Aggregator

President Trump repeatedly criticized CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in the Oval Office Wednesday, accusing her of “false reporting” and “never” smiling. 

California Democrats confirmed five Newsom-backed parole commissioners despite GOP objections that they favor violent offenders over victims and public safety

Jared Verse didn’t hide his emotions during his introductory press conference when he spoke about when he learned he was being traded from the Los Angeles Rams to the Cleveland Browns.

India Throws Open The Bond Gates: Modi Slashes Foreign Investor Taxes In Scramble To Halt Rupee Collapse

Having spent the better part of a decade assuring the world that the Indian growth miracle was self-sustaining, structurally sound, and impervious to the “fragile five” indignities of yesteryear, New Delhi has quietly arrived at the only conclusion that ever follows a currency in freefall: print incentives, slash taxes, and beg foreigners to please, please come back.

According to Bloomberg, India is poised to announce a suite of measures to lure foreign capital - reducing taxes and removing ownership caps on certain bonds - possibly as soon as this week. The cabinet is expected to consider a “significant cut” in the taxes global funds pay on Indian bonds, with officials reportedly weighing whether to eliminate the 20% levy on bond interest income entirely, or shave it down to what the people familiar described as “a bare minimum.” Translation: foreigners weren’t biting, and somebody in the Finance Ministry finally noticed.

Separately, the Reserve Bank of India is likely to designate some long-tenor sovereign notes as “fully accessible,” allowing overseas investors to load up without limits. Readers will recall that the last tweak to this so-called Fully Accessible Route (FAR) came in 2024, when the RBI removed 14- and 30-year bonds from the list. So to recap the master plan: pull the long bonds out in 2024, watch the currency crater, then shove them back in 2026 and call it reform. Smart. 

Meanwhile, the rupee printed an all-time low of 96.9650 on May 20, capping a year in which it became the second-worst-performing currency in Asia, down more than 6% against the dollar. This is the same currency that the consensus crowd spent 2024 lauding as “among the least volatile in emerging markets,” back when foreign funds were piling into FAR bonds ahead of the JPMorgan index inclusion to the tune of nearly $10 billion. As we noted at the time, that “stability” was the entire allure... but stability built on hot money flows has a nasty habit of evaporating precisely when you need it.

It evaporated. The official list of culprits reads like a greatest-hits compilation of things that were supposedly “priced in”: US trade tariffs, record foreign fund outflows, and an oil shock courtesy of the Iran war that detonated India’s import bill. Modi himself was reduced to publicly imploring citizens to conserve foreign exchange - a phrase that should send a chill down the spine of anyone who remembers 2013, when New Delhi slapped capital controls on its own residents and restricted gold imports as the rupee buckled. Back then, those measures “raised concerns of outright capital controls” that would further undermine the confidence of foreign investors. History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme, in Hindi.

The rupee has since clawed back from the 96.97 abyss to close at 95.71 per dollar, helped by the central bank “stepping up support” (read: torching reserves) and oil easing on renewed US-Iran peace overtures (read: rapid strategic reserve drain). The 10-year yield ticked up a single basis point to 7.02%. Markets, naturally, are treating the prospect of tax-cut-fueled inflows as salvation - the same way they treated index inclusion as salvation, right before the biggest bond selloff in a year hit the moment the currency wobbled.

The government is also expected to notify a plan permitting “persons resident outside India” - PROIs, because just like in the West, every desperate measure needs a cheerful acronym - to buy shares in listed Indian companies via the portfolio investment scheme. More doors, more access, more pleading.

The deeper irony is the one nobody in New Delhi will say out loud: a country that genuinely believed in its own growth story wouldn’t need to bribe foreigners with tax exemptions to hold its paper. You cut taxes on bond interest when the organic bid has gone missing and the marginal buyer has to be paid to show up. 

We’ve seen this movie before: in 2013, in 2024, and now again in 2026. The rupee makes a record low, the foreigners head for the exits, the central bank empties the tank defending the line, and then the politburo “discovers” the virtues of liberalization at exactly the moment of maximum weakness. Reform by panic. As always, the gates open widest right when the people inside are most eager to leave.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/03/2026 - 17:20

The blond bombshell’s undergarment is stirring up a busty bidding war

Democrats were also less than half as likely as their Republican counterparts to express enthusiasm in attending an event related to America's 250th anniversary this July 4.

An Arizona Democrat running to unseat Rep. Juan Ciscomani in what is likely to be one of the most competitive races in the country, once said she supports decriminalizing prostitution in an effort to help transgender people. 

Prosecutors said Michael McHenry brutally killed his girlfriend -- but didn't get away with it thanks to an alert off-duty Suffolk County cop.

The trend has a clear origin point.

A shock internal poll for scandal-scarred Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner seemingly indicates that he may be losing ground in his quest to beat incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

There may be a homeless epidemic, but New York City’s lefty mayor is leaving Midtown East without any drop-in centers. 

A new Rams policy will help fans who recently bought Jared Verse jerseys get out of a pickle.

The senior was getting off a bus at East 16th Street and Union Square East around 12:25 p.m. Monday when a much-younger woman – later identified as Paris Valentine, 29 – “aggressively” knocked her to the pavement, according to a criminal complaint. 

California's 'Wealth' Tax Is Coming For Everyone

Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,

If you own property in California, you're not safe. A new ballot measure will empower the state to confiscate a percentage of the assets of any resident, even though its initial provisions don't communicate that intent. California's "One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative," which has already qualified for the November ballot, is even worse than it appears.

It's not as if appearances aren't bad enough. The explicit intent of the initiative already chased at least six billionaires out of the state in 2025. Moved to Florida are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Nevada is now home to billionaire Don Hankey, and Texas has welcomed former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Famed director Steven Spielberg has moved to New York, apparently concluding even that deep blue state is a safer bet than California. Just the departure of these six men has lowered the potential take from the wealth tax by an estimated $27 billion.

A Hoover Institution study claims that another 20 California billionaires have already made departure plans and will leave immediately if the initiative is approved by voters. One of the initiative's many diabolical provisions is that it will apply retroactively to anyone living in the state after January 1, 2026, but unlike the six who got out in 2025, this next tranche of would-be exiles have been advised by their attorneys that the initiative's retroactivity will not survive a constitutional challenge.

Other details of this initiative are likely to survive court challenges, and they reveal a stunning level of aggression toward wealth. If you live in California, and this bill is approved by voters, you will have to pay a "one-time" tax of 5 percent of your "covered assets" valued over $1 billion. "Covered assets" include unrealized gains in the value of stock owned by employees of private companies. It is unlikely the framers of this initiative didn't understand the implications of this provision. Valuations of private companies are subjective, volatile, and illiquid. An employee with stock options valued at a few billion in the last private equity round could be assessed tens of millions of dollars in wealth tax on money they don't actually have access to, based on a value that could plummet at any moment.

It gets worse. The language of the wealth act provides for what amounts to unrestricted escalation of its reach, something that will surely become necessary when high earners are driven away, taking their taxable assets with them. Built into the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is the right of the state legislature to amend its provisions with a two-thirds vote. That would include lowering the $1 billion threshold, replacing "one-time" with an annual assessment, and eliminating the exemptions currently present for real estate and retirement accounts. The wording of this initiative is purposely designed to give the state legislature the authority to override the property tax protections afforded by Proposition 13, passed by voters in 1978 and one of the only obstacles left that prevents the state from stripping the state's middle class of assets they've earned and stewarded over generations.

It is ridiculous to think California's state legislature cannot muster a two-thirds vote, anytime they wish, in order to extend the reach of the "Billionaire Tax Act" down to "millionaires," which, in California, is almost anyone who has owned their own home for more than a decade. In both houses of California's state legislature, 75 percent of the seats are held by Democrats. The overwhelming percentage of Democrats in California, and, for that matter, a sizable portion of the state's dwindling contingent of Republicans, are controlled by the state's powerful public sector unions. And more than anything else, these unions have one guiding principle: grow government, because bigger government means more membership, and more membership means more dues revenue. That's the reason that the top 10, if not the top 50, largest contributors to winning campaigns for seats in the state legislature are all public sector unions.

To grow support for more government, you must grow dependency on government, and to that end, California's state legislature has engineered a perfect storm. Every decade, more regulations buried small emerging competitive businesses, allowing the biggest and most politically compliant businesses to gain captive markets. And in complying with the state's overregulation, lacking competition, these politically favored businesses passed the increased costs of regulatory compliance on to their customers. Voila, California's energy, water, transportation, higher education, housing, and all government services became increasingly unaffordable. And as households, by the millions, could no longer afford to survive economically, government aid stepped in to fill the gap.

The numbers support this assessment. Between 2010 and 2025, when the state's total population only increased incrementally by about 1.5 million people, the number of participants in California's taxpayer-funded food aid benefits soared from 3.7 million to 5.5 million, and the state's Medi-Cal enrollment exploded from 7 million to 15 million, over one-third of the population.

Everything California's state government has done over the past 15 years has exploded commensurately. The state General Fund in 2010 was $87 billion. In 2025 it was $228 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, spending more than doubled when the total population barely budged. And what of this population?

Over the period from 2010 to 2025, nearly 10 million people moved from California to other states. The people moving into California and the people choosing to remain in California are increasingly characterized as either high-income residents who can withstand the high cost of living or low-income residents who depend on government assistance. California's Gini Coefficient, at 0.49, puts it in a virtual tie with New York and Connecticut as the states with the worst income inequality in the nation. To claim this is the fault of billionaires is a convenient lie, promulgated by the very politicians whose own policies were the true cause.

It ought to be clear to anyone who has spent any time in sunny California, a place blessed with literally every scenic amenity imaginable from alpine peaks to sandy beaches, the best wine on earth and spectacular coastal cities, that the only thing that could possibly induce them to not want to live here permanently would be an overtly hostile government. And that's exactly what has happened. Every major challenge California faces is the product of a government that has decided to serve itself instead of the people.

The model of "democracy" that California has perfected can be summed up in one sentence: overregulate an economy to make life unaffordable without government handouts, then win elections by promising more government handouts to people who can't live without them. It is unsustainable, because as the old cliche goes, pretty soon you run out of other people's money. The exodus of California's wealthiest residents is the latest iteration of this doom loop.

Far removed from idealistic fantasies sold to voters, this is the reality of progressive politics in California. Given half a chance, it will be exported to the rest of the nation.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/03/2026 - 17:00

Jeremy Clarkson comes into Season 5 of Clarkson’s Farm with health scares, the usual bold talk, and a host of new challenges down on his farm.

Angel Studios enjoyed a nice theatrical hit with this metaphorical rock slung at the noggins of bigger animation houses.

The restaurant surprised her with a cake that was decorated with several photos of her milestones.

The restaurant surprised her with a cake that was decorated with several photos of her milestones.

The recall affects 165,000 dresser units.

Gold Dethrones The King: ECB Confirms Barbarous Relic Has Overtaken Treasuries As Top Global Reserve Asset

In what can only be described as the latest humiliating blow to the crumbling Pax Americana, gold has officially overtaken US government bonds as the world's top reserve asset.

The FT reports that, according to a fresh report from the European Central Bank released Tuesday, bullion now accounts for 27% of global central bank reserves at the end of 2025 - up sharply from 20% the prior year.

US Treasuries, once the untouchable king of the reserve world, have been knocked down to 22% from 25%. The euro's share remained flat at 15%.

This isn't some organic portfolio rebalancing. It's a full-scale de-dollarization revolt years in the making, turbocharged by Washington's own weaponization of the dollar.

“Geopolitical tensions continue to drive strong central bank demand for gold,” wrote ECB President Christine Lagarde in the report - in the driest possible bureaucrat speak while watching the system she helped build slowly circle the drain.

Central banks are now sitting on more than 36,000 tonnes of gold — nearly matching the peak hoarding levels seen during the final days of the Bretton Woods system (38,000 tonnes). You know, back when money was still somewhat tethered to reality.

The message from the periphery is crystal clear: trust in the US dollar as the ultimate reserve currency is eroding fast.

The catalyst? The same one we have been screaming about for years - the reckless weaponization of SWIFT and dollar reserves.

After Washington froze Russia's FX reserves following the 2022 Ukraine invasion, every finance minister from Brasília to Beijing got the memo: Never let them do this to us.

The numbers tell the story of quiet desperation.

China, Poland, Turkey, and India have been the most aggressive gold stackers since 2022.

Even Tether, the stablecoin giant, became the single largest buyer in 2025, slurping up over 100 tonnes.

Because nothing says "we believe in the system" like parking your balance sheet in physical gold while issuing dollar-pegged liabilities.

Of course, there are cracks in the narrative.

Turkey - after aggressively buying 220 tonnes post-2022 - executed one of the largest reserve drawdowns in recent memory in early 2026, selling or lending out 130 tonnes amid the fallout from the Iran war.

Even gold bugs sometimes need liquidity when things get spicy.

Still, the broader trend is unmistakable.

While dollar-denominated assets still make up 42% of reserves overall, the trajectory is brutally obvious to anyone not drinking the mainstream financial media Kool-Aid.

Gold's surge wasn't just about central bank buying (which slowed modestly to 850 tonnes in 2025 after multiple 1,000+ tonne years). It was supercharged by the metal's explosive rally, smashing through $5,500 per ounce earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the ECB couldn't resist patting itself on the back, noting the euro's "gradual but steady" gains in international usage, with euro-denominated debt issuance hitting record highs and massive capital inflows into euro assets.

Translation: At least someone still wants our funny money... for now.

The bond market's loss is gold's gain - and history suggests this kind of shift rarely ends with a whimper. When central banks themselves start treating Treasuries like a fading brand and gold like the ultimate insurance policy, the writing is on the wall for the dollar's exorbitant privilege.

The only question left is how much longer the music can keep playing.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/03/2026 - 16:40