Aggregator

Richie's latest health scare comes just weeks after he spent three days in the hospital following a concert in St. Louis, Missouri, on Aug. 29.

Richie's latest health scare comes just weeks after he spent three days in the hospital following a concert in St. Louis, Missouri, on Aug. 29.

Sweater season is for coffee, too.

Lili Reinhart is promoting her new rom-com by paying homage to the ones that came before. Based on the best-selling Ali Hazelwood novel, “The Love Hypothesis,” which hits Prime Video on September 23rd, stars the “Riverdale” alum as a PhD candidate who embarks on a fake relationship with a professor, played by Tom Bateman. While...

Lili Reinhart is promoting her new rom-com by paying homage to the ones that came before. Based on the best-selling Ali Hazelwood novel, “The Love Hypothesis,” which hits Prime Video on September 23rd, stars the “Riverdale” alum as a PhD candidate who embarks on a fake relationship with a professor, played by Tom Bateman. While...

Rams looked good on Monday, but not nearly good enough to win a Super Bowl

Passengers at San Diego International Airport faced long lines and crowded terminals Tuesday morning as a technical issue slowed the ticketing process.

Ed Dowd: The Fed Hiked Interest Rates Into A Supply Shock

Authored by Ed Dowd: Beyond the Narrative via Substack,

September FOMC Meeting: First Rate Hike Since July 2023

The FOMC did what the front end of the Treasury market (3-month T-bill) had been telegraphing for two weeks prior. On September 16 they voted unanimously to raise the fed funds rate 25 basis points to 3.75-4.00 percent. Kevin Warsh's press conference was short, blunt, and deliberately light on forward guidance. He said economic activity is expanding at a solid pace, job gains are keeping up with the workforce, unemployment is little changed around 4.1 percent, and inflation remains elevated. He argued the hike "will support a timelier return" to the 2 percent goal and "This Committee will deliver price stability." He did not submit his own dot. The rest of the Committee's median projection for fed funds now sits at 4.1 percent at year end and stays there through 2027. They mentioned inflation risks are to the upside and that labor risks are roughly balanced. Geopolitical shocks and commodity prices got a mention, but they hiked anyway.

Why Did They Hike?

The day before the meeting I posted on X that starting September 2 the 3-month T-bill yield had moved above our simple Fed-funds-rate/T-bill model. Historically the Fed follows the market more than the market follows the Fed. The signal pointed to a minimum 25 basis-point move, with 50 not being out of the question. Politics could have intervened, after all this is right before the midterms, but the Committee chose to follow the tape. They chose 25 but the T-bill market yield of 4.09 said 50 would have been the cleaner signal. The market two weeks before the decision, in my opinion, was starting to discount the energy and commodity shock as something more durable than a temporary disruption. The war is not wrapping up on a convenient political calendar. The Iranians have little incentive to resolve it before November. A war sold as a two-week excursion will be 8 months old by the beginning of November. When a supply shock starts looking structural, the front end prices a higher terminal rate even if the underlying demand picture is deteriorating. That is exactly what happened. Essentially the market priced in a very high probability that there is almost no chance of a deal until after November with energy prices remaining higher and going up.

Was Hiking The Right Move?

Hiking into a supply shock is rarely the right medicine. Rate policy cannot produce more oil or more shipping capacity. It can only crush demand. The Committee knows this...Warsh even said they cannot control individual relative prices. They hiked anyway because they decided they were not yet confident that underlying inflation was moving toward 2 percent "clearly and at sufficient speed." Fair enough as a credibility statement. The problem is the data they are using to measure the other side of the mandate.

Payroll numbers have been inaccurate for years. We have been documenting this. BLS initial prints systematically overstated job growth; the QCEW and subsequent revisions have been carving hundreds of thousands of phantom jobs out of the record. The composition of the remaining "gains" is even more telling. Healthcare has been doing the heavy lifting while manufacturing, information, finance, professional services, and retail have been losing ground. That is not a robust, broad-based labor market. That is an economy being papered over by one sector and by earlier distortions that are now fading.

Housing is already rolling over. Starts and permits plunged again in August. Homebuilder confidence is near COVID lows. Months of supply are sitting near the 2006 peak. Real house prices are declining, led by multi-family. The border tightening removed a floor that illegal inflows had put under rents and home prices. Housing is a huge chunk of CPI and of household balance sheets. It does not look like a strong demand story. Layer on the AI complex: AI and AI-adjacent names are now 40-45 percent of S&P market cap, with massive public and private debt issuance behind the buildout. Institutional investors cannot diversify away from it. Private credit is growing its defaults in the dark and seeing outflows. Enterprise buyers are starting to ask about ROI. The MSM is starting to notice all the risks. Finally China is another risk sitting in plain sight with construction output collapsing, decades of housing supply, fixed-asset investment falling, and no clean export valve left. That does not stay contained.

The Table Is Set

So we now have a Committee that just removed a dose of accommodation into a supply-driven inflation impulse while the demand side of the economy is already softer than the headline payrolls suggest. Housing is weak. The AI trade is crowded and levered. China is an acute problem. That combination has a name: policy error. Not because they raised 25 instead of 50 but because they are treating a supply shock as if it were a classic overheating demand problem and they are doing it with lagging, revised, and compositionally misleading labor data. The market has provided false signals in a rate cutting cycle before and in my opinion the Fed should have looked through the supply shock and past the blatant unwillingness of the Iranians to come to the table before the midterms. They will likely hike again another 25 bp but holding rates steady and waiting would have been more prudent.

The cycle has not changed. Easy-money periods juice activity...sometimes with genuine investment and sometimes with fraud. Tightening and then the eventual easing cycle is when the previous juice gets exposed. We have seen the movie. The current episode has its own flavor: government deficit spending, labor-force distortions, an unprecedented illegal alien sugar high, speculative AI capex boom, an opaque private credit shadow banking complex and now a geopolitical supply shock layered on top. The Fed is late, as usual. Once they reverse course and start cutting again it will be into an accelerating slowdown. It will be too late as anything they do from here will take 12-18 months to hit the real economy. The next year is going to be tumultuous.

Ultimately rates are coming down, not because Warsh suddenly turns dovish, but rather because the real economy is already weaker than the official series admit and the lagged effects of tighter policy will show up in employment, housing, and credit. When that happens the Committee will discover, yet again, that they were fighting the last war with the wrong map.

* * *

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 12:20

All 10 ActBlue Witnesses Take The Fifth As GOP Says Probe Is "Far From Over"

All ten ActBlue employees and board members deposed by House investigators have invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the Democratic Party's dominant fundraising platform. Five of the ten are board members, all deposed in the past five weeks, and the three committees running the probe say they are not done. Their third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones prepares to testify before the House Administration Committee in June. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)

The investigation's third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

It builds on the first report, released in April 2025, which found that ActBlue skipped standard verification steps such as CVV checks, identified at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, and documented 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election.

Investigators found that skipping those checks opened the door to smurfing, the practice of dressing up one illegal mega-donation as a parade of small contributions filed under real people's names. ActBlue's much-touted "passport verification" process appears to have checked nothing against any government database. Fraud analysts inside the company faced pressure to wave through foreign-flagged donations, in one case clearing a donor on the strength of a LinkedIn profile.

House Oversight, House Administration, and House Judiciary are still working the case now, and none of them show signs of backing off. "Whether it's allowing fraudsters to steal taxpayer dollars or accepting illegal foreign donations through ActBlue, Democrats have proven themselves to be the party of fraud," Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer told Fox News Digital. "Our investigation into ActBlue is far from over. We expect more documents and testimony in the weeks ahead."

Republicans have complained about ActBlue's verification standards for years, and the company insists it has tightened those safeguards since the investigation began. That claim falls apart against the committees' own findings. The report says ActBlue took "a more lenient approach" to fraud prevention in 2024, after Steil first questioned its practices in October 2023, and the internal records released last week show employees approving donations despite unresolved red flags about the money's origins.

ActBlue still denies wrongdoing and has given no indication it plans to return any flagged contribution.

"ActBlue's own admissions raise serious questions about its fraud prevention practices, including a so-called passport verification process that did not actually verify or check entries against any government database," Committee on House Administration Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil told Fox News Digital on Friday. "All options are on the table to ensure we get to the bottom of what is going on at ActBlue."

A spokesperson for Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan confirmed to Fox News Digital that the panel "will continue aggressive oversight of ActBlue, including additional depositions."

Co-founder Matt DeBergalis was among the ten who took the Fifth, and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones did the same during a public hearing. In a letter to Steil cited by the report, she claimed donors with non-U.S. addresses must submit a passport number to get verified. The GOP report picked that claim apart, noting the system only confirms the number contains the right count of characters, not that it belongs to an actual passport.

In one internal ActBlue memo, a donation with a Hong Kong IP address was described as a "great accept," reasoning that none of the donor's other signals raised eyebrows. Another argued a previously denied contribution should have gone through because the name, email, and billing address all lined up, even though it was a foreign contribution. A supervisor waved through a donation that had set off a lot of alarms because the donor deserved the benefit of the doubt. In one case involving a Missouri billing address with every sign pointing to Canada, an analyst approved the donation because "Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person."

Now the National Republican Congressional Committee wants House Democrats to cut ties with ActBlue. "House Democrats cannot claim ignorance while continuing to rely on a fundraising platform facing serious allegations," NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella said. "The National Republican Congressional Committee officially calls on every House Democrat to cut ties with ActBlue and return any illegal contributions funneled to their campaigns through the platform." Asked whether it would return any donations, ActBlue pointed back to its own statement instead of answering the question.

"There's nothing to see here," ActBlue said, arguing a third-party forensic analysis had undercut a central GOP claim and accusing Republicans of "orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign." That review of ActBlue's 2023 data found 99.99% of contribution dollars came from donors who gave a U.S. address or a passport number, according to the company's release, though it did not test whether either was genuine. The company framed the entire affair as an effort "to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda."

* * *

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 12:00

A Carnival cruise passenger who went overboard has been identified as a 56-year-old father of three who was on his anniversary trip when he vanished in the ocean. Thomas Gigler, who was reportedly marking the milestone with wife Michelle, 48, was sailing aboard the Carnival Panorama when he is understood to have jumped on Saturday....

Los Angeles Rams linebacker Byron Young sent a heartfelt message to New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart after injuring him on Monday.

These men have made millions by simply sharing their sometimes controversial takes on some of sports' biggest moments.

These men have made millions by simply sharing their sometimes controversial takes on some of sports' biggest moments.

Iran's Fars Calls Reuters' Hormuz Reopening Story "Invalid" Ahead Of Trump's UN Address

Update:

• Iran's Fars Rejects Hormuz Reopening Reports As Brent Slides <$100 On Diplomatic Hopes
• Brent Tumbles On US Media & Aligned Outlets Pushing Rumored Diplomatic Efforts 

Iran's Fars Rejects Reporting 

Kyodo and Reuters published positive diplomatic headlines early Tuesday morning that sent Brent crude futures tumbling below $100 a barrel, but Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency denied them.

Kyodo and Reuters, citing Iranian sources, reported that Tehran could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if Washington eased US naval pressure on the Hormuz chokepoint and lifted its blockade of Iranian ports.

Fars called those two reports "invalid and incorrect."

Despite Fars' rejection of the reporting, US media and aligned outlets focused this morning on rumored diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict ahead of President Trump's United Nations General Assembly address later today.

Brent crude remains below $100.

Brent Tumbles Below $100 After Report Says Iran Offers To Reopen Hormuz Chokepoint

Brent crude futures tumbled early Tuesday, as much as 3%, and slid below the $ 100-a-barrel level to the low $98 range after reports that Iran offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within one week if the Trump administration begins easing naval pressure in the critical waterway and ends its blockade of Iranian ports. 

Tehran conveyed the proposal through intermediaries as part of efforts to revive negotiations and end the conflict, Kyodo News reported, citing a senior Iranian government official. 

The offer calls for the US naval blockade of the critical waterway and Iranian ports to end in exchange for reopening the strait. This comes as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's economic war against Tehran has ramped up (read latest). 

Here's more from the Japanese outlet:

The proposal, which has already been conveyed to Washington through mediators, calls for renewed talks aimed at reaching a permanent end to hostilities between the two countries, the official said.

Tehran plans to use the U.N. General Assembly gathering this week in New York to consult with countries acting as intermediaries.

The official ruled out a meeting between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and U.S. President Donald Trump on the fringes of the gathering, but said progress toward an agreement remains possible.

"There is a possibility of moving toward an agreement," the official said, while adding that Washington must demonstrate "seriousness and commitment" if diplomacy is to advance.

Iran is seeking signs from Washington that it is prepared to return to negotiations and take steps toward an end to the U.S. military blockade of Iranian ports and a halt to military operations related to the Strait of Hormuz, the official said.

If such steps are taken, Iran is prepared to reopen the strategic waterway within seven days and return to the negotiating table, according to the official.

Hamad Hussain, senior climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, was quoted by Reuters as saying this overnight development is a positive sign that diplomatic efforts may be working.

"There may also be other obstacles, such as the issue of tolls and fees, to overcome before a lasting solution can be achieved," Hussain added.

Later this morning, President Trump will address the United Nations General Assembly and meet with world leaders, likely discussing the Gulf conflict and Russia's war in Ukraine.

Despite another exchange of threats between Washington and Tehran on Sunday, Trump said he was open to meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian this week at UNGA. An Iranian official subsequently told Reuters that no direct meeting would take place. 

Diplomatic movement appears to be happening under the surface to resolve the US-Iran conflict and the global diesel crisis. However, Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, does not expect much downside in Brent prices until transits through the maritime chokepoint increase, particularly shipments of refined products, where the real energy crisis lurks ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

* * *

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 11:55

She's ushering in a new era of her life with a new look.

She's ushering in a new era of her life with a new look.

A flash flood threat due to heavy rain covers the region through Wednesday.

Interpol, Sex Pistols and Bikini Kill are just a few of the other rebellious acts on the bill.

The study, published Sept. 15 in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed roughly 190,000 miles of Roman roads spanning Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

See what stars are wearing in the front row.