As the government scrambles to prevent contagion, the Federal Reserve announced on Sunday night that all depositors would get their money back. Yet the revelation about the 'unrealized losses' will only serve to raise concerns about the US banking industry.

The ticking time bomb is due to US banks buying Treasuries and bonds while interest rates were low, but, with interest rates now rising, finding these bonds have declined in value. When interest rates rise, newly issued bonds start paying higher rates to investors, which makes the older bonds with lower rates less attractive and less valuable. Most banks and pension funds are affected.

Jens Hagendorff, a finance professor at King's College London, told CNN that the problem was widespread. 'Many institutions — from central banks, commercial banks and pension funds — sit on assets that are worth significantly less than reported in their financial statements,' he said. 'The resulting losses will be large and need to be financed somehow. The scale of the problem is starting to cause concern.'

They have tightened so hard and so fast over the last year they have raised rates and tightened faster than anytime before. This is in the face of the biggest over-levered situation in history no matter how you look at it… They can only do one or the other, and they already look like fools.

The world is already laughing at the United States. Think of what Russia and China think when we are walking out some army general wearing a skirt. We are getting to the end game.”

The whole system is rotten to the core. The whole system is over-levered. The whole system is fraudulent. The entire system is a Ponzi scheme. The government of the reserve currency of the world has to borrow a trillion dollars a year to stay solvent. That’s ridiculous.”

And as we process the shock of yet another small bank failure (which makes JPMorgan even bigger), the Fed just issued a statement saying that "to support American businesses and households, the Federal Reserve Board on Sunday announced it will make available additional funding to eligible depository institutions to help assure banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors. This action will bolster the capacity of the banking system to safeguard deposits and ensure the ongoing provision of money and credit to the economy."

But wait, there's more: concurrently with the Fed's statement, the Treasury also issued a joint statement with the Fed and FDIC in which Powell, Yellen and Gruenberg all said that they are "taking decisive actions to protect the US economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system. This step will ensure that the US banking system continues to perform its vital roles of protecting deposits and providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth."

Additionally, the trio announced that all depositors at Silicon Valley Bank will be bailed out, as will the depositors of New York's Signature Bank, which has just failed as well, and whose depositors will be made whole after invoking a "systemic risk exception".

Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it — if we think of it at all — as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced. But what if the safe transit of ships could no longer be assumed? What if the oceans were no longer free?

Every now and again, Americans are suddenly reminded of how much they depend on the uninterrupted movement of ships around the world for their lifestyle, their livelihood, even their life. In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, forcing vessels shuttling between Asia and Europe to divert around Africa, delaying their passage and driving up costs.

A few months later, largely because of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 container ships were stacked up outside the California Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, snarling supply chains throughout the country.

Explaining the need for the move, Sunak cited the “challenges of an increasingly volatile and complex world.” The priorities for which the money will be used include “replenishing and bolstering vital ammunition stocks,” as well as modernizing the “UK’s nuclear enterprise.”

In such a situation, “it is difficult to convince people with the logic that we should refrain from developing nuclear weapons and stick to the cause of denuclearisation,” he added. The mayor of Seoul, which hosts nearly half the country’s population of 51 million, said the Russia-Ukraine conflict has convinced him that South Korea should seek a nuclear deterrent.

“Russia freely violates Ukraine’s airspace, flying bombers and firing missiles... but Ukraine barely attacks Russian territory because of the psychological inferiority to a nuclear state,” Oh said.

Meta also plans to close about 5,000 job postings that have yet to be filled, Mr Zuckerberg said in the memo. “This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he wrote.

Mr Zuckerberg is culling employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers as its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp, became popular worldwide. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.

On an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he did not want the company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management, or “managers managing managers.” He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs, blaming his zeal for staffing up on the surge of use early in the pandemic.

In Germany, skepticism of the merits of military strength has enabled a long post-Cold War process of disarmament. As a result, it is a historic anomaly in the heart of Europe — an economic leviathan but a military minnow. Now German leaders are vowing to transform the country into a military power capable of taking responsibility for Europe’s security.

In Nienburg, a medieval town in Lower Saxony, civilians come to train for “homeland protection” units in the country’s reserves. The question is whether a hesitant German society can follow through on this paradigm shift.

“I would say, many of them lean in the direction of being pacifists,” said Anne Katrin Meister, who is training at the base in Nienburg. “But you can only be a pacifist if you have this safe, ideal world. And we don’t have such a world.”

The Bank of England announced on Friday that the UK arm of SVB was to go into insolvency on Sunday night after Californian authorities took control of the business this week. Mr Hunt, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Governor of the Bank of England held crisis talks until late last night amid concerns over the UK's tech and life science sectors.

They have since promised to 'minimise' damage to British firms from SVB's collapse and issued assurances there is no 'systemic risk' to the UK's financial system. The Chancellor this morning also refused to rule out a taxpayer-funded bailout to protect affected businesses. 'The first thing to say is the Governor of the Bank of England has made it very clear there is no systemic risk to our financial system - so people should be reassured on that basis,' Mr Hunt told Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday show.

Following SVB's collapse, tech companies in Britain have had their accounts frozen, meaning they have no access to their money and are unable to pay staff. Major firms such as online retail giant Shopify and Pinterest are also directly affected by the failure.

The chaotic episode showed that the Fed's aggressive interest rate hiking regime could upend institutions that were once thought to be relatively stable. It appears that any rate sensitivity is about to be laid bare, and past risk-taking behavior held accountable.

The big questions now become what rate-sensitive areas will be next to feel the pain, and whether there's any real risk of financial-system contagion. And perhaps most ominously, SVB likely isn't the only bank that's sitting on billions of dollars of paper losses on their bond portfolio, so watch out for further rate-driven ripples.

In an article published on Global Research, Princeton University alumnus F William Engdahl said President Joe Biden’s administration as well as the European Union have been insisting that the energy crunch was brought about by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offensive in Kyiv. However, Engdahl noted that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is believed to be the one stirring up the energy crisis pot.

In January 2020, Fink sent a letter to his Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs announcing a radical departure from corporate investment by saying that money would “go green.” “In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital. Climate risk is investment risk,” Fink said, stressing that “every government, company and shareholder must confront climate change.”

Fink, who manages some $7 trillion in investments, wrote a separate letter to their investor clients where he indicated that his company will cut certain high-carbon investments such as coal and that he would screen new investments in oil, gas and coal to determine their adherence to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030. He said companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, which would cause a higher cost of capital.

“Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. We are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” he said.

A daily scan of the newswires calls to mind three or more of these propaganda rules. On some days, six or seven. On others still, all 10. We refer specifically to the conflict presently arage in the eastern European nation of Ukraine. Let us now consider these rules. We will not take up each of them since some rules relate closely to others. We will instead weld these together. To proceed…

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

On how many occasions have you read or heard condemnations of Mr Putin’s “unprovoked” act of aggression? To phrase it differently, when has it not been described as unprovoked? Yet a man can argue very persuasively that Mr Putin’s war was indeed provoked.

The Russian autocrat warned on several occasions that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a “red line.” Russia would not abide the NATO dagger pressing against its vitals (parts of Ukraine actually lie east of Moscow). Yet the NATO alliance had announced its intentions to incorporate Ukraine — despite Vladimir’s moans and grimaces.

7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big. 270,000 Russian Casualties? Source after source cites claims of unspeakable Russian deaths and woundings. Figures of 270,000 Russian casualties have been proposed. Yet the original invasion force consisted only of 190,000 men. Are they all — plus 80,000 others — dead or injured?

The British Broadcasting Corporation decided to do some spade work. They attempted to discern the true number of Russian fatalities. This they did by poring through death notices, funeral announcements, social media and other venues.

What did they discover? They could only identify the names of 16,071 confirmed Russian fatalities.

Francis said that “gender ideology” has created one of the most “dangerous” ideologies in recent history because of the way it blurs the lines between men and women, according to a translation of his remarks to La Nacion by the Catholic News Agency. Francis explained that “all humanity is the tension of differences” and worried about how “gender ideology” had virtually eliminated those differences between men and women.

“Why is it dangerous?” Francis said. “Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women. The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”

The document reportedly argues that existing memorials project the “perception that the achievements that society considers noteworthy are those of powerful, older, able-bodied white men.”

According to the Telegraph, the statues of general Arthur Wellesley and admiral Horatio Nelson, hailed for their victories against Napoleon, could fall under this rubric.Both commanders have been accused by activists in the past of enabling colonialism and slavery. The guidance advises authorities and other public institutions to “take action” to set “the right historical narrative,” according to the newspaper.