harassment and objectification of women.
“It is time women spoke up and were not browbeaten into accepting places such as Hooters so they are not seen as prudish,” said former Cardiff University lecturer Gill Boden in a 2010 BBC article.
“Places such as this all contribute to the current climate where men see women’s bodies as available objects.”
In the Biden era, as identity politics blossomed into a giant turd, the restaurant not only fell victim to financial issues like pandemic restrictions, supply-chain shortages and increased poultry costs, but also new threats from cancel culture.
In 2023, Hooters was sued by Taria Daughtridge, a dark-skinned waitress at a North Carolina branch who claimed white and light-toned servers received preferential treatment.
In 2024 came the inevitable lawsuit attempt by a biologically male transgender individual, going by the name “Brandy Livingston,” who was banned from Hooters as a man for making lewd comments but went on to sue the restaurant for discrimination after undergoing a gender transition.
Mourners eulogized the outlet on Reddit, with one fan joking that it "went bust" while another wrote, "I just fell to my knees."
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 17:20