“A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes.
But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death.
We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them.”
Blue Owl halts redemptions at one of its funds, deepening selloff in private equity shares
Private capital firm Blue Owl Capital, is selling $1.4 billion in assets from three of its credit funds so it can return capital to investors and pay down debt, and permanently halting redemptions at one of the funds…Questions about credit quality and exposure to software stocks have dogged the industry for months…
"We're not halting redemptions, we are simply changing the method by which we're providing redemptions”
I've discovered that if you use the word "Credit" instead of "Debt" it sounds a lot better. e.g.,
"Margin CREDIT Up 4.4% in January, Hits Eighth Straight Record High"
Top 10 Companies with the Most Cash
My understanding of Berkshire is that at this point, for safety, and to always have enough to pay massive insurance losses, they’d probably keep at least $100B at all times, but the other $281.7 billion is still a lot of money. At least it used to be. Clearly Berkshire does not have FOMO.
Hadn’t looked at Intuit in years. I actually picked up a decent amount in the $350’s for a (rare) trade, so it’ll probably drop to $25 dollars later this week. I own NO (other) tech stocks, so this is “a diversifying move.”
”IBM JUST HAD ITS WORST DAY IN 2 DECADES!” - CNBS
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can shake it off."
“A December survey by Vistage Worldwide found more than half of small business leaders planned price increases within three months, with nearly 70% targeting hikes of 4% to 10% and another 10% expecting increases above 10%.”
Nick Gerli
“Existing owners saw what their neighbor’s house sold for in 2022, and they think that that’s what it’s worth, and they they’ll get a listing agent. They’ll get a realtor. The realtor will tell them, “No, it’s not worth 500. Priced it at 440.” They’ll price it at 500 still. And then in some cases, they’ll then get frustrated and delist the home.
So we’re seeing mainly the stickiness in the market. Why it’s not correcting like it needs to correct is due to the seller delusion. I would call it seller delusion on what their home is worth. For houses to actually transact, prices need to be down probably 15% to 20% on a national basis, but we’re not there…
In Reno, Nevada, I think the typical house there is 550,000, for just a standard house. For a nice house, you’re talking probably a million dollars. A local person in Reno cannot afford that. Same goes for Las Vegas. Same goes for Phoenix. Same goes for Dallas, Houston, Nashville, Tampa, Atlanta - all these boom towns.”
Jim Kunstler: How about Las Vegas, Melody? How’s LV doing?
Wright: “They took the old loss mitigation programs from the GFC and they put them on steroids and they took away all the requirements and things you had to do because back then you had to virtually re-underwrite the loan. Well, they said you don’t have to do that anymore. You don’t even have to ask for their financials. I mean, this is crazy, Marty. I mean, that’s crazy. Like, you don’t even want to know if they can pay? Like, what? Like, why would you? It’s all a game of extend and pretend.”
Wright: “I try to remind myself when I go out into the world and interview people on the road, or Uber drivers - they are way more aware than Fintwit of what’s going on, so I try to tell myself we’re dealing with a select group in financial media that is very ‘ivory tower’, and they don’t really understand what’s going on, but regular Americans do.”
Commercial Real Estate
Mendy Pollack, Ironwood Realty Capital
“Just sticking with my guns saying that there’s more pain to come. Many people think we’re near the bottom where and I don’t agree. I think there’s more pain ahead, and I think it has to do with financial institutions. I think there’s significant exposure to commercial real estate, and a lot of that risk has not been fully recognized yet, and I don’t think it could be ignored forever. Reality has to be marked, and positions at some point have to be addressed. The question is, is there a way to kick the can down the road? I think at some point, when people drop their properties, banks can’t report that they’re performing, and at some point they’re going to need to be doing appraisals. I think a lot of banks are insolvent - I could say that’s one bold prediction.
I think banks are really insolvent, but they’re not on paper, because they’re still showing that they’re secured, and at some point a lot of banks will be acquired, because they can’t absorb the losses on their own, and then some larger banks will acquire them, and I think that’ll that’ll create a lot of debt sales.
Bill Bymel
“You hit the nail on the head there. You know, obviously it would be great for us. There’s a motivation for us, as debt buyers - you want to see that happen. You touched on it so well, because the banks and the federal government have done a surprisingly phenomenal job of kicking the can down the road, and a reason we don’t see a lot of note sales, the reason we don’t see a lot of - we’ve seen the occasional headline, which has not swayed the market enough.
You see the occasional headline where Brookfield gives back the keys on an office building in downtown LA, and the loan’s worth half what the billion dollar loan is, or something like that. That’s just the canary in the coal mine. You hit it when you said they need to mark at some point. I think we’re in this place right now where there’s a lack of anyone wanting to - everyone’s got their head in the sand, and there’s a lack of wanting to actually discover what the real value of real estate is, because at some point, someone’s going to wake up and say, ‘wait a second how does any of this get unwound?’ And that’s when reality sets in.”
Mendy Pollack
“I think they realize that already. I just think that on their books, if they have valuation of the asset at enough to make their loan covered, they almost have to say that it’s fine, because if they don’t, they create what no one wants - a run on the bank - and they don’t want to do that. Could that can happen? It could happen, but your asset is only as good as the real estate that’s supporting it.”
Bill Bymel
“You know, you’re absolutely right. And if there’s any bit of a glimpse for those that are part of that generation that hasn’t lived through some kind of major paradigm shift and market transformation - like we saw in 2008, for instance - you only have to look at the momentary blip of 2023, with Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank. A month before the failure of those multi-billion dollar banks, you would have had no one in the world tell you that either one had any trouble. Not only that, Signature Bank was a staple of New York real estate and New York lending, and had some of the most sophisticated private clients on the banking side of any of the New York banks.
The fact that a few switches in the market of one guy, then one remark, and then one sentiment on Wall Street - it almost unleashed an avalanche then - and the Fed did a great job of, you know, kicking the can, patching it up, but in the meantime since then - and as a participant in the FDIC auction of the Signature Bank assets, I know - they have now spent the last two years preparing for a storm of bank consolidations and failures, just for that same reason.
You can go - especially in the banking world because you’re so highly levered, they keep very little cash on hand - you can go from healthy and viable, to underwater and ready for liquidation in a matter of days, seconds.”
"US banks enjoyed record profits of $300bn in 2025"
“US banks generated record profits last year of almost $300bn as the industry paid lower levels of interest to savers while benefiting from an uptick in lending activity and benign credit losses…
“It was a happy year,” said veteran banking analyst Christopher Whalen, chair of Whalen Global Advisors. “It’s another year where we have skipped past any credit concerns which to me is remarkable.””
“How Obama’s Bank Bailouts Produced Trump”
Obama “and his Democrat brethren still have no idea why Donald Trump is President. And they never will. These are the people who are running the Democratic Party.”
If you think the above BLS chart is disturbing, back in 2023 the BLS changed this model in order to make the explosion of wealth inequality look slightly less bad.
Again, for simplicity sake, I’ll dub this “the middle class” - the 50th to 90th percentile of wealth.
As I’ve opined before, half of Americans own no stocks, and most of the rest hold insignificant amounts. The top 10% own the overwhelming bulk of shares.
Here is the bottom 50% of the population, treading water really, I’d guess due to increased transfer payments.
To steal from Pam Bondi - hey, the Dow’s (almost) at 50K!!
Now this is the top 0.1% - the Epstein crowd. They are killing it.
Decades of ZIRP and QE and other insane monetary intervention, tax policies, and the legalization of white-collar crime - all mother's milk to the Cantillon Effect crowd.
“You need to decide whether for the first time in the last 15 years you need to hedge your dollars if you are a non-US dollar investor…
I wrote this piece about state capitalism, and my last line was ‘welcome to the modern version of the Soviet Union.’ And for some reason they took it out of my article when it was published, but the point being that we live in state-run system with no price discovery, and I know it sounds like an economic concept but basically it’s a system where the market doesn’t dictate the marginal price of of anything.”
Waymo Tries Finding DoorDash Drivers to Shut Open Robotaxi Doors
Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo is enlisting DoorDash Inc. drivers in Atlanta to close robotaxi doors that have been left open, letting the driverless vehicles continue on their way.
A driver in Atlanta recently received a DoorDash offer paying $11.25 to close an open Waymo vehicle door, according to a screenshot of the DoorDash driver app posted to social media site Reddit. “No pickup or delivery required,” the screenshot read.
Class action suit by families of those brainwashed in Montreal medical experiments gets go-ahead
A lawsuit against the Canadian government, the Royal Victoria Hospital and the McGill University Health Centre is moving ahead.
About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars.
Alison Steel says her mother was never the same after undergoing brainwashing experiments at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute.
Treatments included chemically induced sleep for weeks, rounds of electroshocks and experimental drugs…
The plaintiffs allege the Government of Canada funded psychiatric treatments by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute between 1950 to 1964. They claim the government played a role in the supervision and control of these experiments, which were part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program of covert mind-control.
“Parapolitics , n. 1. a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished. 2. generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision making but by indirection, collusion, and deceit. Cf. conspiracy.’ 3. the political exploitation of irresponsible agencies or parastructures, such as intelligence agencies. Ex. 1. ‘The Nixon doctrine, viewed in retrospect, represented the application of parapolitics on a hitherto unprecedented scale.’ 2. ‘Democracy and parapolitics, even in foreign affairs, are ultimately incompatible.’
“We’re mixing the Kennedy assassination with weird churches, with intelligence operations, and now with Andrija Puharichj, Arthur M. Young, and The Nine, flying saucers, aliens, and what else do you want, right?”
If this sounds like a podcast you’d be interested in, here you go. For more info read this.
“The more intensely you stare at the depravity, the less clearly you see the architecture that made it possible. Because Jeffrey Epstein was not, in any primary sense, just a predator who happened to accumulate powerful friends. He was an apparatus — a financial and intelligence intermediary who occupied the precise intersection of politics, science, banking, and philanthropy, and who transmuted privileged access into staggering profit with the mechanical regularity of a well-oiled engine. The trafficking was not the business. The trafficking was the collateral. The island was not the product. The island was the insurance policy.”1
When the Justice Department decided last year not to release its Epstein files, U.S. officials said there was nothing in the documents that warranted further prosecution.
Trump appointees in charge of the Justice Department said that after an “exhaustive review” they had found no incriminating client list. “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the Justice Department and FBI wrote in a memo released in July.
But after Congress required the release of millions of additional documents, authorities overseas discovered evidence of other possible crimes after combing through the files themselves.
The Accomplice Who Was Going to Testify Against Jeffrey Epstein—Then Went Dark
Jean-Luc Brunel was ready to turn on the man who had been his patron and partner. The French modeling scout was prepared to tell prosecutors what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.
Brunel was secretly negotiating in 2016 with lawyers representing Epstein’s victims, according to newly released Justice Department files. Brunel’s lawyer told them his client recruited girls for Epstein and had incriminating photographs. They discussed a date for Brunel to walk into the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York—in exchange for immunity.
“One of Epstein’s bfs, Jean Luc Brunel, has helped get girls. He is wanting to cooperate,” according to handwritten notes taken by a federal prosecutor in February 2016. “Brunel is afraid of being prosecuted.”
Epstein had discovered that negotiations with Brunel were taking place, the files show. On May 3, he fired off an email to Kathy Ruemmler, an attorney he corresponded with regularly.
Ruemmler was White House Chief Counsel under Obama, and then Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for Goldman Sachs. In the Epstein files dump (so far), she sent or received over 11,000 emailsto and from Jeff Epstein.
“After Brunel stopped negotiations, he wasn’t arrested and prosecutors didn’t pursue him further.”
"your friend alleza told me about the project she is doing researching a really bad guy that gets chldren for sex sent to his island. . she almost fainted when i told her that person is me" (2018)
Ex-governor Huckabee teams up with MK for Pollard’s release “MK Danny Danon (Likud) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee met last week to plan a new petition calling on US President Barack Obama to pardon convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.” (February 2013)
“Ambassador Mike Huckabee, President Trump’s envoy to Israel, met at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem in July with Jonathan J. Pollard, an American who spent 30 years in prison for spying for Israel”
Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee I listened to the entire thing and think Huckabee is a traitor to the United States, and I almost never use that word. If you disagree, that’s fine.
“Still… it’s the bank president. It was always the bank president”.
Lily. From ‘A Lily Bit’. On Substack
She takes the themes from your favorite Epstein researcher and drills them down into long, but readable bites. Her last 3 articles on Epstein are public. Pretty incredible stuff. Worth a look IMO.
About Epstein and JP Morgan.
“Still… it’s the bank president. It was always the bank president”.
Lily. From ‘A Lily Bit’. On Substack
She takes the themes from your favorite Epstein researcher and drills them down into long, but readable bites. Her last 3 articles on Epstein are public. Pretty incredible stuff. Worth a look IMO.
Thanks for Nick Lowe!