Aggregator

Trump wrote: "You have paid into this flawed System, and now you are finally getting something back."

The New York City mayor will forge ahead with his controversial tax rollout – despite a judge ordering the city to go back to the drawing board and essentially start from scratch.

A fired-up Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unveiled plans to construct the first new military base on US soil in over four decades and have state governors come before him on camera with "their best sales pitch."

Kid-free households bought more than half of all toys sold in the first half of 2026. Are they immature? Or are toys just getting cooler?

The prediction market took off after the “Euphoria” actress posed fully nude for the company's ads.

Odell Beckham Jr.’s release was not a grand conspiracy.

“Getting drunk should not be an invitation to getting raped but in the current law, it pretty much is,” state Assemblyman Jeffery Dinowitz told The Post.

Newsom Signs Laws Banning Shock Gloves And Taxing Immigration Detention Centers

Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed 21 bills on Sept. 29 aimed at limiting federal immigration enforcement in the state, including a ban on officers using shock gloves and a new 25 percent tax on private detention centers.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks in Los Angeles on Sep. 25, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

"California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state," Newsom said in a statement.

"This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities," the Democratic governor said. "We will continue protecting our people, upholding the rule of law, and making clear that if the federal government operates in California, we will hold them accountable."

The shock glove ban applies to all officers in California, including federal immigration agents. It takes effect next year, expires Jan. 1, 2030, and requires the state Department of Justice to complete a safety study on the devices by Jan. 1, 2029.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract last month for 6,000 pairs of the gloves, which deliver an electric shock at the push of a button. ICE said at the time that the devices would help officers control resisting detainees and protesters.

"Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers," the agency said in a statement at the time, responding to a group of Democratic lawmakers who urged the agency to abandon the plan.

California law enforcement groups broadly opposed the shock glove ban, including Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper, a Democrat and former state lawmaker.

"When the federal government does something, the state Legislature wants to ban it," Cooper said at a news conference last month.

"For me, use of force is so important. We talk about it all the time. De-escalating [to] a lower level of force. What they're doing by trying to ban this glove, and it conducts electricity - a much lower voltage than a taser - they're making our job harder."

Newsom also signed a revised ban on officers wearing masks. A federal judge blocked the state's first mask ban in February, ruling that it unfairly targeted local and federal officers because it exempted state officers. The new law applies to all officers.

Other bills Newsom signed on Tuesday restrict the use of state-owned property for immigration enforcement staging, processing, or detention, and one allows people to sue federal officials accused of violating their constitutional rights.

Another law protects people traveling to and from courthouses from civil arrest, and another bars ICE officers who have committed serious misconduct from becoming police officers or public employees in California.

A fifth law requires rental vehicles that law enforcers use for arrests or transport to display a decal identifying the agency, with limited exceptions.

Detention center taxes will go to state immigration-related services. A separate bill ends a property tax exemption claimed by some detention facilities.

Newsom's office acknowledged in its announcement that California "cannot dictate federal immigration policy." It said the state can set requirements for state property, state resources, detention facilities, public records, and law enforcement practices where federal enforcement operates in California.

Courts have mostly sided with the Justice Department in challenges to state limits on federal agents. In April, an appeals court blocked California's separate law requiring officers to wear identification, ruling that it violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. Federal judges have since blocked mask bans in Virginia on June 30, Philadelphia on July 2, and New York on Aug. 3.

States have fared better on other measures. On Sept. 4, a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit challenging an executive order by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, that bars federal immigration officers from using state property for enforcement. California's package includes a similar ban on state-owned property.

"To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional mask bans," a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an emailed response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times on Tuesday.

"The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California's sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement. No tax will stop ICE from deporting criminal illegal aliens to make California safe again. We need California to cooperate with our officers and stop releasing criminals from their jails into California's neighborhoods. Seven of the 10 safest cities in America cooperate with ICE."

The spokesperson said that enforcing immigration law is a federal responsibility under the Constitution. Concerning the shock gloves, the spokesperson said that ICE reviews its equipment to make sure it is "consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards," and that officers are "highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training."

Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, responded to Newsom's move in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times.

"Gavin Newsom has no authority over federal law enforcement," she said. "The Trump administration will not abide by his unconstitutional legislation. Our law enforcement officers will continue arresting and removing criminal illegal aliens from American communities while radical Democrats in California refuse to cooperate and instead choose to release criminal illegal aliens from their jails into communities to terrorize innocent Americans."

A Department of Justice spokesperson said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times, "The Department of Justice will continue to challenge illegal sanctuary policies designed to thwart federal immigration enforcement or impede lawful federal operations."

California is one of 17 states with Democratic-controlled legislatures that have passed more than 100 bills this year aimed at limiting immigration law enforcement, according to an Associated Press analysis.

The most common goal of those bills has been to bar local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration agents.

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 17:00

As the tennis calendar is in its final few months, Emma Navarro is speaking out about her health and revealing to all what the last three years have looked like for her.

78% of Americans blame rising costs for debt woes: Here's how borrowers can manage the squeeze.

The news comes two days after seven players asked university president Michael Crow to remove Powers and his staff as further investigation unfurls on the events leading up to Mayich’s hospitalization.

The actress is set to release a memoir about her life as a child actress next month.

The actress is set to release a memoir about her life as a child actress next month.

Hegseth Orders Cyber Command, Intel Agencies To Counter Foreign Threats To Midterms

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has directed U.S. Cyber Command and the Pentagon's combat support agencies to focus intelligence and cyber tools on foreign efforts to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections.

The Department of War (DoW) memo circulated Monday and dated Sept. 22 was addressed to the Cyber Command chief and the directors of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

"In America, the people rule - and we must ensure that their voice remains sovereign, secure, and entirely undiluted," the memo reads.

Hegseth wrote that secure voting plays a critical role "in sustaining the strength of our democratic system," and that the department "will effectively wield its capabilities to protect and uphold the reliability of America's voting mechanisms against external manipulation and disruption from foreign actors."

Cyber Command and the combat support agency directors "will prioritize the use of DoW intelligence and cyber capabilities to ensure foreign actors do not meddle in our democratic systems," the memo says.

Hegseth also ordered the Defense Intelligence Enterprise to "execute collection and production on foreign threats to our elections, in accordance with the law, regulation, Executive direction, and DoW policies and directives."

He told Cyber Command to use its authority "in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security to counter potential cyber threats from foreign actors targeting our elections."

As Kimberly Hayek further reports for The Epoch Times, Monday's DoW release directed Cyber Command and the combat support agencies to "prioritize and deploy advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities to identify, disrupt, and neutralize foreign interference in U.S. democratic processes."

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the agencies would work with state and local election officials.

"Free and fair elections are the foundation of our republic," Parnell said. "By working in lockstep with federal, state, and local partners, U.S. Cyber Command and our defense intelligence teams will defend the integrity of America's voting systems, expose foreign malign influence, and ensure our democratic processes remain secure from external manipulation while protecting the fundamental freedoms of the American people."

Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, who serves as Cyber Command chief and NSA director, described the assignment as work the two organizations already conduct.

"U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency are closely partnered to identify and defend against cyber threats to our nation. The Command and the Agency regularly counter actions by malicious foreign cyber actors including those with the intent to interfere with our democratic process," Rudd said.

Hegseth called protection of the vote a "no-fail mission" and part of a "whole of government effort."

The memo also orders the entire Defense Intelligence Enterprise to "mobilize every authorized asset, capability, and partnership under your command to defend our election infrastructure from foreign malign influence and ensure that every lawful voter can cast their ballot free from foreign intimidation, coercion, or fear."

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 16:40

Micron Flat After Strong Revenue Guidance Offsets Slight Margin Miss

The highly anticipated Micron earnings (since memory is the one place in the sector in the market where all those massive new bond sales are funding) are finally out and they painted a solid, if slightly mixed, picture compared to buyside bogeys.

As we said in our preview, what would matter today is not what the company did in Q4, but how it guided to Fiscal Q1 (ending next calendar quarter), and sure enough Q3 was solid across the board:

• Adjusted EPS $33.42, beating estimates of $31.83
   
• Adjusted revenue $54.23 billion vs. $11.32 billion y/y, and beating estimates of $51.49 billion
  • Core Data Center revenue $18.00 billion, beating estimates of $11.34 billion
  • Cloud Memory revenue $16.28 billion, beating estimate $15.14 billion
  • Mobile and Client Revenue $13.11 billion vs. $3.76 billion y/y, beating estimates of $12.95 billion
  • Automotive and Embedded rev. $6.82 billion, beating estimates of $4.73 billion
     
• Adjusted gross margin 87% vs. 45.7% y/y, beating estimates of 86.2%
   
• Adjusted operating income $44.64 billion vs. $3.96 billion y/y, beating estimates of $42.75 billion
• Adjusted operating income margin 82.3% vs. 35% y/y, missing estimates of 82.8%
• Adjusted operating expenses $2.57 billion vs. $1.21 billion y/y, beating estimates of $1.68 billion
  • R&D expenses $1.91 billion, +83% y/y, estimate $1.38 billion
  • Adjusted operating expenses $2.57 billion vs. $1.21 billion y/y, estimate $1.68 billion
     
• Cash flow from operations $43.97 billion vs. $5.73 billion y/y, estimate $33.87 billion

From the slideshow:

“Micron delivered record fiscal 2026 results, and we expect an even stronger fiscal 2027,” CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in the statement. “Memory enhances this intelligence and the competitiveness of our customers’ platforms.”

So far so good. However, what matters more is guidance and here is why the stock's after hours reaction has been muted at best:

• Q1 adj. EPS 38.15, beating exp. 35.40.
• Q1 revenue 61.5bln (+/- $1.5BN), beating exp. 57.024bln. 
• Q1 gross margin 86.3%, missing exp. 86.7%, and notably below buyside bogeys of 87.5%-88.0%

And this is how the company guided:

• We anticipate fiscal Q1 to be the floor for gross margins in fiscal 2027. As Sanjay mentioned, we made a decision to increase fiscal 2026 incentive compensation in fiscal Q4. Most of the increase in fiscal 2026 incentive compensation pertaining to manufacturing was absorbed into inventories in fiscal Q4. As a result, the effects from the sale of these higher cost inventories principally impact fiscal Q1 gross margin. September 30, 2026 September 30, 2026
• Fiscal Q2 benefits from less of this fiscal Q4 related compensation expense, but this benefit is offset by the impact of higher fiscal 2027 incentive compensation. We expect higher gross margins beyond fiscal Q1 for the remainder of fiscal 2027, with a more moderate rate of price increases.
• We project operating expenses to increase by approximately $2.5 billion in fiscal 2027, primarily from higher R&D (research and development) to support an unprecedented set of opportunities in memory and storage and from higher incentive compensation plans.
• We expect a fiscal Q1 and fiscal year 2027 tax rate of around 15.5%

Micron and its rivals continue to be overwhelmed by memory-chip orders. Though the Boise, Idaho-based company is expanding its manufacturing capacity, prices are expected to remain high for the foreseeable future. Here are the highlights from the company's market outlook: 

• Micron (MU) says operating expenses are to increase by about USD 2.5bln in fiscal 2027 and expects memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much higher in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than in 2026
• In Q1, project capex of around USD 11.5bln and anticipate first-half FY27 capex to be USD 25bln.
• Project CapEx to be higher in H2 FY27.
• Given the need for DRAM cleanroom space and supported by greater visibility from SCAs into our demand through the end of the decade and beyond, we plan to increase our capex (capital expenditures) in fiscal 2027 versus prior plans.
• Expect server unit growth in the high-teens % range in both CY26 and CY27.
• Strong server unit growth is supported by a modestly lower rate of content growth than prior expectations, amid tight memory supply.

“Near-term conditions are still very good, in our view, with strong demand and rising pricing in evidence,” Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a note before the report was released. “The debate has very clearly shifted from, ‘How good can it get?’ to ‘How long can it stay this good?’”

For now the jury is out, as unlike last quarter when the stock blasted off after earnings, this time it is flat, having faded a modest after hours rise. 

Micron shares were the best performer in the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index this year, gaining 273%. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 16:28

“Saturday Night Live” scene-stealer Ashley Padilla is one of the TIME100 Next cover stars alongside Raye and Druski. The magazine applauded Padilla’s performance on “SNL,” saying she “reached the 100-sketches milestone faster than anyone in the show’s history.” This comes a week after Padilla appeared on “Good Hang with Amy Poehler” and revealed she was...

“Saturday Night Live” scene-stealer Ashley Padilla is one of the TIME100 Next cover stars alongside Raye and Druski. The magazine applauded Padilla’s performance on “SNL,” saying she “reached the 100-sketches milestone faster than anyone in the show’s history.” This comes a week after Padilla appeared on “Good Hang with Amy Poehler” and revealed she was...

Who Keeps The Money When AI Rewrites Bank Code?

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

The code most American banks run on was designed in 1959, the year Alaska and Hawaii became states. A committee of government and industry people wrote COBOL so that business programs could be read by people who were not mathematicians, and a good part of it was modeled on FLOW-MATIC, an earlier language from Grace Hopper, a Navy officer. I doubt anyone on that committee thought it would still be running banks in 2026. In 2017 Reuters estimated that about $3 trillion of daily commerce still ran through COBOL. In April 2020, when unemployment claims in New Jersey overwhelmed the state's forty-year-old system, Governor Phil Murphy went on television and asked for volunteers who knew COBOL. The state had to go on TV to find programmers for its own unemployment system.

I bring this up because of a clip I posted last night of Bill Ackman talking with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project. Ackman said Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, can rewrite a bank's COBOL "in a matter of days as opposed to many months." Someone replied asking me what I meant when I said commoditized lenders would compete the savings away. It is a fair question and I could not answer it in a tweet.

I do believe Ackman that the savings are real. Inside a large bank the core ledger still runs in batch. The balance a customer sees on the app at noon is an estimate (bankers call it memo-posted). The actual accounting happens overnight, when a mainframe works through a queue of jobs in a set order, posting transactions, accruing interest, charging fees, and producing files that every other system reads the following morning. The programs share data through copybooks, which are record layouts where a field is known only by its position. Cognition described one client where a single taxpayer ID showed up under dozens of different names across thousands of programs. Most big banks were put together through acquisitions, and each acquired bank came with its own core system that management was usually too nervous to shut off, so the old systems just piled up.

.@BillAckman tells @shaneparrish that AI will sharply cut what big banks spend on tech. Rewriting legacy COBOL (decades-old bank code) with @cognition now takes days instead of months. Ackman is right that the cost savings are real. The open question is who keeps them. Banks with …

— Patrick F. Feeley (@PFFeeley) September 30, 2026

Replacing all of that has gone badly more often than well. Commonwealth Bank of Australia spent five years and more than A$1 billion replacing its core, and people in the industry consider that one a success. TSB in the UK moved customers onto a new platform in April 2018 and the platform did not work. Customers were locked out, some could see other people's accounts, and service was not back to normal until December. TSB ended up paying £32.7 million in redress and £48.65 million in fines. Cognition's own figure is that roughly two-thirds of COBOL modernization projects fail. With odds like that most banks built layers around the old core and left it alone. JPMorgan expects to spend about $19.8 billion on technology in 2026, and its CFO told investors in February that the priority had moved to "modernizing the underlying application code and data." I would guess a large share of that budget still goes to keeping the layers standing.

Cognition is fairly careful about what its agents can do today. Devin is good at documentation, refactoring, and batch jobs, which are the parts of a migration where you can give the agent yesterday's inputs and outputs and let it keep trying until the new code matches the old results. Cognition estimates batch is 30 to 50 percent of a typical migration. The real-time systems (card authorizations, for example) are still out of reach. Banks also have a security reason to hurry. Anthropic's Mythos model, which can find and exploit software vulnerabilities, had bank regulators in the U.S. and Europe holding urgent calls this spring, and Reuters quoted security experts who named legacy bank systems as especially exposed.

Ackman's harder point came a little later in the conversation. "The problem with money generally is it's a commodity," he said. For loans I agree with him. A company that wants a five-year term loan will collect six or seven term sheets and take the cheapest one, and a bank whose costs just went down will give up some spread to win it. Deposits have never really worked like a commodity, and I think that is where his argument is missing a piece.

The best explanation I have read is from three NYU economists, Itamar Drechsler, Alexi Savov and Philipp Schnabl. Their paper argues that banks have real market power over deposits. When the Fed raises rates, banks raise what they pay depositors slowly and only partway. Keeping that power costs money for branches, bankers and technology, but almost all of the cost is fixed. So deposits end up behaving like long-term fixed-rate funding, which is how a bank can hold thirty-year mortgages without being wiped out every time rates go up. It is also why the industry's net interest margin has barely moved over several decades of rate cycles. The FDIC has it at 3.32 percent today.

Bankers measure this with the deposit beta (the share of a rate increase that gets passed along to depositors). Checking accounts have low betas. Online banks have high ones because, as the St. Louis Fed put it, their customers are looking for yield. During the 2022 hiking cycle the New York Fed found that super-regional banks passed through more than small banks did, while the very largest banks passed through less than either. After Silicon Valley Bank lost $42 billion in deposits in one day, money moved toward size, and the biggest banks did not have to pay more to get it.

Meta's Muse goes right at this. It launched September 8, the same day Cognition announced it had raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation with run-rate revenue near $900 million. Muse is a personal agent that reads accounts at more than 12,000 U.S. banks and financial apps through Plaid. On Tuesday, September 22, Schwab fell 6 percent, LPL fell 7 percent, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo each fell more than 3 percent, and XLF, the largest financials ETF, was down 2 percent. On Sunday Torsten Slok at Apollo put out a note titled "Is an Agentic bank run coming?" He pointed out that the average checking account pays about 0.1 percent while Revolut, SoFi, Wealthfront and others pay between 3.3 and 5 percent, and he warned that banks "could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans."

Muse cannot move money yet. The Plaid connection is read-only, and Meta deserves to have that said. I still would not want to be running a bank's treasury desk this month. Most people leave savings at a tenth of a percent because switching is a hassle. Opening a new account takes an afternoon, and nobody wants to be the person who breaks their own direct deposit. If an agent already sees every balance and can fill out the forms, most of that afternoon goes away.

A hypothetical helps here. Bank A has $10 billion of deposits that are really savings, money the customers do not need next month and have not looked at in a while. Rates are at 4 percent, and agents push Bank A's beta on those balances up by ten points. That costs Bank A about 40 basis points on $10 billion, or $40 million a year. Say Cognition saves Bank A $15 million a year on code maintenance, which is my guess and not a published number. Bank A is behind by $25 million, and that is before counting any spread it gives up to keep borrowers. My numbers could easily be off in either direction, but for a bank funded mostly by savings I do not see the code savings covering the deposit cost.

Corporate treasurers dealt with this a long time ago. A company keeps enough in its operating account for payroll and suppliers and sweeps the rest into money market funds or Treasury bills, and banks price corporate deposits knowing somebody is watching. An agent gives an ordinary family something like a corporate treasurer. Next month's bill money will stay in checking. The surplus that has been sitting there since the pandemic probably will not stay at 0.1 percent, and I expect it to reprice slowly at first and much more visibly in the next rate cycle.

Some banks are safer than others. Deposits that run a business's payroll and payables, carry a line of credit, or belong to an owner whose banker actually picks up the phone will not move for half a point, and banks holding those should keep most of what Cognition saves them. Banks that fund themselves with rate-shopping savings and win loans on price are in a worse spot, since they will likely pass the savings on to borrowers and pay more to depositors at the same time.

This part relates most to my own work. Ackman was talking about big institutions that own their code. Most American banks rent theirs. The Kansas City Fed found that Fiserv, Jack Henry and FIS together served more than 70 percent of banks in its 2022 survey, and 61 percent of banks had used the same core provider for over ten years. When code gets cheaper for a community bank it gets cheaper for the vendor first. Whether any of it reaches the bank depends on a contract that may run for years and on how hard those three companies compete at renewal. Agents do not have to wait for any contract, and they will reach a community bank's depositors the same week they reach JPMorgan's. On September 22 the market sold banks with deep local relationships about as hard as it sold the ones without them, and in some cases I think that was a mistake.

If I were looking at a bank stock this month I would not spend much time on efficiency ratios, since nearly everyone's will improve. I would look at what the bank's deposits did from 2022 to 2024, which is the closest thing to a live test of stickiness the industry has had. I would want to know how much of the deposit base is operating money and how much is savings nobody has checked in years, and I would want the renewal date on the core processing contract. At Sargasso Capital Management we spend most of our time on small and mid caps where there is a wide gap between what AI can do and what the company has actually put to use. With banks that gap only matters if the customers are still there when it closes. Bill Ackman is right that the code is about to get a lot cheaper. I am just not convinced most banks get to keep much of it.

A note on sources. Bill Ackman's comments are from his September 2026 appearance on The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish. Cognition figures come from its September 8 funding announcement as reported by Reuters, TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE, and from its April 2026 post on COBOL modernization. Muse details come from Meta's launch materials and coverage by TokenPost, CNBC and Zacks. The Torsten Slok note was reported by CoinDesk on September 28. COBOL's origins and New Jersey's April 2020 call for COBOL programmers are widely documented. Banking data comes from the FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile for the second quarter of 2026, the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, St. Louis and Kansas City, the Federal Reserve's review of Silicon Valley Bank, JPMorganChase's February 2026 Company Update, the FCA's TSB enforcement notice, Reuters reporting from April 2017 and April 2026, and Drechsler, Savov and Schnabl, "Banking on Deposits" (Journal of Finance, 2021). Bank A is a hypothetical example.

This post is for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any security.

 

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 16:20

Travel all the way to Arrakis — without leaving California.

Steve Hilton is far behind Democrat Xavier Becerra in the polls for governor. But he can use Wednesday’s nights CNN debate to make a big impact. The most important line of attack is on gas prices. Becerra and Governor Gavin Newsom have tried to blame President Donald Trump for rising costs at the pump. And...