UK - The fall of First Brands and Tricolor may be a warning of much bigger woes in the financial system, says the Bank of England governor. The Bank of England must take the sudden collapse of two American firms “very seriously” amid worries that signs of fragility in the US private credit market echo the beginnings of the 2008 financial crisis, Andrew Bailey has warned. The Bank governor told the House of Lords that global financial regulators must monitor the risks to the banking system from its linkages with private credit, after last month’s bankruptcies of First Brands, a car parts dealer, and Tricolor, a car dealership. “Are these cases idiosyncratic or are they ‘the canary in the coal mine?’ In other words, are they telling us something more fundamental about the private finance, private asset, private credit, private equity sector?” Bailey asked the Lords financial regulation committee on Tuesday.

USA - The Federal Reserve will come to the rescue. One of the Wall Street giants will step in at the last minute. And if necessary, the money will be printed to protect deposits. As the markets grow more nervous over America’s regional banks they can at least reassure themselves on one point: that the US government will bail them out if it has to – as it always has in the past. Don’t be too sure. With Donald Trump at war with the Fed and the government shut down, we can hardly take that for granted – and that is a terrifying prospect for investors. It was not hard to work out why global stock markets were falling on Friday. There is growing nervousness about the exposure of many of the regional banks in the US to loans that could soon turn sour. President Trump is never predictable. He makes decisions on the hoof, has no fixed ideology and often seems to enjoy unleashing chaos. He is a wild card. Does he have much sympathy for bankers who have run into trouble? Does he think it is time that a bank was finally allowed to go bust, in the same way as any other business?

GERMANY - The AfD benefits enormously from the firewall, even though it’s not of their making. The last ten years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing ****show, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD’s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine. At some point, in a way that is as yet unimaginable to us, the firewall will probably come down. The political realignment would happen suddenly, in less than a few months.

USA - For hundreds of years, men dominated the major institutions in western society, but over the past several decades there has been an unprecedented shift. Today, leftist women either dominate or are on their way to dominating most of our major institutions. As a result, the way that things get done has been totally turned upside down. Even our largest corporations are now making consensus-driven decisions that are based on emotion rather than on facts. If you insist on disagreeing with the consensus, you may find yourself being “canceled”. Defending the narratives that the group has established and protecting the feelings of favored individuals have become far more important goals than getting to the truth. The feminization of our society and the rise of “wokeness”… Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

ISRAEL - Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli condemned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday, highlighting a March 30, 2025 prayer in which Erdogan asked that “Zionist Israel” be “destroyed and devastated,” and accusing the Turkish leader of consistently seeking to undermine the Jewish people’s historic bond to Jerusalem. In a post on X/Twitter, Chikli wrote that the line, “May Allah, for the sake of His name… destroy and devastate Zionist Israel,” was not uttered by Hamas or Hezbollah, but by Erdogan himself during a public prayer. Israeli and international outlets reported at the time that Erdogan, speaking at Istanbul’s Camlica Mosque at the close of Ramadan, used language translated as a call for Israel’s destruction. Israel condemned the remarks.

USA - The work of the American novelist David Foster Wallace is littered with little prophecies. In a 2003 interview Foster Wallace described a new problem he had encountered watching television. He couldn’t stop. “I’ve become convinced,” he explained, “that there’s something really good on another channel and that I’m missing it. And so instead of watching, I’m scanning anxiously back and forth for this thing that I want but I don’t know what it is.” “Infinite scroll” is the term now used for the technology behind never-ending social media timelines that endlessly refresh whenever you bump up against the bottom of the page. The idea is to produce compulsive behaviours in users who keep on scrolling in a state of permanent anticipation. Perhaps one more swipe will yield the animal video or conspiracy theory capable of wringing another drop of dopamine from an overtaxed brain. Something similar was happening on multi-channel television more than two decades ago. You could infinitely scroll with a TV remote.

UK - We don’t know how to handle [Prince] Andrew because we don’t understand sin. In the good old days, when we still hanged people, you’d swing with an executioner on one side of you and a priest on the other. The state punished, the church forgave. Today, nobody goes to church, so we’ve become very unforgiving, yet the state also has a mixed record on punishment, so we don’t see the justice we crave. In place of retribution, which we’ve decided is cruel, we isolate and ostracise the accused, known in modern parlance as “cancelation”. Thus [Prince] Andrew will be condemned to a strange half-life where he’s never truly had to confront what he may or may not have done, yet millions will assume he’s guilty and treat him like a leper.

USA - Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, estimates the total financial impact of the AWS service disruption will be in the billions of dollars. “The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Daoudi said in a statement to CNN. “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.” Already, the outage has resulted in delayed flights, prevented consumers from making purchases on certain apps or accessing financial services and caused issues for workers trying to do their jobs on Monday.

ISRAEL - Hamas terrorists have shattered the hard-won peace deal orchestrated by President Trump this morning as they have resumed the organization’s ultimate goal: wiping the nation of Israel off the map. Israel revealed to Fox News on Sunday morning that Hamas launched “several attacks” against their forces in violation of the peace deal brokered by Trump. In response, the Jewish State responded with strikes in the north and south of the Gaza Strip. In the end, it’s not shocking that the Islamist terror group refused to keep its word. The ultimate goal for them is the complete destruction of the Jewish State.

UK - Steep borrowing costs that would once have seemed laughable are now bleak reality for the UK. Soaring debt. Social unrest. Rising inflation. These aren’t just the hallmarks of a developing economy. They are the trends defining Britain today. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, 20 years ago, the UK actually had the lowest debt among the G7 rich club of nations. Inflation was low, wages were rising, and a steadily expanding economy meant everyone felt better off. What has happened since is threatening to tear Britain’s social fabric apart. The global financial crisis inflicted a deep wound on the economy. Productivity – the key ingredient to rising living standards – retreated. The pandemic subsequently created a cultural dependency on the state that spawned a surge in worklessness, leaving Britain’s employees to pick up an ever-growing bill.

UK - From railways to dial-up modems, speculators have often confused new technology with guaranteed profits, only to find the future arrives more slowly than the hype funding it. As the AI gold rush accelerates, investors are becoming jittery. The IMF’s chief economist has drawn parallels to the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s, in which $5 trillion was wiped from the market. The Bank of England warns of a “sudden correction”, and 54 per cent of fund managers surveyed by the Bank of America now think AI stocks are in a bubble. Does the data suggest it’s true? The S&P 500 index has become a handful of tech giants with 495 other companies attached: virtually all of this year’s growth has come from Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta. Spending on data centres alone is estimated to be responsible for nearly half of US GDP growth. A market correction of some sort looks likely: there are plenty of overhyped businesses loosely connected to AI whose stock price has soared.

USA - OpenAI on track for $1.3 trillion payouts while losing $8 billion a year, AI bubble grows wilder by the day. I have a question. OpenAI is supposedly on the hook to pay the circle jerk crew $1,300,000,000,000 over the next few years. Meanwhile, their operating revenue is negative $8,000,000,000. How do they even cover that gap? OpenAI is bleeding $8 billion. Revenue $4.3 billion in the first half of 2025. Losses $7.8 billion. That is R&D, marketing, stock compensation. They are hustling every revenue stream they can think of, from AI shopping tools to video creation via Sora to AI agents. More debt, more data centers, all to keep this fantasy alive.

UK - It is clear that one of the most pro-growth measures the Government could take would be to stop its rush towards net zero by 2050, and instead to reconsider its policy entirely. The supposed economic benefits are disintegrating in the face of reality, and the costs appear to be rising on a near-continuous basis. Earlier this week electricity suppliers warned that green levies are set to increase household energy bills by £300 per year. Even if the wholesale price of electricity halves, this would still be a net rise of £150. Now we learn that the supposed “clean energy jobs boom” promised by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is to be achieved in large part by rebranding plumbers, electricians and welders as “clean energy workers”. Jürgen Maier, the boss of GB Energy, meanwhile, believes it could take 20 years to create the 1,000 jobs at its Scottish headquarters promised by Sir Keir Starmer.

CANADA - Canada has euthanized around 90,000 people since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government legalized so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) in 2016, a watchdog has revealed. The death toll was exposed in shocking new data published by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC). EPC Executive Director Alex Schadenberg revealed the grim total, citing government data and projected 2025 figures. “There were around 16,500 Canadian euthanasia deaths in 2024, representing 5% of all deaths,” Schadenberg declared. “There have been around 90,000 Canadian euthanasia deaths since legalization.”

USA - When silver surged to multi-year highs, veteran bullion dealer Andy Schectman didn’t see just another price move — he saw a rupture in the foundation of the global metals market. In a wide-ranging interview last week, Schectman argued that what’s happening now represents the physical market finally “calling the bluff” of decades of paper manipulation. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he began, emphasizing that this was not mere volatility. "Backwardation… shows extreme delivery stress… It’s the market exposing the shortages of physical silver, the frailty of the paper promises.” For Schectman, “backwardation” — when spot prices exceed futures prices — isn’t just a technical quirk. It’s the alarm bell that the supply of real metal is running thin. He believes the era when investors could comfortably rely on “paper silver” derivatives is ending.